Dave's Fiction Warehouse

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...

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...

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...

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’...

A mazon boycott update : Still pretty sure this is the path of wisdom, not to mention a fun way to flip Bezos the bird. Best of all, it’s proving easier than I thought. One star Yesterday our digital meat thermometer quit working. In simpler times, I would have jumped on Amazon and ordered another one. After all, that’s how I acquired the cheap piece of crap that just broke. It was only $11. What a bargain! Then I thought: Wait a minute. Maybe the low, low price has something to do with the low, low quality. It lasted a couple of years and now it’s more plastic for the landfill. Also, it was a pain in the ass that it quit working while my wife was cooking chicken. She had to check for doneness the old-fashioned way. The horror. Anyway, I looked up the best meat thermometers online, careful to ignore the sponsored ads, the cutesy soliloquies from paid influencers, and of course anything Amazon. I found three possibilities – all quite a bit more than $11. No matter; I was going for quali...

E very couple of years, I decide to join the wife in giving up something for Lent, which apparently started today. I’m not particularly religious, but I figure it doesn’t hurt to occasionally practice some self-discipline.  So, what to give up? The most obvious thing would be wine, just because I rarely go a day without a glass or two. But it says here that Lent lasts 40 days, so … no.  It’s a fine line.  You want to give up something that matters, but not something that life would be altogether meaningless without. So I think this year it will be Amazon. Makes sense because I’ve already gone six weeks without ordering anything from Amazon. That’s 42 days, right? Duration of Lent and then some!  Easy peasy. Just kidding. I’m boycotting Amazon for the next 40 days too, and I hope for a long time after that. I expect a few small benefits: a significant reduction in shoddy merchandise around the house; a lot fewer boxes piling up in the garage; the satisfaction that der...

K ind of feels like we should be boycotting everything these days. But it’s daunting when you look at the lengthening list of Stuff to Avoid: Anything controlled by Jeff Bezos : Amazon, the Washington Post, Blue Origin, Whole Foods, Audible, Zappos. Anything controlled by Mark Zuckerberg : Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads. Anything controlled by Leon Musk : Tesla, Starlink, X, SpaceX, PayPal, OpenAI, the United States of America. That’s just the beginning. All three men control dozens of other companies I’m too lazy to list. Then you have all these other conglomerates that happily sucked up to Trump on the whole DEI question: Target, Google, Wal-Mart and McDonald’s – to name but a few.  You see the problem: Fighting back is no longer as easy as shunning Hobby Lobby or Mike Lindell’s shitty pillows. This might involve some hardship. It’s our own fault, really. We’ve been taking low-cost convenience for granted; now the oligarchs have grown so fat they can take us for gra...

F or me, SNL’s 50th Anniversary special was about as good as the show gets: 50 percent  worked pretty well and 50 percent didn’t. Over the last few years, the average SNL has hit closer to 30-70. But that’s just me. I loved the two legendary Pauls as musical guests, even with their voices now abraded by age.  I loved the reel of commercial parodies (“Oops, I Crapped My Pants”) – always one of SNL’s strengths. Loved Martin Short and Steve Martin. I liked John Mulaney’s musical history of New York. I even liked the reprise of that hoary “Scared Straight” bit with Keenan Thompson and Eddie Murphy. Kristen Wiig’s return as doll-hands Dooneese was not hilarious, but Will Farrell kept it going. Don’t know if I ever want to see the alien abduction sketch again, even with Meryl Streep. Like so many SNL mainstays, this one has worn thin. Ditto with “Domingo”: funny the first time, and now just dumb. A couple other misses: Where was Bill Hader? Dan Akroyd? And if there was even a fleeti...

T his is a paean to New York Times puzzles. Not sure what I’d do without them, in These Troubled Times™.  Every morning I get up, don my buffalo robe (really just heavy terry cloth), slippers and ridiculous pajama pants, and venture forth with iPad in hand. I  force myself to ignore the news or social media, pour a cup of coffee, and consider the day’s puzzles. First, Wordle . By now it’s probably my least favorite of the puzzles, since it’s going on three years old and the daily solve is starting to seem more a matter of luck than strategy. Wordle used to be based on a large, static dictionary of five-letter words, but now there is a puzzle master whose job it is to mess with your day. You get a lot of words with two sets of double letters or other rare combinations. A great victory for me is getting it in two, an average one is four, and I consider it a defeat if it takes five or six. I’ve been getting quite a few fives lately. Then Strands . It’s like those word-search book...

