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.

;-)

atom people

Private notes, though what is secrecy but fear? The trouble is that so few wish to understand people. So many will only speak at the surface. So, many will fall apart not knowing what they should have been. In the face of trial. An error.

There is a streak of sunlight across the page. A relic of distances beyond conquest. As I write toward it, the tip of the pen throws grainy ellipses out of the light. There are 4 distinct bands. As I toy with them I am reminded of complexity -- of numbers & components & chaos. Of what the world is and why it is most amazing if it stands on its own without gods. People always oversimplify things: I see scant difference between the motions of a society and the motions of cells, or the chance crashings of atoms. Look at a highway. Stare at it for hours. What is its pattern? It is blood, carrying oxygen (people) to tissues beyond the exit ramps. Conversely, from the smaller standpoint, wouldn't a blood vessel be a highway to some cellular observer? Only the dimensions are different.

People are just as reactive as oxygen -- where is the line between analogy and accidental truth? Strange, how humans pair off for stability (O2), but divorce under stress & run off seeking new reactions. Look at the instability of O3 ... how long can secrets be kept? One bright ray of light shatters the triad into unsatisfied units.

Secrecy -- to avoid judgement we shy away, content to be ions, never showing our electrons for fear of having them stripped away forever.

Some are more like carbon -- they like things in pairs. Some are hydrogen, always giving what little they have. Xenons live in the mountains in snowy cabins. The list goes on. Eventually we will discover that atoms have shapes ... nervous systems ... hairstyles ... secrets ... and diaries of their own.

===

I was going through an old journal, looking for something I had lost. Found this piece, dated 2/6/88. A fun heap of analogies for any (no) occasion. And I just heard this echo through my head: "Up and at 'em, Atom Ant!" Tanks full of memories.

afterlife 9

Just a quick news flash -- I have a new chapbook available: "Afterlife 9". It's a disturbing parody of afterlife, citylife, social life and hungry machines.

Yes, I printed it myself, after a personal record of 18 years of delays -- deaths, burnt things, publishers imploding, and all that jazz. It's $5 postpaid in the USA. I'm getting the vibe that the color cover is worth 50 cents all by itself.

It's home page is here:
Afterlife 9

;-)

I hope you'll check it out. Thanks to all who support my work.

rpg my other pants

A room full of zombies? No problem. Oh, wait. Crap. I left my grenades in my other pants. Hang on! My other pants are right here in my backpack. Okay ... who swiped my backpack? I need to find seom friends for are not losers, clowns and thieves. No, Jacob, don't mess with that!

KA-BOOM!

===

In related role-playing news, it has been determined that nothing lights up a pitch-black cave quite as nicely as a flaming elf.

===

2/19/06 - Odds & ends that come to mind during quick visit to a Fermius RPG session.

weekend oddities

Whoever said it's fun to put Snap, Crackle, Pop into your morning ... obviously didn't have neck problems.

Someday all entertainment will be mere background noise, at which point nothing will be entertaining anymore.

If all information is supposed to be free, then nobody can be allowed to make a living creating new content, so in the end there's no choice but for reporters to make up shit as fast as they can so they can get back to their dayjobs. At which point there will be nothing worth reporting anyway.

Yet there are people who can fall down mountains and win big prizes, either in ski competitions or by suing the lodges and lift operators and travel agents. What do you mean there are ROCKS underneath the SNOW -- those things can HURT people.

Reminds me of way back when: snowball fights with the neighborhood bully. Sometimes you get a good shot in, so he starts pushing little pebbles into his snowballs and they crush your nose. Pretty soon you're just throwing rocks because they make more of a statement. Eventually a window breaks - that's enough statements for one day.

So .. that's enough statements for one day.

paid in full ... in copies

A recent study at U.C. Berkeley has shown that jobs which offer no cash compensation do, in fact, help our economy by boosting the sales of Quaker oats and Top Ramen products. A participating poet claimed that he could survive for forty days on a single jumbo carton of Quaker oats, and if twenty of those carboard containers are glued together, the resulting hovel is worth at least $249,000 in the California housing market. As we all know, Top Ramen is created in orbit by space monkeys who shower the stuff down on central China for reasons unknown to us. Their manifesto clearly says that if we fail to appease them with inane sitcoms they have the power to make all our national debts real and payable in full. Our experts have informed us that this would be bad, and it's best left for our children's children to deal with.

===

This was actually my response to what sounds like a great writing opportunity that pays in copies. But it sounds great. But I'm so behind on paying for stuff. But it sounds cool. Anyway, it's fun to see what comes out when prompted with various real-life twists & turns. This made me think of all those other things I've done for copies. And they worked out okay.

Right before that I wrote a flash fiction about a guy who gets held hostage by a sandwich.

my Amazon Shorts

Big news! Two of my short stories are now available at Amazon.com, as part of their new "Amazon Shorts" program. These are two of the funniest tales I've written yet, and I hope you all enjoy them. They're just 49 cents each.

One Mistake at a Time - a time travel fiasco

and

The Goblin Saint - a tongue-in-cheek fantasy

I hope you'll check them out. I think you'll get a kick out of them. Thanks.

My Amazon Shorts

Valentine's Day 2006:

Big news! Two of my short stories are now available at Amazon.com, as part of their new "Amazon Shorts" program. These are two of the funniest tales I've written yet, and I hope you all enjoy them. They're just 49 cents each.

"One Mistake at a Time" - a time travel fiasco
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000EFQZM8
and
"The Goblin Saint" - a tongue-in-cheek fantasy
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000EHS88A

I hope you'll check them out. I think you'll get a kick out of them. Thanks. 

