The Good Weird

Contact

2012-03-01T22:37:00.002-08:00

I seem to have stirred something up recently. Some requests for contact info have come in, so here it is:

d p a u l e n e s s "at" gmail.com [No spaces]

The Publications Gather...

2012-01-26T02:22:00.000-08:00

For those of you keeping score at home, I've been in the basement, mixing up some medicine, and some strange stuff is periodically leaking out...

[At this rate, about one new thing goes up per week, sometimes faster than that. Anthologies and novels to come.]

Stupefying Stories Escapes

2011-10-09T07:55:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has told you the age of the pulps is over hasn't read Stupefying Stories. One of my stories appears in the October edition.

Available now for e-reading everywhere (retail $1.99 for the anthology.)

Brain Harvest Magazine: Not Just for Brains Anymore

2011-10-07T00:16:00.000-07:00

Uh-oh. Another one escaped.

Don't tell master.

It's called Zombie Funeral and it appears in public courtesy (or rudeness) of Brain Harvest Magazine.

Ragged Edge - A Writer's Anti-conference

2011-08-25T01:21:00.000-07:00

My retrospective in three parts, over at the Friday Challenge.

I'm a Winner in the Game of Fourth

2011-05-03T12:19:00.001-07:00

Don't let anyone tell you that I'm not a 4th-rate amateur.

Because, now, I officially am. My entry "Zombie Funeral" just fell short of bronze in the judging at the Friday Challenge, the Original Cyberpunk's (Bruce Bethke) informal writing fight.

...and you thought I was up to nothing.

Nothing good, maybe!

Incidentally, I've begun to post musings on the art and counterart of flash fiction there, too, under Flash Fiction Advisory.

Telepath

2011-01-13T19:31:00.000-08:00

Divorced again, twenty-six, three boys, and pressure-cooking in a job that a monkey couldn’t fail at, but she was. Yap-yap-yap went her counterpart’s mouth, and when it closed, yap-yap-yap went her counterpart’s brain. A nice lady named Sue. Super nice. So nice that the nice wheel inside Sue’s brain yap-yap-yapped all day long, a persistent flow of yap-yap-yap that echoed from the cubicle that butted against her own.

Julie Drake knew that the planet was having a bad day: she felt the badness swelling from everyone in the hallway and the cube farm and thought she was going to suffocate in it in the elevator. She would have taken the stairs, but the stairwell was a conduit for thoughts in the entire building: it sounded like a haunted house on fire.

The drugs made her feel better, but hear more. ADHD – Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, they called it, a diagnosis she’d gotten after her collapse and some visits to a counselor and then a psychiatrist. She’d always thought it was a made up problem for lazy kids or an excuse for parents to dope up their rowdy boys.

The only thing that really helped was television. In a quiet room, she could watch the people functioning on television sets without any bubbling, bursting feedback to scatter her attention. She couldn’t hear them thinking. If only everyone lived on television.But right now, it was Sue, each semi-formed, super nice thought tumbling through Julie’s cubicle like skittles. Something pleasant about a soap opera banged repeatedly in the corner of her ear. She hated when people thought about television: it was like cursing in church, not that Julie ever went, of course.

“Julie, hello?” said Sue.

“Sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Those must be fascinating tickets, daydreamer. You are way behind!”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Wanna go grab lunch.” Microwaved sliders, Sue was thinking, little greasy hamburgers that she could inhale by the fistful, greasy-greasy-greasy little swallows – for the third day in a row.

Claim ticket resolution was a holdover task from the analog days: a “yes/no” confirmation that customer calls had, in fact, been resolved. By the time the client tickets made it to Sue and Julie, it was all over: the call had been resolved and confirmed. Their job was to manually enter a confirmation of data that had long-since been automatically registered.

They were a federally-required redundancy.

The ADHD diagnosis was newish but came as close to describing it as anything did. Well, anything but ESP. She thought she had a sixth sense at community college, after a skinny cute boy in ugly glasses was so relieved after she said, "I'd love to take part in your study."

Those remarkable September days when it seemed she had it all under control, when the tests at the college were so predictable, so positive, by two standard deviations, the researcher said, though she still didn’t know what that meant, only that she could pick the right card fourteen times out of fifteen, that she could guess shapes with clarity and accuracy that had always been soft and hazy, undefined and unpredictable.

