Not Non-Fiction

Stories.

Annual Report: 2023/2024.

Author: April 1, 2024 3 Comments

April 2023-Staff assembled in the conference room to mark the occasion of the 28th year of Freethinkers Anonymous and to try and answer the question, What are we doing here? There are a lot of excellent blogs out there on a wide variety of topics that, thankfully, are still going while others, sadly, have dropped off. If anything makes Freethinkers Anonymous distinctive it’s longevity. What started as a random assortment of jokes emailed to a distribution list has grown into something resembling an internet landfill. It predated and survived the dot-com boom and, like those early internet companies, has never had a plan, purpose, or profit. On this note everyone cheered and went back to work.

May 2023-Staff assembled in the conference room to mark the occasion of the 28th year of Freethinkers Anonymous before realizing we just did that, but since no one had gotten any work done in the last month everyone cheered and went back to work.

June 2023-Everyone remembered that every year there’s a vague plan to sample as many local milkshakes as possible to try and determine the best one. And every year an argument breaks out over what defines “local”. Or whether it should be limited to ice cream places since a lot of restaurants serve milkshakes. There was also a side discussion of how some years the plan is to sample every gyro to determine the best one in the area which would be a lot easier, and another side discussion of how to define “best” and a further side discussion of what the definition of “ersatz” is but no one could remember how that came up in the first place.

July 2023-Work was put on hold for the 4th of July. Also July 1st, since it’s Canada Day, and also the 2nd through 3rd of July, and everyone just called in sick from the 5th through 13th. Then everyone took off for Bastille Day, and planned to get back by July 20th, but that’s National Moon Walk Day, and the 21st is National Creme Brulee Day and of course everyone had to celebrate that, as well as the 26th which is National Coffee Milkshake Day, and finally everyone made a solemn vow to get back to work at the start of the next month.

August 2023-Toată lumea și-a amintit brusc că acum vreo douăzeci de ani ne-am propus să învățăm limba Romanian. Nimeni nu-și putea aminti de ce și, în loc să se întoarcă prin arhive, toată lumea a decis să se întoarcă la muncă.

September 2023-Side effects include swelling, brusing, pain or tenderness, itching, dizziness, fainting, blisters, lumps, hives, bee hives, drowsiness, headache, insomnia, autodidacticism, nocturnal cake baking, dehydration, foaming of the ears, hair growth on furniture, and spontaneous decomposition. Seek medical help immediately if you become ersatz.

October 2023-The staff Halloween party was such a great success it lasted the entire month. This year the theme was “Aposematism” and resulted in several people being hospitalized.

November 2023-Staff assembled in the conference room to discuss whether “No Shave November” should be celebrated. Everyone agreed that it should but that staff would only grow sideburns. This led to a discussion of why they’re called “sideburns” since no one wants burns on their face, not even on the sides. Large sideburns are also called “muttonchops” but this was considered problematic for vegans and causing potential copyright warnings from the estate of Shari Lewis. Staff finally unanimously agreed that from now on sideburns should be called “earbrows”.

December 2023-The preponderance of holidays in the month of December meant no one got any work done.

January 2024-Recovering from the preponderance of holidays in the month of December meant no one got any work done.

February 2024-Staff assembled in the conference room to begin the disassembly of a jigsaw puzzle everyone had been working on for over a year. This proved surprisingly challenging as no one could decide whether we should start from the center or go out or from a corner and work inward, and if we did go in from a corner which one should be start with? Finally everyone decided the best solution was to just flip the table over.

March 2024-Staff assembled in the conference room as Freethinkers Anonymous prepared to start its 29th year. The team leader reminded everyone he’d read something once about how the average life of a blog is three years and the realization that we’d almost but not quite gone ten times that put everyone in a somber mood. All things must come to an end, even things without a plan or purpose. And yet it was decided unanimously that Freethinkers Anonymous would go on for another year. On that note everyone cheered and went back to work.

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Adventures In Busing., American Graffiti., Hail & Farewell., Happy Birthday., Not Non-Fiction, Quick Takes., Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Vault

Resolvulations.

Author: January 12, 2024 4 Comments

Having read several articles about New Year’s Resolutions over the years I’ve been able to coalesce all that I’ve learned into the following recommendations:

 

-Always make New Year’s resolutions. If your goal is self-improvement in any form having specific resolutions will help you stick to that and give you a marker to work from.

