lost time incident 17
The evenings this week were dedicated to board games, for the most part. Monday and Tuesday, the wife and I split duties, each taking responsibility for half of a four-man ghost-busting squad in a game— you guessed it— based on the Ghostbusters franchise. Wednesday I introduced work colleagues to Pandemic, and we almost saved the world, but nope, diseases for everyone, sorry. Thursday a friend dropped by to help us bust even MORE ghosts, which feels as good as they say it does. Then we ended the week struggling with some electronic woes as several of our plug-and-wire gizmos started having problems with staying powered on.

Say what you will about board games, but they power up every time.

In other news, crows and cats in the neighborhood aren’t getting along.

In the recent past, I spent a few months trying to get the attention of neighborhood crows. I’d whistle, then throw peanuts their way, hoping to make fast friends across species lines. (For the record, this is more concerted effort than I ever made to get to know my human neighbors.**) While I got crows to swoop down and take peanuts a number of times, I think they just thought I was a chump who didn’t know how to maintain proper nut control. They still don’t seem particularly happy to see me out and about, nor have any of them shown any interest in riding on my shoulder and whispering secrets into my ear as a dark familiar.

Earlier today, one of the neighborhood crows started making a non-stop racket right outside our living room window. Was this a concerted and loud peanut lobbying attempt? It was not. We looked outside and the ruckus was due to the presence of a black cat, poking around in the tree, pushing its luck.

I tossed some peanuts at the cat to convince it to find a different tree. Didn’t work. Bounced the peanuts off the tree. The cat wasn’t much interested in these bouncing peanuts. So now they’ll probably be found by the nocturnal raccoons who like to scream when fighting over who gets right of way, walking along the tops of fences.

No matter what, animals are going to make noise and everyone’s getting peanuts to eat around here.

**We have a next-door neighbor named Lisa who, upon moving in, assumed we’d be fascinated by her life’s story, eager to do favors for her, and has never in conversation tried to get to know a thing about us. She does ask after our cats, though. We have a downstairs neighbor named … I can never remember. Shares a name with a dish I don’t care for. Pasta-based. What is it. Linguinardo. No. Steve-ghetti. No. ALFREDO. Nice guy. Has a family. Don’t know their names at all. There’s another unit that could be full of aliens or serial killers. Don’t even know how many people are in there. And beyond this building, the neighborhood might as well be shrouded in mist and full of shivering creatures like in Silent Hill, for all the familiarity I have with the people who live around here.

Anyway. Who’s up for some fiction?

the atom age
We had to shut down the super collider. Up to that point, it had been a good week. We had bounced atoms off each other with spectacular success. Busted ’em up real good. We were internationally recognized for our work in atom collision. At the end of the shift, you could get bits of atoms off the floor, take ’em home for the kids. Supervisor didn’t care. You were saving the janitorial team on the night shift some trouble, actually, because otherwise they’re spending all their time sweeping up atoms.

But now the whole facility was at half power. People were leaning on machines that were usually too hot to touch, just killing time, checking their phones.

What’s the problem, I asked.

Computer’s got a virus, Wulf said. He pointed. Sure enough, there’s a virus sitting right on top of the computer they keep hooked up to the big red COLLIDE THE ATOMS button. Virus just looked over at us like: What. Daring us to do something. It would have lunged at us to make us jump if it could, so it could laugh if we flinched. You could see it in the eyes wobbling in its protein coat. Good thing it couldn’t lunge. Viruses don’t have the right kind of structure.

Gross, I said.

Hey, said some guy behind us. He had a clipboard. I got a whole truck load of atoms out back, someone going to sign for these? I gotta get ’em offloaded. Got to take a shipment of rain back to Colorado right after. And there’s trucks all backed up behind mine. Line’s going down the block. We gotta move. Who’s gonna sign for this?

—

Later, in the cafeteria, Wulf and I ate cold egg and bacon sandwiches. The virus sat at the next table sipping tea. The delivery guy ate at the table after that, but he wasn’t eating food. He was pointedly looking at print-outs of delivery schedules, then ripping them up and putting them in his mouth while trying to stare us down. Everything is our fault, sure buddy.

What are you going to do for the super collider talent show, I asked Wulf.

