Long, Bad Weekend in Phoenix

Journal entries about a difficult weekend.  Wacky road trip, one frustration after another.

I had to testify in court about certain family health matters in Phoenix on Monday (today), so ... 6-1/2 hour drive, and I got a ticket for not having a front license plate (which was never a problem before) just 4 miles from the state line. Got whatever sleep I could, not much. Got to the mental hospital, and while waiting to be called someone came in from outside and said, "Whoever has the blue Saturn has a flat tire." My reaction, "The way things are going, that would have to be me."

I went through some emotional hell, came out and had to put on the spare tire (while mental patients came and went). Note that my "look good in court" clothes hadn't been worn in 8 or 10 years, and really didn't fit, but I got the spare on and went back to my hotel to ask for a tire place. At the time, someone was revving their engine right outside the door and cussing and yelling, apparently because they had been told it was a non-smoking hotel and they couldn't deal with it. When the dickhead squealed the tires and drove off (thus proving his dickhead status and nothing else), the nice frazzled hotel lady told me about a Discount Tire place just up the road "in that construction area, can't miss it."

True, you couldn't miss the construction site -- it turned out to be a huge project ripping up the 4 middle lanes of Main Street (Mesa AZ) to put in a light rail system. Over a mile of arrows and warnings and sudden turns to get to businesses that would probably be ruined anyway. At first it didn't look like there was any way to get to the tire shop, then there was. I almost locked the keys in the car when I showed the guy the trick to starting the car (a silly security widget), had to slam the door on my hand at the last moment when I saw he'd left the keys in the ignition. While waiting, I walked over to Subway and bought a sandwich I couldn't eat because my stomach was upset and I had 400 miles to drive ...

Someone's floppy-eared dog squirmed out the half-opened window of their truck and ran around all excited. I got a hold of it and kept it entertained for a few minute while the owners were located. Instead of saying thanks, they just yelled at me, threw the dog in the truck and drove off.

As I told my brother when I got home: the way it was going I was sure I'd get trampled by llamas next, so I didn't make any extra stops. I changed out of my too-tight court pants at a rest area, filled up on cheap Arizona gas (it's 35 cents more in CA due to extra taxes) and somewhere along the line slammed the car door on my other hand for no reason at all. Approaching Quartzite, there was finally a break in the clouds, and huge sunbeams shone down on the town like some biblical scene, except that it was the same old place in the middle of nowhere. Of course I stopped at Chiriaco Summit, the best hangout on the emptiest stretch of the I-10, and got to tell some of the local history to some first time visitors. I snapped some photos of a litter of kittens camped out right under a sign saying "Free Kittens to a Good Home."

No matter how bad the day has been, or how dumb humans are, one can always trust animals to make it okay and simple again.

That's why this issue is a half an hour overdue. It had been sitting on my hard drive since Sep 12, just waiting for an intro, and I found myself living the perfect intro today.

(For people who hate loose ends ... back to that sandwich: by the time I got home 6 hours later it was gone and I vaguely recall finishing it somewhere around Indio during the Billy Joel part of the trip, hoping that no CHP choppers were following me with high-tech food detectors, praying all the salami-sniffing K-9 units were busy on other calls.)

2024 note: this was the intro to my newsletter Dark Windows #4, but since that since has been gone for years, I have added it to the flow of this blog.

Now, about the license plates.  I did eventually go through the hassle and expense of getting new plates for my car.  When I went to put them on the car, and unscrewed the screws on the old back license plate frame, TWO license plates came off the back.  So, I had two licenses plate the whole time.  Argh.

Last note (still 2024): I was able to find the photo I mentioned about the kittens, and it was nothing like I thought it would be in my mind's eye.  Way more cold and industrial, but the kitties were cute.

 

finding a plane in a haystack

Here's a "real life sci-fi" story worth sharing. You might have heard on the news that Steve Fossett (aviator, adventurer) is missing. His plane went down somewhere near Powell Canyon, Nevada and hasn't be found, after over a week of searching.

Well, you can actually help look for him online. A fresh satellite image of the area is available, and they set up a very easy-to-use site on Amazon where you can scan little areas of the image, looking for the plane.

Start here: http://www.stevefossett.com/

It's a fascinating demonstration of just how big the wilderness can be. Feel free to grab their Google Earth KML file of the area and zoom around. Millions of trees, thousands of ridges and hills, an endless stretch of wasteland.

And there was a weird estimate in a CNN article that there may be over 100 older crashed planes in this area, never found. So it's an area well worth exploring. We're used to being in safe homes and familiar streets -- but when a person gets lost the world is effectively infinite.

= scott

nonfic, fic and poetry in one day?

I'd have to call this a productive day ...

- I launched my dark fiction/poetry newsletter today:
http://archives.zinester.com/38141 (2024 note, the site is long gone)

- I wrote a 1,500-word article on the history and nuances of the horror genre

- proofed the galley for my tale at Swimming Kangaroo

- I wrote a 2,400-word far future insane internet fantasy (I've never seen anything else quite like it anywhere, which is either good or BAAAD)

- and with the SFPA poetry contest ending tomorrow (Over 250 poems were submitted in 45 days), that's winding down, and somehow I got a rhythm of words in my mind which led to a new poem that's a crushing and tragic conspiracy future in just a few words

plus one rejection, no big deal

making backups now...

Newsletter out, new news already

I just sent out my AuthorsDen newsletter 2 nights ago, but I already have new news.

=====> NEW SALES:

"swirling eyes" (poem) accepted at Not One of Us (Jan 08)

"what the spirits taught us" (poem) accepted at Tales of the Talisman (Jun 08)


=====> COMING SOON:

"Quake Man" (flash fiction) accepted at Swimming Kangaroo Press

"At Ripley's" (poem: ode to the Ripley's Museum) accepted for Helix #6.

"Unusual Vampire Lore" (article) accepted at Hungur.

"Blue sky tentacles" (cover art) accepted by Beyond Centauri.

Poems accepted by Expressions newsletter, Sword Review, and the Verb.

"Harrod Runs his Mouth" (flash fiction) in Burst magazine.

A gruesome illustration has been accepted for the Hungur 2 anthology.

"Jane Doe Discovered" (Poetry chapbook) coming in late 2007 from SamsDotPublishing.com

all paths diverge in the woods

If you noticed a gap in entries, it came from pondering things. One night I zoomed through and tried to update every site, and a few projects wove themselves together.

I launched an email newsletter called "Dark Windows." It is taking a book-length collection of dark poetry and stories and serializing it in 2,000-word chunks. With some extra features. You can find it here:
http://archives.zinester.com/38141

So, darker works and dreams will be moving over there. The new feature that entered the stream was a huge collection of quotes from old books, what I call "odd clips". There are so many great lines and strange moments and arguments, both silly and strange, scattered through a million volumes ... I've had fun finding them, and they add some spice and humor to these "streams of thought" of mine. Things to ponder. Fun to guess where they came from before checking the credits. Anyway, odd clips are going to start appearing, here, there and everywhere.

"Unfuture Chronicle" will continue as the venue for my sci-fi and futuristic works and ponderings.

Along the way, I have been forced to look at how the various genres interact and how I fit into them, while reading more genre history and classic works. Some fascinating stuff. My new, streamlined rationale is "order vs chaos." The darker genres are rooted in the chaos and unknowns of the world, mostly channeled from the distant past. Sci-fi and futurism are rooted in the order and knowns of the world, and look toward the future. The present day is caught in the middle, and that's why it makes no sense at all.

And now, a quick wrap up of my recent creative sales. Thanks for visiting.

=====> NEW SALES:

"swirling eyes" (poem) accepted at Not One of Us (Jan 08)

"what the spirits taught us" (poem) accepted at Tales of the Talisman (Jun 08)


=====> COMING SOON:

"Quake Man" (flash fiction) accepted at Swimming Kangaroo Press

"At Ripley's" (poem: ode to the Ripley's Museum) accepted for Helix #6.

"Unusual Vampire Lore" (article) accepted at Hungur.

"Blue sky tentacles" (cover art) accepted by Beyond Centauri.

Poems accepted by Expressions newsletter, Sword Review, and the Verb.

"Harrod Runs his Mouth" (flash fiction) in Burst magazine.

A gruesome illustration has been accepted for the Hungur 2 anthology.

"Jane Doe Discovered" (Poetry chapbook) coming in late 2007 from SamsDotPublishing.com

what dreams have come

Strange how dreams come and go. Maybe one night a road rally, the next Elysian Fields, a plane crash or some kind of Westworld with the bald gunslinger chasing us across a broken desert. So real at the time, sometimes TOO real (where we have to get up and walk around the house at 4 a.m. wishing the images will go away), yet at the same time they're less than vapor, gone in the flash burn of our minds before they can make a lasting impression. Sometimes fun, sometimes horrifying, never fully explained.

Yet there is a line we can't cross, where we start to believe that they have a reality of their own, that the creatures we see actually live in the cracks and shadows of our world, that all waking people are living in denial. If we follow that path, we can start to deny our real lives, give the dreams more reality, and then we are lost in the greatest cover-up in history, the non-meaning of existence itself. From that lonely hilltop, we can see whatever we wish to see, but it can never touch us, and we can never leave a mark or bring back any kind of solid road to walk upon.

On the other hand, the alternative -- a complete drab explanation of dreams -- would spoil life itself.

domeward bound

After seeing the Transformers movie just for fun, I figured I could expect some fairly odd dreams. In the movie, a teenager's car comes to life, turns into a giant robot, blah blah.

In the dream ...

My car didn't come to life, not like in the movies. Instead, the transmission got a mind of its own, kept switching gears at awkward moments, kept trying to crash me into things. It popped into low gear as I was trying to slow down at some stoplights, refused to get on the freeway entirely, and when I finally parked outside the UCSD BioDome (which was having an open house) it went into reverse, drove me up an embankment and wedged the car between two pine trees. I had to climb out the rear window.

