Novels

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Extra Body: Chapter 12

As Albert began the luxurious climb back to consciousness, he became aware that, during his sleep—a duration he didn’t yet know—Walter had indeed not finished unlocking the first lock on his door.  In fact, just after Albert had drifted off, Walter had found that his tension, his anger, his jealousy, and his hostility had all started to wane.  His nervous system quickly went from reckless agitation to a state of real calm, of equanimity.

Walter looked down at himself, kneeling before Albert’s door, holding and attempting to use a set of lockpicking tools he had once ordered from Amazon out of curiosity, but which he had never been able to master.  He pulled the torsion bar and the pick out of the lower lock, looked at them, and thought, “What am I even doing?” Continue reading →

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Extra Body: Chapter 11

Roughly an hour had passed since Albert had last left the bathroom.  He had eaten, and he had drunk his cup of coffee, and he was quietly scrolling through some of the stories on the Google news page, when a feeling of strange disquiet rather suddenly grew upon him.

He lifted his head from his contemplation of his home computer screen and looked around.  His small living space was fairly well circumscribed, and almost all of it was in view from any other point within it.  There really was no place for anyone or anything to hide—at least, nothing much larger than a spider or an occasional roach.

Nevertheless, he felt a sense of unseen threat, or at least some worry, developing.  He looked down at his forearms and was mildly surprised to see them riddled with goosebumps. Continue reading →

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Extra Body: Chapter 10

Albert awakened quite early the next morning, which wasn’t much of a surprise, considering that—as he now realized—he had gone to bed barely an hour after getting home from work and had fallen asleep not long after that.  At some point it seemed he had laid the book he’d been reading on his bedside table, though he didn’t recall doing so.

He looked at his bedside clock—a relic of sorts that he kept despite the fact that he could use his cell phone or computer for the same purposes it served.  It was just before six in the morning.  It was good that he hadn’t actually needed to get up in the middle of the night to check on the response to the question he was supposedly going to ask, based on what he had told Walter.  He had certainly not set any alarm. Continue reading →

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Extra Body: Chapter 9

Though he slept well—a fact that he relished, since he’d not always been a good sleeper, especially since his divorce—when Albert awakened, he didn’t have any new ideas about how to approach his situation.  He felt the pressure of being perched in the middle of a three-way conversation that was going at cross-purposes and at different speeds and that wasn’t easy to keep clear in his head.

He got up and took his shower pretty much as usual, deciding to use a bit of the shampoo from the newer, larger cup to wash.  He didn’t want to use too much, since he didn’t want to limit the surface on which the V-42 could write, but he felt it was good to test it, in a sense.  He didn’t really doubt that the reproduced—or new, or whatever you wanted to call it—shampoo was just as effective as the original, and that it would do the same good for him, but having the personal experience, he thought, would help him feel, rather than merely believe, that fact. Continue reading →

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Extra Body: Chapter 8

Albert was silent for the rest of the drive home, which was not terribly long.  He didn’t think anything clear or precise, just felt a vague sense of contemplation, something that he supposed was almost a Zen-like state.  He was a bit surprised that he was not more nervous than he was, but then again, he felt stronger, more confident, younger—those things had to affect his mental state and acuity, and not just in helping him remember JFK’s youthful medical issues.

Even if the shampoo didn’t directly influence his nervous system—and he didn’t see how it could affect it—just being healthier, feeling healthier, had to have knock-on effects that would improve other aspects of his health.  He thought that he recalled that he had been better at getting “into the zone” when he was younger, such as when he was studying in college. Continue reading →

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Extra Body: Chapter 7

That evening, as Albert was getting ready to leave for home, his phone chimed.  He looked at it and saw that it was Walter who, not waiting for Albert to call him, had decided to ensure the conversation and so had called Albert.

Slightly irritated, Albert accepted the call, not waiting for Walter to speak, and he said, “Hey, Walter, I’m just getting my things together to head out.  Let me call you from the car.  I can never seem to get the Bluetooth thing to connect right if I try to do it while I’m already talking to someone.”

