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| << January17, 2008 - DARK WINDOWS #10 - Jan 15, 2008 |
February16, 2008 - Dark Windows #12 - Feb 15, 2008 >> |
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DARK WINDOWS #11 - Feb 1, 2008 ===== ===== ===================> INTRO I'd like to do a study on why certain songs pop into my head when they do. There's always some kind of music going on up there, and it is often (FAR too often) unwanted and annoying. Things like "Cabbage" by the Smothers Brothers, or some pop shit by whichever bimbo is hot this week. How does that stuff get in there? Even more interesting: as a study in memory ... how is it that I can call to mind any given moment of any of several hundred songs and play it in my head like a CD? Say I want to hear "Swamp" (Talking Heads). Bang. There it is - "there's a hole in my head." Every instrument, word, and layer of sound. What's the point of getting am iPod? Brain music is far better. I can go into a song and mess around with it, change the words, add a guitar part, whatever I want. And, of course, the music will change itself in strange ways, with no conscious control. Perhaps one of the funniest details is that when I skip over parts of some songs, the sound speeds up as if there was a real tape passing over a real tape head on fastforward. This only happens sometimes, of course. One time I discovered that the song "Freeze Frame" from the J.Giles Band is actually the theme from "Duck Tales". For a whole week, both were going in my head constantly, changing from one to another at random. Oh, and you can't banish the theme from the Simpsons by playing the James Bond theme, since they blend together and become even more annoying. = scott ===================> POEM visitors --- fingers on the stove playing with fire fingers on the armrest drumming mad songs fingers on my feet wiggling my toes fingers in my mind I know I am being watched. --- = 12/86, published in Lil Demon Review #2 (1/88) ===================> ODD CLIPS: (clips from old "factual" sources) I had often heard of the superstition of sailors respecting apparitions, but had never given much credit to the report: it seems that some years since a Dutch man of war was lost off the Cape, and every soul on board perished; her consort weathered the gale, and arrived soon after at the Cape. Having refitted, and returning to Europe, they were assailed by a violent tempest nearly in the same latitute. In the night watch some of the people saw, or imagined they saw, a vessel standing for them under a press of sail, as though she would run them down: one in particular affirmed it was the ship that had foundered in the former gale, and that it must certainly be her, or the apparition of her; but on its clearing up, the object, a dark thick cloud, disappeared. Nothing could do away the idea of this phoenomenon on the minds of the sailors; and, on their relating the circumstances when they arrived in port, the story spread like wild-- fire, and the supposed phantom was called the Flying Dutchman. From the Dutch the English seamen got the infatuation, and there are very few Indiamen, but what has some one one board, who pretends to have seen the apparition. [1] In destroying a small settlement of Caffres, a child of about twelve years of age escaped the general carnage, by concealing himself in a hollow tree, but, unfortunately, was discovered by one of the marauders, who determined to make a slave of his prize. The commander of this barbarous detachment peremptorily laid claim to the little trembling prisoner; the captor as firmly refused to deliver him up, which so enraged the savage leader that he ran with the utmost fury at the innocent object of the dispute, exclaiming 'If I must not have him, neither shalt thou!' and accompanied these words with a blow of his sabre, which laid the unfortunate victim dead at his feet. [2] 1-2. A Voyage to Botany Bay, by George Barrington ===================> STORY Maybe They Were Symptoms, part 1 of 2 By Scott Virtes --- I was bleeding in spurts when the phone rang. My heart leaped at the sudden sound, and a fresh blotch of red smacked the wall. I grabbed the receiver and it tried to squirt from my wet hands like soap. I heard the sharp voice of my boss, Jack. In my mind, his name was Some Jerk, and he was in a file with Other-Jerks-I've-Known. "What do you mean you can't come in to work today? Who am I going to get to handle your end of the production?" I had called in earlier and