I was deeper in the woods that I had thought, and when I came out I was somewhere on campus. I figured I should head for the top floor of the tallest building (about 15 stories up) and would be able to see the dome from there. The building was some kind of massive student lounge, or country club, judging from the lounging students and pop culture clone women walking around looking to score (with anyone but me).

The top floor was just a narrow hallway full of hair salons, with the stink of exotic creams and shampoos and burnt toenails. When I turned to get back on the elevator, it hiccuped, then there was an uninviting grinding sound. A wall section slid down over the elevator doors -- the new chunk of wall had a mock door that said "Janitor's Closet," (ha ha) and a little sign saying "STAIRS --->"

So I took the stairs. Some heavily painted clone girls were there, complaining about the exertion, how walking down stairs would make little wrinkles appear under their eyes some day. They went down only two floors, convinced that somehow the same elevator wouldn't be broken two floors down.

I jogged the rest of the way but ended up in just my underwear. When I ran through the crowded lobby, I was the entertainment of the hour, the thing everyone had to laugh at so they could puff up and feel important about themselves. I grabbed some clothes off the rack at the little Gap store in the lobby, flashed my credit card, gave Starbucks the finger, and stepped out into the fresh air (free at last!) only to run smack into Bill Clinton and some Secret Service dudes.

I was pretty frazzled by then. All I could do is scream, "What the hell are you guys looking at?"

Clinton laughed. We all laughed. It was pretty damn funny, but nobody knew why. I was thinking, "Bill Clinton visiting a tower full of clone girls." He was probably thinking, "Some nerd from the computer lab. I wonder if he can fix my toaster."

I told them to have a nice day, then ran off knowing I'd never be able to find my car.

Later on I was home, reading emails from the uncles I hadn't spoken to in 30 years, all about their families. I must have wasted an hour reading them and taking notes, updating phone numbers & contact info, only to wake up and find that the messages were not real, and the real uncles hadn't responded yet.

My car came home around 3 a.m., reeking of hydrogen & sulfur.

teddy bear rampage

I was looking for markets to send a new batch of stories and poems to, and stumbled across this classic story:
"Fluff and Buttons on the Teddy Bear Range"
by Matthew Sanborn Smith
published at Chiaroscuro

Check it out. It's the perfect blend of being dead serious about the absurd. It reminded me of my first sale to Analog -- "Last of the Soft Things," about how stuffed animals indirectly destroy civilization. Even if a premise is silly, true "speculative fiction" thinking means that we follow our "what ifs" to their logical conclusions, however illogical the results. That's how my current Analog tale ("Jimmy the Box") fits into a hard sci-fi magazine: the logic is pure science, and if the premise is not entirely serious, the results are still valid. Throw in the human element, and it makes the day. Regardless of genre or current story formulas, I think we should always be allowed to have fun with reality.

Okay, I know I should be promoting my own works on my blog. Really? Why talk and talk and never ask for money? Just kidding. I hate selling things, hate talking about money. I like to hear about people, and get tired of talking about me.

I hope you enjoy what I write and check out some of my books and other projects -- see the links at the right.

Nowhere, Arizona

We got back to the hotel at midnight, and Carmen went to sleep in the first two minutes. But I couldn't shake the feeling that we'd forgot something. I hope we made it clear that we were going back to the hotel, not staying at the house. And now it was too late to call.

I couldn't sleep. It reminded me of other possible lapses. Not closing out magazines 100% right - someone out there would corner me and say I never gave him an answer on a poem. And if I ever went back to college there was a whole semester of incompletes, for weird classes I never would have chosen.

We started home the next day, my nerves frazzled. The car sounded funny. We ended up seventy miles from anywhere in a small town baking in the sun. A friendly general store, a truckstop, and though there was no hotel, there was a guy who followed us around and begged us to stay upstairs. When the car exploded after dinner, we had no choice but to stay upstairs from the video store. All night Carmen slept and I heard the ch-ching of the cash registers, as the small town of eighty people dished out a thousand videos. In the morning the car was fine, but the town was made out of barbed wire, the townsfolk were plastic bags caught on the barbs, crying in the wind.

Time to go. But when I checked the map, we were in no known state, no known country. There were red roads and blue rivers, and glyphs that looked like eyeballs. I knew we lived west, but halfway home we were in the ocean, far from land, and the last of the air was gone.

= dream 5/27/07

feel the buzz

Studying bees. Cages, hives, mazes and transmitters, and the everpresent smell of honey. Yummy research, really. But still, I couldn't eat my peanut butter and honey sandwiches instead of the little critters. But one night as I was turning off the lights, and there was a plastic crash, and I was quickly surrounded by a buzzing swarm. They went down my shirt, and stopped, stingers ready ... while a hand of bees flipped the light switch back up. Lights came on, and a line of bees lined up on the table, in groups of seven: three horizontal, four vertical, forming a bunch of number eights like on an old calculator. It was something we had tried to teach them, but they had pretended not to learn.

Now they formed words, but flipping bodies up or down, like a furry LED display:

"THE HUM. MAKE IT STOP."

We had been studying the effects of cell phones on the hive. So I knew which hum they were talking about. I turned on the jamming system, which canceled out the cell tower signals from around the lab.

"NO. THE HUM OF THE WORLD."

"I can't change the world."

"OR ELSE ..."

"Well, I can't change it YET. We're learning what the problem is."

"TOO LATE."

They all stung at once. I swelled up and the world went red, but I saw their last message.

"NOW WE TAKE IT TO WASHINGTON."

===
a dream 5/27/07
And I wrote another tale about bees just yesterday ...

face factory

I had no trouble parking my boat. My friends all brought
theirs. We took over Ridge 30 and overflowed into 29. I jumped
to the pier and let the mooring boy do the rest. But none of my
friends got off their boats. I waited for hours, until morning,
when all the boats were gone, including mine.

In a state of great displeasure, I set out across town to
find the one guy I did know. After a short while, I came to his
address, but there was a huge looming factory there instead of a
home. Then I recalled that he lived and worked there, and even
the factory name seemed familiar. Crimson Faces, Inc. I sought
entry.

The foreman was seated at a strangely garbled control panel,
half machine, half gadget, breathing in places and covered with
faces. I asked for Guy, and the foreman said he'd try to page
him, but no guarantees. He cranked the phone for a moment, then
took a carton of milk out of his coat pocket and poured it into a
wet place at the top of the panel. "Hell, it gets me a dial
tone," he joked. His phone wasn't plugged into anything, so he
quickly gave up. He picked up this open-ended TV from the ground
and tried to get a bearing on my friend, but succeeded only in
giving himself a nasty shock.

"Look," he said, finally. "Here's where he sleeps. I
suggest you wait here." He took a handful of white-red sand from
one of the bins over the door, and sprinkled it over the yellow
sand that filled the coffin. He trailed a sand-pattern on the
floor and pronounced the place fit to be visited.

There was no decor, everything was pipes and bits of faces.
Guy never did show up. The foreman came back later to say that
he had been absorbed by the input manifestor, and that I had been
sent by God to replace him. He congratulated me on my fine work
building that LILCO plant on the Island (which I didn't do), then
he said that there were no longer any doors in the place, so I
might as well get comfortable.

My sandcolor was light brown, and I could start sorting the
facebin first thing in the morning.

==== dream from old journal - 3/19/86

Analog, coming soon

Looks like my tale "Jimmy the Box" will be in the July issue of Analog. Complete contents here:
http://www.analogsf.com/0707/issue_07.shtml

I hope you'll check it out -- it's a fun little romp.

I've been working on some new tales, and a series of nonfiction -- mock science articles on seemingly pointless topics. Hard to explain. I hope to get them "out there" soon. I will avoid littering this blog with nonfiction in the future, but sometimes a news item is just worth shouting about.

Writing news - April 2007

Hi again,

I hope everyone's doing well out there. Seems like most of my writing these days is describing things I'm selling on eBay, but I've managed a bit of real writing, including selling another offbeat story to Analog and posting some of my short films and outtakes on YouTube.


=====> BOOKS & CHAPBOOKS:

Poetry chapbook "Peripheral Visions" (NEW) now available from Assume Nothing Press for $6.
Here's the link: http://tales.scvs.com/bk_pvisions.php

Poetry collection "Appalling Limericks" now available from SamsDotPublishing.com -- I was the editor of this one, and it's a lot of fun.

My new story collection ("Blank Spaces & other dangers") is currently offline.
I'm working to get it setup again soon.

I still have a few copies of "Afterlife 9" and "the Other secret house" available for $5 postpaid in the USA.

=====> RECENT STUFF:

Recent works of mine can be found in Appalling Limericks, SciFan, Late Late Show, Star*Line FlashShot, Between Kisses, Sage of Consciousness, and Amaze.

My latest art pieces were: cover art & design for Ecotastrophe anthology, and cover design for Wondrous Web Worlds 6.

I wrote most of the game mechanics and character dialog for the video game "Left Behind: Eternal Forces", which was a fairly major release. But most of my contributions were replaced in the last year of production.

=====> NEW SALES:

An offbeat story "Jimmy the Box" will be appearing in Analog soon.

Poems accepted by Hahaku, SamsDot Publishing, and a few others.

Poetry chapbook "Jane Doe Discovered" coming in 2007 from SamsDotPublishing.com

A gruesome illustration has been accepted for the Hungur 2 anthology.

=====> MY SITES:

My active blogs:
"writer's life" blog ... http://www.authorsden.com/scottcvirtes
Unfuture Chronicle ... http://unfuture.blogspot.com

Thanks for your interest. Drop a line if you have any questions, or want to chat. Have a nice day.

= scott
http://tales.scvs.com?inw=blog

armed and maybe controlled

The Unfuture quote of the week comes from the show "Futureweapons:"

"Anything can happen when you give a machine gun to a robot."

I have to agree with the military guys who want little combat robots they can run by remote control. Never send men into a crossfire or a building full of hostile forces when you can send a little metal thing loaded with weapons. We're already programmed to play video games. How would it be any different to set a few thousand bots loose and let people go down to the local arcade and strike a few blows for their country?

