Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

From the people who brought you Holo, the preferred way to watch holographic movies and television on the hypernet in exchange for reasons of personal data and highly targeted ads…

…and the people who brought you Holo Plus, the clumsy attempt at monetizing that goodwill by gradually moving formerly free hypernet content behind a pay wall in a desperate attempt to compete with HyperFlick and Valkyrie Optimus…

…comes a brand-new offering: Holo Nonplussed. With content and interface designed to stream holographic movies and television in a way that’s convenient only for a tablet, it will drive you to distraction and confusion should you try to use it on a real computer. Based on a shabby, focus-group influenced aping of a competitor’s product, we are sure that Holo Nonplussed will nevertheless continue to be popular, if only because we control the licenses to a select group of content that you desire.

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MARVIN: I…I just can’t…

MRS. POINDEXTER: See, he’s like this all the time.

MARVIN: It’s just…ugh…agh…

MRS. POINDEXTER: He acts out, but I can’t get him to vocalize what’s the matter, what he’s thinking.

NICK: Let me try.

[NICK walks across the studio and kneels by MARVIN]

NICK (into MARVIN’S ear):

MARVIN (leaning toward NICK):

NICK:

MARVIN:

MRS. POINDEXTER: What is it, what is it?

NICK: Mrs. Poindexter, Marvin is suffering from the fumes of your patented spicy curry gumbo, which are filtering down into the basement where he can smell them. He can’t bring himself to tell you because the dish is your pride and joy.

MRS. POINDEXTER: I’m sorry, I didn’t know! Marvin, my baby!

MARVIN: Momma!

ANNOUNCER: The Nerd Whisperer. Fridays at 8 on NBS.

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Usually Frank had a giggle at signs in suburban neighborhoods that warned “Slow Children At Play.” Naturally the signs were meant to mean “slow down because children are playing and might dash out in front of your car,” but the semantic ambiguity was always mild amusement for an Usway distributor who spent a lot of time in cookie-cutter suburbs. It was the only use his moldy old English Literature degree got, at any rate.

Upon entering one neighborhood in East Hopewell, Frank saw a sign that seemed like a model of linguistic efficiency and purity: “20 MPH Children.” Clear an succinct, it warned of children and set a 20 MPH speed limit rather than using the relative term “slow.”

Partway to his destination, though, Frank was accosted by…something…darting in front of his car. He couldn’t for the life of him make it out, as it was moving fast enough to be but a blur in his slightly rheumy vision. Craning his neck and stutter-stopping his car through the area, Frank’s knuckles were white on the dashboard and his eyes were wide as saucers in fear of hitting one of the…whatever-they-weres…before he had a chance to unload his Usway merch and get the money he needed to make rent (and cover any repairs or insurance rate hikes).

Eventually he eased his way past the obstructions. Arriving at his destination, Frank asked about the mysterious blurs. “Oh, that’s just Bryan’s kids,” said his local distributor, as if that explained everything.

A few blocks back, the McClintock kids had just wrapped up their game of tag. “Dad! Hey Dad! Did you see that guy come through here? He looked pretty scared!”

Bryan McClintock, once known as Lightning Runner before he’d retired the cape and leotard, shrugged. “I put up the sign warning people that the children here run at 20 miles per hour; I guess that gentleman just didn’t know how to read.”

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“Are you not aware that we are never seen one without the others, and that we are called, at court and in the city, Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, or the Three Rhetoricians?”

The three men spread out across the barren fields of the Preaux-Clercs, which were generally employed as a place for duels of men who had no time to lose.

“My faith! I was ignorant of this little fact,” replied d’Aristotle.

“Sound off!” cried Logos.

“Ethos!” cried the first rhetorician, his noble and handsome, but frightfully pale, head held high. “Surrender! Do as I say, because I know what I’m talking about! I am an authority!”

“Pathos!” sounded the second, a rhetorician of great height and haughty countenance, dressed in a magnificent baldric, worked in gold, which shone like water ripples in the sun. “I’m passionate in my beliefs! Yield before me, to spare yourself heartache and fear!”

“Logos!” added the last. A stout man, he had an open and ingenuous countenance, his cheeks rosy and downy as an autumn peach. “Lay down your arms! Logically, you cannot prevail with three against one!”

