Dave's Fiction Warehouse

How'd that pansy get there?   I ’ve surrendered to the dandelions this year. Same with the sundry other unidentified weeds that make up most of my front yard. They’re all God’s flora, right? I’ve wasted too much time and money trying to stand in their way. Grow free, my pretties! It’s your lawn now and I can’t wait to see what you do with it. Actually that’s pretty evident already. The thing about dandelions; you mow them down and those coppery stalks immediately rise again like charmed cobras, pushing their fluffy globes aloft. It's like they're sentient and have figured out how to duck the blade.  I’m not sure of the botanical processes at work here. My strategy now is to feign stoicism and convince myself that this is nature’s way.  I doubt the neighbors agree. Everyone else in the ’hood pays a lawn service to come once a week. I cut my grass less often than they do, so the property lines become sharply delineated as the week wears on. It’s right there, where my forest...

T hree episodes in, I’m loving “ Widow’s Bay ,” the comedy/horror series on Apple TV. While it’s hard to tell whether “comedy” or “horror” should come first in any given episode, the writing, direction and cast have proven deft on both counts. It’s not a show where I spend any time looking at my phone. Matthew Rhys (best known for “The Americans”) is the mayor of a seaside village in New England, determined to make it a tourist destination despite continuing evidence that the place is cursed. Think “Jaws” with a supernatural element and a dark sense of humor. Or, say, "Northern Exposure" set in Castle Rock, Maine. His main antagonist is a crusty old tar played by Stephen Root (lately of “Barry”). Kate O’Flynn (whom I first took note of in “ Landscapers ”) is perfect as the mayor’s perpetually aggrieved and hyper sensitive assistant. Then there’s the great Dale Dickey , who extends her run of playing hard-bitten women who dispense questionable wisdom and don’t put up with a lo...

I hate AI, but I asked it to crap out this image anyway. I f there were an app that tracked my personal use of the F-word (and there may be; I haven’t checked) it would doubtless show a dramatic increase over the past 10 years. Every day I look at the news and “fuck” is the first word that comes to mind. Often the second and third words too. Feels like I’m approaching singularity: One day, every word that comes out of my mouth will  be some permutation of what used to be the mother of all profanities. When that day comes, I will convey meaning only by subtle variations of volume and tone.  Fuck. I’ve always been proud of my vocabulary, and now it too is going, along with strength, agility, and the ability to instantly identify film stars appearing in other roles.   I blame Trump, of course. And popular culture, which has embraced profanity even more enthusiastically than I. Dialog on streaming services is now about 38 percent “fuck” and “fuck”-related. I know it mak...

J anuary is named for the two-faced Roman god Janus, who looks into the future with one face and into the past with the other. That's kind of where I'm at, too. On these dark days following the winter solstice, I look at the year ahead and resolve to be better in some small way, even as I look at the year past and realize how unlikely that is. Was it just 12 months ago I was standing in front of this same mirror, vowing to hit the gym, cut down on the fatty foods and take it easy on the wine? I think it was.  Those vows are too easy to make after the excesses of the holiday season. Suddenly the waistband is a little too snug and you've got some acid reflux going on, and a little headache just behind the eyes, and you realize that in a whole year all you've achieved is another trip around the sun with everybody else. It really is time to make a change, you think, and this time the change will extend beyond the first week of February.  Which no doubt why the Romans invent...

W e got around to streaming “ Spinal Tap II: The End Continues ” the other night. Probably not the best timing, so soon after the murder of Rob Reiner. It tended to mute the laughter every time he was on screen as his character Marty diBergi. Still, it was funny. Not as funny as the original; sequels never are. But there was at least one laugh in every scene. And the appearance of various real-life stars — including Paul McCartney and Elton John — seemed like a fitting if unintentional tribute to Reiner’s career now that he’s gone. You had to chuckle at Sir Paul praising the lyrics of “Big Bottom,” and Sir Elton being asked to tone down his piano playing. Reiner seemed like one of the good guys in an industry where good people are rare. You could infer that from his sense of humor and the nuance he brought to every script and genre. You could also infer it from the malevolent glee his death elicited from dotard-in-chief Donald Trump. Being hated by a hateful dolt is its own kind of tri...

