Purgatorian

Sleepy Time

2006-12-08T12:47:00.000-08:00

I am temporarily shuttering this blog.

Assimilated Boy

2006-12-07T06:11:00.000-08:00

It occurs to me that I’m living in the assimilated world. I’m living in The Borg.

In my freshman year, my roommate introduced me to two albums that I changed my entire attitude. One was by The Dictators and the other by Television; two early punk bands. Their disdain for expensive instruments, high tech recording equipment and a clean vocal line at first repelled and the attracted me.

We were trying to survive Olivia Newton John and still had Disco in front of us and here were these ugly bastards with their crude voices and cruder lyrics that took you all the way back to where Rock was supposed to be: in opposition to the establishment.

Punk is past now. Like everything else, like the 60s, like Viet Nam, like drugs and discos, everything has been assimilated.

At some point, the establishment figured out that resistance was futile but that assimilation worked perfectly 100% of the time. So if gangbangers in the hood were to start wearing pink tutus today, by tomorrow you will see a Gap ad with a much more upscale looking tutu. Something that says, “I get the whole poverty thing, but, let’s face it, I can afford better.”

Somewhere someone must be doing something new but I don’t know what it is. And I believe that by the time I heard it, it would be on a Gap ad.

Am I Now Or Have I Ever Been...

2006-12-05T06:47:00.000-08:00

A liberal? I don’t even know what that word means to most people but to me it just means you don’t overlook human suffering for the sake of profits, you don’t represent the rich in lieu of the middle and lower classes, and that you’re open to new ideas as solutions to enduring problems.

Do I believe that all income over a certain amount should be taxed at 100%? No. I don’t even believe in the income tax. I believe in the Fair Tax which is a sales tax.

Do I believe that the economy should be brought to its knees so we can mend the environment? No, but I do believe in Global Warming and that we need to address it.

Do I believe that forced bussing was a good idea? No, I believe social experiments like that were the death knell for liberal thinking.

Do I believe everyone deserves a free ride at taxpayers expense? No, but if you took the free rides away from corporate America, you could afford to feed a lot more people who are poor or working poor.

Do I believe people are poor by choice? I've often wondered who would actually choose to be poor. I think a poor environment serves to limit your choices and low self esteem really finishes the job, but it's not like someone woke up one morning and chose to be destitute. I think that if you legalized drugs and invested some of the tax revenue in business located inside the red-line side of town, you could take the bang out of gang bangers.

So, what does that make me? A practical liberal? A libractical? A practiberal?

I don’t know, but I am worried that this far reaching and widespread repudiation of the neocons (which was deserved) is going to be followed by an exuberant swing to the left (which no one deserves). We don’t want to go back to the bad old days of printing money to throw at problems.

The Democrats need to understand that they weren’t swept into office so much as dragged into it by the vacuum formed when we threw the Republicans out.

They are very much on double secret probation right now and while I will never switch back to the Republican Party, I will be watching for the first sign of Grand Social Experiments (apart from the legalization of drugs) or skyrocketing taxes or an LBJ/McNamara approach to Iraq.

Be seeing you.

FFF #62: Omega Man

2006-12-03T14:49:00.000-08:00

He ran in front of the small whirlwind with hands apart yelling, “Jehovah! I’m here! Jehova!” But the whirlwind turned out to be nothing more than a dust devil made ghostly white by the chalk flats. It blew around him, coating his face and ragged clothes white, and then disintegrated.

He stopped, forlorn, with his hands at his sides and his head hanging, black hair made gray by the chalk dust. Then trudged back to the wagon and slipped the traces over his shoulder. They had eaten their horse a few days ago but the meat had gone rancid even during the meal and they had left the carcass for the buzzards and the demons that skittered out of the ground at night.

“Why do you do that?” she asked from the back of the wagon. “Do you really think He’ll come for you if you call him by name? Do you think if you call out Yaweh, or Yehovah, or Y’hovah, or Yahuweh, or Ya-oh you’ll win the secret prize?”

He ignored her, leaning hard into the traces to get the wagon trundling along again, and searched the endless bleak horizon for a landmark, something to make his bearings, but there was little to break the view. A twisted white tree without a single leaf would erupt from the chalk here and there but even they all looked alike.

That was the reason they traveled west; because they could follow the sun.

“Are you going to answer me?” she asked as a coughing fit gripped her.

He stopped so suddenly that the wagon rolled into him and he had to scramble out from under it before he could see to her.

“It’s just a cough,” she said.

“You could kiss me,” he said. “You could kiss me and we could go together.”

“It’s not the Judgment,” she said. “No open sores. He’s not coming for me and He’s not coming for you even if you kiss me. Now start pulling the wagon or there’ll be no rutting for you at the Sabbath.”

He slouched out of the wagon, hopped down, and slipped into the traces again. He pulled them until sundown, ever heading west, and then stopped for the night. That night she let him rut with her and sleep with her to share their body heat against the plunging cold of the darkness.

And in the morning she was dead.

He stood over her body in prayer for an hour with his hands behind his back before abandoning both her and the now unnecessary wagon. The demons would have her body tonight but her soul was already in Heaven.

As he walked, he thought about how she had said to him that God wasn’t coming for her. Had that been a lie? Had she conspired to leave him here alone? But they had rutted last night. If she had been sick with Judgment he would have been infected, too, and would have been taken up the same as her.

Gradually, he began to play back the conversation in his head and remembered how she had taunted him with the various incarnations of the Name and he thought that maybe in there somewhere she had hit the right one and been spared.

A terrible thought struck him. What if he hadn’t gotten sick because couldn’t get sick? For that matter, what if he couldn’t die? What if the world required one last resident to stand for all the billions that had gone before?

A whirlwind kicked up in the chalk dust and he bolted for it, shouting, “Yaweh! Yehova! Yahuweh!”

Flash Fiction Friday #62

2006-12-01T10:26:00.000-08:00

In this time of continuing crisis, who can we turn to? Who will save our village? What about the children? Oh, look! Up in the sky! Oh, it’s just a plane but over here is Flash Fiction stumbling half dressed from a phone booth.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, you will wake to find yourself in your underwear giving a speech about family values to 1,000 flag waving KKK members. And no amount of pinching will wake you up.

He/She ran in front of…

Have fun.

Yours, Mine, Ours

2006-11-30T08:13:00.000-08:00

I read an article awhile back in which Stephen King recounted the beginning of the Gunslinger series. I’m heavily paraphrasing here, but it went something like this, “I started getting heat from my publisher to follow up the first Gunslinger because the fans were really agitating for it and I thought, ‘Fuck them, it’s my story and I’ll decide when to write it.’”

Or something like that. The point he made, that the story was his and fans had no business intruding on his decision making process, hit me sort of hard because I’ve always believed that when a man starts a business it’s his company to do with as he wishes, but when he hires employees it becomes something else. There are people depending on his decisions then. It’s not their company precisely, but it’s not really 100% his anymore, either.

The same goes for story. When a writer writes a story, it’s his. When he sends it out into the world, it becomes not public property but something not entirely his.

So, who owns story? Many people may lay claim; publishers, agents, readers, scholars. Oh, and the writer. I always leaned toward the readers having the greatest ownership (in the cosmic sense) because they invest more emotionally than anyone apart from the writer and there are more them than there are of him.

And then I read King’s new book, Lisey’s Story.

Watching Lisey Landon fight off the swarms of scholarly locusts and overzealous fans that feel entitled to her dead husband’s work was a real eye opener – mostly because I had never looked at it from the author’s point of view before. Or the author's family. After all, now that the author is gone, all they have left of him are his stories.

I still don’t have a definitive answer that would split out ownership by percentages. And, of course, I’m talking about cosmic ownership rather than financial which is well covered under the law.

But, it’s fascinating to me that these constructs of pure whimsy take on such real gravity when they enter the mainstream and travel down to the myth pool where we all go to drink once in a while. I've spoken before about the crushing emotional loss of a show canceled before its time (mostly with Firefly) and the feeling of loss when you get to the last page of the last book in a longer series. Through our emotional investment, these fictions become a part of our reality -- sometimes the better part.

The book is excellent, by the way. Recommended.

Oh, Toto...

2006-11-28T07:46:00.000-08:00

Nobody panic. This isn’t happening. You aren’t real and neither am I. It’s just that I woke up in Bizarro World this morning. What’s Bizarro World? Oh, that’s where they legalize corruption:

It's just currency

And try to turn your 32” TV into a movie theatre that requires a $50 license fee from the MPAA before you use it:

MPAA attempting to out dumbass RIAA

And ads for The Nativity Story are banned from a Christmas Festival because they might offend non-Christians:

Taking the X out of Xmans

Watching internet porn at work is self-medication and getting fired for it is wrongful termination:

I think I pulled something.

And, finally, it looks like production on Hamlet 2: Payback’s a Bitch is being held up because Rob Schneider is refusing to work with Mel Gibson.

Oh God.

There’s no place like home.
There’s no place like home.
There’s no place like home.

Shit, I’m still here.

The Golden Age

2006-11-25T19:46:00.000-08:00

(Is anyone else being hammered by Blogger to switch to the new format only to be told when you try that your blog doesn't qualify?)

I just finished watching this week’s episode of Studio 60 and once again found myself wondering if we aren’t in a Golden Age of Television. Don’t get me wrong, I have no doubt that Studio 60 will soon be canceled. It’s just too good and though it tries to be fair to both sides, the Red States surely feel their tiny toes are being stepped on with every comment.

Anyway, I watched the episode four times in a row just to bathe in the dialog which is superb and the acting which is excellent and tried to remember a time when I looked forward to watching TV.

It certainly wasn’t the 70’s. What I remember of that devastated landscape was Starsky & Hutch/Fantasy Island fluff shows, the Brown Comedies (Barney Miller, One Day At A Time); the dozen or so half hour sitcoms that all shared the same drab palette of brown and khaki colors. I read somewhere at the time that the idea was to highlight the acting by keeping the background and wardrobe drab. Of course, when you do something like that the law of unintended consequences demands that the background and wardrobe stand out because of their sheer drabness. And finally, there were dozens of overly earnest one hour dramas that tended toward the cloying when they weren’t being outright repellent.

Those half hour sitcoms weren’t much better. When I look at One Day At A Time or Maude, I see a “socially relevant” one hour drama the EP couldn’t float in a sea dominated by sitcoms. Remember all the “very special episodes” of these clunkers? My father used to stand up, dust his hands, and say, “Call me if they say something funny.”

There were some exceptions, of course. I remember thinking Hill Street Blues was some sort of parody because the dialogue was so different and the characters so well drawn. St. Elsewhere was good until it did what so many long running dramas do and sank into the miasma of soap opera. Cheers was genuinely funny for the first four or five years.

But I can’t think of a show as hilarious as 30 Rock or dialogue as sparkling as Studio 60 or action/adventure shows as engrossing as season one of Lost, Desperate Housewives or Heroes.

And let’s not forget that paragon of the hour drama: The first three seasons of West Wing. After all, it kept us Dems going with our very own make believe President while the real one was… well, let’s not get off on a rant here.

What are you watching? What shows do you remember from the dim dark past that I’ve overlooked here? What were the most egregious very special episodes?

UPDATE: Here is the WKRP moment of brilliance on YouTube...

As God Is My Witness

The Book of Talk

2006-11-21T07:03:00.000-08:00

In the beginning there was Phil Donahue and the people saw that it was bad but they couldn’t get enough of it and so they watched it. And God saw the people were evil and punished them with Morton Downy Jr. And the people ate it up so God punished them with a rain of toads that included Sally Jesse Rafael and Geraldo Rivera and Rush Limbaugh and Oprah Winfrey.

And the people ate that up, too.

And God was mystified because He had used less lethal plagues than this to get his children out of Egypt and so He decided to hit the people hard and He sent them Ann Coulter.

But by now the people had built up a tolerance to adults acting out like children just to get attention so, while mostly appalled, they watched her, too.

And so, finally, just to teach the people a lesson God sent them Nancy Grace who actually killed on of her guests, but the people wouldn’t stop watching.

And finally, He reached into His black bag of mean tricks and sent the people “OJ: If I Did It” and the people vomited and fell to the ground and pulled out their hair and wore sack cloth and ashes and the sun turned black and Fox canceled the stupid fucking show and the stupid fucking book and fired the stupid fucking bitch who thought it up.

And God was happy.

Until he found out they also canceled Arrested Development and then He was pissed again and gave Rachel Ray yet another show – and though this was a punishment on the people He had Metatron jot down her recipe for 15 minute dumplings.

The End of the Middlish Part of the Beginning

2006-11-20T11:00:00.000-08:00

Don’t relax. It’s not over yet. It’s not even the beginning of the end. At best, it’s the end of the beginning… er, wait…

Well, anyway, the forces of Big Brother have spoken and a warrentless wiretap is their definition of freedom – which falls in line with their definition of a separated church and state as giving federal tax dollars to religious organizations.

I would think that if there truly is a difference between conservatives and fascists, even conservatives would be outraged by this program. After all, this is America. Right? Isn’t it? Did I miss a memo?

I mean, did we spend ourselves into eternal bankruptcy to crush the Soviet Union only to become the Soviet Union?

Wiretaps without warrents; Merry Fucking Christmas

Glitch-o-matic 2000

2006-11-20T06:44:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Brooke, we're back live but, let's face it, the site was dark all weekend and most of you, probably thousands of you, didn't get the starter sentence. And we won't be doing an FFF this week, so it's going to be a while before you exercise your creative bone.

Don't panic.

If you get into a situation where you really need some fictional exploits, just make something up in your head. It still counts.

Flash Fiction Friday #61

2006-11-17T11:27:00.000-08:00

Yada, yada, yada.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, yada, yada, yada.

Place your hands on the…

Have fun.

A Letter of Pleading

2006-11-16T08:50:00.000-08:00

EW counted down Top 10 Worst Bond Girls and I was pleased and not surprised to find that only one of them was from a Connery film – and I doubt their doubt on that one.

But looking through the list I was reminded of a repellant tendency of Hollywood to pair very old men with very young women, a scenario that inevitably leads to the yuck factor of the hint of incest.

The worst case I can remember was actually in a non-Bond Connery film (as opposed to a non-Connery Bond film) called Entrapment. Many people felt it should have been called Fraud or Extortion because of the desperate desire to retrieve good money gone for a bad movie, but I bring it to mind to recall one very scary scene.

The filmmakers had spent most of the movie trying unsuccessfully to ignite a spark between Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones when they came to a moment where the two were spending the night in an abandoned house. They were lying on the floor talking and Jones was flirting with Connery.

I remember preparing myself to stand and bolt for the door. This proved unnecessary, however, as even the dolt of a director realized this would push the audience over the edge but he was still stupid enough (or powerless enough) to leave this little bit of flirtation in the movie.

To be honest, it wasn’t a very good movie to begin with, but this scene popped me right out of the story and I never managed to get back into it. And I am (or was) a huge Connery fan.

The thing is that there are many women over forty in Hollywood who are still quite beautiful and sexy and would make for much better partners in films with aging action heroes. Is it just the actor’s ego that propels this tendency forward? Director’s thinking with their little heads? Craven producers?

Whatever it is, please stop. It’s gross. Either get a younger male lead or an older female lead but quit with the daddy-daughter gross out you think is sexy.

Cheers.

A Thought (okay several) About Cable TV

2006-11-15T06:37:00.000-08:00

For reasons too complex to describe here, I was unable to use my DVD player last night for a couple of hours which forced me to actually watch real television. I don’t do this much because most TV sucks and commercials drive me crazy. I TiVo my favorite shows and then rent the DVDs of others from Netflix.

With those two options out of the question, I finally got bored enough to turn on the TV which someone had inexplicably left tuned to Turner Classic Movies where a 1950’s film noir I had never heard of called Cry Danger was starting up.

Normally, I would have tuned to the Science Channel right away but this movie starred Dick Powell, a favorite of mine since he played Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (actually Farewell, My Lovely but they had to change the name because he had just come off a Broadway comedy of similar or same name).

I had been a full on member of the Only Bogart Can Play Marlowe (OBCPM) club until I saw Murder, My Sweet. There is something about Powell’s hapless charm that really informed a different version…

Oh God, I sound like I belong hosting a show on TCM.

Anyway, Dick Powell is great and funny and tough (for a dancer) so I settled back and watched all of Cry Danger. It was really good. The mystery was only so-so for a sophisticated whodunit fan but the humor was great and Powell really acquitted himself.

Oh! Plus there was a rare sighting of the now nearly extinct “funny alcoholic” not spotted since the Andy Griffith show went off the air.

All of this reminded me what it was like when we only had four or, if you lived in the DC area, five channels. With so little choice and with so much of what was on so similar to everything else that was on, we had a tendency to not be too picky. As a result, we watched things we would today skip right over on our way to channel 500.

And that got me thinking that they gave us 500 channels but they didn’t give us anything new to watch on them. I mean, anyone who thinks Extreme Makeover Home Edition or Queer Eye are new has never seen the equally creepy Queen For A Day.

Why? Because there isn’t anything new. There hasn’t been anything new for several thousand years. It's all in the way you tell it. And today we aren't telling it any differently, we're just telling it a lot. 500 channels, moves, books, straight to DVD movies. And that goe me worried. What if there are a limited number of stories? What if we’re burning through them at a rate only outstripped by the pace at which we’re wasting our natural resources?

Actually, it might work out okay because by the time we’re all sitting around campfires wearing those weird thickly woven gray clothes post-apocalyptic people always wear there wouldn’t be anything to watch even if you had electricity to run your TV.

One final thought on this random excursion: If the above is true then that makes bad storytellers the equivalent of people who drive Hummers.

Stumble Drunk.

Pardon My French

2006-11-14T12:08:00.000-08:00

Every day we hear about some new transgression committed by airport screeners that tops yesterday’s seemingly untoppable fuckup. It occurs to me that we have turned a critical area of our security and our lives over to people who aren’t just under-trained or ignorant, but who are belligerently stupid.

Here is one where a woman went into shock because the security people took her medicine away from her:

http://www.thelocal.se/5493/20061113/?PHPSESSID=49923a53f02bacd658192d5b3499679f

Of course, when I read that the screener was French and refused to even attempt to speak anything but French, I thought to myself, “Well, things could be worse here. After all, our screeners can sometimes communicate in a language resembling English. Even if they doing nothing more than reiterating whatever criminally negligent plans they have for you, at least you have an idea what they’re saying.”

So, cheer up, America. We don’t live in France.

Faith

2006-11-13T10:42:00.000-08:00

Okay, first off I just want to apologize for the Flash Fiction starter. I really thought it was going to be a fun little exercise until I tried it myself. So, this week we’ll do something more fun and less brain-breaking.

But what I really want to talk about is this whole Faith Hill thing. For those of you living under a rock or in Iraq, Faith Hill stood up to accept her CMA entertainer of the year award before they called the name of the winner. The whole time they were opening the envelope she was smiling and nodding like she knew for certain her name was on that piece of paper.

Then they called Carrie Underwood’s name and Faith threw up her arms and yelled, “What?” And, of course, they got it all on tape as they are wont to do. They being everyone, apparently.

I totally agreed with her, too. Carrie Underwood is a game show contestant not entertainer of the year. She hasn’t even been an entertainer for a whole year yet.

Of course, the real reason Faith was upset was because she was embarrassed. Someone whose junk is on the chopping block right now must have convinced her she was the shoe in.

Anyway, this reminds me of the time a band called Firehouse won the award for best new hard rock band at the 1991 American Music Awards. I’ve listened to their music and it’s technically proficient without adding anything to the genre. It’s very much like some guys read “Glam Rock for Dummies” and did exactly what the book said and then stopped thinking about it.

The real problem is that they beat out Nirvana for that award.

Faith, I’ve never listened to your music so I’m no expert but I think we can all agree that these awards are just political extravaganzas put on by the RIAA to pump up sales. So, relax at one of your million dollar ranches for a while and decide if you’re Firehouse or Nirvana.