Those days were nothing like the rare day in third grade when she suddenly knew which kids in her class were wearing underoos, by cartoon character, just about three seconds before Shannon Pallser shoved her off the steps of the tornado slide. She could occasionally hear the echoic impressions of daily living, but never the thoughts of someone who was about to turn her forearm into a jackknife.

But at that long shaky table in the dingy science lab, it had awakened. It had focused. And, just like that, the noise got louder, and louder, and wider and louder (by two standard deviations? she wondered.)

In weeks, she could see cards in other decks, in the storage room, in the dollar store five blocks away, in houses around town, in the casino in St. Rob, fifty miles away.

She soon couldn’t discern where they were, or who was thinking of them, or if anyone was.

Thoughts about cards, the obsessions of gamblers, metaphors spoken down the hallway about “playing your cards right” or “holding all the cards” all of them came to her: indistinguishable cacophony, and she started guessing during the research, and guessing wrong, more often than even random chance would allow.

The results faded, the student study broke down, and all she was left with was noise.

Today she drove home, her car serving as an amplifier of the unspoken thoughts that surrounded her on the highway. It was like radio static, punctuated occasionally by horrible news.

She knew by now that people lied to themselves even in their thoughts, so what she heard was incomplete, unusable and highly unreliable. It made her skull ache, and the one advantage it gave her was nearly as much of a curse: a sort of precognition.

She could feel, or think or sort of almost smell someone well before that person became aware of her. It usually didn’t do any good: it wasn’t accurate by distance or direction, so she never had any idea if she’d cross paths with the person in seconds, minutes or never: if they were coming her way or walking away. Thought odors crossed, sometimes the scents were indistinguishable.

But not Ronny’s.

She pulled up to her rental house, a bungle-oh, she called it, a creaky little thing trailing two month’s rent and thirty years of upkeep. Ronny’s thoughts had been amped for city blocks.

She’ll see now she’s no better off she needs me she cares.

That’s how Julie had fallen in love with him in the first place – his thoughts were so obvious. The top of his mind was the only mind he had. Sure the thoughts got garbled half the time, and other times plowed under by the chaos of other people, but what she could hear was comfortable, predictable, plain.

Sex and cars and exactly what he was going to do next. Dull and lovable.

But he worked two jobs and got into meth to “keep up.” He lost one of the jobs, quit the other, and his thoughts stayed plain, but got scary. Burn it down, punch the wall, kill her now. She couldn’t sleep near him, made him sleep in the basement, turned her television up loud, but his thoughts filled the house. He never touched her, never raised his voice, but money went from bad to terrible and his thinking drove her literally insane.

His thoughts seemed better now than they had when they broke up, but he carried with himself the lingering weight of their past. His thoughts were tainted with the burnt plastic and dirty oil of the carwreck that had been their marriage.

Julie noticed the kids in the neighborhood turning away from her. It had taken only months to establish herself as the creepiest crazy on a dumpy dead-end street known for them. She wasn't getting better. She whacked her shin on the cracked concrete ornament at the foot of the stoop that had been placed a hundred years earlier for the sole purpose of attracting the shins of countless generations.

Ronny had thrown her off. She hadn't stumbled on it for weeks.

Ronny had become more like his old self again: straight and true and honest.

I want one thing from you and you will give it.

"Hey Jules Verne," he said cocking half a smile. He scrubbed the stubble on his chin and lay down his shoddy but endearing Robert Downey, Jr. vibe.

"Ronny, today's not the day."

"It is, Jules. It is."

Just one thing.

"Ronny, call me another time."

"You got no phone." True. Headaches, couldn't ever hear anything on the other end. Not like television at all. This fact had cost her more than one job offer.

She tightened the skin of her face and forehead to a point right between her brows. "Really hon, I can't keep doing this."

"I want Wyatt to come stay with me." You will give it. "Please, just for a while. I miss him." You are killing him like this. Give me the other boys too, give me everything you got. You can't handle it. They can't handle you. "Take some pressure off a you."

"Oh," she said, her face draining white, the tiny curly-cue corners of her mouth turning down, her hazel eyes turning dark as she squinted. "Hell no. Go away."

She turned hard and swung the screen door wide. It popped off its hinge. She slammed the door behind her.

Get back here. I'm going to follow you. Nice view from back here. Want to go on a spree? I do.

