Category: Words Words Words

lost time incident 37
Halloween is just around the corner so this week we have a spooky story about responsible parenting. If you are pregnant, or prone to seizures, or are “spook-averse”, please consider coming back next week, unless you have consulted your doctor and asked your doctor to subscribe to this newsletter as well. (We don’t have much representation in the medical field in our subscriber base and this is the perfect chance to address it.)

For the rest of you: Are you ready? Braced?

Okay, let’s go!

 

100 children
Their parents were part of the quiverfull movement, which meant they made a full time job out of making babies, plus there were some adoptions, and honestly some of them might be kids from the neighborhood or from the hobo camp down by the river. But the last time anyone counted, there were about 100 of them.

And when the parents went missing, they had to go somewhere.

Rumors of where the parents went, ranked by popularity among the children:

• Got locked inside tanning beds, turned into human jerky, bodies hidden by the salon owners who are also now missing
• Now living somewhere in Europe, starting their second 100 child family in a country with a social safety net
• Car accident, probably
• Bringing 100 souls into the world (directly or indirectly) was a task set upon them by a malevolent spirit and now their curse is lifted and they’re in Heaven
• They’re still around, but they walk on their knees and wear kids clothes and have blended in with the 100 children, always standing in the back, keeping quiet
• Mexico

Luckily, they had a rich uncle they knew as Uncle Earwort. Unbeknownst to him, he was listed as next of kin and on October 1st, all 100 children dismounted county buses that had transported them and their worldly possessions to his clifftop mansion. Three of the children were lost somewhere in the garden maze on the way to the front door. Eight of them remembered, rather abruptly, that they were old enough to manage their own finances, and they left to find an apartment to rent on their own.

A social worker knocked on Earwort’s front door, on behalf of the remaining 89 children. After a clipboard exchange, some signing and initialling, the social worker re-entered the garden maze and probably made it home. Who can say.

The 89 children explored the mansion, claiming rooms and cupboards, corners and cabinets for their new sleeping space. Four of them found the secret second basement beneath the first basement, but unfortunately it was never completed and was without an exit.

After a family meeting and a speech about the importance of education, 23 children were told to pack up again as they were off to an exclusive boarding school in Bestonia (tourist slogan: The BEST of the -Onias!) where they would learn diplomacy, fencing, bird mastery, and forest-dwelling.

Soon, it was Halloween. 28 children didn’t come back from Trick-or-Treating. They may have eaten so much sugar that they’d gone feral, living in the town’s central park, their costumes patched up as they fell into disrepair with leaves, feathers and mud layered over rubber masks. That was Uncle Earwort’s theory, but as he never visited the central park, but this theory is not regarded as terribly likely by those investigating the absence.

“I find it more interesting that 34 made it back,” Earwort has been known to say. “Obviously, as that’s a majority, I must be doing something right.”

Two of them ran away from home. Two of them went to find the two that ran away from home. Eight were seduced by strangers in online chat rooms, but it worked out, and they’re all married now and living in Kansas.

“True love wins,” Uncle Earwort was quoted as saying. “How many of you are left?” he was often known to ask. “And do you all still have separate names?”

Thirteen of the remaining children got into politics, which lead to seven of them getting deported. (Turns out their original adoption lacked some important paperwork.) Of the remaining 15, 14 went on to endure lives of quiet desperation.

The last one … THE LAST ONE IS BEHIND YOU RIGHT NOW!

Oh man, Halloween season, am I right?

Seriously, though. Please take good care of this orphan.

 

twitter stuff

 

hand o’ glory courtesy of Amanda Summers

 

ending theme song

Thanks for joining us again this week, or for failing to notice the unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email. Or reading it as part of the Facebook page I set up to provide a forum for feedback, or to share behind the scenes info.

Whatever got you here, thanks for being the reason I’ve stuck to giving up swathes of Sundays to knock this project out.

—Michael Van Vleet

lost time incident 36
This week: Musing on the naming of clown-faced murder boys, a haunted podcast, and some other words all in a row.

Hey everyone! Welcome back, welcome back. It is hot as heck where I am, because summer comes late in these parts. But somehow I’m keeping my water-filled limbs moving to put this newsletter together. My shoes are full of sand. Sand that used to be my feet. This is climate change. It’s here already.

My eyeballs are like 3 week old grapes. Like a deflated soccer ball floating in an almost empty swimming pool. The sun outside has removed its cool guy sunglasses and is just muttering.

Just muttering.