Flash Fiction Friday #60

2006-11-10T10:32:00.000-08:00

Oh, man, what a day! He’s only 22 minutes late getting Flash Fiction posted. Maybe he’s started to sober up a little. What? It could happen.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, you will be handed over to Frat boys for Rush who will force feed you alcohol until it squirts from every opening. Practice repeating, “Thank you, sir. May I have another?”

This week’s theme is bad sword and sorcery fantasy. Remember to stop writing when you start to throw up a little.

In the red light of the Gnaleth Frignicon, Mansor and his/her trusty Valworth strode into the…

Have fun.

I May Join The Race For The Disease

2006-11-09T10:07:00.000-08:00

From the cure is worse than the disease files, Thing 1 was in a minor car accident night before last and was sent to the hospital by the… airbag. She has burns on her face and chest, a jaw so badly bruised the doctors at first thought it was broken, and ditto a rib they had to X-ray to find out it was only bruised.

This from a one car accident into a tree at 25mph. She wasn’t driving but was sitting in the front passenger seat (“I called shotgun”) and everyone but her walked away without a scratch.

Everything happens for a reason… oh, wait, no it doesn’t. The universe is just as random and stupid as we are.

We still aren’t sure why it deployed at full force in such a minor accident or if all people are burned and beat to shit when an airbag deploys.

Any experience out there?

Dems take the House, almost break even in Senate

2006-11-08T08:24:00.000-08:00

This election was no less than a referendum on the corruption, lying, cheating, and rampant stealing that always seems to follow the Republicans into the majority. And all I have to say is: yippee!

Also, this is endlessly fascinating to me:

Break Down House

You can clearly see that almost every stereotype about voter breakdown is statistically reinforced. The only thing that amazes me is that any women at all vote Republican, much less 43% of them. I mean, this is the party that is trying to take your choice away from you, ladies.

But then again, there is always a bunch of Arab women who vote to keep wearing the burkha. I imagine that once you’ve been programmed from birth to be a second class citizen, it’s hard to think of yourself as anything but a tool for someone else’s use.

FFF #59: Buffalo Bill Won't You Come Out Tonight

2006-11-06T08:59:00.000-08:00

Not good, but quick and in on time:

It was untoward what he/she/it said to him but worst of all was that he was struck with this case of sexus nonplusitus, the clinical inability to differentiate the sex of a person or animal.

Yes, it was true that he/she/it had exclaimed, “I faked every orgasm,” on his/her/its way out of his life forever but worse was the damage the sudden shock of confession wracked on his ability to see another person’s humanity.

He couldn’t let him/her/it leave him that way could he? No, of course not, but he also couldn’t continue to refer to him/her/it as him/her/it. Finally, he came to the answer as he lowered the bucket into the hole.

“It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it is told.”

Flash Fiction Friday #59

2006-11-03T14:31:00.000-08:00

In a press statement today, the President announced that anyone posting a Flash Fiction starter sentence before 4:30 would be imprisoned and tortured until such time as the guards got bored or found something else to do.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, child pornography will be discovered on your computer and you’ll be sent to Guantanamo for a relaxing stretch – on the rack!

It was untoward what he/she said to him/her/me but worst of all was…

Have fun.

DivX: Another Fine Idea Brought To You By American Business

2006-11-01T19:57:00.000-08:00

Remember this when Republicans start yapping away about privatizing the government. Ideas like this one come from businessmen in expensive suits, not civil servants who wear ties with shortsleeve shirts and drive Geo Metros well into their 50s.

Does anyone remember DivX ? In a stunning example of green thinking (in this case meaning the green of dollar bills over the green of the environment) the video industry created DivX as an answer to the overwhelming problem of video piracy.

This clumsy and ineffective scheme involved special DVD’s that would essentially time out. You could watch the movie a certain number of times over a certain number of days and then just, you know, chuck it in the garbage. Straight off to the landfill to lie nestled next to the zillions of America Online CDs that will also never biodegrade.

As we can see by the many studios going into bankruptcy, DVD piracy was a major threat… no, wait. Actually, the studios use the revenues from DVD sales and rentals to help pay for that that thin stream of diarrhea we just can’t get enough of. DivX failed before a shot was even fired, so why aren’t the pirates bleeding the studios white?

As always, the solution is not an iron fist. Just give the people what the want. You want to price your DVD at $60? Fine. Expect it to be pirated relentlessly by little Malaysian girls chained to a cubicle where they feed one blank disk after another into a burner for a penny a month and a handful of gruel. Literally a handful. The poor little urchins can’t even afford a bowl.

Or, you could just price that thing that cost you 10 cents to produce and sell it for $15.00 and move a whole lot of them. To be honest, I’ve never understood the urge to buy a movie – even though I succumb to it myself from time to time – because who really watches a movie over and over? Apart from a few stalwarts that you can put into the player anytime and still get a bit of the buzz from the first time you watched it – The Matrix, Terminators 1 & 2, Alien and Aliens, Old School – you pretty much watch a movie once or twice, generally over the same four or five day period, and onto the shelf it goes next to all the others.

But, back to the problem: To me the greatest folly of this ridiculous circle jerk was the idea of tossing zillions of DVDs into landfills after they had only been used for a week. That kind of thinking which doesn’t even drive by responsibility’s neighborhood goes a long way toward explaining why our polar icecaps are melting.

And, by the way, instead of spray painting women in fur, shouldn’t we be bombing the offices of America Online until they quit sending out those disks? The freakin’ internet is now old technology and they’re still sending out those disks. They. Must. Be. Stopped.

Ciao for now, baby.

FFF #58: The Trial

2006-10-28T08:42:00.000-07:00

Blink. That’s the last thing I remember. I was lying on the table, the IV’s running into both arms, and I turned to look at the victim’s family through the viewing glass; their faces frozen into grim visages of triumphant revenge. It was the look a lynch mob collectively adopts when they hear the crack of a neck breaking in a noose. And I blinked and then it was over.

I was groggy and disoriented at first – something they tell me is natural for chemical deaths – but eventually I came to find myself at the defendant’s table in a large courtroom packed with onlookers. At the bench, instead of a man in judge’s robes sat Joe McCarthy looking as swarthy and depraved as ever. And, worse, sitting next to him was his right hand rabid dog, Roy Cohn, looking as oily and vicious as ever.

McCarthy gaveled the meeting to order and began speaking without even looking at me. He raised some non-descript papers for a moment and said, without identifying what they were, “We have the evidence and we know you’re guilty so we won’t even talk about that…”

“Wait,” I said. “What evidence? If you’re going to site evidence it needs to…”

But he gaveled me into shutting up. “That’s enough. You were tried, convicted, and put to death for murder. I think that’s enough evidence for anyone.”

“Convicted, yes, by forced confessions, faked evidence, and the suppression of DNA evidence that proved I was innocent,” I said. My God, I had already gone through this farce once on Earth was I going to have to go through it again in the afterlife?

“One thing we know is that human beings are very good at judging each other,” McCarthy said. “We don’t need to rehash a trial that already proved you were guilty so let’s move on to your sentencing.”

“If you let humans decide who’s going to Hell then you’re going to need to add on space because hardly anyone will get into Heaven.”

Cohn checked some papers, covered his mike, and whispered something to McCarthy who then said, “About forty-four hundred.”

“Out of billions? Does that seem right? I mean, honestly, have you no decency?”

“Everyone knew the rules,” he said. “All you had to do was follow them.”

“The rules?”

“They were plainly written in the book.”

“Which book?” I shouted. “There were about a thousand and that’s just the popular ones. I mean, we had everything from the Torah to Zen for Dummies and no two agreed on the ‘rules’. And what about all the people who came before there was a book?”

“There’s a special place for them,” the senator said in a forced blandness. “They’re in the pool out back.”

Cohn whispered something to him again and he said, “Well, it’s not so much a pool as a lake of fire, but basically the same thing.”

“This can’t be right,” I said, scratching my head. Was this a dream? Was I still in my cell on death row waiting for the phone call that would never come? “Does God know you’re doing this?”

“God?” McCarthy snickered. “He’s off with Satan playing chess somewhere.”

“Wait. You’re not Satan?”

“No, I’m more like middle management,” he said.

“I’m being condemned to an eternity of suffering by a corrupt middle manager?”

He gaveled me quiet again and said, “Eternity in Hell. Next case.”

A bailiff took me by the arm but I shrugged him off. “I’m not going to Hell based on the judgment of a man who claimed a war wound that was actually caused during an initiation for sailors who cross the equator for the first time. I mean, for God’s sake, you can’t have the evil judging who should go to Hell. I’m surprised Hitler doesn’t have your job.”

“He’s upper management.”

I looked behind me at the doors in the back of the room. They were wide open. “I’m leaving.”

“If you do that you’ll be blacklisted,” McCarthy said. “You’ll never get into Heaven.”

“You just said I was going to Hell forever, I don’t think that was an option to begin with.” I looked around, straightened my tie, and started walking up the aisle to the doors, waiting for someone to stop me.

McCarthy shouted, “You don’t know what’s out there. It could be worse than this.”

“I’ll take that chance,” I said and walked through the doors into the light.

Flash Fiction Friday #58

2006-10-27T10:13:00.000-07:00

We are the few, the proud, the crusty remnants what’s left of the flash fiction crowd. Let’s get busy before more of us die off.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, I won’t say it outright but it rhymes with schmenital schwartz.

Blink…

Have fun.

The Golden Compass

2006-10-27T08:23:00.000-07:00

I am just finishing The Golden Compass, the first book in the series called His Dark Materials, and I am so impressed with Phillip Pullman’s cleverness that I’m almost unable to write. Almost. An addiction is an addiction, after all.

Fantasy simultaneously my favorite genre and one I find repellent. The problem is that “fantasy” is a broad brush that covers everything from the “Gorg mounted his trusty Firglemirth and headed out to slay the many headed yublik” fiction for the socially retarded to Harry Potter and His Dark Materials. Even the vaunted Thomas Covenant devolved into tree dwelling midgets, dimwitted giants, and evil sprites.

Understand that I am speaking from a prejudice here. I don’t like stories with non-earthling characters in them. Whether its an alien that developed wheels instead of legs (too ridiculous to say much about but it is from an actual published book) or Gorlkimon the giant, it just doesn’t ring true to me.

So the trick to pleasing me – something I know most of the world is out to accomplish – is limited to rethinking what we have. That’s one reason I like steam punk. It’s inventive without resorting to absolute fabrication.

Dark Materials does exactly this with amazingly creative conceits that I bought almost instantly. Pullman remembered that the trick isn’t to dispense with the Hero’s Journey but to find a new twist on it.

And recommend any good fantasy that falls within my admittedly narrow borders.

Weekend Roundup

2006-10-23T07:24:00.000-07:00

Roundup

A quick roundup from the big weekend:

1) There is something extremely enjoyable about laying on the couch all day drinking tequila and watching one bad movie after another on the SciFi channel.

2) The comedian Jim Gaffigan had a good standup late Saturday night. He was funny though he relies a lightly too heavily on the Hot Pocket as a punching bag.

3) Steven Wright has gained a lot of weight but he’s still funny – though he actually used the “I’ll have French toast in the 17th century” bit.

4) Thank You For Smoking is an excellent movie. You should watch it.

5) Friends With Money is not a good movie. It’s boring and all the pretense and long silent shots of someone putting cold cream on their face is not interesting.

6) The Alfredo sauce at Shells in Port Aransas is watery.

7) Making a giant pot of queso con carne and guacamole with a pitcher of Margaritas won’t make you Latino but it will make you happy.

8) Port Aransas is farther away from River City on the way back for some reason. I’ll have to check my Relativity for Dummies to see how that could be possible.

9) A middle aged man with his back thrown out walks like a zombie.

10) Which is really sort of funny on Zombie Movie Day on the SciFi channel.

11) 30 Rock is very funny. I just hope it doesn't get lost in Studio 60's shadow.

That’s about it. Tomorrow we’ll learn how cold the ocean is in October.

My Bad

2006-10-22T15:39:00.000-07:00

I left town Friday for a three day weekend and forgot to put up a Flash Fiction starter. Hold your breath until this Friday, kiddies, when FFF resumes.

JJ

Another Jailhouse Conversion

2006-10-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

I have long been a supporter of the death penalty. As a Texan who lived in Kenneth McDuff’s killzone while he was still preying on various targets of opportunity – one girl was abducted and murdered from a self-serve carwash my wife and I regularly used – I can be excused, I think, for believing in capital punishment.

I won’t relate the whole story here but I will summarize: McDuff was sentenced to die in the early 60s and was on death row awaiting a face to face with God when the Supreme Court abolished the death penalty, converting all to life in prison without parole.

Here is the sorry truth about our justice system: it is populated by underpaid, overworked, and often retarded humans that make so many mistakes they make the unbelievable seem inevitable. We all know this in our heart of hearts which is why a jury in LA was able to convince themselves a vast conspiracy had been perpetrated against an irrelevant professional athlete and set him free to search for the real killers.

Kenneth McDuff was somehow, inexplicably I think, paroled and went on a cold blooded rape and killing spree.

The logic is obvious: If McDuff had died in the electric chair when he was supposed to then he wouldn’t have been alive to kill all these nice young girls.

I have changed my mind about that now. I think that our law enforcement and justice systems are so corrupt and so prone to force confessions and fake evidence and bullshit juries into a conviction that they no longer should be afforded the benefit of the doubt.

On the contrary, their bungling and bullheaded tendency to focus on one easy target rather than actually looking for the real killer have allowed many murderers to remain free, untouched by the hand of justice.

This conversion comes on the heels of reading John Grisham’s new work of nonfiction – that’s right nonfiction – called The Innocent Man. It will flabbergast and terrify you much more than The Grudge 2. When you see the rampant abuses going on in Oklahoma law enforcement – btw, Oklahoma leads with executions, not Texas – you will fear for your own safety… unless you have a lot of money.

Another hard fact is that if you can afford a good attorney, the government's mistakes become your asset as he uses them to free you even if you are guilty.

People who hate the ACLU and Amnesty International need to understand what a government gone wild is like and that no one is safe, not even their most ardent supporters. Who did Stalin kill first? Always those closest to him because a powerful government is a paranoid government.

I’ll leave you with this bit of trivia: Oklahoma once built an entire prison block underground reasoning that it would be escape proof? When? In 1881? 1885? No, 1985. It wasn’t that they didn’t take into consideration that fact that the air would become too stale to breathe or how claustrophobic it would be or how the prisoners would wither without sunlight, they just didn’t care.

Sleep well.

Why you should care about Reds

2006-10-16T19:47:00.000-07:00

My first thought on seeing Reds, Warren Beatty’s 1981 3.5 hour masterpiece, was: I loved the first feature. In 1981 they still had intermission for long movies so slugs like me could go outside and catch a smoke. I remember being excited and elated and another e-word that means the same thing as we made our way outside.

Watching the first two hours it’s nearly impossible not to catch the sense of excitement this generation felt as they crested the wave of monumental change.

Okay, yes, they were wrong. Communism turned out to be shitty and the Russians were too corrupt to run a government that looked for the best in every person to come forward. But, we have become so rooted in our belief that capitalism is the final answer we’ve forgotten what it’s like to believe in change.

True, some of us believe there is a change coming and have moved to Montana and bought a lot of guns to prepare for it, but I’m talking about the belief in a positive non-dystopian future.

The second movie, the hour and half that came after the intermission, is a beautiful and yet un-romanticized look at the fucking mess the Russians made of it and how the young hopefuls from America – the ones who had fought in Spain with the communists against the fascists – were abused and tossed aside with the rest of the trash.

It is a profound experience when the same auteur can take you from the pentacle of hope to the valley of despair in a single – albeit three and a half hour – movie. Plus it’s probably the most beautiful epic shot since Dr. Zhivago.

We all need a jolt to kick us into high gear so we can pull ourselves out of this coma we’ve been in for the last six years. How about a trip back in time to when change was in the air and hope still supported the human condition as one of its main pillars?

Oh, yeah? Well, you're another one.

2006-10-13T14:12:00.000-07:00

Anybody who still believes that complaints about the Bush/Cheney assault on our rights is just a bunch of liberal whining should read this:

http://www.progressive.org/mag_mc100406?cheney

Have a nice weekend. While you still can.

Flash Fiction Friday #57

2006-10-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

Give me an F. Give me an L. Give me an “ash fiction.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, cheerleaders will be dispatched to your home at 5:00AM. Nuff said.

Is this blood? Did you get blood on my new…

Have fun.

The Prestige

2006-10-12T07:21:00.000-07:00

I’ve just finished reading The Prestige by Christopher Priest. Although it has a WTF ending that feels a little like the author ran out of paper more than the story actually coming to a close, I loved it. I give it four cuddly hugs and a big smooch!

Wait… What I meant to say was that it was very engaging and the characters well drawn. If I wished the ending had tied some things up a little better, maybe that’s just me and my limited imagination not “getting it”.

But we know better, don’t we?

Priest is quoted as saying that he intentionally writes ambiguity into his stories to keep them more interesting. That’s one theory. Ran out of scotch is another one.

At any rate, now I’m dying to see the movie because from the trailer it appears to be not at all about the book except for the part about the rivalry of two turn of the previous century stage magicians. In the book they were never friends. In the trailer it says they were childhood friends whose friendly competition turns deadly. If you’ve read the book, you’d know it would be impossible for them to have been childhood friends or one of the principle illusions wouldn’t work.

No one in the book ever says, “What other magicians pretend to do, he can do for real.” I don’t know where they got that, but I do like Christopher Nolan’s work, so it may just be like The Shining where the story can’t be visualized so you have to do something representative of the story. So, if art is the distorting lens through which we see life more clearly, then this must be a distorting lens through which we see a distorting lens… not really sure where I was going with that.

I’ll go see it, of course, if for no other reason than to see the incredible Tesla illusion up on the big screen. Read the book, if you get a chance.

If you want a better Christian Bale movie but aren’t a comic book fan, may I suggest one of my favorite lesser known gems: Equilibrium. Sure, it’s Fahrenheit 451 meets the mother of all Hong Kong action movies, but it’s still great.

If you want a better Hugh Jackman movie but aren’t a comic book fan, may I suggest that you are shit out of luck?

Stumble Drunk.

Empathy

2006-10-11T07:28:00.000-07:00

I was a barefoot boy. Actually, I still am. I hate wearing shoes and do it as little as possible – which explains, I think, why I haven’t been asked to host the Academy Awards. But, when I was a boy and we lived in the land of endless summer, it was possible to spend most of my non-school time unshod.

The weirdness of this is that while Texas’ weather is hospitable to bare feet most of the year, its flora is not. Grass burs were the worst. I remember countless times standing on one foot, the other bent across my vertical knee to expose the bottom where a number of small but painful hitchhikers had taken up semi-permanent attachment.

We also have cactus. Why people put cactus in their yard is beyond me. It’s ugly. It’s mean. And it hates bare feet.

Why did I start this? Oh, yeah: Tag. Running around Rob Phillips’ yard in our bare feet playing tag until I came to close to a cactus and ended up with one of its spines sticking directly out the front of my big toe. The cactus we have are not the furry ones or the tall, majestic saguaro. These have spines as long as two inches sticking out all over and they’re hard and sharp as needles.

I either don’t remember the pain or it missed a nerve or I was in shock because all I thought of was that I might be in trouble with my parents. I so often got hurt when I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be that I had inadvertently come to associate getting hurt with getting in trouble.

So, not wanting any parents involved, I told Rob to pull it out. He tried but couldn’t get a grip. So I told him to get some pliers. He ran off while I stood there waiting with my injured foot off the ground until he returned with pliers and went about removing the spine with the odd practicality small boys can sometimes employ in even odder tasks.

He tugged, but it didn’t come out. It hurt. I remember the pain from that and I remember that I started to tell him not to try again, but before I could get the words out he wrapped both hands around the pliers and yanked with all his might.

He sat back on his haunches when it came free and held it up, still gripped by the pliers, so we could both see. It’s impossible to accurately remember the size of things from a time when you were small but I remember thinking it was horrifically long and, worse, ¾ of it glistened red.