Personally, I'd prefer a world where there was no fighting at all. But apparently, I was delusional all those years. It now looks like we will be at war forever. We can never let our guard down, because we would be trampled in an instant by all the people who want what they want, for whatever reason. Self-interest is our guiding principal, and apparently we all want to see how much we can get away with, from top to bottom. There are pressure systems, just like in the atmosphere, with all goods flowing from place to place driven by unseen forces.

I'd like to see a news service that only shows good news. Where we can see that people are still giving, caring ... but this doesn't sell, so it has been largely wiped from the big screen. I wonder if there's any good news at all, and hope like hell there is. Left to themselves, I've found people to be decent, and interesting. But as soon as they start to get together, they can destroy anything in their path.

So here we are, giving machine guns to robots and hoping they can clean up today's mess without screwing up tomorrow too badly.

the buzz about dying bees

Right now there are bees dying. They go out from their nests but never come back. There seems to be an outbreak of what entomologists are calling "colony collapse disorder," and a growing buzz over what's causing it. Possible culprits are cell phone signals, disease, and pesticides. We've got a definite "unfuture" coming if the problem gets out of control. After all, without bees, plants will stop producing seeds, including most major agricultural crops.

It's sobering to think that our actions or creations could have such a subtle, unpredictable effect on the world around us, and that the effect is hardly noticed until it becomes too vast to ignore. Or is that just the way we do things? All flowering plants could be wiped out, and the pine trees and ferns would return to carpet our dead cities. I'm just speculating, because that's my role. But let's keep an eye on this story. It will be interesting to see what's behind it all.

More reading ...
http://www.google.com/search?q=dying+bees+cell+phones

tuna guitar & the origami troupe

First there was a guy who tried to tune his guitar using the Doppler Effect. He figured that at some delta velocity the thing would sound right. Trouble is, he would never know. It sounded different to everyone he passed on the freeway, always different from the way he himself heard it, standing still with respect to the thnig in his hand. Still, he played in the half-shell house on the tractor trailer bad -- CAUTION: WIDE LOAD -- and people whizzed past and gave him the finger.

Then I was at an odd stage play. The crew came out and setup a man-sized wooden dog, then walked off stage. The planks that made up the dog began to unfold and twist in slow-motion transformations, soon becoming a lion in a classic stalking pose. Then the gears turned again, and the wooden surfaces moved, and it was a caribou. Someone began to chant "Hakuna Matata," and when the whole crowd was spouting that vibe, the production had to fight back. Someone slapped on "Animal Magnetism" by the Scorpions. The guitar crunched out the chords, then the cast came out and began to frolic and devour each other.

Of course, that's when my cell phone rang, which was surprising since I don't have one. But there it was in my pocket, ringing. I picked it up, covered one ear. "Dammit, I told you I'm trying to get out of building websites for people. Right now I'm at some kind of off-off-broadway cannibal party, gotta run."

But by then the feast was over. Later I was told that the blood was symbolic, but there wouldn't be a repeat performance.

--- dream 4/18/07

getting into 9th gear

Lots of vivid dreams lately...

I had a car with a 9-speed stick shift, where the very last gear will teleport the car up to a mile away in a random direction. The non-space bubble would float up or down to the surface of the earth before collapsing and bringing the car back to reality. Someone stole the car when I was in the city looking for clues ... I saw her go around a corner, engine sputtering. She obviously wasn't used to a stick. Then she vanished.

Nobody in their right mind would do a random teleport inside a city. It was made for places like Kansas with long straight roads and square miles of corn to hide in. I took out my keys and pressed the emergency button, hoping I wasn't too late. The car should have teleported back to the dealership and sprayed knock-out gas on the driver. Fun times. My phone rang less than a minute later.

On a good day, technology does work as advertised.

a final fire

day after day of pushing buttons. never knowing which one will start the reaction, the mixing of fuel, the runaway implosion that forces the core inwards. he sees the gauges behind closed eyes, glowing. they will not let him sleep. the stress in unbearable. alarms go off. temperatures rise, the damned gauges react, the all-or-nothing pressure reaches ALL then releases its rage reducing the world to NOTHING.

but not today.

another day, no faces, run and hide. shift after shift, shifting but never changing. wars imagined, made real, fought to the death. the banks win every time, quietly behind the scenes, laughing between piles of infusible irrefutable gold. the buttons, pushed. hidden codes shuffle. thunderstorms pass far overhead. what if the power fails? all the codes would fall to the floor like last week's rose petals. and without the codes there is nothing to stop the irrational, irreversible reaction.

the end of 10,000 years of arts and invention. maybe plants will survive and inhabit our bones when we're gone. things will scurry and tunnel and dine on our silted-over credit cards, take a bite, spit it out, inedible garbage. the sun will continue to pump energy into the earth. we were just a side effect of that energy. may the next creatures rise and be all we wanted to be, and more.

--- daydream at 1am, 4/17/07

felons in limbo

I just saw a short piece on CNN about some sex offenders in Miami who are forced to live under a bridge and actually had a parole officer who went under the bridge at 5 a.m. every morning to check up on them. The laws which said they couldn't live within half a mile of any place that "children might congregate" meant there was no place left for them to go.

Link here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/wplg/20070323/lo_wplg/11346356

Obviously, these are dangerous people, and there's no good way to know which ones will repeat their crimes. It's a strange situation where the people can't be held in prison forever, but can't be set free either. New legislation may result in tagging the felons with radio transmitters, and one can picture a scenario where computers track them and sound alarms if they leave their prescribed area or enter some forbidden zone. It's almost a scenario for shared computing -- I'm sure there are people who would sit around all day watching little blips on a map and firing buzzers every time they saw something they thought was suspicious. Even easier, why not just tag everyone, and then we can zap each other and penalize each other for fun, or send anonymous drug tips about ex-boyfriends just for kicks.

I'm not trying to be facetious. We all should have our freedoms and rights, and each type of crime may properly result in loss of certain freedoms for the safety of the society. I'm just trying to point out one of those futuristic-seeming scenarios we never could have predicted, that doesn't appear to have a solution, now that Australia is off limits for all our riff-raff. Don't laugh just yet -- European nations used to send their convicts to remote islands, or the persecuted people could sail off to new lands, but the world is flooded with people now. Some of them even end up under bridges ...

welcome to my sandstorm

I was hiking somewhere near Globe, AZ and got caught in a sudden sandstorm. Any building looked good through dirt-crusted eyes. I felt my way around the corrugated structure, found an opening and slipped inside.

It was pitch black and there was a giant cartoon dog on the wall. At first I thought it was talking to me, but then I saw the three children sitting on the couch in the darkness, lit only by cartoon-dog-light. I kept to the shadows, found another door, then a black hallway.

A group of commandos came pounding up the hall after me. As they approached, images appeared on the walls around them. I pressed my body up against a tall curtain and they rushed right past me, barking orders and cusswords at each other. They went into a room up ahead and started shooting and shouting. I sneaked a peek through the door, and saw they were in a cave full of demons. Things rushed at them, they fired, things burst, but I could see it was all on the walls. None of it real. Of all the places I could have found shelter, I chose some crazy VR gallery, and unless the system knew I was there, I couldn't participate in any of the games.

I rushed to find the front desk, to buy a ticket. One of the games on the list was Sandstorm, which I thought ironic at first, but then I rushed outside and found that the storm was made of pixels about an inch wide. I wondered why I hadn't noticed that earlier. Maybe the reality server was having a glitch. I turned around to get a refund but the arcade was just a gaping maw in the earth.

I checked and double-checked my firewalls, then dove down into the emptiness.

--- from a dream 4/10/07

invitation to crime

Craiglist hoax
---

Here's a strange technology hoax ... someone posted on CraigsList that everything in a certain house in Washington was up for grabs. You could go take whatever you wanted for free. So people showed up, stole everything and gutted the place. They ripped out the water heater, sinks, even light fixtures, probably leaving dangerous bare wires sticking out. Some visitors filled up whole carloads, some even stopped to spray graffiti on the wall. I doubt the posting said that vandalism was okay, but you just don't invite strangers to a party.

How insane is that? It's wrong in every possible way: that someone could post such an invitation and have it go live; then that people would find the posting and think it was okay; then that people would show up and still think it was okay to grab whatever they want; that people are so desperate to make a buck any way they can; that the ransacking went on for hours before someone called the police; that people would leave trails of garbage all over the lawn ... apparently the posting was soon flagged as a violation, but the damage was done.

Disgusting behavior. This is what we get for giving the masses access to the internet, huh? We try to give everyone access to information, and instead we see a proliferation in crime, and whole new categories of crime being invented.

There was a clip on CNN of the investigating officer essentially saying that they're used to tracking down crap from craigslist, but this was a whole new kind of thing. Craigslist was reported as saying that they would not release any information about the offender(s) without a proper warrant, which is technically the correct response, but only if they're proud about sponsoring crime and scams. If I was running an online community, I'd certainly care about whether I was contributing to illegal activity, or at least becoming the laughing stock of the town. Craig himself always seemed like a pioneer, an underdog we could all cheer for, but you just can't hand technology to people these days without criminals and screaming heads finding a way to corrupt it.

I guess there will be a bunch of copycat revenges against ex-spouses now. More invitations to destruction and theft. Because there is no shortage of desperate people looking to get in on any action in an otherwise miserable world. Maybe the days of unmoderated forums and listing services are over, and clinging to the hope that people will use them honestly is just another Grimm fairy tale. On the bright side, the police could probably use similar invitations as a sting operation for petty thieves.