W here fiction is concerned, I like history, love time-travel and loathe romance. So at two out of three, Kaliane Bradley’s “ The Ministry of Time ” seemed worth a look.  And I guess it was. In a near-future Britain, a pretty young civil servant joins the title agency to help repatriate people scooped from the various eras in the past. Somehow the government  has stumbled on a way to do this, and now wishes to test the effects on both the “expats” and that pesky space-time continuum (which you’ll recall from the “Back to the Future” movies). Since each of the abductees is presumed to have died in their own era, the bureaucrats think there’s little risk to the timeline. Maybe a bit more to the expats themselves. A few develop subtle symptoms, such as becoming slowly invisible to CCTV cameras and biometric sensors. It’s as though something in the timeline is trying to erase the anomaly they represent. The ministry assigns each expat a “bridge” to help them assimilate into modern...

Apparently not complicated enough for Gemini. F unny story about AI: a few days ago I was building a crude little cabinet with two sliding drawers. I was fiddling with the measurements and grew tired of adding and subtracting fractions each time I decided to change a dimension. Hey, I thought: I bet AI can do this faster. And it did. I typed in the prompt and in seconds it crapped out a cut list for each piece of plywood I’d need. Just one problem: I noticed that one of the pieces was off by a full inch.  I mentioned this to Gemini, and a couple seconds later got this response: “You are correct. My original calculation was in error. Here is the corrected version of the cut list.” Thank you so much, Gemini! You’re a real lifesaver! But you have raised a haunting question: If you botch a relatively simple math problem, might you also shit the bed in other, more important areas? I t took the Internet about 20 years to evolve from miraculous tool to utter shit. It’s only taken AI — whi...

It looked bigger in the barn. H i there. Just stopped in to make sure the pipes haven't frozen and somebody's still feeding the racoon. Check and check.  I do pay a couple of troubled youths to drop by from time to time. They are not diligent, but neither are they expensive. I pay them in empty beer bottles from Bayern Brewing , which are redeemable for a piddling discount on the next six-pack. Not a livable wage, but I assume they have other income streams. Petty theft and so forth. Anyway, the place looks OK. Graffiti is minimal and the tramps haven't burned the sofa. Knock wood. The toilet seems to be clogged, but maybe that will discourage further use. I'm thinking of selling. This being Missoula, developers have expressed interest in buying the Warehouse and chopping it up into 450-square-foot condos. Each unit would rent for $5,000 a month or sell for 750 large. Seems steep, but around here that's called affordable housing. You're welcome. I just like to g...

I ’ve been looking at this all wrong. All this time I’ve been viewing this Trumpian madness as temporary and fixable. Yes, we have malignant fools steering the ship now, but soon they’ll be undone by their own incompetence and tossed overboard. This can’t go on. Right?  Wrong. This situation looks to be a lot less temporary than I’d hoped. Not long ago we were sailing along with fair winds and a following sea, and then somehow the crazies mutinied and abruptly changed course. Now we’re headed straight into the storm of the century. Also, there are icebergs. The gale-force winds don’t quite drown out the maniacal laughter of the flaccid old Ahab up on the bridge. This will end, as all things do, but it will not end soon, and it will not end well. I just finished Ian McEwan’s latest novel, “ What We Can Know. ” In it, he imagines a historian 100 years hence, surveying this time with a mix of nostalgia and incredulity.  Humanity is still limping along in 2125, in a chastened worl...

T oday was supposed to be the Rapture. Again. I haven’t kept meticulous records on these predictions, but I’m pretty sure at least 165 Rapture dates have come and gone since I was first made aware of the phenomenon around 1970. That’s based on a conservative assumption of three end-of-time dates per year. Spoiler alert: Every one of them was 100 percent wrong. We’re all still here, righteous and sinners alike. Well, except for the billions who have sadly expired of non-theological causes over the past five-plus decades. I’m this close to concluding that all Rapture predictions are utter bullshit. Speaking of percentages, the author of this latest forecast, South African pastor Joshua Mhlakela , said a couple of weeks ago that he’s “a billion percent sure” this time is the charm. I would like to remind Pastor Josh, and a certain American president , that percentages don’t become more dramatic with the addition of random zeroes beyond 100. Anyway, if you and yours do experience the Rap...