"I'm sorry, Jules. Just for a little while." He budged the door back open. Her hands balled. Cars passed by, echoing stupid thoughts. The older boys were home, zoning on video games. Wyatt was at the neighbor's house, who were cooking something in a deep fat fryer that smelled good there, but smelled like skunk spray in her thoughts.

Ronny took one step inside the house.

She turned and slashed her finger at him.

"Not one step further. Get out. Go, Ronny. Go. I'll go to the neighbor's and call the cops. You get."

He held up his hand and surrendered his ground to her, the boards of the porch squeaking.

You lose, Jules. You still love me and you lose. I'm getting my son and I'm getting him easy.

One nail, a gnarled, hand-smithed artifact was the only thing keeping the floorboard in place. Julie popped it.

This was new.

Ronny slipped backward and tried to turn in mid-air to catch himself. She pushed him, hard, or he fell without her touching him, or both, and he wildly changed course on the way down. He struck his head flush against the concrete ornament.

If she hadn't seen it, she would not have believed it. Ronny died on impact.

Julie shook and shook and shook. She fell to her knees on the porch and cradled her head.

She could still hear him thinking.

The Day There Was Nothing On the Internet

2010-08-29T21:18:00.000-07:00

Seventeen years, one hundred thirty one days, sixteen minutes and sixteen seconds
Into the Internet
It so happened that Harvey Whitcannack
Took note of the moment
He realized
That the glorious bazaar
Had eroded its tent cities
Into campsites
Now washed away in the flood.

"It's like T.V.," he said.
"But with text and glitches."

He posted the thought
To a site that was never
Read by Anyone.

-- from An Unread Clue In the Westing Game, by Turtle

Ode to Those Let Go

2010-07-08T13:18:00.000-07:00

"Let go."

According to the MLS, 135,789 people were laid off in May 2010.

In other words, more people were laid off, mass-style, that month than the total number of private-industry jobs created. It is, for many, a nauseating, disorienting, demoralizing process.

Yet, every day, hundreds of thousands of productive workers wake up to no job (in many cases, no job prospects), dig in, and seek their fortune and the chance to better the fortunes of their loved ones.

They are, in fact, not the ones who have been "let go" but are the ones who understand, truly, what it means to "let go" - to let go of the false sense of security and merit that employment brings, that let go of the doubts that stand in their way, that let go of the little controls so they can take flight in the big sky.

Just because there isn't paying work, right now, doesn't stop them from doing the hard work.

If you've been laid off, but were never "let go," you are my weird hero of the day.

Saving Cats in Afghanistan

2010-07-08T12:40:00.000-07:00

All right, dagnabbit. Don't fight the spectre of death alongside your brethren in that miserable vortex and save kitties, too.

Not if you don't want to break my stony heart into to a thousand melting rainbows.

Chapter 53: The Hauntedest Town In the World

2010-07-01T10:43:00.000-07:00

"Ones and zeroes. Zeroes and ones. The Things assumed that that was all that they would, and should, be. And they were right.

Almost."

-- From UFO vs. CBS by Susan De Witt

Sci Fi Song About Fantasy Fan Art

2010-06-24T14:18:00.000-07:00

Because nothing says good weird like songs about Unicorn Pegasus Kittens and reconciliation.

Come back Wil Wheaton.
Can we be friends?
Come back Wil Wheaton
Can this bloodshed end?

Bad Memories are Easy

2010-06-16T11:56:00.000-07:00

"Bad experiences wear grooves into the memory. Nine times out of ten, if you unconsciously tap your memory, the recollection will be one of failure, regret, embarrassment, sadness or loss. That doesn't mean that most memories are bad - only that bad ones are the most naturally occurring.

If bad memories are trenches, burrowing out to the horizon behind your brain, the good ones are kites: you've got to run a little before they catch flight, and the wind is blowing forward, so you'll need to meet them in the future. The man of sorrow is the one with three meager trenches coursing through his field of memory, and a hundred thousand kites on the ground, lying motionless."

--From Origins of a World War by Rosignol

Six Degrees of Marlin Bacon

2010-06-16T07:05:00.000-07:00

I like this mangled and cheery headline:

An Unlike Hero Saves Phillies Bacon in Win Over Marlins

Yet again proving that English is the delightfully twisted sister language to...English.

