Stuart goes postal.



“Good morning, Stuart. How are you today?” Mr. Shin’s voice greeted Stuart as he entered the cool yet brightly-lit interior of the local supermarket.

The automatic greeting emanated from an overhead speaker in the lobby, with its air-sealed doors and glass panels from floor to ceiling. It was twelve-oh-seven a.m. on a Tuesday night; or rather a Monday morning, according to the machine.

“Uh.” Stuart stalked past the glassed-in booth where the manager’s actual head was visible, bent over a blue-glowing computer screen.

All he wanted was a lousy quart of milk, and he wasn’t in the mood for small talk right now.

It had been a long day. He didn’t want to be up half the night without any milk or food in the house, and he was concerned that maybe tonight would be an insomnia night. Although he hoped not, it kind of looked that way.

“Would you like a cart, Stuart?” The stock clerk’s irritating voice came.

But Stuart only wanted a quart of milk. The only place that was open this late at night in the whole town was right here, a mile and a half out on the Golden Mile Parkway, and he didn’t need a cart for a quart of milk. Theoretically, he could go to the Nine-Twelve Gas Bar and pay two bucks more for it. Two bucks is two bucks.

“Argh!” He grunted at the thing as he sauntered past.

“Hi, Stuart, it’s been a long time.” The butter on the end of the dairy case had a bright, cheery voice. “When was the last time you picked up a pound of dairy-fresh butter?”

Stuart just shook his head at this question, as he’d just had a big blow-up with the car over the parking position. The vehicle was arguing that he could park a ways away, as he could use a bit of a walk, while Stuart would have preferred to park it right in front of the store, as it looked like a spot of rain was on the way. And it was late at night after all. The parking lot was empty, there were plenty of spaces for all, and when was the last time you saw a disabled guy who could afford a car anyway? Not that he was planning to take one of the disabled parking-spots, but there you have it.

But the talking butter display reminded Stuart of an important point, which was that one often thought of a few other items while in the store. Spinning around on a whim, he went back and got a cart.

“I told you so.” The stock-clerk had a note of triumph, and he growled at it in response.

Stuart walked down the aisle, and wished he could turn all this stuff off, as one-hundred-and-fourteen cheeses bid for his attention. As he moved along, each product had a range of about two metres, in which it would activate by motion sensor or body heat or something and then it would go into its spiel, trying to outbid all the other products on the shelf for his attention.

“Mister Jones! Mister Jones!” The cottage cheese yelled.

“Stuart! Stuart!” The Monterrey Jack Cheese by Kraft had something it urgently wanted to draw his attention to.

“They’re fun for your tummy, Stuart.” The process cheese slices clamoured as he proceeded past.

“Argh.” Stuart groaned as he went by.

He wished he’d never accepted their ‘points’ card, the one with a little radio ID chip in it, but he had thirteen thousand points saved up, almost enough for a trip to New Guinea that he was promising himself. Only another two thousand points to go, and only a month and a half before the deadline. At that point, he would lose the first five thousand. But he couldn’t let that resentment stand in his way…one quart of milk would be five more points.

All he really wanted was a quart of milk.

Not that it wasn’t a good cheese or anything like that, but at some point one tired of all the racket. Just then his phone buzzed, and he pulled it out of his pocket, pushing the cart along one-handedly while his attention was momentarily diverted by the pictures on the push-handle mounted video display screen: the Sports Illustrated Annual Swimsuit Edition was out, and Stuart reminded himself to grab one at the checkout. The display on the phone indicated that an automatically-generated e-mail from the auto-dealership where he had bought the turkey, the lemon, had arrived. The last time he had taken the car in for a free recall repair, he walked out with a bill for over ten thousand dollars.

'A few other little things' were found wrong with the car upon, ‘a casual inspection.’

None of them were covered by the original warranty on the two-and-a-half-year-old car.

He shoved the phone absent-mindedly into his pocket again.

“Ten cents off a half-dozen eggs, twenty cents off on a dozen.” Yackitty-yack went the eggs. “If you forgot your coupon, just ask at the checkout.”

But Stuart just wanted time to think. He knew he needed a quart of milk, and surely there was at least one other thing. He’d driven all the way out here with a mental list of three, or maybe four little things. At least two of them had been crucial, one of which was the milk, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember the others. And yes, a bag of chips would be nice, and something else as well—if only he could remember that one other thing. He was pretty sure it was just the four items.

“We can beat that.” The next product display spoke matter-of-factly. “While the sizes may vary as pictured in this week’s flyer-insert, our eggs in the five and ten-packs are only a dollar ninety-nine and three-forty-nine. And you don’t need a coupon.”