===

I'm thinking that news stories which suggest we're "living in a weird future" can find a home here from time to time.

at your disposal

I was on a ferry, working as the disposal guy. I tried for the cushy disposal job, the one where I could bale together all the plastic jugs and stomp the aluminum cans, but that didn't work out. My boss said that job was for newbies, and he had a related job that got much better tips. That's how I became the dead body disposal guy. Whatever dead bodies people brought me, I would wrap in black trash bags, then grab some ballast from belowdecks and shove the whole package overboard under cover of darkness. Strangely, the ship's ballast was almost entirely made up of old manual typewriters, the kind that an old Harlan Ellison novel said were by far the best things for weighting down a corpse.

It was steady work. Every night we'd do five runs across the harbor, and on every run, at least one group of shady, jittery bad guys came to my tiny office dragging a dead goon by the hair. No paperwork, no questions, just my life on the ship of ghouls. The downside was not being able to tell my friends what I did for a living, so I had to say I was a bartender. Still, it put me through college, and then the ferry conveniently sailed into a fog bank and never came out. I had nothing to do with that, by the way. I heard the boss just got burned out and one night he called the disposal guy who made whole ships go away, not questions asked.

Fair enough, I guess.

--- from a dream March 2007

short-lived heroes

I think I killed all those annoying characters from "Heroes" last night. I tipped them off to a secret lab underneath an old brick building in Newark. They showed up in their usual ways, and spent hours talking about how they were feeling. Then they finally got their asses moving and went inside.

I wasn't planning on killing them. It was more of a "candid camera" setup, I just wanted to see the looks on their faces when they walked through the fire and did the puzzles and traveled through time and whatever else to get to the safe with all the secrets in it. Confetti was supposed to pop out, along with a note saying "Smile, you're on YouTube!"

But apparently one of them was allergic to confetti, and when he sneezed it caused earthquakes. Heck, I don't think he even knew it, because they're all such lame characters (except for the blond with the two personalities). All I know was, I was a few blocks away in my SUV, watching the video feeds, when he sneezed and the ground started shaking. A few minutes later the building did a perfect Hollywood implosion, and nothing was left but a roiling cloud of dust.

I stared at the wreckage for a moment. Various shades of Oops crossed my mind. Then I drove off slowly, thinking, "They're coming to take me away, ha ha, hee hee, ho ho ..."

But they never did come.

===

a fun fever dream - 3/15/07
Apparently, I just don't like that show.

deserts of the mind

We did some driving in northwest Arizona in January. Our usual quick zip through a few too many places, not much time to stop. Still, there are moments. Like when we were in Chloride and ran into a guy walking his dog with a rifle slung over his shoulder. That's when I discovered that a few types of people should always get a friendly hello -- women with little kids, older folks, and people with guns. Road trips lead to odd discoveries. Almost every time we got out of the car there was a cold biting wind, up to 40 mph. The reality of January. But the cold part wasn't so bad for me, but the constant wind was like having someone following us around babbling; it got old after a while.

Cold midnight with stars, and the the sound of fine sand rushing across the pavement. There were probably tumbleweeds circling us, sizing us up, looking for the right moment to leap under the tires like scratchy lemmings.

Whoever planned out Route 66 was not in his right mind. It's fun trying to follow the thing. Almost any time there's a clear route ahead, it veers off in some direction or other, looking for obstacles to overcome. Interesting, though. The full spectrum of "historic" from run down rusty nothings to well-kept diners and hotels.

A funny moment when we walked up to a Sonic and couldn't figure out how to order, and the wind drove us to the diner next door instead. Now in their TV commercials they tell you how the weird machine works, and what credit cards it takes. Little too late.

No new writing of any kind in January, just these reflections on old roads and sandy wastes. Our roasted almonds from Oatman only lasted so long, but all the funny photos of us with the burros ... priceless.

The lecture on flatulence

Okay. Dreams can take us to funky places. I don't mind the nightmares, but sometimes there are all-out comedy moments there, too. Some of my favorites come from the body trying to tell me something.

For me, when I have to take a leak, my dreams fill up with mysterious tons of water. Elevators full, airplanes full, waterfalls in the desk drawer, suddenly pulled out of a car and dropped into a river. Sometimes they seem to go on for hours, drenching wet, until we finally get the message.

Here was a funny twist on this phenomenon. I woke up for a moment, had a spot of gas, rolled over, and my dream changed from something on a train to:

Boring lecture hall. Emotionless professor who looked like a character from a Monopoly game card, going on and on:

"Some primitive cultures would say a wish when they felt a fart coming on. And then they would blow extra hard to try and get the message up to Grandfather. I'm not sure these people really expected an answer, other than to be hit with whatever their wives had in their hands at the time. But the women would do the same thing in their secret huts, reciting cryptic spells and then blowing hard while their sisters beat drums to cover up the audio evidence. They could walk outside after a degassing ritual and actually appear innocent of the whole ordeal. The men didn't want to know what went on in those huts, I assure you. According to Al Gore, this was the beginning of the end of the ozone layer."

And there you have it. Dare I say it? My brain fart of the week.

Happy feet, sad reminder

We went to see "Happy Feet" last week. Figured it would just be goofy, probably some top-tapping in there. I was good to see a film that wants to entertain. There were serious bits, and the expected ecological theme later on. What was odd was that they put so much work into the graphics. If you can sit through the orca scene or the blizzard scene, or the chase scenes without at least thinking "Wow," I recommend checking your vital signs. Singing penguins with attitude? They could have been just funny sketches if that's all they were going for.

Oddly, one of the big walruses was voiced by Steve Irwin. I wonder if this is the last piece of new work he did? What a guy. I still miss him, but it's not the same when watching the Croc Hunter just makes me feel bad, now that he's gone. And where does that feeling come from? It's not like we knew the guy, but yeah, he took us places and showed us a good time. It's a little odd knowing that he's not out in the wild somewhere, cooking up a new adventure.

Still, I can conjure those Happy Feet when I need them, and mourning does go more quickly for these imaginary friends.

game madness

The past few months, I have been trying to do something other than fiction. But I find that nonfiction just bugs me -- I feel like whatever I'm saying is readily available elsewhere. It's an odd sort of dissatisfaction.

So I've been going for the middle ground: trying (again) to do some writing for the gaming markets. But the typical role playing game has so many rules, and I've finally come to the conclusion that there isn't a system I'd actually want to run a game in. Every system has some crazy problem, either too much detail or not enough, so I'm stuck again. The open calls for writers almost always require buying some new book, even though I already have a zillion of them, and they're not cheap. Likewise, a guy would have to be insane to try and introduce a new system at this point in time. A gaming book needs about a thousand killer illustrations before anyone will look at it.

I did send a bunch of work in to a project using the Savage Worlds ruleset, but the project itself seems to have fizzled.

It seems like it would take a computer to keep track of all the tiny little rules now. But when I start to sketch out code, it grinds up against needing thousands of little graphics ... or being a text-based adventure thing, which is old, old, old. Personally, I'd like an online game that allows a huge range of actions, instead of ones that are all pretty but only let you fight.

So, my endless quest continues. Madness for the holidays.

an odd kind of blowout sale

The local Humane Society was having a fundraising craft fair this weekend, and we had a table. It was an outdoor thing. We wrestled to get the canopy and tables set up on Saturday, and there were some gusty winds. Someone's whole canopy blew over and knocked an old lady down, then the society sent out volunteers with huge bags of dog food to use as sandbags to keep us from blowing away. We had a whiteboard to write a sales blurb on, and drew a blank at first, but then we realized it was an honest old-fashioned BLOWOUT SALE!

There was a funny mellow Persian cat in a chair at one of the tables. When whole displays were blowing down and things were breaking, it barely looked around to see what the fuss was about. Cute. Where do people find these mellow cats? Ours bounce off the walls for no reason at all. Forget about taking them anywhere.

We got out for a horse & carriage ride down on Grand Avenue saturday night. When the horses came around each time, they brought a strong odor with them. It took a while for it to register. It smelled like Iowa! When the guy asked which carriage we wanted to ride in, I had to shrug. "Don't care. They both smell like Iowa." Was a nice little community thing, and shops were open, families walking around. Finally some life in our little downtown. The place was like a ghost town 5 years ago.

Sunday morning 8:30am, there was about a 40 mph sustained wind with some nasty gusts, and nobody even tried to setup their stuff. In fact a few people had (duh) left their displays up overnight, and they blew away or got trashed. Not too smart. So we gave up & went home, watched some football, went back over there around 11am and it was still windy. But we got a little spot against the side of the building, and the wind went around us. Seemed like a good spot. Until we realized we were next to the raffle table, and people thought our stuff was part of the raffle -- but once we made a gap it went okay.

Not many customers. The weather probably kept the wimps away. But the Humane Society did raise some money, and people were going in and out adopting animals all day, so it worked out good in the end.

tangled up in goo

If there's one thing nobody wants a pop quiz in, it's gymnastics. So when the professor started singling people out and making them do athletic moves on the spur of the moment, I tried to sink into the floor. When it was my turn, I instinctively went into defensive mode and showed everyone how to wield a quarterstaff and a broadsword, using the broom handle by the door. Still, the guy complained it wasn't technically "gymnastics." Again, defensive: "Bite me, this isn't a gymnastics class. It's physics."

To which the other students gasped. They were all wearing tights, and what I had taken for the science lecture hall was, in fact, a gymnasium. But what was the proper defense for being in the wrong reality?

The building shook, the ground trembled and split open. The desks and stupefied students tumbled down through the crack one column at a time. Then there was no solid earth beneath me, either. It was about eight feet down into a stream of boiling goo. It wasn't "hot" boiling, just agitated. We watched the professor fail to make any athletic moves and within a minute or so only his hand was sticking out. Another crack opened and drained the goo away. Firemen came to rescue us, even though none of us was one fire.

Just one of those days in imaginary college.

two comedy shorts on YouTube

Here's a change of pace ...

I just posted two of our older short films on YouTube.

Check out
the Siberians
and
Psyched out

These two are quirky comedies. Enjoy!

talk is cheap

Communicating is a lost art. Just sit there and hear the words pouring out of people's mouths sometimes. It's a source of endless wonder. Now, try to identify the statements one by one, actually count the claims being made. Amazing, huh?

