Excuses + Moving

     Hey folks, sorry to skimp out on another week of RFF. I didn't realize this Summer was going to be so crazy. This week we’re moving out of our place and into friends’ houses because the place where we were planning to move hasn't had its closing date yet.

     Last night we, my deputy and I, were talking about all the crazy moves we've done over the years. When we moved down to New York, I moved down first taking the bare essentials (toothbrush, computer, guitar, bike), just so I could start my new job. Then when she was ready to move down we found a place together and we borrowed a friend’s car-trailer which is only maybe 10 feet long, but they can’t lend us their ball-hitch because it’s rusted to their car. They can’t lend us the car because they need it that week, and I can’t get the hitch off without breaking something (most likely myself). Next we notice that her landlord has a ball hitch on his car, so we ask him if we can borrow it, he say “yes”, but it’s also rusted to his car. So we borrow his entire car to drive 3 hours away to another state.

Great guy.

I know that we managed to load a box spring and mattress, a futon, three desks, a computer chair, all our books, our bikes, and clothes, bookshelves, and winter equipment (skis, snowboard, snowshoes [I like winter]) on this trailer, but I don’t know how. I remember that it looked precarious as hell, but everything was so Tetrised together when you pulled on anything the whole trailer moved. It reminded me of the image in my head of when the Joad family left the farm in The Grapes of Wrath. Everything was piled up on that truck, and when they needed more space, they built up the sides and piled on more.

Loading my sci-fi collection into boxes make we really want to finish my book, and long for the fall when I’ve got my mornings back so I can get into it again. It sucks that books takes so long to write; my life has changed three times since I started. There are things that were relevant to my life then that the characters feel, which I’m not so interested in now. There are things I’ve learned with experience that I want to include, but if I do that I’ll never stop writing it.

Keep following, keep reading, keep telling your friends. If I get a good following I’ll leak chapters of the novel over the winter.

-Tyler R McNamara

The Dewey DEATHcimal System

The Library was quiet. That’s dumb. Of course it was quiet, but I mean it was EXTRA quiet. No one had come in in hours, and when they did it was only to rent freaking DVDs.  Sorry, it seems like I’m complaining about no one picking up a book anymore, and you’re thinking, “Wow, big surprise a librarian thinks people don’t read enough,” but that’s not what I’m getting at.  I just thought it was relevant to WHY I was combing through the non-fiction stacks so carefully.

     Every year there’s a library book sale, and the books in it are generated from these searches. We go through the electronic system and see which books are collectors, and which are movers. Sorry, that’s library jargon. I wonder if that’s jargon for all libraries or just ours? Anyway, what I mean is collectors just sit there collecting dust. They’re books that have a borrow score that’s dropped by 15.4 or more over the last five years. Obviously, movers are the opposite. Sometimes if we see a book that’s trending toward the collector scale, we’ll put it on the ‘read of the week’ display shelf to try to generate some interest and save it. Rebecca, one of the other librarians, keeps managing to save this schlocky novel The Wind Through her Hair. The book is one of thirty crap novels written by Janet Johnson, which is the pen name of some guy named Randy Wentworth, who apparently thought a woman’s name would sell more books than a guy name Randy. Well… I guess he thought right, because that thing jumps off the shelves whenever Rebecca puts it out.

     Sorry, I’m off topic again. So I noticed that A life of One’s Own, was starting to become a collector, so I went to fetch it for the ‘Read of the week’ shelf, but it wasn’t there. I double checked to make sure it wasn’t… sorry I’m doing it again. I’ll skip ahead. While I was combing the non-fiction stacks for it, I found this hardcover, bound in black canvas with no title, author’s name, or any writing on the side. It didn’t even have a Dewey decimal code taped to the spine. The book just looked like some common book stuck on our shelves. So I pulled it out. It looked relatively new, not excessively dusty, and there was no spine fade, which you’ll get on some of the older volumes. The front was marked with big, gold lettering that made me cringe. At first I thought, at the title: The Death of a Librarian. But then I realized the shiver going down my spine wasn’t the creeps, it was the font. This was the kind of type Daniel Steel would use, and I thought: What is this doing in the non-fiction stacks?