Note from 2024: this was copied over from my AuthorsDen blog that I had forgotten about.  Amazon Shorts all went away about 8 years ago.

 

downhill slump

What's up with the olympics? I know, we're supposed to be all excited about it, but the coverage just seems to get more lame every time. We get profiles of the Americans, then interviews with them, then we get to see their performances and maybe a Russian or Chinese person or two. Doesn't feel like an international event at all.

The new scoring system for skating is bugging my wife. But I never did get the old system. I can't stand events that are scored by starting off perfect and bitching and whining and criticizing and scrutinizing and deducting. Bleah. Give me a sport where you have to finish with the best time, or with a score based on discrete events, something tangible and less subjective. The coverage suggests that we should be eager to put other people under a microscope and tear them down.

Screw that.

I want to see athletes from all over the world getting together, having a community, doing their best, shaking hands when it's all over. Instead, I get to watch what's-his-name running one feature after another trying to pump up Apollo or poor Michelle Kwan as some breed of super hero, and I'm reminded every half hour that I can buy the damn jackets and buy other olympic logo crap at such-and-such a website.

Today we got to see some nasty skiing and luge accidents. If we can find the events in between the commercials, that is. There's a sense that if anyone hurts themselves trying to do this impossible stuff then "Oh well, on to the next hero."

We got a brief chuckle over a piece about curling. So it's an odd sport. It obviously takes some kind of skill. At least it's different. It's not like just changing the length of a sled to make a whole new sport. Let's have more eclectic, more alien events.

Here's an event I'd like to see: chase the announcers around with a pointy stick, and poke them until they sound like they care.

Great escapes

I was out at pizza night with Fermius, and we came to an odd piece of chat about escaping reality by romanticizing other historical times. But we forget all the crappy bits to make them all sound wonderful.

It's the 21st century, and many people fantasize about being pirates (stinky mostly-starving criminals) or living in the wonderful Middle Ages (with all the dirt & disease, tyrants & vermin).

But the people in the Middle Ages were probably fantasizing about living in ancient Rome, with things like plumbing and flying go-carts. Maybe that's not so bad.

But the people in Greek and Roman times were pining for an earlier day, a simpler age, where men could be men (and attack their neighbors) who could be men (pawns of the gods). And get attacked by their neighbors.

Civilized people may have cursed the invention of farming and wished they were free to graze among the daffodils.

Iron Age people wished they were living in the Stone Age.

Stone Agers must have dreamed of the good old days, living in their caves, eating popcorn with bears.

Cavemen must have dreamed of swinging from trees and saying "Umph."

Apes fight all day and throw their poo around.

====

2/1/06 - a conversation gone awry, then captured (for better or worse)

now, future people can dream of the lovely month of January 2006 where Exxon-Mobil just posted astronomical profits by a consumer ripoff of epic proportions.

reading the soup

on divination
by s.c.virtes
---

The misguided notion
Of separable fortune, misfortune,
Each travelling in clusters,
So that anything good implies more good;

These ideas are the babble of children,
From start to finish, my day speaks how:

There was an extra flavor packet
In my 23 cent soup today ...
Does this mean I'll meet
The "girl of my dreams",
Or that I will suddenly begin
Having such dreams,

Will all goodness fall at my door,
So I need never worry, need never fear,
Will people give up their fighting
And find quieter songs,
Or does it mean nothing more
Than a strong bowl of soup?

===

Poem from 1988, unpublished

stink or no stink

I guess I signed up for the Stink of the Month Club without realizing it. You know how those clubs advertise impossibly great deals then start sending you stuff you don't want, and you have to pay to ship the junk back, and they charge you anyway?

Well maybe it was the chunk of graveyard funk I ordered from that guy in Romania. But no, that was Romania. Doesn't matter.

I need to remember to read the addresses on the mail before opening it. This month's selection was "ammonia headache" and "tijuana toilet". Almost scalded my eyes opening that one. There was a brief memory of playing "the ammonia game" in high school chem class -- you know, the one where you put a little water in two beakers and an equal amount of ammonia in another, then find some freshman and tell him if he can figure out which beaker has peppermint schnapps he gets to drink it. They usually get grab the ammonia on the first whiff, and their eyebrows shoot right off their heads.

So I sent back the stink. It may have been funny in high school, but now I'm older and I'm not going to pay $9.95 for the dubious pleasure.

Though I did notice that next month's featured item is "rancid cranberry surprise"...

====

from a dream 1/26/06

Poetry Night Out

Just got back from a fun poetry event. About a dozen of us reading or work at a friendly coffeehouse down by Balboa Park (San Diego). There were some shy readers, I did my usual oddities in a hopefully enjoyable carefree way, and a few guys really performed their words. A good variety, from haiku to a guy with a hand puppet raccoon that tried to bite his head off.

I brought all new work (mostly poems), no repeats from last week. However, it's all new to almost everyone, since few people have ever seen my work, statistically speaking. Forgot to pitch my chapbooks (again!), sold nothing, but I did meet folks, and got some contact info.  I'm always trying to expand my network of people, increasing my chance of finding out about future events. Nice group. Sold enough stuff on eBay while I was down there ...

Some writing news:

"Fluency" (story) accepted at the "Musical Voices" issue of Sage of Consciousness
http://www.sageofcon.com

"Consumption" (story) accepted by the "Hungur 2" anthology
http://samsdotpublishing.com

Note from 2024: this was copied over from my AuthorsDen blog that I had forgotten about.  And both links are dead.