“You are well named, gentlemen,” said d’Aristotle. “But your rhetoric does not persuade me! I find that your appeals lack supporting evidence!”

This entry incorporates some text from the public domain Dumas books at Project Gutenberg.

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“Did you hear that? The way the buffet seemed to creak and settle?”

“Yeah, almost like a sigh.”

The buffet had started life as a stand of trees in what later became Tecumseh County, Michigan. After the brushfires of war with the natives and the British died down, lumber men had come up from the south with their axes and saws. The area was well-served by rivers which were deep and wide enough to float logs on, and when the lumber boom came in the 1880s, the trees found themselves in the center of a large logging camp known as Reid’s Slashing.

Cut down in the first expansion of the camp, the logs were floated downriver to Muskegon, where they went through a riverside sawmill and emerged as rough lumber. Then it was up the Grand River to Grand Rapids, the great Furniture City and boomtown of the hour. Berkley and Sons, a fast-growing furniture maker destined to become the state’s greatest carpentry concern until its collapse in the Great Depression, bought the lumber. Finished into a buffet in the then-fashionable style, it was loaded onto the Grand Rapids & Indian Railroad, ultimately destined for Chicago.

Gilded Age Chicago was booming in its own way, a center of railroads, meat-packing, and other heavy industry. The buffet quickly found a buyer in an up-and-coming district, changing hands several times before winding up on the South Side just before the second World War thanks to a pair of newlyweds and a garage sale. It held everything from knickknacks to wedding feasts over the next 40 years, before the crippling urban decay of the late 1970s and early 1980s forced the buffet’s owners to the suburbs.

30 years later, one of their grandchildren and his wife found the furniture in a storage unit where it had lay for almost a decade following the deaths of its owners. They loaded it up on a truck for their vacation home to the north–up in Michigan, in the blighted buckle of the Rust Belt, the boom days long since past. Setting it up in their second home, an old lumber baron’s mansion in the Tecumseh County seat of Deerton, they had both been startled by the strange, earthy noise it had made upon being set down.

Thing is, Deerton had grown up from the nucleus of the Reid’s Slashing lumber camp. The old house had been built in the heart of the Slashing, where the first trees had been logged long ago. For those old boards, sitting where they had once grown, they weren’t just decorating another living room.

They had come home.

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“Yes, we won!” he cried
Alone, thousands of miles hence
From men he’d never met

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The political crisis continues this week in the Republic of Slon, where deadlock between the Democratic-Republican Party and the Whig Party has led to the suspension of all essential and non-essential government functions. The Slon News Network reports on the fallout.

Surprisingly, the shutdown does not seem to have affected the average person on the street in Slon, despite the apocalyptic rhetoric unleashed by the two parties in the weeks prior to the shutdown. According to experts, this is because most functions that were once provided by the Slon central government, and which are provided by many of its fellow governments, were so inefficient and backward that most citizens long ago made the transition to using unethical corporate alternatives. “Sure, it sucks that Slon Post isn’t delivering,” said one citizen, “but my packages always arrived late, singed, and smelling of bacon, so I send all my stuff through GesteCo Express these days. GestEx might pollute the environment and use my money to influence corrupt legislators, but at least they get the job done.” Another citizen, on being informed that the Slon Library and Archives of the Republic were closed for the duration, expressed surprise that they were still in operation: “Oh they were maintaining our priceless heritage for free and making it available on the network? I just assumed that GesteCo Heritage Services was the only source for that stuff, so I’ve been buying access at 99 sloncs a month.”

In a statement for the Democratic-Republican Party, Archon Laden O’Bourne said that the shutdown was entirely the fault of the Whig Party, saying that the Democratic-Republicans were “innocent as little baby goats” while adding that the four-day-old shutdown was “the worst such political crisis in the history of Slon.” When reminded of the gridlock that led to a shutdown 18 years ago, which lasted two weeks, Archon O’Bourne backpedaled, claiming that “no one remembered” the earlier incident and that his statement was still correct inasmuch as he meant “the worst crisis in current history.”

The leader of the Whigs in the Assembly, Ephor Jimmy MacRibb, countered with a statement of his own indicating that O’Bourne’s words cast him as the “most ignorant, ineffective, and reviled Archon of modern times.” When reminded of Archon Crater, whose four years in office 35 years ago were so disastrous for the Republic of Slon that they are still known today as “The Great Malaise,” MacRibb said that his comments were taken out of context, despite being the only words he had said in a featureless and otherwise unoccupied room.