Magic show, he said.

You know magic?

Magic. Hypnotism.

You know hypnotism?

I made you forget that I know magic.

What, I exclaimed, and my top hat fell off, didn’t even know I was wearing one, bunnies spraying out of the hat in arcs as the hat bounced along the ground, a solid spray of rabbits, bouncing off the walls, colliding with each other, pellets shaking out of them like tiny atomic bits.

Oh yeah, now I remember, I told Wulf.

What are you going to do, Wulf asked me.

Probably some carpentry. Get my cousin’s tae kwon do class to come in, kick some boards in half, make a chair out of it.

Sounds like a great act, said Wulf.

Everybody likes chairs, I said.

—

The next morning, the super collider was up and running again. Noting the hints of aggression coming from the virus, someone on the night shift put up flyers around the compound advertising a ‘fight club’ in the basement, with tear-away coupon strips on the bottom for a free first punch, redeemable upon one’s first visit.

The virus was caught in a net trap as soon as it entered the basement rec room, torn off coupon still gripped in its tail fibers.

The night shift woke up the atom delivery guy, who had been sleeping in his truck, and all night long upright hand trucks were rolling their tiny wheels down the compound’s corridors, bundles of atoms offloaded and stacked in storage rooms or dropped down delivery chutes.

By the time we came in, everything was ready, so we strapped on our goggles and thought about how much better atoms are when they’re hurtling around. Looks like break time is over, Wulf, I said.

Atom-smashing time, he said.

And he hit the big red button.

golden age of tv
[SFX: rock music]
[stock footage: helicopter over a city landscape, a busy police office, a purse-snatcher running down the street, an empty church, a gravestone with handcuffs resting on top]

[TITLE: TBD ]

[footage: Following a beat cop as he walks a city street.]

NARRATOR: In the big city… crime doesn’t pay. The police force responds to hundreds of crime reports a day and if the criminal is found… they’re going down.

[footage: Beat cop goes up steps of burned out building.]

NARRATOR: And if the criminal has escaped, passing beyond the veil of this world, dying before they can be brought to justice–

[footage: A ghost cop falls into step with the beat cop, climbing stairs and going deeper into the building.]

NARRATOR: That’s where the ghost cops come in.

BEAT COP: Okay, partner. The arsonist’s spirit is in this next room. You ready to bring him in?

[GHOST COP turns, mouth open in a rictus, unable to talk… its hands pass through the door knob. Its eyes roll back. Nearby glass shakes in telekinetic frustration.]

BEAT COP: This was a terrible idea.

[GHOST COP wavers, its face in agony, fingers curled… then disappears.]

BEAT COP: … Great.

look listen
listening to: Berlin Community Radio
reading: The True Believer: Thoughts on Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer. An interesting look at the driving factors behind and the members of society most susceptible to the allure of joining a mass movement of any variety: political, religious, etc.
watching: Sicario. Whoah. Super intense. Probably gives fits to anyone working in Mexico’s tourism industry.

ending theme song
That’s going to do it for us for this week. It’s about that time of the weekend when final errands must be run, meaning it’s time to go pick up some fruits, veggies and barley tea from the local Asian market. Then maybe read some comics. Listen to more music streaming from Berlin.

Happy birthday wishes go out to Team Pan this weekend. Thanks again to my wife Amanda for the original illustration.

Also, a guy I went to high school put up a photo that a 15-year-old me appears in. Good looking kid, though I remember he didn’t think so. Too bad I can’t pass him a note. Too bad it’s creepy to tell young people “You’re probably never going to look better than you do now! Be more confident!”

No wonder nobody told us.

As ever, thanks for reading.

— Michael Van Vleet

find me elsewhere
signalstation – home
TinyLetter – archive/subscription
Twitter – short nonsense
Tumblr – reblogging
Goodreads – reading
Bandcamp – listening
Amazon – wishlist

lost time incident 16
Hey folks! It’s probably too early to be sure, but it sure seems like if you force yourself to practice a creative pursuit, it does actually get easier. Or maybe I just got lucky and had a hot streak this weekend. Put out a lot of Twitter activity, recorded some video game stuff with my better half, filmed a truly dumb instructional video (which you’ll see below) and then there’s this thing!

