I have learned from more than one source that dogs’ paws can smell like Fritos. I would assess this for myself, but I have more than once seen my dogs step blithely into large and avoidable dog poop piles.
Yesterday evening we passed the crest of Belmont as it dips over the shoulder of Mt. Tabor, and there on the corner stood a boy, about twelve or so, shouting “Here boy, c’mere!” As we drew closer he said to me, “Have you seen a black Lab.” Now, I am not the type to mock a child calling for his lost dog, but I was tempted to indicate the two black Labs tethered to me by nylon leashes. One black Lab who was attempting to jump on the boy and be his new best friend. I indicated I had not seen his dog but would return if I did. Just after that I heard an adult shouting what I believe was the news that the dog was found and the boy should return home. I hope so.
Of the 5,326 songs I have loaded on my ipod, the first ten that showed up when I just hit shuffle are:
“Jimi”, Butthole Surfers, Locust Abortion Technicians
“From a Buick 6”, Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited
“Against”, Sepultura, Against
“Scrawled in Sap”, 16 Horsepower, Sackcloth ‘n Ashes
“Young, Fast Iranians,” The F.U.’s, Do We Really Want to Hurt You
“Looking for the One”, The Wildhearts, Riff After Riff
“When She Begins”, Social Distortion, Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell
“Cyborg Assault”, Bill Laswell, Sacred System
“Introduction (Part 2)”, The Delta 72, The Sould of a New Machine
“The Saint”, Orbital, In Sides
If you emerge from the bushes in the landscaping around the Walgreen’s parking lot, and I am walking by with the dogs, and if you’ve just been in those bushes for the purpose of getting high by whatever means, then please don’t try and engage me in incoherent, drug-logic small-talk. I really don’t care what you’re doing in the bushes and I don’t feel like chatting with you about my cool-looking dogs and am I a professional dog walker and whatever nonsense is firing from your fried synapses. I just don’t want you to get any closer to me in case I get twitchy and have to hit you, which will probably get the dogs all crazy and I’ll get gross bodily fluids on my hands.
In other Montavilla drugs news, I saw my first R0n Rhymes-with-Pall lawn sign the other evening.
Yesterday evening the power went out for about a half-hour. Only a few hours earlier I had been walking with the dogs through a several-blocks-long blackout and felt relief when I turned a corner and saw I had reached the border of restored power and that our house was lit. Whatever was wrong in that area had moved on to ours. Now, a few minutes of reading by a camping lantern is no hardship, and I am well aware of how the lack of power causes real suffering in less fortunate parts. Still I felt annoyed. What kind of a power outage was this, with no wind and the temperature probably barely below freezing, if that? I suspect the power company was involved in some manner of current-interrupting maintenance and couldn’t be bothered with notifying any residents. There’s goes my self-regard as an opponent of the conspiracy theorists.
Just after the power was restored something outside exploded, probably a streetlamp. This deeply frightened Boris, who hates fireworks and probably expected the barrage to continue all night. He lay on the sofa, a cowering and very flat dog, only his mournful brown eyes moving as we mocked him. It took some petting and the lure of a bouncing racquet ball to get him to forget the recent horror and get back to being his useful pushy self. Thankfully, because when there are exploding fireworks in the area, there’s no way he’s going outside and I always worry his bladder will burst during the night.
I’m entranced by Lucinda Williams again today; this morning it’s Happy Woman Blues. There are other plates on the musical menu, however. I downloaded a two-song e.p. just released by The Accused on their website. As reluctant as I am to imagine the band without Blaine Cook, the new singer sounds sufficiently like him that it’s not a jarring change. There’s also a download of a recent live performance from the Netherlands available on the site, and listening to it makes me look forward to their next appearance in Stumptown. It’s not as if there isn’t precedent for a band losing a founding figure and forging on. Of course it’s rare that the result has the relevance of the former iteration, but one adjusts one’s expectations to circumstances.
The 2008 calendar above my desk here at work shows a different Wayne Thiebaud painting each month. January displays this. I like Thiebaud’s work for a sense of fun and detail, but not so much for creepy. More than two-thirds of the month to go before I can stop looking at the devil’s toy closet.
This week I have been listening to Lucinda William’s “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” over and over again. It’s an indictment of myself that I did not earlier take the initiative to listen to her, and an indictment of American culture that I never heard a song of hers by chance until I watched the movie Talladega Nights, of all things. In fact, the song plays during the credits of that movie, which made my encounter with that divine voice even chancier. Bless those movie makers.
Of course that movie had Sepultura and AC/DC on its soundtrack, so I was always going to be kindly disposed to it.
