A Harsh Mistress Indeed

A Harsh Mistress Indeed
by
Gabe Wollenburg

Don't give me any of that Blue-star bullshit. Terra's a completely broken economy built on a caste system of rich men and woman who eat and shit the peasantry. On Luna, we live hard and die young, and that's the way the loonies like it.

I ran my hand from my brow to the top of my head as if I was slicking my hair back as a matter of habit. A person could judge a Loonie's time in the grey by the way they adapted their unconscious movements to Luna's reduced gravity. I'd been here only six months. The old timers say that it takes at least nine before you even start thinking of Luna's reduced pull as an asset rather than a hindrance. By that time, living in reduced g has taken it's toll on your blood, and, without extensive therapy treatments, you've increased your personal likelihood of dying of stroke or heart failure. Which each additional month, the risks increased ten-fold. Gimmie two years on Luna, the old timers say, over ten years on Terra. On Luna, the old timers are 35.

I wonder when we stopped calling them "the Moon" and "The Earth." The only places on Luna that used the ancient nomenclature of "The Earth and the Moon" were small touristy shoppes and those little booths in the hipster districts that used the phrases of the old astrology "ironically."

Of course, it was one of those little tatoo booths where I'd met her. We smiled at each other while we waited our turn, flicking through the flash books. She spoke first.

"You know that the only people who get the brand are tourists," she said.

I swallowed hard to try to quash my immediate reaction to her approach, which was to turn and run. "I'm a Loonie," I said. I wasn't. I hadn't been on Luna for more than two days; I practically still had dirt caked under my nails. I didn't realize it then, but I probably wreaked of soil, too. It takes more than a few months of Luna's chemical showers to strip Terra's stink from your pores.

"Sure, you're a loonie," she said. "Don't lie to me. I can tell you're fresh."

I fumed at being caught in such a stupid and obvious lie, focusing my stare on the different brands I was toying with. "Why don't the locals get the brand?" I asked.

"Why advertise you're a loser?" she said, her face breaking into a grin.

I smiled back and relaxed almost instantly. She talked me out of getting branded and we went to a little noodle shop around the corner. That night she introduced me to Luna's secret treasure, not the black tarry compound that was mined from the lunar soil, but the crack-a-lackin', mind altering, reality-bending moon rocks. Smoked, stroked, injected or just placed under your tongue, moon rock was what brought the junkies to Luna. She'd spotted me for what I was from across the room.

"Further than that," she admitted later. "I've been following you since you landed at Tranquility."

"Tranquility?"

"The old name for Luna-Central." She sighed and stretched her neck. We were laying back to back on the bed of my rented efficiency apartment. I could feel the sharp corners of her vertebrae sticking into the flesh of my back. Her skin was cold and seemed to leach whatever warmth it came across.

"Some kind of old-school spaceman mumbo jumbo," she yawned. I sat up and she rolled over to look at me. "You wanna hit some more of that rock?"

I nodded.

She grabbed her makeup case from under the bed where she'd dropped it as we collapsed onto my bed, a writhing mass of prickly, erratic sexual lust and moon-dust. She unwrapped a rock from the packets of cellophane from the case, dropped it into a small glass tube, shook it a few times and then inhaled the dust from the tube. I snatched the tube from her as she fell back into the bed and snuffed up the rest of the dust. The rock's warm hug crept out of my ears and down my shoulders, wrapping me in a happy glow. I found myself back in bed, wrapped in the arms of by glowing, bony mistress, rolling along like Terra's oceans in Luna's steady pull.

"How did you get here?" I asked her. I was sitting on a chair across from the bed. it was the only other furniture I had int he room. I was wrapped in the yellowed sheet that had come with the bed and she was had wrapped herself in the bedspread, and was flipping through one of the free magazines that they had in the lobby of the apartment building.

"I came with you," she said.

"No," I said. "I mean Luna. How did you come to Luna?"

She looked up from the magazine and cut me with the sharp tone in her green eyes. "A moon-girl has her secrets," she said.

So, It would turn out, does the moon.

Probably not to be continued...

