Mother teases as the seasons creep.

Mother teases as the seasons creep.
She knows what she wants, and she can’t help but give glimpses
of the fires that bellow below her crusted coverings.

Ragged tufts of green poke between the crusts and cracks.
A bountiful bust of blossoms stands between the stations.

Can the turning of seasons come so closely to the deeps of winter’s despair?

That is not ours to say.
But it is ours to hope.
 
We hope
and hope
and hope some more.

Life waits between the peaks and valleys. Fire strikes at the midpoint, snuffing desolation with its bawdy smolder. Its flames belch dance and song, bread and wine.

It is springtime, and it comes again.

Feb. 2, 2010 \ Read it on Scribd \ Photo attribution

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."

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Sometimes, I just can't believe that @AsheDryden puts up with Pete and Me. Well... me.

Anyway, I've agreed to take on the title of "T-Shirt Czar" for Barcamp Milwaukee 4. This is a thankless job, because it will be nigh impossible to follow in the footsteps of the mighty Mike Rohde, but the good news is that I'm not actually going to try.

Here's the thing: With the caliber of designers involved in Web414-- BarcampMKE's sponsor organization-- I can manage this T-shirt thing and hopefully let the designer do the design work-- let me run around making the phone calls and moving the data.
So watch this space for t-shirt contest ideas. If you're a hot-shit designer in the Milwaukee space, shoot me a note, because otherwise I'm going to end up designing the t-shirt and it will probably have skulls or birds or pirates on it. That's supposed to be discouragement, people.

Let the t-shirt ideas flow, friends. Lets go!

I’m probably the wrong person to talk to about electronic books. I actually read through a whole book on my fourth-generation iPod once, so I’m kind of dedicated to the idea.

The big deal for me is that, at night, I don’t like having a reading light. Seriously. That’s really the big deal for me. Everything else is worth putting up with if you can, at a minimum, read self-lighting material.

When I picked up my iPod touch, I was really excited to try out the Kindle App, and then subsequently disappointed on how little I liked it. Look, my intention was not to buy electronic books. It was to read my collection of electronic books.  It was _readable_ yes. And grabbing the sample chapters of books I was thinking about reading is neat and all, but it’s nigh-impossible to get my large books that I’ve been reading onto the kindle app, and it’s surprising how badly formatted they are when they get there.

So I looked around. I remember someone, probably Andy Ihnatko, singing the praises of Stanza’s iPhone App, so I tried it, grabbed a handful of books, and am now happy as a pig in mud.

Over the weekend, I finished Rudy Rucker’s “Postsinglar.” It’s about the singularity, and another singularity, and actually a few more singularities and the subsequent fallouts there from. If you love Rudy Rucker, you’ll love this  book. If you don’t love Rudy Rucker, it’s still pretty good. I find him a far more tolerable version of Neil Stevenson. Sci-Fi Nerds, Flame On.

Anyway, one of the many great things about Stanza is that it is automatically tuned in with feedbooks.com, which has as good a collection of electronic books as any I’ve come across. I’ve already downloaded more reading materials than I’ll get to months.

Which gets me to the question here: Why are book publishers so hung up on only _selling_ electronic copies of their books? I can go to a library and get just about any copy of any book I want to read. How is the Internet so different?

I love libraries. I really do. But the electronic books they have at the Milwaukee Public Library are so DRM ridden and locked down (YOU ACTUALLY HAVE TO CHECK THEM IN AND OUT (!!??!)) that they’re virtually non-options. I call them “untronic” books because as far as I can tell, they only exist to discourage the library from actually getting an electronic book distribution system that works. 

I’m invested in making a living off of writing and selling books. I really am. But I don’t understand how cutting out people who want to read, recommend and share your books on their terms fosters that goal.

If libraries want to remain relevant, and don’t become the second great institutional tragedy since the failure of the newspapers to adapt to the world where data is no longer scarce, they need to find away to make themselves into resources as great, if not greater, than services like feedbooks or even the DRM-riddled Amazon Kindle service.

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

I'm about 30,000 words into my final edit of the first draft of my novel "Someone Liche You" and I came across a passage that really nails one of my characters, so I thought I'd share it with you guys:

The other thing Gregor loved about the junk mine was that he'd manged to keep it entirely biotronic free. It was all old tech in here. Slow, unreliable, old tech-- but if it broke, he could take it apart and fix it. He didn't have to grow replacement parts in a dish. Nothing in his junk mine skirted that weird line between living thing and vacuum cleaner.

one more time

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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.

Duhh!
I don't know why I never thought of this before.
I embedded the Origins of Shame story hosted on Scribd into the Origins of Shame page here at Writelarge.com.
There is also a local .doc file here, but I've been struggling with how to better present the stories here on Writelarge. This just about foots the bill.

You'll need Flash to read the embedded file (Sorry Larry) but it's a decent player and nicely PDF-like without actually requiring Adobe. Bonus!

One of the great cool things about outsourcing webhosting to third parties the way I do is that when my own hosting takes a dump, as happened to me in December, you don't necessarily lose all your organic web presence because the original, 3rd-party host service that I was using still maintains it's data.

And Since most, if not all, of my 3-rd party hosting services have a social component, they also generate referrals. (Up until my old blog died, Scribd was like my No. 4 referrer.)

Scribd, the document storage hand hosting social network, also includes a fantastic amount of meta data with it's hosting services.

My "Origins of Shame" story, the one about Super-anti-hero Gordy McPharpenstien, has been up there since March 24, 2007, and has quietly been garnering a rather entertaining collection of organic search results, which I've listed here behind the cut.

I mean, if some of these hits don't make you want to read the story, I don't know what will.