My intention, when I started the newsletter, was to get back in the habit of being creative, because too much time was slipping past me with with work/passively watch something/sleep cycle. It might be working.

Time is still slipping away, but that might now be more linked to my own advanced age.

The photo above is one I took last year in India, documenting the cows who liked to hang out in the vacant field next to the office I was working out of. For whatever reason, I’ve been thinking about that trip again recently, which reminded me of this anecdote:

out-of-town money
Last year, I spent a few weeks in India for work. I got into town early so I’d have a weekend to recover before I had to turn up, be awake  and act respectable in the office on Monday morning. My first morning out, I figured I’d just walk out the front gate of the hotel I was staying at, pick a direction, and see where I ended up.

However, parked just outside the gate was a good-natured fellow who jumped out of his tuk-tuk-style cab and volunteered to drive me wherever I wanted to go. When I asked him his rates, he insisted he didn’t charge. “Oh, are you affiliated with the hotel?” I asked. He dodged the question, but was fine if that was something I wanted to believe.

As it turned out, he was just a charming guy with no working meter who found that if you can charm a foreigner into hopping into your cab, their guilt at not paying you will usually lead to them tipping you more than you would have collected… by a long shot.

If you’ve read any sort of travel advice, you’ll know there’s usually a section about how to avoid being taking advantage of as a foreigner-with-money. Sometimes it’s as simple as telling you that you can haggle. Sometimes it’s as terrifying as telling you that if your driver runs someone over or crashes the vehicle, you absolutely should not leave the vehicle until help arrives, due to the possibility that it’s all a trap to kidnap you.

(That last one is for Angola, by the way.)

But India’s not too bad.

One of the things you get warned about is that if your cab driver won’t start their meter, you shouldn’t go with them. You’ll also be told that some drivers have partnerships lined up with local vendors and they’ll offer to take you anywhere for free— so long as you don’t mind browsing at a shop first. And if you buy something there, so much the better, because they’re getting paid for dropping you and your wallet off, and the kickback’s sweeter if you actually buy something.

But I tell you, if you’re up too early in the morning on a Sunday and you genuinely have nothing else to do, going to a handicraft shop at the suggestion of a cab driver who says you don’t have to pay him at all isn’t a bad way to pass the time.

That’s how I ended up looking at carved wooden elephants while chatting with with an Indian-appearing fellow named Javaid who said he was actually born and raised in Russia. Though he now runs his family’s handicrafts store, convincing people like me that we need a heavy brass statue of Ganesha, he originally studied to be an engineer. After getting out of school, he found himself working at a coal mine up in Siberia. He bailed on the coal-flecked snows of Siberia when the Soviet Union’s economy collapsed.  Claimed he doesn’t miss it, if you can believe that.

“Where are you from” he asked. When I said “The US,” he asked who I thought our next President might be.

“Well, the odds are favoring Hillary Clinton,” I said. This was mid-2015.

“She would be the first female President, correct?”

“Yeah.”

“Your country has been around for hundreds of years. Why do you think you haven’t had a female President yet?”

“Uh… because we’re a sexist country? Isn’t that obvious?”

Biggest laugh I got on the whole trip, my moment of honesty with Javaid.

e-book ideas

• So You’re Haunting a Rich Person
• My Gun Talks With Bullets
• A Pet Owner’s Guide to Kettle Corn
• B-bye 4ever – Suicide Notes from Children
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Binge-Watching
• Public Domain Fiction Make-Out Sessions

meanwhile somewhere else

interview with some vampire
“What is that? Will it hurt me? Or do you… do you use it to prepare food?”

The vampire was pointing, concerned, at my smartphone, which I had just placed on the table between us to record our conversation.

“… It’s harmless. Don’t worry about it.”

—

“I have traveled over mountain ranges of time and while I was doing so… I was studying the art… of sexy.” He picked nervously at a ragged fingernail. His nail beds were pale and recessed. “I am one of those sexy vampires.”

He smiled, his fangs poking out past his lips, yellow like table butter that’s been left on a picnic table under the summer sun. “Like in your fimms. Your movings.”

“You mean ‘movies’?”