 

-Never make New Year’s resolutions. If your goal is self-improvement in any form having specific resolutions will just frustrate you and distract you from what you need to do.

 

-Share your New Year’s resolutions with others, especially friends who will help you remember what your resolutions are and keep you on track.

 

-Keep your New Year’s resolutions private. Sharing your goals can actually have the effect of making you feel like you’ve already accomplished something, making you less likely to finish what you started. Your friends also have their own resolutions and forcing them to remember yours just makes you a jerk.

 

-Make your New Year’s resolutions realistic and attainable. Setting goals that you’re unlikely to meet is just going to harm your self-esteem, making you even less likely to accomplish anything.

 

-Set lofty, seemingly unobtainable goals for yourself. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t accomplish these goals but even incremental steps toward something grand can help your self-esteem.

 

-The practice of New Year’s resolutions started in ancient China. Also ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, prehistoric Ireland, the Mayans, western Africa, and Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1932.

 

-The first modern record of a New Year’s resolution is from Peterborough, England, on January 1st, 1802. George Critten put a notice in the Peterborough Times that he had resolved to take a bath once a week.

-The first modern record of a New Year’s resolution being broken is from Peterborough, England, on January 3rd, 1802, when George Critten reportedly declared the River Nene “bloody frozen”. He would eventually take a bath in the summer of 1809.

 

-Create a reminder, either by writing it on a calendar or on a phone or other device, to remind you throughout the year of your resolutions so you’ll stay on track.

-Keep your resolutions in your head. If they’re really that important you won’t need reminders.

 

-Beryllium in its pure form tastes sweeter than sugar. It’s also incredibly toxic. However since it’s relatively rare on Earth and is never found naturally in its pure state our taste receptors never evolved to recognize it as a poison. This was in an article about New Year’s resolutions. I don’t remember what it had to do with them but I thought it was interesting and I’m pretty sure I missed everything else the article was about because I was so busy wondering who looked at some pure beryllium, which is silvery and crystalline, and said, “I should lick that.”

 

Johnny Karate: Always remember, kids: When you find something new, you must always lick it before you eat it.

Carpenter Ron: That is incorrect in a number of ways.

Source: Nesflix

Not Non-Fiction, Quick Takes., Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

The Other Spirits.

Author: December 15, 2023 4 Comments

Deleted Scenes From A Christmas Carol, found in the archives at The Charles Dickens Museum, Portsmouth. Scholars presume these sections were removed by Dickens himself to maintain economy of the story. The pages were also only recently transcribed thanks to radiographic analysis. Earlier reading was impossible due to the pages being heavily stained with port wine.

 

Section 1

When Scrooge awoke, it was so dark, that looking out of bed, he could scarcely distinguish the transparent window from the opaque walls of his chamber. He was endeavouring to pierce the darkness with his ferret eyes, when the chimes of a neighbouring church struck three quarters.

Then the air before him shimmered as though it had come to life and a tall, thin figure wearing a silvery gown appeared before him. From its countenance it seemed to be a woman, and upon her nose she wore spectacles; from either end of these descended chains of pearls that extended behind her neck.

Scrooge tried to say “Humbug!” but the word caught in his throat. Instead he gasped, “You are the first spirit?”

The woman took a step back and a child appeared before her holding a Latin primer. Then she spoke.

“I might have been the Ghost Of The Subjunctive Pluperfect were I to have appeared here upon the…oh, something, look, do you mind if I go back and start again?”

 

Section 2

Awaking in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore, and sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together, Scrooge had no occasion to be told that the bell was again upon the stroke of a quarter past. The room around him was filled with lights the likes of which he had never seen before; they appeared as sections of church windows illuminated by sun, yet they hung in the air. All shapes and sizes they winked on and off, accompanied by strange whistles and chirps such as Scrooge had never heard before.

A figure stepped forward. It wore a heavy black woolen robe with a thickly rounded collar about its neck, but its head was bare and silver, and red eyes glowed evilly from within its sockets.

Scrooge drew back.

“Are you, as promised, the Ghost Of Christmas Yet To Come?”

The ghost sighed and said, “Actually I’m The Ghost Of Christmas Of The Really Distant Future. I wanted to get here ahead of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come before he could give me any more grief about muscling in on his territory. Look, I know you’re a businessman and I just wanted to drop some advice. Write a note for Bob Cratchit’s great-great grandkids telling them to invest in Apple.”