Rob looked from my foot to the spine, back to my foot, back to the spine, and burst into tears.

North Korea, The Sudan, Iran, school shootings...

2006-10-09T10:47:00.000-07:00

From the “Don’t you watch your own show?” files: Everyone’s favorite right wing lunatic and demonstrably the most boring human alive, Ben Stein, came on the CBS Sunday Morning show to list the stories that should be bigger than the Mark Foley scandal but are being completely ignored by MSM. I agreed wholeheartedly although I think Ben Stein is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome after being in the Nixon Whitehouse.

Cut back to the host who turns to the big monitor to find out what’s on Face The Nation immediately following Sunday Morning. His answer? “We’ll be looking at the Mark Foley…”

Classic.

FFF #56 Planning Ahead

2006-10-09T09:46:00.000-07:00

The air was redolent with the stink of turned earth as she watched the backhoe dig a trench through her newly planted rose garden. The officer standing next to her seemed ill at ease in her presence, nervous about what they might find.

She wasn’t worried. She knew there was nothing there to find, but it broke her heart to see weeks of hard work with a hoe and spade destroyed with a few graceless reaches of the backhoe’s enormous arm.

Detective Frist, who had been dogging her since her husband’s disappearance and her subsequent refusal to take a polygraph, seemed mystified to find the trench empty even down to six feet.

“Are you going to have them put it back the way it was, Detective Frist?” she asked.

He leaned into her so close she could smell the mixture of mint and tobacco on his breath and said, “I know you killed him and I will find that body and you will get the chair.” Then he stormed off and took his cadre of blue suited officers with him.

She stood for a while in her ruined backyard, mourning the loss of her rose garden. It had, of course, served its exact purpose.

The next morning, she came running out of the house with two large plastic bags just as the trash men were pulling up to her driveway but she was intercepted by a police officer who stopped her, took the bags, and called Frist. The garbage men left and she and the officer stood in uncomfortable silence while they waited for Frist to arrive.

“Would you like some coffee?” she asked.

He she shook his head, nervously staring away from her, and she recognized him as the nervous young cop from the previous night.

Frist arrived in a huff and a cloud of tobacco smoke and, without ceremony, tore open the bags to reveal they were filled with the cut down parts of a human body – except they weren’t. It was just regular kitchen and household trash.

“Detective Frist, you’re putting me in the unlikely position of having to take out a restraining order against a police detective – if that’s even possible,” she said. “I’m trying to be nice about this but my husband absconded with his mistress and took all of our liquid assets when he left. I think your efforts would be better spent trying to find him alive than trying to hang me for his death.”

The police chief told him much the same thing that afternoon.

She waited for several days to make sure Frist and his boys weren’t still spying on her and then went into the basement to the crawlspace behind the heater, just as the police had done when they turned her house over and brought in the cadaver dogs to sniff out every nook and cranny of her home hoping to find her husband’s body. They had found no cadaver because there had been no cadaver to find.

She reached deep into the three foot wide recess, found the handle secreted there at very end of her reach and pulled the rolling board toward her until the man lying on it was fully in view. Sure that she would be the prime suspect in her husband’s disappearance but unsure for how long, she had known she could not kill him because he would start to go bad and the smell would lead them right to his body.

Now she removed the feeding tube and pulled the new hacksaw from the Home Depot bag. She had removed his larynx at the very beginning of this endeavor so all he could do was struggle against his bonds quietly but desperately while she laid the cold edge of the saw blade against his throat.

She checked her watch before beginning. She was going to have to hurry; she had to be back from the dump to pick up the kids at school by three o’clock.

Flash Fiction Friday #56

2006-10-06T13:14:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I was MIA this week. It doesn’t mean we can’t do a little thing I like to call Flash Fiction.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, I will be displeased.

The air was redolent with…

Have fun.

Flash Fiction Friday #55

2006-09-29T12:47:00.000-07:00

How ya’ll are? Welcome to da swamp. Watch for gators and Flash Fiction

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, you will become what’s known locally as gator bait.

She never would have done it if she hadn’t got drunk…

Have fun.

Why I Want To Be Cremated

2006-09-28T12:27:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, we lived in Friendswood, TX and it was always summer there. It was also always near Houston, one of the stinkiest cities in the lower 48. There was one part of town – I don’t remember the name – where all the refineries were located that stank like the farts of rotten eggs.

We didn’t have A/C in our cars back then because it was the 60s and men were men and dinosaurs roamed the earth and A/C was still considered an option. So we drove around the city in our Ford Galaxy (I think) with the windows down.

Until we came to the stinky part of town and then my grandfather exhorted the family to “roll ‘em up.” My grandfather smoked constantly. You see the irony here, even if Alanis doesn’t, right? We rolled up the windows to keep the skinky out and trapped ourselves in a smoke chamber.

Shortly after the car filled up with smoke like a Cheech & Chong movie we drove into a tunnel that took us under the bay. Or the river. Or something. Anyway, it was a tunnel and I was suffocating and that, my friends is why I’m claustrophobic today.

I’m pretty sure it was that. Well, it was either that or when I got buried alive that time.

Anybody out there got any phobias?

With Fond Remembrance

2006-09-27T08:12:00.000-07:00

What I find interesting is the mind’s ability to recall pain but not what it felt like. Let’s face it, if women could truly remember the pain of child birth we would all have one kid. But time doesn’t just dull the reality of physical pain, it also softens emotional suffering. That’s the part I find really interesting because it’s the sort of pain that is in and of the mind and yet the mind, its very container, chooses not to reveal it completely.

This comes by way of my attempts to create a character that has had his personality split and reconfigured after a tragic loss. In order to portray that loss effectively, I thought I’d do the Method thing and reach back to a time when I felt pain in huge swells that threatened to swamp my emotional boat.

For that, you have to go back to you young adulthood. Because grownups don’t hurt, they get depressed; which is much worse because it prolongs the problem, gets you into a groove that feels natural, and tricks you into thinking there is no hope.

So the first time I thought I was in love this girl broke up with me and I was like 19 and a freshman in college and I was so in love and she was so in love and then I transferred to another school and she wasn’t so in love anymore and…

And it means nothing to me now. This was an experience so profound, so devastating it drove my heel for two years and yet I can’t recall the feeling of it in any way.

I drove across the country to get away from it. I went to California and New Orleans and Washington Dc and everywhere I went, the pain had gotten there just ahead of me.

Which is, by the way, why I was the only one in the theatre who didn’t laugh when Buckaroo Bonzai said, “No matter where you go, there you are.”

I can remember waking up from dreams in which she and I had gotten back together and the sudden rushing in of the realization that it was all a dream but I can’t remember how awful that felt. How soul suckingly awful that felt.

So, yesterday I spent about eight hours listening to “Faithless Love” over and over – actually I’m listening to it right now. I can’t seem to stop – which is the saddest song ever written as far as I’m concerned and I was just able to touch the edge of how destitute I felt way back when. I also remembered suffering can come to feel natural, that it can suck you in and own you just like depression can.

Sense memory: It’s fun until someone loses an eye.

So, what's the saddest song you know?

The Queen of My Kingdom

2006-09-26T15:18:00.000-07:00

I’ve been watching Kingdom Hospital, the 2004 miniseries, transposed from Lars Von Trier’s Danish original. I missed it when it was broadcast and I’m glad because this is like a novel for television. I don’t particularly want to wait a day or a week to find out what happens next.

Which makes it all the more stupid that I set it up wrong with Netflix and only got the first three DVD’s for the weekend. So, tomorrow I’ll find out what it’s all about.

Anyway, it’s good. I’m enjoying it.

One interesting thing to me is that Von Trier’s version was 280 minutes long and Stephen King’s version is 780 minutes long. That may explain why you need a backhoe to get some of his books home from the store.

Also, I’m formally announcing my decision to leave my wife and marry Sarah Silverman. Of course, she doesn’t know me and is already seeing Jimmy Kimmel so I may be back from Cali sooner than expected.

But then again, the very fact that she’s dating a schlub like Kimmel gives me hope.

If you want to know the basis for this radical decision, rent (or buy) Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic.

A word of warning, however, avoid the DVD “extra” which is her take on the Aristocrats if you’ve eaten in the last… well, if you’ve ever eaten.

Flash Fiction Friday #54

2006-09-22T09:58:00.000-07:00

Come here. No, closer. Closer still. You see this? This is an actual official Flash Fiction that normally goes for up to $99 or more. Now see… hey don’t walk away from me. I’m trying to make you a deal, here, pal.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, a single gnat will buzz around your head for the period of one year and then will get stuck in your eye.

Oh, you lying bastard. If I had known…

Have fun.

The Jackal Speaks

2006-09-21T09:54:00.000-07:00

I just finished re-reading Carrie by Stephen King and it put me in mind of a girl who transferred to my junior high in Mt. Olive, New Jersey. At the end of Carrie’s rampage, as she lies in her death throes in a roadhouse parking lot, her psychic transmitter is sending nothing but her own name over and over. And as I read this, I kept thinking that this girl’s sense of self was never inflated. Her world had been battened down to the space inside her own mind. Her only recognition of the outside world was as the walls of her oppression.

The girl that transferred to my junior high in 6th grade had the unfortunate shape that could only be described as hulking. She was too tall for a girl, so she slouched. She was too fat, so she tried to pull herself into herself. Her skin was an unlovely pastiche of freckles over an uneven doughy surface. She wore thick glasses and had mousey hair.

But that wasn’t her sin. Her looks had nothing to do with the torture we were about to inflict on her. The problem was that she had transferred from a good school where they taught stuff – unlike our school where we spent most of our time beating the living shit out of each other or fighting with the teachers who hated us – so she knew things.

Like how to diagram a sentence. Like who was President during the Civil War. Like how to bisect an angle. We knew things like if someone tells you your shoe is untied to just punch them in the mouth because they’re trying to get the drop on you. And we knew that tripping someone for full effect should only be done in the cafeteria when they were carrying their tray – in front of their girlfriend. And we knew that everyone had to sleep sometime.

I remember one really awful class, the one in which it all began, I think – where our new English teacher was trying to go through the fundamentals of what we were supposed to have learned the year before and was getting extremely frustrated because we hadn’t learned a goddamn thing the year before. Our previous teacher, good old Mrs. Brown, had been dotty as a syphilitic South American dictator. Her mind wandered. She let us grade our own papers. We all got A’s that year. It was amazing.

Our new teacher had also transferred from one of those schools where they actually taught stuff and she was realizing with mounting horror at that moment what an awful mistake she had made in leaving her old position.

At length it became obvious that the only person in the class who knew the answers to her questions was the new girl. So she fell into this repetition of calling out a question, waiting for the class to answer, and when we didn’t answer she would point to the new girl and say, “New girl.”

And the new girl would give the answer.

I’ve watched a lot of National Geographic channel but I’ve never seen a better example of a beast being cut from its herd, singled out for the predators. After that English class was only a matter of time.

They did a lot of terrible things to her – I should say ‘we’, I was in on some of them – but the worst I can remember was unbuttoning her blouse during class. The guy who sat behind her very carefully and with monk-like patience undid every button on her loose fitting blouse. I watched him, entranced, as the infamous bra strap came into view. I laughed with everyone else when she stood up and only saved herself from flashing the room by the quickest of reactions.

She was horrified and looked around at us in frank surprise that anyone not wearing a swastika could be so cruel. I recognized that expression, I had been wearing it the year before and often still did. I wasn’t out the frying pan yet, myself. It would take another year and the administration of a vicious beating on a kid who had once bullied me before I moved from wildebeest to jackal.

She transferred at the end of the year (or it may have been the middle of the year) but it wasn’t because we had broken her emotionally. It was because our school sucked and her parents wanted better for her.

The difference between this hulking new girl and Carrie White was that she had a fully inflated personality, she knew who she was and she knew that in the end we would be pumping her gas.

Flash Fiction Friday #53

2006-09-15T10:57:00.000-07:00

So that’s it, eh, beautiful? I turn my back for a second and you pull a gun from your purse. Well, maybe you forgot I was carrying… flash fiction. Take that! And that one, too. Into the mud, slime queen.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, I will use my words as a cudgel to batter down your self esteem until you feel you have no more purchase on this planet than a gnat.

I saw her/him through the smoke…

Have fun.

Well, do you?

2006-09-14T12:41:00.000-07:00

Movie quotes. I want movie quotes. Great movie quotes. Or terrible movie quotes. Whatever you can think of but nothing that’s too well known. Nothing about napalm in the morning or anything from a Dirty Harry movie. But the best quotes of all are the ones they screwed up.

Here’s my favorite:

In The Big Sleep, Lauren Bacall is trying tease information out of Bogart while making herself a drink. He rebuffs her every request with, “And your father was kind enough to offer me a drink.”

Finally, she says with great frustration, “Fine. Would you care for a drink?”

He says, “No, thanks.”

And she gets all hot and says, “Then why did you…”

And they let it go there. Bogart’s next line should have been, “I just wanted you to offer me one.”

Okay, chimps, fire away. What’d ya got?

The Creeping Ear

2006-09-13T05:55:00.000-07:00

After my success at recapturing childhood willies with The Devil Commands, I decided to take on an even bolder task: The Trollenberg Terror.

I can remember watching this movie on TV with my best friend Rob Phillips and literally leaping into each other’s arms when the two student mountain climbers were finally able to raise their fallen comrade only to discover that something had ripped off his head.

The Trollenberg Terror (aka The Crawling Eye) was the very first movie lampooned on MST3K, so I wasn’t expecting much when I viewed it straight; meaning without the help of a big spliff or Joel and the bots.

I was pleasantly surprised. It’s not a great movie but it’s light years away from something like Robot Monster or Teenagers from Outer Space.

More than anything else, though, it falls into that category of “Movies I’d Really Like To Rewrite.” Updated for modern audiences and free of the laughable monsters, it could make a great horror movie.

Ask John Carpenter. He remade it as The Fog and was quite successful.

So, what movies would you like to remake?

Flash Fiction Friday #52

2006-09-08T08:19:00.000-07:00

Right, listen up. A few notes before we go out on our missions. First off, most of you have noticed that Capt. Anderson isn’t present. That’s because he’s been in hospital with 3rd degree burns. How many times do I have to remind you not to stand in front of your mounts when they’re about to sneeze? Another thing, let’s keep the wing scales shining, please. We aren’t going to strike fear into the hearts of our enemies if we look like we’re swooping down to get a dragon-wash, right? Oh, and one more thing, I won’t be accepting the excuse “my dragon sneezed on it” excuse for Flash Fiction this week.

That’s it. Lift off.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, you’re going to need an asbestos handkerchief.

In honor of Angela’s new look (or her site’s new look, I should say), this week we all tell a dragon rider story:

Her arms shackled to the stone floor and her wings constricted by leather bindings…

Have fun.

Fixed!

2006-09-08T06:43:00.000-07:00

Okay, I think I understand the basis for the funk now and this understanding comes from the strangest place. I’m re-reading Bag of Bones by Stephen King and there’s a part in there where the protagonist explains Melville’s story “Bartleby” by saying that because Bartleby has no past and no family described in the story he is one of the first American existential characters. Why? Because the only thing that ties him to the world is work. And when he begins to question even that, he has nothing left to live for.

In the last two years I’ve had two near death experiences. Not “near death” like the tunnel and bright light and relatives urging you on (or in my case pushing me back), but with doctors saying things like, “Wow, if we had caught that a day later, it'd be the mortician getting the new wet bar,” and, “I had a patient last week had this same thing. He died.”

Like most people, I’ve wasted 90% of my days. And that has been fine because I was immortal and had an endless supply of days to waste. But when God shoots at you twice (and barely misses both times) you’re no longer immortal and you start thinking, how is this day worthy? What am I doing today that is worth doing?

Well, nothing. Like most 47 year old men, I’m tied to the world by work and I’ve reached a stage in my “career” where I would prefer not to.

And what makes this beautifully existential is that the answer is the problem. If nothing you do matters, then it doesn’t matter what you do. Just enjoy yourself and stop trying to give value to your days.

So! I’m off to smoke a blunt, steal a Super Charger, and drive 200mph across the country with no one but the Mysterious DJ to guide me.

Productivity Is Way Up

2006-09-07T13:52:00.000-07:00

Todd wants to know how someone like me who has been so terrifically good looking all his life that he only realized he needed a soul when he turned 30 could be funny anyway.

Easy. I outsource.

My humor, my snappy comebacks, my literary references, even my platitudes are hand made by 12 year old orphans chained to IBM Selectrics in Macronesia.

Did the same with my family, and all I have to say is, “Wow, how about those savings!”

True, it was a difficult conversation when I had to let MLA and the Things go – conversation may not be the right word, “email” would be more like it – but I think in the long run they understand that for the Macintosh Company to thrive we have to lower the bottom line.

And, let's face it, I can get a woman to spend my money on madcap shopping sprees for just pennies on what I was paying MLA. And the Things? Well, suffice to say that my outsourced kids don’t even know what a college is much less want me to send them to one. Same goes for cars.

Currently, the bottom line has one last expense that I need to get rid of before the company is completely and perfectly productive. But I haven’t been able to find anyone in Macronesia tall enough to take my place.

Well, hidy-ho, I’m off to pay some guy to play golf for me so I can focus on my core competencies.

The Wicker Man? Really?

2006-09-06T11:10:00.000-07:00

Too many friends of mine, also horror fans, urged me to watch the original 1973 version of the Wicker Man for me to do anything but run right out and rent it as soon as video killed the radio star.

I remember the exact expression on my face when it ended: the sort of frown like you get when someone tells you a joke with no punch line and there you are hanging on to the silence waiting for something… and you just don’t get it.

That’s it?

I had a similar response to Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13. I don’t see genius there. I see buddies making a movie for fun who ought to be sued for stealing Ray Bradbury’s ending in the case of the former. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge John Carpenter fan and a lover of 1970s film but these two entries don't bespeak the genius to come. Which is why I'm not a talent scout, I suppose.

The same goes for THX1138. That movie is so dull and long winded and speechified that people really should have known better than to give Lucas money to make anymore movies.

The movie I love and rave over in spite of all its obvious flaws is called Dead & Buried. I love this movie with the sort of fondness you have for a dimwitted relative.

Stephen King’s favorite nugget is called Tourist Trap. I’ve seen this movie and ended up with an even more stupefied expression than I did with the original Wicker Man, but to each his or her own.

In that vein, what are your favorite discoveries movie-wise? What gems have you unearthed? (I'm looking to fill up my Netflix queue, if you can't tell)

P.S. - Although I know it's going to suck raw eggs through a straw, I probably will go see the new Wicker Man just to see Nick Cage get what has been coming to him for a long time.

The Edge of Running Water

2006-09-05T10:49:00.000-07:00

One of my fondest memories from growing up was the Saturday Night Creature Features, a 2 – 4 hour block starting at 10pm on Saturday night, usually on the UHF channel in your area, that showed scary old horror films.

But when I think back on those nights, and there were hundreds of them, I can only remember the standards:

Frankenstein
The Werewolf
Dracula
The Invisible Man
The Mummy
The Creature From The Black Lagoon

And I remember that there were so many more than just these few, most starting with the Universal logo with the little biplane taking its trip around the globe.

The movie that I remembered the most clearly that wasn’t on the above list turns out to be called The Devil Commands, starring Boris Karloff from a novel called The Edge of Running Water (my nomination for the world’s greatest title) by William Sloane.

It’s your standard “There are some things Man just isn’t meant to know” horror flick from that time (Remember that Frankenstein’s subtitle was “The Modern Prometheus”) but there was an image in it that stuck with me for over thirty years.

Karloff, as the mad scientist, has invented a device for reading the thoughts of his dear departed wife (I’m editorializing wildly here so this won’t run on for pages) Helen.

He steals bodies and puts this diving helmet type contraption over their heads and sits them all in a circle, like a high tech (for the time) séance and then jolts the whole business with a lot of electricity.