     I brought it back to my desk, and ran a search through the library system, but it says, ‘I’m sorry, nothing with that title can be found’. Then I realized it didn't credit an author so I started looking on the first page for an is-bin, or a Library of Congress code, but it's missing all of that information. The first page is just the title again. It was obviously self-published, the pages were not library quality, but none of that matters. I turned to the second page and started reading. The writing was loose and too casual, and it didn't even start with any character description, it just seemed to drop straight into the action. Action in the sense that a verb describes an action, not like the car-chase kind. It wasn't to my taste: I like to know who I’m reading about before I can really get into a story, even if it is fiction.  The first page described the non-fiction stacks of a library, and a librarian finding a book that doesn’t belong there. She takes it back to the computer and when she can’t find it in the system, she begins to read it.
The book had a beautiful depth of detail about specifics of the library, and they all matched this library perfectly. Reading it gave me the eerie feeling of being watched. I stopped and looked around. For a moment I considered calling out something like, “Hello?” But it felt too damsel in distress so I went back to reading and --I swear to God-- this is what I read next:

     “This is describing MY library,” she thinks, feeling the hairs rise on the back of her neck. No longer sure she’s alone in the library she stops reading, and looks around. There’s no one there. Or at least no one she can see. She thinks about calling out, but doesn’t want to act the victim, and goes back to reading. Now she’s gotten to the part of the story where she’d reading exactly what has happened, and now exactly what is happening. “What the hell?” She thinks. “This has got to be some kind of prank,” and closes the book.

     I read it, thought it, and did it.

She opened the book back up. “Did IT make me think that? Or is it just recording what I’m doing? NO, I’m in control,” she swore to herself and slammed the book closed before reading the end of the paragraph.

     A moment later she opened it back up and finished the paragraph, just to make sure it said that she slammed the book. She closed the book again, this time more slowly, trying to catch a glimpse of the next… “Oh my God!” She thought.

     It’s a prank, it’s a good prank I’ll give the bastard that, but regardless, it didn’t belong in my stacks, even if it did seem to be non-fiction. A book needs an author, a publisher, a copyright notice, an is-bin, and most importantly a Library of Congress Control Number. I picked up the phone and started to dial the director, when I read the title again The Death of a Librarian, and I got an idea. I hung up the phone, and flipped to the last of the 300-or-so pages to cheat and read the ending. The page was blank. The last ten pages were all blank. I kept flipping backward through the book; the last hundred pages were blank. I flipped faster and accidentally flipped past hundreds of texted pages and stopped.

     “You have to believe me!” She shouted to the director. “Someone is trying to kill me!”

     “It’s just a book, Rebecca. No one is trying to kill you.”

     I closed the book with a sigh of relief. Thank God, the prank isn’t for me. I turned it over in my hands appreciating it for what it was, and called the director.

     It rang twice.

     While I waited my eyes glanced at the clock. Goodness, it’s already 1:30.

     It rang six times. Wasn't Rebecca supposed to be in at noon?

     Where’s Rebecca?  I thought, and the director never answered the phone.

Apocalypse + Oral History

Thanks so much for this week’s motif suggestions, but I'm going to play around with a concept of my own this week.

     “The scientists kept calling it global warming so when it started getting colder everyone figured it was just an early winter. But then it started snowing down south. Georgia, Florida, Mexico. The roads needed plowing all the time, and for a while, the plow drivers were heroes. It the Wild West commerce and communication all relied on the train, but in the days of the early ice age people lived and died by the snowplow. There were passenger plows, freighter plows with 18 wheels, communication plows, and mail plows (and boy did that make the federal postal service angry). Those drivers that didn't kill themselves in the first year with calories, caffeine, and cocaine lived like Wall Street fat cats... for a time. When the plows ran out of places to push or dump the snow, a man named Ron went to the president with a plan to use the snow to construct ice tunnels over all the major roads.”

     “What about planes?” asked the little girl, turning from where she sat by the fire.

     It cast an orange-yellow light from the cinderblock hearth in corner of their Manhattan apartment, which lit her grandfather’s face with a happy glow and made his wrinkle lines all the more deeper as he smiled and said, “Anyone ever tell you you’re too smart for your own good? Where’d you hear about planes?”

     The girl pointed to the lowest shelf where her small stack of children’s books lived. “A day at the Airport!”

     “Very good Sara’k.”

#

     “Airplanes had been grounded as soon as the first blizzards started. Emergency trips were attempted, but only one in nine ever reached their destination. So this plow man, with the help of the government’s oil and all of his friends started building the first tunnels over the roads. The original plan was to keep them big, but when I was a little girl, they realized that the ice age wasn’t going away any time soon—”

     “Grandma Sara’k? What’s an air-plane?” The heavily wrinkled face before them scowled, and eyed the group of children.