What better way to begin a year’s blogging than to share another story with the internets? Here’s one I dashed off last month, another bit of flash fiction. It was rejected by the one magazine I submitted it to, and I’ve decided it doesn’t need to accrue the indignities of numerous rejections required to find a home at some obscure and short-lived zine. Might as well be published on this obscure but stable site.
My Children
by Gryffyd Eamonn Dempsey
Our goblin has taken the children. Trussed them like totems. Dog fur has been hateful to us for many years. Tufts of fluffy tail are glued to my little girl’s forehead. She looks like a devil with a summer’s velvet on its horns.
My daughter carved spells to convince people that foul strong smells were faint and far away, like toiling peasants carting night soil to fields just visible from your luxury sedan speeding along the freeway.
“Has it harmed you?” I asked her. I did not want to kill a child myself.
I looked past her, at the goblin sitting behind its garden fence of dragon bones. Its stench wavered on the border but could not overwhelm me.
My daughter does not love me. Her other spells misrepresent me to gluttons.
Not many of you could be the sort who had led the revolution, fighting underground when many thought me a dead man, fingers warped by Interior Police torture, mind strengthened and honed by long ordeal and determination baked like old hardwood. Not many had that to backstop their credibility. I am a man of action and you always misjudged me.
As usual you acted irrationally, such that when I withdrew you were meant to approach, and vice versa. When I came into the room I naturally opened a window for your escape. You invited me to reciprocate, then when I acted, you simpered that two wrongs do not make a right.
Goblin gas seeps past us. Where the holly tree had been was now an almost perfect circle of thatch and detritus in the middle of the lawn. The several stumps seemed too small to have provided a skeleton for that erstwhile bulk, the massive shiny green thing that had shielded a secretive busy world, now denuded and destroyed for no discernible reason.
My father kept me fed but traumatized my sisters on the other side of the wire fence as he spent hours on preparation of greasy brown stew, taking tastes from a wooden spoon while wiggling his bushy eyebrows at the women.
The little boy was dead — in the night rats had gnawed through his stomach too eat the sugar in his belly. He might have survived without a stomach but these rats defecated into his blood and their poisons showed how the care of dead orphans who look into the living world for help are treated.
The father sat in the cold room in a bathrobe, shins hairy and bare, feet shod in slippers. He cast an air of a gloom Christmas morning as he raised a hand to beat me.
A dead, naked child, standing stiff, pointed at me and mocked my failures.
“Pig-killer sacrifice,” he said.
In each room of my father’s house a wall held a framed section of a map, so many rooms and so intricate the geography that no one could, by moving from room to room, say where they connected and if they all described the same land. I found a map leading to the underground and lost myself there and when I left the house the reek of dragons was upon the land again.
They say I slew the dragon but let it live too long in its dying. It bred a poison that infected the world. Goblins bred and planted our children in the fields surrounding their dens.
I reached down and touched my daughter’s hand, then lifted it lightly. She flinched as her innards grated against the stake. She had no spells to save us and I no killing left in me.
Our goblin has taken our children. I know they are dead.
This story was brought to my attention by valued reader and commenter Indanth. It is an uplifting note on which to end the year. And more reason why one shouldn’t hate Gaiman just because he’s an insufferably talented bastige.
Here’s wishing a happy and healthy and serene New Year to all.
Yes, here is a very short story I wrote, derived from a impression of Robert Browning’s “A Death in the Desert”. Since that is a very long poem, obviously my impressions were of a specific point — ‘Was John at all, and did he say he saw?’ is the relevant line, and that’s the mystery of St. John the Apostle in brief.
Was John At All
by Gryffyd Eamonn Dempsey
They walked in from under a hot desert sky. The lobby inside was cool
and dim behind smoked glass windows. A counter directly in front of the main
entrance guarded access to corridors and doors beyond. A woman wearing medical
scrubs sat at the counter, writing. She looked up and smiled. "Hi there! And who
are we bringing in?"
"I found him on the old State Road," he said, tugging slightly on the
leash to present the dog forward of him. "Was out hunting." He tugged again to pull the
dog back from snuffling at the base of the counter.
"Such a cutie."
"Yeah. Well I took him home and fed him, took him to the vet yesterday."
The woman walked around the counter. She squatted in front of the dog,
who sat down on the man's foot. "Did he have any identification?" She put one
hand out for the dog to sniff, then felt along its withers.
"No. No tags. Nothing on the scan. No collar or nothing even. So he
says, the vet, I should bring him by the shelter, see if anyone reported a lost
dog of similar description."
