Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

In my garden I grow fresh hours
As others might grow verdant flowers
I harvest fresh bouquets of seconds
To hang about as summer beckons
My minutes are coming in a bit small
Ground cuckoo fertilizer to make them tall
Though you say my garden is a waste of my time
I’ll keep my precious moments in green and rhyme

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As you know, each year at commencement it is Southern Michigan University’s pleasure to present the Ernest Smedley Distinguished Faculty Award. The recipient of this year’s award is Dr. Horace Butler, a dual appointee in our Biology and Pre-Medicine. As any of his pupils will tell you, Dr. Butler is a tireless advocate for his students. The nomination letters we received said that he is always available for consultations, day or night, rain or shine. He has answered students at 5am, on vacation in Hawaii, and from his hospital bed after a major car accident.

Dr. Butler’s dedication to helping his anatomy and physiology students is so great that he will cut open his own chest cavity to demonstrate how various human organs work. He has tirelessly pitched in up to and including distributing test answers, grading on a vertical curve, and allowing students to take his exams up to five times in practice.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Dr. Butler’s volunteer work in the community. Because he hates his wife and children, he dedicates nearly every waking hour that he is not teaching to community involvement. Dr. Butler has put in over 1000 hours personally collecting, transporting, and spaying or neutering feral cats, dogs, and freshmen. He is the faculty advisor to the local campus chapter of the Illuminati, recipients of that organization’s prestigious Invisible Hand award and growing its membership from less than 10 to over 200.

Please join me in congratulating this year’s Ernest Smedley Distinguished Faculty Award winner, Dr. Horace Butler.

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Hey there party animal! We all know that spring break is a time to get your drink on and hang loose, but have you ever stopped to think about all those calories? College is a time of changing metabolism and expanding waistlines, dude, and all that drinking and eating and partying can really build up. Bulimia can only get you and your smokin’ hot babes so far, and as we all know the Freshman 15 can soon be the Senior 16 if you’re not careful!

That’s why Amazing Dude Tours (a subsidiary of Globomex Petroleum LLC GmbH) is pleased to offer the all-in-one inclusive DrillDive™ Experience, a combination exercise regimen and rustic getaway on the scenic Gulf of Mexico! It’s a well-known fact* that oil workers have some of the highest calorie burn rates of any profession in the world, and that their no-frills existences and low-calorie foods meshed with the natural beauty of the Gulf give them some of the highest job satisfaction rates in the world.**

With DrillDive™, you get to participate in the same fitness activities as oil workers in a controlled and welcoming environment aboard the Trapezoid Nowhere themed resort platform. Our level of verisimilitude is unparalleled, yo: you’ll swear that our efficient hot bunking, simulated well capping and pipe welding, and “high-risk”† diving inspection and repair programs are the real deal. Once you’ve signed our totally rad nondiscolsure agreement†† you’ll be whisked away for an unforgettable one-week getaway on the gulf that will have you as fit and trim as you’ve ever been. And our exclusive oil treatments for exposed skin are guaranteed to help combat the aging process, sun damage, and dozens of other disorders that serve to fade the youthful glow of your skin.‡

Drilldive™: the combination spring break getaway experience and weight-loss experience that all your friends will be talking about for years to come.‡‡

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April 2-May 29: Faced with repeated complaints about fire ant infestations in buildings abutting the quad, Landscape Services repeatedly poisons anthills in the large grassy area using both commercially available products and those sourced from professional exterminators.

May 29: In preparation for the three-day holiday weekend, and in acknowledgement of the lack of recent complaints, Landscape Services ceases its poisoning campaign against the fire ants on the quad.

June 1: Returning students report an “odd” structure in the middle of the quad. Analysis of cell phone photographs shows a small anthill with uncharacteristic “holes.” Landscape Services takes no action, as the observations are not complaints and many employees remain on vacation.

June 2: The first reports of invasive fire ants in buildings bordering the quad come in. Landscape Services dispatches fresh poison; workers report that the anthill has grown to nearly a foot tall and is made of a material that resists crushing. Landscape Services delivers the poison, but the crew is severely stung in the process.

June 3: Members of the Landscape Services ground crew are rushed to the hospital in anaphylactic shock due to lingering effects from fire ant stings. The remaining employees refuse to venture onto the quad to lay more poison, which seems to have had no effect.

June 4: The first deaths occur from allergic reactions among the initial ground crew. A commercial exterminator is contracted, and entomology experts are brought in. The structure on the quad is now approximately three feet tall. Buildings with an infestation are closed, and the quad is roped off.

June 6: Entomologists at the state agricultural annex, after examining the ants, report that they seem to have developed a resistance to most commonly used pesticides. Furthermore, a form of hardened mound-building most commonly seen in tropical termites appeared to have spontaneously evolved in the local fire ant population–explaining the 6-foot tall structure that now dominated the quad.

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The stranger entered the Juarez bar with a jangle of spurs, a cloud of cigar smoke, and a faint but audible twang of guitar strings. He had a hard face with a hard life writ large upon it, hovering over a sweat-speckled ranch hand’s shirt and below a beat-up Stetson that was at least as old as disco.