Then the bodies, still wearing their diving helmets, all lean forward together in unison as a sort of ectoplasmic tornado spins in the middle of the group.

Anyway, I got Fawlty Towers and The Devil Commands recently from Netflix and I was surprised to find that I still find Devil quite creepy, if a little dated, but Fawlty (a show I used to drop dead over) I now find about as funny as an infected hang nail. Or Seinfeld.

Flash Fiction Friday #51

2006-09-01T10:39:00.000-07:00

MEMO: To High Priests/Priestesses. Just a note to say that ya’ll have been doing a really great job and to keep up the good work, though I do have a few items. First of all, the idea is you are to deliver 40 virgins not a 40 year old virgin. That guy just creeped me out, really. Secondly, the baskets of fruit and grains and so on are great but remember the idea is to be regular, not unstoppable. When in doubt, throw in a bottle of tequila. That’s about it except to say that unless someone comes up with some damn fine flash fiction, there will be heads rolling on Monday. Just kidding. No, really. Heads rolling.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, then you will have the chance to find out the answer to that age old question of how long the head can see after it has been separated from the shoulders.

This week you will write a story beginning any way you wish but end it with the following sentence:

…but the little creep beat me to it.

Have fun.

There's No Place Like Home

2006-08-31T16:46:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I've been a little low lately and that's when I'm at my least communicative. It is now the eighth week of the experiment and I'm officially quitting it. Taking away all the things that make you happy just to see if it will make you even happier turns out to have been a stupid and greedy idea.

One happy thing, though, is that I've learned my life was fine the way it was. Enough with the kvethching (s?) let's get back to writing. I've started a new project and it feels like like my blood is pumping again.

See you all tomorrow for Flash Fiction.

Flash Fiction Friday #50

2006-08-25T11:11:00.000-07:00

Write a story that contains the line, "And then, by God, I killed the son of a bitch."

What's The Point?

2006-08-23T08:24:00.000-07:00

Is there a point? I mean, who has the game figured out? The surfers or the billionaires?

Is every day just one day or do they all add up to something? Is it about the photo albums? Is it about pictures of who you were and the people you knew? Or is it live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse?

You. Just You.

2006-08-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

Are you in your life because of what you want? Or trapped in it because of what other people want from you?

In other words, if you could slip around the block and just take a powder on your current life and nobody would remember you and nobody would be hurt buy your departure, would you?

Would you get into your car and drive west or east or north and just start over. No bills. No responsibilities. No one telling you that “we” need to do better about picking up after the dog. Or “we” need to make sure to lock the back door at night. No fucking humongous mortgage check to make you shit your pants every month.

If you could clean out the checking account and drive somewhere and sit in a small, air-conditioned apartment for a month while you let the scales drop off from your previous life. Where you could sit in the cool dark place and think and just concentrate without all the fucking noise for a couple weeks before deciding where you would go and what you would do.

Would you?

FFF #49 My Dearest Mina

2006-08-21T05:45:00.000-07:00

My Dearest Mina,

At the outset of recounting this harrying and extraordinary adventure, I want to assure you that I am in good health and shall join you soon.

On our second day of travel, as dark mountainous territories slid by outside my window and I lay abed sick with missing you, Henry came to inform me of some terrific news.

So flustered by the shock of what he had to tell me was he that at first he could do no more than sputter incoherently. At length I threw some cold water in his face and shook him roughly by the collar.

“They are aboard,” he said. “All four of them.”

My mind reeled, remembering the dire circumstances surrounding our escape the last time these animals had us in their clutches.

Were they crawling the corridors that very moment, sniffing me out like bloodhounds? At first I hastened to make an escape but there turned out to be little chance of that as on one side of the tracks were sheer walls of stone that disappeared into a starless sky and on the other side the land fell away into a deep chasm.

“Perhaps we could hide undetected in the baggage car?” Henry offered.

“No, they’d find us sooner or later.” I put a hand on his shoulder and said, “We’re going to brace them.”

He smiled up at me, if only half-hearted, for I knew his fear of these animals was complete after how he had suffered at their hands previously. “Are you sure about that? Won’t they just fall on us the moment we come into view?”

“It’s Mina they want,” I told him. “They won’t attack until they’ve ascertained where I’ve sent her to safety.”

He slapped his hands to his head in misery and uttered, “Oh, why won’t he just leave her be?”

“Because love does strange things to some men,” I said. “It foments into obsession from which no logic escapes. He will stop at nothing until he has her and I will stop at nothing to protect her. So, tonight, let’s have a test of wills and see who prevails, hmm?”

We found them in the dining car, clustered around a table as if they were no more than passengers enjoying a cup of coffee, when in fact the only liquid that could have sufficed for them was my blood.

I cleared my throat and the four of them leapt as if startled. The American cowboy Morris was the first get his wits about him. He slipped a large and rather garish crucifix from his coat and charged up the aisle – startling the other diners from their meals – and slapped it against my chest.

“Die, you rotten monster! In the name of Gawd, perish from the this Earth!”

I grabbed the crucifix from him and said, as calmly as I was capable at the moment, “I died driving the godless Turks from Wallachia for the Church. It was a Turk magician from whom I received the curse that has left me in this condition, dear Quincy. Do you really believe I would find the touch of a cross discomforting?”

Then I reached out with the speed and deadly accuracy of a snake and pinched open a hole in his carotid artery. Gouts of blood immediately leapt from this wound, landing on a pair of shocked diners to our right. He slapped a hand over the would with a wet splash, continuing to stare at me as if hypnotized.

I looked up and noticed that vicious pig Van Helsing working at one of his modern contraptions. It seemed to be some sort of device, similar to a crossbow, for launching stakes much like missiles.

“That’s a nasty wound,” I said to Quincy. “You should see a doctor about it.”

At that moment, I grabbed the villainous Dr. Seward by the arm and jerked him in front of me just as Van Helsling loosed his missile. “Here’s one,” I said. The stake impaled Seward perfectly in the heart causing him to shrug in my arms. I let him drop next to the American and advanced the length of the dining car, my heart filled with murderous rage.

Lord Godalming fretted between heroism and cowardice for a moment as Van Helsing attempted to reload his cantankerous device. Eventually, but with some trepidation, Godalming opted for heroism. He grabbed up one of the ash stakes and, blurting out a cry that reminded me of the whoop allegedly made by Red Indians when they attack, he made as if to charge me. It was little effort to brush away his weak stab and bring his throat to where I could use my own weapons on him, using his body as a shield between myself and Van Helsing whilst I drank.

That left only the old man who has been such a thorn in our side for so long. In the end, he put up little fight. I’m sending him home to you as a present to mark our freedom from the harriers that have nipped at our heels during every step of our romance.

I shall be home with you soon. I have only to finish some business in Istanbul before we can begin to live out our happily ever after.

Yours,

Vlad.

Flash Fiction Friday #49

2006-08-18T09:07:00.000-07:00

Everyone please open your booklets to page number… OH MY GOD! IT’S MOTHERFUCKING FLASH FICTION ON A JETSKI!!!

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, you will find yourself on an extended mission in the Space Station with the astronaut from #7.

This week you will join the elite Hollywood screenwriters in tackling a story that is sprung from the ages. Don’t forget to apply the three act structure using the Hero’s Journey for plot points:

Vampires on a Train.

And keep your necks covered.

Cineplex Ready

2006-08-16T12:46:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about writing a screenplay so that I can make it big in Hollywood but I only want to do quality stuff, you know, Citizen Kane type stuff, and it’s going really well. So far I’ve come up with eight really good ideas. And don’t worry, I’ve already done an extensive background check. Neither Jane Austen nor William Shakespeare wrote anything even verging on these ideas. Ready? Here we go:

1. Scorpions On A Train

2. Rats In Your Pants

3. Komodo Dragons In A Car

4. Bats On A Stagecoach

5. Gila Monsters On A Boat

6. Wasps In A Hot Air Balloon

7. Irritable Bowel Syndrome In A Space Station

8. A Similar But Non-Trademark-Infringing Alien On A Vespa

Now, here’s the exciting part: I’m leaving my Hollywood success in your hands by putting it to a vote. Which screenplay should I write first? Hey, if you're lucky I might even post pages here as I go along.

Early In The Journey

2006-08-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

“Okay, so whites and colors?”

“Well, sort of,” she says. “It’s more like lights and darks.”

“When I was a bachelor I just had to separate whites and colors.”

“That’s because all of your clothes were cotton and preshrunk.”

“Okay, so lights and darks,” I say and start heaping clothes into the washer.

“Wait! You have to start the washer and put the soap in first.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t want to put soap onto the clothes. It can burn them.”

“What? Soap never burned my clothes…”

“When you were a bachelor and all your clothes were jeans or broadcloth. Right. But my clothes are a more delicate than that.”

We stand and watch the washer fill. “Now?” I ask. On her nod, I dump in the soap and then grab a handful of clothes.

“Wait! That top doesn’t get washed.”

“Then why is it in the laundry room.”

“It goes to the dry cleaners.”

“Then, I repeat, why is it in the laundry room.”

“All the dirty clothes come here. I separate the dry clean from the washer stuff here and put the dry clean in a pile over there.”

“How do you know which ones are dry clean?”

“They have tags that say Dry Clean Only.”

“Of course, they do,” I say and start pealing the clothes apart, tossing some into the washer and others into the dry clean pile. “Now can I watch the game?”

“Sure. Just listen for the buzzer.”

“For when they’re done?”

“No, for when you add the fabric softener.”

“You have got to be kidding me.”

“Nope.”

“Then I just take everything and throw it into the dryer?”

“Are you crazy?”

“I’m beginning to think so.”

Half way through the list of all the clothes that don’t go into the dryer and what has to be done with them and how they’ll be destroyed if they aren’t handled exactly right, I say, “Okay, the laundry will be your job and lifting heavy things and taking out the garbage will be mine.”

She puts her hand on her hip and says, “I thought we weren’t going to fall into conventional male-female roles.”

“We aren’t,” I say. “Conventionally, I would watch the game while you did the laundry and periodically I would interrupt your chores to have you get me a beer. Instead, you’re going to do the laundry and I’m going to take out the garbage and we’ll watch the game together. And I’ll get the beers.”

She thinks about it. “Deal. But, we’re going to have to talk about ironing later.”

“And picking up after the dog,” I add.

She thinks about it, nods. “Nice move.”

FFF #47 Monkey Sacrifices

2006-08-13T20:13:00.000-07:00

“Monkey sacrifices? What has this got to do with monkey sacrifices?”

“I’m not talking Aztecs here, I’m talking Clairol! Don’t you see? It’s not the big things! It’s not the goddamn pollution. It’s not the goddamn cars. It’s the little things we’re paying for. I’m talking a hole in the atmosphere, California sliding off into the ocean – actually sliding under Arizona, technically speaking – and forest fires that denude the entire Pacific Northwest.”

“And the monkeys are doing this?”

“No, you idiot. We’re doing it. In a hundred little ways every day. It’s not the hydrocarbons spewing into the atmosphere, it’s the perfume being sprayed into the eyes of rabbits, killing monkeys for the space program, and it’s never going to be right – Never! – until we start making amends. Just like how it’s never going to be safe for stage performers on April 15th until a sitting President assassinates an actor…”

“Now, we’re getting down to it. Is that what’s going on, Mr. President?”

“Did I get him? Was it a clean shot?”

“Right through the heart, yes sir. Mr. Clooney was dead before he hit the stage.”

“There, you see? Just doing my little part. Like Dengue fever. That’s the monkeys getting back at us right there. The monkeys, yeah. It really comes down to the monkeys.”

“Take him away. I’ll call the Vice President. I don’t think he’s shot anybody lately.”

Flash Fiction Friday #48

2006-08-11T11:00:00.000-07:00

All right, quit your bellyaching and line up. Now, Management informs me that we are no longer allowed to shoot you for being late to work. Instead, you bunch of layabouts, lollygags, and malingerers are sentenced to three days of Flash Fiction. Welcome to Hell, scumbags.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, you will be put on the Callista Flockhart diet. For ever.

Everything worth having is worth sacrificing for. You might say that sacrifice is part of life. The only question is who is sacrificing whom. To that end you will write a story about:

Sacrifice.

And put your back into it.

Not One Penny For Butter

2006-08-08T12:58:00.000-07:00

How much money have we spent on the pointless war in Iraq? Don’t tell me in dollars because that number is too big for my tiny brain to get around. Tell me in college tuition units where one unit is a semester of college for anyone in the nation. You know like in all civilized countries.

Then, if you have time, explain to me why this country, of all countries, views a college education as a luxury? Why does this government feed students to the credit monsters?

When did we as a people – or 52% of us anyway – lose the capacity to care about others, about society, about the future?

Flash Fiction #47

2006-08-07T07:16:00.000-07:00

This is the most difficult thing I’ve done since college. Essentially, the prof would tell you to write a 10,000 word short story and when you handed it in he would tell you to cut it down to 5,000 words, and then 2,500 and so on until you got down to just the ribcage and heart muscle of your story.

Also, I’m pretty sure I plagiarized this idea, either from myself or someone famous. If you recognize it, let me know. Anyway, here we go:

He dived into the water in the crisp early morning, leaping off the wooden dock that ran from the boathouse into the lake. Above him, on the hill, the house sat quiet, ruminating amongst its many rooms over its own silence.

As he cut through the water he imagined her emerging from bed in that long, silk robe and making her way into the bathroom where he had been thoughtful enough to draw a hot bath for her before leaving for his swim.

There she would find the cup of coffee and the note apologizing for last night’s row. It began curt and then waggled its verbiage with the flirtatious implication that tonight might be right for one of their ever fewer romantic interludes.

She slips into the hot bath and sips at her coffee and begins to feel drowsier and drowsier until eventually she slips under the water.

The maid will discover the body and then in a few days they will put that bitch into the dirt and talk of divorce and allowances and prenuptial agreements will be forgotten.

A twinge hurt his stomach suddenly and brought him to a coughing stop in the middle of the lake. It passed and he began to tread water.

Another twinge hit him like a hot rubber band stretched inside his stomach and caused him to twist like he had the bends.

What had he eaten this morning? Nothing out of the ordinary. Every morning he ate a single fresh orange and drank a single glass of prune juice. There was no reason to be having these cramps.

The next one came so hard he went under for thirty seconds before he could regain enough control of his limbs to tread water again.

Now he was scared. Things began occurring to him, bits of random information that hadn’t seemed important at the time. The syringe in the garbage – their maid was diabetic, he figured she had needed a shot during the middle of the day. The fact that only a single orange had been in the fridge despite there having been at least six yesterday.

His guts seized again and he curled into a ball and slipped under the water. Dark time passed until his air ran out and he realized he wasn’t coming up again. The bitch had got him good.

His last hope was that she enjoyed the coffee.

Flash Fiction Friday #47

2006-08-04T11:14:00.000-07:00

I’ve got it. Hold still. It’s on the move. Hurry. Oh, God, it exploded and got Flash Fiction all over us. Yicch. You can’t even Shout this stuff out.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, all your crap will be packed into one corner in your house and the carpet installers will call every day and tell you they’re coming tomorrow. Yea, verily, and unto the end of time shall they call.

This week something a little different: you must tell your story in 400 words exactly. No more and no less. 400 words and they must include the following:

Here we go:

Dirt.

Hurt.

Curt.

Flirt.

And an orange.

Have fun.

They Never Showed

2006-08-04T06:35:00.000-07:00

There is a special alcove in Hell where your aunt with the hairy mole on her chin forever tweaks your cheek and remarks how big you’ve grown and it’s reserved for the kind of vermin who cause you to go to endless amounts of trouble to accommodate them and then don’t even show.

Yes, I’m talking about cable installers and flooring contractors.

And now you ask, “JJ, how can we avoid these pitfalls?”

And I tell you, “Check with the Better Business Bureau. They’re online. It takes two seconds. It’s easy.”

And then you ask, “But, JJ, wisest of the wise, why didn’t you check the Better Business Bureau?”

Because I’m a dumbshit, that’s why! I forgot. And worse, this is Carpet Closeouts, a shack by the highway where sweaty men wear polyester pants and shirts through which you can easily see their wifebeaters, and they all have bad comb-overs.

They never showed. Now they tell me they can fit me in on Saturday. So I have to live for two days with my life thrown into the sort of disarray common only to old women who own hundreds of cats and haven’t thrown a newspaper away since Truman bombed the living shit out of the Japs.

I’m sorry, I meant to say Asians.

If you live anywhere in or around Central Texas, call Carpet Closeouts and tell them you heard they suck and you’re going to buy your flooring elsewhere. Oh, and tell them if that Peckermullet Bobby mouths off to my wife one more time I’m going to use a shovel to get the stick out of his ass.

Carpet Closeouts: (512) 794-9600

Have a nice f*cking day.

90 Pounds of Crap in a 10 Pound Bag

2006-08-03T07:08:00.000-07:00

I’ve done some difficult things in my life – basic training, roofing construction in Texas summer, stalked deer in the subzero temperatures of early dawn, drank an entire bottle of cheap white wine on a bet (well, the difficult part came later), disengaged myself from the woman who had looked so beautiful through my beer goggles without waking her, changed quietly in a dark closet with a pocketful of change while the husband was walking through the front door – but I have not, as it turns out, ever known true difficulty until now.

Today, the Berber storm troopers descend on my house to install new carpeting. It never really occurred to me until last night that nothing can be on the floor when they install new carpeting and if 90% of your house is carpeted you have to fit 100% of your possessions into 10% of your space.

Last night was a long night and this morning is a painful morning. Sure, that sounds great but there is a downside: after the bastards leave, I have to put everything back. It’s like zipping and unzipping your house.

Anyway, if I don’t get round to your blogs today it’s because my PC is in one of those unmarked boxes that I probably won’t find until midnight. Also, after tearing everything apart, I’ve got better ideas about how to wire it all up again. In my case, “better ideas” generally means I’ll be out of service longer while I try to figure how buggered the whole mess.

But, lest ye panic and throw yeself off a cliff, know ye that Flash Fiction Friday shall continue as planned.

Pray for me.

EDIT: They didn't show!

A Happy Place

2006-08-02T10:05:00.000-07:00

The Cure for Writer’s Block is apparently to make a heartfelt commitment to give up writing for a period of time – in my case 12 weeks. The more evenings I let pass without sitting down to work on some novel or short story the more my imaginative battery recharges.

I allow myself only the weekly flash fiction exercise as a methadone program.

Another part of the cure I’ve found over the years is to reread The Danse Macabre by Stephen King. It’s a retrospective on the horror genre that never fails to get my blood reenergized for another crack at that thing I love more than any other thing but which has spurned me forever.

So, here I sit at my trusty typewriter – okay, computer – with a thousand ideas, set pieces, and characters tumbling around inside my head.

Here is a moldering door that opens onto a dark room from which comes the sound of something large shuffling over rotted floors.

Here is an abandoned refrigerator, a summer day, a game of hide-n-seek.

Here is a man diving into dark water desperately trying to catch hold of his wife’s bare foot as she disappears into dark green depths.

Here is a house that weeps when the wind blows through its rafters and cries blood when it rains.

Here is a man staring at a hole in the wall, his hands shaking over his face, his body quaking, as the bargain he made comes due.

It’s a happy feeling.

Cluelessly Yours, Montana

2006-08-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

I’ve finally figured out why Republicans hate the poor. They’re under the mistaken impression that everyone in America lives on an income as bloated and corpulent as their own.

Witness for the prosecution: Senator Conrad Burns from Montana who thinks that firefighters make $10,000 sitting on their asses and was so incensed about this that he found it appropriate to loudly denigrate one such firefighter by yelling across the airport and pointing at him.

Turns out, this guy made about $12.00 an hour coming in from out of state to fight Montana’s fire for them. So he probably sat around on his ass for 100 hours, right? Probably not, considering the place on which his ass would have settled was on fire at the time.

Let’s all move to Montana to vote against this dumb son of a bitch.

The gory details.