     “What do they teach you in that school anyway?”

     Not realizing the question was rhetorical they all started bouncing excitedly on the carpet of furs, and all talking at once, “How to make fire with wood and friction!”  “The laws of Has and Take!” “How to skin an animal, and tan, and sew!” “How to—”

     “Yes yes, those are all well and good things that every child should know, but what about History?”

     The flap of the hut lifted for a moment, letting in beams of orange and pink light that cut through the dim light of the small tallow lamp, and an adult man, dressed in deerskin ducked into hut.

     “History is dangerous,” the man said.

     “Not nearly as dangerous as ignorance,” Grandma Sara’k replied.

     “I agreed to let you tell this story so they would know why rules like Has and Take are important."

     Grandma Sara’k interrupted, “—and so that when they reach the Age of Choice, they actually have a choice to make.”

     “What choice? I want to choose now?” “Me too!” “Me too!”

    “Hush!” the man commanded, “I only came in here to tell you to keep your voices down, and listen to Grandmother Sara’k. Children who do not have patience do not catch food.”  The room was so quiet one could have heard a pin drop, if anyone besides Sara’k remembered what a pin was.

#

     “Just as my Grandmother Sara’k told me many years ago, and as her grandfather told her before, you have reached the age of choice.” The woman they called Grandmother, more because of her role than her age, paused. Looking out at the fifty or so young adults, men and women dressed in their finest leathers and linens, adorned with months of delicate beadwork.

     She continued, “You have lived in this community only as partial members, we have taught you, trained you, fed you and clothed you. You have done your part and paid back all that was given to you except the cost of your birth, which can never be repaid. But today is the day you are given the freedom to choose your home, and choose your path. You have heard the stories about the time before. About the dark times, and the cold times. You have heard about the level of technology humankind had achieved, both the good and the bad. You have heard about why this community chooses to live simply, beautifully small lives. And you have heard stories and seen people from other communities who choose to search for, relearn, and rebuild the old ways. Who dream of one day flying through the air in huge metal birds, and having lives that demand they do so.” She was relieved to see many heads shaking with disapproval. “You don’t need to choose today, but once you chose to join another community you may not return.” The Grandmother began to cry, and did not hold back her tears. Her own son, Wolf Spider has chosen to go, and everyone still remembered the day he tried to come back. “You may not return,” she repeated. “Do not come back to show us the ease and simplicity of hunting with black powder, or sewing with metal needles. You will believe you are helping us, or maybe even saving us. You are not. You are offering us a slow poison, which won’t kill us for seven generations.”

#

     “I had tried to go back twice. The first time to show them what civilization had already remembered, and what it was capable of, and the second time because I wanted to come home.”

     One of the boys who surrounded the old man in the alley loudly complained at one of the other boys, “You said he could make fire without matches!”

     The youth responded, “He can, don’t interrupt!”

     The young man stood, puffed out his chest and challenged the old man. “Well then DO it!”

     Wolf Spider sat there, unaffected by the young pomp, and waited.

     “Maybe Mr. Spider will make a fire after the story?” The smallest of the boys offered and asked at the same time.

     “Well his story’s lame, and I bet he can’t even make fire. Come on guys.” Seven eights of the posse stood, and started walking away with the loud boy.

     Of the two boys who remained one called after them, “Wait! He knows about some kind of poison that’s killing us!”

     The second boy comforted the first saying, “Don’t worry, I’m staying.”

     The first boy sat back down. “Keep telling your story Mr. Spider. Tell us, is there a way to get cured of the poison?”

     Wolf Spider took a flask from his shirt pocket. He didn't know where the shirt came from, it was from the island certainly, but he didn't know exactly where, only that machines had somehow made it, and that machines used electricity. He knew about growing flax, and processing flax into thread and weaving that into linen, but he couldn't figure out how electricity turned into clothing. He took a long pull on the flask and put it back, “Yes,” he lied, “But it’s not going to be easy or comfortable.”

     After three hours I still haven’t gotten to the place I thought I was going. It’s funny how writing like this is not storytelling. It’s like taking a roadtrip. When I first started driving west I thought I was going to California to see the ocean, but when I got there I ended up discovering something else entirely more interesting. When I started writing I thought I was talking about stories passed down the generations. The punch line was going to be a child living natively off the land, singing the Alka-Seltzer jingle from the 60s as if it were a Mother Goose song about swimming. Plop-plop fizz-fizz…

     Maybe, if this ever turns into something longer (afraid to use the word novel), I’ll use that idea.