100 x 2 = Mazing

2010-06-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

A Hundred Times Too Amazing

Harvey Whitcannack lifted a tractor up.
This two-ton cockroach, its Goodyears
Instantly on top, on its back
Off of his nephew, Clint, who was six
Years too young to be pulling stumps.

But Harvey said he could, and the child nervously
Believed, open throttle, until it
Reared up like a war-mad stallion,
Ran up itself and flipped.

Death dove on Clint, a crow on kernel
Into the field of a good day's work.

Doubt sprouted all over Harvey.

The adrenaline-induced delirium
Tremens washed away, and the
Flesh-hoisted chunk of steel and oil,
Combusting,
Served a mundane testament to the
Improbable survival of our race.

--From the Unfiled Private Collection of Pierre Menard

Half-Norwegian, Half-Vogon

2010-06-08T06:56:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine just reminded me that, while I have all the gregarious nature and openness of a Norwegian hermit, the other other half of me is Vogon, so I really don't mind holding an audience hostage and subjecting them to awful poetry until they die of madness. In fact, one could say that I rather prefer it that way.

In a good way, of course.

So consider yourself subjected:

In Memory of Lurch

In the basement sits the ex-candidate
Spooling reels of film
A hero in clacks and color
Dashing in his youth,
Flickering on a sheet

A scandal never touched him
And he never touched one back

It was a girl
She was alive
She was naive
She was his wife

The bolts don’t show.
Hollow tones echo from his head.
His face goes blank

It couldn’t be
He lacked the human gene

-From On Knives, Thrown and Uncaught, Morticia Addams

The Magic of Three and Why Things Break

2010-06-07T07:05:00.000-07:00

Three is a very useful number, appearing in patterns in nature and culture all the time:

Mother, Father, Child
Shoot, Move, Communicate
Mind, Body, Spirit
Installation, Operation, Maintenance
Beginning, Middle, End
Planning, Execution, Resolution
Yolk, White, Shell
Earth, Sea and Sky

Heck, even the brain has, roughly, three parts.

Any time I'm stuck in a postmortem of a failure, or planning for the next big project, I try to distill it into three component parts. In the case of failure, usually two components were successfully included, and a critical third one was not. In the case of success, all three hit. What I find interesting is that, usually, a real failure requires two out of three: i.e. I knew what I was doing, and how to do it, but not why (or why and what, but not how, or whathaveyou.) Getting only one component of three right doesn't even rise to the level of failure. It is, so to speak, not even wrong.

More often than not, it seems that contrary to the great philosopher, two out of three ain't good.

Stand by You: Part the Sixth

2010-06-04T01:52:00.000-07:00

I write about or am inspired by weird heroics, everyday humans, filled with doubts and sin and no certainty of success (in fact, no certainty of even failing quietly -Frodo should have been eaten by Shelob, and, before him, Bilbo by Smaug; they were small, the enemy was big - the same with Ray Garraty, Elwin Ransom, the shepherd David against the giant.*) The thing to keep in mind is this: that which overwhelms the hero is often peculiar and particular. Legolas against the giant spider would have been no contest, Wolfgang Schwerk would have led the Long Walk from end to end, and John Carter would have subdued the Unman of Perelandra in a single blast.

The pressure Wheaton endured may have been easy for someone else, someone who didn't care about Star Trek fans, someone who had divorced popularity, work and income from the concept of validation, someone who didn't have a family to support. But that's just it: people who overcome every obstacle with ease, without being bloodied, without, in the deepest parts of them finding themselves attacked at their own, personal weakest points aren't heroes: they are gods.

And I'm not that interested in this planet's gods.

The point is that, somewhere along the way, Wil turned a corner, a corner he didn't have to take, a corner that could have set him "off course," a corner where monsters, with his name on them, had camped for years.** A corner that set him free.

Now, with a growing library of books, a variety of guest and recurring slots on television, w00tstock (the happening for, ahem, the Next Generation), the Guild, about 3 go-jillion twitter followers, Wil Wheaton hasn't just conquered some demons: he's conquering (in his own, nonconquereresque way) all media. Why? Mostly because he stopped playing the small box games his enemies wanted him to play, and started playing his own - one that's a lot more fun.

But taking that step is fraught with even a greater risk: the risk that you, on your own, as yourself, with no excuses to lay nor others to blame, simply may not be enough.