FFF #46 City of Chimneys

2006-07-31T06:24:00.000-07:00

With a shoutout to my man A. E. VanVogt...

I had never seen one before except on television, so I took the chance to kneel down over it and get close. It was a sight that shook the contents of my stomach. “It looks just like a person,” I said. “How can you be sure?”

The black eyes they called eight-balls came from the blood forced from the back of the head into the eye sockets by the shotgun blast. The head, what was left of it, still reeked slightly of cordite. That shotgun must have been close.

GEO Phelps, a pudgy and sullen man in the middle of a tedious life, nodded. “Blood work. DNA run-up.”

I stood up and brushed my hands on my pants. She had been a curvaceous one. It was amazing the white satin dress had had the wherewithal to contain such curves but even now as she lay face down in the street with her head scooped out like a bloody watermelon the seams held fast.

“What makes them so different from us?” I wondered – unfortunately, I wondered it out loud.

GEO Phelps looked up from his note taking and arched an eyebrow my way. “They’re slower than us. Stupider than us. And weaker than us.”

“And yet she infiltrated us.”

“Not for long.”

I nodded and looked around for my assistant. “Where is Ted?”

“I sent him on,” Phelps said, still working in his notebook. “With your driver.”

I turned a complete circle. My driver and my assistant – and let’s be honest he was more bodyguard than assistant – were gone and I was alone in the worst part of the city, the bombed out part that had never recovered from the war, with only one middle aged Genetic Enforcement Officer for company.

“Tell me you’re armed,” I said.

He looked up again, confused. “Huh?”

“I’m in Slan territory without my entourage. Tell me you’re armed.”

He looked around at the dark empty buildings, at the piles of rubble that used to be buildings, at the dark streetlights hanging like dead eyes from atrophied stalks, and then opened his jacket to show me a shoulder holster with the butt of a pistol sticking out of it. “Happy?”

“Thrilled. And do you want to know why, Phelps? Do you? Because I’m going to have your badge for dinner. I don’t know what you were thinking…”

He looked up, suddenly alert, and scanned the dead cityscape around us. “Let’s move this conversation to my car. I’ll call the red caps to come for the body and you can tell me how fired I am from behind bulletproof glass. Sound good?”

It did.

I started for the front passenger seat, but he said, “Better get in back.”

In back behind the wire cage where you couldn’t open the doors from the inside. The thought, a little late to do any good, finally formed in my head. “I’m being kidnapped.”

“Yes, you are, Mr. Mayor.” A bullet plinked off the door, causing him to break out into a jog. “Better with me than left behind, don’t you think?”

It became apparent after a while that our silent tour through Slan territory was just that; a tour. This part of town where the war continued to simmer at a low heat and where shooting erupted daily was little more than a city of chimneys poking rudely from collapsed buildings.

I said, “I’m the mayor, Phelps, I’ve seen it before.”

“Good enough then, let’s get on with the festivities.”

He drove us directly to a small stone church that had managed to remain standing while all the buildings around had collapsed under artillery fire. Probably because soldiers don’t like to shoot churches, they’re superstitious that way. We parked in front and he escorted me inside to the dusty, filthy nave where rotted pews moldered away the years.

Our footfalls echoed in the empty space. Even the Christ had been removed at some point, leaving this little more than an empty building with pretty windows.

Four men, all wearing the sand colored fatigues of the Slan rebel fighters, seemed to materialize from four different spots in the church at once. My bowels seemed to turn to water with fear causing me to worry I was going to shit myself. So this was what it feels like to know you’re going to die, I thought.

Slan warriors were known for their extreme cruelty and savage treatment of their prisoners. These men looked more like haggard refugees than stone killers, however. Their faces were drawn, their bodies wiry from a barely minimal diet. Their expressions were hooded with the weight of suffering.

“Relax, Mr. Mayor,” one of them said. He was taller and therefore even more gaunt than the rest and appeared to be the leader if only because he was carrying a large stack of acrylic sheets. “You aren’t going to die tonight unless you do something monumentally stupid.”

“You know we have a policy of not negotiating with kidnappers,” I said. After I said it, I thought it might have been a stupid thing to say, but it had been night for gaffs.

“Uh huh, if I could have your attention for a moment, I would like to show you something.” He placed the stack of clear plastic pages on the back of the nearest moldering pew. “C’mon, we won’t bite.”

I took a step over and discovered that he had what appeared to be a stack of newspaper articles, each forever saved between thin sheets of plastic. “Newspaper?”

“Yes, it is,” he said. “Look at the date.”

“2025?” Shock washed over me with cold shivers. “That’s obviously a fake. Nothing survived the… uh… holocaust.”

“Go ahead, give it its rightful name.”

“No…”

“Say it,” he demanded.

“Nothing survived the Slan Holocaust.”

“And that’s exactly what they would like you to believe, Mr. Mayor, because it very neatly covers their lies and their tracks and allows them to make up their own origin myth.”

“Which is?” I asked.

“Just read the pages, please.”

I took the first article and scanned it. A new company had opened in town and been given special tax breaks…

The Slan Corporation.

I looked up, confused. “You made this up.”

“Please just read. We’re going to leave them with you so you can carbon date them later. But for now, just read.”

I turned the page and skipped a year in time. The Slan Corporation was ready to announce a breakthrough in their treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. They were confident their “genetic bullets” would eventually cure every human ailment.

The story on the next page skipped five years and talked about the Slan Corporation’s new prenatal product that would guarantee immunity to all congenital diseases.

I fanned the rest of the stories, skimming the headlines as I went. This couldn’t possibly be real. It couldn’t possibly be.

“You see, Mr. Mayor, we aren’t the Slan. You are. Faster. Smarter. Stronger. And absolutely 100% dedicated to eradicating your progenitors.”

I regained my composure, slipped back into my skin, and said, “Look, I will have these verified and if they’re real, if you’re telling the truth, I will tell the world.”

The Slan shook his head with a strange resignation. “No one is going to listen to a mayor, albeit one from the most powerful city in the nation.”

“Then I’ll take it to the president.”

“That’s what we’re hoping,” he said and then nodded to Phelps.

Before I could speak, Phelps drew his gun and shot all four of them dead.

“What…” I couldn’t make words out of air for a moment. “What did you do?”

“Youngest mayor in the nation. Good looking, charismatic, and very savvy. You’re already being talked up as a candidate for the next presidential election.”

“I can help you,” I stammered. “There’s no need…”

“We’re beyond help,” Phelps said. For the first time I understood that he was a Slan infiltrator, a fox in the henhouse. “What we want now is to be remembered -- correctly.”

He slapped the gun in my hand and threaded my finger through the trigger guard. “And who better to make sure we are remembered, that we take our honored place next to the Neanderthal and the other dead branches of the evolutionary tree than the next president of the United States.”

Before I could say anything, he closed my hand over the trigger causing me to shoot him in the face.

And then I was alone. A hero who had killed five Slan infiltrators and freed himself from his own hostage crisis. Standing there in the spreading pools of their blood, I had become exactly what they had intended I become; a bona fide hero, unchallengeable in the polls. The next President of the United States of America.

Flash Fiction Friday #46

2006-07-28T11:45:00.000-07:00

What? Look, I’m busy, kid. Okay, here’s a quarter. Go buy yourself some Flash Fiction. And stay outta my yard.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, your sweaty in-laws from a state where they don’t wear shoes will move in with you.

Here we go:

I had never seen one before except on television…

Have fun.

American Nincompoops

2006-07-28T05:52:00.000-07:00

You know all those American nincompoops* who have Asian characters tattooed on their bodies they think mean “Peace” but really mean “Whore”? Well, once again, Japan outdoes us even in our own nincompoopedness.

If you don’t believe me, please see the below entered into evidence from Engrish.com:

* If you are one of these, please don’t get mad at me, I’m not the one who made you a nincompoop. Get mad at your parents.

Green Hills Redux

2006-07-27T07:27:00.000-07:00

For the three of you brave souls who read the VLP (very long post) here is the question: Would it have been a better read with the following ending? The following is the original ending that went out to editors. I’ve never been able to make up my mind if it wrapped things up too much or just enough:

He collapsed that night after walking for fifteen hours straight. Didn’t even try to break his fall, just went flat on his nose and slept until the sun came up. He woke easily, still in a dream, and started walking again.

By noon, he was shirtless and covered with cuts and bug bites. They didn’t matter, though. Once you got to Green Hills there weren’t any bugs. Just soft grass and a cool spring-fed stream. He didn’t blink anymore. His gaze was permanently fixed on the horizon, on that place where cool waters ran and folks luxuriated like kings of ancient Persia.

At nightfall, he was stumbling forward and ever onward. The noise coming sharply from his pants pocket startled him into a state near waking. Ring. A ringing sound. A phone. A phone in his pants? Right, a phone. A phone. He pulled it out, flipped it open and put it to his ear just to see what it would say.

“Charles?”

That didn’t even sound familiar. Wrong number. Number? Why would someone want to talk to a number? He said, “There are no numbers here,” and flipped it shut, slipped it back in his pocket. He was smiling. Green Hills was close. He could smell the clean, wet grass. Could almost hear the brook babbling.

His pants rang again and he stopped. His mind, tired and disoriented, flitted back to the voice. It seemed so familiar. So close. Something about it made him think of comfort and love and… Jell-O shots. Lisa. The name swam lazily to the surface of his consciousness. The blonde girl at the bar in Cancun. Drinking Jell-O shots. With him.

Ring.

Lisa. The girl on the beach with the bright orange bikini. He had said… What was it he had said? You’re a caution flag. She laughed and he could see the laughter like bright sparkles on the water.

Lisa.

He answered the phone in his pocket. “Lisa?”

“Yes! Charles, where are you?”

“Long gone,” he said, smiling. “We had a time, though, didn’t we?”

“Charles, what is happening to you? You hung up on me!”

“Just no time for that now,” he said, “going to Green Hills. But, feel free to help yourself.”

Then he dropped the phone on the ground and kept walking. He could hear Lisa’s voice, small and tinny, in the dark behind him but it didn’t mean anything. Just a girl he knew once. A long time ago on a beach in Mexico. He pressed on into the night toward Green Hills.

First the Sheriff had come. He had been relieved by the State Troopers who had, in turn, been relieved by the FBI. Martin Cunningham sat on the expansive front porch of the antebellum house (more like a castle, really) with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Agent Darnell, a tall man in a nice suit with an FBI badge flipped out of the top pocket, stood in front of him asking the same questions the troopers had asked and the Sheriff had asked before them.

“I didn’t know anything about it,” he said, his words dropped wearily through his fingers. He looked up when he heard shouting, looked beyond Agent Darnell at the huge transmitter truck parked at the foot of the drive. It was off now, thank God. The infernal machine had at last been silenced.

“Take your hands off me!” Walton was screaming. He was a little man, small and skinny and way too intense, like a Chihuahua. Two agents had his hands cuffed behind his back and were trying to stuff him into the backseat of their government issue sedan. He wasn’t going easy.

“You understand what you’re doing, right?” he barked, his legs spread, knees bent, heels dug in. “This is a career ending mistake, right?” The agents didn’t seem to care. One started working at his ankles. “You’re arresting Thomas Edison!” Walton yelled. He was maybe 28 at the oldest, full of himself like most young men. “Alexander Graham Bell is who you’re shoving into this car!”

Boom. They got him in the back seat and slammed the door on his vitriol.

Martin lowered his face into his hands again. “All he said was he would double bookings. I never gave him a dime. I swear, I just thought he was transmitting commercials.”

“Christ,” one of the agents near the road yelled. “We got another one!”

Martin looked up and let out a smallish whimper when he saw the slightly pudgy man with no shirt and no shoes, feet cut and bleeding, stumble out of the brush across the road. He had the same look on his face all the others had had when they saw the sign by the road. The one that said, “Green Hills Resort.” Like pilgrims emerging from the wilderness to find the land of milk and honey.

“They found that kid,” Agent Darnell said. “Choppers spotted him a day after he disappeared. You’re lucky on that count, Mr. Cunningham. And also that nobody died because of you and your crazy scheme.”

Martin cried into his hands, now it was tears running through his fingers, “I didn’t know what he was doing! I’ve got eight thousand people in Red Cross tents to feed! They won’t leave! I’m going broke. I didn’t know what he was doing!”

“We figure it takes about four days for the effects to wear off,” Agent Darnell said. “Some of the first ones to show up are already starting to come around. You’ll have them off your hands in no time. Shoot, probably just in time to show up in court.”

“I didn’t know what he was doing!” Martin screamed but his voice broke with tears and he collapsed into frustrated anger. “I didn’t know what he was doing.”

Green Hills

2006-07-26T06:32:00.000-07:00

What, you may be asking, would lead JJ to break his famous "no posts longer than my arm" rule? Well, the following story is one of my favorites and yet has been rejected by every living (and some dead) editor on the planet. Okay, four. But that's still enough to leave me scratching my head over why.

I'm not posting this for you to tell me if it's good or not, no one can tell you if your story is good but yourself. Instead, I have a question about the ending.

So, without further nonsense from me, I present to the two of you who will read a post this long, Green Hills:

Everyone called him Chipper except his wife Lisa who called him Charles and his daughter Shannon who called him Dad. He was on the road seven or eight days at a time and then home for three or four. He called every night even when Shannon had been too little to use the phone and talked to them both before bed. Maybe some men reached his age and wondered why they did what they did, but Chipper knew exactly why.

He loved people, could converse at length on any subject without ever being tedious or becoming bored. He could strike up a conversation with a stranger in a checkout line and walk away five minutes later with a life long friend. People liked him, liked to be near him, drew off his good cheer the way they might take heat from a fire on a cold night.

Salesmen in general might be considered loathsome overbearing creatures better avoided than embraced but not Chipper. His sales pitch was so low pressure it was practically nonexistent. He would walk into a restaurant and talk to the manager or the chef for as long as there was something to talk about – everything from the weather to sports to whose kid was going to college in the fall – and then he would turn to leave. And if his customer didn’t say, “Aren’t you going to take my order?” he would turn as if he had just remembered his reason for dropping by and ask, “So, how are you doing on peanut oil?” That was it.

Other fellas might stop in from time to time, encroaching on his territory with their collars wide and ties low and their shirts smelling like an ashtray, and try to hassle a sale out of Chipper’s clients but it was no use. That manager or chef who had passed so many fine hours with Chipper wasn’t about to do something that might invite this oafish, foul smelling thug back into his establishment. They all said the same thing, “I buy from Chipper Prendergast.”

He loved to drive. There was something about an open road and AM talk radio that cranked his natural hum up another notch – to bliss, or nearly that – and his territory was perfect for that sort of driving: Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. All three were wide open states crisscrossed with highways so long and straight you could climb in the back for a nap without having to pull over.

Chipper drove the speed limit, he was never in a hurry. He didn’t make appointments, he just dropped by, and if someone wasn’t in then he would check back later. If they still weren’t in, he would try again on the way home at the end of his run.

That last day he was traveling through Oklahoma at the far end of his circuit, headed for Shasta, a small town with a big heart and a city limits sign that read, “Welcome to Shasta, Population: 300 plus you.” Shasta was nestled in the middle of wide open farm land, mostly corn, and it was bigger than most of the towns he visited; two main streets, six cross streets, and twelve stoplights. He eschewed the Concorde Motel on the highway just outside of town for the Little Inn that stood across from the antique store that had once been a Ben Franklin’s Five & Dime.

Shasta was like most towns in the wide open spaces. A few city blocks of buildings mostly dating back to the 20s and 30s, some modern gas stations, and a single movie theater. Seen from above, the town would appear to rise from the endlessly flat landscape in a flourish of mature elms and oaks. There were trees everywhere in Shasta. They hung over the streets and shaded the yards of the old brick houses, all of which had a screened porch to one side or the other.

The suburbs ran for a few blocks in all directions from downtown. Closest in were the large, brick homes, the ones with the spreading pecan or oak trees in the front yard. Further out came the clapboard houses, the ones added after the war when all the GIs came home and wanted to raise families but didn’t want to live on the farm.

And just beyond that last suburban clapboard house the landscape opened up into wide blue sky and perfectly flat land, all of it farmed.

Chipper had his Buick’s cruise control set on 65 right up until he pulled off the Interstate and caught a crosscut road through the fields that would take him to the main road into town. It was July then and the corn was high and the darkest shade of green. The color made Chipper’s day even brighter and he realized that, when he thought of the color green, it was this green exactly that he saw in his mind’s eye: the green of corn ready for the harvest.

There was a stop sign at the intersection of the crosscut and Shasta’s main road. He came to a complete stop and looked both ways before proceeding. No traffic in either direction. Clear blue sky, clear empty road.

The trees over the suburban part of Main St. made an arboreal tunnel that blocked enough light that he had to take off his sunglasses the moment he entered it. He was happy, listening to someone on the radio sound off about the real reason we were in Iraq, eyeing the pretty brick houses and their perfect yards. Kids’ toys in the driveways, dogs curled up on the screen porches.

There were cars in every driveway but no people about. He didn’t notice the lack of people because of all the cars. Cars, parked or otherwise, just gave a place a feeling of movement. He put his sunglasses back on when he entered downtown proper where the sun reflected off the whitewashed buildings causing his eyes to take a moment to adjust. He always worried about hitting someone when that happened so he tapped the brakes to slow down a little until he could see again. He needn’t have worried about hitting someone that day.

His eyes adjusted as commercial buildings replaced homes. Cars and pickups angled into spots in front of parking meters. The traffic light dutifully proceeded through its cycle of colors even though there were no drivers waiting.

Maybe he should have sensed something then, but the truth was that there was never much traffic in a town like Shasta. And as for people on the street? It was hot that time of year and being three in the afternoon it was as hot as it was going to get. People were more likely to come out when the sun was low and it was cooler but before dusk when the mosquitoes started biting.
Or maybe it was just that the whole reason he liked coming to Shasta was The Little Inn. The woman who ran the place was a furious and obsessive baker and the place always smelled like warm cookies or cakes or pies fresh from the oven. Her name was Mary Kate Ashley which he always got a secret chuckle out of because Mary Kate and Ashley were the twins his daughter watched on TV all the time.

He had an opening line for all the regulars on his route and for Mary Kate at the Little Inn, it was, “I smell something gooood.” Just like Andy Griffith would say it. “I smell something gooood.” And then she would smile and bring out a plate of cookies or a slice of pie even before she checked him in.

It was probably that he was concentrating on that moment when he would say his opening line to her that he didn’t notice there weren’t any people around. No cars in motion. No mothers with strollers. No farmers hefting bags into their pickups. Nobody.

Life on the road was a series of moments to him. Moments that he looked forward to before and cherished after. The first greeting when he walked into a customer’s store. The smile on their faces. The handshake. Taking the order was just business, he never cared much about that.
So, he cruised down Main St. waiting patiently at each red light until he got to The Little Inn, and then turned into the alley and parked his car in the lot behind. He grabbed his valise and hanging bag from the trunk and trudged through the back door which fed into a narrow corridor that led to the front desk.

The first he noticed something was wrong was the smell. There wasn’t one. No cookies. No brownies. No cakes or pies. Just the dusty smell of an old building in which no other human had recently trod. He furrowed his brow and continued down the corridor to the front desk, all set to ask Mary Kate if she was feeling all right – but she wasn’t there. The front door was closed but not locked. The check-in desk was neat but unmanned. He crooked his ear up the staircase and heard not a sound from the rooms upstairs.

This troubled him slightly and he worried that something might have happened to Mary Kate, but there was a note on the check-in desk next to the old fashioned bell that said, “Help yourself. Gone to Green Hills.” Mary Kate’s unmistakable signature, honed in a calligraphy class many years ago, swirled and looped below it.

“Green Hills?” He had never heard of it, made a note to check his map later, and wondered for a moment if he should drive out to the Concorde Motel. No, from the note she had left Mary Kate wouldn’t be gone long. He signed himself in. There was a honeycomb of slots in a wood cabinet behind the desk, each with a brass key fob. On the base of the fob was a white porcelain disk with the room number in black. He pulled the key for #1 which was his favorite because it had a balcony that overlooked Main St. and at night the sound of cars passing on the street lulled him to sleep.