“Do I? Perhaps? When I go to see a fimm, I sneak in … as a bat. Bat ears don’t hear human words so good.” He frowned. “I have never seen a moving that wasn’t upside down. And very blurry. Bats don’t see so good. But it was enough to be sure that I am sexy.”

—

jazz appreciation EP001

For those new to appreciating jazz, I put together a one minute introduction that will set you on the right path. Just some basic moves for beginners. Nothing too taxing.

ending theme song
Okay! We made it! One more lost time incident full of nonsense, out the door. As ever, we’ve got some amazing original illustrations from my wife Amanda. How about that, huh? An entire comic, we got from her this time!

If you like it, tell your friends. If you don’t like your friends… just keep this newsletter to yourself.

Thanks for showing up! See you next week!

–Michael Van Vleet

I don’t think I was going anywhere with that, but here’s a secret: Much of the time, I’m just letting my fingers start a-typin’ just to see what’s going to come out. That’s right. I don’t value your time. Ha!

There’s a breeze coming in through the front door and a cat is hanging out on my right leg, providing a counterbalance to the laptop on the left leg. My wife is laughing at internet summaries of a show about murder, so we’re all in a good place.

How are you doing?

It’s such a gorgeous day out there that it’s enough to make you forget that they won’t all be this pleasant.

[optional soundtrack: Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats – “I Need Never Get Old”]

the position or velocity of dogs

autobio corner
In the small town I grew up in, for many of the years I lived there, there was nothing terribly remarkable about the town itself. Downtown we had a grocery store, a 5-and-dime, and a used bookstore where a nice old lady named Linda enforced a rule that you had to sell her a romance or sci-fi novel first if you were going to buy one yourself because otherwise they’d all go out the door. She had trouble keeping those genres in stock.

Every weekday at noon, through the soles of our feet, we’d feel the deep bass hum of the gravity wave factory just outside of town, down-by the Wal-Mart, generating energy and keeping the bills paid for most of the families of the kids I went to school with.

Our school mascot was the Comets, since our county had a higher than usual incident rate for attracting rocks and space ice, pulled out of orbit and into our outdoor swimming pools, our mini golf arcades, and our competition-grade cross-country running courses. Our sports teams weren’t great, so the local newspaper used lots of “crashing and burning” imagery when covering our matches, but our logo was fantastic: the comet wore a fierce expression, lip curled, and three sharp points came off the back with orange highlights to create the comet’s tail.

Things picked up when I hit the teenage years, though, because that was when a lunchtime pulse pulled in the Object, as it was originally called. It fell down by the woods where rumor had it Chad and Lisa had once been caught having sex where the grass was at its tallest. Who knows what happened out there behind the woods. One time Terry said he was walking around back there and came across a big pile of those full-head Halloween masks, half covered in brush like someone was hiding them out there. Said there was a wolf man and some kinda fish, but it had been raining and the pile of masks looked gross so he just left them alone. Weren’t there the next time he went back though.

The Object hung about those woods, waiting for kids to wander near. The kids who went out there to smoke found it first. It rumbled at them, wobbled a bit… but mostly it listened. Erik said he figured it belonged to one of the families whose homes had their backs up against the hill, like maybe it was a pet that wandered off, but it was the size of a refrigerator.

Of course now, with the benefit of hindsight and with the insight of world-class scientists, the consensus is that it’s a very clever probe designed to acquire language via some mimicry algorithms. We’re still not sure it knows what it’s saying, but most of what it learned to talk about was: which kids in the nearby middle and high schools sucked, which teachers sucked, who was a slut, and to say it was a big fan of many of history’s worst dictators and serial killers. I’ve heard that when they originally put up that tent around it and the government folks moved in, the first thing it asked them was how much they enjoyed a particular impossible sexual position, then affirmed that it liked it very much. “It’s the best,” it said. It then laughed with a series of barking hard-K sounds.

Any hope of learning more about its origins seemed to be dashed. It wouldn’t answer questions, if it ever had, instead preferring to copy the questions asked of it, or would fill silence by singing advertising jingles, but with all the original advertising copy replaced with “shut up,” but matching the original melody precisely.