“Why in the hell would anyone make a five-pack of eggs?” Stuart was mystified as to where the world was headed sometimes.

Was the whole world going insane? Or was it just him?

“Originally, increasing demand led to a slightly smaller pack than a dozen, i.e. ten eggs. Then one thing led to another, and we ended up with a half-sized pack, of five eggs. But people of a certain demographic group love the trendy and upscale asymmetrical packaging.”

“Who in the hell would buy five eggs?” Would the madness never end?

“New Age, the twenty-five to forty-year year-old segment, college or university-educated, mostly lesbians, many of whom only eat one egg at a time. Or they eat two and serve three to a friend. Or maybe they each eat two and save one for mixing up a batter of some sort or another.”

“I’m sorry I asked.”

“Most of our clients have a tattoo. We get that from all kinds of surveys. Do you have any tattoos, Mister Jones?”

“No!” Stuart wondered whether to take the car in for the recall, or just ignore their e-mails.

Milk, chips, pop…was it pop?

“Well, you probably don’t want any of our eggs, then.”

“I already knew that.”

Was it pop that he wanted? It was milk, chips, pop, and one more thing. Was that it?

Lunchmeat? Bread? Pickles? None of these items jogged his memory with any conviction.

“Would you like to participate in a survey?”

“Argh.” Stuart moved on, finding no peace as he sped up abruptly and zipped along towards the other end of the aisle where the milk was kept.

“Orange Juice! Margarine! Poppin’ Fresh Breakfast Buns!” Their words blared and blasted and sang and murmured and muttered and buzzed all along beside him as he went.

Dozens of voices called out to him as he traversed the hundred feet or so till he got to the refrigerator he sought.

“Argh. Argh.”

He slowed there, gripping the push-handle of the cart and grinding his jaws.

“And how can we help you today, sir?” The fridge greeted him in vacuous cheer as he approached.

“I just want a quart of milk, a fucking quart of milk. And I don’t want no fucking back-talk from you!”

“What size of milk are you looking for? Our two-quart jug of two percent is thirty cents off.”

“I want one God-damned quart of milk. One God-damned quart, just one fucking quart of milk. One quart. Where is it, you son-of-a-bitch?”

“Our line-up includes one-quart plastic jugs, and one-quart waxed cardboard containers."

“Argh. Just tell me where they are.”

For some reason he was blinking at a high rate, completely uncontrollably. For weeks now, he had been under stress at work, and at home, but just knowing it did no good. He wondered if it was all coming to a head, and if he was having a nervous breakdown. All that commuting at a high rate of speed to save time…racing from traffic back-up to traffic back-up, stoplight to stoplight, waiting endless minutes at a standstill in the coffee shop drive-through…

“Milk.” Stuart snarled resentfully, as he ground his jaws back and forth. “Just give me some fucking milk, before I smash your ugly display into a million pieces.”

“Two metres further down to the right, sir.” The machine muttered quietly to the still hulking and tension-ridden figure of Stuart.

Stuart, who just stood there, holding on to his cart with both hands for dear life.

“Is there a problem here?” The store’s security-drone floated directly ahead of him, it was right in his way.

“I just want some fucking milk! Get the hell out of my way.” An ashen-faced Stuart Jones seemed unable to move on.

He had just about had enough of this place.

For some reason this place was always better when it was crowded, then the hum of real human voices, women, kids, infants, store employees, all two of them in this eighty-thousand square-foot retail space, drowning out the bedlam of the artificial ones.

“There’s no need to create a disturbance.” The machine chided him in its metallic, officially-oriented voice, like a Canadian news-caster speaking through a tin horn.

“Argh. I just want some fucking milk. Why can’t you turn all this shit off? I’m tired of all these voices, voices. I just want you to shut them off!”

“But they are so pleasant and helpful to our other customers. We have to think of their safety and convenience as well.”

“You don’t have any other customers, I’m the only one in here!” The outburst brought only more reproof.

“Sir, if you cannot behave in a civil and socially-acceptable manner, then store security will have to ask you to leave.” The thing had flipped over into its neutral, non-judgmental tone.

“Argh!”

“I don’t know how to interpret your response, sir.” The machine floating there in front of him had an air of regret. “Perhaps it would be better if you were to just leave now, sir.”

“Argh. All I want is a fucking quart of milk. And why should I be polite to a fucking machine? Fuck you. I want a quart of milk.”

“I’m sorry, sir. Police are being notified, and I will have to ask you to leave peaceably.” The floating cop-thing spoke in its imperturbable fashion.