Editor's Notes:I wonder why I stopped writing this story. I think it was a hardware failure. I know I wrote at least two other chapters that aren't around anymore. Anyway, this is -obviously- a direct homage to Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." I remember wanting to take a crack at re-writing "Mistress" without the trappings of Heinlein's culture. I love Heinlein, but he was such a freakin' hippie. A big inspiration for this was drawn from The Hold Steady's "Separation Sunday" album, particularly "Your Little Hoodrat Friend.
Life is all about choices. Maybe one day I'll make the choice to pick this story back up. But, since it's here, it's released under Creative Commons, Attribution Non_Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license. That means, you, dear reader, have my leave to pick it up where it leaves off and finish it. All I want is credit, and-- if it's not too much to ask-- a chance to read what you've done.

A Patriot in Loonieland

Brand new fiction: A Writelarge.com exclusive.

A Patriot in Loonieland
by
Gabe Wollenburg

"So you're telling me that you come out here, night after night, to get mocked by college kids while you freeze your butt off, because of the love of woman?" I was incredulous. I knew that each and every one of the Men of Elizabeth II, the Loonies, had to have their own reasons for joining up and coming back night after night to patrol the great Canadian borderlands, but, honestly, love hadn't been one I'd expected to come across.
Robert Ralph, the 62 year-old combat veteran from the decades-past peace wars fought between the Americas, didn't fight to keep the Americans from crossing over into Canada illegally because of some strange love of his mother country, he did it because of a woman. Ridiculous!
"It's different than that." Ralph said.
"No. You just said. It was a woman."
"My ex-wife." he said. He glanced across the treeline and squinted, like he was trying to make out something in the cover of darkness. "You can't understand." he said, turning and walking back to the rear of his truck. He popped open the equipment box and rummaged around a bit while chewing on his cigar. "You're a Pat. You can't get it."
There it was. The argument that the Loonies would throw in my face at each and any chance they could. "I'm a documented Patriot, Ralph. I came over legally. For my angioplasty. I've got my papers. You know that."
"Yeah..., " he said slamming the gear box down and sliding his night-vision goggles over his head. "But you don't get it. We're a peace-loving people. That's bread into us. You Patriots think that the only thing that matters is 'liberty.' It's hard wired into your thoughts." He slid his ancient scanning goggles over his eyes and started adjusting the lenses manually. "You might have taken the naturalization courses, but inside you're still a red-white-and-blue patriot."
I stammered for a moment. Ever since they learned of my Naturalization, the Loonies never took me seriously. Never mind that I didn't really take them seriously either. I was about to complain about being unfairly stereotyped as some kind of jingoist when he spoke: "Well. Would'ja look at that." he said. He motioned to the south. "Check the peak just under the tall pine at 7 o'clock."
"What is it?" I asked, my pulse rate racing upwards.
"A flasher. I swear I can see a flasher."
I didn't see anything. "Are you sure?"
"Sure as shit," he said, walking closer to me and continuing to crane on the aperture on the goggle's eyepiece. "It's a goddamn DHS blinker."
"You want me to radio it in?"
'No." he said. "We need to get a little closer and check it out."
“That’s not protocol.”
“Sure,” Robert Ralph said. “But do you want get the whole fucking crew up here to chase some ghost?”
I wasn’t sure if he wanted me to answer.
“Obviously,” he said. “We need to confirm the flasher is really there before we call in a strike.”
“Obviously,” I mumbled. The thing was, Robert had been seeing spooks all night. Flashes of light in the distance that weren’t there. He wouldn’t usually say anything, but I could tell by watching his eyes, the way they’d dart from one place to the next, and the way his breath would stop and start when he thought he’d caught something. They say the flash weapons that the guerrilla Patriots had used on the Canadian Peacekeepers left many of the Canadian soldiers who were exposed to them with erratic vision, cursed to a lifetime of nighttime floaters and sparking twinkles haunting their peripheral vision.
