Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

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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The man lay dead on the floor of his apartment, lovingly polished brass in his hands. “Look at this,” said the responding officer, Detective Mullins. He pointed at the cause of death, a bullet that had shattered the mouthpiece of the instrument before entering the man’s skull. “Shot him right through the sax organ.”

“Yeah, hell of a way to go,” said his backup, Grabowski. “From the pose and everything, it looks like he was in the middle of sax when he died.”

“Is it a sax crime?” said Mullins. “Should we get forensics in here to sweep for sax fluids?”

“Well, from what I see in the database, he was a registered sax offender. Played loudly after midnight despite repeated complaints.” Officer Grabowski shook his head.

“Don’t they send you to jail if you get back into sax with mirrors?” said Mullins, looking at the full-length mirror before which the dead sax offender had been playing. “That sort of thing makes me sick.”

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” said Grabowski. “Maybe this sax maniac had it coming? Maybe we just look the other way at another scumbag sax offender.”

Mullins frowned. “You’re sure this won’t come back to bite us?” he said. “It seems pretty clear that the people upstairs got tired of all the noisy sax.”

“Well, if he had been put away for sax crimes years ago, maybe,” said Grabowski. “Time was they’d call you a sax offender just for being horn-o-saxual. But this guy, with his rap sheet, and his sax with mirrors? No, the world is better off without his kind.”

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A horrified squeal arose from the assemblage of dentists. For there, on the hill, silhouetted by the setting sun, were the Four Horsemen of the Pocked Lips. Straining at reins of floss and digging in spurs of shattered mirrors, they rode into the midst of their enemies with unleashed fury.

Plaque, weilding his calcified club that sticks fast to all things.

Decay, whose touch rots enamel into viscous and foul-smelling goo.

Halitosis, who leaves stench and the portent of death in its wake.

Stain, whose dark marks will never be removed, even with bleach.

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And then Man said to Tree “But trees have not culture and they build not cities. A tree leaves nothing when it dies.”

Tree responded to Man: “Culture has in every instance led to death and misery, its achievements dwarfed by its toll. In no sense have trees culture, and for us that means we fell not our fellows.”

But then Man said: “What about the stranglers, the figs who creep and grow upon other trees, being parasites who kill?”

Replied Tree: “You speak of the process of intertwining another, of enveloping them as you grow together, and eventually, when they die, finding that they have left a hollow inside you? We count that as love, not murder.”

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The man, not even a petty king or duke but a farmer, approached the altar and asked for one thing: a point from which to begin, to strike out from strength, as he tried to protect his home and his family from the depredations of the world.

In response, a single mote of dust degan to fall in front of his home, only to stop an inch or so off the ground. No force could move it, even the swing of a pickaxe.

The farmer was not a smart man, but he was a shrewd man. He began, mote by mote, to build upon the foundation that had been franted him. In time, he was able to construct a cone welling up from the immovable point, and upon that build a small home. Over time, as more material was added, the plot grew. The land beneath was carved away, and by the latter days what had once been a mote of dust now supported a vast fortress, impregnible, ruling over the land.

Impenetrable, that is, until the youngster arrived one day whose special gift it was to move the immovable.

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The goblin cackled through cracked lips. “The Dead Hand…five long lakes, five thin lakes, but no real water in them. To drink is to die, but one must drink to pass.”

“It is true,” said Tinain. “The fingers of the Dead Hand are saltier than the sea, and there is no fresh water outside of rainstorms, which are so violent as to sweep all before them.”

“It is…barren as a salt cracker,” croaked the goblin. “The Gob Legion carries its water with it, water rightly won in battle and borne by our own willing porters…where will you find such?”

Myn sneered. “If we move fast enough, we won’t need water.”

“I hope so…for your sake, ctonb. But it matters not. When the Gob Legion reaches the Palm of the Dead Hand, what we seek shall be ours.”

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