left a message. I was expecting this call, but now it hardly seemed to matter as I sat in my clotted chair and tried to rub the blood from my eyes. "Look," I tried to explain, "a human being has the right to take a day off from work. You can't change that. And a company that can't cover for an employee who's sick is badly managed, plain and simple. If I was in any way indispensible, you would pay me more. Today I'm ... sick." "That's great. What the hell is the matter with you?" I shrugged. This was going to be rough. "I'm ... bleeding. I can't explain it. There's no wound, or pain. But I can't stop it. Everything is soaked, and whatever I do, the blood just keeps spraying out." "That's the stupidest story I've ever heard! Now I'm sending Danny over there to pick you up. I want you to quit being such a baby. We've got an order for 40,000 brochures over here, and you're going to print them." The boss hung up. He didn't want to hear it. He was a burnt-out neurotic skinny guy with six kids. The way he saw it, if he was trapped working 70 hours a week to pay the bills, then everyone else should work just as hard, just to amuse him. He was pushy and loud, and expected his workers to skip lunch breaks or eat standing at their machines. More than anything else, he hated excuses. In his mind, there was no excuse for anything. I couldn't take the stress. Ten-hour nights (or more) throwing cartons of paper around, sweating like a rag, with the damned quotas on my back the whole time. The press was hard enough to run without being forced to churn out 9,000 sheets per hour OR ELSE. Sometimes a job took some time to set up. Sometimes the press threw a belt, or the plates had to be reshot ... Besides, this was not an excuse. The room stank like a slaughterhouse. The carpet was so thick with blood that it felt like mud when I paced on it. My feet squished into the tortured fibers, and red gunk sprayed between my toes. I could not keep a mirror clean long enough to see what was happening to me; it was covered with arcs of dripping fluid as quickly as I could wash it off. I had run out of towels hours ago; I was running a load of soaked towels and sheets through the laundry as I paced and bit my nails and hated what my life had become. At least no friends were going to come over. They would scream and run for the door. I smiled when I thought of Danny coming here to yell at me, and seeing me like this. The thought was so satisfying, I had to laugh. I could picture Danny gibbering to the boss that I was some kind of deformed, peeled lump of flesh; maybe he would describe the running syrupy walls of this abbatoir I called home ... I should have been worried, but I wasn't. When I woke up this morning, floating in that cake of half-dried plasma, I almost lost my mind. I felt fine, but it looked like someone had dumped gallons of blood in the bed. I wondered who? and why? and how? and was it sheep's blood? cow's blood? Where did it all come from? Then I realized that it was me. I took a shower to wash the stinking mess off, still wondering who and why? but even as I washed, fresh blood oozed up from the cracks in my skin, pinked in the water and swirled around the drain. I ran out of bandages an hour later, but no pressure could stop the bleeding. I tossed the last wad of drenched cloth in the corner, and flopped into the chair by the window. Nobody has this much blood. I knew I should have been dead hours ago, but I'm here, and I'm still bleeding, and I can't explain it. I'm just waiting for Danny. Some Jerk. My heart went wild when I even thought of work. It was pure slavery, archaic and simple, exploitation and manipulation. We were on salary, so we only got paid for 8 hours, though we worked at least ten, and fifteen hours nights were not rare. Is that all there is to life? Breaking my back and falling into bed, waking up stiff and broken just to do it again? And what was all this abuse getting me? Why did I do it? All it did was pay the rent and pay for the car, but I knew there had to be a better way. I could sell some stuff, get by for a few months ... --- TO BE CONTINUED --- ===================> DARKVISION: (captured dreams) I was at the university library. They really packed the books in there. The shelves were jammed together so you'd have to turn sideways to go around corners. While they must have spent a fortune on the books, they only spent about a dollar fifty on the shelves. When I tripped over a hundred pound copy of The Fermius Guide to