Category: Fiction

Utopia 16: Student Driver

               An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.  Howard Zinn

Dystopia 15: Surprise

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!

ANATOLE FRANCE

The Last Birth

Tis not an end. It is a birthing. And with that rending always there is pain, always the flood of waters, the passing of blood which so many fear. As eternal, the moment passed, agony will be erased in the blessedness of the event, blessedness of the new beginning.

You will come back to us, my sisters and I, the guardians again. We are four, we are one, and have been named as many things. Just as the four riders bring apocalypse, we bring a new dawn, rebirth.



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The Love Buffet

   E and I met him by the pool when we were drunk. I think we were drunk most of that year. We all hate our jobs. Lucky I didn’t stay there for twenty. I thought he was decent looking and articulate. He also had a good job which was a rarity in that town. When we went out to the local bars we were screwed. The women got pissed off at us because their men asked us to dance and the men got pissed off at us when we said no in order to avoid angry women confronting us in the battered washrooms. We learned to drink out of town fairly early after our arrival. I dated a local for a while he was a long haul trucker with other girlfriends no doubt, but when he was in town he always brought me lunch at work and took me dancing at the clubs in Mexico.

Anyway. I liked this guy for E who was still mooning over some ex university boyfriend. He offered to take us out to the lake in his boat. He was careful to suggest she bring a couple of friends. So we did and we had a nice day. They went out on a few dates and I thought: finally I will stop hearing about this stupid ex.

Sadly E informed me that he kissed like a lizard and she ended the relationship. Every time I saw him at the apartment complex after she shared this information I saw him as a skinny green lizard and in time we called him lizard man behind his back. He stopped me one day and told me that she was “too nice” for him and he hoped he did not hurt her feelings when he ended things. On balance, I believed E’s version simply because I to had been kissed in a lizard like fashion and concluded there was no hope for for pleasant coupling. E later dated and married R who apparently kissed rather well but had severe employment difficulties. He didn’t want to work as much as talk about what he wanted to do with his life one day. Initially E took this talk for greater ambition. We all did.

J dragged me to the rodeo and then to the bars after to met a cowboy. She actually met a rancher. He was very unavailable at times. He lied to her about where he was going. J made me go out on stakeouts with her to track him down. We drank in the car and then one of her colleagues suggested she go to a spell casting woman since some other woman obviously either put evil upon J or her own powers over the rancher. These things make ultimate sense when sobriety is rare and the weather is constantly hot. The spell casting woman made up a dubious concoction for J to drink and wanted once weekly sessions to strengthen the spell. J ditched the concoction and just continued stalking the rancher. I tried to point out that in a small town there was a high degree of certainty he would realize she was dogging him. As it happened he did notice and he thought it was “cute”. They got married.

I went home for a visit and ran into a guy I went to school with who suggested a movie. He let me pick the movie and then complained about the subtitles even though I asked him several times if he minded seeing it. It was weird to see you there with a blonde version of me. Ironically my date was also blonde. My date asked me after if I liked “American” movies. I said,” you mean where a bunch of shit gets blown up or where some really hot woman gets won over my a nerdy guy.” A mutual friend told me that he talked obsessively about me but then declared he never wanted to see me again. We only had a few dates when I visited home from time to time and he never really enjoyed whatever I suggested we do. I thought it was interesting that he jumped right in the shower after we had sex.

F and R had a problematic relationship. R’s parents had a habit of showing up at their place unannounced and then inviting him out for lunch or dinner. Just him. She got annoyed by this and pushed R to confront his parents about the exclusion. His parents were puzzled when he finally did and said,”what are you talking about.” F and R broke up and his parents gave him money to go back to university. He dropped out after a year and married a woman a few years older than him. F was outraged when she ran into them. The woman was quite plain when contrasted with F. F was also an excellent cook and far more organized than I. ” Fuck”, she said,” I don’t get it aren’t you supposed to upgrade in your next relationship?” F later married a christian drug addict. She was an atheist and not much into drugs. They divorced because the religion thing got too much for her to handle. She did not mind paying for rehab.

Utopia 15: The Pilgrimage

The man of science, the naturalist, too often loses sight of the essential oneness of all living beings in seeking to classify them in kingdoms, orders, families, genera, species, etc., taking note of the kind and arrangement of limbs, teeth, toes, scales, hair, feathers, etc., measured and set forth in meters, centimenters, and millimeters, while the eye of the Poet, the Seer, never closes on the kindship of all God’s creatures, and his heart ever beats in sympathy with great and small alike as “earth-born companions and fellow mortals” equally dependent on Heaven’s eternal love.–John Muir

Utopia 14: Monument

If you want people to get nothing done, convince them they are on one side of something. —Carolyn Casey

Dark Soul Chapter Thirteen

appy Saturday and welcome to the Dog’s serialization of his novel Dark Soul. This is a work in progress, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions, don’t be shy about offering them up. Sorry this is posted a little later than usual. There were internet connectivity issues here at the Dog house.