R obert Redford was probably a better director than an actor, mostly because he was too damned good-looking to be fully believable in any of his best-known roles. But it’s hard now to imagine anyone else playing them.  I’m thinking mostly of “The Sting” and “Three Days of the Condor” and of course “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” For those of us who were young men in the early 70s, this is the way we covertly longed to look and be. Not that we ever could. We lacked the wardrobe. And the smile. And the tousled hair. And yeah, the easy charm and the good looks and the journeyman acting talent.  Check out the opening scene in “The Way We Were”: Redford standing at the bar, ostensibly passed out on his feet, resplendent in his Navy dress whites. There were and are better actors, but none of them – even Paul Newman – ever looked that cool. I’m guessing that the look in Barbra Streisand’s eyes during that scene didn’t require a whole lot of method acting. She was genuinely smit...

T he other day I was briefly gladdened by the internet rumor that Donald J. Trump had finally shuffled off to Buffalo — or wherever a guy like that goes when his time is up. Probably not Buffalo. It was false, of course. Everything is false on the internet, without exception. But my reaction prompted a bit of soul-searching. First, I wondered: Have I ever in my lifetime been cheered by the idea of someone else’s demise? Nope. Well, Ted Bundy maybe, but I can’t think of anyone else offhand. Takes a special kind of person to convince me that their absence would make the world a better place.   Second: Would it though? Trump has already poisoned America to the extent that it seems unlikely to recover any time soon. He’s gutting every public good, destroying trust in elections and governance, putting troops on the street and enlisting tens of thousands more masked, steroidal thugs to enforce his personal whims. Whatever happens to Trump in the years to come — and I hope it’s somet...

I t’s been a slow year (not counting the endless carousel of Trumpian atrocities) so maybe it’s time once again to go to the mailbag. Remember mailbags? How they used to bulge? They were fun. Dear Dave : So what have you been reading lately? That is, assuming you are not yet too old to decipher printed material beyond, say, a third-grade level? – Made-Up in Montreal. A: Thank you, although I would point out that we live in a country where a third-grade reading level is considered overkill.  Anyway, I just finished “ Fingersmith ,” by Sarah Waters. It’s set in Victorian England and involves a 17-year-old thief sent to pose as a maid for a 17-year-old heiress. The thief’s mentor, a charming villain known as Gentleman (think Fagin, only better looking), intends to seduce the heiress, marry her, and then ship her off to one of England’s excellent madhouses. He promises the young thief, Sue, a share of the proceeds. Twists ensue – so many that this gentle reader had to stop once in a w...

M artin Cruz Smith died last month, but I didn’t really mark his passing until last week. That’s when I finished his last book, “ Hotel Ukraine .” Smith was a great story teller, and his character Arkady Renko is the most memorable of the hundreds of fictional detectives I have known. I’ll miss them both. “Hotel Ukraine” is set immediately before and after Putin’s invasion of the country in 2022. Like nearly all of the 11 Renko novels, this one has him investigating an individual murder amid the vast corruption of the modern Russian state. This time it’s a diplomat, beaten to death in the titular hotel in Kyiv. As we all know by now, when high-profile figures die anywhere near Putin, there’s not a lot of pressure from the top to crack the case. Far from it. If the plot feels sort of familiar, the story is well-told and timely. We get a glimpse of the Bucha massacre and a fascist paramilitary that closely resembles the Wagner group. (You’ll recall that Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin ...

T his summer I accompanied the brunette to her 50-year high school reunion. I really didn’t want to go. I mean, I skipped my own 50th reunion six years ago, and the one before that . The 10- and 20-year reunions were fun, but after a while they begin to seem as dreary as that face I see in the mirror every morning. So I told Tess no. For some reason she kept at it.  I finally relented. I’ve gotten better at discerning the things I must refuse and the things I probably shouldn’t. I bought a new shirt and a new pair of shorts and steeled myself for an introvert's nightmare: a weekend of small talk among total strangers. At least, I thought, they’d all be unaware of the countless regrets and embarrassments that define my own memories of high school.  We drove to Ellensburg, a middling college town best known for its rodeo and unceasing wind. The former classmates gathered Friday night at a dive bar on the edge of town. There was the obligatory guy in a MAGA hat and another in one...