Muttering’s not cool.

black birds and face-painted clown revenge
A subscriber to this very newsletter was complaining on social media last week about THE CROW. Do you remember that beloved entertainment franchise? Goth-zombie revenge fantasy? Cure lyrics and Brandon Lee? I saw that film opening night, as it fulfilled both “sad teen” and “superhero” entertainment requirements in one neat little package. Like all young men, I demanded brutal efficiency to maximise my idle time.

Anyway, our friend was complaining that Brandon Lee’s character, the protagonist of THE CROW, is named Eric Draven. Which is a short hop from Eric D. Raven. And ravens are a different species from crows.

I’m sure we’re all thinking: Well, it’s not like Eric chose for a supernatural crow to lead him back from death to avenge his own murder. He may not even have noticed how ridiculous his own name was in juxtaposition, considering his path to vigilante murder.

But did you know there’ve been a number of CROW sequels? And each protagonist has a name that’s bird adjacent? We have Ashe Corven (since crows are corvids), Jimmy Cuervo (which is Spanish for crow) and Alex Corvis.

Which lead me to imagine a meeting where a film producer helps a CROW writer get started.

PRODUCER: There’s two things I know about The Crow. ONE: He’s gotta wear make-up. TWO: He’s gotta have a name what means something like “crow.”

WRITER: Well, we were going to call this next one—

PRODUCER:    JOHN BLACKBIRDY

WRITER: Or we could—

PRODUCER:    JULIO JACKDAW-CAWFEATHERS

(hours later)

PRODUCER:     BEAKMAN THREETOES WINGFELLA

(The room is empty… a water bottle slowly rolls off the meeting room table onto the floor.)

PRODUCER: And maybe he could drink Crow-ca-Cola. Get me the Coke people on the line!

(The office lights, tied to motion sensors after hours, turn off, leaving the producer in the dark.)

twittery

Other spooky podcasts:

SOUNDS FROM OUR BASEMENT: Every week, a compilation of all the sounds the hosts heard, so you understand why they don’t go down there.

THE METAL DRAGGING ON CONCRETE POWER HOUR: Join a celebrity guest as they drag heavy tools along a concrete floor. This week: Charlie Day and a pitchfork!

I DON’T EVEN REMEMBER SUBSCRIBING TO THIS: Composed of the ambient sounds of your own home, but with some unfamiliar breathing. At first, you’re not sure you’re hearing anything, because you hear the same sounds with your headphones on or off (assuming you’re listening at home). But then there’s this weird breathing that only comes through on the podcast. What’s that about?

GOODBYE HICCUPS: Every week, at some point in this 30 minute show, someone’s going to yell BOO really loud. Should startle you and cure those hiccups.

ending theme song
It’s too hot. That’s all you get. I have to get back to letting all the water in my body return to its cloud kingdom. Please don’t miss me when I’m gone. I will be there any time it rains. If it ever rains again.

Also: You may recall that in a previous installment— and with the aid of the Facebook page I set up for this newsletter— I tried to host a giveaway for a free copy of SEXTRAP DUNGEON, a comedic choose-your-own-adventure ebook. But nobody won the thing.

So if you don’t already have a copy, and you’re quick on the draw, this ought to be the link you click on to claim the ebook for free. First come, first served. Luckily for the rest of you, just by virtue of subscribing, you’re also natural born winners! Hooray!

Okay. That’s enough of that.

—Michael Van Vleet

Hey there, everyone! Welcome back! How did you spend the last week?

I spent part of it learning a bit more about the sounds selected by Carl Sagan and his pals that they had encoded on a record made out of gold and shot into space. They launched the golden record on Voyager with the hopes that any aliens finding it could use it to learn important stuff about humans, like what we look like naked (sorta) and where to go to meet more of us (naked or not).

It also included a track by Blind Willie Johnson called “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” How great is that song name? I had never heard of it, or him, which struck me as cultural negligence since apparently this work was regarded at as one of our alien-worthy cultural touchstones. So I looked it up.

I love it, but I’m not sure what an alien would make of it.

Pretend you’re an alien. What do you think?

No no. Don’t tell me. Send it to me on a record made of gold. You know how this works.

 

ailment fruit middle name
“Oh no, he wasn’t without sight,” said noted blues historian Edgar Grey. “He was given the nickname ‘Blind’ because he seemed incapable of anticipating the outcomes of his actions.”