Sorry there've been no Read it for You updates, I've been swamped directing summer camp. Also, I'm working on getting a guest reader for last weeks story just so you don't have to listen to me all the time.

~TM

Parkour + Chase Scenes = Carkour

Can you tell I spent all morning Sunday watching trials bike stunts?

     Nestled in the space where a normal radio would be had been, a police scanner sat and squawked about the accident on the bridge ahead of them. Her tires squeaked, almost with joy, as they slowly climbed the polished granite curb. A low growl rolled from Her dual tailpipes. Not upset, but hungry. For speed.

    The cars in front of Her, bound by laws of state and nature, were bumper-locked and watched Vedoro Green with envy. Their operators pulled out cell phones to capture the infraction, but She wasn't street legal anyway. One didn't need license plates to differentiate Her from the 260 million other passenger vehicles. She was one of a kind. Sure there were others that shared Her chassis, but it was what She could do that set Her apart.

     A route was recalculated with the 'pedestrian' option selected. Heads turned when she drove by, but never more so than as she drove along the empty sidewalk, dashing up to 30 mph and power sliding to angle in between the railings of the public library. For a moment it was clear to the onlookers that her tight ground clearance of 5.3 inches was not enough to climb the first step. She seemed to whine in frustration as it would require a tow truck to back out of this tight situation between the rails and the traffic, but the sound was not that of a spoiled princess, it was the whine of a compressor powering up the hydraulics. Suddenly, with a sound like a can being crushed, She raised up to a height of 9 inches, higher than a Ford Ranger, and began climbing the stairs. At the top of the stairs was a bronze statue of some long dead war hero, mounted atop a gelded horse, heroically raising his sword aloft. As She drifted around it She shat long, black rubber burns on the white marble.

     A tall elderly woman with short, freshly permed, burgundy hair, and large glasses on a gold chain ran out of the library and shushed Her as she sped off to the west along a pavement walkway toward the library's dedicated parking lot. But the Librarian's anger turned suddenly to fear, "Look out!" she yelled after Her. Ahead the pathway was blocked to traffic larger than a golf cart, by waist-high marble obelisk. The hydraulics crunched again, launching the passenger side into the air. Balancing on two wheels She navigated the gap, entered the parking lot and fell back down on all fours. She growled approval, and tore though the empty parking lot toward the "Entrance" side of the automated toll booth. Her tires squealed, perhaps in fear as they saw the quickly approaching tire shredders protecting the lot from toll dodgers.

     She checked traffic both ways, but never slowed down, and as she was about to drive into the iron teeth of the shredder, the hydraulics crunched and She jumped clear over them, not even touching the sidewalk on her way to the street. Taking a sharp 90 She found herself momentarily facing an oncoming garbage truck, but nothing so stout could out maneuver her. Finally the police scanner crackled with an alert about Her off-roading on public land. Because of the accident at the bridge the cops were just blocks away, not only to dodge them, but also to continue following Her GPS guidance She took another sharp 90 down an alley so narrow it threatened to scratch Her mirrors. She danced like this from alley to alley across five blocks while the Bears chased sightings of where's She'd been. Neither traffic, nor stairs, nor narrow allies blocked her passage until she pulled out onto a wide boulevard and into a construction zone her GPS wasn't aware of. On both sides jersey barriers blocked off the entire boulevard. In front of her the bare orange of a high-rise's iron skeleton rose out of a dirt lot, crowded with heavy construction equipment, stacks of I-beams, piles of gravel, and beyond lay the canal. Thank goodness it was getting dark and the construction crew had left.

     The scanner chirped about the alley She had just emerged from, and low-voiced  officers had already deduced her exit point. She wasn't trapped, She just had to get creative. After a recon lap around the construction lot, her tires bit into the dirt and took a running start toward a modest pile of gravel launching her through the air and onto the second floor of the high-rise. From this height She could see a barge lumbering slowly down the canal toward Her, if She accelerated fast enough She could clear the gap and use the barge a mobile bridge. Carefully knocking over a few sheets of ply-wood which leaned again one wall, it collapsed in her path and formed a ramp. She backed up as the barge drew near, and when the moment came she burned out her back wheels building up engine RPMs before catapulting forward like an F-14 off the deck of a aircraft carrier. Feet from the ramp She realized she wasn't going to making it. She didn't have enough height. At the last second the hydraulics crunched and threw the rear tires into the air, forward kick-flipping Herself through the air and gaining the height she needed to land on the highest stack of shipping containers.