Now it's all on your head I have a rich history of ridiculing new Apple products, most of which then go on to be hugely successful. Nevertheless, allow me to deride the Apple Vision Pro. I’ll take my chances. You’ve heard of this, right? It’s a virtual-reality headset. It starts at $3,499 (because $3500 would be too much). When you strap it to your head, you can interact with computer imagery superimposed over your view of the real world – which in your case will consist of your cluttered living room.  Of course, you can tune out the living room and just go with the computer imagery. Which, I should point out, is already available without a high-tech headset that messes up your hair and won’t accommodate your glasses. All that stuff is on your computer, just not with the illusion of 3D. It’s on any of the myriad iPhones and iPads you already possess and for which you can never seem to find the right charging cord. (And yes, the Vision Pro requires yet another proprietary cable.)...

Neverending loads of useless crap I am calling for a nationwide boycott of Amazon beginning at noon tomorrow. If you need something after that, just go to the store or do without. I appreciate your cooperation. It’s not that I dislike Amazon, really. It’s more that I hate it. I hate it so much that one of my New Year’s resolutions was to refrain from ordering anything on the site during 2024. Like all my resolutions, I expect this one to last anywhere from a week to 10 days. Because a guy still needs stuff. But I feel like an empty gesture is better than none. Why? No reason, really, except that site has gone from being really cool (circa 1998), to being really convenient (the last two decades), to being the world’s leading purveyor of cheap, useless crap (2023 to present).  When you search the site for anything now, it’s pages of poorly disguised ads for items of sketchy provenance that are distinguishable only by price.  The reviews, long a helpful feature on Amazon, are now...

A new year that already feels old I have this theory that decades, from a historical perspective, don’t really start or end on the years that end in 0. A casual look at the last hundred years or so suggests that real changes in the zeitgeist don’t become apparent until the third or fourth year of any given decade. That’s a facile rule, I know, and one full of exceptions. But if you cherry-pick the history, you can make a plausible case.   For example, it’s hard to argue that the memories we associate with the Sixties started on Jan. 1, 1960. It’s more like 1963, with the birth of Beatlemania and the Civil Rights movement coming to a head and the assassination of JFK.  That was also the year the Viet Cong really became a thing – which would end up killing more than 50,000 Americans over the ensuing decade.  The seventies, in turn, didn’t start until 1973 or so, with the rise of Disco and the formal end of the Vietnam war and the beginning of the end of Richard Nixon i...

I walk by this banner every morning and still haven’t figured out exactly what it is supposed to represent. At first glance, it’s Viggo Mortensen emerging from the shower, sporting a bird hat and a Golgotha tattoo on his right pectoral. It’s unclear if that’s his hand pulling back the shower curtain, or someone else’s. The thorny hat band suggests that this is supposed to be Jesus, but why would the Prince of Peace opt for a USA-themed shower curtain and why would he appear so downcast? Was the shower curtain left to dangle outside the rim of the tub, thus drenching the bathroom floor? Hard to say. I guess the motto makes sense, in a generic sort of way, but you have to wonder: Faith in who? Fear of what?  I’m being facetious, of course. We all have a pretty good idea of the message. And it probably doesn’t have much to do with Jesus.

  If it ain't covid, it's something else L ast week I felt the tiniest scratch of an imminent sore throat, a few unfamiliar aches, a bit of leakage around the nostrils. I thought, here we go. My wife had caught Covid for a second time not even three weeks earlier, and pretty much everybody else I know has had it at least once. I’d made it three and a half years without testing positive. It was a good run, but I knew it was just a matter of time.  We still had a couple of tests lying around. Being a responsible adult, I took one. Waited the required time. Negative.  Well, people often test negative before the disease fully takes hold. I waited a couple more  days, until I was dry-coughing and blowing my nose every three seconds, and even a small bite of oatmeal felt like a big bite of sandpaper. I also had a fair amount of pain elsewhere, as though  I’d been dropped from a great height onto a field of farm implements.  The next day I was slightly better. I t...