Scrooge pondered this.

“You wish them to purchase orchards? Perchance to feed the poor and undernourished?”

The Ghost chuckled. “Oh, something like that. Let’s just say I’m planting seed money for future investors.”

And with that it took forth a small black rectangle which it tapped a few times with a silvery finger and disappeared.

 

Section 3

Scrooge tossed in his bedclothes then, upon hearing the sound of bugles and other brass instruments, pulled the curtains aside. There before him appeared a stage and, in the middle of it, a bright green figure that, though made of cloth, had something of the countenance of a frog. In the darkness behind it was just visible the figure of a tall, lean, bearded man.

“Oh Spirit,” said Scrooge, “many wondrous and strange things I have seen tonight but you are the strangest yet. Tell me, Spirit, what Christmas are you?”

The voice was high and sounded as though spoken through the nose as it said, “I am the Ghost Of The Best Adaptation Of Your Story There Will Ever Be. I wish you to know, Ebenezer Scrooge, that children and adults alike shall, each Christmas, gather around boxes to see your story. They shall rejoice in it in many languages, many forms, and with many players, but none shall exceed that one which I and my partners shall bring to life. Rejoice in this, Ebenezer!”

Scrooge smiled. “Is it true, then, Ghost? I am redeemed and shall be loved and share love with others until the end of my days?”

“Greater rewards than that await you,” said the Ghost, “for you shall be played by Michael Caine!”

With that the Ghost disappeared and the morning churchbells began to ring.

Not Non-Fiction, Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

Welcome To The Winter.

Author: December 8, 2023 8 Comments

We don’t know how he came to life. Greg said he thought it might be the combination of the charcoal pieces and the sunglasses we stuck on him. There was the pipe too. It was just a stinky old corncob pipe I’d stolen from my brother Mike’s room. He didn’t need it anymore since he got a new glass bong. Anyway that didn’t make sense. Randy said it had to be the hat because when we put that on him that’s when he started talking. It was a round black hat with a flat top. I think I’d seen one like it in old pictures of magicians or something, except this one had some silver stuff around it, like a small belt. That still didn’t make any sense. How could a hat bring a snowman to life? Karen thought it might have been some kind of chemical reaction from the pesticides they use on the vacant lot where we built him, and I agreed with her that had to be what did it. There was just no other explanation. It’s not like he just suddenly jumped to life as soon as we put the stuff on him. No, the first thing he did was sort of lean forward and we thought maybe we’d stacked his body up too high and I thought the hat would fall off but it didn’t. Then he leaned back and then forward again. Then he started talking.

“Oh, hey little kids, what’s up?”

He was kind of quiet, I guess because he was a snowman and not really used to talking. And we were all, like, freaked out that this was happening. Like, we couldn’t believe it was really real. I asked Karen if she heard that and she said, yeah, she did, so it wasn’t just me.

“Oh, hey little kids,” he said, and I really didn’t like him calling us little kids when he wasn’t that much bigger than us and I was ten, but he said, “I don’t have any arms here. You think you could help me out with that?”

We went and got some sticks but he didn’t like those because they broke when he tried to bend them. Then we found some, like, flexible tube stuff that was over by the abandoned refrigerators that we put the needles that get left there overnight in so no one gets stuck, and Joey ran to his house and got a couple of rubber gloves. It was really weird. We stuck all that in his sides and he could move them all around and even the fingers, like he had real hands.

Then he started to move around the lot a little and we asked if he’d play with us.

“Oh, yeah, sure,” he said, “has anybody got a guitar? I could really jam out.”

None of us had a guitar with us and we didn’t know why he asked for one but I remembered Mike had an old one in his closet that our stepdad had left. I ran and got that and brought it back. It wasn’t electric or anything, just a wood one. The snowman took it.

“Oh, acoustic, so I guess I’m gonna do like a retro unplugged kind of thing,” he said. Then he started playing the guitar, this, like, really high sounding sort of string of notes.

“Hey,” said Karen, “I know that song. My grandpa plays it all the time on his old CD player!”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, “it’s called Sweet Child O’Mine. This is a riff I came up with while we were just having a warmup session.”

