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| << February01, 2008 - Dark Windows #11 - Feb 1, 2008 |
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DARK WINDOWS #12 - Feb 15, 2008 ===== ===== ===================> INTRO I'm an amateur astronomer who has never been able to afford a telescope. I have many other ironic failures to share, but let's stick to this one. Luckily, there's a boom in astronomy right now, with a mind-boggling array of surveys and catalogs and tools available online. In most other ways, the 21st century has been lame so far. According to the sci-fi classics, we oughta be much further along than we are, but the world continues to be 99% dull, and hardly anything seems to change. The internet itself is almost entirely drivel, but there are some astronomical gems if you know where to look. And don't forget to look away from time to time ... In July, 2006, I was up at the 60" telescope on Palomar Mountain. An unexpected invitation and twisty road trip into darkness. Okay, if it was dark, the astronomers would have been too busy to see us, but the full moon was out, the deer were lurking, and there we went. Comically, since the real astronomers never actually look through the scope with their eyes, when there's a tour they only have a really, really old eyepiece to slap on there. Looking through this telescope is like having a volkswagen suspended over your head, but looking through the tailpipe you can see millions of light years away. That, and zero emissions. And those precious moments where you feel you can touch the universe in some way. A vehicle of sorts after all. Of course, there was a little control room full of computers. Every time they opened the door, this insane blue glow came pouring out. No wonder we can't find all that dark matter -- our eyes have become accustomed to the radiation. A very interesting trip. Including the discovery that there is more than one road up on that mountain, and the other one doesn't go anywhere. A brief shift in reality, and then we were gone. (Thanks, Mike.) = scott ===================> POEM Not One of Us --- The hand touches flesh, soft flesh recoiling and screaming, loud screaming with fear the hand moves away, moves into the shadows, shedding skin, waiting for another chance to strike. --- = 1/87, unpublished odd note: my very first story was published in a zine called Not One of Us, back in 1986. The phrase crops up from time to time, and though I sent this poem to that market, it was rejected. ===================> ODD CLIPS: (clips from old "factual" sources) [Visiting copper mines near Trondheim:] Being fixed in a wooden bucket, I was let down above fifty fathoms; and, on reaching the bottom, never did I see a more horrid prospect or what appeared to be a truer picture of the infernal regions. Nothing met the eye but rugged caverns, flames of fire, and creatures more resembling fiends than men. They were dressed in black leather jackets, with leathern mufflers about their heads, and wore aprons. These miners have various allotted avocations, and some not destitute of danger. The master miner, who descended with me, seeing I was afraid and taken with a cold fit, rang a bell, which is the signal for being drawn up, and we soon ascended into a more favourable air. [1] We were becalmed under the arctic circle; and some of the crew being superstitious enough to believe that the inhabitants of the neighbouring coast could rule the elements, and dispose of the winds at their pleasure, the captain was prevailed on to send a boat ashore to purchase a propitious gale; amd curiosity prompted me to accompany those who went on this ridiculous errand. [2] Coming to an anchor on the eastern coast of Zembla, one of the seamen landed, when a bear, approaching him from behind, struck him down with its paw, and would have devoured him, had not his associate shot and killed the animal outright. This accident deterred the rest of the mariners from venturing on shore. [3] 1. Historical Account of the Most Celebrated Voyages..., by William Mavor, Vol. 11, p.8 2. same, p.9 3. same, p.47 Note: These travels took place in 1653. ===================> STORY Maybe They Were Symptoms, part 2 of 2 By Scott Virtes CONTINUED from issue #11 --- The doorbell rang, and I hopped to my feet happily, sending a shower of sticky rain across the entertainment center. I bounced down the stairs and opened the door. Danny was standing there, doing his best to look annoyed. "Man, what kind of crap are you trying to pull? If you stay home, we all have to work an extra four hours, and I'm not in the mood. I want to get home to my kids, you know. You're just a selfish piece of shit ... who do you care about, who needs you? Maybe I'll stay home, and YOU can work till five a.m." Danny was an uptight, long-haired kid who thought he was important just because he ran a press for some little company in a town that 99.9999% of the people in the world never even heard of. As I summed him up, I realized how unimportant all this labor was. All the stress I had been feeling was for nothing. As Danny rambled on and on, cursing at me like a psychotic cartoon, I saw just how the stress was destroying him. I could feel it in myself. "I don't feel good," I maintained. Danny looked at me as if he was about to grab me by the neck. He held back. "You look fine. You're just a lazy gringo who whines about everything." "I'm bleeding ..." "I don't see any blood. You can't stay home just because you've got a damned paper cut or something." I looked around the house. The blood was everywhere, spattered like the canvas of a slingshot painter, layer upon layer suggesting abominable forms, a blank verse waiting to be deciphered. Yet the blood was drying, and fading ... "Blood pressure," I muttered. That's what the whole episode was all about. Danny was ready to explode. "What?" "I'm going to a doctor. There are clinics that handle stress, and they'll be glad to sue you and