The Nitpicker’s Guide to Magnum, P.I.
I’m staring at her animated features from across a half-eaten slab of flounder and a mostly-empty glass of Chardonnay. She drones on. Still pretty as when I first met her, but I wonder if I were to choke on an errant bone if it would give me an excuse…
No such luck.
You wouldn’t think it possible that any one person could know this much about Magnum, P.I. Much to my surprise, you would be wrong. I bet she could recite every word of the script of every episode by heart. Apparently, she maintains her own very complete “Nitpicker’s Guide to Magnum, P.I.” site on the web. I say “apparently,” because I haven’t seen it myself. Probably only two or three people in the universe have. I chuckle at the thought. I guess the chuckle is well-timed, because she doesn’t seem offended.
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Dead, Long Dead
Photo © 2007 Rachel Cobcroft CC 2.0 BY NC SA
“We’re both dead,” he says, “long dead. But that doesn’t mean we can’t grow alive again!”
She can hardly believe what she’s hearing, of course. A fellow zombie, wanting to be human? Aspiring to be like them? If she didn’t know any better, she would think he was still one of them. But his pallor, his fetor, his unkempt appearance, his bulging eyes, his expressionless countenance, even the moan in his voice, all point to the sophistication that characterize their kind.
How? she wonders, Again human? One cannot undo death, cannot un-lose one’s innocence.
“No,” she says. “They want. We good.”
He shakes his head at her. “You have it all wrong. They don’t strive to be like us, and we don’t fulfill their wishes. They just want to be accepted, to be included.”
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Abigail White
(Here’s a very short character sketch I wrote 6 years ago.)
She never imagined that this would be the defining moment of her life.
Born Abigail Little, she had grown up with platinum blonde hair and deep brown eyes. As a teenager, she obsessed about her appearance and social behavior. She was smart and pretty, funny and good-natured. She was the girl every boy wanted to kiss and every other girl wanted to be.
As an adult, she married and mothered. Crow’s feet etched their way around her eyes, and though still potentially attractive, looks mattered progressively less to her. She bought nice clothes for her children; sweats and sneakers for herself. Her hair became frizzy and wiry. She put all her energy into her family, all her time into her home.
When the kids were old enough for school, she took a job as groundskeeper at a local amusement park. She was always cleaning up someone else’s mess, but she didn’t mind. In fact, it was an honor, for she knew the story of the broken window. It has been said a building can be vacant for years without becoming dilapidated, until even a single window gets broken; and then the whole building will become uninhabitable within days. Abigail knew that just one piece of trash, and her entire world would begin to disintegrate.
It was this passion she threw into her work. As a result, she was late one day. She was late picking up the kids from their after-school program. She got bawled out. Actually, the woman was very nice to this overworked mother. But Abigail couldn’t see it any other way. She had failed her duty.
It was then she realized, she was being controlled by circumstances. She had lost the excitement, her passion for life, her passion for her own life. She lived for everyone else, where she had once lived for herself.
The next day, she blew off work. She got in the car and drove across the state. Then she walked into the First Bank of Everytown, U.S.A., she walked up to a teller, pulled out her gun, and demanded they fill the satchel with cash.
Just A Bite of Coffee and Ice Cream
Photo © 2006 HD41117 CC 2.0 BY NC SA
Her great claim to fame was that she failed Freshman English Lit. Twice.
How is it even possible to fail English Lit? Think about it. This is a course that has no real requirements, save that you show up and say something. Yes, you’re supposed to read the novel that everyone else is also reading. But lesser students had squeaked by on the Cliff Notes, or even outright faking it.
Even so, she managed to fail English Lit. Twice. And so ended her college career.
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Too Much Information
Photo © 2008 Paul Falardeau CC 2.0 BY ND
This story is a test.
Seriously, it’s a test to see whether I can magically change the future. Really.
I know you don’t believe me, but let me explain. For the past three weeks, I’ve been dreaming the future. Actually, it’s been 20 days. Today will be day 21.
It may have been going on for longer, but I first noticed it on May 21. Actually, at first, I thought it was just a coincidence. It wasn’t until a few days later that I began to suspect something… paranormal. (Yeah, that’s the word I want, paranormal. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s the only word that fits.)
On Friday, May 21, a friend of mine was telling me what happened to him that morning on the way to work. He had almost gotten into a 5-car accident. (He would have been in car number 6.) And as he was telling the story, I remembered I had dreamed the night before about the same thing, an almost-accident.
In my dream, an old work colleague, who I haven’t seen in years, was driving a motorcycle down I-95, and suddenly a truck ran over her. I freaked, of course, but then she got up and assured me that she and her bike were okay. It had been a near miss.
Crazy coincidence, I thought, and I told my friend about the dream I’d had. We all had a good laugh over it and didn’t think any more of it.
That night, I dreamed a man with bloody feet was pushing boulders off a high hill, sending them barreling over the city of Philadelphia. Each boulder was larger than the previous, striking the city with ever more force, time and again and again and again. Finally, he reached the last boulder, and he told me not to worry, that this was the last one.
“What’s that been, five?” I said. “Why not ten? Why not twenty?”
“Five is enough,” he replied, grinning.
The next day, the Red Sox shut out the Phillies, 5 to nothing.
I began writing down my dreams, all of them that I could remember, every night. Then each day, I scoured Google news to see if my dreams had come true. Over and over again, I found that they had.