If you have just started reading this, you can find the previous chapters at the following links:

Dark Soul – Chapter One

Dark Soul – Chapter Two

Dark Soul – Chapter Three

Dark Soul – Chapter Four

Dark Soul – Chapter Five

Dark Soul – Chapter Six

Dark Soul – Chapter Seven

Dark Soul – Chapter Eight

Dark Soul – Chapter Nine

Dark Soul – Chapter Ten

Dark Soul – Chapter Eleven

Dark Soul – Chapter Twelve

This serialization is only available here at Docudharma!  

Warp Speed

Zeph slept into the late afternoon.  I went and awoke him, shaking him.  “Zeph, Zeph, we did it!  We constructed a stable warp field and went faster than light, or at least you did!.”

Zeph was very passed out from the night before.  I finally was able to awaken him.  “Dave, what happened?”

“Zeph, you broke the light limit!  We did it!”

“Oh, shit, my head hurts.  I dreamed of little, well full sized, green men with pointed ears.”

“Shit, Zeph, those were the Vulcans.  You really met them.  They saw our warp signature and landed to meet us.  You are going to be remembered forever.”

Dark Soul Chapter Twelve

Happy Saturday and welcome to the Dog’s serialization of his novel Dark Soul. This is a work in progress, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions, don’t be shy about offering them up. Sorry this is posted a little later than usual. There were internet connectivity issues here at the Dog house.

If you have just started reading this, you can find the previous chapters at the following links:

Dark Soul – Chapter One

Dark Soul – Chapter Two

Dark Soul – Chapter Three

Dark Soul – Chapter Four

Dark Soul – Chapter Five

Dark Soul – Chapter Six

Dark Soul Chapter Seven

Dark Soul Chapter Eight

Dark Soul Chapter Nine

Dark Soul Chapter Ten

Dark Soul Chapter Eleven

This serialization is only available here at Docudharma!  

Dark Soul Chapter Eleven

Happy Saturday and welcome to the Dog’s serialization of his novel Dark Soul. This is a work in progress, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions, don’t be shy about offering them up.

If you have just started reading this, you can find the previous chapters at the following links:

Dark Soul – Chapter One

Dark Soul – Chapter Two

Dark Soul – Chapter Three

Dark Soul – Chapter Four

Dark Soul – Chapter Five

Dark Soul – Chapter Six

Dark Soul Chapter Seven

Dark Soul Chapter Eight

Dark Soul Chapter Nine

Dark Soul Chapter Ten

This serialization is only available here at Docudharma!  

DD Writer’s Jam Fest: Round Robin 14_01

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The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. ~Tom Clancy

I want to try something different today. And I should mention I will be here intermittently as I have some errands and adventures to attend to. (Did I mention I’m on vacation? 😉

rrdd

Your RR challenge today, if you should decide to accept it, is to craft-write something from the prompts below. It can be a story or a poem or song lyrics or whatever. Or you can jumpstart a Round Robin with one, if you want (make sure you tell us if that’s what it is).

Shall we begin?

The Dark Knight of the Soul: Part 1 (draft)

This is a draft of part one of a post I long promised to write here.  For a variety of reasons, it has been a long-delayed labor, which is already extremely long and broken into several sections.  I am posting this draft here because as this has become a piece of writing which is significantly larger than my regular blogging endeavors in both size and ambition, I would greatly, greatly appreciate feedback to let me know how it can be refined for maximum readability and comprehension, and indeed for intrinsic worth (meaning if you think this is stupid, uninteresting bullshit, let me know before I waste any more time and effort).  Thank you in advance for your time.

CAUTION: Spoilers, for the films “Watchmen” and “The Dark Knight”, as well as the books Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke, and much of the rest of the Batman canon, abound in this post.

In contrast to the simplistic opposition of good guys and bad guys, spy thrilers with artistic pretensions display all the “realistic psychological complexity” of the characters from “our” side. Far from signaling a balanced view, however, this “honest” acknowledgement of our own “dark side” stands for its very opposite, for the hidden assertion of our supremacy: we are “psychologically complex,” full of doubts, while the opponents are one dimensional fanatical killing machines.

~ Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

Truth is a well-known pathological liar. It invariably turns out to be Fiction wearing a fancy frock. Self-proclaimed Fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honest. You can tell this, because it comes right out and says, “I’m a Liar,” right there on the dust jacket.

~Alan Moore  

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