He played us a bunch more songs, some he said were from his “snakepit crew” and we danced around the vacant lot for what seemed like hours. Then he started playing this one song he said was all about dancing by someone he knew named Jeff. It was, like, old jazz or something, and it was really long so I think we were all glad the sun came out. That’s when he started melting really fast, his head collapsing into his body and his arms fell out. But before he totally went away he said, “Hey, thanks little kids for giving me this chance to jam.”

It’s getting warm again and I don’t know if we’ll get more snow but if we do maybe we’ll have another visit from Slashy The Snowman.

Not Non-Fiction, Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

Hey, Aqualung.

Author: December 1, 2023 6 Comments

Stages Of A Cold

Day 1, Morning: You wake up with a sore throat. It doesn’t seem bad, but it’s a harbinger of things to come. You gargle with some warm salt water and assume that the gagging that follows must be enough to dislodge any infection.

Day 1, Late Afternoon: The runny nose starts. This also doesn’t seem bad. The fluid is clear and a few good blows into a tissue seem to clear it out. By the time you walk out of the bathroom and down the hall your nose is running again and you decide you’d better just take a couple of tissues with you.

At this point you could take some cold medicine but why would you when you haven’t got a cold?

Day 2, Morning: You’ve got a cold. Your head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton, your voice is an octave lower, and you can’t pronounce glottal stops. You blow your nose into a tissue until it’s completely soaked through and starting to disintegrate. This takes approximately twenty-three seconds.

Day 2, Evening: You can’t remember whether the rule is “Starve a fever, feed a cold” or the other way around. Not that it matters because you’ve lost your appetite. The good news you still have your senses of taste and smell. The bad news is you don’t really want anything you can taste or smell.

 

Day 987: Actually it’s Day 3, Morning: It just feels like it’s been that long. You can’t tell if it’s the cold or the cold medicine that makes you feel like all you want to do is lie in bed and shiver.

Day 3, Late Morning: A scaly crust has formed on your upper lip. A quick search tells you the divot under your nose is called the “philtrum”. This is mildly interesting but you don’t see how you’ll ever use this information since at the moment you’re hot, sweaty, and leaking fluids and can’t imagine wanting to be near another human being ever again.

Day 3, Afternoon: All you want is just a few minutes of normal breathing, the kind you had in the distant, hazy past that was last week. And now the coughing has started. It’s just small coughs. You’re hopeful this is as bad as it will get. You’re also wrong.

Day 3, Late Afternoon: You remember seeing people put a towel over their heads and lean over a pot of steaming water. You decide to try this to see if it will work. The bad news is it doesn’t. The good news is you now know the fire extinguisher you’ve had in the kitchen for decades works. Next time will you take the pot of water off the hot stove before you hang your towel-draped head over it? Of course not. You’re never going to do this again.

Day 3, Evening: Still shivering uou take your temperature. It’s 68.9. Oh, wait, you have that upside down. It’s 98.6. Is the rule “Feed a cold”? Let’s just say it is. You heat three cans of condensed chicken soup. You’re halfway through slurping it straight out of the pan when you realize you didn’t add any water. While you’re finishing the rest you order a pizza. While you’re picking it up at your front door your six boxes of Chinese food arrive.

 

Day 4, Morning: The cold medicine you took last night is labeled as “working for up to eight hours”. At exactly seven hours and fifty-nine minutes terrible, hacking coughs cause you to fall out of bed. You stumble into the kitchen and blow your nose into a paper towel which now looks like someone hit it with a spoonful of crème brulee.

Day 4, Lunch: Your nose has become a gelatin factory. The less said about this the better. You’re cycling through hot beverages: cider, tea with honey, tea with lemon, tea with orange juice, tea with maple syrup, tea with yak butter.

Day 4, Evening: You’re tired but not so listless. You crawl into bed and almost immediately slip into a dreamless sleep.

 

Day 5, Morning: The cough persists but you can breathe deeply through your nose without any trouble. You think you just might recover.

 

Day 10, Evening: You’re out for Trivia Night with some friends. The host yells out, “What is that divot under your nose called?” You’re about to answer when a guy on the opposing team says, “Philtrum!” You avoid him. You don’t want to catch whatever he’s got.

 

 

Not Non-Fiction, The Weekly Essay

You Got Me.