Transcript. Note: Capitalization used to indicate relative volume.
THERE WAS ONCE IN THESE WOODS. NOW SAY JERRY. MELT STEEL BEAMS. I AM STUPID. Listening? Fucking RULES, man. SUCK DiiiiiiiiiiiiiCKS. High five for Hitler. Mitts. Mitts. Comets. Kek kek kek kek kek kek. After me, REPEAT. Ooored. Errd. Bored. Ting bored. Geh. ♫shut up shut UP shut up SHUT UP shut-shut-shut [advertising medley of 20 minutes cut].

But times change. Things progress. I bet it’s repeating smarter stuff now that scientists are talking to it. With any luck, maybe they’ll even notice they’re getting nothing back.

current events
During a walk home from work, apropos of nothing, I remembered that in elementary school I had a class where each week, we were meant to study current events. We had to grab a newspaper from our parents, cut out an article, bring it in and summarize it.

The memory that came back to me was that one time, I found an article about ninjas and brought that in. Even had a picture of a ninja next to the article. I have not yet remembered what the article was actually about, but it was easier to understand than the conflict in Israel, or whatever was on the front page back in the 80s.

It’s just weird. Little fragments from an earlier life, still bumping about inside my head.

[memory tosses down a smoke bomb and disappears again]

ending theme song
I’m going to keep it a bit short this week, folks. Even though my head is buzzing because I ate WAY too many licorice all sorts. So let’s keep things focused so I’m imparting only the most important information. Okay. Cannonball Run 2 is full of talented people but it’s awful.

We’re already going astray a little bit.

Let’s see. Amanda and I created some more art postcards yesterday. We may have almost enough to send to every subscriber that I actually have an address for. If you’ve moved in the last however-long and don’t have an explicit memory of letting me know, well now you can. Maybe right now?

This week’s chunk of fiction was inspired by Simon Stålenhag’s Tales from the Loop which I backed on Kickstarter and was so excited about, I stuck it on a shelf and ignored it for months. I was waiting for a special occasion to flip through it and today ended up being that special occasion.

Also in the mental mix was the news that Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg want to fire tiny nanobots out into the universe to see what’s out there mixed with what happened when Microsoft set a chatbot loose in Twitter, only to see it turned into a racist monster within a day.

Thanks as ever to my wife Amanda for providing original illustrations.

Hope your weekend went well. I have to go and see if the internet knows what the antidote is for too much licorice.

Later, gators,

Michael Van Vleet

find me elsewhere
signalstation – home
TinyLetter – archive/subscription
Twitter – short nonsense
Tumblr – reblogging
Goodreads – reading
Bandcamp – listening
Amazon – wishlist

lost time incident 14
That’s a photo of my mom, offering a deep-fried gator chunk. She and my dad retired to Florida some years ago. My dad now prefers to spend his days sitting in the driveway, smoking his pipe and reading e-books, with some time taken out to play a Facebook game that involves managing a fleet of battleships. As reading, gaming and doing nothing are my preferred weekend activities, there’s obviously a biological connection.

My mother, however, has found time to explore entirely new hobbies. She’s running marathons, scoring well in darts tournaments, and taking workout classes that involve dangling from ceiling-mounted ribbons. We’re a bit more different.

Anyway.

Things I did today instead of writing:

• Woke up late
• Finished reading Woman With a Blue Pencil, a meta-narrative novel
• Cooked up parathas in the skillet to have with some channa masala and coffee for brunch
• Watched a bearded British guy on Twitch play Bioshock, a video game set in an underwater ruin that had, in its heyday, been designed as an art deco libertarian wonderland
• Took a slow shower and wondered if at some time in my life, showers will stop being available, as I quite like them, but we’re all doomed
• Agreed to abandon writing mid-afternoon to go get donuts with friends
• Poked around on Facebook
• Wrote this list

I had some time yesterday to write, but instead I spent 3-4 hours putting together a new Signal mix, which is a series of 45-minute music mixes I’ve been making for my own amusement for over a decade. The latest installment was the 123rd episode.

That’s something.

I should write something.

Did I already write something? Earlier this week?

 
that’s right I wrote something

It was only until after posting the above that I started to wonder how Chicken Hills managed to win a 2016 award so early in the year. The fix is in. I think it’s possible to build a better fence in the time remaining. If we all pitch in now, I bet we could build a fence that could hold in human-chicken hybrids AND does something special… like lighting up, or playing music over Bluetooth or something.