An uninterested third party, speaking on condition of anonymity, had the following remarks: “The end result of the gridlock will primarily be twofold. On the one hand, when the Whigs are in power, the Democratic-Republicans will use the same tactics they now decry with a smile on their faces. Much as the Whigs’ current tactics were practiced by the Democratic-Republicans during Archon Germanicus Briar’s administration six years ago, tactics that the Whigs at the time called ‘a holocaust-genocide-abortion.’ On the other hand, other countries jealous of the Republic of Slon or wishing to minimize their own horrible internal problems will trumpet the problems. Expect the Tyranny of Kyiiv to use jokes about the shutdown to distract from their current practice of grinding up political opponents and homosexuals into a nutrient paste for general consumption, and the Confederation of Maghrebos to feel better about themselves despite their corrupt governments squandering every cent of aid earmarked for their starving and restive citizenry.”

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“Mr. Armitage,” people often ask me. “You spent more time hunting this outlaw than any other lawman. Why did they call him ‘Veils’ McGaff?”

Surely you’ve heard all the regular theories. The most popular is that he killed so many men that the market for mourning veils for their wives exploded in every town he visited. That’s not true, since Veils McGaff tended to kill men like him–hardened desperadoes without wives and for whom no tears would ever be shed–or men like me–whose hollow marriages, maintained for the sake of propriety only, would result in nothing resembling mourning should either partner take the long dirt-nap.

Another is that McGaff came from the small town of Veil Falls. That much is true, as he was born in an apartment above a whorehouse and below another whorehouse in that very town. But in those days Veil Falls was known as Whore’s Crossing, and it did not assume its less salacious monicker until Veils McGaff had already begun his reign of rampaging terror.

Some have even claimed that Veils was McGaff’s actual given name. I’ve heard that it was short for the name Veilorious in honor of Veilorious the Reprobate, a Roman senator written about by Cato and Cicero. The fanciful combination of given and middle names Vernon and Illinois into Veils has even been proposed by men who are no doubt staggering home from a long saloon night. But I know for a fact that McGaff’s actual given name was Aloysius, after his grandfather, and his middle name Mergatroyd, after the man his mother imagined had the best odds of being his father.

In fact, Veils McGaff was called that because of an incident in which he improvised a kerchief out of a piece of mourning veil during a bold daylight robbery of a haberdashery in Prosperity Falls. To his dying day at the end of two nooses from two equidistant gallows, he hated the appellation and for a time shot anyone who used it. He eventually settled on savage beatings instead, after realizing that it would be hard to recruit confederates if they were bulleted every time they used his most famous nickname.

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Whether you call it soda, pop, soda pop, Coke, fizzlers, The Bubbly, or simply cola, you have to admit that this family of soft drinks has never been more pervasive in global society. From ubiquitous advertising to cultural practices that normalize “going out for a cola or two after work with the boys,” people do not realize that colas carry the same risk of addiction as hard drinks (but not medium-strength drinks).

People do not realize that, in a cola addict’s brain, consuming a fizzy caramel-colored beverages lights up the same Important Brain Areas as sex, straight morphine, cocaine, huffed paint, and the Russian skin-rotting drug krokodil (all at the same time). Long-term abuse of cola can lead to:

– diabeetus
– Africanized killer cancers
– kidney hijinks
– bladder explosion
– British Smile Syndrome (BSS)

But we’re here to help. The John Pemberton Center for Cola Addictions is a nonprofit organization that, provided you have the money which we totally do not use for profits of any kind, can help you through your addiction. Our exclusive inpatient treatment center is equipped with all the amenities, support, and strong-armed orderlies to help you deal with cola withdrawal side effects such as:

– sleepiness
– The Bad Shakes
– too much sugar in the form of pastries
– coffee consumption (in conjunction with our sister institution, the Betty Folgers Center)
– irritability
– lack of pop and fizz in one’s step
– sudden increase in tooth health and whiteness
– hours rather than minutes between bathroom breaks

Don’t delay! The John Pemberton Center for Cola Addictions is here to help.

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This post is part of the October 2013 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “Lions, tigers, and bears, oh my.”