“All I want is a quart of fucking milk!” Stuart manfully shoved the hovering machine aside, which took a surprising amount of force.

Brushing past the hellish thing, he headed for his destiny.

He remembered a report on TV that said these things were gyro-stabilized. He gave it another shove, and then forced his way forward with the cart. He could see the milk, his prize, awaiting him just two feet away…suddenly his body stiffened and convulsed, and before his numbed brain could comprehend what was happening, he was laying on the floor, as another bolt of lightning flashed through his body.

“Please leave quietly. This establishment is private property…we have rights.”

“Argh! Argh! Argh!” The machine hit him with blast after blast of Taser energy.

“If you continue to resist arrest, you will be subdued using sufficient force.” The cop-thing regarded the squirming blob of protoplasm that had once been a fairly rational human being, Stuart Jones.

“Argh!” Stuart moaned and cried, his tears leaving a wet path, and lubricating the floor under his limp torso and abdomen as he tried to crawl away from the freezer case.

Unfortunately, blinded by tears and rage, anger and resentment, Stuart crawled in the wrong direction. He was headed for the back rooms, by all factual indicators, and the cop-thing Tasered him again, while Stuart cried, shouted, gasped, choked, gagged, and puked on the floor, his limbs, no longer under rational control, still moving reflexively, still struggling to get away.

It was mercifully over. Strong hands gripped him under the armpits.

“Fuck.” Then a short, sharp blow to the head stunned him into a silence that he stubbornly decided to maintain against all assault.

He watched with a corner of his mind as the cops, real, flesh and blood ones this time, dragged him out to the parking lot. As he slid along, he noted the blood dripping from his head, or facial area, leaving bright, flower-shaped spatters on the highly-polished flooring of the store.

“Up you go." Then Stuart heard a big ‘thunk’ noise, a light flashed in his head, and his world went black again.

Stuart Jones woke up in the back of a police cruiser, and slowly became aware that they were still sitting at a standstill in the parking lot of the shopping center. The security drone hovered outside the car window as an officer in the driver’s side engaged the thing in conversation, and another officer took notes from the other side of the front seat.

“Whoa.” Stuart groaned in disbelief.

“I’ll have to ask you to restrain yourself, sir.” The female cop in the passenger seat warned Stuart.

Unable to help himself, Stuart bent over at the waist and began to vomit into the floor well, shoving his feet over against the door, and trying to hit the far side with the sudden upwelling of stomach contents.

Suddenly the fire of fifty-thousand volts shot through his body from a hundred short, sharp metallic electrodes in the seat and back bolster of the car seat.

“That will teach him.” The pretty blonde female cop smiled as Stuart screamed and screamed and screamed.

Finally she pulled her hand off the little yellow button on the dash, complete with its little logo, ‘Taser International.’

“Are you going to behave?”

“Oh, God, oh, Jesus Christ.” Stuart's bad back had just been sent into a spasm, and suddenly he began vomiting again.

“Ah!” Stuart’s screaming rose again as the female cop zapped him with another ten or fifteen seconds of high-voltage.

The tasering only stopped when Stuart was little more than a blubbering, sobbing, broken thing, no longer recognizable as a man or as a human being. Finally he was able to speak.

“What are you doing? Why are you doing this?” He gasped and sobbed uncontrollably. “All I wanted was a fucking quart of milk!”

The cop-bitch’s hand was hovering all over the yellow button as he said all this, so he stopped. With a mean glance at her victim, she waited for a moment of silence, then slapped the button again, sending Stuart into a paroxysm of fits, starts, seizures, and forlorn attempts to get up and stay off of the seat. Finally, he was unable to sustain it, and fell back onto the seat with a little groan, and then apparently went unconscious.

“So what did this turkey do?” The male cop asked the security-drone for more details.

“He was causing a disturbance.”

“Did you receive any complaints? Like from other customers?”

“No, not really, but he was bothering our employees.”

“And how many employees were on duty at the time?” Stuart’s cracked and almost psychotic voice came unexpectedly from the back seat. “Can you tell me that, you stupid and immoral machine?”

“You’ll get your day in court, Buddy.”

Stuart was rewarded by the sight of the female cop’s hand on the button again, and another jolt of electricity was sent sleeting throughout his body.

“He assaulted a store employee.”

“You don’t have any employees.” A berserk Stuart shouted from the back seat.

“Another fifty thousand volts for the rude person in the back seat.” The female cop, a certain Rodericka von McGuinty, known far and wide, and even in this stinking little shit hole of a town, as, ‘The Bitch in Blue,’ hit the button with reckless joy.

