Finally, I get the urge to write another short story. It is very short, I must say, but at least its a sign of life from the blog. It’s called Kinetic Still Life and can be read here
There have been a few complaints from my more near-sighted readers that reading the white on black theme puts a strain on their eyes, so in response I have decided to redesign the page to a white on black theme. I also decided to widen the theme in acknowledgement of the growing screen resolutions of the standard web user. If you dislike the new theme for some reason, please feel free to leave a comment about it, and I’ll flame you for it.
A new short story has been posted to the text section. Not one to make you all cheerful perhaps but not all stories are meant to be. It’s called The Sailor.
A new little short story has been posted to the blog now which has stood still for some time now, I know. The reason has been that I am trying to finish first draft of my novel by sometime December and this means some degree of focus, I’m afraid. But here is another revolting little idea of mine that people with no taste whatsoever might enjoy. It can be read here.
So, I received quite a bit of spam today on a site that I work with. This was in no way surprising but the topic of my spam was. I mean, I expect someone to attempt to sell me Viagra using spam or to convince to increase my… size (how do they all know?! Who is telling everyone this?!) or anything that could be bought spontaneously or in a weak moment. Exactly for that reason I had not expected to be spammed into the ground by this guy selling… Grand Pianos. I know, you are thinking: how did that happen? How did someone decide to try and sell grand pianos using spam-mails? Well, it’s actually quite easy once you think about it.
I mean, imagine that you are waking up on a lazy Sunday morning and slowly you finish scratching yourself and tumble over to the computer. Now, it’s early in the month and you still have some disposable income and you are already considering how best to waste it – by no means excluding sordid options, by no means. You are open to any offer on pills, pumps and female shaped balloons and if someone told you about how you just won the special Bolivia Lottery for Former Llama Breeders, you would be ready to go nuts over that too. Instead, though, you are confronted with a series of staggering deals on Grand Pianos. So, rather than ending up with a suspicious but basically innocent bottle of blue pills that you will probably never use until you are at some poor souls bachelor party and use it to spike his drink, you end up with a three meter long, black grand piano that you somehow squeeze in between the back wall and the front door of your apartment just as you realise that you can’t even play the damn thing. Right about this time a bottle of Viagra is beginning to sound pretty good.
So, what on earth do you do? Your apartment is completely ruined by this majestic, black monster of a musical instrument that shouldn’t by all rights even have been able to get into your apartment in the first place. There really only is one thing to do – you have to sell the damn thing. So, then you start trying to get the spammer to take it back, but he is a spammer – no way. He probably lives somewhere in Africa or China where he mass-manufactures Grand Pianos in small sweatshops and then smuggles them all to the west using very obese humans for mules (it’s the only way known to successfully smuggle a grand piano). Then what? You try to contact friends and relatives on Facebook but no-one needs a grand piano or they are too embarrassed to admit that they do. Using Ebay only gets you banned from the site for selling that sort of illicit product.
So, what can you do? Only one answer: you set up a mail-server and you start spamming people with offers on Grand Pianos. With the awesome power of the spam-mail at your side, soon your piano is sold, but then it happens. Offers keep coming in on the damn piano even after it’s sold and it’s just too darn tempting. Before long you are trying desperately to import a batch of “genuine” Steinways from some guy who supposedly is named “Nick” and lives in Boston but still for some reason prefers to send his Grand Pianos from Porto Alegre using a small, fat Mexican named Pedro who has an uncanny amount of room up his backside.
For a moment everything is well and money is just pouring in but then Pedro gets caught burping up sequences of Mozart’s 21st piano concerto in C major right as he is passing through the toll at Amsterdam. Suddenly, you find yourself a wanted man and fleeing through Europe desperately dragging your last genuine Baldwin SD-10 Concert Grand Piano behind you in a thin rope hoping to sell it at a bar in Marseilles for a boat ticket to Buenos Aires. Much later, retired and living with your much younger wife – a once-beautiful and famous concert pianist who never could give up the habit and married her pusher – you tell small children on the small market square on Sundays how you were once a big-shot, a major player during the legendary days of illicit grand piano smuggling at the very beginning of the century. They, of course, don’t believe a word of what you say.
And really, who wants that?
I thought I had better breathe a bit of life back into the blog. I have been gone for the last months for two reasons: I decided that I needed to focus on getting my novel back on track and then that I also had to do a bit of work to earn money for staying alive and such minor details. This has kept me a bit busy, but now I am back to give you a new, strange short story. A short story about time travel, money and sudden friendship. A must read for all who have just built a time machine and are thinking of using it! Read it here!
“Life is like a box of chocolates” – Forest Gump (or actually, his mother)
Admit it, you all thought it when you saw the headline, didn’t you? It’s the sort of sentence that really sticks if for no other reason then because of how often Forest Gump repeats it to us during the film (and probably the book). Of course, it really makes little sense. The punch line ”You never know what you’re gonna get” may be true about life, but it’s hardly true about a box of chocolates. You are almost certain to get chocolates out of a box of chocolates. Then, to be fair, the meaning of the metaphor is more along the line of how one cannot easily judge from the appearance of a chocolate how it’s going to taste. And so it goes to the element of seemingly random surprise that does sometimes seem to dominate life – at least it dominates the life of Forest Gump a lot – and the ability to enjoy it, whatever taste you receive. The sentence also seems to be what saves Forest Gump from the fate of Jenny, who symbolizes her generation much better in her restless idealism, drug abuse and finally to a too early demise. Forest on the other hand embraces passivity and lives exclusively in the moment, reacting to things that happen to him. So, to Forest, life is indeed a box of chocolates. It is hard, however, to claim the same for Jenny’s life. Her metaphor would most likely be “Life is life a broken ladder – one long disappointment”.
Well, when you write things that initially exist exclusively in your head (until you transform them into words and they somehow become living stories that annoy other people), you sometimes wonder about this sort of sentence. The life-metaphor. As it turns out, life it like a lot of things; chocolates, chess, a rollercoaster, a flower and so on. So, this got me thinking about a theme, I would do – a theme of things that life may or may not be in the hunt for something that life really isn’t. It’s harder than you think, finding something that life really isn’t. Here are a couple of attempts so far:
Life is like a nuclear bomb – it eventually kills everyone.
See? Who would have thought.
Life is like a giraffe, long and useless.
Life is like an iPad, at lot less than you would expect
Life is like money, something you never have enough of and always worry about
Life is like a cheeseburger, addictive and very unhealthy
Life is like a fossilised sea turtle shell, surprisingly ancient and yet seemingly pointless.
I will come up with more useful observations on this subject soon, I promise you.
So, it’s the New Year which often brings with it a disease of futile contemplation as to what the future brings. Since I already know this, I thought I would spare everyone the hassle. So here it is: the future revealed.
Alright, where to start. First of all the world does not end in 2012 no matter how the Maya indians felt about it. It turns out that whoever founded that theory really hadn’t spent more than a few minutes studying their calender system anyway. Instead the world ends in 2017 on an quite normal Wednesday for reasons unknown to all but the squirrel that causes it. And also, Elvis was in fact not dead, but he is kicked to death by a rampant mule just outside of Tulsa in 2015, no one will ever find out why.
Sports fans will be interested to know that international football will be dominated by Wales in the years to come, starting with a highly surprising win in the world cup 2010 where they aren’t even qualified to participate. The Super Bowl will eventually be acknowledged as the biggest single day sporting event, but only based on the average weight of players participating. Sumo wrestlers will continuously attempt to overturn this decision. Women football will be banned by law due to a dangerous epidemic of narcolepsy among its fans. Tiger Woods will make a remarkable comeback in golf but eventually be defeated by Kim Jong-Il who, much to the surprise of many, really is THAT good.
Those with an interest in politics will be glad to know that most politics still won’t make any sense in the future either. Oh yeah, and Norway implodes in 2014 due to what scientists describe as “a really bad case of having it coming”. I am not sure that is really political, but perhaps it should have been. The financial crisis will end the exact moment when people (on a particularly cold Monday) realise that the value of money is all made up anyway. Journalism will continue to deteriorate and write about it. There will be no more World Wars, but the earth will win a major strategic victory against The Moon in 2016. The war will be mostly fought on sea.
The next generations won’t have time to ruin everything, but it turns out that they actually would have, the punks. Finally, during 2010 (very early in fact) the misspelled word “teh” will permanently replace the word “the”. This will according to everyone born before teh year 1992 be considered teh end of teh world as we know it. To all of those people teh actually end of teh world in 2017 is considered a relief.
That is it – enjoy teh future everyone! And a delayed Happy New Year!
The vote was tight, and only thirteen minutes from the deadline was the outcome decided. I want to thank everyone who voted and I hope you will all enjoy this life confirming little tale of Christmas Spirit! A merry Christmas to you all and a happy New Year!
Most Christmas Carols end happily, but is that actually what the people want? Well, now we have the chance to find out! All you select few readers of my blog can now help decide the fate of a young boy named Toby, and his arch nemesis, the killer robot named Powner 3000 in this slightly unusual Christmas Carol that I have chosen to name A Democratic Interactive Christmas Carol. I beg you to take the time to read these few lines so that this undecided story can have its just finish!
And aside from this I wish you all a very merry Christmas!
