Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

In the palm of Nä Ti, the Dead Hand
Lies Rait Tirat, the Tomb of the Rebel
He who rebelled against It
Nyir Rvi, murderer of the Creator
Xon Vty, father of the Goblins
The father awaits his children
To give to them purpose anew
And to anoint them with right
And free them of their sins

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Once the transmission ended, Yekaterina made no further log entries. Based on biometric data, it appears that she systematically depressurized all the units of the station except for three: her quarters, the central corridor, and the arboretum.

The cherry trees in the arboretum were in full bloom, and Yekaterina apparently clipped all of their blossoms one by one over the course of the next 36 hours, stopping only to eat food stored in her quarters and to use the bathroom there. Once she was done, she laid out her EVA suit on the bed and filled it with flowers before closing and locking the faceplate.

What telemetry is available suggests that Yekaterina’s next action was to move through the station, pressurizing rooms ahead of her and depressurizing them behind. When she reached the main airlock, she overrode the safety mechanisms with a screwdriver and opened it.

To this day, no trace of her body ahs ever been found, and the reasons for her final actions remain a mystery.

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The Orcs practiced a syncretic religion that was related to the worship of the Creator, as in the Sepulcher of the Creator, but also Muolih the Spreading Darkness, as in the Goblin and Dwarven faiths. Furthermore, many minor spirits were recognized, from ancestors to those posessing trees and streams, though the primary surviving codices note that they all emphasized the paramountcy of the gods of good and evil.

In Orcish, Muolih was called Tirat, the Rebel, while the Creator was called Nyir, which literally means “that which has created.” Their faith was, as a result, sometimes called Nyirtirat, literally “creator-rebel” but more accurately “the rebel and the rebelled against.” It’s important to note, though, that despite commonalities each Orc community and band had its own extremely local interpretation of faith and disagreements up to and including violence were all too common.

Naturally, this changed with the introduction of the Hamurabash by Hamur, which replaced the former religion with a set of ethical and atheistic strictures and emphasizing the memory of departed kin. The bashamalurs who succeeded Hamur were generally successful in eradicating all traces of the former Orcish religion with only a few isolated (and well-fortified) communities harboring so-called taiwa or apostates.

Even as Hamur’s successors agressively spread his message of atheism, equality, ancestral memory, and the militarization of society, there remain significant Orcish ruins in the high desert of the Lrira, predating the Hamurabash, and in many cases even the Sepulcher, deeply carved and embossed with the memory of the old faith.

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Think of the most lauded person you can who isn’t actively a deity. Someone who is pretty unanimously thought of as a moral person and who left a major mark on our world and on Western civilization–but as a ruler, not a philosopher or a religious leader.

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone like that with a better reputation after 1900 years than Trajan, the lucky 13th emperor of Rome.

He was renowned as a builder and a leader, who made more civic improvements to Rome and the empire as a whole than anyone before or since. Trajan was also a military leader who expanded the empire to its greatest extent in history, from the Persian Gulf to Britain. The list goes on; the Senate usually gave emperors titles to comemorate their rule, and for Trajan they simply awarded him Optimus, best. Every subsequent emperor was wished to be felicior Augusto, melior Traiano–as lucky as Augustus and as good as Trajan.

It’s a strange thing, then, that there are almost no surviving sources from his reign: all the relevent books are lost, and all that remains is people writing years or centuries later. Stranger still is the fact that Trajan was also an arch conservative when push came to shove; asked about Christians, he mercifully said that they should be given every opportunity and benefit of the doubt to reclaim paganism. If they still demurred, well, to the lions with them. That little detail bothered medieval and Renaissance theologians so much that they came up with outlandish ways for the centuries-dead emperor to be resurrected, forgiven, and baptized.

But the most interesting detail to me is this: Trajan was never related to any of the emperors that came before him. He was of comparatively humble stock, working his way up from the bottom. His predecessor basically had his arm twisted to adopt Trajan as his heir to retain the support of the army, after all.

It kind of makes one wonder–what sort of man was the “best emperor,” really? The sort of man you’d have a beer with? A standard politician with an unusually astute mind for appearing humble? Or a Pope Francis-like figure who really was humble and able, but whose talents happened to lie in war and the apex of political power rather than religion?

We’ll never know. But Trajan is a fascinating guy all the same.

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I’ve never read or seen The Quiet Earth or On the Beach, both of which have been books and movies.