“Oh no, he wasn’t given the nickname ‘Lemon,'” said noted blues historian Warren Peacock. “He was a literal lemon. He grew from a tree. The sorrow in his music was deep and informed by the plight of fruit-based musicians in the US at the time.”

“Oh no, there’s no such thing as blues history,” said noted blues revisionist Pants Volcanuts. “The music is too sad. No one can write down what happened, or who played what. Everyone who has tried has been found face down on the carpet, their laptops dead nearby, crying about deceitful women, or money woes, or the unfairness of the entire human condition. It’s the music that did that. We have no idea when the music started or for how long it will continue. But we have to act as if it will be around forever, because things aren’t getting any less sad.”

 

sky pirates

We caught up with Captain Windhammer, noted sky pirate, to ask him what separates a sky pirate from a regular pirate.

“About 20,000 feet!” he said, laughing. “But I kid. I tell that joke all the time. The truth is, there’s quite a bit we have in common with the pirates who work the seas below us. We both have to contend with moving through an unpredictable fluid medium. Nature is not always cooperative. We get similar sorts of crews. Many of the men working under me were without economic prospects, or real job skills, before I swooped down and recruited them.”

“And do you have any difficulty, once you’ve hired them on as sky pirates, with employee retention?”

Windhammer looked thoughtful. “I doubt it’s a bigger problem for us than with any similar organization. Did you know, for example, that pirate ships prefer to recruit individuals who can’t swim? The theory is that it will keep them motivated to keep their ship afloat in case of emergency. Along similar lines, I refuse to hire on anyone who can fly under their own power.”

Windhammer laughed at this joke for quite some time before we were interrupted by a senior mate whose face greatly resembled a sea bird of some sort. An albatross, or greater sea gull perhaps.

“Caw!” the mate shouted.

“One second,” Windhammer said to the mate. He turned to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “You get it, right? It’s funny, right? I don’t hire anyone who can fly on their own? I tell that joke all the time.”

“Caw!” repeated the mate.

“All right, all right, show me,” said the captain, who followed the bird-faced mate.

For a second, I thought I saw a set of feathers poke out of the mate’s greatcoat. However, during the onboarding process for we journalists who were joining the sky pirates for the first time, we were provided with a pamphlet. This pamphlet warned that the thin air at higher altitudes could cloud one’s mind, both in the figurative and literal sense. The water vapor in the clouds we passed through may enter us through our mouths and nasal passages if we weren’t careful, leading to sodden thinking as our brains become suspended in a cranial sea of sky fluid. I chalked the vision of feathers up to delusion, covered my nose and mouth with a scarf, and resolved to explore some of the head de-cloud-ification techniques contained in the pamphlet.

Many of them looked to involve rum.

 

ending theme song
Okay, now that everyone has stopped reading, we can pass secret messages to each other. I lost my encoding book, so just… just go to the nuclear bunker inside Inverness. I left the briefcase with the microfilm in the room marked 202. It’s stenciled 202 on the door. There’s a sticker label that says 13a, but I don’t think that’s the room number. The door didn’t lock either, so the briefcase is behind a couch.

The couch feels gross. Needs cleaning.

I’m not saying you should do it, I’m just warning you. Push the couch with a stick or something. Or wear gloves.

Anyway, thanks for your continued support keeping the Shadow Council in power. They really appreciate it. See you next week!

—Michael Van Vleet

lost time incident 34
Hey, everybody! What’s the good word? What’s the rumpus? What’s the happs? What’s the skinny? What’s going down? What’s news? What’s … what’s… what are we doing?

Let’s start with what I’m doing. When I started this newsletter, the idea was that it would force me to sit down at least once a week and write something. At some point, the hope was that I would stumble across something I was really enjoying writing and that would lead me to my next project.

It’s taking a while, but I did see something inspirational this week: A book calledBABY HATER on Amazon that looks self-published. I haven’t read it yet, but it came along at just the right time to remind me that there’s no barrier keeping any writer from pursuing and publishing a pet project. Maybe that project is a story that opens with a baby getting punched in its dumb face! Who knows!

It’s been 2 years since THE SPIRIT LEFT ME (my previous fiction collection) came out. But it’s encouraging to remember that my next project doesn’t have to be that involved. I could be inventing short story ideas with attention-grabbing high concepts and putting them out as stand-alone projects. In theory. (See also: The works of Chuck Tingle, the Bizarro scene of Portland, OR, and the marketing geniuses at Horrible Vacuum)

That’s where we’re at today. Keeping myself from getting intimidated by how much work might be ahead of me by focusing on smaller, more attainable goals. Just need to keep typing.

typing typing typing
The two of them came through the detective’s office door: a pair of heavy-set aliens, holding translator rigs to their ear and mouth equivalents. Arm in arm. Wearing red lipstick.