Jack for harrassing me. If you had any brains, you'd get help too, but you won't." "But ..." "NOW!" I shouted. The last burst of blood came from my mouth like the breath of an ancient dragon. I was hoping it would burn the kid to ash, but it faded before it reached its target, and I felt clean once again. "But Jack ..." "To hell with you and Jack." I slammed the door and went to look around the house. Everything was back to normal, all traces of the morning holocaust faded to a bad memory. The dryer beeped like a demon, to let me know that my clean towels were cleaner. Yet there was a drop of blood remaining. There was, in fact, a deep paper cut on my thumb, and I remembered it now. I'd sliced my finger trying to tear open the envelope to look at my last paycheck. I found the check on the nighttable. Comparing it to my calendar, where I marked the hours I had worked, I saw that the company had ripped me off for fifteen hours of my life. I saw that it wasn't worth it anymore, and I felt good for the first time in weeks. Besides, I noticed, we spend half our time undoing the work someone else just did. If there was any sort of organization in the world, we could get by working only three hours a day ... Beginning today, my health was no longer for sale. --- END --- ===================> MY LATEST BOOK: "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 ===================> DARKVISION: (captured dreams) I was walking past flooded houses, humming "Jessica" (The Allman Brothers) for about 3 hours. The ground was grassy, with patches of water showing through; the water missed some houses, while other homes floated past with old men paddling them along. My steps covered about 100 feet each. The flooding went on for miles. In some spots there were no houses at all, only columns of bubbles rising from the bottom of the sea. [1] # She was old and alone, always faking a stroke to get some attention (at the hospital). One day she died because nothing was wrong with her. They sent her body home to its chair by the window. It still bakes cookies for children 1,000 miles grown. [2] # This week I finally counted all those bees that were crawling along on the ground instead of flying. Everyday there seemed to be a zillion of them. They can't all have stung people. I counted an average of 22 per day on the walk to work. I still don't know why they crawl around like that. Maybe they like getting eaten by ants. [3] 1. journal excerpt, 2/26/95 2. journal excerpt, 2/20/95 3. journal excerpt, 2/17/91 ===================> MY NEWS: NEW blog: The Unlikely Times A journal of the hard-to-believe and the not quite believable. http://unlikelytimes.blogspot.com New acceptances & publications: "tangled up in true" (poem) accepted by Space & Time Stories (reprints) now available on AnthologyBuilder.com: "Bricks" "Last of the Soft Things" "Tuesday Came Apart" URL: http://www.anthologybuilder.com/authordetails.php?byline=Scott%20Virtes Poetry (reprints) posted on writersCafe.org: "the shape of things to come" "all those toys" "in the blackout" URL: http://www.writerscafe.org/writers/scottVee/ ===================> POEM staring --- life is death with senses a state of definition of staring through life and never seeing the life staring back at your state of definition with senses -- death is life. --- =1/87, published in EGAD! #4 (11/87) ===================> STORY BITES: (clips from old fictional sources) You see a man in an odd white hat pass by and think little or nothing about it. Afterwards, when you hear that a man wearing just such a hat had committed murder in the next street five minutes before, then you find in that hat a certain interest and significance. [1] "They were to the ear what slime is to the touch," and then the words: every foulness, every filthy abomination of speech; blasphemies that struck like blows at the sky, that sank down into the pure, shining depths, defiling them! [2] He peered over the green wall of the fort, and there in the ditch he saw a swarm of noisome children, horrible little stunted creatures with old men's faces, with bloated faces, with little sunken eyes, with leering eyes. It was worse than uncovering a brood of snakes or a nest of worms. [3] 1-3. "Out of the Earth" (story) by Arthur Machen ===================> POEM In Days of Trance --- Sunlight rushes in through the window crawling squarely across my bedsheets, to rest ultimately upon my eyes. Its glass-amplified heat burns me into awareness as I shield my face from the dancing spark-motes I had been breathing all my life. And awake shuddering feet on the coldness of floor tiles, moving to block the climate from my skin, to hide myself from unasked critics, to set another day into motion, all the activity, routine senses, motion again, the carbon monoxide of life is deep within me now, bidding me return to my perch by the window. An escape, a meal, needs unlike bludgeoning my eyes with cathode-blue insanity from the electric box on the TV stand, here alone straddling only moments and erasing those which failed to impress me. My eyes sting, begging for closure, bestowing numbness and all has come full-cycle, dreaming reality until the sun. --- = 2/87, unpublished Note: there are a few themes here. I lived in a frozen basement in Connecticut at the time this was written, where I had an episode of carbon monoxide poisoning and had hours where I couldn't move. Since then, I've had mono a few times, which includes an odd paralyzing sort of fever; and sometimes when staring at TV I get the same life-sucking sense of immobility. So ... a good fever can lead to days of wild dreams, and having 150 channels of crap can destroy those dreams overnight. ===================> MY ANALOG STORY: 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. ===================> 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. ;-) ===== this issue: 2,230 words cumulative: 25,100 words |
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