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| << March17, 2008 - Dark Windows #14 - March 15, 2008 |
April18, 2008 - Dark Windows #16 - Apr 15, 2008 >> |
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DARK WINDOWS #15 - Apr 1, 2008 ===== ===== ===================> INTRO April Fools! A.k.a. fools in April ... you don't want me writing personal notes around tax time. And other excuses. Actually, we didn't hear of a single good April Fools gag, either among people we know or on the news. Or in any of the endless newsletters and websites I get/visit. Unless that was the gag: April Fools being canceled this year! Taxes = argh. We spend the whole year trying to make it look like we're making a lot of money. Then we have 4 months to fiddle with numbers to make it look like we didn't make anything. But, if the numbers then say we didn't earn anything, did we really earn anything? What an odd shuffle of mostly imaginary numbers. A drop in the pan of an economy that doesn't make any sense on a grand scale either. You can't just print more money and give everyone a $600 rebate. Throw some numbers in the debt column? How is that any different than people using their credit cards to buy things they don't really need? Seems obvious that if you let people/countries rack up enough debt (some colossal amount) there's bound to be a crisis somewhere down the line. But the stupidity just keeps going, at every level ... like candidates who need to have $100 million just for a chance to become president (and throw more money away). Shame on the congressmen who add absurd wasteful pork riders to every bill, to benefit their districts with expensive projects, while we all just sit here and grit our teeth, expected to pay for it and given no choice in the matter. And what has the war cost? Half a trillion dollars to bomb things, kill people, and ruin our reputation? And right now California is asking every school district to make huge budget cuts, teachers and support staff -- and students! -- be damned. It's just agonizing to watch. So, yeah, tax time. It wouldn't be so bad if there was any sense that our country or state sticks to a budget and uses its money wisely. But that's a fantasy. Being a dreamer, let's now return to fantasy. I hate it when "reality" creeps in. = scott ===================> POEM Passages --- A car slips by, out of the driver's world into mine, For an instant I feel why it is travelling, where it is going, Distantly like the sound of mist [raining onto nowhere never touching the ground] Around the bend and out of my world, back into its own, A car slipped by. --- =4/87, unpublished ===================> ODD CLIPS: (clips from old "factual" sources) Human existence was deemed to be full of many fair and lovable things, but they were generally marred by the infernal Keres, who abhorred to see mankind happy and prosperous. Indeed, they were thought to make life such an intolerable burden, as to induce individuals to prefer a quick, painless death on the field of battle rather than to live their lives to the bitter end. [1] Frazer, quoting Rocher: "This 'dog' disease was probably a form of insanity which seems to have prevailed among many races and the essence of which consists in the patient imagining himself to be an animal and behaving as such, This sort of madness was known among the ancients as cynanthropic ('dog-man') or lycanthropic ('wolf-man') disease." [2] Bacchantes clothed themselves in skins of beasts, tore live animals to pieces, and devoured the flesh raw as beasts do, and fondled and suckled wolf-cubs, fawns, and young panthers, as if they were their own offspring. [3] 1. Cesidio R. Simboli, Disease-Spirits and Divine Cures Among the Greeks and Romans (Columbia Univ., 1921), p.13 2. same, p.19 3. same, p.19 ===================> STORY Consumption ---- I have eaten your brain, now your memories stir inside me. I feel your emotion like strength within me, as your neurons tell mine all they've known. There's the shifting, sifting blades of coupling, scents like windstrewn, mowed grass I now recall. And in the so-many details of your childhood I have become innocent. I hang on the swing strings, standing up on the seat just to defy the watching, wary elders who shout their concern. I splash in the muddy puddle, stirring bloated and ragged worms with my foot. Springtime! How I have never savored the breeze before, it seems now a crime. I have missed much. Your species is mine now, and it is good. But that part of it has been digested, and it is gone forever. I have never known remorse, but I feel it now. Aging, I as you, you as I, Into the days of learning, I see how the solid world makes sense to you. But though you understand and therefore so do I, I do not see these things directly. Then all passing into ecstasy, the mundane are forgotten; first kisses upon vehicular-cool metals of night. Response, reactions, equal but opposite excitations. Patchwork fadings of the many occasions into an in-out rolling of a collective “Yes!”. How we fight the agings from there! Why did your innocence die, why did your magical loves and passions become desolate routines? I now share the further learning, growing before I am diminished by your gradual loss. Oh, even in sorrows there are bursts of love ... I love the taste of your kind. I am loving as I witness -- I have never felt this way before. I know my own past, so inglorious now as yours proceeds through me into the void. I can draw upon your passing concepts to imagine myself, prostrate myself before your stark superiority. How I was hatched alone, unmothered in a cold moisture somewhere near one of your cities. Sometimes in your terrible moody passion, your people create these marshes of despair, somewhere in these marshes I came to be. If there had to be more of my kind, would I have interacted as you do and developed into something more like yourself? Another love. I wish to digest more slowly, call all to a halt to stay here in this moment with what you have done. But I cannot. It is beyond my voluntary control. I try, and I feel a tiny reaction. Your moment of desire extended itself some small amount then snapped back into