I hope I haven't made it sound easy, or foregone, because there are so many places his story could have fallen and in fact, just based on Vegas odds, should have fallen: locked in bitterness, isolated in a constantly reconstructed past, trapped by the expectations of others, or simply overwhelmed by the spectre.

There were no ashes of drug addiction, abusive parents, suicidal tendencies or nihilism to spring from. So what?

There's an episode of Star Trek where Wesley is able to interact with a hologram recording of his dead father. His dad says all the right things, but it is evident on Wesley's face that what he really needs is to hold on to his father, who isn't really there at all. The recording gives him resolve, but a real-life embrace would have given him everything he wanted. At that point, it becomes very clear: Wesley must, eventually, decide to cut his own path, or spend the rest of his life in the alluring, doomed quest to satisfy the projected hopes of long dead ghosts.

In real life, when Wil forged a new pathway in his own narrative, a phoenix of a whole other sort had risen.

*G 1-2-3, for those of you playing at home. Thanks TSR!

**No, this isn't about a potential revival of CBS' 13 13th Avenue. Unfortunately.

Stand by You: Part the Fifth

2010-06-03T00:53:00.000-07:00

It wasn't until many years later that I even discovered that Wil Wheaton's character was unpopular in some circles, even controversial. I paid attention to the show, but I wouldn't count myself among its diehard fans - too much McCoy in me, maybe. I rarely thought about Star Trek: TNG outside of its airings.

So years later, when Wil Wheaton himself expressed his distress at the time, and for many years after Trek, at being "the most despised Star Trek character ever," I thought, at first, he was being dramatic. Actors are good at that. He wasn't kidding, though. I went on to realize that Wesley's unpopularity, while not universal, nor even spread throughout the majority of Star Trek fans, was widespread, and vicious in the extreme. Google it. Better yet, don't.

It was bad.

From what I can tell in Just a Geek, one of Wil Wheaton's printed autoblogiographies*, it was a miserable, extended, ongoing episode of massed, anonymous meanness and harrassment. It, combined with the disappointment of a long, dry season of little work and less self-certainty made for a young man susceptible to a grinding, incremental defeat.

I remember, upon first learning of this, being surprised that Wheaton (the human) was so unlike Gordie LaChance: when the bullies came around, I wondered, why didn't he just pull out Chris Chambers' gun, jump onto usenet and say:

"No alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die, just you."

Didn't Wheaton even see Stand by Me?

But River Phoenix died in '93, and had been an addict for years leading up to it. If anyone other than a sober Phoenix would have been better suited to help Wil fend off the vultures in that strange, isolated land of teen stardom and popular blowback, I don't know who it might have been. Feldman? Right.

And you will recall that it wasn't Gordie versus Ace in Stand By Me. It was Gordie's tribe versus Ace's - outnumbered, but not outgunned. In the Wesley Crusher incident it was Wheaton's own tribe: Trek fans, who had turned on him. For him, it wasn't "Them against Us."

It was "Us against Me." And "Me" was starting to have second thoughts about him.

*Okay. Now I'm just being a dork.

We Could Be Heroes, But Why Bother?

2010-06-02T12:35:00.000-07:00

Because, just maybe, if you train hard enough, and long enough, you can pull an airplane with your eyelids.

I think Dong Changsheng's dedication is enough for him to qualify as a weird hero.

Thanks Reuters!

Stand by You: Part the Fourth

2010-06-02T01:20:00.000-07:00

Needless to say, of all the young characters I idolized growing up (Luke Skywalker, Tony from Witch Mountain, Roald Dahls' sparky boy heroes, Jodie Foster in Candleshoe and Freaky Friday), and the ones I in some way pathetically resembled (Ralphie from Christmas Story, Lucas from Lucas, Duffy Moon, uh...Gollum) the one I really identified with was Gordie LaChance.

I'm an unrepentant grognard (White Box is too progressive - if you can't deduce D&D from the original Chainmail rules, you aren't trying.) I'm Star Trek Old School - totalitarians at the helm or call the whole thing off. "FPS" stands for "First Person Structure" - because if a game isn't text based, it isn't really an adventure.

Okay, I'm being facetious - but it probably fairly describes my resistance to the new 1980s re-launch of Star Trek. The captain was bald and thinky, and there was a whole lot of cooperation. It seemed like it was going to be Sesame Street in space.