PLAY-BY-PLAY: And we’re back with the Detroit Lions versus the Chicago Bears. 4th quarter, 0-0, and just coming off a Meyersby flummox by the Bears that Oscar Earle stopped for the Lions using the Thatch Weave.

COLOR: You just made that up, didn’t you?

PLAY-BY-PLAY: True enough, Carl, true enough. But it’s not like anyone actually listens to our chatter, we’re just a part of the background noise like the roaring fans and the commercials for products aimed at males 18-35. And if we can’t embrace that, own that, and have some fun with it, ours is a hollow existence devoid of meaning–a meaningless howling into the infinite void, if you will.

COLOR: Fair enough, Tom. Looks like Earle is up for the snap on our next play, third down.

PLAY-BY-PLAY: Yes, the Detroit Lions are going all out with this one. They’ve got Earle with Tennison on his right, but the Chicago Bears are countering with Masterson in the center. They both want this bad.

COLOR: Yes, it’s a knock-down, drag-out fight this one, because the loser in this case will be at the very bottom of the NFL rankings not only for this season but for all time. Statistically speaking a very tough black mark to shake, and neither the Lions nor the Bears want to replace the 1924 Birmingham Klansmen in the NFL museum’s “Hall of Shame” for worst record in the history of the sport since organized competition began on November 6, 1869.

PLAY-BY-PLAY: There’s the snap, and…it’s bad! The Lions fumble, and the Bears’ Masterson has got the ball! He’s…yes, he’s out and clear, on the Lions’ thirty and closing in on a touchdown!

COLOR: Not looking good for Detroit and the Lions, Tom. Given the staggering incompetence demonstrated by both teams at the sport in general and this game in particular, it’s unlikely that the Motor City will be able to recover. This will be yet another tough body blow for a city currently suffering from bankruptcy, organized and disorganized crime, corruption on a biblical scale, and relentless nightly assaults by zombies who cannot be killed as they are on the city’s payroll and vote regularly for alderman thanks to a legal loophole.

PLAY-BY-PLAY: Masterson’s on the twenty, on the ten…Masterson is down! Yes, Masterson is down just short of the Lions’ endzone! A player wearing a grey uniform, no pads, and a ballcap has appeared on the field, and…yes, he put Masterson down using what appears to be a baseball bat!

COLOR: That’s right, Tom. Dozens of players, all armed with bats, are surging onto the field from the Detroit locker room. From the stylized “D” on their caps and the leaping orange felid on their jerseys, I can only assume…yes, we’re getting confirmation from the field! The Detroit Tigers have joined the game on the side of the Lions, and it has degenerated into a general melee!

PLAY-BY-PLAY: Yes, Carl, the Bears that were guarding Masterson have themselves been pummeled into submission, their pads, helmets, and indeed cups being no match for skillfully wielded aluminum bats in the hands of anabolic-steroid-blasting meatslabs. The Tigers are forming up, and…yes, they have just awkwardly punted the ball back to the Lions with those selfsame bats. Carl, your thoughts on this sudden and almost certainly illegal play?

COLOR: Nothing against it in the rules, Tom, and I know those backwards and forwards as they’re the only reading material we’re allowed during the 27 hours of pregame coverage. It looks like the Detroit Tigers have come to the aid of their fellow Motor City players, being as upset at the idea of having a worst-ever team in their city as anyone. And, being no good at baseball, they seem to have found their niche–the Tigers, for those who only pay attention to good teams, being in little danger of slipping to historic last place themselves thanks to the continued existence of the Chicago Cubs.

PLAY-BY-PLAY: The Bears are fighting back as best they can, Carl, even emptying their benches, but with the Cubs nowhere in sight, they are being massacred, literally and figuratively, by the combined Lion/Tiger assault. The refs are not stopping this, Carl, they are not stopping this. The Detroit ref has actually joined the assault–that’s him strangling Zaford with his whistle–and it appears that the Chicago ref has fled the field out of fear for his personal safety. It’s a confused melee out there, but one definitely trending in the direction of the Chicago endzone and eternal infamy for all participants in this debacle, surely the death knell of professional sports in every city and franchise involved. Carl, your thoughts?

COLOR: Lions, Tigers, and Bears, oh my.

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
Ralph Pines
ishtar’sgate
skunkmelon
pyrosama
julzperri
Angyl78

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