We both slunk down the hill, leaving Robert’s truck unlocked behind us as we went, slowly picking our way along the dear paths that ran through tall grasses that grew along where the forest line met the roadway. I absently projected the suspected flasher’s distance into my GPS uplink, knowing that once went into the forest treeline any hopes of orienting ourselves visually would otherwise require shimmying up a tree.
“You mind if I ask you something?” Robert asked as we walked. “What would your Uncle Sam think of you now?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, why would a Patriot like yourself refuse to go home after his surgery. What made you ask for asylum? You have some kind of secrets?”
I shrugged. “No. Not really,” I said, hoping the conversation would die there.
“So what is it then?”
“Look.” I said. “I got into country legally. I’m an ex-pat.” I said. “An ex-pat. I won asylum the same as anyone.”
“But why did you ask for asylum in the first place?” he pressed.
I sighed. “It’s not what you think.” I said. “Besides, we were talking about you. About your girl?”
‘My ex-wife,” he corrected. “And before I get back to that, I gotta know where you’re coming from, Pat. I gotta know.”
I stopped following Robert for a moment, I listened to the gravel scrape and crush under my Canadian Peacekeeper Paratrooper Boots. “Do you put all your new partners through this?” I asked.
Robert stopped walking too, and turned to face me. “Look. The Rancher vouched for you. So you must be Ok. I trust him. And Pauly Toronto said that The BlueJay said you were good people. That’s two sources. So you must be on the up-and-up. But what I don’t get is, why would a good American like yourself come up here in the cold of night to fight off your former countrymen. What makes you think you need to play a part in keeping your fromer countrymen rom smuggling drugs from our pharmacies and bringing their dirty American diseases and righteousness over into our land of peace and prosperity?”
He was somewhat shorter than I, and had to look upwards slightly to look me in the me right in the eye. “What would make blue run right out of your red-white-and –blue blood, son?”
We sized each other up, then, for a molment. He was rugged and angry looking. His phase-weapon dangled from his belt hook and there was a scrape of carmex crusted around the edge of his tight lips.
“Love it or leave it,” I said. “So I left it. I don’t’ have an Uncle Sam.”
Robert smiled, and started walking away. “That’s what I wanted to hear son.”
“Robert, wait.” I said. He kept walking. I jogged a little to catch up to him. “Robert. I need you to stop walking now.” I said, desperate. “I know about the blinker.”
Robert stopped and turned to me again. “What?”
“The blinker. I saw its signature when I ran my first frequency sweeps of the area. It’s really there.”
“What are you getting at, Patriot?”
“I need you to put your hands in the air where I can see them, Robert.” I said, pointing my shooter at him.
Robert stammered. Looking around wildly. “Is that a goddamn shooter?” he asked, is voice climbing.
“It’s a sparkler,” I said of the flash-weapon. “I don’t want to use it on you, though, Robert. Just put your hands in the air.”
Robert looked over my shoulder and back up at his truck on the top of the hill. His vision must have not been as bad off as he made it seem, because he clearly spotted my compatriots who had quietly slipped in and were securing the loonies’ patrol zone as I marched Robert toward the blinker decoy.
“You’re a goddamn patriot spook,” he said, lunging at me with the phaser that hung on his utility belt.
I pressed the discharge on the shooter, blinding Robert with seventeen photon bursts tuned to a frequency that he couldn’t ignore, but I had been conditioned to. The sparkler shut his brain down and dropped the combat vet out cold. I picked him up and started lugging him back up the hill to the rest of the American special forces which were quickly clearing away Robert’s truck and any sign that the two of us had ever been there. It was a good thing they were nearly done because the sparkler discharge was certain to attract the rest of the loonies quickly, if not the full blown mounted police. It was time to scramble.
"I'm sorry, Robert," I said to his unconscious body as I dragged him into the woods. "My Uncle Sam is sick. She needs medicine. That's what would cause a man to turn on his country. My baby can't wait around."