But one character, and one character alone enticed me to the show, reeled me in, and kept me there:

Wesley Crusher.

Originally I tuned in to see Gordie take on Galactic Ace Merrills - Klingons, certainly. Needless to say, I got something else. Most of the characters (early on - things improved) seemed pale, "corrected" versions of the "real" Star Trek - sort of the same, but tentative, less... robust.

Not Wesley.

The thing I really, really liked about Wesley is how he seemed so...mistaken for something else by the crew. He was a contradiction: preternaturally intelligent and a dumb kid, detached and emotional, competent and restricted, gifted and conflicted.

He was, in short, a people-pleasing Mr. Spock with sub-Sulu duties. A child out of synch, a man out of time, a palimpsest of my own screwy teenage self-image.

I found him (indulge my word choice, please) fascinating.

Stand by You: Part the Third

2010-06-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

When the train rattled on that bridge, my bones twitched to the throb of death thundering past. I only noticed vaguely that it was an old steam engine, something that, in the summer of 1959, was almost as likely to be used in transportation as a biplane - in my memory it is a big shining diesel Union Pacific - like the ones that ran the cornfields across the dirt road, 120 times a day .

The year following the Stand By Me watershed, the dying childhoods of the characters merged with the dying childhoods of my friends: we took "two for flinching," Have Gun, Will Travel, and calling each other 'Verne' when we did something stupid, as our own. We even had one last hurrah in a forest pool, complete with leeches (none attached, thankfully.)

I knew the smell of heavy dust crisped by sunlight in the room when Gordie's older brother talks to him - I had sat there, having almost adult conversations with elders many times before, elders long since dead. It wasn't Oregon - it was Iowa: the woods and tracks near my house, or the ones behind the houses of my friends.

It was an olden spell: Stephen King's fictional childhood, translated through Wil Wheaton's cinematic childhood, both reflected and becoming my own childhood. There are times when I remember small, distant things: like a wooden apple crate with cards on it, or a vaguely Hawaiian shirt, and am uncertain if it is a memory of life or of celluloid.

I got a cassette player on the following Christmas - my first tape was the soundtrack to Stand By Me. After all that wading through static and the anachronistic DJ banter of KIOA, the first artists I played on the latest, cutting edge technology were the Del Vikings, the Chordettes, the Coasters and Buddy Holly.

Weird of the Day: Kitten Doesn't Die in Washing Machine

2010-06-01T04:28:00.000-07:00

A metaphor for the human condition - kitten survives spin cycle.

Stand by You: Part the First

2010-05-28T12:25:00.000-07:00

In 1986, I went to a movie at a little rural dollar theater in a town about a dozen miles from the farm. I was jacked, partly because I loved movies, but mostly because my fading friends thought to include me one last time before school started up again, maybe one last time for all time, as far as I knew.

"Fading," not because there was anything wrong with them: something was wrong with me. My boon companions at play and war of just a year or two prior were catching (not just chasing) ladies, some of them had parents divorcing, and all of them were getting shoulders as broad as haybales and legs as long as corn stalks. I was not.

I was less than a year away from being street legal, but stuck in junior high, in mind, spirit and body. Small in 7th Grade, I was hardly much larger by 9th. Two years later, even, I'd start wrestling at 112 pounds.

I listened to KIOA 940 AM on my toy radio, because it didn't play tapes and there wasn't a good FM station that reached me - All Oldies, All the Time, til sundown. So, while my friends were cranking Def Leppard, Dire Straits and Motley Crue on their ghetto blasters (a good state and a half away from the nearest "ghetto") or their cassette players while we rode beans or detasseled in the summer, I had, in my ears, Bobby Darin, the Chordettes, the Del Vikings, the Coasters and Buddy Holly.

My interests were likewise delayed. I still secretly played with toys I was too old for, watched cartoons, still thought programming adventure games in BASIC was the surefire way to woo women, thought being the biggest dork amongst the D&D crowd made me cool.

I was falling behind. Quickly.

Whenever my old friends recalled me, it was an occasion. One of the group got the others to go along because it was a Stephen King movie. I knew the basic story, having skimmed the novella of King's "The Body" which was included in Different Seasons, along with what I thought of at the time as far more interesting stories: "Apt Pupil", ''Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" and a really disturbing "bad miracle" story at the end.

