Whoosh! Boom! Pew! Pew! Boom!
Pohang had its annual fireworks festival tonight.
Last Rites For A Vagabond
My story “Last Rites For a Vagabond” has been published over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It’s about ghost-hunters, drugs, and making poor life choices. It’s neither “lovely” nor is it just a “good story”.
Here’s a snippet:
The dispensary was so organized it made my skin creep. Give me a hovel little better than a roofed-over hole and a crone with teeth as black as night. She’d hardly care what you bought or why; might even give you more if you spoke straight to her. No one likes a liar, but life forces you to it.
A Heap of Random Thoughts
Love books. Love reading. Don’t love a genre.
The fact that the number of SF authors who would have sex with their cats is not zero is disconcerting to say the least.
Ishmael Reed should be as popular Kurt Vonnegut.
You can judge how healthy a relationship is by how well its members can work together in a kitchen.
Heavy metal is good. Louder heavy metal is better.
Mental incontinence might be more destructive than mental incompetence.
Some folks are ignorant chuckleheads more in love with mansplaining and the sounds of their own voices than in actually saying something worth acknowledging.
The best thing about writing by hand is the sense of accomplishment one feels when one’s pen runs out of ink.
“He cried like some high school twerp screaming emo at the world because the mall’s book kiosk didn’t carry Naked Lunch.”
Some folks think of books as entertainment. I prefer to think of them as mind-altering substances.
Et al.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #126 is already available at Weightless Books for electronically inclined readers. The issue includes my story “Last Rites for a Vagabond”, which I’ll talk more about when the issue gets published later this week*.
And while you’re over at Weightless Books you might also want to check out Minions of the Moon and Dust Devils on a Quiet Street both by Rick Bowes, Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria, and Jim Nisbet’s Snitch World.
All of them are pretty great.
* When it’ll be free to everyone with an Internet connection.
Great Books, Great Thoughts?
“It is the notion that being exposed to the Great Books and the Great Thoughts must lead to Great Morals; unfortunately, we should probably be satisfied if it leads to a decent vocabulary now and then.”
– from Robert Sapolsky’s, The Trouble With Testosterone
Your Children Are Mutants
Seriously, they are.
Not only do they have warts, topical skin conditions, various physical tics, and other minor abnormalities, but their thought processes are different. They see things you don’t see. They hear things you don’t hear.
They think things you don’t think.
If its a physical thing, you might be in luck. Remember that kid in your class with the deformed ear, or the unsightly mole, or crooked teeth? Childhood is the great era of corrective surgery, braces, and the lasering away of unsightly blemishes. They’ve had that shit taken care – because doing so helps them blend in and walk among us with their weird, mutant thoughts.
It might be your world, but they’re adapting to it. And soon it’ll no longer be your world.
It will be theirs.
Today’s Question
Are you really taking a break from the internet if you don’t go online and tell everyone you’re taking a break from the internet?
And now your moment of academic propaganda…
Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