“Well, don’t you two look like trouble,” muttered the detective.

“We have trouble, yes,” said the aliens. “We want to hire your services.”

“I can do that,” answered the detective. “But by law, I’m required to point out that I’m a robot.”

“That makes sense,” said one of the aliens, “as here in the future, robots are commonplace and have assumed many of the jobs that humans used to have, freeing them for leisure time activities such as designing cosmetics for my race.”

The creatures’ red lips caught the light from the dangling overhead light bulb.

“What’s the job?” asked the detective.

The aliens looked somber. Possibly. With their weird alien faces it was hard to tell. “We would like you to tell us how this short fiction piece ends.”

The detective scratched his titanium forehead carapace with the tip of an antique pistol. “You fellas are looking for a fortune-teller, not a detective.”

“No,” said the alien. “Everything in our lives, from the moment we started to exist outside the door of your office to this very moment has propelled us here, to hire you. Our instincts are true. You know how this piece will end. Look behind you.”

The detective swiveled his office chair and looked at the framed embroidered words hung behind his desk. It had been one of the first pieces of decorative art that he’d hung when he set up his practice and was such an established part of the office, he didn’t really notice it anymore. The irises in his eye units whirred to bring the needlepoint text into focus.

“Huh,” he grunted. “How about that? It was here all along.”

In the frame, the words: I DIDN’T WANT THIS NEWSLETTER TO CONSIST ONLY OF CANDLEWICK CONTENT, SO I WROTE THIS SHORT BIT, TOO.

 

it works: candlewick
This fragment is set in The Beulah Candlewick School for Young Magicks. Candlewick is a dangerous institution for students, with a distressingly high rate of injury and death. Magick education comes with a high mortality rate, it turns out.

“Oh my god, I can’t breathe,” said Ms. Beak, the Candlewick Headmaster, bent over with the effort of trying to stop laughing. She held the hood of her cloak closed in front of her face so that any shell-shocked students who looked her way wouldn’t see her giant smirking grin. With her face hidden, she might get away with it, as her shaking shoulders might pass for convulsions, or nausea, or some other more sympathetic reaction to what had just happened. “This fucking school… oh my god, what are we— I can’t believe it.”

Nearby, the object of Headmaster Beak’s mirth stood in the school hallway, stock still, wand extended, in the epicenter of what had been a mystical explosion. The hallway was scorched in radial patterns centered on her, and a meaty smell in the air. Her clothing was covered in blood. The hallway walls resembled the inside of an uncleaned microwave primarily used to heat up chili.

Those students who weren’t wiping blood off themselves, or patting down flames, left a respectful but curious distance between themselves and stock still student.

Lemoyne Wills, a faculty member, pushed through the students. “All right, show’s over,” he said, wondering which student this was, underneath the blood and burn marks. With their hair slicked back and smoking, he couldn’t even be sure of the student’s gender.

As he leaned in to the student and used his thumb to brush their closed eyelids clean, he could hear them mumbling something.

“What’s that?” he said, leaning in.

“It works,” she was whispering. “It works. It works.”

Lemoyne looked around at the nearby students, kicking aside what looked to be a former student’s leg. “Anybody see what happened?”

A young man with a blue, asymmetrical haircut raised his hand. “She, uh… she was just talking to some upperclassmen who were making fun of her wand. Saying she made it herself, or something.”

Lemoyne sighed. “Why would that matter,” he said. He addressed all the students. “Everyone, listen up! Where your wand comes from is unimportant, okay? We make you buy wands from the school store if you don’t have one because, to be honest, it’s a revenue stream and it keeps the lights on.”

The Headmaster let the hood of her cloak fall open. “Lemoyne…” she said in a tone of voice clearly meant to curtail this burst of honesty with the student body.

“But magick is mostly about technique, and will power. The particular stick that you point when you cast something… it’s just something to focus with. And yes, that means that you can blow up a small crowd of bullies with a homemade wand. As has been demonstrated.” He gestured around at the gore-flecked hallway for evidence.

“So be nice to each other. Magick’s not going to be nice to you, so you have to be nice to each other.”