[Download as PDF]
[Google Doc]

All the write moves

This mostly true short-story was originally published as part of the WriteLarge Podcast on Sept. 16, 2006.

All the write moves
by
Gabe Wollenburg

I went in to this pretentious bookstore in Brookfield; you know, the one with three names and an extra middle initial? That's the one. So, There is was, trying to buy a journal. And I'm looking through them, And they all suck. They all suck.
So there is this girl looking thought the journals with me. I pick up of the journals with a Superman drawing on the cover, just because it seemed cool. Inside were all these crazy Superman drawings, spattering up the paper with cartoons and onomatopoeic explosions. Oh yeah, that'll help clear out the ol' writer's mind. Nothing like lavish distractions actually embedded into your blank page. Obviously, this was not a good journal. And so I put it down, and say, “Whoa! Yuck.” and the girl next to me starts to laugh.
“What's wrong?” she asks.
“That's a terrible journal.” I say.
“Why?”
“Well look at it,” I say.
She picks it up and says, “It must be for little kids.” She puts the Superman journal down. “What are you looking for?” she asks.
“A journal-- A nice ringed notebook.”
“Yeah. I like a ring bound notebook. It makes them easier to write in.” she says.
“Yeah. You can fold them.” I say. “I'll probably just go to Target, That's where I got my last one.”
“But the paper in those is no good,” she says.
“Yeah, but look at the covers on these...” I say.
“What’s wrong with them?”
“Well, don't take this the wrong way, but all of these are... well...girly.” Her blank stare tells me she didn't understand.
"Look at this one," I say, pointing to the bottom row. Pointing to what would be a great notebook, except that it's yellow, and has little pink ribbons on it, and little pink icons of gardening tools.
“And this one,” I say, handing her a journal with a cartoon kitty kat playing with a mouse on its cover.
“And this one,” I say, handing her another journal, this one the color of a speckled bird egg and criss-cross tied with a pink ribbon.
"Oh." she says. She hands me the one she had been holding when I arrived. “Here. This one has a typewriter on it.”
The book she hands me has a nice feel, a good size, and the paper is thick, and acid free. The artwork on the book is a little picture of a typewriter-- it's lame, but at least its not overstated.
“This is nice,” I say.
She smiles.
“I think I'll take it.”
“Good” she says.
I turn to leave, but then something causes me hesitate. I feel the tiniest pang of guilt as I realize that this girl might have picked this journal out for herself. “Listen,” I say. “What is your name?”
“Heidi.” she says.
“Thanks. I'll put your name in my new journal. So I'll remember you.”
And her eyes light up to match her huge smile, and she says, “Oh, thank you...” as I turn and leave.

Production Notes and Commentary

This story is a short and mostly true. Certainly I took some liberties with the description of the hideous journals that were actually for sale at Harry W. Schwartz that day, but it emotion, all of it, including the callous indifference the author had toward the woman at the bookstore, is reals. For reals, yo.I still have the journal. I have all my old journals, so that shouldn't suprise you. And this story, in its original format, is taped to the inside cover of the journal. Just like I told the girl. I have no idea if her real name is Heidie or not.

The Writelarge podcast was produced, written, edited and voiced by Gabe Wollenburg, which am me, and hosted on the mighty Archive.org.

[Download the PDF.]
[Download the 128 kbps mp3]

Allica and the Chalk Blue God

College is a hard time. You walk around believing you know everything, only to discover that after you graduate, you don't know anything. This story is reminiscent of the former, but hints at the later, and is, arguably, the best thing I wrote when I was in college. Is it indicative of my current work? No, Not at all.
But I can't believe I never shared it here.

Chalk Blue God

This story was originally released as part of the Writelarge Podcast, which is graciously stored at the Magical Internet Archive.
[Podcast Part One]
[Podcast Part Two]
[Podcast Part Three]
[Podcast Part Four]
[Podcast Part Five]
[Original PDF]

Love Songs are for Suckers

On Labor Day of 2006 I sat down with the intention of composing, editing, recording and publishing a short story about relationship between love and heartbreak. This story was first published at The Internet Archive.

Description: In the Future, the Milwaukee Police Department's IS director is probably using his VPN connection to spy on himself.

Here's the text, too.