Author: October 20, 2023 4 Comments

As summer camp drew to a close there was always one final big campfire. Everyone, all the counselors, the support staff, the director, and all of us campers would set out after supper and climb the winding path through the crabapple orchard, along a winding, narrow path with pine trees on either side, before we emerged onto a little ridge at the top of the mountain. Most of the time we’d get there as the sun was halfway below the horizon and start the fire in the brick fire pit that had been there, well, I think before some of us were even born. As I’d look out over a seemingly endless swath of forest below I always felt it had always been there, and would always be there. By the time I was thirteen, though, I was starting to grow out of that feeling. I didn’t want to but it was inevitable. I’d been coming to the camp for three years, which, at the time, felt like a lot, because it was. It was almost a quarter of my life. And the group I was with had been moved to a relatively new section, set apart from the main camp. The main camp was a cluster of cabins, basically miniature houses with electric lights, clustered around the dining hall. We, the older campers, were sent to a spot several hundred feet beyond the bath house, which had previously marked the edge of the camp, and we changed, slept, and kept all our gear in “the hogans”, . These were large canvas tents thrown over arched wooden frames with wooden floors, as though a disorganized wagon train had rolled through the forest and then collectively gave up and rolled their wheels away into the woods.

At the campfire, after complete darkness had settled but Gary, one of the counselors, decided that before it was time to extinguish the fire and leave he would tell a ghost story. Gary was a good guy—he was my group’s counselor, and slept in the hogan next to the one I shared with a few other guy, and we all liked him. He was eighteen which, at the time, made him seem like an adult to us, but also close enough that we could relate to him. He was a good guy, always looking out for us, which couldn’t have been easy.

“You’re a good group of kids,” he said, and I felt warm not just from the fire but from a sense of pride that Gary liked us. “All of us who work here appreciate that,” he went on, “because we all know what happened to Bernice.”

Now there was a slight chill. I think all of us kids were confused but we could see the adults shifting uncomfortably.

“Bernice was an old lady who lived in town. She was retired but she came here every summer to work as the camp’s cook. She didn’t drive. She walked home late at night, sometimes ten o’clock, after she washed all the dishes.”

Firelight played over Gary’s face as he looked at us.

“One summer there were these two kids, Nancy and Sam, a brother and sister. They were always up to something. They found a dead toad and left it in someone’s bed. They locked a cabin and went out through the window. Stuff like that. Then they stole a rattlesnake rattle we had in the display case in the dining hall and one night hid in the bushes down by the lake. When Bernice went by on her way home they shook it. It sounded just like a live rattlesnake. Bernice jumped and ran and slipped on something. She hit her head on a big rock. Died instantly.”

Someone gasped. Gary shook his head.

“No one knew Nancy and Sam were responsible but they settled down after that. Except a few nights later Nancy woke up in the middle of the night. She felt something drawing her and she could see two glowing eyes in the darkness and a voice said, ‘Come with me’. She followed the glowing eyes down to the lake. And that’s where everyone found her the next morning, dead, with her head cracked open on the same big rock where Bernice had fallen. No one said anything. I guess they thought it was best to let camp go on, but Sam’s parents were called and they were supposed to pick him up the next day. Except the next day they found him. By the lake. His head on the same rock.”

Gary tossed a stick into the fire.

“Well,” said the camp director, “thanks for that, Gary. Let’s get this fire put out and everyone head back. We’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

Even as an easily frightened and often gullible thirteen-year old I had some real suspicions about the “ghost story” we’d just heard, such as, when had this happened? Had three deaths, especially the deaths of two campers, prompted some kind of investigation? How did anyone know the kids saw “glowing eyes in the darkness” and heard a voice? But I liked Gary and if he got a kick out of telling us a silly ghost story I didn’t want to ruin it. And I think everyone else felt the same way because we all chattered happily as we made our way to our various bivouacs.

Then, in the middle of the night, something woke me up, a powerful force that drew me out into the darkness. It was my bladder, of course. Too much fruit punch at the campfire had caught up with me. I walked a good distance from the hogans, picked a spot, and was feeling a tremendous sense of relief when I realized that, through the woods, I could see two glowing lights off in the distance. Still not fully awake I felt a cold terror creep over me before I realized they were the lights of the bath house, which were always left on all night. A new feeling of relief was coming over me when a voice in the darkness said, “Are you okay?”

And that, I’m sorry to say, is the story of why I punched Gary in the face.