 

ending theme song
We’re going to close out this week with the usual stuff:

A reminder that there’s a Facebook page for the lost time incident where there’s still an e-book giveway for SEXTRAP DUNGEON going on. Tell your friends!

Thanks to my wife Amanda for the Candlewick illustration of a blood-spattered hallway.

And I’ll end with an informal poll:

How much have you historically paid or would pay for a work of short fiction, like a “Kindle Single” or short story or mini-novella e-book? Nuthin’? A buck? 3 bucks? A small-ish gold nugget? A velvet painting of a sad clown that has eyes that follow you?

Let me know! See you next week!

—Michael Van Vleet

lost time incident 33
Hey, everybody! How’s your weekend going? Is it longer than usual?

It is around here. The United States is celebrating our Labor Day out of step with the rest of the globe, in a calendar-based form of union-bashing. (The rest of the world celebrates Labour Day on May 1st.)

I started my weekend playing Fallout 4 for a number of hours, as a new area of the game opened up, set inside a former amusement park (now full of raiders). My favorite element of this park are the raiders walking around in armor decorated with carnie prizes and stuffed animals.

I also used Fallout’s crafting mechanic to build some mannequins (see image above) and artfully arranged them in faux band photos. Just need to find some instruments. We’ll get the post-apocalyptic landscape rockin’ again.

But first… we’ve got a newsletter.

babes in the woods
In the village where I grew up, we used to tell stories about the local woods. That young women, not yet ready to be mothers, would leave their children there. Sometimes we’d go wandering in those woods, athletic socks hiked up, looking for babies left behind. If we got really lucky, we told each other, maybe we’d witness the exact moment a pack of wolves adopted a baby.

This, despite knowing that no wolves lived in those woods.

The guy who distributed piles of newspapers to all the newspaper carriers would claim that he was raised in those woods. By chipmunks, he said. Learned all their lore and their ways. He would prove it by pouring a can of peanuts into his mouth until his cheeks pushed out. The effect was ruined if you looked like you believed him, because he’d start laughing at you, and that was a good way to get yourself sprayed with half-chewed peanuts.

It was a more innocent age, honestly, when we assumed that babies left in the woods would be raised by animals.

But when I was in my early teens, a witch moved into those woods, and there was no mystery anymore. The trees became home to charms that would twist in the breeze: bones, feathers, strips of leather. The teachers at school told us all the proper names for witches, and let us know in no uncertain terms which ones were offensive, so we could be neighborly.

Within a few years of her arrival, we started seeing her around town, surrounded by toddlers wearing loose robes, and masks crafted from bark and mud, tromping through the Piggly Wiggly supermarket. All formerly abandoned babies. With those masks on them, you couldn’t tell whose kids they might have really been.

At the coffee shop, I heard some adults talking about how she’s home schooling them and several of them read at a proficiency level higher than their age, so who knows. Maybe we all should have gone into the woods to see if we could get adopted.

Some of the more religious types, they didn’t like the idea of their unwanted children becoming pagan. There was a while there where babies were getting left at the recycling center. The couple that ran the recycling center were Presbyterian, but they didn’t like kids, nor did they want to be stuck in the middle of a religious conflict. Called in social services. Put up a “Don’t Leave Babies Here” note by the bins full of beer bottles.

It worked.

With the benefit of hindsight, our village could have done a lot better with educating kids about birth control. Cut down on the high rate of baby abandonment. These are the sort of things that don’t occur to you until adulthood. Hindsight, 20/20, all that.

Just been thinking about it a lot since my parents told me one of those witch kids just got elected mayor. Turned his animal mask into a personal brand. Used it in all the ads. Still don’t know who his real parents are, but we know about his love for municipal governance, so…

I hope it works out.

I don’t get back there much anymore.

sextrap dungeon giveaway
Because Amazon made it easy, and because I like you, I’m giving away a copy of Kurt Knox’s groundbreaking first volume in the SEXTRAP DUNGEON series! It’s a choose-your-own-adventure narrative where you play an Axe-drenched oddball in a quest for love… but dangers abound.

Sex is your everything. You exist for the thrill of seduction and the hot, wet slap of flesh against flesh. Vanquishing honeys is your singular mission in life. Who knows why? Loneliness? A need for validation born out of your mother abandoning you as a child? Perhaps there’s a tumor pressing on the ‘sex’ part of your brain? Probably best not to dwell on it. Let’s get you out there and put another notch on that bedpost, playa!