“Love Songs are for Suckers“
By Gabe Wollenburg

Stan Fillipo rubbed his fingers together, hoping to knock the cheese crumbs from them. In his head, he knew that Rebbecca had been gone only a few hours, but it felt like forever. It felt like days that he'd been sitting in his laptop chair, meandering away across the internets while flipping though the high cable channels. She'd left in a huff-- a righteous huff. She'd packed up the dog, Little Billy, and a bag of her belongings and left without explaining anything. He fought his urge to chase after her, that was what he wanted to do, though. He knew from experience though that it didn't help. If he chased after her he'd just delay her return; making a scene outside in the parking lot would only escalate the situation.
She'd be home soon enough. She usually didn't stay away so long though. And she'd never taken the dog before. Stan plowed through a whole bag of O-ke-doke while he sulked in his laptop chair waiting for her.
She was really pissed. Really pissed. She had every right to be. He'd smoked four bowls-- four bowls!-- on his way home. Well, waiting to come home. Well, before he'd come home. Brian, his long-time high school buddy and apartment manager, kind of made him. Stan meant to go, but Brian kept packing 'em up, and that damn steam roller that Brian had at the bar just kept the smoke rolling. Then the two had stumbled and bumbled their way home in a haze of giggles and goofiness.
When Stan got home it was 3 a.m. -- where did the night go?-- and Rebbecca was standing at the door waiting for him. He knew he was in trouble, just from the look on her face. She pushed past him through the apartment door, the little dog tucked under her arm. He stood and watched dumbly as the door closed and then the building door slammed behind her. He didn't turn to look but listened to the dog chirp worried little barks from under her arm as she trudged down the snowy alleyway to the parking lot outside their bedroom. Stan didn't move, still looking at the back of the apartment door as he listened to Rebecca's car turn over and rumble past the bedroom window. He'd been meaning to take the old Chrysler in for muffler work for weeks.
He stood by the door then, afraid to move and break the spell, clinging to the idea that he could somehow deny that any of this was happening. After a few minutes listening to the apartment building's creaky night sounds, his feet got tired.
He sat down in the chair next to his laptop, figuring he had to do something. He logged into the computer and toyed with the idea of sending a trace on her vehicle locater box, or calling some of his cop buddies and having her stopped and interrogated. He dismissed the Milwaukee PD dispatch remote browser that he'd impulsively launched and decided that not only would getting the cops involved aggravate the situation but would probably end up getting him fired from his cushy job as the dispatch sysadmin. No, there was no reason to call the cops. He instead clicked over to the internets and mindlessly browsed the news aggrigators, trying to push back the rising sense of desperation welling in his belly.
That was what seemed like hours ago. He'd since pounded through the entire bag of cheese popcorn and had watched half an infomercial on some kind of miracle mopping robot that reported detailed data on the filth found on your floor back to a central database. For $45, the mop's makers could send you a report “with over 99% accuracy“ about what sort of shit your family was pulling behind your back. Nobody trusted anybody, Stan lamented. The word was an unsafe place-- it really was.
What if Rebbecca was in an accident? She shouldn't be driving around upset after dark. It was dangerous. And the snow made it worse. He imagined her car flipped over, rolling down one of the hills along Lafayette Place. He'd seen that happen before. And she'd certainly take Lafayette Place from their apartment. A coyote or something could cut in front of her and then she'd go over the edge. If she was lucky, she'd hit one of the benches or a stop sign and only end up with a serious injury. Usually, the cars that slid over that railing tumbled for a quarter of a mile down into the tennis courts at the bottom. She'd flip at least five times before she came to a rest and the police would find her body mangled and broken, covered in broken glass and blood streaming down her face., coming from a raw clump of meat and hair above her scalp line He saw Rebecca's face in his mind's eye, peppered with chunks of broken glass from the windshield and swollen from crying as she drove. He clicked up the dispatch application on his laptop again. the client loaded across his desktop. Stan stared at the dialog's crawling ellipsis that followed the loading screen as client made its network connections to the downtown police shop. Query... handshake... authentication...