Not Non-Fiction, Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

Inspiring A Classic.

Author: October 13, 2023 6 Comments

Yelp Reviews by Odysseus

Serifos, Island Of The Cyclops

Nice, level place with a lot of stonework and sheep around. My crew and I found what we thought was our Airbnb and settled in for the night when the owner of the place showed up. Let’s just say we did not see eye-to-eye. He went kind of crazy because we ate some of his cheese but chilled out when we shared some of the wine we brought. Had another run-in during the night and he got mad and started throwing rocks at our boat when I said we’d keep an eye out for him. Do not recommend the surfing around there.

Three stars

Aiaia, Island Of Circe

Another situation where the owner was there when we showed up. Super nice place, though, really enjoyed it. The lady who owns it was great to us, very hospitable. Got a little annoyed when my crew made pigs of themselves. Which I understand. Would definitely go back.

Four stars

Hades

Gotta take a star off here because the place was hard to find and the price of admission was a bowl of goat’s blood. WTF? Awesome place, though. Our tour guide was blind. I don’t want to sound ableist or anything but wasn’t so sure about that. He was great, really knew his way around, and gave us some good advice for stuff to look out for on our trip.

Four stars

The Sirens

Too tied up to stop here but it sounded amazing.

Five stars

Scylla and Charybdis

Not enough time to see both. The tour guide from Hades told us if you see one see Scylla. Lost half a dozen guys here but what are you gonna do? Also not that exciting. It was just a cave, really. Maybe try the other one if you go this way.

Two stars

Ithaka

Full disclosure: this is my place. I want to respond to a lot of these one-star reviews. Most of them are coming from guys who stayed here when I was gone and they totally trashed the place. We love having tourists here. My wife does these really cool weaving instruction sessions on old-fashioned looms and we have an annual archery contest. We’d just prefer that if you come here you show some respect for the place, capisce?

Also special deals for military people and their families. I’m a veteran myself. Pets are also welcome.

Some of the other one-star reviews seem to be confused about where we are. We’re Ithaka with a K. Nowhere near Syracuse or Rome, and I don’t know why so many people end up here thinking we’re in southern New York.

Not Non-Fiction, Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

The Change.

Author: October 6, 2023 5 Comments

A friend of mine told me, “I’ve been having these dreams that I’m running through the woods on all fours. I’m chasing something and I think that running on two legs would be better, but somehow I find myself going faster than I could on two legs, and it just feels natural. Anyway if I’m not around during the next full moon maybe this is why.”

And this is my reply:

Congratulations! You’re about to go through one of the great Changes Of Life. It’s like puberty in that you’ll get a lot of hair in places you never had it before, as well as extremely strong emotions, and an overwhelming desire to run around naked. Unlike puberty this isn’t a change most people go through, but I’m glad you shared it with me because I can offer you some advice.

First, it’s not the moon, it’s the mood. The moon may be full or it may be gibbous, and I’m not just saying that because “gibbous” is a funny word. It’s cyclical but it’s irregular. You’ll find it hits you primarily spring and summer, but also sometimes in the fall. Pray it doesn’t hit you in the middle of winter, especially when it’s been snowing.

Second, when the mood hits you avoid people. Just get away. This is where it’s also like puberty: you’re going to want to have some companions around you but you’re also going to be irritable and difficult to deal with, even for people who know what you’re going through. You’re also not going to want to be around people, and that’s for the best. Someone could get hurt and no one wants that. Also people don’t taste very good.

Third, keep a change of clothes in your car. While you’re going to feel better after a nice long stroll through the woods chances are you’re going to forget where you left the ones you were wearing. Figure out a nice secure place to store your phone, wallet, and keys. This should probably not be inside your car since they’ve all got this auto-locking feature now, and anyway you wouldn’t want to go off and leave all that stuff in an unlocked car anyway. Hollow logs are a bad idea because animals like to go back and forth through those and you don’t want a raccoon getting your credit cards. Putting stuff under a rock usually works.

Fourth, remember where you parked your car.

Fifth, yes, silver bullets can kill you. So can copper bullets, steel bullets, pointed sticks, rocks, getting hit by a car, and pretty much anything else that can cause serious injury.

Sixth, you may feel the desire to mark your territory. I recommend you do this late at night with the lights off. Your neighbors don’t want to see that.