Anyone interested in building a better fence and finally putting the spotlight on the corrupt fence-judging industry in this country, please respond to this mailing list with a list of available dates and an outline of all relevant fence-building skills.

stay on target
Just walked a pizza box outside to the compost bin and you guys… it is so pleasant out there. I absolutely should not be sitting inside, typing these words.

this will become something
In the world that was left, the bullets ran out fairly quickly. But thanks to nuclear power, the electricity stayed on. No matter what bunker or cave you lived in, you still had devices lining the floor, being charged, while you drank whatever horrible hot drink your region had to replace coffee. We all missed coffee.

And when daylight appeared on the horizon, we’d split into teams. One group to find food and the other group to find podcasters.

Rottentooth Manpuncher, bandit leader of New New Orleans, wasn’t the sort of person to have a stale mp3 player full of pre-Fall podcasts. Oh no. The only way to show the other rival warlords that you were top dog was to gather together the most mildly amusing of survivors who still had a knack for sitting down in front of a USB microphone

In the evenings, we’d heat up our suppers and watch them work. We’d ask the podcasters to include advertising segments that helped us remember our lost past, when we were supposed to order boxes of snacks delivered. Do our own legal documents. Try out mattresses, or glasses.

The stars would come out and you couldn’t see much beyond the glow of the face of your mp3 player, ticking along second by second.

rolling pins
Just got back from Rolling Pin Donuts in scenic San Bruno, the California city so named because all other saints had already been claimed by other, faster cities. While I had some fantastic cream-filled donut holes, I didn’t get anything of use for this newsletter.

Unless I count the joke that occurred to me on the way there, which is that the absolute best song about sandwich-related cosplay is probably David Bowie’s “Heroes.” Though it was suggested that one could make a strong argument for “Yellow Submarine” as well.

apocalypse head
The climate changed and the waters rose. The climate changed and the air became thick as plastic. We could still see each other, across the room, but we could no longer go over there because air wouldn’t get out of the way like it used to. It was a new kind of climate.

If you could push your way to the bathroom to clean up, you’d have to chip your way to the faucets and keep your hands clear when you turned the spigot, because hard climate would tumble out before you’d get any water. Plants withered and that was understandable. We get it, plants.

All the petrocarbons that we burned used to be living matter. Organic matter. Liquid dinosaurs. What we didn’t realize was that they all wanted to come back. All the dinosaurs, just biding their time. We burned them and they came back, in the air, swirling particles, reforming their graceful reptilian necks, their crested skulls, the size of buildings. They whispered their lizard desires into the ear of climate, and climate did as they commanded. It finally turned against us, unfriended us in real life and online.

We had to wade everywhere. Pushing climate out of the way, water up to our ankles. No one could look a polar bear in the eye. The last sympathy cards ever printed were filled out and mailed to penguins. How the penguins distributed them among their number, we never knew. We just left a big pile of apologies and fled, hiding our eyes and our burning cheeks, overflowing with shame for what we’d done.

Was it so wrong? To set so much on fire?

Could we be blamed when so much of the world looked better in flames?

[composite illustration courtesy of Amanda Summers]

ending theme song
I was raised as a Catholic and was told that it was partially my responsibility to keep things in good shape because Jesus was due to return. It didn’t take much pondering to add up the number of generations who had lived and died already, each assuming that they were definitely living in the End Times before the return of their Messiah. So many people, each sure that they’d be around for the world’s end.

But the thing of it is: one generation is going to be correct. They’re going to be the last. Not with regards to Christ’s return. I’m not a believer anymore. But apocalypse is in the post at some point.

For each of us, individually. For all of us, collectively, at some point. Somebody’s going to feel like the world is ending and they’ll be right.

The entire world that we find ourselves in is absurd. I’ve got a cat on my lap. I’ve got music in my ears. I’ve spent a few hours today trying to be entertaining. It all evens out.

How are you doing? During this brief pause between disasters?

— Michael Van Vleet

find me elsewhere
signalstation – home
TinyLetter – archive/subscription
Twitter – short nonsense
Tumblr – reblogging
Goodreads – reading
Bandcamp – listening
Amazon – wishlist