He trudged over to the bar, slouched upon it, and ordered the strongest drink on the menu–a boilermaker made from tequila and whiskey–by flicking his thumb at the menu. The bartender opened his mouth to protest, but upon seeing (and smelling) the man before him, he thought better and served the drink unquestioningly.

“Tell me,” the stranger said in clear but accented Gringo Spanish after slamming back the sledgehammer cocktail in a single drag. “What do you know about Señor Guerrero?”

The bartender’s eyes widened. “Nothing. Nothing at all!”

“Let me tell you a story,” said the stranger in a rough voice braised in the harshest of liquors. “I have traveled many a long and weary mile on this earth in search of one thing, and one thing only. I want the best, and people who get between me and it tend to end up in the hospital if they’re lucky, the morgue if they’re not. I have heard that Señor Guerrero is the man to talk to about this in these parts, and that his product is stronger and more pure than that of his competitors.”

“But-” the bartender started.

“I’ve tried what his competitors have to offer and found it wanting,” the stranger continued, growling out the Gringo Spanish as if it were a series of hard watermelon seeds. “So you will tell me where I might find Guerrero and his product, right now. Or you’ll be seeing the inside of a white room of one kind or another very, very shortly.”

His hand trembling, the bartender held out a faded and warn business card for Señor Guerrero’s Secret Taqueria featuring the Hottest Tacos and Taquitos in the World. The stranger took it without a word, paid his bill, and left.

“Soon,” he murmured, patting his belly even as he felt the great taco hunger rising within his gullet once more. “Soon.”

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“As you are aware, we have been asked to read a statement from the Continental Football League,” said CFL play-by-play announcer-at-large Carl Drake.

“That’s right, Carl,” added Tom Hicks, his color-announcement partner-in-crime and Gal-Friday. “We have the somber duty, as designated neutral third parties, to announce to you that Ulysses Calhoun, who you may know as the star forward of the Southern Michigan University Fighting Grizzlies, has failed to report for duty at the Richmond Squires spring training camp.”

“This constitutes evasion of the CFL draft, one of our nation’s most sacred institutions,” continued Carl Drake sorrowfully. “Those of you with a passion for history may recall that the CFL has not had a draft dodger since ‘Dike’ DeSilvo refused to report for training with the Iowa Caucuses in 1972, and that no draft dodging player has been convicted and sentenced since ‘Kiddie’ Voles failed to appear at the Birmingham Klansmen’s Grand Wizard Stadium in 1923.”

Tom Hicks, his head lowered, pursed his lips. “That’s right, Carl. It is our sad task to inform you that Ulysses Calhoun is now considered a fugitive from professional football. Under CFL Bylaw #237-B, it is hereby prohibited for anyone to give him aid or succor, and it is further required that anyone seeing Ulysses Calhoun or with knowledge of his whereabouts must come forward with this information. Failure to do so will constitute a violation of CFL Bylaw #237-B, and any such persons will be held as equally guilty of draft dodging.”

“While we urge the public’s help in assisting in the apprehension of this draft dodger, we must caution that Ulysses Calhoun is to be considered unarmed and dangerous. Do not approach him. We also wish to avoid a repeat of the unfortunate incident from the 1955 CFL draft when Swedish recruit Diks Vloeide was accidentally lynched on his way to training camp after a rumor emerged that he was a draft dodger.”

“That’s right, Carl,” sighed Tom Hicks. “Do not approach, confront, or attempt to apprehend Ulysses Calhoun. Report his location to the nearest local branch of the CFL armed forces and take shelter until the CFL Special Operations Group has had the opportunity to deploy. These dedicated professionals, many of them CFL veterans themselves, have the necessary combat, sport, and large animal handling experience to apprehend Calhoun and bring him to justice.

“The CFL Special Operations Group has honed their skills reining in CFL players during drunken escapades, drug binges, outbreaks of roid rage, and the rare, regretful circumstances when a player breaks containment and is allowed to roam free among the populace,” said Carl Drake. “Report any sightings, let them do their job, and soon we will be able to put these unfortunate events behind us.”

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My fellow Minosians, no one can deny that the Magick-Industrial Revolution has made our fair city a more technologically advanced and wealthy place to live. Life has never been easier with sorcery now available to all from the haughtiest hierophants at the Temple of Clohl to the most miserable congregants gnawing on day-old holocaustberry pies at a Savage Pie Hole franchise. Nevertheless, I must call upon our fair city to turn a keener eye to the effect that the rampant and unrestrained use of magicks has had on our environment.

But the soot caused by the Incantation of EverFire can only be removed with crushed Essence of Diamondroot, which is rare and expensive. Smog and soot from cantrips like Coldburn, Major/Minor Heat Liquid, and Illuminate Self chokes our skies and our streets with purple eggplant soup fog. Familiars from the Dimension of Magick have been turned loose and now breed feral and wild, displacing our native fauna–and we all know about the choking swarms of Hellweed that follow upon the improper disposal of material components imported from the Dimension of Infernis.