"Well that was really kind of you to go to all the trouble and care for
him so. I'm sure that such a beautiful boy has a home? Hmm, don’t you? Are your
peoples worrying about you? Don’t worry, for sure we'll find you a home right away."
She ran her fingers through his thick, long coat. Her voice modulated from sweet to
soft. "He looks like a purebred golden retriever. Such beautiful, friendly dogs."
She scratched him under the chin.
The man cleared his throat. "Well, I was thinking that if no one's reported him
gone, then I'd like to keep him."
"Of course! You'll have first dibs." She ran her fingers through the fur over
its brisket, parting it as if looking for fleas.
"Some owners have a bar code put on their dogs. If he's unmarked and doesn't match
any missing reports, why then he's yours."
The man kneeled beside the dog and scratched his head as she searched his chest.
The dog's tail thumped on the linoleum floor. "Weird," she said. "Take a look at this." The
man shuffled on his knees to her side. She held the fur out of the way with one hand.
Beneath, on a shaved or depilated patch of skin near the breastbone, was a small
tattoo. It showed the head and upper body of a robed man. The details of the
face were crude, as if unimportant, but clearly outlined were the man's halo,
a book he held in one hand and a cup in the other; over one shoulder hung a serpent
and over the other loomed an eagle. In the calm light of the lobby it looked
other-worldly and the woman leaned back as if she suddenly recognized it as evil.
"Yeah, weird," said the man.
The woman was silent for a moment, her happy disposition now displaced by
worry and fear. She looked around as if someone might be looking. "This is
some kind of crypto-catholic icon, I’m sure of it. I had heard that they tattooed
communion medals on themselves. I didn't know there were any around here anymore."
She stood and looked around again.
"Who would do that to a dog anyway?"
She shook her head and walked back, putting the counter between herself
and the dog and man.
"Maybe I should just take him with me now?"
She frowned, as if biting on her lip had pulled her scalp down. "I don't
think you want to invite trouble."
He shook his head.
"And I don't even want to think of what would happen if the people who
did this come in to claim him. I don't want to have anything to do with that. Do you?"
He shrugged.
"It's a slow day. No one's seen you come in. We're short-staffed anyway, so
we can be quiet about this." Her perkiness returned. "There's usually a euthanasia
fee for drop-offs, but I think we will just waive that since we're being hush-hush, right?"
She walked around the counter, took the leash from the man. "Come on puppy,"
she said brightly. She led the dog behind the counter. As they went through
one of the doors the dog looked back at the man. The dog’s brown eyes showed
white crescents of fear.
"Sorry, dog," the man said. "Don't say you saw."
-END-
I subscribe to the Discworld Monthly email newsletter, because I am exactly that kind of geek. I confess that I have stopped buying each of Terry Pratchett’s books as they are published in paperback here, but only because of a sense that I needed a break from them and could return once a bountiful backlog tempted me. Same with Iain Banks. Now I read in the DM that arrived today:
AN EMBUGGERANCE
Folks,
I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news. I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s, which lay behind this year’s phantom “stroke”.
We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism. For now work is continuing on the completion of Nation and the basic notes are already being laid down for Unseen Academicals. All other things being equal, I expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers. Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there’s time for at least a few more books yet :o)
PS I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as ‘I am not dead’. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think – it’s too soon to tell. I know it’s a very human thing to say “Is there anything I can do”, but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.
I went and confirmed the sorry news. Best wishes to Pterry, and here’s hoping for a cure that will ensure that he will continue writing for a great many years yet and I’ll never get caught up with the series.
In my youth in the corrupt capitals of European libertine diplomacy, I attended for some years the International School of Geneva. Here I will not dwell on my attempts to subvert the plots of Transnational Organized Crime, but rather to remember a day we were called to assembly.
On the Grande Boissière campus that I attended is a large and attractive Greek amphitheatre, called, selon la façon subtile des européens, the “Greek Theatre”. Normally this was used as a hang-out by students eating lunch, plotting coups, pulling hair, sharing needles; I especially remember endless games of soccer played on the floor of the theatre, using tennis balls, and the mouths of the stairs as goals. It is a trick to kick a tennis ball with force and accuracy. Adapting myself to this particular version of the game undoubtedly ruined my skills for the larger, internationally-recognized version of footy.
On the occasion of this solemn and unprecedented assembly, the pompous ass who was the headmaster told us that Indira Gandhi had that day been assassinated, and as she had attended the school decades before, we were to have a minute of silence. Now this was hardly the most tenuous of links, but it still smacked of self-aggrandizement. Benazir Bhutto probably deserves some moments of silence herself, and hopefully those who devote a few thoughts to her life and death today do so not just because of institutional attachments.
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