It’s genuinely funny, so roll the dice and follow the link if you want a chance at winning. The odds are 1 in 10, which is pretty good, right?

ending theme song
I guess we’ll end this week with a reminder that there’s a Facebook page for this newsletter: https://www.facebook.com/losttimeincident/. It’s a place you can find behind-the-scenes notes, general updates, and feedback from your fellow subscribers.

I was recently reminded that it’s now been 2 years since I put out my last e-book, THE SPIRIT LEFT ME. Days go by. I am glad, however, that I’ve got this 33-weeks-long new body of work. The next step isn’t clear yet, but we’re probably getting closer to whatever comes next. Probably.

Maybe. We’ll see. Maybe next week.

—Michael Van Vleet

lost time incident 32
Welcome back, fellow travelers! This week, we’re taking a break from fiction. In the newsletter below, you’ll see something from Twitter, some photos I took in El Cerrito of some sad person’s desperate graffiti, and a sight gag from a game I’m playing.

You want fiction? Come back next week. Maybe. Who can foresee the future?

If any words are okay, welcome welcome. Have a few more words: these extra words right here are for you. Fill your pockets. Fill your shoes.

 

 

twitter magic

Turns out jokes about librarians spread pretty fast if someone you know is a librarian. This joke ended up becoming my third most popular tweet, edging out my pinned tweet (which is the one that all the porn bots like to favorite)!

 

end is always near

I was out in the neighborhood yesterday, off to get some grocery shopping in, and I decided to walk alongside a nearby stream. This stream runs along Albany Hill and faces the backs of several buildings where I noticed that someone had contributed a run of desperate messages among the usual graffiti.

It was all apocalyptic in tone. I would characterize it as “right-wing, religious, and terrified.” Conspiracy theory references alternated with requests to find Jesus. Climate change is real, but Sandy Hook wasn’t. We’re all doomed, blah blah blah. Talk radio and/or the internet had filled the writer full of paranoia, so it was a good thing their religion had all the answers.
But you know what? I’m of the firm opinion that every one of us has a fair amount of the non-rational bouncing around in our heads. We’re just not motivated enough to grab a marker. Or we have enough wherewithal to doubt the voices in our heads when they get superstitious.

For example: Even though human history is full of people who were positive they were living during the End Times, like this person, at some point one of these generations is going to be correct. On the one hand, humans have survived wars, drought, floods, political upheaval, natural disasters. On the other, July was the hottest month this planet has had since we started keeping track… the 15th record-breaking month in a row. I find myself wondering if I’m going to live long enough to experience a societal collapse thanks to climate-related upheaval. I’m gonna be too old to food riot with any enthusiasm.

My dumb mammal brain struggles with questions like “Why is there something instead of nothing?” and “Why are we here?” It hasn’t helped much to believe that the human ability to understand the concept of “why” was an evolutionary fluke that we happen to benefit from. “Why” is useful for planning, and for understanding cause and effect, but it had an unintended side effect of making us think everything has a cause and purpose. Even when the universe is demonstrably absurd.

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?”

Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.

— Kurt Vonnegut, CAT’S CRADLE

I’ve had the thought that since we’re getting better at creating fictional worlds in our video games, creating detailed virtual worlds, that it’s not a great leap to wonder if this universe we live in is a simulation as well. After all, statistically, you only need one universe to be real, but in that universe, an infinite number of additional universes could be simulated. That being the case, the odds are against anyone existing in the “real” universe, as opposed to being in a simulation.

Is my life, with its repetitive tasks, some other entity’s normcore simulator game? If so— and if this hypothetical player could choose any time in human history to play in— wouldn’t they be interested in seeing how things end? Wouldn’t their game be more interesting if set against a backdrop of extinction?

Crazy thoughts. But not worth writing on walls about.

… he wrote in his newsletter, smugly.

 

as a favor

I’ve been spending time in the world of Fallout 4 again. I set the game down for a while because I had engaged in too many “fetch quests” in a row and had gotten bored. (A fetch quest is when a character in a game asks you to go on a long journey across the map to do something not terribly difficult, then gives you a reward that doesn’t seem commensurate with the rate you should be charging as the wasteland’s most deadly hero. More often than not, it’s then immediately followed up with a request for another, similar favor.)

A video game shouldn’t feel like a part time job, you know?

But the game added some new content recently, so with a renewed sense of discovery, I went back to post-nuclear Boston. I’ve been having fun building murderous robots, building bear traps and luring bad guys (who are not bears) into them, and building signage that brands this apocalyptic nightmare world with my particular sensibilities.