“I’m sorry, I have decided to withdraw all charges, and am irrevocably wiping all details of this incident.” The drone, for no apparent reason, began backing away from the car.

“What up with him?” The male cop, a certain Steven Culvert, was quite mystified by this.

Turning around, he was slightly bemused to see what had once been a living, breathing, human being, albeit one with a few issues, maybe…or what was left of him, smoking in the back seat.

Jake looked at Rodricka for a moment, then shook his head in resignation.

“We can only kill so many people before someone somewhere begins asking questions.” He gently reproved her. “They can’t all be mentally ill—we have to shoot a criminal once in a while or it doesn’t look too good.”

Still, one had to admire her stand-up attitude regarding issues of access to justice for the poor, the mentally ill, the disabled, the working poor members of this here community.

With Rodericka, zero-tolerance meant just that.

Still, if the information was properly presented to the media, the situation might work out to their advantage.

Steve could visualize the CTV News Channel coverage now: “Mentally-ill terrorist subdued by brave, courageous, self-sacrificing, noble, unbelievably honourable, terribly underpaid, quick-thinking city cops…”

Yes, that would do very nicely, and here in Canada, the media was carefully trained not to ask any questions.

Steven Culvert looked at his watch.

“Well, this is all very upsetting. How about grabbing a bite to eat?”

“What about him?” She indicated the figure in the back seat with a jab of her thumb.

“I don’t think he’s very hungry right about now, and if we’re going to dump him in the usual place, then I prefer to do it on a full stomach.”

All in all, it was looking to be a pretty uneventful shift. The best days were the ones where absolutely nothing of any real importance happened. Any cop will tell you the same thing.



Building an audience; psychohistory.

Building an audience requires patience and foresight.

Building an audience as a writer takes time, by that I mean over a longer term, and it also takes time out of your day.

Presently I’m working on my tenth novel and at the same time I commit myself to two major blog posts a week. One of them is always speculative non-fiction that I write that week. I also post short fiction, some kind of crazy story, or a book excerpt on the weekend, usually.

Because there are links to my products on the blog, I work to build up the audience for the blog with the presumption that it will help to sell books.

Sounds simple enough. After getting about 5,900 hits in the first four years of blogging, in the early part of this year I started using the methods of ‘active blogging,’ which can be found here.

At this point in time I’m getting just under 5,000 hits per month, which shows some success with these methods. With a little applied effort toward a specific goal, I might crack 5,000 hits this month.

While there are a million factors that affect the sale of one book to one reader, everything from the blurb, the cover, name recognition, genre and price, number of sales channels, et cetera, at some theoretical level, the more people who simply see your book, the more likely you are to make a sale.

But, there are challenges. If a million people see your book, by reading your blog, and absolutely every one of them says, “Man, this is the worst blog I ever read, Buddy, I ain’t ever going to buy one of your books,” then clearly the blog is a failure. Even though you have somehow developed an audience of a million people for your blog.

The blog’s effectiveness is exactly zero if the sole purpose is to sell a book. There are any number of purposes for a blog, including politics, news, commenting on popular culture, simple information, recipe-sharing, whatever. You don’t necessarily have to be selling anything, but you want to be read, and the same principles apply.

Now, if a million people see your products on your blog and a thousand of them actually go and buy a book, then you have converted that audience into a readership, and the effectiveness of the blog would have a zero, and then a period, and then two or three more zeros—(Whatever. My math never was too good, and then you have the numeral ‘1.’) It’s probably eight or nine or ten zeros.

This looks like this in real math: 0.000(whatever)1

Then the goal or challenge becomes to improve the ratio. You want to take a few zeros out of that result, right? Maybe even move it up into the realm of whole numbers.

There are ways to test results. If you post something on atheism, and get thirty hits off Twitter in the first hour, that tells you that thirty of your available followers are interested in that subject matter, although the quality of their experience is still guesswork. That’s why comments are so important. Someone liked it enough to care about it and comment on it. (Not all of your followers are on at any given moment.) Assuming that people are buying the books, if a post on fuzzy bunny rabbits brings in a hundred and eighty page hits in an hour and you sell six times more books, then the measure of effectiveness remains the same, but the subject matter has six times the audience-interest, and perhaps you should post more of that type of material. Obviously I’m over-simplifying. It’s best to remain true to your basic message, which in my case is that I’m a hell of a good writer and people really ought to consider reading one of my books…

Also, if you post something and get 100 hits in a day, repost it on the weekend and get fifty hits, repost it Monday morning and get three hits, then obviously prime-time versus off-time factors come into play, but also your available followers have become saturated. Those who saw the link the second and third time around might have already read the story. Or, they're just not interested.