A coastal trail near Ardmore. W e’re going to Ireland in a few days. It’ll be our third time there. Mostly we’re going because a few months ago we got a killer deal on round-trip tickets between Seattle and Dublin. How cheap? You don't want to know. Ever been? It’s a pretty easy place to be a tourist. Sunshine is rare, but the people are generally friendly and that accent makes them seem even more so. They don’t yet hate Americans. Few places in Ireland are very crowded. That has become my primary condition for traveling anywhere these days. I always feel a bit uneasy before a trip abroad. I like being in a new place, but I loathe the process of getting there when air travel is involved.  There’s a poem by Derek Walcott that I always think of the night before traveling. “Tomorrow, Tomorrow.” I’ll post it here from memory; my apologies if the wording and punctuation is not precise: I remember the cities I have never seen, exactly. Silver-veined Venice. Leningrad, with its toffee-twi...

L ike a few million others, we’ll be back on the street tomorrow. Singin’ songs and carryin’ signs. Still trying to come up with original slogans. Can’t use the ones from two weeks ago. We thought things were bad then but they’ve only gotten worse.  Now Trump and his minions are openly defying the Supreme Court and laughing about it. They’re still getting rid of people solely on the strength of the boss’s whim. Which, when you think about it, is pretty much the last stop on the train to Treblinka. I wonder if these nationwide protests are too little, too late. But this is no time to sit at home. Here in Missoula, the April 5 event didn’t feel like a protest so much as a party or a wake:  A gathering of a few thousand like-minded people aggrieved, bothered and bewildered by what appears to be the rapid disassembly of America.  It was kind of uplifting to see that our months-long sense of anger and dread was widely shared. But the protests didn’t generate enough headlines a...

The original cast of MAGA W hat happens when a rapacious, hateful and thoroughly corrupt gasbag gains complete control of a government?  Well, we’re finding out, aren’t we? But this is not specifically about Trump. It’s more about this book I just finished: “ A Fever in the Heartland .”  In it, Timothy Egan relates the sordid saga  of a Trump-like figure who managed to take over the state of Indiana in the early 1920s.  At the height of his power as Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, David C. Stephenson controlled much of the Midwest and believed he had a shot at the White House. If his depravity hadn’t escalated to an actual sex slaying, he might have. Even then it was touch and go. “Fever” is a great example of what Egan does so well: Take well-trod episodes of American history and structure them almost as novels, with villains and heroes and quite a bit of  dramatic tension.  In a lot of fiction, it’s the villain who keeps you turning the pages. You can’t...

Y ou can imagine my pride in discovering that my work is among the millions of pirated books and papers used by Meta to train their newest AI model (dubbed Llama 3).  Thus far I’ve found only three short stories out of the dozen or so I’ve written, but hey: It means I’m in good company! A lot of famous authors are justifiably pissed off. The Atlantic reported on this today. Basically, it describes how Meta employees briefly thought about licensing the material, but quickly decided it would be a lot faster and cheaper just to steal it. Especially since most of it had already been pirated and amassed online via Library Genesis, or LibGen.  Atlantic writer Alex Reisner set up an interactive database so authors can enter their names and see how much of their stuff Meta has scooped up free of charge. That’s how I ended up discovering my stories.    I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, I guess it doesn’t hurt to have my words comprise a synapse or two in the vast Meta h...

A ccording to this piece in the New York Times , more Americans are forgoing the doggy bag  –  apparently unconcerned that there are starving children in Africa who would be delighted to dine on their unfinished mac ’n cheese.   The story says the average American leaves about 53 pounds, or $329 worth, of food on their restaurant plates each year. That’s hard to credit: how many restaurants do these average Americans hit in a year? For me it’s maybe five or 10. No wonder they’re getting fatter . And that’s without cleaning their plates! But back to the takeout box. There appear to be a variety of reasons people don’t ask for them:  young dating couples don’t want to seem cheap, post-covid social stigma about sharing entrees,  the unwillingness to go clubbing with half a Cobb salad at your side.   All of which is another reminder that I have little in common with these crazy “average” Americans.  I rarely leave restaurant food on my plate. I’...