He dragged his bags upstairs and took a moment to listen to the other doors to see if maybe someone else was staying at the Inn. No TV noise, no phones ringing, no talking, no footsteps. He was alone.

He probably should have thought something was up at that point but he didn’t and the truth was that by then it was too late. It had probably been too late the moment he had turned from the crosscut onto Main St. Maybe even the moment he had decided to come to Shasta in the first place.

He dropped his valise on the bed and hung his suit bag in the armoire before heading downstairs and out into the street. He loved Main St. in towns like Shasta. People always stopped to pass the time. People always let you kiss the baby, told you how old the little guy was, how long the labor had lasted. Farmers would tell you when the last rain was, how the crops were doing, who was going to make All State that year.

He stepped onto the sidewalk, took a deep breath of small town air into his lungs, and then looked around. There were no people. No babies to kiss. No farmers to talk about the weather. Not even a cop to complain about the expired parking meters.

Now he understood that something was wrong. He put his hands on his hips and furrowed his brow again. Was it a holiday? The harvest wasn’t due just yet. Sometimes that emptied a town – but not of everyone. The middle aged and old would still be around then. It was the craziest thing. Even on the Fourth of July, the most sacred of American holidays, there would be people on the street. But here they weren’t, as his father would have said.

A holiday. That was the first thing his mind settled on. Everyone was somewhere celebrating something. He didn’t bother at that early stage to wonder why cars were still nosed into overdue parking meters.

Well, if he couldn’t get a fresh brownie from Mary Kate then he might as well pay a visit to one of his customers, Tom Greenburg, the manager of Nib’s Ribs. Nib’s was a very popular place in Shasta. Ribs weren’t a common menu item to these people, so eating at Nib’s was akin to eating something exotic like Chinese or Mexican. It was eating Southern.

Chipper decided to walk the six blocks instead of going back for his car. He didn’t use a laptop computer or pager or personnel digital assistant (whatever the hell that was). Instead, he kept a small spiral notepad and a Bic pen in his pocket. His only concession to modern life was a cell phone and that was only so his customers could call in orders if they forgot something when he stopped by. He didn’t carry a sample case, either. The American Restaurant Supply Company catalog was two inches thick. His sample case would have had to have been the size of a freight truck. He had the catalog memorized and the vocal talents to describe every item in mouth watering detail.

He stopped after three blocks. That moment when he stopped at the corner to wait for the Walk sign was the exact point in time when he got scared. It occurred to him that he had passed five or six stores, all with plate glass windows, and hadn’t seen a single soul. What scared him, though, were the notes. He had seen them from the corner of his eye, not really paying attention, but the back of your mind had a way of pushing things forward when you were in trouble and right then he could see all those hand lettered signs on the doors of all those businesses.

He didn’t have to go back and read them. That part of his mind, the primitive part that knows about the dark, was quite sure what each of them said. But he did go back. The front of his mind, the part that new about electric lights and telephones and fire, had to see for itself.
“Help yourself,” each one said. “Gone to Green Hills.”

A shock of panic went through him, sweaty and ambiguous, and he started looking around. Down the side streets, up ahead. Behind him. Cars parked. It was maddening. Cars were parked everywhere but not a single person in any of them. He stopped himself, took out his handkerchief and wiped the perspiration from his face. “Green Hills,” he said with a little laugh. “They’re just all gone off to Green Hills.”

And that probably would have been enough except for that nagging two word sentence that every note opened with: Help Yourself. At first, he had thought it meant they would be back soon, but now he realized the opposite was true. Who would leave their store unlocked with a note offering every bit of merchandise for the taking if they were coming back?

He turned down the side street, Nib’s Ribs now forgotten, and started into a jog. It was hot, the sun had an unobstructed view of the street, and he immediately began to sweat under his arms and around his neck. He didn’t care. He wanted to get to those houses that crowded around downtown. He had to get to people. Someone. Anyone.

He came to the place where the shade trees covered the street and slowed down to cool off in the shadows. There was a pleasant breeze blowing then, cool and dry. He turned up the first walk he came to. It led to a large brick home with Victorian gables and a screen porch that ran all the way down one side. There was a detached garage in the back yard and a driveway that was little more than a pair of concrete strips that led to it.

He banged on the screen door and then knocked a little lighter, trying to calm the rising panic. That was what scared him now: the shapeless black shadow rising up his spine. He couldn’t even put a finger on what terrified him so. He just knew that he was afraid.

No one answered, so he called through the screen door. “Hello? Hello, in the house!”

Silence. Not even a dog came to check out the noise. He darted off the steps and ran next door to another brick house in the cool of spreading shade trees. He banged on the screen door and got nothing. The doorbell. He ran around to the front door and pressed the small, lighted button set into the brick. He could hear it Ding Dong inside. Footsteps? Did he hear footsteps? His heart began to beat a little faster, fear and hope mixed together. “Hello?”

No, it had been branches against the shingles he had heard. Off to the next house, running faster now, out of breath. No one home. And the next: no one home. And the next: still no one.

He went to the front door of the last house and didn’t bother to knock. He just turned the knob and pushed it open – he had known with a terrible certainty that it would be unlocked. It was cold inside the house. The nicer homes down here had air conditioning and they, by God, used it.
The living room was dark, filled with tasteful colonial furniture he associated with his grandmother. There was a phone table in the front hall and next to it a message pad. He saw it and wanted to run outside. He thought he might be able to forget having seen it if he ran out right then but it was no use. It was there, it was real, he had to look at it. Had to touch it.

Someone had written Green Hills over and over on it. At first, the script was smooth and looping as though someone had been writing with an idle hand while on the phone or thinking about something else. Half way down the page the script became a little more intense. The loops tightened and the letters leaned forward as if they intended to march off the page. Maybe they were heading to Green Hills, too.

He didn’t want to turn the page, had a terrible feeling about what he would see, but did it anyway. Yes, the second page was worse. The script became manic, the letters pressed tightly together, leaning at a dangerous slant.

The last page was the worst. It was the last page that caused him to break out in a cold sweat. The script returned to gentle loops and dangling descenders before trailing off. It was if he had witnessed a terrible struggle on those pages. A struggle that had ended in surrender.

The phone.

He had to call someone. He picked it up (Yes! A dial tone!) and punched in 911. It rang. And rang. It rang fourteen times before he hung up. Apparently the nice folks at Emergency 911 had wandered off to Green Hills, too.

Okay, that was local. A local number that rang at the police station right there in town. The state police would have to answer. They would help. He called 411 to get their number and let it ring 14 times before he hung up. Was 411 local? Had everybody in the state wandered off to Green Hills?

No, he had seen traffic on the highway right up until he had taken his exit. But no one on the crosscut. Not even tractors in the fields. No high school boys joyriding on the long dirt roads that sliced between farms.

Maybe the whole county had wandered off.

He was about to call someone else – or at least try to think of someone to call – when he saw movement from the corner of his eye. Something, or maybe someone, had gone by the window, heading by the front walk.

He dropped the phone and ran outside in time to see a young woman in a pretty dress, fancy like an Easter dress, strolling down the walk to where the street ended abruptly at the edge of a vast cornfield.

“Hey!” he yelled from the porch then reminded himself where he was and tried better manners. “Excuse me!”

She kept walking. Not fast, not trying to escape. She was sauntering. Her narrow arms swung loose at her sides. Her high heels clicked on the concrete. And she just kept walking.
He ran after her, caught her easily, and grabbed her arm. He must have been panicked. He never would have grabbed a strange woman by the arm in any other circumstance. “Excuse me! Hi, I’m Chipper Prendergast. I was wondering…”

She turned to him, a dreamy smile on her face, and looked at him without actually seeing him.
“Can you help me?” he asked. “I’m wondering where everyone has gone.”
She turned her gaze back to her intended direction and began walking again. She didn’t exactly break his grip, just started walking until she was free.

“Miss,” he said but she kept walking.

So he followed her down the end of the street where the shade gave way to bright sun on dark green stalks that stretched out to forever. He expected her to turn, maybe go into a house, or at least stop. But no, she walked down the muddy embankment and slid between the rows of corn so tall they were higher than her head. He watched for another moment until the crops swallowed her and he was alone again.

He broke into a jog, coming to the point where the grass turned to dirt at the lip of the embankment, and stopped before that first step down into the field. Don’t go in there, a strained voice whispered inside his head, or you’ll never come out. Just like the rest of them.
He drew back, dry swallowed, and started running again. This time he was heading to his car. The heck with this mystery. He was going to get in his car and drive the heck out of town and call someone from the first rest stop. In Nebraska.

He was in a full run by the time he broke from the shadows into the nearly liquid sunshine and turned up the block for the Little Inn. He turned right at Main St. and kept running, all the stops out, more exercise than he had had in years while fear ran through his muscles like quicksilver and panic drove his heel.

Three blocks up, he came to Nib’s Ribs and that brought him up short. Nib’s? He turned around, looked behind him. Had he turned the wrong direction? Only six blocks from The Little Inn and he couldn’t for the life of him remember how to get there. It was so plain and so simple, but he couldn’t get it into his head. It was like a name stuck on the tip of his tongue. It just didn’t make any sense. The whole damn town was only six blocks long.

He struggled for a moment and found he simply couldn’t think of it. Not its location nor the name of the woman who ran the place. He stood in the harsh light of a relentless sun, sweating through his shirt and damn near through his jacket. He stood legs apart like a drunk on Saturday night trying to remember where he parked his car.

He was thirsty. Parched. All he could think about was water at point. Cool clear water. The kind you could drink all day. The kind they had up at Green Hills.

He turned back to Nib’s and, sure enough, the note said he should come in and help himself.
The lights were on inside the rib joint and the juke box was playing a Patty Loveless tune. It was dark despite the lights, as bars and rib joints were likely to be. There was no one there, of course. Empty tables on one side. Empty bar on the other. He could hear the air conditioner hum. Every now and then the ice maker shuddered.

He went around the end of the bar and poked around until he found a small fridge with bottled water in it. The cold air chilled the sweat on his body so he pulled off his jacket and loosened his tie. His image in the mirror behind the bar shocked him: tie loose, jacket off, sweaty pits, hair mussed. He looked like every other salesmen at that moment. It bothered him enough that he cinched his tie back up.

After drinking half the bottle of water, he screwed the top back on and put it away. It was good, sure hit the spot, but it was nowhere near as good as the water at Green Hills. Up there was this stream that gurgled by a clearing where the grass was soft and there weren’t any chiggers in it. You could lie down in that grass all day and never get a bite. And when you got thirsty, you could just lean over the bank of that stream and drink until you got your fill. No PCB’s in that water. It bubbled out of the ground from some subterranean source too deep for pollutants to reach it. Drinking that water was like drinking from the fountain of youth…

He snapped out of it and slapped himself across the face. There in the mirror over the bar, he saw a disheveled middle aged man agape in shock. What the hell was he talking about? He didn’t know anything about Green Hills. It was getting to him. Whatever it was, it was getting to him, too. Just like the rest of the folks in town.

He had to go. Right damn now. He had to go back to The Little Inn and get his car and get in it and drive like hell and get gone. Right damn now.

He tore out of Nib’s, his destination clear in his mind now, ran the three blocks in the scorching sun and made a left, back into the shade of the giant oaks, back down the walk, back to… the end of the street where he had seen the young woman disappear.

He felt lost then. Every time he thought he had it right, he had it all wrong. It frustrated him to the point of tears. He had a car. It was close by. He could get away if he could just remember how to get back to the Inn. He was good with directions. He could find his way home without a map or street signs from the end of the frigging Earth! Why couldn’t he find an inn that was only a few blocks away in a town he knew like the back of his hand?

“Tommy! Stop! Stop right now, mister!”

He whirled around in time to see another young woman, this one in a strapless gingham dress and tennis shoes, run across the intersection at Main St.

“Hey!” He yelled. “Hey, wait!” Then he was running again.

He turned the corner onto Main and saw her corral a boy, maybe nine years old, a little tow headed guy in a pair of overalls and boots. No shirt. Sunburned shoulders and cheeks. The woman, obviously his mother, scooped him up in her arms and shook her finger in his face. “You need to listen to me, young man.” She had a strange accent, slightly exaggerated vowels and sloughed consonants. He couldn’t place it but didn’t care at that point. She was someone who wasn’t in the middle of wandering off, though it looked like her son might be.

“Excuse me!”

She didn’t turn to face him.

Again he had the frustrating experience of watching someone walk away from him without heeding his call. “Excuse me, please!”

The boy looked over his mother’s shoulder at Chipper, but it was just like the woman who had disappeared into the corn. He wasn’t seeing Chipper. He was seeing something far off on a distant horizon visible only to him.

Chipper caught up to the young mom and touched her shoulder. She screamed, did a little panic dance, and ran a few steps away before turning to see who had accosted her. She looked him up and down, apparently decided he wasn’t worth being scared of, and simmered down. “Oh, sorry, you scared me.”

Then he placed that accent. She was deaf. Probably from birth.

He said, “I’m sorry,” moving his lips with as much expression as possible.

“It’s okay,” she said with a self deprecating grin, “I’m used to it. Have you seen Walter?”

“Walter?”

“My husband? Runs the pharmacy. You’re the sales fella that comes around to Nib’s, right?”

“Walter,” he said, remembering. “Right. No, I haven’t seen him.” He stopped short of telling her about the note on the front door of the pharmacy. “What’s up with the little guy?”

“He’s so bad today,” she said. “Every time I turn around, he’s run off. Usually he’s a good boy. I think he’s sick. Look at his eyes. See that look? That’s a fever look. I wish I could find Walter.”

“Haven’t you noticed that no one is around?” he asked. He almost asked her if she noticed how quiet it was but caught himself in time.

She looked around, realizing it for the first time. “Where is everybody?”

“Green Hills,” he said. “From the notes.”

“What’s Green Hills?”

“I have no idea.” He started laughing from the sheer relief of passing words with another person. He figured it was going to be all right then. When there was someone else around you could talk things through.

“Want some coffee?” she asked, then that smile again, she stuck out her hand. “Norma.”

He shook it, said, “Chipper.”

“C’mon, I’ve got a fresh pot on and you can help me keep an eye on the wanderer here.”
He followed her across the street from where the cornfield had beckoned him, down a similar sidewalk to a similar brick house with a screen porch along the side and a garage in back.

They sat on the porch where it was cool in spite of the sun and he drank his coffee black – like all salesmen, because you couldn’t count on having a bunch of condiments if you were on the road all the time. Black and strong. Good for the soul and a sure kick-start for conversation.

She sat down in a rocker next to him with her own cup and said, “I locked him in his room. I know it’s bad but he’s been so off today. I can’t get a moment.”

“Norma,” he said, choosing his words, “something strange is happening in town. People are gone. You’re only the second person I’ve seen today and I’ve been looking.”

“Something’s going on,” she said, sipping her coffee. “People started wandering off last night. Walter was all upset about it, but I figure people’s business is their business. I don’t like to bother.”

“They could be in trouble,” he said.

“In Shasta?” She laughed, full of easy joy. “I figure it’s a Klan meeting. They’ve been sniffing around lately. Sometimes the fellas will go out just to be polite, but we don’t truck with their kind here. We’re good neighbors to all, no matter the color.”

Green Hills? Klan meeting? Not likely. “Walter’s gone.”

“Walter is fishing,” she said with a scowl. “That man only has two things on his mind and the other one is fishing. I swear. Found his rod and kit missing from the garage this morning, went around to the store and, you bet, there’s a note on the door. Man’s got a problem with fishing.”
“Yes, but…”

Chipper heard the crash and looked around.

“What?” Norma asked.

“Something crashed.”

She was panicked, turned his face to her, “I couldn’t see you.”

“Something crashed,” he said.

She put her cup down and ran inside the house. Chipper didn’t know whether to follow or not. Most likely, he figured, it was the boy getting into more nonsense. He didn’t like being around when folks disciplined their children. That was a side you hesitated to see.

He waited for five minutes, until his coffee was cold, and then stood up and walked through the house. She wasn’t there as he knew she wouldn’t be. That sense of doom in his soul had told him so. He had been with another person for a moment, just long enough to taste the sweetness of it before it was yanked away again. He let himself out, heard her calling after the boy, running after him down the street. He could follow them – but why? He knew where the kid was going. The end of the lane where the corn urged you to take that last step over the edge of the world.

Back at Main St., he stopped and put his hands on his hips, looked around. Empty street, empty town. Every time he thought about The Little Inn his mind wandered back down the lane. Back to Green Hills. To oblivion.

He was hot, tossed his jacket on the ground and rolled up his sleeves. Likewise, the tie went into the gutter. At Green Hills you could take your shoes off and run around barefoot in the grass. Hell, you could stick your sore feet in the cold spring, cool them right off. At Green Hills you could lie back in the grass and sleep like an innocent.

At Green Hills.

Oh, how he yearned to see its softly sculpted rolling hills. The stand of oaks that lined the clearing where the little stream burbled through. He was tired and hot. He’d been on the road a long time. Forever, it seemed. On the road making friends of strangers, but what sort of friends were they? Acquaintances, really. People you passed time with. Was that what life was about? Passing time until yours was done?

He sat down on the curb and put his head in his hands. He had wasted his life. His brain chemical deformity had turned him into a robot, a gutless cyborg. What about all the great things he had been going to do? What had they been? He couldn’t even remember now. Maybe he’d always been a machine. He’d worked his whole life, worked since he was thirteen years old, and for what? A car he couldn’t even find.

He began to weep then. All the tears he had never cried rolled down his cheeks into his hands. He may never have had a soul before, but he had one now. He could feel it being shredded inside him. It was too late to start again. What would he do? Sign up as a late night DJ? Open a restaurant? The terrible truth, the one he hid from himself in the deepest part of his brain, was that he had never had big dreams. Had never wanted to DO anything. He just liked people. That was all. He was the simplest sort of moron.

Well, he wanted something now. He wanted to go to Green Hills and lie down in the soft grass and maybe stick his feet in that cold mountain spring.

He got up, wiped his tears with a rough stroke of his shirtsleeve, and went back to the lane where the woman had gone into the corn. A sad but hopeful smile broke on his face. He was going to Green Hills and it would be fine. He would relax and cool off and just generally wash away his life. Maybe start over as a new person.

He stood at the lip of the embankment and looked out across the dark corn. It wasn’t so far, really. Just a pleasant walk through the fields.

Homeland Insecurity

2006-07-25T11:40:00.000-07:00

We have a new password policy at work and it’s driving me crazy. For the longest time we had no policy which is exactly the sort of libertarian thinking I like, but now it’s the “has to be changed every month, have weird characters… yadda yadda” nonsense that leads to one thing: people writing their passwords down on yellow stickies and sticking them to their monitor where the Russian cleaning lady can plainly see it.

So, if there is a massive failure in the national security network and we all end up prisoners of the Commies (who are still in power in Russia, just hiding) then you know whom to blame.

Also, I’m thinking about putting up a really long post tomorrow so don’t come around. Do yourself a favor and just skip a day.

FFF #45: Tell A Friend

2006-07-24T11:59:00.000-07:00

Well, Blogger was down until right now so I am not late...

I came up the sidewalk that morning feeling like a million bucks – well, a hundred grand at least. I was in such a good mood, filled with such largess, that I even decided to do the planet a favor and pick up a half crushed Dixie cup being scooted along by the breeze. I stopped at the corner and watched the cup as the wind picked it up and whirled it around before setting it down again in a fresh bed of ashes, dust, and litter and I thought to myself, “That’s me.”

What do you do at a time like that? What do you do when you come up against the forces of the universe in the form of a paper cup? What can you do? You let the breeze move you along, too.

You pick it up.

I decided to make a basketball shot out of it. Maybe that was my big mistake, my turning point of misfortune, you never really know. I missed. Because I always miss. I’m a terrible shot. After checking that no one was watching – who would be watching? – I snatched it up and dropped it into the wire basket at the corner.

