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| << September18, 2008 - Dark Windows #26 - Sep 15, 2008 |
October19, 2008 - Dark Windows #28 - Oct. 15, 2008 >> |
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DARK WINDOWS #27 - Oct. 1, 2008 ===== ===== ===================> INTRO Sometimes there are moments when I find myself doing some odd combination of things I never pictured myself doing. Like hopping off a bus in Eagle, Colorado and running into Wee Willie Wonka's One Stop Shop in the middle of the night. Or making bead earrings while watching football. Or helping my wife sell candles at a Humane Society street fair while gusts of wind are ruining everyone's tables -- I ended up calling that event our blowout sale of the year. Just now, another odd combination: watching a vice presidential debate while wearing a portable heart monitor. Just gathering some data overnight. Comically, after spending three weeks on a waiting list for a "loop monitor" to get a week's worth of data, I got hooked up with this 24-hour "Holter monitor" today, and was home for less than half an hour when the doctor's assistant called and said the loop monitor was available. Those moments of medical comedy are far between. Last time I was at the cardiologist's office, sitting in the waiting room with a bunch of much older, much sicker people, someone's cell phone went off, and the ringtone was ... "I Feel Good!" by James Brown. Nice & loud, too. Anyway, back to some of my more "normal" combinations. Like playing monopoly online while mapping Phoenician settlements in Google Earth. Or cataloging stamps with angry talk radio going in the background. Maybe I'll listen to an MP3 lecture about Newfoundland geology instead. They have some of the oldest crust on Earth, ya know ... Strange world out there, in here. = scott ===================> POEM Haunted Feeling --- Ghosts in the air, drifting through the ages, appear within our walls with deep hallowed, hollow eyes, faint shimmers of life reminding of death, a scent like peppermint, a cold-breeze feeling, and we in our skin-soft armor wait for answers; They follow us around asking why we are haunting them, but we're not; Their fallen faces semisolid, these ghosts on the wind, return to their eternal wrongness in the mind. --- = 5/88, published in The Fifth Di... (10/01) ===================> ODD CLIPS: (clips from old "factual" sources) Waking or sleeping, I have no rest. In dreams I read blurred sheets of glacial writing, or follow lines of cleavage, or struggle with the difficulties of some extraordinary rock form. [1] The crowded deck was speedily deserted on account of seasickness. It seemed strange that nearly every one afflicted should be more or less ashamed. [2] Think of the hearts of these whales, beating warm against the sea, day and night, through dark and light, on and on for centuries; how the red blood must rush and gurgle in and out, bucketfuls, barrelfuls at a beat! [3] 1. John Muir, Travels in Alaska (Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1915), p.v. 2. same, p.3 3. same, p.5 ===================> STORY ELIXIR (part 3 of 3) ----- Darius thrashed but could not wake up. The dreams went on, one scene of hell-on-earth after another. After many hours, the elixir felt it had made its pointr and the visions waned. Darius wailed into consciousness. ?You cannot share this secret with the world,? said the potion. ?Of course not " Darius agreed absently. His plans had been crushed, his noble motives ruined by his success. ?I will show you a real future,? it promised. ?I only wanted to help.?' ?They do not wish to be helped. They possess no good futures. Let us depart.? ?I want Elianne with me.? ?Elianne has been dead for four months. She left you when she knew she had cancer, because she did not wish her decay to affect your work ? Darius howled aloud, torn to pieces somewhere deep inside. ?Maybe we can find her again. It is a strange multiverse.? Darius was too shocked and numb to reply. The elixir tried to soothe him. ?What of the rest of the elixir?? he finally asked. ?I am all there is,? It replied. Darius ran to the nurturing room and surely enough, the vials were all empty. He cried for a dozen reasons, good and bad, noble and selfish, while the elixir gently pulled him from his body. The travels had begun. His body lay down next to the empty vial from which he had first consumed his future. # When the rent fell sufficiently arrear, they broke in and found him there. His landlord thought he was sleeping, so alive did he look, but the policeman pronounced him dead. "Look at this," the landlord said, kicking the vial. They looked at the nurture tank. Over the months it had grown into a terrible rot. The other vials were still in its midst, filled now with a rancid ooze. The officer shook his head. "The poor guy poisoned himself, no doubt.? The landlord was short several thousand dollars, so he cursed at the body of Darius, but when he saw all the expensive apparatus in the next room, he smiled. "I think I see a settlement here," he observed. "What about this man?" asked the cop. "Let him rot, the bastard." And he stepped on the dead hand on his way to ths door. --- END --- : written 10/15/1985, published in Black Satellite #2 (spr 2002); Blank Spaces and other dangers (2006) ===================> NOW AVAILABLE: Check out the PDF edition of Dark Windows #1-10... http://scott.virtes.com/ebooks.php ===================> DARKVISION: (captured dreams) Domeward Bound --- After seeing the Transformers movie just for fun, I figured I could expect some fairly odd dreams. In the movie, a teenager's car comes to life, turns into a giant robot, blah blah. In the dream ... My car didn't come to life, not like in the movies. Instead, the transmission got a mind of its own, kept switching gears at awkward moments, kept trying to crash me into things. It popped into low gear as I was trying to slow down at some stoplights, refused to get on the freeway entirely, and when I finally parked outside the UCSD BioDome (which was having an open house) it went into reverse, drove me up an embankment and wedged the car between two pine trees. I had to climb out the rear window. I was deeper in the woods that I had thought, and when I came out I was somewhere on campus. I figured I should head for the top floor of the tallest building (about 15 stories up) and would be able to see the dome from there. The building was some kind of massive student lounge, or country club, judging from the lounging students and pop culture clone women walking around looking to score (with anyone but me). The top floor was just a narrow hallway full of hair salons, with the stink of exotic creams and shampoos and burnt toenails. When I turned to get back on the elevator, it hiccuped, then there was an uninviting grinding sound. A wall section slid down over the elevator doors -- the new chunk of wall had a mock door that said "Janitor's Closet," (ha ha) and a little sign saying "STAIRS --->" So I took the stairs. Some heavily painted clone girls were there, complaining about the exertion, how walking down stairs would make little wrinkles appear under their eyes some day. They went down only two floors, convinced that somehow the same elevator wouldn't be broken two floors down. I jogged the rest of the way but ended up in just my underwear. When I ran through the crowded lobby, I was the entertainment of the hour, the thing everyone had to laugh at so they could puff up and feel important about themselves. I grabbed some clothes off the rack at the little Gap store in the lobby, flashed my credit card, gave Starbucks the finger, and stepped out into the fresh air (free at last!) only to run smack into Bill Clinton and some Secret Service dudes. I was pretty frazzled by then. All I could do is scream, "What the hell are you guys looking at?" Clinton laughed. We all laughed. It was pretty damn funny, but nobody knew why. I was thinking, "Bill Clinton visiting a tower full of clone girls." He was probably thinking, "Some nerd from the computer lab. I wonder if he can fix my toaster." I told them to have a nice day, then ran off knowing I'd never be able to find my car. Later on I was home, reading emails from the uncles I hadn't spoken to in 30 years, all about their families. I must have wasted an hour reading them and taking notes, updating phone numbers & contact info, only to wake up and find that the messages were not real, and the real uncles hadn't responded yet. My car came home around 3 a.m., reeking of hydrogen & sulfur. --- a dream from July 2007, published in Unfuture Chronicle. ===================> MY NEWS: Finally, a few bits of good news ... a few new poems accepted: "old mr. cyberpunk" and "meet the Avalla" for Illumen "For the dogs" for TeenAge "sunrise blues" for Amaze cinquain journal #16 ===================> POEM If Only --- Sometimes traces of doors flash at the corners of our eyes & vanish with the turning of our head; Usually hints of other lives crossing our own, opportunities for travel between distance and time; Sideways pieces of memories on racks in rows of spectral closets to be taken out at will and worn like flea-market clothing; If only we knew how. --- = 5/88, published in Senior Citizen Reporter v15#12 (12/89) ===================> STORY BITES: (clips from old fictional sources) The day that Mr. MacGregor lost the locomotive was a confusing one for our accountants. They didn't know whom to charge it to. [1] Unfortunately the current issue of our magazine has had to be abandoned because of low visibility and an epidemic of printers' nausea. [2] While in India, a friend of mine, a Mr. MacGregor, assisted me in confusing the natives, in more ways than one. We dressed up in Indian costume, for one thing. This confused even us, but we took it good-naturedly. [3] 1. story: "The Lost Locomotive" 2. story: "Contributors to this Issue" 3. story: "The Rope Trick Explained" 1,2,3 are found in "My Ten Years in a Quandary," by Robert Benchley ===================> POEM To J.W.: a Field of Tactics --- Battle plans meeting -- one on one what to say what to pass between where to look between the long pauses where to pause between the lookings. Attack sending a squadron up this hill around the arm of the sofa Defend massing a wing of aircraft to guard the peaceful space in front of your lips A silence is slashed by machinegun fire of this parallel possible A speaking is shattered by a bomb of not listening. We lose direction or faith or barrack friends to the trenches and mines of the field, to the wires. We move around through our campaign hearing without moving calling upon ourselves to stop the wars to play the surrenders to get to the truth of it all. The task of rebuilding and branching out to the cleaner skies of togetherness. --- = 5/88, published in Senior Citizen Reporter, v15n2 (2/89) ===================> 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: 1,860 words cumulative: 56,260 words |
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| << September18, 2008 - Dark Windows #26 - Sep 15, 2008 |
October19, 2008 - Dark Windows #28 - Oct. 15, 2008 >> |
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