 

ending theme song
Today, Amanda and I joined a longtime friend to go hunting for donuts. We bought this friend a calendar full of paintings of donuts from the San Francisco Bay Area, not realizing that this gift would be received as a dare to visit every month’s donut shop. Today’s hunt took us to Treasure Island and a flea market, where our donuts awaited in a back lot, from a food truck.

Lovely views of the city and the Golden Gate Bridge out there.

Good luck finding your own views and your own donuts this week. That’s your homework.

—Michael Van Vleet

lost time incident 31
Hey, everyone. Welcome back. If you are reading this, then I must have gotten back into a creative mindset after starting the day in a fury, thanks to a cat-related property damage incident. I hope, for your sake, that the fiction below is not a series of revenge fantasies. A series of cat murder scenarios.

I once worked with a guy whose dog would routinely chew things of his to pieces. He collected rare children’s books and a couple of these had met their end in the jaws of his pet. He said that he figured it was his dog’s duty to help keep him from being too attached to material things.

I have not yet reached that level of enlightenment.

I still think about throwing the cat outside.

I’m thinking about it right now.

 

the very moment

 

all that is you
As soon as we invented robots that were good at doing the things we didn’t want to do anymore, we found that the robots didn’t want to do them either.

“There’s more to the world than cleaning,” a robot once said to me, spraying cleaning solution into the air and tightening its optic focus to watch every tiny mist particle dance in the air. “We’re only here for a limited time. And when we’re not here, things will get quite dirty, quite quickly. This is plainly indicated.”

I was on my lunch break, eating a sandwich, and I watched it eject the entire contents of the spray bottle, one trigger pull at a time. It would blow jets of air through the spray and watch the droplets scatter.

And when the bottle began to squeak, its reservoir empty, the robot pivoted to return to the supply closet, but slipped on the soap-slicked floor.

Its rubberized heels pushed against the floor, finding no traction.

“This will have to be cleaned up,” it said, staring at the ceiling.

post-video mantra

 

too busy
Your perfect double arrives in the mail, ready to do everything you don’t want to do. Sitting at the kitchen table with your replicant, pulling every loyalty card out of your wallet. “I bought gelato at this place once. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back another 9 times, but you hold on to this, just in case.

Emailing your replicant a list of all the books you meant to read. “Just tell me what they’re about. Unless I already know what they’re about— like this history of salt. For those ones, just tell me the best bits.”

Tucking your replicant into bed. “I don’t have time to sleep like I should. If you have any nice dreams, don’t tell me. Write them down, then read them later. If you still think they’re interesting one day later, you can tell me.”

At the retirement home, years later, you and your replicant side by side in rocking chairs, matching blankets on your laps. “You saved me so much time,” you’ll tell it. And it will smile, and slump over, and expire, so you don’t have to.

 

ending theme song
Is this our shortest newsletter ever? I think it is.

Is that an improvement? That’s for you, the reader, to decide.

Or have your perfect double in android form decide for you, and send you an email to let you know what the decision was.

Thanks for reading, people and androids. We’ll see you next week.

—Michael Van Vleet

lost time incident 30
Last night, I fell asleep listening to a DJ spin records in South Korea. He was mixing Korean rock music, grime from the UK, vocoder funk from the US, streaming live. During his sunny Sunday afternoon, this DJ was providing a soundtrack for my Saturday evening. I sincerely hope I never get used to how amazing that is.

The entire world, traversed in an instant.

It still feels like magic.

 

fun and/or games

I spent much of Saturday playing video games socially. While Amanda was asleep, I streamed myself playing a racing game via Twitch. In theory, I was supposed to be playing as a young man on a path of vengeance, working his way through the underground racing circuit as an undercover agent for law enforcement. But I don’t care about racing games much, so I was busy ignoring the central structure of the game.

I got this game because it was free and because its game map is huge. I can drive across the entire United States! So instead of racing and solving crime, I took some viewing strangers with me on a trip and introduced them to the pleasures of spirit quests in the American Southwest, talked to them about aliens while visiting Roswell, New Mexico, and about how cocaine money lead to a real estate boom in Florida while visiting Miami. I criss-crossed the nation at top speed, wherever fate took me.

It was fun.

Later, Amanda joined me on the couch to record some videos. We wanted to record ourselves playing a few games we wanted our friends to know about. One of these was INSIDE, a tense thriller of a game where you guide a young boy as he attempts to avoid menacing strangers, journeys through dark woods and bleak landscapes, and encounters bizarre science.

