That’s it now, turn the knobs on that magic radio, navigate the squalls and squeals and give yourself a voice, any voice, the first one that comes through free and clear, out of the hanging clouds of scintillating static, the chaff of a hundred anti-aircrafts, the diced tinsel of a million Christmas trees. Here’s one now, one speaker through the speakers, addressing you and only you and everyone else. What’s that disembodied stranger saying? You missed the first few syllables, but yes, it’s definitely a sentence and yes, YES, it definitely could be about you. If only you spoke Portuguese, or even Brazilian Portuguese. One of the Portugueses. She sounds cute, so it only matters half as much. A voice for radio and a face to match, maybe, if you’re lucky. And we know — you’re lucky.
Sabbatiaccidentalisticexplicatidative.
August 24th, 2010Thus Spake Dog, or Ecce Rob.
July 8th, 2010I’m going to yell something, Rob thought, so he did. “Big hair in the morning!” He spread his arms out wide and grinned a wide grin as he yelled it. And Carter turned away from the television, a soccer match, the players so tiny, so crisp, so ineffectual on that big green field full of moiré patterns. The artful mowing of the field. Carter squinted, Carter squinted a lot. “What?” Carter said. She propped up her head on her right hand, fingers tangled in the hair around her ear, smothered by it. In her left hand she held what looked like a violin bow. He made a mental note to ask her about it. “My hair?” Carter said, and didn’t look happy.
Forgotten Television: Ernst.
May 25th, 2010In the spring of 1974, NBC’s rotating showcase of evening crime dramas, the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie, suffered from flagging ratings. None of Wednesday’s quirky prime-time sleuths connected with audiences the way Sunday night’s Columbo, McCloud or MacMillan & Wife had (with the qualified exception of Banacek), and viewer interest was flagging. The network needed a new colorful quasi-detective, as quickly as possible.
Producers of the show turned to Joachim Fessender, an experienced television writer at NBC since the mid-sixties. Writing under the pen name Joe Fest, Fessender had earned a reputation as a talented “fixer”, punching up weak scripts for a variety of popular shows, often under extreme time constraints, but had yet to win a solo writing credit. Though Fessender submitted his own scripts — hundreds of them, at one count – they were unfailingly rejected. Said one producer: “Joe was writing for Bonanza for a while. Did great revisions and sent in at least one script a week of his own. But his work was too… esoteric for prime-time back then. I mean, you don’t get Little Joe hopped up on peyote and have him wander around in the desert hallucinating for three episodes. Maybe today you could get away with the stuff he was writing, but in 1968? Not even the hippies would’ve watched that.”
Those Goldurned, Dadgummed Good Ol’ Days.
April 20th, 2010A panorama of browns and beige! Sepia, as far as the eye can see! Everything awash in aged colors, positively drenched in them! Everything looked like it fell from a tree a month ago! We’d seen colors in those fancy Chinese rugs and we didn’t want them! They rattled the blood and unbalanced your electric field! Ask Tesla! Go ahead, you ask him! I know he’s dead!
(The man leans on a cane and watches the horizon, or at least he faces the horizon. He squints, and the face around his eyes is an intricate lattice of wrinkles upon wrinkles, so it’s hard to tell exactly what his eyes are doing.)
Everything was cheaper, but it was built to last! You could get a five-course dinner for thirteen cents! A whole house for a dollar and a half! One of those fancy occidental ladies of the evening, you gave her seven bits and she’d be your wife till you died! A nickel cost a penny! And you had to work five weeks to earn one of those! A fitternight, we called it! Five weeks! People knew the value of a nickel! And quarters! Only Rockefeller and the Pope had those! The Pope kept one hidden in his hat for safety! No one dared knock off the Pope’s hat! Filthy Catholic!
Polestars and Overcompensation.
March 23rd, 2010Are your hoods up? They should be. It’s night out, and the hood is a useful thing at night. A hood is useful any old time but especially at night. Night is chilly, night is dark, night is full of things that, without sunlight, seem strange and menacing. Some of these things are strange and menacing. Strange and menacing during the day, to be sure, but the sunlight hides these qualities. That’s ironic, isn’t it?
You don’t know what irony is. Huh.
That makes sense. You’re five. And your brother’s three, so we won’t even ask him. Is he asleep? That’s fine. Is his hood up? Good. Remind me to explain irony later. Maybe when you’re seven. I think that’s when I learned about it. Yeah. Seven sounds about right.
Yes, it’s late. Well past your bedtime. Or at least the bedtime your mother gave you. Does Carson have anything to do with that? The setting of bedtimes?
You don’t know.