Finally, relax, this is all perfectly natural. If you just go with it you’ll find it can even be a lot of fun, and most of the time it’ll just pass without anyone even noticing anything. Oh, before I forget, though, if some morning you wake up in the woods naked and smeared with blood you’ll want to get checked for tularemia.

Welcome to the pack, good luck, and here’s hoping we don’t run into each other!

Nature Talks., Not Non-Fiction, The Weekly Essay

Round And Round.

Author: August 19, 2023 8 Comments

The writing group I’m part of decided it would be fun to try a round-robin writing exercise with everyone who wanted to join adding part of a story. And that got me wondering why it’s called a “round-robin” so I went to the Oxford English Dictionary and found that a round robin is, among other things, a small pancake, a sunfish, a hedge plant, a protective plate for a carriage axle, and, most interestingly, a letter signed by several people with all the signatures arranged in a circle so the recipient wouldn’t know who signed first. This was mainly used by sailors when presenting grievances to their captain, specifically something like, “If you don’t give us shore leave we’re all going to jump ship.” I’m not sure why who signed first mattered but maybe it was their way of showing there was no peer pressure.

Anyway it eventually got around to meaning “A group activity consisting of successive participation from each member of the group” which is what the writing group is doing. The group doesn’t really have a leader but it does have two co-organizers, and they’re generally okay with giving us shore leave whenever we want.

The guy who was supposed to be in charge of the round-robin exercise had to drop out, though, because he’s really busy and he asked if I’d take over. I said sure. I was already planning to join in, although I’d missed the initial discussion meeting, and I didn’t think there’d be that much difference between taking part and starting it off. Except starting it was a bit of a challenge. I had to come up with an interesting opening, a perfect setup that would draw everyone else in while also giving them plenty to work with. I’ve never been part of something like this and the only example I could think of was Naked Came The Stranger which, for obvious reasons, didn’t sound like the best model, although Naked Came The Manatee is a little better. And as a collective project I wanted it to be fun for everyone.

It also got me thinking about how all stories are, in some sense, collective. We all draw inspiration from what we’ve read, what we’ve experienced, and we build stories around a shared language. That led to an epiphany: the closed circle of suspects subgenre of mystery. Think Clue, the movie, not the game, or Knives Out or, for more literary examples, Murder On The Orient Express.

It seemed like the perfect setup. It wouldn’t have to involve murder but I thought trapped people having to work together or turn on each other would, metaphorically and practically, be a great way to keep it interesting and keep it from getting too far out of hand. I wrote about five hundred words about a woman driving to a large, isolated house in a rainstorm. Just after her car passes over the bridge she sees it washed away in her rearview mirror. When she reaches the house and goes in she finds her brother and several strangers all gathered for the reading of her eccentric mother’s will. She tells everyone that the bridge has washed away and a voice from the darkness says, “Oh, we’ve got bigger problems than that!”

I sent it off to the group organizers and got a reply back that, since I’d missed the initial meeting, I missed that they already had a plan drawn up and I’d just be stepping in to lead what they’d started.

Fine. Okay then. Hey, this is a collective project and I’m willing to go with the group.

But they’d better not ask for shore leave.  

American Graffiti., Not Non-Fiction

The Storyteller.

Author: July 14, 2023 5 Comments

When I heard that the novelist Milan Kundera had died the first thing I thought of was the time I met his wife. It was partly a chance encounter. I was in Paris and I’d gotten his home address from a writers’ directory. After a lot of wandering and checking the map—his street was short and narrow, almost an alley—I found his apartment building. There was an intercom next to the door and someone had just pressed the buzzer and gone in so I could see a courtyard, but I stood there, realizing I didn’t have any plan beyond just finding his home. After a few minutes a dark-haired woman came out and I said, “Pardon, je ne parle Francais. Parlez vous Anglais?” And she said, “Yes, I do.” We both laughed and I said, “I’m looking for Mr. Kundera. I’m a great fan of his work and I was hoping to meet him.” She softened a bit and said, “I’m so sorry. He’s out of the country right now. I’d invite you in but I have to go as well. Do you have a note or something I could give him?” She probably saw I was holding a copy of his novel Life Is Elsewhere, fitting, since he was elsewhere. I didn’t have anything but I said, “Could you please just tell him a young poet came to pay his respects?”