Here's one I heard recently: "The Knights Templar came to Canada in the 1640's and brought the Holy Grail with them -- it's buried in an old-style rock tomb in Seabury. I saw it on the Discovery Channel."

Seems simple enough, right? Believe it?

In fact, this statement claims ALL of the following:

1. A group named the Knights Templar once existed (okay)
2. The Knights Templar were still around in the 1640's
3. They came to Canada in the 1640's
4. The Holy Grail exists in some form.
5. They once had the Holy Grail
6. They still had the Holy Grail in the 1640's
7. They brought it with them
8. A town named Seabury exists somewhere in Canada (probably on the east coast)
9. There are "old-style rock tombs" (whatever those are) near Seabury.
10. The Grail is buried in such a tomb.
11. The TV show actually exists (instead of being used as a fake attribution)
12. The TV show was stating facts and not just perpetuating a fiction.

The problem with this example is that each statement is hard to prove. Instead of setting out a string of facts, it's just a lot of guesses. If any one guess should fail, the whole argument must be dismissed as false. You can look up Seabury easily, and search the web for tombs of interest in the area -- but you need to ignore any pages which tell the same story, because repeating a story does not make it true. Look for supporting stories, additional facts and clues, and then keep looking.

One trick with language is that it's easy to make big sentences. Lots of words must have lots of meaning, right? When we speak to one another, it's easy to get distracted or lose our train of thought, or have ideas come out in the wrong order. But the overall quality of information we hear is actually fairly low.

Sadly, even when we read written "facts", we often get caught up in the flow and fail to apply the proper analysis, though the statements are right in front of our faces. Practice breaking down some of the things you hear into logical components. If our goal in communicating was to share facts, this would be a skill everyone had. But in fact, most conversation fills a social need, and the "truth" of the words is not the focus at all.

dark road and missing time

Coming home from a Halloween Party in Long Beach, it was clear driving for the first 50 miles or so. Then the world got moody. There was a serious marine layer, with waves of clouds passing in front of the yellowish half moon. Looked like smoke at first, but it went on for too many miles. We stopped at a rest area to switch drivers, and there was the moon, low over the Pacific ocean, with it's reflection shimmering off into the distance on the sea that never ends.

We hit highway 78 and it was a wall of brake lights, then twenty minutes of merging lanes and selfish people not giving an inch of room, even though cooperation would actually SAVE time. Lost the two left lanes. The stink of flares. Bored highway patrol officers waving us over. We must look like an endless stream of idiots to them, but we didn't have the luxury of knowing what was going on. The whole highway was closed, and we were forced to exit. We got a glimpse of some line of emergency lights under one of the bridges, cutting across all lanes. Probably a ghost or two sitting on the median that night.

So we took back roads home, and there was a wall of fog covering San Marcos, waves of clouds scraping the ground, looking for souls to consume ...

... if only we could remember the spirit of Halloween, not just buy buy buy all the crap we can get. And not plastic masks and cheap scares? How about breathing some of the old spirit and realizing that we're powerless fleas on the skin of the earth, and there are secrets all around us?

I don't know. Maybe the magic is truly gone. The cure for cancer is probably waiting in plain sight, in some kind of crab grass that we never pay any attention to, because we're only looking for the big thrill of the moment.

boils, bugs, bird

A rare "dream inside a dream" event: We found ourselves in an upscale senior center on another planet. I couldn't sleep, because I kept dreaming that I had a horrible rash and all my skin was falling off. Not in the red, soupy radiation-sickness way, no -- that would be too normal. Instead, it started as white spots, which became white rings, then turned into hard cake frosting and flaked off. So I'd wake up screaming, with that alien world beyond the window. So they'd drug me back to sleep. My dream-dreaming mind got revenge by giving everyone the cake frosting boils one time, but then I woke up and there was nobody left on the planet to get drugs from.

So I woke up and walked around the dark house a bit, to clear my head.

Fell asleep, and dreamed that I was helping a park ranger turn an abandoned gas station into a tourist info house. It was in a rocky place, with a small town like Quartzite visible in the distance, and the ground had just as many antique bottlecaps as pebbles. I knew something was up when she handed me a six-foot pole before we went inside. The place was overrun with giant bugs. There was a knee-high praying mantis guarding the garden, chasing mice under the house. Inside, it looked like a Halloween spiderweb store, except that the webs were real, the spiders were chattering and covered with a pink jelly of baby spiders. After a while, leeches started appearing out of thin air, and that was it for me. I almost ran away, but ended up chasing a 12-pack-sized grasshopper across the desert.

Carmen woke me up then, because there was a bird in the house, and the cats were going nuts trying to kill it. So she herded the carnivores into the sun room, and I chased the bird as it bounced and flitted all over the house. Finally, I threw a washcloth on it and it calmed down. It weighed about half an ounce, was about three inches long, and had a nectar beak. Don't know why critters can't tell when we're trying to help them...

the 6-run homer

There was baseball on all the big screens. Fermius said he once hit a triple and knocked in three runs at a company softball game. But the liar was also at pizza that night...

"Nyeah, I once knocked in SIX runs. Yeah, six. You ask how? It was Canadian rules baseball. They've got six bases, a hexagon, yeah. But the exchange rate killed it off. It got to where those six Canadian bases were only worth four American bases, see? So they started laying off shortstops. You know, shortstops ain't necessarily short. They used to be regular joes, all shapes and sizes. And when the shortstop's over six foot three, you don't call 'em Shorty, you call 'em Sir! Yeah, those were the days ... a guy could drive in six runs, fair and square."

Say Jeez!

I just don't like photographs with people in them. Of all the things in the world to take pictures of, why focus on people? I mean, people are everywhere, swarming in huge numbers, getting on each other's nerves ...

What about taking pictures of people to remember them by? You will remember the important ones, and others will fade away. Photos won't change that.

What about taking pictures of ourselves with famous people? Those are the worst. Why do we idolize people for their success? How annoying it must be to have strangers come up to you and want their pictures taken with you. Does that make them better? Is the fame supposed to rub off? I often see pictures of people with Mel Gibson or Stephen King or whoever, and the people are always so happy, the celebrities either bored or with a big false smile. Same with autographs. When I run into someone well known, my only instinct is to thank them for all their work, or their performances. I don't need to pretend that I can take a piece of them home with me, or ch-ching some scrap of paper for cash.

Okay ... historical moments make good photos. And we can't tell if a moment is historical until after we're dead (j/k). And little moments may be a part of our personal history. But give me something other than "Bob and Jo" and "Bob and Jo with baby". I'll take stars and mountains and distant lands -- places I can escape to. So many of the photos online are the equivalent of the floor of a taxicab.

Okay, hold it right there and say "Jeez!"

offbeat places

From a simple trip through noplace special ...

There was an Odd Lots next to a pawn shop. So, I guess people can pawn their beloved junk, it goes through a hole in the wall and you can buy it back at a big discount right next door?

There was a place called Crazyburger. Maybe not such a great choice of names now, with potential Mad Cow Disease out there. I'll have the crazy special with extra meningitis?

We passed a friendly looking place: the Angel Animal Hospital. Now, what kind of smart-ass things could anyone possibly come up with for this harmless name? Surely, nothing comes to mind. Having just seen Criss Angel walk through a plate glass window last week, here goes ... the Criss Angel Animal Hospital. He can astound your pets, make them chase ghosts and do card tricks, then levitate them home happy. And when he tells them to SIT, they'll sit for 36 hours on a giant pedestal in the middle of New York City.

Later in the day, before walking into a place called Penny Lane, I swore I heard a voice say this:

"His phone went dead. Or, maybe his brain went dead and his phone just said, 'No signal!'"

Oh yeah, the voice was me (again).

Brains at work. Hardhats heartily recommended.

writing news Sep 2006

Time flies, summer is gone, days are getting shorter but still rather toasty outside ... here's my latest writing news.

Naturally, if you don't want to receive these occasional newsletters, just email me and I'll take you off my list.


=====> BOOKS:

New story collection ("Blank Spaces & other dangers") now available from
Rage Machine Books. You can grab a copy here: http://www.lulu.com/content/290938
or I'll send you a signed one for $14 plus $2.50 shipping, just email me.

I still have a few copies of "Afterlife 9" available for $5 postpaid in the USA.

Poetry chapbook "Jane Doe Discovered" coming in 2007 from SamsDotPublishing.com

=====> RECENT STUFF:

I have had works in Scifaikuest, Bondage, and Star*Line recently. I recently judged a poetry contest at sfpoetry.com, limerick contests at limerickContests.com, and finished editing a short book of limericks for samsDotPublishing.com.

I was a guest at Leprecon (Phoenix) in May.

I went up to Worldcon in Anaheim in August where I got to hear Ray Bradbury do a quick talk -- always inspiring. I got to say hi (again) to Stan Schmidt of Analog, and keep send him weird, offbeat stories, hoping for the best.

I will be a guest at ConJecture in San Diego at the end of September. Looks like I will have to skip Milehicon in Denver again this year -- these trips get expensive.

Recent book cover art and/or design:
- a trilogy by Christopher Sloan for RageMachine Books
- Ecotastrophe anthology (SamsDot)
- Wondrous Web Worlds 6 (the "Best of 2005" collection for SamsDot)

Flash: "Radio Disconnect" recently appeared in FlashShot

=====> NEW SALES:

Two articles about poetry will be appearing in Star*Line.