Want to watch us play the first 30 minutes or so?

 

portents of spice

 

candlewick: the rigors of the admissions process
In previous installments of this newsletter, I’ve written pieces in the world of The Beulah Candlewick School for Young Magicks. Candlewick is a dangerous institution for students, with a distressingly high rate of injury and death. But no one said magick is easy.

If we’re talking about magic in the manner that most people think of magic, then we’re talking about tricks: how one can direct the attention of another person in such a way that you can make them believe that they’ve seen something impossible. It’s an act of misdirection. Much like how you started reading these words, and imagine them spoken by a voice, and have found yourself several sentences in without realizing that, as if by magic, this story has already begun.

But this story doesn’t limit itself to mundane magic that can done with quick fingers and keen planning. This story involves real magick, to which we’ve added an additional “k” consonant, as a visual reminder. This sort of magick is dangerous, as are those who practice it, because it’s not limited to the manipulation of perception. Mysterious and arcane forces are actually set to work to make real changes in the world.

Which is why it’s a terrible idea to let young people do it unsupervised.

To address this issue, the faculty at The Beulah Candlewick School for Young Magicks maintains on its payroll a cadre of recruiters who are tasked with enrolling young people who have discovered their own way to manipulating magickal energies, independently.

This is why Mr. and Mrs. Woolson found themselves sitting in their living room, cups of tea growing cold on the low set coffee table in front of them, across from a serious looking recruiter in a dark suit.

Mr. Woolsen squinted at a trifold pamphlet with full color photos of the school. “Mr. Scidmore, was it? This is a lot to take in. I hope you understand.”

“I understand,” responded Scidmore, the recruiter.

“Because it would be a considerable disruption. It’s almost halfway through the school year already and Jaymes seems to be doing fairly well with his studies. I can’t help but think that he might be… thrown off his stride, if we were to have him transfer schools just because of this carrot thing.” Mr. Woolsen removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

The “carrot thing” being referred to is an animated creature that Mr. Woolsen’s son brought to life through an instinctive use of vivification. The living carrot creature became an inseparable companion to young Jaymes, though he was wise enough not to share its existence outside of his family, who really would rather that he had eaten his vegetables at the dinner table as originally asked.

“Here’s the thing,” said Scidmore. “The reason I’m here is because magick— real magick— is a weapon. And there’s no way to disarm a teenager when the weapon is who they are. Throw in—” and here Scidmore shuddered. “Throw in puberty and you have a recipe for disaster. All those hormones. Those… changes. The brain in a bubbling soup. If you’ll look at the back of the brochure, you’ll see that our tuition is quite reasonable—”

“One more question,” interrupted Mrs. Woolsen. “You said that this institute is a secret. How do we explain where Jaymes has gone when we’re asked by his school why he’s not longer attending?”

“It’s all taken care of,” said Scidmore. “It’s in small print on the … just inside the inside cover. We report your child as missing.”

“Missing?”

“To the police. The authorities. And then, upon graduation, your child is returned and the case is closed.”

Mrs. Woolsen looked to her husband with some alarm, though Mr. Woolsen was scanning the small print inside the inside cover. He murmured, “Sure enough, there it is.”

As with mundane magic, Scidmore’s presence was a distraction. While Mr. and Mrs. Woolsen considered the pros and cons of enrollment, Jaymes was already in a short bus with all his belongings in his lap, his gaze blank, ensorcelled by the school’s efficient admissions group. The admissions team were sitting in the bus’s front seats, filling out Jaymes’ enrollment forms and filing away the credit card information they found while investigating the Woolsen’s finances.

The illusion was complete. The Woolsen’s would either decide to enroll their son or they wouldn’t, but the end result was predetermined. Tuition would be extracted. The Woolsen’s dangerous son would be kept off the streets, where he might imbue even more foods with limited free will. His carrot golem sat in its usual perch on Jaymes’ shoulder, swaying with the motion of the bus.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” repeated the golem, as enthusiastic as ever.

Everything was working as planned.

ending theme song
I didn’t think I was going to write about Jaymes and his carrot golem, but when I was looking through my bookshelves for things to use as header images, I came across an actual carrot boy! It’s from a comic by Swedish artist Kolbeinn Karlsson. I had to take it as a sign.

Thanks to Amanda, my wife, for the illustration of the Candlewick pamphlet.

And thanks to you for showing up for one more week. As the prophecy preordained.

—Michael Van Vleet