Extrasolar Diseases, and reached out my hands to stop my fall, I hit a shelf and could feel the vibrations. The particles inside the shelf were trying to decide if today was a good day for a paper disaster ... The shelf went over an inch too far. The books slid back and dropped out the downside of the shelf, whispering as they headed toward total chaos. The wave of books and metal hit the next shelf, then another, and it was a devlishly glorious game of dominoes after that. When it was all over, there were some groans from underneath the ruins of the anthropology section, all kinds of pages flapping in the air -- trying to escape the carnage -- and I could only wait until the perfect comedy pause had ticked down before letting out a primal, "Doh!" ===================> MY NEWS: Hot off the press: - "Old Emmett's Grave" (flash) posted at Postcards from Hell. URL: http://postcardtales.blogspot.com/2008/01/old-emmetts-grave-pfh.html Recent works accepted: - a haiku accepted by Mindflights - "Lugosi Rock" (flash) accepted by Postcards from Uranus. - "supernobody" (poem) accepted by Not One of Us New book cover design: - Sounds of the Night, Feb 2008 (SamsDot) Books & stuff: "Blank Spaces & other dangers". Now available again! The original publisher dropped all projects, and I have posted a second edition myself over at Lulu.com. A collection of 27 of my stories - all kinds of fantastic flights and weirdness. For more info and excerpts: http://scott.virtes.com/bk_blank.php Also (I forgot to mention this earlier) ... I have a stack of the July/Aug 2007 Analog with my story, "Jimmy the Box", in it. If you'd like a signed copy, email me at writer@scvs.com - $8 includes postage in the USA. Thanks. ===================> POEM watchmaker --- picking up moments from the Void handing them to Others who pack them into small metal boxes and hurl them at the World. --- = 12/86, : published in SPWAO Newsletter (12/88) ===================> STORY BITES: (clips from old fictional sources) Indeed, pursuers were following hard after him. Their shapes were but dimly seen, their number -- three or four -- perhaps only guessed. [...] they were on the whole more like dogs than anything else, but dogs such as we have seen they assuredly were not. [1] Something stirred in the blackness [of the burrow], and then, to his intense horror, a hand emerged -- a clean right hand in a neat cuff and coat-sleeve, just in the attitude of a hand that means to shake yours. He wondered whether it would not be rude to let it alone. But, as he looked at it, it began to grow hairy and dirty and thin, and also to change its pose and stretch out as if to take hold of his leg. [2] My family thinks that I am dead; so let it go at that -- perhaps I am. I imagine the Germans buried me, anyway. [3] 1. The Residence at Whitminster (story), by M.R. James 2. The View from a Hill (story), by M.R. James 3. Beyond the Farthest Star, by Edgar Rice Burroughs ===================> POEM believing everything -- -- I picked up a paper on the way back from there, an Enquirer this time just to ease the monotony. front page news told me I was dead. the vendor had been laughing, but I was laughing now: should I sue? nah, I figured they would most likely send forth a thug to kill me, how ironic. maybe it was for the best, maybe now my work would sell? I already had the cover letter worked up in my mind, "Dear Sir, hello, I'm dead, I hope you like the following..." --- = 1/87, published in Stellanova (10/89) ===================> ABOUT THE AUTHOR Scott Virtes has had over 400 stories & poems published since 1986. Look for them in Analog, Space & Time, Ideomancer, Dreams & Nightmares, Cafe Irreal, Planet, and more ... My Home page: http://tales.scvs.com?inw=dkw Notice: Odd Clips and Story Bites all come from original sources in the public domain, or are brief clips in the spirit of fair use (a.k.a. free advertising for the source). All other sections of this newsletter are copyright (c)2008 Scott Virtes. All rights reserved. Please don't grab chunks of my work and post them all over the place. If you ask permission, you'll find that I'm pretty easygoing. ;-) ===================> POEM (one for good luck!) under my bed --- time hides under my bed when not being pursued by poets --- = 2/87, unpublished ===== this issue: 2,433 words cumulative: 22,904 words |
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February16, 2008 - Dark Windows #12 - Feb 15, 2008 >> |
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