Flash fiction "Harrod runs his mouth" and "Other monsters" to appear in FlashShot

Audio story "Lost at Sea House" to appear in the Late Late Show (web)

Story "Coral Morning Blue" accepted by 5th Story Review

Poems accepted by Illumen, Diagram, Amaze, Appalling Limericks, Esperance, Between Kisses

Audio poems to appear on Podiobooks.com virtual poetry slam

Audio drama serial "Nightbeat 2,3,4" in production at PhillipsFilms

=====> MY SITES:

My active blogs:
"writer's life" blog ... http://www.authorsden.com/scottcvirtes
Unfuture Chronicle ... http://unfuture.blogspot.com

surreal estate

The rate at which we kill is alarming. Homeowners try to cash in, make the most they can on the insane inflation, kill all their bushes and plant whatever they think will get them the best offer, then the new owners come in and kill all that stuff and plant what THEY want to see. Then not leaving enough time for irrigation, all those plants suffer and die, or maybe the guy gets a new girlfriend who wants camellias out front, so all the jade plants have to die ...

Trees which try to shelter us, shade us, keep us comfortable -- they get hacked down so we can have a better view of the beach instead. Then those people complain about being hot all the time.

A strange diversiona few months ago, I was looking at real estate in Alberta. Sure the houses were affordable but that usually menas there are no jobs in the area. How odd to see whole pages of listings, photo after photo of houses buried in snow. Just one white lump after another with only the descriptions to tell them apart. Is that really where I want to be?

That made me think about the Moon. Thinking, if we could figure out how to make lunar adobe without choking on the dust, how would that play out? I wonder about the effect on property values if there's no atmosphere, if you step outside and your head just explodes. Will these lots also sell for a quarter million dollars per acre someday? Will the insanity go on forever?

audio oddities

I just posted three odd audio pieces I thought you might enjoy ...



The Killer Sandwich (funny flash fiction)




Overshadowed (poem)




Moondust (wild sci-fi story)

train escape & astro accident

From a two-dream night ...

First we were running through a forest, skipping down overgrown slopes, trying to get away from the wizards who were chasing us. They were wimps, but they could set our clothes on fire from a few hundred feet away, so we didn't want them getting too close. The woods ended at a gorge, crossed only by a narrow railway bridge. We heard the ancient locomotive huffing closer, then leapt out and caught the caboose railing as it rounded a sharp turn. The antique train took us across the gorge and away, and we knew our foes would never pick up the trail.

I don't know what we did to upset them. Apparently just visiting their secretive town was enough to get chased off and set aflame. Anyway, we enjoyed the short train ride, through a tunnel, and dodging the conductor who expected riders to have tickets. Security chased us around the terminal, but we caught another train through some rocky foothills and ended up at a roadside attraction in Arizona. Apparently, we'd parked our cars here about a week ago, got on the little cheezy wild west train ride, and somehow found another dimension ...

===

I was filming a documentary about an astronomer from about 1910, who built an observatory on the roof of his old Victorian house, only to have the roof collapse under the weight and kill his whole family. Only a daughter survived, and the granddaughter still owned the house, now an old lady with the sad story to tell. I found a time capsule beneath a flagstone by the back porch, and it had old photos of obscure scientists, including the great Bernard Apocalypse or Cambridge.

Something about the photos and the man's old notes -- so many nights spent, so many numbers captured, looking for meaning in an infinitely vast universe.

eye on the hill

There's a jewel in the eye of the thing on the hill. It
drips sweat and bleeds sin. It lies in the hole, waiting for
night. It suffers thru midday, but the children didn't know. A
boy and a girl walked up the hill, the pail in his hand clunking
along. He cranked up the bucket from within the hole, but no
wanter came up. Instead came a huge eye which glared at him from
the bucket. Then followed a sticky limb from below which swatted
him away, and something flowed over the lip of the hole and
became a man. This man lashed tentacles about the girl and cast
the boy from the hill. His screams were caught up in the air,
muted, repeated, then digested as his head hit a rock below. The
girl screamed, but the man took her and forced her down. Jill
went tumbling after.

---

a dream found in a journal dated 10/17/1983

So you want to be a stuporhero?

I never really got into superheroes. Or supervillains. That whole hidden identity thing, and then having to put on the silly spandex costumes before doing battle. What kind of freakish mythology is that anyway?

I have no problem with mutant powers. In fact, they could be a lot of fun, when they're not a complete curse. So the X-Men were a bit more realistic, except that they turn funny colors or dress in cool tailored leather to show the world how different they are, while trying not to be different. Yes, they'd probably be hunted down by the silent majority if they ever got too public.

Right now, Smallville has is doing a fine job of showing life as a young superhero. In fact, it's more effective for me if you don't know who has powers. Well acted, too.

Then there's "So You Want to be a Superhero", which I promised I wasn't going to watch one minute of. But it's cute, a bit satirical, and as Fermius said, Stan Lee really is a legend to those people, and they really do appear crushed when they let him down. But I don't want to be a superhero, and those folks are mostly just posers, and I can't believe one of those bums is going to get a saturday night movie of their own.

So we have a media engine that creates celebrities, and a mass audience in a stupor waiting to be told what to think, who spend more time watching other people's lives than living their own -- I think this is the point in history where the only thing that can save us are a bunch of bright blue mutants. But nobody wants to step up and drink the toxic goo, or zap themselves with gamma rays, because 99.999% of the time it kills them.

So Big Brother kicks our asses, and the mythos endures.

Crossed on Malta

We were vacationing in Malta, tracking along rugged coasts and through ancient weathered ruins. There were jagged black cliffs dotted with old pottery shards. At one spot there was a melted trickle from a Roman-era lead mine, but the sky grew dark and I was hit with lightning.

We went to a salt pan, where fingers of black primeval stones poked up from an unknown civilization. But the sky grew dark and lightning chased us away.

There were temples from the dawn of time, sandy stones baking in the centuries; traces of artwork, and the heads of bulls looking blankly down over altars that hadn't seen action in ages. Darkness fell and the electrical storm blocked our way.

There was a sign boasting about the oldest known human habitation, but when we got there it was just a crack between two slabs of granite, filled with water and covered with a tarp. The sky grew dark and I was jolted again.

Private planes became whooping cranes. Cars turned to turtles. People became savage things, splitting skulls with heavy rocks. In the end there were only stones, studded with the fossils of things to come.

===

A dream from sometime this week. I've never been to Malta, but it's on my list of things to do. Just enjoy the vision. The lightning storms seemed to be a carryover from a vacation Fermius just took. They became a sort of politically correct guardian -- any time I looked at something that might give insight into history, it chased me off.

Bog Man

Bog Man
by s.c.virtes
---

Maybe this story was never told.

Of how it began and how it developed,
I suspect you know naught.

The ending which might have shocked generations
you cannot reconstruct from the brain tissue
you stole from our bog, from my head.

How you pulled me from my days of rest
and proved that I was one of you,
this story you proudly
but mistakenly tell.

But the true story, the one my father told me,
I told it to my flesh which
delivered it to the earth
from which all stories begin.

But the more you scrape my bones
the more I hesitate and wonder
if I was ever told at all.

---

Written 11/20/86, just found in an old notebook & revised 7/21/06.
A story version of this was written but never published.

least exciting medical mystery ever

I have to admit, I enjoy watching medical mystery shows. The fictional ones are okay, but the factual ones keep showing that the real world is stranger than we can make up easily. Things like "Mystery Diagnosis" or "Medical Incredible", where people may have all their skin fall off or their eyeballs explode, or get crushed by elephants and survive.

It's partly research -- what are the limits of the human body? And partly fascination or a grim curiosity. But there's a big relief factor. If you think you had a bad day, here's a guy whose lower legs are on backwards, or whatever. It's encouraging to know that these things can be survived and overcome.

Trouble is, in real life, I have a bit of a medical mystery. Dizzy spells, and if I spend too much time around people, I can end up fainting. Seems like it's mostly acid reflux; just enough of it at times to make me nauseous, and then if I don't pay attention to the little symptoms they can turn ugly. But I've given up soda and caffeine and tomatoes and some other things; no snacking 2 hours before bed (it's worst at night and in the morning), allow extra time to get up and chug water in the morning. Other things. Odds are, some diet will keep it under control.

But when I do go to a doctor they just get everything all confused. Diabetes? Sleep disorder? Liver problem? Thyroid? I had some extensive blood work last week, part of a physical. The results came back. Everything normal except that my bad cholesterol is good and my good cholesterol is bad. Yeah, that solves it. I just need to drink one small fish every day ...

Frankly, this is the least exciting medical mystery ever. They write weird shit in our charts and then we have a hard time getting insurance to pay for them to write more weird shit in our charts. It's probably nothing big in the end, although I should be at Comic-Con this week but I'm worried that I'll crash just waiting in line for those three hours to get inside.

free world collapsing

I regularly hear wild arguments that all art should be free. It's obviously consumers talking here. Easy for them to say! How's that supposed to work, exactly? Who is going to write books 20 years from now if there's no way to make money doing so?

Aside from being purely selfish, some of this comes from common delusions about how writing (or other arts) actually work, from a business standpoint. Maybe they think all writers are greedy bastards who make millions of dollars by overcharging for their work. Then I'd agree that some things could change. The few successful artists get all the media coverage, painting a completely reversed image of what it's really like. The vast majority of artists are struggling to make ends meet, just hoping to be seen among the glut of products cranked out every day. And if they succeed in getting a book deal or distribution deal, they end up getting just a small percentage, while publishers set the prices and control everything.

If anything, it would be fair to ask that creators get a bigger cut of the money earned by their work, and all the middlemen settle for less ... but I know that's unrealistic, because it's an industry, many roles interlocked into a beast that just barely functions.

If all art was free, then an appalling gloom would set in. We'd never get away from our crap jobs. We'll never be able to do what we love to do full time. We'll always be somebody's slaves. There will be no hope of success anymore.

But I suspect these rabid consumers wouldn't care. There's plenty of stuff already written. Why bother creating any more? You may think that "anyone can do it", but you'd be surprised ... anyone can make a half-assed attempt at creating art. But is that what we should set our sights on?