In his turn, Walter also did not provide any pleasantries.  He simply said, “How long do you think it’ll be?”

This irritated Albert a bit more.  He could call Walter on his own time, when he wanted to call, and it was awfully presumptuous of the man to ask for time parameters.  Still, as he had reminded himself before, Walter had done him some real favors.  After a breath, he said, “Probably about five to ten minutes.” Continue reading →

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Extra Body: Chapter 6

When he got to his house and went inside, Albert felt hesitant to go into the bathroom and see if his second experiment had worked.  He took a bit of time changing out of his work clothes, turning on the TV, fumbling about with another microwavable dinner, and so on, but there was only so long he could put things off.  He had to use the toilet, for one thing, and he couldn’t put that off until work the next morning at the best of times.  He also needed to brush his teeth before bed, and then in the morning take a shower.  There was no way to avoid going into his bathroom, and so he went.

He walked into the small room and his eyes immediately went to the cup.  There, in it, was a modest amount of amber-orange liquid—and nothing else.  Albert looked at it, stopping where he was when he first saw it, though at that point his bladder was quite full.  He found that he was not surprised that there was more shampoo; he was past the point of disbelieving in the stuff, given what had happened.  But there was at least something about the situation that was a minor shock. Continue reading →

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Extra Body: Chapter 5

Albert decided to have his dinner before trying anything with the V-42, largely because he didn’t want to let himself get too excited.  It would be only too easy for him to try Walter’s idea and then sit and stare at whatever he threw together, hoping to see a change.  He wasn’t sure that he understood everything that Walter had been trying to communicate, but it seemed to him that, if bacteria and mold and yeast and the like could take food from their environments and make copies of themselves, it wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable for tiny, designed machines to do so.

Of course, he had to let himself accept that, even if Walter was right and the shampoo was actually a collection of numerous tiny devices, that didn’t mean they would copy themselves.  They might just be—what…programmed, designed?—to clean someone and smell nice and…well, and fix their appearance and health.  Even thinking about it seemed impossible, but he’d received so much positive feedback from people at work on his appearance, and Walter was also involved.  It helped him feel less that he might be going insane. Continue reading →

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Extra Body: Chapter 3

Albert left early for the lunch meeting on Sunday, eager and even slightly nervous about seeing his friend.  He’d had abundant energy the day before, so he’d gone for a walk, done some chores around his place, and gotten a head-start on his laundry, since he wasn’t going to be hanging around during the day on Sunday.  He had even gone to a small local restaurant for his dinner, by himself.

Ordinarily, he would have been a bit self-conscious, thinking it was pathetic for a fifty-year-old man (plus a few years) to be eating out alone on a Saturday night.  That night, though, he’d felt fine about it.  The evening air was pleasant, so he had walked to the restaurant, and he felt more than satisfied with the available options.  He enjoyed a glass of wine with his dinner, feeling only very slightly affected by it, and when walking back to his house afterward, he thought that, just maybe, his waitress had been flirting with him. Continue reading →

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Dreams of appreciation for one’s works in the past, present, and future

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting at the Tri-Rail station, waiting for the first train of the day.  I’m writing this on my cell phone, though I came within a jackrabbit’s breadth* of bringing my mini laptop back with me yesterday afternoon.  I even packed it in my backpack.  But then I decided that its added weight might give me trouble, since I was planning to walk back to the house from the train station.  I also had planned to bring one or two other things that might add to the usual weight of the backpack.

It turns out, though, that not only was I too tired/lazy to walk, but I also forgot to bring the few things for which I had foregone bringing the laptop.  So, that was entirely pointless, and now, here I am “typing” on my “smartphone”, waiting for the train to bring me most of the way to the office on a Saturday during what is technically a holiday weekend (in the US).  And, of course, I’ll go in on Monday more or less at the same time, since on Monday, the Tri-Rail will be operating on a Sunday schedule (which is also a Saturday schedule), since most sensible people will take the day off.  I mean, it’s Labor Day.