It's a long way from "Yellowstone" F or the first time in 13 years, I was watching Florida hurricane reports at a far remove. Just the way I used to watch the reports of Montana wildfires: Tough luck, I’d think, but what are you gonna do? No matter where you live, it’s always something.  I’m a Montana resident again, once more fully tuned in to the whole wildfire thing. The wife and I have our new driver’s licenses and license plates and we’re registered to vote in Missoula County.  We’ll be voting straight blue, needless to say. All we need now is a Golden retriever and a Subaru Outback. We left Montana in 1997, moving first to Kansas City, then to Philadelphia, then to Wichita, then to Jacksonville. We had good reasons for each move, most related to money and our newspaper careers. But I always missed the homeland. No matter where one lives, I think, one’s birthplace exerts some considerable tug on the psyche.  So here we are. Things have changed some. Not Rip-Van-Winkl...

Two for the road I too would have traveled America in a ‘61 Corvette, solving the problems of pretty young women along the way. All I lacked were a driver’s license, frat-boy looks, and of course the car. I watched “Route 66” quite a bit as a kid, even after discovering that the show rarely involved interesting homicides or gunplay, or really much action of any kind. It was just these two guys tooling around to that cool Nelson Riddle theme, unencumbered by steady jobs or family sorrows, dispensing life-changing epiphanies like they were handing out leaflets at a trade fair. For cross-country motorists, they carried very little baggage – and I mean that literally, given the trunk size of those earlier Corvettes.  Their names were Tod (one “d”) and Buz (ditto the one “z”). I guess the spellings were meant to project a nonconformist vibe, but both wore pressed shirts and snug chinos like they’d just emerged from a J.C. Penny catalog. Despite appearances, they were always up for part-...

At least the alligators are sincere A fter 13 years, we’ve decided to quit Florida. I don’t expect to miss it much.   I’ve realized I’m not a beach guy. I’m not a Jimmy Buffett guy. I hate theme parks and I hate I-95 and I’m not fond of the year-round bugs and humidity. I’ve never gotten used to the sodden air and sulfurous water. I will miss the alligators, but I won’t miss Florida Man – especially as personified by the overstuffed figures of Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.  I know what you’re thinking: It took you 13 years to figure all that out?  Well, it hasn’t been all bad. The weather’s nice in February and March.  You can get fresh produce year-round. There’s no state income tax. We live in a neighborhood that’s pretty walkable and, in many important respects, nothing like The Fucking Villages.  We’re convenient to a somewhat moribund downtown. For local color, we boast a fair number of thieves, idlers, beggars and loons.  We’ve stayed this long ...

China's beautiful balloon W e were tracking that Chinese spy balloon here at the Warehouse. But now it’s been shot down off the Carolinas. Biden says U.S. fighters took care of it, but did they? We don’t trust the government. We trust MAGA and Marge Greene.   Yes, the balloon was at an altitude somewhat beyond the range of weapons used primarily for school massacres. But when you believe in Qanon and Jewish space lasers and rampant election fraud, as Marge does, it’s not that hard to believe that your gun can shoot 12 miles. Especially if you climb a really tall tree to do it. It’s just common sense! Last time Americans got this excited about a balloon was in 2009, when noted publicity whore Richard Heene told authorities his 6-year-old son was trapped in a primitive craft drifting across Colorado. Turned out that the kid, Falcon (of course), was in the attic instead. The Heenes were fined $36,000 and got some jail time out of it. They were pardoned in 2020, for reasons that ...

Those bikes need a lot of adjustment T here’s something about being an older white guy in America: At some point you feel like the kids need to get off your lawn. Figuratively speaking.  We got some new neighbors a few weeks ago. This neighborhood is OK, but there’s a somewhat decrepit rental house across the street. It’s so decrepit that it is actually affordable. Thus, the tenants come and go. They come for the affordable rent; they go because the house is, well, decrepit. Black mold and so forth.  Our newest neighbors are two or three young guys who spend a lot of time working on their mini motorbikes on the sidewalk out front. There’s only one way to work on a motorbike. You tinker with it, and then you start it up and twist the throttle to see if your tinkering has made any difference. Maybe take a test run up and down the street. Repeat until the neighbors call the authorities.  We’re not calling the authorities. Sometimes, brooding through slatted blinds, I’ve felt...