One thing I knew, and they didn't: this wasn't going to be the Shining or Maximum Overdrive.

The Empire Strikes Fargo

2010-05-28T11:07:00.000-07:00

The Huffington Post just put up a ton of movie mashup posters. Good ones, too.

Stand by You: Part the Second

2010-05-28T09:24:00.000-07:00

It was eerie in an entirely different spectrum. I instantly recognized every scene in Stand By Me from my own life*.

Everything: the junkyard, the train tracks, the comics, the music and secret knocks. This wasn't 1959. This was just last summer.

One of my best (fading) friends at the time wore white t-shirts all the time when we used to play World War II (that's right, we'd had Korea and Vietnam - but kids in Iowa fought the same imaginary armies our dads did - the Nazis.) He looked an awful lot like Chris Chambers - tall, blond, strong, crewcut, cool. For pity's sake, we watched Combat!, Twilight Zone and Gunsmoke in reruns with greater frequency than we watched the current stuff.**

I was Gordie LaChance: awkward, writerly, uncertain.

And falling behind.

* I had seen 1983's A Christmas Story by then, and a few years later would catch The Wonder Years. Liked them both a ton. Recognized universal boyhood experiences, even got "false nostalgia" for events in them, but the experience was not even in the same galaxy as the riveting "my life on instant replay" sensation that lingered for days, even weeks, months and heck, now a quarter-century after seeing it.

**Doubling down on the weirdness: People remember where they were when they heard Kennedy was shot, or when the Challenger exploded: I remember where I was when I heard the star of Combat!, Vic Morrow, died during the shooting of Twilight Zone: The Movie - the band room, putting away my baritone. If I recall it, he had died many months before, but the release of the movie in '83, or lawsuits, or something brought it to my attention.

Inspiration from the Distant Past

2010-05-27T01:42:00.000-07:00

"'You are alive. That's bad. It means you have to hurt, carry heavy things, remember to breathe. Nonsense. Difficulty.'

The ghost was wrong. She had to be. 'But what about love? Don't you miss it?' I said, trembling.

'No,' she thought a bit too long before continuing, 'I could love if I really wanted to, but I wouldn't trade back if it meant I had to risk smelling pickled herring ever again. Heroics, though. That's a different story. I wish I'd once been a hero.'"

- From The Songs of the Long Land by Lallafa [Prior to the edits. Prior or after...not sure which]

The Pulps vs. Slicks in Real Life

2010-05-26T06:26:00.000-07:00

Ryan Harvey at Black Gate brings up a very interesting point originally proposed by Jon Tuska:
"Beyond entertainment, which both pulp and slick fiction alike provided, slick fiction had to deliver an ideological message to readers which agreed with the editorial policies of the magazine and these were dictated by the advertisers and their agencies. Perhaps it is for this reason that so much of the slick fiction of the 1930s and 1940s had become hopelessly dated while pulp fiction from that same period still pulsates with imagination and iconoclasm." - Jon Tuska, “Frederick Faust’s Western Fiction” - The Max Brand Companion (Greenwood, 1996). [emphasis mine]

I don't think this division between slicks and pulps is a relic of another age, or confined merely to books. There's a reason why, a quarter-century later, rabid fan followings of the little-seen (at the time) The Adventures Buckaroo Banzai, but far less fandom abounds for that year's Academy Award winner (the lovely biopic Amadeus.) The Passion of the Christ became a cultural lightning rod, but its focus-grouped (unofficial) prequel (The Nativity) a passerby.

Unfettered, lovingly edited pulp stories often result in a hot mess, clanging cowbells all the way down the pit of obscurity, while the slicks never fall to such depths. But never do the slicks rise to the greatness of Lovecraft, Howard, Smith, or even, at the far, doomed end of the pulps, Bloch or King.

The slicks, under the strict controls of the publisher's "vision" are safe entertainments. The pulps are not. It is in risk and personality where the greatest of the pulps enjoy something very special: immortality.

Maybe this explains Rod Blagojevich.

Australian Ninjas Rescue Mugging Victim

2010-05-25T00:46:00.000-07:00

I always think the plural of "ninja" should be "ninjae" but that's beside the point.

I think this little episode should make up for the centuries of assassination and terror, and, possibly, the one season of NBC's The Master.