Artists should be free to do their best, and consumers are free to choose what they will or will not buy. But this arrogant grabby attitude of people wanting work handed to them for free ... no. Maybe they should work a few weeks at their regular jobs without a paycheck and see what that's like. Maybe their jobs are the ones with no value in the end.

a real telescope eye

I'm an amateur astronomer who has never been able to afford a telescope. I have many other ironic failures to share, but let's stick to this one. Luckily, there's a boom in astronomy right now, with a mind-boggling array of surveys and catalogs and tools available online. In most other ways, the 21st century has been lame so far. According to the sci-fi classics, we oughta be much further along than we are, but the world continues to be 99% dull, and hardly anything seems to change. The internet itself is almost entirely drivel, but there are some astronomical gems if you know where to look.

And don't forget to look away from time to time ...

This weekend I was up at the 60" telescope on Palomar Mountain. An unexpected invitation and twisty road trip into darkness. Okay, if it was dark, the astronomers would have been too busy to see us, but the full moon was out, the deer were lurking, and there we went.

Comically, since the real astronomers never actually look through the scope with their eyes, when there's a tour they only have a really, really old eyepiece to slap on there. Looking through this telescope is like having a volkswagen suspended over your head, but looking through the tailpipe you can see millions of light years away. That, and zero emissions. And those precious moments where you feel you can touch the universe in some way. A vehicle of sorts after all.

Of course, there was a little control room full of computers. Every time they opened the door, this insane blue glow came pouring out. No wonder we can't find all that dark matter -- our eyes have become accustomed to the radiation.

A very interesting trip. Including the discovery that there is more than one road up on that mountain, and the other one doesn't go anywhere. A brief shift in reality, and then we were gone.

Thanks, Mike.

Shatner rules & Earth escapes destruction

I have to say, I enjoy watching William Shatner, no matter what he's doing. He could be doing some weird "Worst Songs of the 80's" show on VH-1, or narrating something about comets, or trying to sell me a hotel room. heck, there was even a 2-hour special recently called "How William Shatner Changed the World." He's older now, but seems to enjoy himself so much more. Sometimes he's lampooning his old characters or just hamming it up. I don't care. He's friendly and entertaining.

And then there's Denny Crane, his trigger-happy larger-than-life character on "Boston Legal". He could just walk through a plate glass window at any moment. You never know with him. Brooding, strange, flamboyant, dangerous. We can't take our eyes off him. Like it or not, he can perform.

Just now I had to go outside and look up. It was cloudy (again) but it was sobering to think that an asteroid was zipping past the earth at that very moment -- a near miss this time around. Naturally, the silent event was narrated by Mr. Shatner. "Tumbling through ... the cold depths of space ... an insignificant rock hurtles towards a blue ... planet."

It just wouldn't have been the same without him.

stoopid human, clever animals

First, some entertaining animal news ...

A cat chases a bear up a tree?
See photo here

A new snake was discovered in Borneo that can change colors like a chameleon.
Read it here

Thanks to my dad and National Geographic for those items.

Now for the stoopid human ...

It's funny how our brains can be temporarily shut off, or paying no attention to what our hands our doing. I was smashing open a coconut last night. Normally a hammer does the trick and a flat screwdriver it the optimum tool from getting the meat off the husk. Except when you slip and ram the screwdriver between two fingers and leave a little hole that stays open for a few seconds before figuring out, "Oh yeah, I should be bleeding now."

I'm pretty careful about always cutting away from my body with sharp things. It's the blunt ones you gotta watch out for. I had a funny slip last year which left the entire blade of an x-acto knife in the webbing of my thumb -- luckily that was such a perfect cut it went away like nothing had happened. Just felt neat, and I had a recording session right afterwards where I was flipping dials and pushing sliders while trying hard not to move my hand at all.

Make sure you tie up the loose ends at the end of any story.

During lunch we saw an episode of Andromeda where Dylan was playing with a kitten in one scene, then the ship started throwing people around in classic Rodenberry style, and the episode ended 40 minutes later with no hint about where the cat ended up.

And on Ripley's, one of those stories about a guy driving down a country road and ending up with four feet of rebar sticking out of his skull. Except that there were no bridges or trees or anything -- his medical story was great, but I wanna know where the projectile came from!

Now to leave a loose end of my own ...

around the block

There's a place in town where the propane trucks drive on the wrong side of the road. Witnessed 3 times now. Near a very flammable lumber yard.

Was walking around the block, pretending to be fit, and some neighbors were sitting out front of their house with a barbecue going ... except that it smelled like Band-aids.

Last night just before 9 there was a luminous blob of goo in the sky. Another launch from Vandenberg, about 150 miles north of here. Some kind of spy satellite. Yay, the world needs more spying.

Tonight we found someone's wallet, a big fat shiny thing strangely devoid of cash and credit cards. Found some contact info, called her, she's already making it a pain in the ass to return the thing to her. then she'll probably accuse us of stealing her money. I wonder if it's worth it trying to help folks anymore.

I got $10 for filling out an interminable survey about how biased the news media appears to be. Oddly, people trust the internet more, even though any given page is just as likely to be complete fiction. And now, people trust blogs more than the internet in general (recent blurb in Science magazine). Is it because blogs are more personal, and people never lie or make shit up when they're speaking to you in confidence? Apparently there are about 11 million blogs now, with a new blog created every second. Talk about hopping on the bandwagon. At what point does copying everyone else become the height of lameness? Digital sheep. Baaaa.

Unfuture chronicle?

Well, the blog went and mutated on me. I don't spend as much time pondering the future, since I can barely keep up with the present day. And much of the present day is distractingly weird and unbelievable, so that's where the flow is.

In a way, it's about weird viewpoints. And not the kind of "viewpoint" you see on the news, which is just people stuck with their own opinions of things. I'm talking about "viewpoint" in terms of where you put your mental camera and look at things. Looking down from the ceiling is a fresh viewpoint, especially if there's a ceiling fan.

What is "weird"? All we can really say about it is ... it's a weird word. After all, there's that pesky rule:

"'I' before 'E' except after 'C'."

Anyone remember the second part?

"Unless pronounced like 'A' as in 'neighbor' or 'weigh'."

I don't remember if there's a third part. If not, it should say,

"Except of course for 'weird', which is just plain 'weird'."

And that's how it is. I don't spend all day trying to be weird. I just sit here open to possibilities, and I don't discard them just because they're a little bit odd.

Finally, I've been staying on the light side. Silly bits. Since I'm sick to death of hearing about crime, I've nixed the "Underworld" part of the blog. It's now my personal "Unfuture Chronicle".

"Meet the new boss ... same as the old boss." (love that song!)

Weirds of wisdom

Things overheard or almost said out loud recently ...

You can't do #2 on a golf course.

Did his business card actually say, "Strawberry Orgasm Engineer"?

The problem with burning your trash, if it's full of cat poo, is that the nearest teenagers will complain that it smells like barf.

The castle was old, dark, and backlit in an ominous way, with three kinds of celery growing in a small patch right out front by the plastic gnome.

Meet Pus Bucket, the rather mean ogre.

I wouldn't say his hair is greasy, but the only thing missing are the croutons. (Okay - this was from Kolchak, the Night Stalker. He had some great sarcastic zingers, didn't he?)

Quit staring at those girls, they're nothing but trouble. Here's a paper towel already ... go wash behind your ears.

I think back to a lunchroom at a big company in Iowa ... everyone was complaining that if the corn doesn't grow fast enough, their marijuana plants could be seen from a mile away.

And the freakish PHP error of the year:
Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM on line 0 of ...

Yeah, that's what life is like right now.

Gerald Ford.

s'not funny already

We were driving home from somewhere odd. About four hours out of Paducah, we saw a curious sign at the side of the road. "World's Largest Booger - next exit." Now, who could resist that?

It turned out to be a monstrous thing in a glass case at the back of a convenience store. It even showed signs of intelligence -- when the caretaker pulled out a plastic separator, the thing would navigate through a small wooden maze and then the man would reward it with a few sprinkles from a cardboard tin labeled "POLLEN".

There was a donation bucket by the door. The guy asked us each to spit into the bucket as we leave. It was once of those things you probably shouldn't ask about, but I asked anyway. The guy said that once the bucket was filled, he'd tip it over, and the contents would shamble off into the wilderness and later run for Congress.

======

dreams are funny. you just have to let them do their thing.

comically, I was coming down with a cold that night. and the maze thing was a weird anecdote I'd read about years before, showing that slime molds can navigate small wooden mazes looking for food. my brain is apparently a crock pot just waiting for spuds.

gaming strangeness

Some comic moments from a game session with Fermius ...

Beware of the vorpal doberman.

Any time a bad guy starts to lecture, just hit 'em with the nearest table.

A sorceror optimist: "I keep dying and coming back -- life is good."

Jeff's vampiric goat of doom.

New spell: Transmute rock to puppies.

And ...

According to U.S. postal regulations, the only way to ship an eldritch horror is in a stone tube with magical seals.

(who says these games aren't creative?)

tumblewhats?

If you've ever driven through the Mojave or Arizona Desert at night, you know there are some windy places. Sand blows across the road, cars drive in crooked lines, things fly by that you can't focus on. And there are usually piles of tumbleweeds at the side of the highway. Every now and then the tumblers all leap out as a group -- yaaaaaaaah!

In fact, the tumbleweeds hunt in packs and pick off the weakest cars in the herd, those which are running on empty. You can see the cars at the side of the road, their windows bashed in and no clues to where the drivers went.

But it doesn't stop there. Cactus roots slowly drag the empty cars further and further from the road. And though there's never any rain, the carcasses rust quickly and sand creatures strip their paint away with digestive acids. Eventually the dead vehicles sink into the sand completely, and nothing is left but a mound of earth with a ring of agaves raising their spectacular stalks up to the heavens.

It's best to just drive on. Even if the little blue signs say there is food and gas at the next exit. Some of those towns are just rusty skeletons, picked clean by even larger monsters.

Leprecon

Hi - eek, ugh. What happened?

Well, I was out in Phoenix at Leprecon on May 5-7, drinking warm Morgans with fake pirates and I meant to login and post some stuff, but forgot the password.

Then I left my brain in a suitcase for a while.