After that all that was left was to choose a direction. Left or right or straight ahead? I was off balance from doing a little fade shot into the basket which caused me to drift left anyway so I figured that was as good a way as any for a guy who just fleeced a Wall Street banker type for ten grand.

And there she was standing on the corner like a wet kitten in a rain storm. The sight of her brought me to a stop so sudden that the old Chinese woman behind me ran right into my back.
Was she beautiful? Yes. Was she shapely? Yes. Was she dressed in little more than a sheet? Oh, yeah, but that wasn’t what made me stop. It was the wound on her throat. The ripe one oozing blood. And I knew that dazed look on her face, the look of someone whose world had just been spun around counterclockwise.

I sprinted through traffic against the lights and caught her in mid-swoon just as she hurled, projectile vomiting her lunch into the gutter and scaring both pigeons and tourists in the process.

Finally, she rocked her head back and a little blood returned to her face. “Oh, my God,” she said, expelling some really awful post-vomit breath my way. “That was fucking brilliant. Can I do it again?”

“Sure,” I said. “You can do it two more times if you want to become the soulless shell of yourself walking the world forever as a spirit string.”

“Spirit string?” She disengaged herself from me and tried to smooth the sheet as if it were a dress.

“A puppet. Your soul sort of dances around on his strings. But wait! If you buy now you’ll also have to prey on the living while they sleep. Sound good?”

“Sorta,” she said. “Do I get to live forever?”

“If you call it living, I guess.”

“And I never get older?”

“Well, no, but…”

“Okay, I’m in!”

I turned around and watched the traffic fly over the hill, everyone headed down to the pier to eat lobster and Alaskan king crab and feed their greasy children chicken fingers. That was the world I longed for. Behind me lay the world I had run from.

I said, “Well, good on you, Barbie. I’ll just leave you to have your soul sucked out of your body. I’ve got a bus to catch.”
She grabbed me by the arm, pleading now. “But he won’t have me again. Do you know him? Can you talk to him?” She was like a groupie trying to talk a roadie into letting her backstage to fuck the band.

“Oh, I know him and I’m definitely going to talk to him, but I’m not going to argue your case.”

She pouted. I looked around. Lots of people, no one caring. Thirty seconds ago I had been strolling in the clouds, now I had a vampire junky on my hands and nowhere to put her.

“Come with me.”

She shrieked with delight when I led her back into the Victorian townhouse from which she had just stumbled. It was a classic affair, Dracula was a creature set in ways that were set 500 years ago.

I opened double doors onto a large sitting room where a line of girls had formed under the unfurled flag of Wallachia, waiting to be bitten. Prince Vlad Dracula, a little flush in his dead face, sat in a high-back chair, beckoning to the next girl.

It was bizarre. He was like some macabre Santa Claus. Each girl waited her turn in the line and then sat in his lap, arched her head back to expose her neck, and enjoyed the delirious ecstasy of the vampire’s bite.

He finished with the girl currently on his lap and beckoned for the bug eating troll Renfield to lead her away. Then he looked up and saw me and his expression fell from utter delight to frustrated despair.

“Van Helsing!” he cried. “What is it with you and your accursed family? You hound me relentlessly when all I want is peace.”

“I’m not hounding you,” I snapped. “I just happened by.”

Then he got pissy, mocking me in that weird accent of his. “Oh, you always just happen by.”

“It doesn’t matter why I’m here. What you’re doing is illegal.”

“Show me the law that says I may not give a hicky to some girl for money.”

I had to think about that one. “Okay, maybe not illegal but it’s more addictive than crack.”

“This is not my problem, you see?”

“What I see is that you are callous sociopath…”

“Bah!” He stood, causing the girl to tumble from his lap, and shouted, “In my day I would have had you…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. In your day you would have had me on pike right through my heart. But this isn’t your day. It’s my day and I’ve got your heart right here.” I slipped the amulet my grandfather had given me from my pocket and let it swing and glint in the late evening light.

He retook his seat and scowled. “Your grandfather was a peasant.”

“Yeah, and he kicked your ass.”

“Go. Leave me to my business.”

“I can’t leave you to a business that is wrong,” I said. And then I noticed the girl who had tumbled from his lap. She lay curled with a stoned smile on her face and three fifties wadded up in her hand. “Say, what’s the take on this action?”

“One hundred and fifty American dollars for each bite and, according to my oath to your grandfather, I only bite the one time.”

I counted the girls in line and ran some numbers in my head. “And what’s Renfield’s cut?”

“All the cockroaches in the building. It’s infested. He’s delirious.”

“He’s always delirious,” I said. “What do the Weird Sisters have to say about so many pretty girls traipsing through here?”

“They now prefer to be called the Eccentric Sisters,” he said. He leaned over to Renfield and said, “Clear the room, I’m not in the mood right now.”

The cry went up from the girls but Renfield was unyielding as ever when it came to his master’s orders. Then Prince Vlad the Impaler, Count Dracula of Walachia, knight in the order of the dragon, noble born and eternally cursed, shrugged in his makeshift throne. “This is ridiculous. Were it not for my oath to your grandfather and that troublesome amulet I could create an army of vampires and rule the world.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Theoretically,” he said, still dejected. “But that many vampires is a management headache. Not like soldiers who follow orders, they’re always snacking and following their hunger. Plus, I cannot tell you the number of stupid idiots who stay out past dawn.” He shook his head. “This is the real curse, how stupid people are and they never change. They are always stupid.”

“If you don’t want to raise an army, what do you want?” I asked.

“To go home,” he said. “To return to my castle in Wallachia, the Dragon’s Lair, and maybe spruce it up a little. Some indoor plumbing would be nice. Maybe central heat. The winters are so cold.”

“You want to retire?”

“Call it what you like,” he said with a heavy sigh. “After 500 years you begin to realize that it’s all the same over and over.”

“And that’s what this money is for? Retirement?”

He nodded sadly.

“How much money do you need to get home?”

“Two hundred thousand of your dollars will pay for my return and to buy back my castle, but I am still fifty thousand away from my goal.”

I turned to Renfield and said, “Tell the girls that the price just went up. It’s still a 150 but they have to bring a friend.”

“What are you doing?” Dracula asked.

“Network marketing,” I said. “It’s the latest thing. We’ll have you on a slow boat to Transylvania in no time.”

Flash Fiction Friday #45

2006-07-21T10:46:00.000-07:00

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird… actually, it is a bird, but next to that, flapping its wings ominously as it approaches our fair city is… Flash Fiction Friday!

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, you will that the combination of kryptonite and the phrase “where the sun don’t shine” can be quite unpleasant.

Here we go:

You will write you whatever beginning any way you want but containing all of the following five items.

A Girl

A Whirl

A Curl

Something that unfurls

A Hurl

Have fun.

Checking Out

2006-07-20T06:59:00.000-07:00

Yikes, having a new dog is more work than I remembered. The problem with Charley is that despite his full grown size, he’s still a puppy – and one whose previous owner taught him nothing – so you look at him and you think, “Dog,” but what you’re really seeing is, “Puppy.”

I’m walking through the living room and I catch a movement out of the corner of my eye that sends me into action before I even realize what I had seen: the lifting of a leg. I dart back into the room in time to see my beloved Charley taking a leak on a clean shirt I had draped over the back of a dining room chair.

Much loud voices ensued and Charley got to spend the next half hour on the outside looking in.

And that’s when we realized we had been giving him a little too much freedom – treating him like a dog instead of a puppy.

Taking him for a walk every night is more exercise than it sounds like. He’s not leash trained and his prodigious proboscis can instantly take over his brain with little more than the scent of a cat that was there yesterday. Much pulling and yanking is involved but he’s getting better every day.

He is still attached to my ankle and races around the house whining for half an hour after I leave for work. News of which makes his taking a leak on my shirt even more astounding. Maybe he didn’t know it was mine. Maybe he didn’t read the label on the inside collar where it said Bad Motherfucker. He knows now.

All of this comes at a good time because I have decided to take a break from my life. Or rather, the routine of my life. I want to climb out of the rut that I had fallen into over the last six years or so.

Part of that is to quit writing for the next three months if I can. I’m also giving up alcohol and caffeine – by which I mean when I do drink I will be cheating.

I had thought about giving up the blog, too, but then I realized that I write in it so infrequently that it could hardly be considered a part of the rut.

So, here I am now. Entertain me.

Over A Dog

2006-07-18T06:26:00.000-07:00

I feel a little like Jack Nicholson crying at the piano in As Good As It Gets. The depth of his bereavement at losing the little rat dog he once put down the laundry chute has simply overwhelmed him and all he can do is laugh and cry at the same time. Unlike Jack, I was expecting some emotional response to losing Mack the Dog but I am just as surprised at how hard it hit me.

Looking back over my emails, posts, and writings – not to mention remembering how I have treated other people – over the last couple of months, I can see now that I was pretty damned depressed.

The good news is the successor to the throne of Mackenzie has been named. King Charles – okay, actually Charley – has come to live with us after being surrendered by his owner – doesn’t that sound like a SWAT team was involved? – in Houston.

He is a German Shorthaired Pointer and those of you who read the earlier post about the frustrations of trying to get a dog through a rescue society will realize this is the first place I contacted and never got back to me. Well, they finally got back to me.

I had read in breed books that GSP’s are known to be excellent family dogs due to their love of people and gentle behavior. They couldn’t be more right. Charley is one of the most loving and loyal dogs I have ever come across. In just a few days, he has become an integral part of our home.

Meaning, of course, that you can’t do anything from tie your shoes to make dinner without his nose getting in the middle of it.

Another benefit is that he’s 14 months old so he’s already housebroken and sleeps through the night. He knows a few commands but it’s plain his previous owners didn’t spend any time with him.

That’s fine. I’d rather train him the correct way than inherit a dog with bad habits.

So, anyway, allow me to present King Charles the First.

Flash Fiction Friday #44

2006-07-14T07:39:00.000-07:00

Wait, the capsule door seems to be opening. Could anyone – or anything – have survived that crash? No. Oh no. It’s coming out. I can see it clearly now. It’s… It’s Flash Fiction Friday!

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules or if you think it's too late because it's after noon on Sunday, you will wake up in Shanghai with a strange tattoo. And everywhere you go people will berate you and attack you because that Chinese character on your forehead doesn’t mean “Peace” or “Prosperity” it means, “Kick me.”

Here we go:

You will write you whatever beginning any way you want but containing all of the following five items.

A Rope

A Dope

A Grope

Hope

A Slope

Have fun.

So Long, Fair Well, Auf...

2006-07-05T07:39:00.000-07:00

I never could spell that word.

Anyway, I'm taking off Thursday and won't be back until next Friday, so talk among yourselves. Hope you had a happy 4th.

JJ

FFF #43 A Gong For Wong

2006-07-03T09:03:00.000-07:00

“If there can be no balm for my creation, I wonder if it can at least be allowed to live.”

I closed the diary and tried to understand its meaning while surrounded by the detritus of a decrepit – what to call it? A laboratory? – that had been sealed by a cave-in more than a thousand years before. Even though months of living in the hill country outside Doon-hai had taught me to expect the weird, my experiences had yet to inure me to the bizarre history of a place mostly cut off from the normal evolution of the rest of society.

Wong, my guide, called for me in his gentle, whispered voice as I put the diary aside. “Mister-ah. A moment.”

I stuck the diary inside my jacket and picked my way through the sinister lab, passing a stone table on one side and a bank of alchemist equipment on the other. The stone on the slabs had been soaked with something the color of old leather that could only have been dried blood.

He was a small man in black cotton pajamas and skull cap who picked his way through the rubble with the alacrity of a mountain goat. And he never broke my concentration without good reason – and this time was no different.

Standing nearest the remaining strands of daylight at the upper level of the decrepit structure where it depended into the ancient soil, I tried to peer through the gloom at whatever marvelous discovery he had come across this time.

“Mister-ah. A moment,” he repeated. But this time I heard the unsteady current on which his words rode up to me from the depths. Concern. Trepidation. The sort of fear that returns like an infected wound that refuses to heal.

I made my way as quickly as possible to the old stone staircase that led to the lower level whereupon I was immediately greeted by the smell of very old death. It was a stench redolent of sins committed in a distant but not forgotten past. And it made me stop.

“Wong?”

“Here, Mister-ah.” His voice floated up to me from the impenetrable darkness below, at first beckoning and then, on closer inspection, had the quality of a hostage forced to call a loved one into a trap.

“What is it, Wong? What have you found?”

“The history,” he whispered. “The bad, very bad history.”

“Should I come down and see it?”

A long pause followed. Finally, “Wong is not able to make such a decision. A man’s spirit is his own ship to steer.”

“Could you make that a little more enigmatic for me?”

Silence.

“Fine,” I said, “I’ll be right down.”

Each step on the stairs leading down to the pit I felt the tread crumble under my boot and each time I paused to wait for the whole structure to collapse under my weight. Partly dreading it, partly hoping for it to happen. After all, a sudden death would have been a perfectly acceptable way to avoid what unnamed horrors waited below.

“Wong, are you all right?”

A long pause. “That is a difficult question, Mister-ah.”

My sense of curiosity had always been a sort of wild force in me. I could have stayed above. I could have stayed near the light. I chose instead to make my way down that crumbling staircase into the gathering stink of air that had been fresh long before it had been soured by some unnamed sin.

Seeing him at last in the well of dark, the heart that had been fluttering around inside my chest looking for an exit finally slowed and my drawn grimace faded to a pleased smile.

There stood my trusty guide next to a massive brass gong holding the striker by a leather thong from its wooden handle.

And then he raised the striker and my happy mood faded into chill foreboding. “Don’t, Wong.”

He shrugged as if he had no choice.

“No…”

He swung the striker and hit the gong. There was a silent moment as if the act had stunned even the universe and then a long, deep bong echoed from the brass surface.

Something terrible stirred in a part of the darkness I hadn’t explored. “Wong?”

He shook his head. And only then did I see that his cheeks were slick with tears. He opened his mouth and seemed to be under his own control for the first time since I had sent him into the pit.

And then he was gone. Or rather, half of him of was. The right half remained standing for a moment after the gleaming dark claw struck from behind and below. Then it, too, slumped to a pile in the dust at my feet.

“The thing that consumes,” I said, recalling the diary. “The thing that consumes the dark.”

Whatever it was that had stirred – and had taken my guide in the process – went still in the depthless basin beyond my vision.

“The thing that consumes,” I repeated. “Even it requires a bosom to cling to.”

The silence in the pit deepened and then emitted a contented coo that would have been more comfortable issuing from a puppy having its neck stroked.

If there was to be no balm for his creation, the long dead alchemist would have settled for a loving parent. What choice did I have?

I peered into the depths beyond me, beyond the pieces of my guide, and said, “Come to Papa.”

Flash Fiction Friday #43

2006-06-30T11:28:00.000-07:00

Flash Fiction Friday? Oh, Lawrence! This is the happiest day of my life! I think my testicles are dropping!

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules I will pay the gardener to give a case of the clap to the downstairs maid who will in turn give it to the butler who will in turn give it to upstairs maid who will then give it to you. Pray I’m in a good mood or it’ll be a case of genital warts.

Here we go:

You will write you whatever beginning any way you want but containing all of the following five items.

A Thong

A Gong

A Pair of Tongs

Someone named Wong

A Bong

Have fun.

The Paper Chase

2006-06-28T10:55:00.000-07:00

I don’t know why I am constantly amazed/confounded/frustrated by the absurdity of life. You’d think I would get used to it after awhile, but I don’t.

Knowing that Mack the Dog was due to leave us at any moment, MLA and I started searching for a successor. Notice I didn’t say replacement. Mack could never be replaced, but her reign can be extended by finding another benevolent monarch to rule our lives.

First thing we decided was no Border Collies. Mack will be the last Border Collie we own. And besides, it’s fun learning the quirks of a new breed.

I looked around and decided on the American Foxhound. Look at that, what a beautiful dog. Turns out that they cost a ton of money and even then you have to wait a long time to get one.

At the same time, MLA decided on the Vizsla, another beautiful dog, but it turns out – yes, you guessed it – they are mad crazy expensive and even then you have to wait six months to get one.

I turned from the Foxhound to another hunting dog, the German Shorthair Pointer (or GSP), a dog that I think has a striking look, but MLA thinks it looks like a redneck’s dog. Again, too expensive and too rare but someone suggested I look at the GSP Rescue society.

This set off a race between MLA and I to basically see who could get a rescue dog first. Would it be a GSP or a Vizsla? Only time would tell.

At first it looked like we were getting a Vizsla because while MLA’s online application was answered immediately, the GSP folks never got back to me – even though I pinged their email address several times.

But, I caught a break when it turned out that the Vizlsas weren’t 6 months old, but 6 years old. And there were no younger dogs in the area.

I went to a different GSP URL and pinged a different address. This time they got back to me and told me they had no application from me and I probably used the old email address and could I fill it out again and send it to this address?

Well, forgoing the question of why their site has the wrong email address on it, I decided to fill it out again because I had found the perfect dog. Her name is Holly and she’s one to two years old, a survivor of Hurricane Rita.

So, I send in my application and wait for a reply. During this time MLA convinces me she doesn’t want a GSP but she has found this great Chesapeake Bay Retriever named Chester.

The pressure was on at this point, because Chester was not just a beautiful dog, he was going through extensive training at some sort of dog college and would know something like 25 commands and be able to do long division when he was done. How could my little Holly compete with that?

Speed. That’s how. It was going to take weeks for Chester to finish his education so I had to get Holly on board before Chester the Rocket Scientist graduated Harvard.

I sent an urgent email to the GSP society inquiring about the home visit they were supposed to schedule and got this incredible response:

“We don’t have any GSP’s in your area.”

I went to the web site and found Holly still staring mournfully out me.

“But, I’m looking at one. And she’s looking back at me.”

“Which one?”

“Holly.”

“Oh, Holly isn’t a GSP. She’s an English Pointer.”

“I don’t care,” I said, trying to keep the growl out of my voice. “I want her.”

“Well, we only handle GSP rescues. You’ll have to go the Pointer Rescue Society for her.”

Now as steam jetted from my ears and my face turned a shade of red that was mostly purple, I said, “Why is she on your site then?”

“We’re helping them out.”

Helping, yes. Of course, very helpful.

Okay, so Chester has passed his first year at Harvard Law by now and is next in line to be editor of the Review while I’m chasing my damn tail for two weeks.

Calm. Take deep breaths. Remember your Buddha nature.

I contact the Pointer Rescue Society and discover I have to fill out the application all over again. I do this. I wait. I get an email from a woman who wants to question me to make sure I’d be a good father to Holly.

“She’s a beautiful dog,” I say at one point.

“Oh, she’s very popular,” the woman says.

“Popular?”

“Yeah, you’re in line behind five other couples who want to adopt her.”

So, a month has passed only for me to discover that I never had a chance at getting this dog anyway.

I decide I really like Chesapeake By Retrievers. Besides, once he passes the Bar, Chester can defend me on the murder charges after I choke the living shit out the people who had me dancing in circles on my hind legs for the last month.

The Call Every Parent Dreads

2006-06-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

You’re sleeping. It’s the dead of the wee hours. The phone rings. It’s your daughter and she sounds extremely distressed.

“Dad, I need your help.”

You wake instantly and sit up in bed, already dragging on your jeans with one hand while holding the receiver with the other. “What’s the matter? Where are you?”

“I’m in my car.”

“Where? Did it break down? Are you with someone? Is it a boy? Is some boy pressuring you to have sex?” You reach for the aluminum bat you keep next to your bed.

“I’m at the curb.” Her voice issues tremulous from the phone.

“What curb? Where?” You slip on your shoes, grab your keys, and start downstairs.

“In front of the house.”

You stop. Heart racing. “Huh?”

“I’m in my car in front of the house. I want to come inside but there are things in the front yard.”

“Things?”

“Giant rats or something. I can’t tell because it’s dark.”