His fingers were numbed with panic as he typed his ID into the launcher app. The dog would have been thrown from the car who knows where and if they'd find the little guy. The Launcher app rejected his credentials. Wrong password. his fingers flashed out the password across his laptop keyboard again. Rejected. He must be typing it wrong, he thought. He took his hands off the laptop. He shouldn't be panicking anyway. She was fine. it was a serious breech of ethics for him to check the dispatch data stream for his own information. It was probably best that he didn't get his password out correctly.
His mind flashed to an image of Rebecca's blond curls rolling across an ambulance stretcher, dangling down and spilling across the edge like a broken telephone handset. He saw her, a linen draped from head to toe, Little Billy still tucked under her arm.
He was the only one who'd know if he was tapped into the data stream, his mind snapped back to the living room. He could just edit the logs in the morning and no one would be the wiser. The PD would have to ask him to analyze it if they ever investigated anyway-- and besides, there were several journalists in the city who tapped the dispatch feed twenty-four seven using licitly obtained detective's codes. His fingers fluttered across the keyboard again, this time putting the pass code in correctly. The dispatch browser popped up and he quickly scrolled through the last few hours worth of reports. The usual gunshots, street violence, a few UFO sightings-- that was weird-- but no accidents. None that matched Rebecca's beat-up Chrysler, anyway. He pushed his palms into his eyes and leaned back into his chair.
He must have fallen asleep, although he swore he'd closed his eyes for only a moment, but little billy startled him by jumping into his lap and trailing along behind him was Rebbecca. She was still cross with him, her furrows told him as much.
“What the fuck?” she asked as she spotted the dispatch log rolling across his laptop. “Are you fucking spying on me?”
He tried to blinked the sleep from his eyes and then sheepishly realized it was cheese-scum from the O-ke-doke. “I was worried you were hurt.” he croaked.
“Nice.” she said. “Nice that you can fucking log in and spy on me. Why don't you just hack into my LoJack next time and bring the car home forcibly.”
“It's not like that,” he grumbled.
“Well, you can thank your fucking dog. He's the one who wouldn't let me leave.”
“I was worried, I thought you were hurt.”
“Now you fucking know.”
Stan tried to rub the crud from his eyes again. “Know what?”
“What it's fucking like to wait around wondering where the fuck you are.”
Stan ignored the pronoun trouble in Rebecca's statement. He knew what she meant. “I know.”
“So you fucking just had your cop buddies spy on me?”
“No.” he said. “No. It's not like that. I was just watching the dispatch stream. You know what?”
They caught one another looking into the others eyes for a moment.
“Never mind. You're right,” he said. “You're right. I'm an ass. What do you want?”
“I want you to tell me when your fucking coming home! And then come fucking home when you tell me when you're fucking coming home.”
“You could have just called me. My communicator was on.”
“I shouldn't have to. You should just fucking come home at a reasonable time.” She shouted. “And without the stench of illicits on you,” she added. “Jesus. You work for the fucking Police, remember?”
“Who do you think sold it to me?“ he shouted back. They were going to have a big fight now, now he could feel it.
“Don't raise your voice at me.”
“I'm not.” he had. “I mean. I didn't want to.”
His eye caught the dispatch logs flickering across the terminal.
“Look,” he said.
She glared at him.
“Look. One of the neighbors just called us in,” he said, quiet now.
“Seriously?”
The fight dissipated.
“Yeah.” He leaned over the laptop and put a trace on the data stream.
“Can you see who it was?” she asked.
“Already looking...”
The data stream flowed in at real-time while the dispatcher processed the call. Stan had only logged into ASCII feed; it was the one that took up the least bandwidth. “It looks like ...” he said, trying to mentally recall the telephony id's from the network box in the apartment complex's router in the basement. The trace popped up across the screen before he could recall for himself.“
“It's Brian.”
“What?”
“It's fucking Brian. The logs say someone from his apartment called in a noise complaint. Domestic squabble, the dispatcher noted.” Stan clicked away the trace and then put a dismissal script on the incident. The script would delete it from the cue before it got assigned. A low level noise complaint wasn't going to get sent straight out to the beat cops very quickly. Fuck it. Nobody would ask. He was saving the cops from coming out unnecessarily. The beat cop would probably thank him if he knew.
“We so have to move,” she said.
“I know. I'm sorry.”
“Fuck your sorry,” she said. “Just don't do it again.”
He stood from his chair and grabbed her. She was short so he had to lean over to hug her properly. She hugged him back. He really was sorry. He sobbed into her shoulders. “I'm so sorry,” he sobbed; “so sorry.”
“You're getting cheese crud all over me,“ she said.