I realize now that she might have been politely saying, “My husband doesn’t get a lot of stalkers but I’m seriously thinking about calling the police.” But I still took the hint and, after saying it was nice to have met her, I went to explore the rest of Paris as it should be explored: without any plan.

At home I wrote him a letter saying I was that young poet and I was sorry to have missed him. I don’t think I apologized for showing up unannounced at his home, but I did say I’d read all his novels except his latest one, Immortality. About a month later I got a package from him: a copy of Immortality, inscribed to me with a message and a weird picture of a hand. Why a hand? In my edition of Life Is Elsewhere, translated from Czech, there was a forward by Kundera about how the translator had gone back and redone his original translation, making it better. Kundera said he was grateful and added, “I offer him my hand as a friend.” It was his own personal signature and he was offering me his hand as well. At least that’s how I interpret it.

Of course I sat down and read Immortality immediately, enjoying all its rambling strangeness. There’s a character in it named Mr. Kundera and he talks about how he’s writing a novel. Someone asks him what the title of his novel will be and he says, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” When the other person says, “I think someone’s already written that,” Mr. Kundera replies “I did! But it should be the title of the novel I’m writing now.”

I’d always approached Kundera as A Very Serious Writer, a preeminent example of postmodern fiction, who wove deep philosophy—Neitzsche, Heidegger, Sartre—into his work. But I’d never thought of him as funny until then. I went back and reread all his other books. I’d always understood that, as a postmodern author, he played with fiction and the power of stories to make anything happen. Stories can shape history, or even invent things that never happened, and everyone is a character. Parts of Immortality imagine what Goethe is up to in Heaven. I realized what I’d been missing when I reread The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting which includes a story about his own life when he was labelled a dissident in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia. He had a set of astrology books that he kept on his desk where friends could see them and he even told them he’d been an assistant to a French astrologer—which wasn’t true. As a dissident he couldn’t get work as a writer but based on his “experience” an editor gave him a job writing an astrology column under a pseudonym. Then a high-ranking government official contacted the editor, discreetly, and asked if the astrologer could—just for fun, you understand, because it wasn’t something any rational person took seriously, you know—do some horoscopes for him. Kundera said he wondered how many government decisions his “horoscopes” influenced.

It’s a funny story but the first time around I was too busy trying to understand the meaning in the context of people who fly when they dance in a circle. What I realized the second time around—weight replaced by lightness–was that there was a deep vein of humor running through all his work. Hey, his first novel is called The Joke and while it’s not exactly funny he did understand the power—and danger—of satire. Life Is Elsewhere is a tragicomedy that pokes fun at the pretentiousness and naivete of young poets and as I write that now my twenty-year old self feels attacked. But also amused.

Back at college I was taking an Eighteenth Century Literature class and one day, sitting in the student lounge, one of my classmates and I got into a discussion of how much the novels of Henry Fielding, Swift, even Samuel Johnson, and especially Laurence Sterne, resembled postmodern novels, with rambling, sometimes bizarre plots, and asides where the authors directly address the reader.

“The difference,” my classmate said, “is postmodern novels just aren’t funny!”

I proceeded to open up a whole can of Kundera right there. Humor is subjective thing, but I pointed out several scenes from his books I thought were pretty funny, ending with the short story “Symposium” and a young doctor who sneaks out to the garden at night. He hears someone he thinks is a woman he thinks is in love with him. When he says, “I knew you’d come,” he’s greeted by the voice of an older male doctor who replies, “Yes, I prefer peeing outside.”

The classmate faded away into the wallpaper and I was sitting by myself when I heard a heavily accented voice say, “That was quite the speech.”

I looked over and immediately recognized the gray hair, the heavy brow, the strong chin from his author photos. It was Milan Kundera, sitting right across from me! He must have known I couldn’t speak Czech so he spoke French which I couldn’t speak either but understood anyway.

“You know,” he went on, “all these critics, they focus on my characters, their relationships, philosophy in my work. Sometimes I think I know how Kafka would have felt if he’d known Max Brod turned him into some kind of ascetic who suffered for his art, rather than a person who just loved telling stories.”

Completely stumped I came out with the most irrelevant question I could think of. “So what brought you here?”

“A plane. A smart young man like you should know you can’t drive to Indiana from France.”

Hail & Farewell., Not Non-Fiction, Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval.