description

A strange tale of a poor sap who sees strange things.

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My old bedroom I haven't visited in several years. I walk past it on my way to the kitchen with rarely a thought. Last time I looked in there, the Mass had grown to occupy a third of the room, engulfing most of my old bed. When I was a kid it had been a small, irremovable, black dust bunny that only I could see. Now it was a three-dimensional obsidian inkblot the size of several refrigerators.

Cereal and juice while coffee brews. Slim is there as always. His gray-skinned, lanky body is dressed in faded jeans and a crisp white tee. He sits on the floor in the breakfast nook, back up against the wall. Slim doesn't speak much, which is fine by me as I stopped interacting with sprites, for the most part, six years ago after my mother passed. Instead, he enjoys his eternal cigarette and the smoke—which I thankfully cannot smell—circles lazily around his bald, narrow head.

After what I've just revealed it may not be necessary to admit this, but I am a very lonely man.

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6,000 words

description

Five crew members of Starship Noah are awakened from suspended animation to find their ship, and the resident machine intelligence, completely unresponsive.  As they attempt to solve the puzzle, they find strange things have transpired while they were sleeping.

excerpt

“Lead the way,” said Leslie. “So you haven't answered my question.”

“I can't tell you anything that happened before we woke up. Drawing a monumental blank. My life, my family, nothing. I didn't want to say anything in front of the children, but I only remember our names and how to do my job.”

“That's what I thought. I'm suffering from the same thing.”

“Another unexpected side effect?”

“Or perfectly normal. Even deliberate. How would we know the difference? Who knows, maybe we volunteered for it.”

“I may not know who am I, Captain,” said Clayton. “But that sounds like something I would do.”

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4,200 words

Forgive me Father for I have sinned, yes it's been a year since my last post.  I decided to start posting again.  Not that anybody is actually reading this.  :\ OK, now that that's out of the way....

I friggin' hate 3D movies and videos.  Yes, amidst the biggest draw for a 3D movie in history--what up, James Cameron--I am saying that this is the worst move in entertainment technology that we could be making.  Allow me to demonstrate. 3D is an old technology!  3D movies have been around for 50 years and coming up on 60!  And although the technology has been improved somewhat, those improvements are not worthy of five decades of upgrades.  This is the year 2010!  We should be out near Jupiter haggling with HAL about how to save the Discovery but no we're stuck in terrestrial movie theaters awed by hot pokers coming out at us from the big screen.

Which brings me to my next point.  3D movies are typically--can't speak for Avatar yet because I haven't seen it--lame as the scripts are written to provide as many gimmicks as possible, thereby all but ensuring the story is shit.

And now 3D television?!  Talk about impractical.  Are all our guests for the big game or movie night going to have to bring their own glasses?  Do manufacturers and content providers expect us to don glasses whenever we watch TV?  WTF is going on here?

Speaking of glasses, can there be a less attractive and more nerdy facial accessory than a pair of 3D glasses?  And what of our visually impaired friends and family?  I can't believe wearing 3D glasses on top of prescription glasses is at all comfortable.

No, my friends, we truly missed the entertainment boat when it was decided to chase 3D tech over holographic.  That's where we should be: in theaters watching holographic movies with our bare eyes!  I say we boycott this trend now before it's too late and my wife has to purchase tiny 3D glasses so the damn dog can watch AFV in 3D!

Howard Stern may have put it best: "Don't we see in 3D all the time already?  I wanna see 2D." Well, maybe not the best, but it works.

OK, can we please, as a nation, as a self-proclaimed civilized society, stop thanking God for Fridays? I'm not knocking the religious aspect of it, but I do have three specific arguments against this practice:

#1. Friday's are inevitable. Yes, they will logically and regularly follow Thursdays. And if you are going to thank the big man for seeing to it you survived until Friday, shouldn't you thank him for Saturdays? Even Mondays? There are better things to thank God for. Seriously. Your health, your family, the fact that you were not born as a skunk.

#2. It's played. Yes, it's old. People have been saying TGIF since the 60's, or maybe even before, I don't know.

#3. Just look at the picture... The phrase was made famous by a disco movie, OK?  Enough said.

Let it go, people, let it go.

description

Zach Dunn and his best friend, Jerry Fischer, take a road trip to Reno to pawn some stolen jewelry.  But they get more than they bargained for--much more.

excerpt

The only piece of advice my father ever gave me that was worth a damn was never name a business after a street.

The day he imparted that little nugget of wisdom to me I was only nine years old.  Walter Dunn, my father, and I had spent the better part of a Las Vegas summer afternoon in a car with no air-conditioning, driving up and down Warm Springs Road in search of Warm Springs Road Garage—it made sense to me.  Only the business had moved to East Russell and hadn't bothered to change its name.

The frustration my father felt that day resulted in a bruise on my arm, the size and shape of his meaty Irish fist.   That was his way of adding emphasis to his words.  He even had a name for his special brand of infliction.  He called it Punchuation.

Yeah, Walter was a real class act.

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10,000 words