Origins of Shame

Origins of Shame is a coming of middle-age story about a superhero who I created in partnership with the good Tryke Kemnitz, who I'm sure won't mind me sharing some of these stories with you. The world that Tryke and I created involved a Midwestern branch of the Justice League, which was really a training ground/high school for "Metropolitan" heroes-proper. Tryke has the rejection letters from DC somewhere. If the story sounds familiar, Your thinking of Disney's "Sky High". A lot of that movie was pretty much exactly what Tryke and I created 15 years prior. That happens sometimes. It happened to tyke and I often. Keith Geffen, I'm looking at you.

“Origins of Shame” was always supposed to be a story about depression, although I didn’t know it when I wrote the first part of the story. Originally, the third part was a third-person telling of Gordy catching a burglar, but bungling it and falling off the roof and screwing up an undercover investigation.

Also, watch for the names of some of the other famous characters who went to the same college as Gordy. Cameos! Of people you’ve never heard of! Fun!

Origins of Shame

This story was originally Podcast in three parts on Writelarge.com.

The Patron Saints of Planet Video

Here's a short (less than 550 words) piece I wrote when I was very active in an online flash fiction workshop. It's an marginally absurdest look at the Golden Era of videocassette rentals.

The Patron Saints of Planet Video
By
Gabriel D. Wollenburg

John Belushi leaned down and spoke directly into the adolescent boy’s ear. “C’mon, kid. I don’t got all day.”
“Forget it, John,” Whoopi said.
“Yeah,” said Jim. “The kids, they don’t go for that intellectual stuff you did in your day.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Carrey?”
“Well, it’s just that, kids, man, you know... They like the low brow stuff,” said Jim, looking at his feet.
“You’re calling me heady?”
“Well, John,” said Whoopi, “be honest with yourself.”
“I am being honest. How the hell is: ‘I’m a zit, get it?’ heady?”
“Heady stuff, John, heady stuff,” said Whoopi.
John turned his attention back to the kid, who had narrowed his choices down to two: Animal House, or Liar Liar.
“Come on kid...” John whined.
Whoopee and Jim folded their arms and shook their heads. The kid placed the two boxes next to one another on the shelf. Looking back and forth between the two. Animal House; Liar Lair.
Animal House; Liar Liar.
John crouched down to the kids eye level, squatting just inches from the boys face.
“Come on kid. I’ll make you a deal,” spoke John, staring directly into the kid’s eyes. “Animal House will change your life forever. I promise you.”
“John...” said Jim. “Let it go man, don’t beg him. Have some dignity.”
John stood up, and turned to face Jim.
“That’s not begging, Carrey. Are you looking for a fight?”
Jim said nothing, instead, shrugged and gestured John’s attention back to the kid.
The kid grabbed one of the boxes with both hands, and turning to face his mom, he shouted: “Can we get this one, Mom?”
“Yes!” shouted John, pumping his fist in the air, “Yes! Yes!”
Jim and Whoopi continued to watch the mother. “Animal House?” the mother asked. “I don’t know-- What about Jim Carrey? You like him; he’s funny.”
“Ok,” The kid said, exchanging the video box in his hand with the one he had placed on the shelf earlier.
John’s jaw hung open.
“Thank you very much,” said Jim, walking over to the woman, putting his arm over her shoulder. Jim explained the video stores rental policy to the woman as he walked her away from the video wall. Jim whisked the woman and kid off to the front desk, through check out,
and was gone.
John punched his fist against the wall of videos, “Dammit!” he fumed. “Dammit!” Hr sat down on one of the shelves of videocassettes.
“Dammit,” he said quietly to himself, and shook his head slowly.
Whoopi came over and sat down next to him. “Its OK John,” she said. “Just have faith. You gotta have faith. People still believe in you John.”
“It’s Aykroyd’s fault, isn’t it?” John asked, still shaking his head.
“Maybe, John. But I think that there’s more to it than that.”
“I guess it could be worse.”
They both paused and scanned the video store, looking from patron to patron. Across the aisle, they watched Shelly Long pleading with a young couple, following them, on her knees, holding a copy of the Money Pit, crawling, and calling to them, “Come on! You like Tom
Hanks! It’s Tom Hanks!”

This is “The Internovel.”

The Internovel, a 10,000 word, dialog-based novella, is set in the transitional space between the ASCII internet of 1992 and the HMTL Internet of 1997. I wrote it in the spring of 1996, and you really need to consider it my version of “my shitty college art film.”

The Internet was a funny place in 1994. The World Wide Web was being used to do cutting edge things like allow people to keep track of the levels of coffee in a pot in a computer lab in England. Dial up services that were not AOL typically offered users the option of using a Terminal-based interface, and PPP or TCP was a luxury that often required a special login and administrative permission. It was a text-based Internet. – But change was coming. ASCII was giving way to Hypertext. That’s the world this novella was composed in, and the world it was composed around.

It was never meant to be a period piece, and I have resisted the effort to go back and make it so.  I share it today as a time capsule of the Internet as it affected a Midwestern college town in the Spring 1994.

It’s probably not fair to call it good writing, and in fact, the novellas near total lack of narrative was a thought experiment I was playing with. I was hoping that by working only in dialoged I could blur the line between  textual, electronic, immediate, and delayed conversation.

Today’s computers, high speed connections, multi-core processors and always-on-Internet life-streams make fifteen years ago seems so far away now-- and so foreign.
Because they is.

The Internovel

NightSwimming

In honor of International Pixel-stained Techno-peasant Day I'm releasing this new short-story on this here blog.

This is a short story originally written for Matthew Wayne Selznick's sidelined Wordhouse Anthology project. The idea was to pick a song you loved and write a story that captured some of the images and feelings from the song. I wrote "Nightswimming" based on the R.E.M. song.

The story is hosted at Scribd.

It's released under the usual terms.