Then I worked a few long days down at Stu Segall Productions as a production assistant on what turned out to be a soap opera drama thing. Still, I'm oddly at home on a film set, too bad most of the work pays scrap.

Then I turned 40. Dammit.

fishy frogs

Frogs are nature's meter for water contamination. At the first sign of heavy metals or invading germs, they start sprouting extra legs. First a spare to help them get away, then another spare to trip them up, finally legs and nubs from the middle of their heads. Yet people will say that mutations don't happen, nothing can evolve into something else without going through some kind of silly phase that has never been observed in the "real world" ...

I love those old reports of when it used to rain fish on villages miles from the nearest sea. Maybe a waterspout was playing tricks, or an updraft of freakish proportions. Maybe they were just swimming upstream to spawn, decided to turn UP and got lost in the atmosphere. The reports used to point out that what made them most unbelievable was that it would only rain one species at a time. So ... there's some kind of angelic cannery at work, stuffing sardine tins but throwing out the baby mackerel. Or maybe some kid chucked a barrel full of kippers out into the field when nobody was looking, only to laugh at the adults as they crawled around with their Sherlock Holmes' magnifiers having what they could only describe as spiritual experiences.

Are you allowed to eat fish in heaven? Maybe the cows will give you a ticket, then go back to munching their cloud grass ... which, if you listen reeeeeeallly close, can be heard screaming.

earth day weird

Today was Earth Day, and there was a big festival down at Balboa Park. Naturally, it attracted thousands of gas-burning stink machines (cars) that had to fight for parking. There were lots of little booths everywhere, mostly with overpriced food. A few outdoor stages with music; some good sounds, some international sounds, and a few crooning husband and wife hippie duos (of course).

I don't understand why the environmental movement got all tangled up in dumb New Age baloney. There were booths where you could pay people to teach you how to meditate. The Scientologists were there with a one-stop massage and brainwashing booth. There were some local temples recruiting tomorrow's Hindus and Krishnas. All kinds of delusions out there, few of them helpful. I'd say about 30% of the booths were actual environmental stuff, and those were good.

There were some super hybrid cars on display, even a hydrogen-burning truck developed by folks at Camp Pendleton. Trouble is, we couldn't afford any of these vehicles if we wanted to, and even if we could, only the dealers know how to service the things. Gone are the days of being able to fix your own cars. Yet it's impossible that they need to be so damned complicated. A power source turns wheels, and there are flashy bits. But no, they all have to be computer-controlled megatech monsters. And I guess we could take on a massive debt for this luxury, but that's really not a good idea.

There was a lot of info on local parks and conservation projects. Thanks. And a fun area for kids, even a table where they could make their own paper (a.k.a. the world's messiest hobby). There was an area where kids could arrange old book covers of all different colors on the grass to make pictures - or throw them at each other. Nearby were the stinky generators that were producing much of the electricity for the event. One could hope that by the time all the gasses reached the stratosphere, the diesel had been subdued by all the yummy kettle corn and funnel cake fumes.

There was plenty of info on recycling, but with a clear demonstration that people won't walk an extra 20 feet to recycle their crap if there's an overflowing trashcan right at hand. They had big recycling station set up, yet all the regular trashcans were overflowing with paper plates and plastic bottles ...

Some solar and wind power companies were there, trying to make a mark. New ways to heat your water. Low-power desk lamps. And the Kashi people are always nice, with tasty cereal and crackers. Though I have to say soy milk still tastes like regular milk that had someone's sock in it overnight.

But my favorite bit was the Japanese man whose two kids (about 5 and 6) were chuggin Rockstar energy drinks. After much pondering, I could come up with only one explanation ... he must have a giant hamster wheel at home to harvest their energy.

scurrying dreams

Dreams scurry around the bedroom like mice. Only half as nice. Wake up, think I hear them scratching, but it's nothing, or is it? Stucco ceilings shouldn't be allowed in bedrooms - look up at 4 A.M. and the whole blurry surface is crawling, triggering images of spiders and beetles. Roll over, knowing there are microscopic things chewing on my legs, or partying between the weave of the cotton sheets rejoicing in the dead skin snowfall.

At least we're in a quiet neighborhood. No more hearing the people in the apartment across the hall - just beyond the wall - screwing or shouting or crying. Although one time I got even, accidentally. I was a kid and had found a small garter snake outside, brought it home in a cardboard box. Looked in the box before bed, and it was gone. Heard screams from across the hall, snake under the fridge, kid comes out holding it my the tail. I wanted to say, "Hey, that's mine." But we all know we can't own those things. I'm just glad they didn't kill it ... people are just so heartless ... kill first and bitch about it later. Now that I think back, it wasn't getting even with anyone, just freaking out the wildlife.

Snakes under the bed. Lizards in my head. Late nights are the best.

cleaning like zombies

Whatever happened to good old-fashioned soap? Soap was working fine for centuries. But now there are thousands of cleaning products, with millions of dollars dumped into scientific and consumer research and testing every year. Now we have whole lines of hair care products full of truly noxious chemicals, and funny little wipes that leave only the toughest germs behind, and soaps with perfumes and moisturizers ... bath scrubs, bath oils, scouring powders, scrubbing bubbles ...

Yeah, we need cleaning products. But we're just "consumer" zombies with targets painted on our chests, and we buy whatever "they" throw at us. So we end up with whole piles of swiffers and wonder brooms and gobbledy goop that we never needed. Some of it seriously toxic. If only we could think before we swipe those cards ...

Who would've thought that the first household robots would be little disc-shaped thingies that quietly bounce off the walls. In theory their mad meanderings should end up cleaning the whole house, or at least scaring the cats on a regular basis. I hope they have the laws of robitcs programmed in ... I'd hate to have them come after my ankles when I'm headed for a midnight snack!

real zoo experience

We see only the fluffy pretty stuff when we go to a zoo. I was thinking of all the other things that might be going on, maybe some new events to show a wider range of animal behavior than just pacing around and sleeping all day ...

How about:
- the meerkat petting zoo (ankle armor recommended, and count your fingers when done)
- hand feeding the porcupines (they don't actually shoot those quills, you know)
- limbo in a leech pond (get down, get funky)
- a wildcat hugging contest (they look like comfy pillows but it's more like hugging a cuisinart)
- elephant scat scavenger hunt (never know what you'll find)
- lorikeet halloween (they're not just noisy and hyperactive, they're also vampiric ... just hold out your arm & say your prayers)

Yeah. Something like that.

===

From a chat at the WAP with Andy F. 3/26/06

pop star & meltdown

Had a dream that I was someone else, some guy dating a pop star. She was pretty by day, but by about 2am she had melted down to a bubbling pink lump. There were gutters at the side of the bed to catch the goop. At the first scent of coffee in the morning, she would slurp back into shape, smile a big white smile, and blast through another action-packed day. Leaving me behind to face a completely ordinary nothingness.

Had a dream that I was crashing airplanes for fun.

Had a dream that I was building a forest out of a truck full of two-by-fours and a billion nails. My power tools spit out batteries like a machine gun spewing shells. I hadn't been able to read the assembly instructions, since they were written in Aramaic. In the end there was a sorry excuse for a forest and a mountain of dead batteries, leaking shiny green toxins into the ground. A swarm of disgruntled wind-up squirrels chased us off so they could wallow in their agony alone.

time, numbers, whip

Time goes cruising by again. Editing a novel - I think I finally have the "perfect" ingredients. Mainly I wanted to shoot a few numbers in here, to let you know I haven't been doing nothing ...

Writing Summary: so far in 2006

Stories Written: 10
Stories Word Count: 3,955
Poems Written: 22
Poems Line Count: 495
Nonfiction Written: 0
Nonfiction Word Count: 0
Current Novel Revision: 102 pages

Submitted works: 45
Works accepted: 11
Rejections: 15
Still waiting: 17

Last updated: 3/17/06

video delusions

Video games ... what a weird market.

20% of them won't install.

Maybe 30% will install but won't run.

40% of the ones that actually run are repetitive and boring, or they're just like a game you already have.

And if you're really unlucky, you'll get a super-wonderful game that you get addicted to, and it ends up eating whole months of your life.

I used to love video games.

Now it seems best to leave them at the store, all shrinkwrapped and happy, where they can't get into my brain.

down with power windows

As a long-time sci-fi writer, I used to write about all the wonderful gadgets we'd have someday. Now, everything comes out as deconstruction and "back to basics". The gadgets themselves are fine. I'm bothered by the way companies churn out junk and advertisers convince us we can't live without them.

We're surrounded by buttons, but we don't know what any of them really do.

Last time I bought a car I wanted regular roll-up windows, not the stupid electric windows that stop working when the car shuts off. I bet you can't find a new car with manual windows anymore, and that's lame, any way you look at it. Are we really too lazy to crank a handle? We let the machines take over, just like in the old sci-fi stories ... and now we wait to see what happens next.

BTW ...

Some extra fancy cars have electric windows that will still work when the engine is shut off. But that's a "feature" they can charge extra for. A bonehead remedy for that other convenience they used to charge extra for.

If your car ends up in a lake, you're supposed to exit through the windows because you can't open a door against the weight of the water. With the engine swamped, odds are you can't roll down the electric windows either, and the glass is supposed to be harder to shatter now, to protect you during accidents. Talk about drowning in our own solutions. Eek.

big words from tiny heads

I was talking with a friend, and the subject of "big words" came up. He had never heard of antidisestablishmentarianism ... for a long time it was the longest english word in the dictionary. Not counting self-propagating chemical names.

In a funny bout of tongue-twisters and bad etymology, we came up with these totally useless phrases:

Antiaccomplishmentdisciplinarian -
One of those parents who will smack their kids if they do anything out of the ordinary

Antiestonianditzplanetarium -
A place where anyone who's not from Estonia can go and watch an airhead talk about stars

And my favorite:
Antiestablishmentdiscoplanarian -
A little flatworm who hates to be told what to do, he just wants to dance.

;-)