     Just as the radio was squawking about disappearing cars and scrambling the eye in the sky, the garage door was closing behind her. Carefully the little one in the back seat was unbuckled and lifted over a shoulder.

     As the door was quietly closed a voice said, "Shhhh, he's asleep."

     "Thank you so much for driving him around the block. Sometimes he just won't go to sleep without a little car ride. I hope traffic wasn't bad."

     A shrug. "Nothing we couldn't handle."

     Then the eyebrow went up. "You didn't have anything to do with that accident on the bridge?"

     "No. We kick-flipped over the canal and skipped that section."

Counseling psychology sessions + Sonic the Hedgehog

Thanks to Katie for this weeks suggestion, I found it more difficult than I was anticipating. Also, sorry for the week of silence. I we went camping for our honeymoon and didn't bring computers.

On the top floor of the Sega Enterprises building, there is a small office in the middle of the open building layout with no windows, and a wooden door as heavy as the feeling Yuji carried in his chest. He felt like he was in trouble, as if he'd been falsely accused of some ugly crime.

"Welcome Yuji. Please, make yourself comfortable."

Yuji sat on the edge a long leather couch, rested his elbows on his knees and tried not to make eye contact with the strange western doctor. He had big round eyes that were positioned too close together, idiotic round glasses, and a bushy mustache that made him seem powerful and dangerous.

"Is there anything in particular you would like to talk about today?"

His Japanese was passable as far as vocabulary was concerned, but there was something offensive about the way he pronounced everything back in his soft palate.

"Īe."

He made a note on his big aluminum clipboard. "That's quite alright. Is there anything that's been bothering you?"

"Īe."

The doctor took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. "Yuji, I know this can be difficult. You and I don't know each other at all, yet I'm asking you to talk to me as if we were harmonious. Let's start slow. Watashinonamaeha aru Doctor Robert Nicks, I work for Sega Technical Institute back in the U.S.."

Yuji slid farther back on the couch. "I'm a programmer, I write code for the Sega Mega Drive."

Doctor Nicks smiled. "Good. I understand you're having trouble coming up with a concept for your new game?" In reaction to Yuji's tensing up, he pulled his question, "Never mind that. Do you have any hobbies?"

Hobbies? Yuji thought, looking around Doctor Nick's office he noticed that he had furnished the walls with many wall shelves. Each shelf varied by length and height starting at around waist level, and they weren't arranged parallel up the wall like a ladder, but randomly, at different heights and intervals. Yuji imagined he was six-inches tall and had to climb to the top of the wall by jumping up the shelves. "Coding is my hobby."

Yuji passively argued with Doctor Nicks over the nuances of a hobby while looking at all of the things on his shelves. There was the obligatory shelf of awards, diplomas, and certificates. The sturdiest shelf was occupied with thick books with long English names. But all the others were taxidermy of various sizes and shape, all of them protected under glass bell jars. The shelf closest to them held a blue bird with a rosy chest perched on a branch. Above that was a chubby little brown bird with a short, upturned tail, and big white eyebrow stripes that made it look very serious. On another shelf, perched on the side of a grey and weathered piece of barn board, was a small white bird with black wings and white spots, it had a black crest, a black chinstrap beard, and a tiny spot of red at the back of its head. All the other shelves were covered in eggs. Nests filled with green eggs, or blue eggs, or spotted brown eggs. There were Ukrainian painted Easter eggs, and golden eggs, but most of them were actual bird eggs.

Yuji had stopped paying attention, but Doctor Nicks hadn't noticed yet. "...is to calm the chaos of your thoughts. Thoughts can be very powerful and if one can focus that power--you're looking at my nature collection." Nicks rose from his chair, "This is a fine example of focusing the chaos into something productive." From the most central shelf, he took something that Yuji has glanced over at first-- thinking it was some kind of giant burr--from under its bell jar. He cradled the spiky object in his hands and as he brought it closer to Yuji, he could see the spiky ball had a tiny mouse face.

"This is the prize of my collection," Doctor Nicks said. "This was my first taxidermy I ever got. My brother got it for me in Africa. It's my favorite. Atelerix albiventris. Hejjihoggu."

Yuji shook his head, "Hari Nezumi." Needle mouse.

A small bell chimed. "And that's the end of our time today. Next time I'd like to talk more about finding things that refresh your creative energy."

Pressure, Yuji thought, feeling a wave of creative energy wash over him. I know exactly what I'm going to do about this new project.