But their message is nevertheless compelling: the last people on Earth, the last survivors of a physics experiment and a nuclear war respectively, living out their final days in ANZAC. Australia and New Zealand are in many ways an admirable locale for such: isolated yet temperate, distant yet with all the comforts of the First World.

They would be excellent places to live out an apocalypse, if apocalypse come.

So even though I’ve never been there, even though their cost of living is astronomical, even though, even though, even though…I am attracted to the romantic notion all the same. Places distant and safe, civilized and alien.

They seem like places I could live.

New Zealand especially. An isolated microcontinent, diverse in flora and fauna, as far away from Europe as one can get without booster rockets. If ever I fear an apocalypse, I feel like it’s as good a destination as any.

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I think I am mildly allergic to curry powder. It irritates my mucus membranes and makes me feel like I’ve been maced.

I lost a dime-sized chunk of skin on the back of my leg to a necrotic spider or tick bite.

I’m ambidextrous, can write with my left hand, and am right eye dominant. This explains the failure of my archery career.

When I taught college English for a few years, I was younger at 21 than some of my students.

I love movie and video game soundtracks and music with no lyrics or unintelligible lyrics. It lets me plaster my own story over the song.

I once sold a story for a tidy sum to people so secretive they tracked down a Livejournal about it and made me change it.

Finding good bargains at thrift stores gives me a similar high to that most drug users get.

I hope to visit every continent someday. Three left: South America, Australia, Antarctica.

I flunked out of the spelling bee two years in a row for the same word: allegiance. I still can’t get it right and in fact misspelled it while tying this entry (as “allegience”).

I’m a compulsive punner. If I were a superhero, it would be the Pun-isher.

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The first love
Which one? There are
Many firsts
Holding hands in grade four?
Maybe I was just imitating
The girl in seventh grade
The first I noticed
An eighth grader
She was the first
I even considered asking
Or the freshman? I’d known
Her since we were three
I think she’d have said yes
If I ever asked. When she
Asked years later I said
Yes but my mind wasn’t there
At the time, a junior
I only cared for the most
Volcanic crush, the first
To break my heart, the first
To say no

The first kiss
Unconscionably late
Classmates had children
Before I took even that step
Twenty-two and two degrees in
She was from my hometown
Her parents knew mine, though
We never met before
I waited too long, gave an
Awkward hug trying to screw
Up the courage
I kicked me heels in the lot
Afterwards, scarce aware of
The Dear John email a month
Away and the journal, online,
I’d only see years later
Chiding herself for accepting
A kiss from someone she wasn’t
Interested in, critiquing my
Goofy look of satisfaction
Wishing she’d kept her
Lips to herself

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As a child of the Class of 1983, so to speak, my first memory is probably from late 1985, when I was a little under three years old. I remember visiting my mother where she worked from September until she took her leave to give birth to my younger brother.

The building was an ugly Brutalist monstrosity with more a large curved exterior wall, something which made a big impression on me as a tot. Inside, my mother’s office was all bright lights and cubicles. She was visibly pregnant at the time, with my brother. I had no idea what she did, and only a vague idea that “work” was where she was all day.

And the next memory I can assign a firm date to? July 8, 1986, the day my mother went into the hospital to deliver my brother. We got new carpets that day, carpets which would last us until 2014, and I remember sitting on our dining room table with my older brother, looking out on the bare wooden floors and wondering when the new baby was coming home.

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Desperate Marketers
Everybody and their mom is on something social, which means that they are all also infested with self-promoters looking to make a buck. Whether ads, reposts, “signal boosts,” or desperate pleas to “like” the page of a small struggling business, you get the feeling that you’re the central cog in a money making machine that no one has quite figured out how to run. You are the “Part 2” in the “Part 1: Steal Underpants, Part 2: ???, Part 3: Profit” formula.

Poorly Researched Memes Ahoy!
People like clever things, and things that make them look smart or good or smartly good or goodly smart. Passing on the latest meme does this handsomely, and people like George Takei have built a personal brand out of it. But it also means that you have a constant, firehose-like stream of meme disgorged at you, and much of it is patenly false, misattributed, or easily slain by Snopes. Good luck trying to convince that girl you met at a party once in Phoenix that her rant about mind control flouride in the water is bunk, though!