If there were ever proof needed that we have failed to protect the rights and well-being of workers in general, it’s the fact that most businesses and services are open on Labor Day.  Even many white collar workers probably work on Labor Day (though many lawyers may not, since courts and other government facilities are closed).

I used to feel pretty good about going to a rather meaningless job, because the whole point‒as I deliberately decided and told myself‒was simply to keep myself alive while I wrote my books.  But I’ve stopped writing my books now.  I never really wrote them for anyone but myself, of course, but it does eventually get discouraging when no one but family actually reads them (to a good first approximation, anyway, though there are one or two exceptions).

I don’t tend to be the sort of person who craves popularity for its own sake, but it really would be nice if more people read and enjoyed my stories.  I guess maybe I should share them all again on social media, perhaps for the last time, and maybe I’ll share my songs (my original ones, I mean) while I’m at it.  Why not?  One last desperate grab at passing driftwood seems like an appropriate act for a drowning man.

Heck, if I thought anyone would listen, I’d try to read more of The Chasm and the Collision out loud and post it up to YouTube.  I have the first nine or so chapters up there, and a couple of my short stories.  But I don’t think anyone (but I) has listened to them.  They have fewer “views” even than some of the videos of my original songs or even the covers I’ve done.

Again, I do these things mainly for myself, not to pursue some dream of fame and fortune.  Nevertheless, one does sometimes sputter to a halt when one is not merely alone in day to day life but receives no significant interest in one’s best, most creative products.  It may be a fine thing to “dance like nobody’s watching”, but it’s less great to write like nobody’s reading, especially when it’s almost literally the case that no one is reading.  Ditto for writing and/or playing music.

If I were a painter, after a while, it would become discouraging to keep painting if no one wants any of the works.  I can completely sympathize with Van Gogh for shooting himself.  And while I am glad he did a lot of painting before that‒I think his pictures are often deeply beautiful and unique‒I recognize that the fact that he is revered now is of absolutely no benefit to the man as he lived his life.  There is no Doctor Who, “Vincent and the Doctor”, episode in real life to give a past figure‒Van Gogh, Herman Melville, whatever other famous-after-death artist one might consider‒a chance to know that, though unappreciated in life, the artist would eventually be recognized as someone who did something that would bring joy to many people.  For a real person, there is only what happens during one’s life.

Getting famous only after death is almost a form of tragic irony.  It’s not common, though.  I think it’s more common for one to be relatively successful and famous in one’s lifetime and then be forgotten than the other way around.  But many truly great creative artists‒Shakespeare, Picasso, Dickens, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Steinbeck, Tolkien‒were revered in their time and are still revered now.

I don’t quite know what point I’m trying to make.  Maybe just that there is no long-term point.  Or, maybe it’s a variant of the Woody Allen joke that he doesn’t want to achieve immortality through his work, he wants to achieve immortality through not dying.

But I don’t think it’s pointless to be respected (for one’s work) after death; I think it’s actually kind of wonderful to think that future generations might love and admire one’s work.  But it would be especially beneficial if they had also done so during one’s lifetime‒some of them, anyway.

The future admiration of the world is probably just as ephemeral as is such admiration during one’s lifetime‒since, compared to infinity, any finite amount of time, no matter how large, is vanishingly, unnoticeably tiny, and is always unreasonably close to the beginning of any counting of time‒but it is almost certainly the case that being honestly appreciated for one’s work during one’s life is a wonderful thing, all else being equal.

I don’t know how I got on that subject; perhaps I’ll figure it out when I read and edit this before posting it.  Whatever the case, I hope it was mildly entertaining for you.  Feel free to follow the links to my books or to my Amazon author page, or to my YouTube “topic” page where my original music is, or to my personal YouTube list if you want to hear my “covers” and a few raw originals, if all that seems as if it might be somewhat interesting to you.  And please try to have a good weekend, holiday or no holiday.

Thank you.

*Get it?