Those of us who are of like minds in confronting these challenges have formed Minosians Against Magickal Abuse (MAMA). We meet once a fortnight at the original Savage Pie Hole location in the Ragpicker’s Quarter. Look for our broadside, and ask yourself whether or not a Minosia in which you can see the sky even on a day when the winds are not right is something worth striving for.

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Harold Lee, thrived 1919-1939, was nothing if not an inveterate self-promoter. To that end, he seized on a newspaper misprint covering his unsanctioned field reporting on the Mexican Civil War and referred to himself as “Dangerous” Lee. His further adventures across the globe in search of fame, fortune, and glory can be summed up thusly:

Reporting form the front lines of civil wars? Living Dangerous Lee.

Carrying on a string of torrid affairs with married women? Loving Dangerous Lee.

Exaggerating, fabricating, and altering his reports to make them sensational? Writing Dangerous Lee.

Chartering and flying a plane over the undiscovered wilds of New Guinea? Flying Dangerous Lee.

Being devoured by cannibals after crashing? Eating Dangerous Lee.

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The city owned property abutting on Quinn Logistics LLC and had used it to erect a faux park with a few picnic benches for the benefit of the cyclists and hikers who went by on the nearby trail, the one which had once carried trains. QL employees often went there to eat lunch during the nicer days of spring and fall, and occasionally they would pick up detritus that had been left behind by the well-heeled health nuts that were the trail’s most prolific users.

Alan Daugherty, senior procurement clerk at QL, went out to the picnic tables one afternoon to try and spice up his usual ham sandwich and yogurt. He had a notion that he might replicate the most spectacular find anyone at QL had made, the iPod that some college brat had left and Jones in Shipping had claimed as her own. Instead, the tables were very clean save for one item: a pencil.

It was much nicer than the pencils that QL bought for its employees, admittedly, with a fine heavy weight. It was also unsharpened, but curiously the eraser seemed to have seen some use (or perhaps someone had been gnashing nervously on it); the pencil was undecorated except for embossed script that read ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ. Surreptitiously, at his work computer, Daugherty worked out the glyphs’ meaning: Greek for “truth.”

Not long afterwards, Daugherty believed that he had made an error in adding together two handwritten expense reports. He took ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ and attempted to erase his scribbles, only to find that the figures simply would not erase. They yielded easily to another desktop eraser, but were indelible to ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ. Changing the figures by one digit, though, meant that they easily disappeared. After checking his arithmetic, Daugherty came to a remarkable conclusion: his math had been correct, and ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ had refused to erase correct figures.

Sharpening ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ, Daugherty made another discovery: the pencil would refuse to write incorrect figures, or, in fact, any statement which had a verifiable truth value (it appeared to demur on questions of philosophy, writing them in very light strokes but also erasing them easily). The usefulness of ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ was quickly apparent: QL LLC was in the business of dealing with suppliers and middlemen, making and taking bids. If a piece of business was filtered through ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ, it would quickly reveal the truths or falsehoods involved.

Six months later, Alan Daugherty was Vice President and Acting Manager at QL LLC, with an unbroken streak of success in dealing with notoriously slippery and elusive customers. His career seemed to be in the middle of a meteoric ascent that would soon take him to the presidency of QL and beyond. But every so often, his gaze would settle uneasily on ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ, now barely larger than a golf pencil with an eraser nearly worn down to a nub.

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Madam Ionescu, leaving the Five-N-Dime Discount Grocery on 27th St with two bags of fresh produce, returned to her car in the parking lot. Shoved under the windshield wiper of her faded Dacia 1300 four-door sedan. It was an immense annoyance to her, wrestling the groceries into the back hatchback and then having to pry up the wiper with her arthritic hands and hold the paper at the right angle and distance to determine that it wasn’t a parking ticket.

“Work from home,” she read. “Up to $1500/hr selling HomeopaThing products. No experience required.”

Looking up, her red and clouded eyes angry, Madam Ionescu groused at no one in particular: “I already work from home, and my crystal ball and cards do not need to be diluted 30,000 times to not work.”

This was unforgivable, far worse than the Thai menu that had appeared on the knob of her home a month ago. That person, at least, had no way of knowing that Thai food was far too spicy for Madam Ionescu’s IBS and that she preferred to cook for herself (as there were far, far fewer turnips than she thought proper in most American foods). But to prey on an old woman in a shabby car, hoping that her naivete would lead to involvement in a pyramid scheme that could reduce her mostly fixed income?

Unforgvable.

With one hand on the brochure and the other on the thaumaturgic preserved monkey’s paw she wore as a broach, Madam Ionescu pronounced a curse in the Old Tongue: “Aceasta este o traducere fals. Vă mulțumim pentru verificarea-l oricum!”

Ten blocks away, in the midst of pulling up a wiper to set down a flier, an ex-car-salesman suddenly felt a burning itch.

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