Preaching to What You Think Is the Choir But Really About Half of Them are Atheists
I have three major social circles on social media: friends from family, friends from high school, and friends from college. They tend to be on the right, far right, and far left respectively, a stew of mutually incompatible political and social viewpoints. And yet they are all, all of them, always, spurting stuff that’s incredibly offensive to any dissenting viewpoint and acting surprised when the few people of another persuasion call them out on it. I’d say it’s the closest thing to genuine political dialogue I see anymore, except it usually gets little beyond the name-calling stage before unfriending is afoot.

Pressure to Like and Comment
“Why didn’t you like my slides of Tijuana?” says your aunt, or your friend, or your friend’s aunt. “Don’t you love me?”

Blazing Speed Plus Weighted Timelines Equals Uh-Oh
“Because you posted them ten minutes ago, Auntie Mae, and my timeline is weighted by an obscure algorithm with 11 secret herbs and spices that thinks it’s more important that I see the 110 cat videos and liked sponsored pages than my own flesh and blood.”

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She bade her friends good-bye, and again started along the road of yellow brick. When she had gone several miles she thought she would stop to rest, and so climbed to the top of the fence beside the road and sat down. There was a great cornfield beyond the fence, and not far away she saw a Scarecrow, placed high on a pole to keep the birds from the ripe corn.

Dorothy leaned her chin upon her hand and gazed thoughtfully at the Scarecrow. Its head was a small sack stuffed with straw, with eyes, nose, and mouth painted on it to represent a face. An old, pointed blue hat, that had belonged to some Munchkin, was perched on his head, and the rest of the figure was a blue suit of clothes, worn and faded, which had also been stuffed with straw. On the feet were some old boots with blue tops, such as every man wore in this country, and the figure was raised above the stalks of corn by means of the pole stuck up its back.

While Dorothy was looking earnestly into the queer, painted face of the Scarecrow, she was surprised to see one of the eyes slowly wink at her. She thought she must have been mistaken at first, for none of the scarecrows in Kansas ever wink; but presently the figure nodded its head to her in a friendly way. Then she climbed down from the fence and walked up to it, while Toto ran around the pole and barked.

“Good day,” said the Scarecrow, in a rather husky voice.

“Did you speak?” asked the girl, in wonder.

“Certainly,” answered the Scarecrow. “How do you do?”

“I’m pretty well, thank you,” replied Dorothy politely. “How do you do?”

“I’m not feeling well,” said the Scarecrow, with a smile, “for it is very tedious being perched up here night and day to scare away crows.”

“Can’t you get down?” asked Dorothy.

“No, for this pole is stuck up my back. If you will please take away the pole I shall be greatly obliged to you.”

Dorothy reached up both arms and lifted the figure off the pole, for, being stuffed with straw, it was quite light.

“Thank you very much,” said the Scarecrow, when he had been set down on the ground. “I feel like a new man.”

Dorothy was puzzled at this, for it sounded queer to hear a stuffed man speak, and to see him bow and walk along beside her.

“Who are you?” asked the Scarecrow when he had stretched himself and yawned. “And where are you going?”

“My name is Dorothy,” said the girl, “and I am going to the Emerald City, to ask the Great Oz to send me back to Kansas.”

“Where is the Emerald City?” he inquired. “And who is Oz?”

“Why, don’t you know?” she returned, in surprise.

“No, indeed. I don’t know anything. You see, I am stuffed, so I have no brains at all,” he answered sadly.

“Oh,” said Dorothy, “I’m awfully sorry for you.”

“Do you think,” he asked, “if I go to the Emerald City with you, that Oz would give me some brains?”

“I cannot tell,” she returned, “but you may come with me, if you like. If Oz will not give you any brains you will be no worse off than you are now.”

“That is true,” said the Scarecrow. “You see,” he continued confidentially, “I don’t mind my legs and arms and body being stuffed, because I cannot get hurt. If anyone treads on my toes or sticks a pin into me, it doesn’t matter, for I can’t feel it. But I do not want people to call me a fool, and if my head stays stuffed with straw instead of with brains, as yours is, how am I ever to know anything?”

“I understand how you feel,” said the little girl, who was truly sorry for him. “If you will come with me I’ll ask Oz to do all he can for you.”

“Thank you,” he answered gratefully.

They walked back to the road. Dorothy helped him over the fence, and they started along the path of yellow brick for the Emerald City.

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