Look, I’m not being critical here, I don’t think you’re bad, but you really need to be more observant. You’re my eyes and ears in there, you know, my man on the ground. You provide me with valuable intel.
That’s right. Intelligence. Like in the spy movies we’ve been watching. See, you’ve got a good memory. That’s why I asked you to be my inside man.
Mr. Tompkins Makes The Best Of Sandwiches.
February 18th, 2010Mr. Tompkins noticed that it was past eleven and the lunch rush hadn’t started yet – in fact, he’d had no customers at all that day – so he walked from behind the counter to the front door, checked that the sign was properly flipped to OPEN, and swung the door outward, to gauge the action of the hinges. He’d oiled them the day before; they worked just fine.
“I’ll have a sandwich, Mr. Tompkins,” said a man dressed in black. The man sat at one of the shop’s half-dozen tables and spoke from behind a newspaper. As soon as he finished his sentence, the man in black snapped down the newspaper, and stared at Mr. Tompkins, arching a large dark rakish eyebrow. The man’s face was a shard of bone china, pale and sharp, and his eyes were a light, almost golden brown, like perfect toast.
“I didn’t see you come in,” Mr. Tompkins said.
The man in black smiled. “No, you didn’t,” he said.
There is a kind of smile only contented elderly men can master, untightened by self-consciousness or significant regret, grown from a life lived as well as circumstances would allow. Pleasant, drowsy, almost beatific, the smile slid onto Mr. Tompkins’ face right after the birth of his first grandchild and had never left, even while sleeping, except for the occasional stubbed toe. The smile didn’t waver as Mr. Tompkins said to the man in black, “You’re the devil, aren’t you?”
How To Be Invisible.
January 26th, 2010Invisibility: dream of half-mad scientists, unrealistic criminals and nerdy ten year old boys… and perhaps also you? Who wouldn’t want the ability to skulk around undetected, learning what your world is like when you’re not in it? To be the greatest spy the world has ever known (though technology has rendered most applications of personal invisibility obsolete)? To perpetrate elaborate hoaxes on those foolish enough to believe in the “supernatural”? To run around outside all day in the summer and never fear a sunburn? To be undeniably, irrefutably, 100% see-through?
The advantages of voluntary invisibility are self-evident, but the process of becoming invisible is fraught with challenges. Only the truly dedicated should undertake the task, and even they should realize that their chances of success are wafer-thin (assuming the wafer is very thin).
To start, you should determine if you are “invisibility material.” The following quiz will help:
Stuff and Nonsense, With Footnotes.
January 25th, 2010I know I said I wouldn’t talk about myself, or I said that I would only talk about myself in an obscure and fictionalized way, and for all you know, my dear four readers*, what I’m about to write is a bulky knot of lies and embellishments (although if you are one of my four readers**, either you should be able to sift the truth from the lies with ease or the truthiness and/or lie-ishness matters not to thee, oh no oh no oh no). Regardless, I’m going to write it, and ostensibly it is autobiographical, may the lord have mercy on our souls.
Therefore, in the spirit of this flagrant self-exposure:
Dear Diary:
Read the rest of this entry »
A Bad Case Of The Vapor Lock…
January 22nd, 2010… and my lunch break is never long enough, but I swore on the lives of my nonexistent children that I would not lapse any further than I already have, move or no move, so here’s some tidbits I feel compelled to share.
If you want to know if you value a material possession, ask yourself “Would I carry this up three flights of stairs?” It’s as good a starting point as any.
How To Start The New Year.
December 31st, 2009First, a word of probably-unnecessary warning: any essay claiming to help you start the new year is at least a little facetious. Technically, you don’t need to do anything. The year will start on its own. Most modern years include a simple push-button or touch screen interface in case of accidents, but you might need to turn the crank on the front, or push it for a few feet. Even if you don’t do either of those things, there’s a better than fifty-fifty chance that the year will have started by the time you wake up tomorrow, if you live in the continental United States. (If you live elsewhere, your results may vary.) Also, sometimes there’s no crank and it’s not a push-starter, so you have to find the pull cord, or the ignition key, or on truly vintage models, the jackknife switch, though why you’d be starting a year that old, I have no idea.
Technical details aside, the beginning of a new year is a useful if arbitrary point conducive to self-evaluation and improvement. The hoary tradition of New Year’s resolutions is a prime example of such examination, but by following the steps below, the acknowledgment of the past in hope of improving the future can be made more involved and complicated, not to mention less covered in gray or white hair. And a little facetiousness never hurt anyone (though a lot of facetiousness has been proven to cause cancer in lab animals).
So let’s do it! Let’s start your new year!