You peer out the window. A pair of armadillos are fucking in the front yard. They make that weird screeching sound when they get laid. It’s like the rodent version of the rebel yell.

“Open the front door so I can just run right inside.”

You open the front door. A moment later she bolts into the house, shuddering uncontrollably. You’re just happy she’s home and safe.

And that armadillos aren’t six feet long.

Flash Fiction Friday #42

2006-06-23T10:58:00.000-07:00

Okay, kiddies, it’s that time again. Now, just like last week, make sure your parents aren’t around. I’ll wait. Okay, coast clear? Great, now go get mommy’s purse. There you go. And the wallet, that’s right. Now you see all those green slips of paper? That’s Flash Fiction! Just send them to me…

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules Peppy LePieu will fall in love with your leg.

Something a little funner this week. We’re going to have several starters and you get to pick one. It will be interesting to see who picks what by whom. Or whatever.

Here we go:

It all started with a ham sandwich.

How did my underwear wind up...

That can't be my mother...

He woke up, wondering where his...

(big props to Ubie)

Have fun.

The Worst Possible Thing

2006-06-21T06:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening at 5:15, we had Mack the Dog, our loyal companion for more than a decade, put to sleep after being stricken by a sudden and virulent form of cancer. Four weeks ago, she was fine. By yesterday, she was so ill she could barely move.

I promised myself that I would be at her side when the moment came. Though I knew it was going to be difficult, I didn’t want the last face she saw to be a stranger’s and even though I underestimated the difficulty of watching the light go out of her eyes, I’m still glad I was there.

Afterward, MLA and I went out for several Mexican Martinis. Then we staggered home, changed clothes, and took a stroll along the path where we used to walk Mack.

Along the way we met a man walking a Border Collie and a German Shorthaired Pointer and made conversation with him while petting his dogs. He talked about a dog he had lost after 15 years and how it had taken him a year to get over the loss. The he asked us how long since we lost our dog.

“An hour,” MLA said.

Last night as I was finally nearing sleep, it occurred to me that Mack had been a Border Collie and we are currently looking at German Shorthaired Pointers.

Just another weird paroxysm of coincidence from the universe, I guess.

We rescued Mack from a kill shelter when she was a sick, traumatized pup. So, I’m not going to waste my time thinking about what happened last night. I’m going to focus on those extra 11 years.

Besides, she’s on The Island of All Beef Frisbees and No Cats Allowed now.

Flash Fiction Friday #41

2006-06-16T12:47:00.000-07:00

‘Tis a far better thing I do now, than I have ever done before. ‘Tis a far flashier fiction I fict now than I have ever flash ficted before. So, I like Flash Fiction. What are you going to do about it? Cut my head off?

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules, two words: Hulk smash.

Here we go: A cry went up...

Have fun.

Okay, knuckleheads

2006-06-16T07:03:00.000-07:00

Don't forget to send in your starter sentences for Flash Fiction.

Wrong

2006-06-14T06:09:00.000-07:00

It’s difficult for a man to reach middle age – if he’s somehow going to live to be 96, anyway – and come to the inglorious conclusion that everything he has believed throughout his life, every idea he has championed, has been wrong.

I mean, what’s the point of being a liberal? Right? What’s in it for me? Nothing. If I win, I get to take care of a bunch losers who can’t take care of themselves. Great.

If I win, I get less money. Right? Because my money will be going to help – and by help I mean feed their drug habits – the less fortunate – and by less fortunate I mean too lazy to work and too stupid to obey the law.

What kind of prize is “less money”? That’s like Alex Trebec saying, “And now, JJ, if your answer is correct you will owe us $5,000!”

Right?

You only go around once in this life, or twice if you’re Bridie Murphy, so why waste that chance by trying to help others?

Because, let’s face it, if you help someone they’re just going to screw you over by continuing to expect your help. I mean, they chose to be poor. Why is this my problem? Right?

No, you know who’s smart? Trump. You know why? He’s ugly and stupid and has tragic fashion sense and a ridiculous toupee but he’s so rich he’s banging fashion models two at a time.
Where are my fashion models? Huh? Where is my penthouse three-way?

Right? The rich repatriate themselves to small island nations so they don’t have to pay taxes in the country that made them rich. How brilliant is that, right?

No, I think I’m going to go downtown on my lunch break and kick a homeless man into a coma. If I’m lucky, a high powered conservative will see me and offer me a powerful position in one of the corporations that own the government.

TTFN, suckers.

Pathetic

2006-06-13T12:59:00.000-07:00

I thought to myself, "I know how to get my comment numbers up. I'll start a flame war. Not just a flame war but a freaking world flame war."

And did anybody notice? A couple of people - thanks for your comments, my friends - and that's about all. I guess I forgot that to have a flame war more than four people have to read your blog.

Sheesh. I'm going to set myself on fire to see if anyone notices.

Football

2006-06-12T12:51:00.000-07:00

I'm not arguing that with you.

I agree that it's the most popular sport in the world.

It's just that you spell it weird and play it wrong.

Flash Fiction Friday #40

2006-06-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

Nice night for a walk, eh? Wash day tomorrow? Nothing clean, right? Nothing clean but Flash Fiction.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules, Todd Vegass will crash your next formal party and throw the C word around until every single guest is gone.

Here we go: Arm aching...

Have fun.

* Extra props for anyone who can name the movie referenced in this post.

** Last week's reference was to Apocalypse Now. It’s from the letter that Kurtz sends to his wife when he goes off the reservation.

Stay Up! Stay Up!

2006-06-07T20:21:00.000-07:00

The suspension of disbelief is one of the most heroic acts your brain can perform. After all, we’re the only creatures we know of who can do it. Even Dolphins who are smart enough not to have hands and thereby get to play in the ocean all day instead of working as bottle corker in some bleak factory… but I digress.

Where I was going with this is that it takes a little more effort to suspend some disbeliefs than others. For instance, Michael Mann’s film Heat was so thoroughly researched and so well written and so classily directed that it takes almost no effort to hoist that old disbelief over your head.

On the other hand, we have any movie by Michael Bay. This is a man who has never met a plot hole he didn’t like so you have to be like the strong man in circus grunting under the barbell of disbelief until, very often, you fail and the thing crushes you.

Here are some hoists and their relative weights from my movie going life:

Alien: The alien grows from chest burster to full size in about five minutes.

Level of Effort: Easy.

The movie is so good and the suspense so sharp that you don’t notice this for about ten years after you’ve seen the movie.

Interestingly enough, in Dan O’Bannon’s original script (or at least an early draft) the crew locks the little critter in their pantry while they try to figure out what to do and the thing consumes all their food over a few hours and grows to be a big, big boy.

The Matrix: The plant runs on human batteries.

LOE: Easy, at the time.

In retrospect, I feel a little silly but drama and the best kung fu you’ve ever seen can help you shrug off something like that. However, the line “…combined with a certain type of fusion…” is probably the worst logic filler I’ve ever heard. If you’ve got fusion, you don’t need copper tops.

Armageddon: The entire movie.

LOE: Impossible.

The Island: They have to keep the clones awake and socialized or they die.

LOE: Impossible.

The Game: Apparently the entire world is in on it.

LOE: Easy

That movie is so much fun you just sort of dodge the more ridiculous points subconsciously as they come at you.

Matchstick Men: The big trick.

LOE: Easy. As I unspooled the events backwards in my head, I couldn’t find a flaw. I’m still amazed.

Lethal Weapon: That that is Mel’s real hair.

LOE: Extremely difficult but not as hard as Braveheart.

Signs: That a creature intelligent enough to build intergalactic spacecraft can’t figure out how to get out of a pantry.

LOE: Difficult, it pulled me right of what had been pretty suspenseful film up until that point.

Manhattan: That an underage girl would be sexually attracted to middle aged Woody Allen.

LOE: Difficult at the time but much easier now.

Tootsie: That anyone anywhere under any kind of lighting would think Dustin Hoffman looked like a woman.

LOE: Impossible, but didn’t hurt the movie.

Rocky III: That they would make a third one.

LOE: Impossible, I still haven’t seen it.

Rain Man: That Tom Cruise wasn’t the retarded one.

LOE: Easy at the time. Now? Not so much.

So? What are some of yours?

Wordless

2006-06-06T12:05:00.000-07:00

Wordless.

May I have the definition, please?

Wordless: to be so mind-bogglingly over stressed and over worked that your forehead caves in.

Is there an alternate pronunciation?

The alternate pronunciation is: Fooked bleddy stoopid.

May I have the origin, please?

Originally used to convey the sensation of having had so much sex, usually on X, that one is left without the ability to form words, it is now used to describe someone overworked to the point of slack jawed dumbness.

May I have the etymology, please?

Fooked comes from the French term for having sex with your clothes off – as opposed to “standing in line” which conveys having sex with your clothes on.

Bleddy is a Scottish term meaning very much or completely.

Stoopid is an American misspelling of the word stupid.

The phrase was popularized by illiterate American shepherds who immigrated from Scotland during the great sheep rush of the 1880s.

Wordless: W-O-R-D-L-E-J-J. Wordless.

Flash Fiction Friday #39

2006-06-02T12:13:00.000-07:00

Sell the house. Sell the kids. It’s Flash Fiction Friday.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules, you will wake up next to William Bennett after a heavy night of drinking.

Here we go… “He said little as they paddled their way along the sunken streets...”

Have fun.

* Extra props for anyone who can name the movie referenced in this post.

** Last week's top reference was to The Zero Effect (rent it) and bottom reference was to Nurse Betty.

Your Virtues vs My Fears

2006-06-01T11:01:00.000-07:00

William Bennett, the alcoholic who was made the country’s first drug czar under Reagan, the racist gambler who refused to shame his friend Newt Gingrich’s extramarital affair but had the temerity to write a book suggesting he knew what our virtues should be, said recently that the reporters who broke the stories on secret overseas torture facilities and illegal domestic spying by NSA deserved subpoenas more than Pulitzers. He supported this by saying that when your country is at war and you expose their illegal activities, you’re committing treason.

This goes beyond the general Republican notion that to question your government is unpatriotic and breeches that Orwellian territory of government as supreme being. Overreacting? Follow his logic not down the slippery slope, not to its extreme conclusion in a distant future, but to right here and right now:

Is it all right for the government to break the law? Only during wartime.

How long is the “War on Terrorism” going to last? Forever.

What Bennett is saying is that it is okay for the government to break the law as long as it’s during a war and since the war is going to last forever the government never has to obey the law.

Why even bother fixing elections? The Republicans can just abolish them now.

People in red states are voting for Republicans because they fear change, they loathe homosexuality, they’re against abortion, they’re terrified of the terrorists, they dread higher taxes but what they’re getting instead is something far worse than what they fear. The loss of open government. The undermining of the constitution. A massive national debt held by two of the worst, most atrocious nations on the planet. China and Saudi Arabia.

Our forefathers’ dreams are swirling down the drain while these people wring their hands over the thought of one guy sticking his dick in another guy’s ass. You know what? That thought bothers me, too, but I’m a little too preoccupied with the attempt of the Bush administration to wipe out everything Americans worked for and died for and sacrificed for from Paul Revere’s ride to the intelligence oversight laws enacted after Watergate.

So, the question remains the same: When are they going to wake up?

Flash Fiction Friday #38 Raising Hell

2006-05-30T10:29:00.000-07:00

“They should make people take a test before they raise the dead,” Jeanie said. We were standing at the edge of Montpelier Cemetery, one of the largest in the area, peering through the iron bars that surrounded it. It was beautiful in a silvery, moonlit way. The tombstones gleamed iridescent in the bright moonlight. It looked peaceful, the way a cemetery should, like maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to spend eternity under the spreading branches of that pecan tree with a view of river down the hill.

Then the first bony hands began to punch through the soil, skin blue and ripped rough from clawing through the coffin lid. Climbing up through the soil is the easy part but getting through the wooden coffin lid is a real bitch and is just hell on the manicure.

There were a lot of them, a lot more than usual, but Jeanie seemed unfazed – as usual. She stood five and two and had hair the color fire would be if it was angry enough. Feisty was the word for her. Yeah, they made that word just for Jeanie.

“Who did this one?” I asked, making sure to whisper out of the side of my mouth. The undead may be shambling but they can react violently to loud noises.

“Vandemeer,” she said. “How much silver you packing?”

“Me? Plated under the copper jacket, why?”

“Just curious.”

“I thought Vandemeer was in lockdown.”

“He is,” Jeanie said. “That’s what this is all about. Zombie army to break him out of the Kingston Super-max.”

“He got through the Shaman wall?”

She nodded at the dozen or so freshly dead corpses now half way out of the ground above their graves. Blue skin, white eyes, and an uncontrollable desire for human flesh. I’ve never actually tasted human flesh – I skipped that part of our training cycle – but I can’t imagine it would have any better flavor than beef or chicken.

I raised my machinegun and racked in a silver loaded round. “I guess it’s time to go to work.”

“It is,” Jeanie said, turning to me. “For me.”

“Oh? I am not going in tonight?” I laughed. I thought she was kidding. “I’ve got your back? Is that it?”

You have all sorts of ideas about what it would feel like to get shot but you never really know until you actually get shot. Imagine a mule kicking a four inch spike into your chest. That’s what it feels like; being kicked by a mule and stabbed at the same time.

I was wearing my bullet proof vest as regulations stipulated but being hit by that many rounds at that close range it was only partially effective. Besides, I was pretty sure she had loaded her clip with armor piercing rounds ahead of time.

She had been planning on taking me out of the equation long before we got there. She must have somehow fallen under Vandemeer’s power. I went down and kept quiet like I was dead, the pain in my chest making me half wish I really was.

She left me to use her torch on the gate. The zombies were mostly out of their graves then, just shaking off the effects of their resurrection.

As quietly as I possibly could, I loaded a special shell into the chamber of sub-mach. One especially for the feisty little girl who had just assassinated me. I was a good shot, I was close, and she was preoccupied with helping the zombies get out of the cemetery. It should have been a breeze and would have been if not for the bullet in my lung.

I felt like I was drowning on dry land. Couldn’t get my breath, a panicky feeling in the best of circumstances, and all I wanted to do was lay my head on the grass and go to sleep. But every time I closed my eyes I saw an army of walking dead enforcing Vandemeer’s mad agenda.

So I struggled to my feet, vision blurred by now, and raised the gun. “Jeanie?”

She turned, a crazed light in her eyes I knew came from Vandemeer’s control, and raised her gun – this time pointing at my head. But I was ready, already there, pulled the trigger with the bead lined up right between her eyes. No protection there. I squeezed the trigger and there was a soft pop, a half second of quiet, and her head was surrounded by a plume of yellow smoke.

She staggered to the side, shook her head, and looked at me as if she didn’t know where she was. “What…”

“Behind you,” I said.

She turned back to the graveyard to see a hundred poorly dressed members of the newly undead shambling toward the gate. “Oh, no.”

I limped forward and started spraying the advancing force with silver bullets. After a moment to get her head straight, Jeanie joined in.

It took a while and the last one dropped at our feet but we got it done.

As the paramedics were taking me away, I said to her, “You know you’re going to have to buy my Starbucks all month for this, right?”

She patted my arm and climbed into the back of the EMS van with me. “Two weeks, tops.”

“Three weeks.”

“Two weeks and I drive an extra day.”

The morphine slipped through me like oil running down a wire and suddenly all there was to look at was a happy black hole. Before diving into it, I said, “Deal.”

Flash Fiction Friday #38

2006-05-26T13:00:00.000-07:00

Good guys? There are no good guys. There are no bad guys. You understand that, right? It’s just a bunch of guys. And they all love Flash Fiction Friday.

The rules:

You will send in your suggestion for starter sentences anytime during the week up to 12:00 noon CST on Friday.

If your sentence is not chosen and you feel it is too wonderful not to be chosen, you will send it in again the next week.

You will write an anecdote, short story, or novel length prose poem beginning with the sentence below.

You will add comments to this post indicating your desire to participate and the completion of your story.

You may join in at any time prior to the deadline.

You will display your story as a post on your own blog.

You will be done by Monday 12:00 Noon CST.

Those are all the rules, if you ask me about the rules or if something is or isn't allowed by the rules, I’ll be singing that old song, “Two in the head, makes sure they’re dead.”

Here we go… “They should make people take a test before they...”

Have fun.

* Extra props for anyone who can name the 2 movies referenced in this post.

Any Starters Today?

2006-05-26T10:03:00.000-07:00

Or are you going to leave it up to my fevered imagination?

Thomas Rand KBTY, Pt IV

2006-05-24T17:05:00.000-07:00

Marty sat next to me on the bench as the subway train, my ticket out of hell, slid quietly out of the station into the tunnel where its lights gleamed off the immaculate tile. He put his arm around my shoulders and said, “So you have to ask yourself if you’re willing to fight for people who don't deserve your help. If you are willing to give your life for people who aren’t worthy of your sacrifice.”

I grunted with my face in my hands. “Who would do something like that?”

“Why else would you do it?” he asked.

I looked at him by swiveling my head on my hands. “Huh?”

He shrugged and said, “The way I look at it you can be a hero for two reasons. The first one is for the glory, for yourself. The other is for the people you could help – whether they deserve it or not.”

“What about if you just believe in the goal?” I asked.

“The goal is always about people,” he said. “Right the wrong, avenge the crime, unseat the despot… it doesn’t matter. It’s about the people injured by the wrong, victimized by the crime, who suffer under the despotic regime.”

I stood and walked around to clear my head. “When’s the next train out of here?”

“They run every day. It’s about a two hour ride into the country. It’s a little uncivilized out there - I’m not promising milk and honey - but there is plenty of open space, food, fresh air. It’s the best bet. The wise choice.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So why do I feel like I should stay?”

“I don’t know. Do you have a history of mental illness in your family?”

I laughed and shook my head. “Not that I know of. Why do you stay? What do you do?”

“I fight the good fight,” he said. “I stay because every day I can stick my thumb right into the Man’s eye. That’s a pretty sweet feeling.”

"But you can never win."

He laughed. "The simple act of defiance is winning. Just having the timerity to fight at all is winning. Every moment Upper Management can't rest and enjoy the exploitation of the people of this city is a major victory."

"Upper Management?"

"The dogs that run this town," he sneered. "The worst of them is the CEO. Callous bastard. More of a machine than a man. Heartless and selfish."

“Sounds like someone who needs to have his ass kicked. So, if I stay, you’ll by my Morpheus?”

“Your what?”

“You know, teach me kung fu and weapons training and all that.”

“Sort of,” he said. “I won’t train you personally but you’ll get training in both drunken boxing and the piñata cudgel.”

“Drunken boxing? Piñata what?”

“Cudgel,” he said, “it’s a heavy stick. Any stick will do, really. Baseball bats are fun.”

“And what does this have to do with piñatas?”

“You’ll get all that during training,” he said and stood.

“Hey, I remember you,” I said. “You were dead drunk and took out a couple of heavily armed cops to cover my escape.”

“I wasn’t drunk,” he said. “I was drunken boxing. Very effective.”

“That can’t possibly be true.”

He stood up, put up his dukes, and immediately sank into a sort of ungainly inebriated stumble. He kept losing his balance which would cause him to have to move is leg suddenly which would cause him to sway or shift to one side. This kept up until he had shambled a half circle around me. “Hit me.”

I stood and put up my fists boxer style, just like I had seen on countless TV shows and movies. I hunched my shoulders and kept my feet moving, my balance steady, and couldn’t hit him at all. Every jab sailed right by him as he stumbled and twirled and shambled like a drunken moron.

Then he popped me right in the mouth when I left my guard down for half a second. Not too hard, it didn’t even bleed, but it hurt. And pissed me off enough that I started throwing quicker harder jabs in faster succession. In response he hit me on the nose, the eye, the side of the head…

“Enough!” I yelled and stepped back. “What kind of craziness is that?”

“You think that’s crazy? Wait till you get to piñata training.”

I sighed and closed my eyes. “When did you say the next train out of here was?”