- The Alaskan pipeline spill (May 25)
- Obama’s targeting of US citizens as terrorists (May 27)
- The protest march in Phoenix against the Arizona immigration law (May 29)
- The phonetic-spelling protesters at the Scripps National Spelling Bee (June 4)
- The tornado in Illinois (June 5)
- The 4-alarm fire in Henderson, Nevada (June 8)
- The 429 people arrested in a national drug raid (June 9)
- The beached whale on Jones Beach Island (June 10)
So I figured I’d try an experiment. I read up on lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is when you wake up while you’re dreaming, just enough to know that you are in fact dreaming. And at that point you can affect what happens in your dream. You can do anything you want; after all, it is your dream. I even tried it a few times, just so that I knew I could dream lucidly. But I was careful not to affect anything in my dream. I just wanted to see if I could do it.
All the while, I continued to test that I was still dreaming the future, and indeed, I was. In fact, when I dreamed about the beached whale, which in my dream, appeared as a beaver caught in a trap, I saw the people coming to take it away. And dreaming lucidly, even though I felt helpless to stop them, I considered pulling out a machine gun (because after all, it was my dream, and I could do anything I wanted in it) and mowing them all down. But then I reconsidered, remembering that I wasn’t ready yet to progress to the next stage of this experiment. And I let them take the beaver away. I’m glad I restrained myself, because if I hadn’t, who knows what would have happened to those people in real life, the ones with the sad task of disposing of the dead whale?
But now I’m ready to futz with the future. In fact, I already have. Last night, I created my own dream, carefully designed, nothing dangerous, but specific enough that I can tell whether or not the experiment worked. I dreamed a man who had inherited a million dollars, and he walked up to a lady sitting on a park bench with her young son nearby. And he whipped out a thousand-dollar bill and gave it to her, just like that.
Remember, the actual meaning of the dream is symbolic, because the dream is a metaphor. But I take it to mean that something extraordinarily good will have happened to someone, and he (or she) will share part of his good fortune with those around him.
So now, I ask you whether anything like that happened to you, or around you. If so, you’ll have confirmed the theory that I indeed can change the future through lucid dreaming.
C’mon. Someone. At least one of you must have had a stroke of good fortune today.
Author’s Note: This story is also a test of something else, a storytelling principle. There’s something slightly off about it. Or at least according to conventional wisdom, there’s something wrong with it. Can you tell what? -TimK
The Confidant of Jericho
Photo © 2008 Jenjke Bykov CC 2.0 BY NC ND
From the moment they appeared at my door, I knew the two men weren’t from around here. The first of them introduced himself as Salmon, told me they were seeking my services, said that Avi had sent them. I looked him in the eye for a few seconds. Good-looking, not too eager. I try to be careful about making mistakes, because there are some services I don’t provide, and I’ve been burnt before. But they looked okay, and they knew Avi. Business travelers, I thought, slumming it up in the red-light district. I let them in.
They gave the room a once-over, my humble abode. I told them where to sit, in the dark corner near where I had been weaving flax into rope. I poured them each a drink, gyrating and throwing them each a wink. I described to them the services I offer—and told them which ones I don’t offer—and how much it would cost. Nods all around.
One of them started a conversation. Nothing about that seemed out of whack. Men often enjoyed a little casual talk before satisfying their baser urges. Salmon said he had heard that I sometimes met high-ranking officials. Even that didn’t make me suspicious. I just told him I couldn’t discuss who I know or don’t know. I may be just a whore, but privacy is still pretty important in my line of work, and I don’t want to get on the wrong side of some of my clients.
“What have you heard about the nomads camped on the other side of the Jordan?” the other man asked.
I think that’s when I first started to suspect something wasn’t quite right about these two.
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Only the Lonely
Photo © 2009 Janine CC 2.0 BY ND
All those days sitting through Mrs. Owens’s seventh-grade algebra class, then years staring through Reverend Hardy’s sermons, and now centuries yawning through business meetings, she would have thought she’d have gotten used to the experience.
She shifted in her seat, as the company CEO flipped to another PowerPoint slide, animatedly spewing the latest rendition of corporate spin to the assembled audience. Sales figures and production are up! (Except in the divisions that the company did not purchase this year.) We’re launching several exciting new projects! (Because we weren’t able to finish the last ones.) We now control more gigabytes of shitty software than all of Microsoft and IBM combined! (And that’s something to brag about? Even if it were true?)
She glanced around. Hundreds more faces, just like hers. She was suddenly overtaken with isolation, that she could feel so alone amongst so many others just like herself.
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Baby Boy
Ted Jackson reclined on a park bench at lunch thinking about what it was like to turn 30.
The overcast sky had provided him a brief respite from the drizzling rain, and so he decided to stroll through a nearby park during his lunch hour. He wasn’t much hungry, because his mind was full of thoughts, about Clydene, about love, about progress, about failure, about meaning.
When he had sat on the bench, he felt its moist coating leech through his pant legs. Normally the feeling would make him jump up in disgust, but today, he just didn’t care one way or the other. He didn’t suffer the chill breeze that gusted in his face. Neither did he enjoy the moist, fresh aroma of a late summer day cleansed by the rain. His mind was too full of other thoughts.
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A Bad Job Two-fer: Living Inside a Top/A Tribute to Lorelai
The following two poems reflect the angst of working in a bad job, a dysfunctional employer-employee relationship. It can stress you out, depress you, and make you cry. Sometimes, the only act that can save you is sending your resume to another potential employer, because that’s what gives you hope and makes you feel a sense of control over your own destiny.
-TimK
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The Widow’s Granddaughter
The revised version of “The Widow’s Granddaughter” is now available as a free downloadable eBook:
-TimK