time. Through my system. Into my energy. Gone forever. More aloneness, further despair. The presence of your spirit filtering through me allows me such clarity! If only I could keep you here forever, I could become one of you. Surely that is all it would take to make me your equal, to be as beautiful as you. But you are dwindling, near the end. If I had another ... yes! If I consumed more of your kind and practiced my digestion-slowing, I would surely approach humanity myself! But the road to you is so hazardous, and it would take so many. Though I know it could be done, I fear it. My body is even now developing the craving, the delicious NEED to better itself with your spirits. I will brave the Paths and the Torture of your world -- I will brave ANYTHING -- to always have humanity within me! You are almost gone. I see your last memory, I see myself through your senses. I sense your fear, it becomes my own. I have become disgusted at the sight of myself. This is your parting gift. Or are you fighting back now? Suddenly I am torn: loving hating fearing myself. My gullet spasms, gagging on what it must consume in the end. It almost feels like you're trying to crawl out of the void into which I've plunged you. I'm sorry for what I have done, but I needed to live! If you fought, you lost. Nothing remains but the reeking, vague factual horror of the destruction I have caused. I have committed a crime. I wish to put you back, but you no longer exist to replace. I have killed. The aftertaste of knowing your love is living with my guilt ... But as your vibrations slowly leave my mind, I become hungry again. I become calm, calculating my next meal. I am entirely myself again, with only a vague memory of what I have just eaten. I know it was excellent, though a bit bitter at the end. But the long-lasting sweetness was well worth it. I know I want more. --- Published in THE NEW PENNY DREADFULS #1 (11/88) Published in YEAR OF THE TWIST by Scott Virtes (2002) ===================> NOW AVAILABLE: "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) The Wanderer ::: From out of the blue sailed the ship, a relic of a milennia long gone. White sails fluttered in a dead breeze pushing the ship forward as quickly as time itself. From the uppermost mast hung a flag not seen in years: the skull and crossbones fluttered from such high points as to set all who saw in fear. For it is fear which is the pirate's greatest ally. Out of the fog-driven cold she sailed with an eerie glow about her, enough to turn all but the stoutest hearts aflutter. She stands for that which she does. The ultimate in freedom. The final test of Darwin: will the strongest truly survive, or merely those who save their sanity? Perhaps the ultimate survivors will be those who never possessed any worth that could be called sane. The sadists outlive only those who perform the necessary. Are they really different? And the true enemy could only be the psychiatrists who calmly lee us as sheep into the mental abbatoir of society. Too many are blind to their colors. As I journey through the Sahara I dream of tea with you. Is this a sign of my colors or just an escape from the reality of the ship? It always seems to be leaking up there, in my head. If we were all full and true and together, I would hold you and let our hearts be knit. As I look down the bore and I see the bloodshot eyes, I wonder who he is. Does he have a family, or is he a fellow wanderer who would be a friend if there was peace? He is just a soul I have condemned from this world. When I pulled the trigger, I thought of tea with you. --- Captured daydream, Spring 1983, with Chris Clarkson in physics class, recovered 1/25/86. ===================> MY NEWS: New Editorial projects: - I am now an editor for the Infradead anthology at SamsDot (opening May 1) - I am now the chief editor for an anthology at SamsDot called ... the Book of Tentacles (opening May 1) New acceptances: none! (grr) Now in print: - my poem "supernobody" is available in Not One of Us #39 right now. New book covers for SamsDot: - Ewaiponema, by Mary Turzillo - Illumen Spring 2008 - Puppets of Low Magic ===================> POEM Country, I --- I wake up stringing lines between towns and towns into cities tossing up walls, I speak with some neighbors turning face to the others, And seeing suddenly how my people sort themselves, I try to hold them back Shouting love equality love and I die in a bloody spray of lead, and the child born is not mine. --- =4/87, published in Poetry Break v1n1 (1/89) ===================> STORY BITES: (clips from old fictional sources) It was curious withal, to see the stretch of long galleries running away into the dim distance, and whose 'halls' and 'chambers' into which we suddenly emerged, and whose roofs were propped on columns of salt, and decked with frieze and cornice never carved by earthly chisel. [1] That was her sole instinct now, to go on living, to survive, no matter at what price. And if were indeed true that her soul had been slain, she defied its murderers to slay her body also. That night, at her hotel in San Francisco, she double-locked her door and lay down without undressing, leaving all lights burning and an automatic pistol underneath her pillow. [2] I know how to open bolted doors as well as you do. And I know other things. And if you ever come to me in this life I shall first torture you, then slay you. Then I shall tell all! ...and unroll my shroud. [3] 1. John Berwick Harwood, The Underground Ghost (story) 2,3. Robert W. Chambers, The Slayer of Souls ===================> POEM Sky Grey Blues --- In the sky grey before the storm I saw A village burning centuries ago Spirits ambitions agony-released in the fires of flight, Cooling through the ages now falling like rain. --- =4/87, published in Poetry Break v1n1 (1/89) ===================> 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. ;-) ===== this issue: 2,170 words cumulative: 31,540 words |
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| << March17, 2008 - Dark Windows #14 - March 15, 2008 |
April18, 2008 - Dark Windows #16 - Apr 15, 2008 >> |
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