Why the Good Weird?

2010-05-24T17:31:00.000-07:00

My first encounter with Star Wars was as a story told to me. I was five. My older sisters had seen the movie at a theater, and one of them took the time to tell me the entire story, from beginning to end.

A few weeks later, I got to see the thing in person. I was not able to keep up with the opening scroll, but my limited reading skills could easily apprehend the opening title:

A New Hope.

I'd come in, expecting an evil black robot that choked people and was trying to find good robots and beat the rebels who were trying to save a princess and fought each other with laser swords. I got that, plus a spectacle my mind could barely fathom, and a new thrill every 30 seconds or so. It was two hours of bliss, but most unexpected were those three opening words.

Even with my extensive prep, I had no clue that there had been a loss of hope requiring the promise of new hope. But it left a dramatic impression. For its stunning visual effects, fast plot, and thrilling climax, what snagged me in the gills was the awakening to my visceral need of a new hope.

Those little words expressed, at the time, everything I needed to know about heroes: they start with hope, a new hope, formed out of the aftermath of disaster, seeds planted in a land inhospitable to the good. Heroes aren't gods, shrugging off the blows of the world like a submarine shrugs off rain.

They are:

An old man
Someone's bounty
Two slaves
A refugee ex-regent
And a farm boy

Heroes move because they must, not because victory is in sight, or even likely. The fact that they win, ever, is just plain weird.

[Photo: Mary Chind's shot of the rescue of a woman from the Des Moines River - Ten bucks says Mary wasn't thinking Pulitzer when she started shooting, even though that's what she ended up with. Ten bucks says she was, instead, praying for a New Hope.]

What's the Good Weird?

2010-05-24T00:21:00.000-07:00

It is a very simple formula: Words + Weird + Good = the Good Weird

Whether I'm riffing on strange wordplay, exploring the depths of Appendix N:, or just talking about new good weirdness in entertainment.

If you remember fondly any of these:

When George Bailey's suicide is interrupted.
When Samwise proves (to no one watching) that he is, in fact, most brave of all.
When the Misfit makes sense at the end of it all.
When Ender realizes what really happened in the simulator.
When Sancho Panza becomes the romantic.
When Roy Batty sits down to talk.
When Han Solo comes back to help...

...then you know that history, or at least a good story, turns on a regular someone doing something...well...weird. We think of the above turning points as "out of character" when, in fact, the weird thing, the heroic thing, is not just the thing that tells us something new, it tells us something very old: that heroism is, at heart, the test of something unseen, almost unbelievable, unexpected, and yet, when it finds its moment, wholly and most certainly True. Human heroism is weird. It is latent in the hero, and you don't know it is there until, at the last possible moment, it is exercised to shocking effect.

Only afterward do you realize that the power was there all along.

If you really like your words saturated with the good and weird, you can be one of the first to purchase my best-selling, genre-bending novels, play my award winning videogames, and participate in my true-3D interactive movies...in the future.

Until then, I've got this steam-powered typewriter, dumping odd alphabet-based inscriptions into the swirling netstream.

Here's what you get, just for showing up:

Wordplay, or, if you will, "Weirdplay"*
Heroic Weirdness
Weird History
Masters of the Weird
Literary Weirdology

I thought, to kick off, it would be fitting to take a look at the origin of the phrase"What's the Good Word?" - Apparently, it is shrouded in mystery.

Which is fitting, I suppose.

P.S. Despite the protestations of some among the Legions of the Strange, there is such a thing as "bad weird." The tunnel scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, for instance. There are places for that...but this isn't one of them.

*Yes. I am this easily amused.

Daniel Eness - Author

2010-05-24T00:20:00.000-07:00

Daniel Eness is a writer living in Des Moines. For twenty-five years, he's written strange stories, odd books and downright unreadable poetry (think Vogons without the charisma.)

He's written a novel or two, and the voices have told him that they are better than the works of Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Donna Tartt, Flannery O'Connor, Milan Kundera, Dean Koontz and Franklin W. Dixon combined. [Measuring criteria: lowest gross weight when printed and least number of words.]

Raised on a farm, he is a 5th degree master of the cattle prod (self-inflicted), and falls into a zen-like trance whenever a pitchfork finds his hand. Despite popular belief, he has seen a building taller than three stories before. It was a really big grain elevator.