The best thing is to post it all over your available platforms, maybe repost it on Twitter once or twice, and then drop the story for weeks or even months. Trust me, I do recycle stories. Stories that started off with fifty hits will eventually have several hundred, or more as time goes on. That involves a certain amount of SEO, (search engine optimization,) which I'll talk about some other time. This is one reason we try to build up the number of Twitter followers, as well as friends and followers on other platforms. This does not exactly equate with ‘fans.’ A fan is someone who likes you or your material for any reason and may occasionally purchase it, download it for free, collect them or swap with friends, etc. (That’s a whole different blog post, in my humble opinion.)

At a very simple level, the interactions, which are all human, can still be rendered in terms of mathematical formulae. Hari Seldon was right, ladies and gentlemen. It’s psychohistory in the making.

The trick has always been to figure out what people want to read and then provide it for them. It's an attempt not so much to predict the future in probabilistic terms, but to somehow affect its outcome, also using probabilistic methods.

I guess that’s all I was really trying to say.

The Cabbie.

Flashlights stabbed the night and alarm bells rang, but it was already too late.

The convenience store was only three blocks from the jail. His bent coat hanger was a spare, from the rack in the medical room. The nurse bent over to look in a drawer, and it was gone.

Too easy, really.

Richie Algernon put the cab in gear and drove off. Hot-wiring the old thing was no problem due to years of experience. It was New Year’s Eve, and the driver was safe inside the gas bar, holding a forlorn cup of coffee in one hand. He was waiting at the back of a very long line-up.

The windows were all steamed up from wet floors and mucky boots, and the victim probably couldn’t see a thing. It was black anywhere not directly under a streetlight.

The maximum security county bucket was simply too easy…too easy. Richie was resourceful.

Making a right and turning out onto the street, two young men on the sidewalk suddenly leapt out, almost right in front of the car, waving their arms frantically. On some mad impulse, thinking that three heads in a taxi would be a bit of a cover, Richie pulled over.

With a touch of the button, the passenger side window began rolling down, but the young guys weren’t waiting.

“Hey, mister! Can you take us down to the south end?” The kid, about nineteen years old, practically bellowed in his ear.

The second one was already climbing into the back seat on the right side. They smelled like beer.

“Sure, hop in. Where did you say? I have another call. I really shouldn’t do this.”

“It’s a big party. You should come on in, man. It’s going to be great.”

“Car eighteen.” The radio muttered away.

A voice answered as Richie gave it some gas. The streets were covered with about two to three inches of a thick, sloppy combination of snow and slush.

“Car thirteen, car thirteen…” Again came the voice of the dispatcher, but there was no immediate response. “Car thirteen…car thirteen…”

Ritchie reached over and switched off the radio.

“Right!” The kid beside him was still talking way too loud.

Cursing, Richie tucked the nose in, gave it some throttle, and the back end came out.

She went around the corner like a dirt-racer, and Richie feathered the throttle down. No one seemed to care that he was wearing orange pants, and elastic-sided slippers…thank goodness for the cabbie’s jacket and a spare ball cap in the back window.

“We’ll give you twenty bucks if you can get us there in like five minutes." The kid in the back whipped out a cell phone and punched in numbers.

The guy started talking on the phone in a low tone, surreptitiously looking all around out the windows. The front end of the car bobbed up and down, and in the glare of the tail-lights he could see rooster tails of slush coming up.

The snow flurries were coming down on an angle, the wipers were going back and forth, the FM radio was babbling away, and Richie didn’t mind hurrying, although he would have liked a moment to think.

The gas tank showed about a half…driving from city to city would take cash. He wondered if he could pry the sign off the roof without too much hassle. With his heart in his mouth, he saw a cop car coming along on a side street to the right. Richie eased up on the throttle. It stopped and it had the left blinker on…Richie was doing about sixty kilometres an hour. The kid in the back twisted and watched out the back window, as it turned and went the other way.

“We’re cool man, don’t get pulled over!” Richie understood that maybe they had something on them.

“Hah!” He gave a sharp grin. “I ain’t got time for them guys. I’m going to make me some money! Give me the twenty.”

The kid gave him a look and Richie glanced over.

“I’m Roscoe.” The fellow was a lanky male with long, dark hair falling all over the place and  wispy beard. “This is Dud.”

“Hey, Dud.” Richie accepted a twenty from Roscoe.

“Here’s your twenty.” Dud handed one over as well.

With raised eyebrows, Richie accepted that one too, but Roscoe just grinned. The smell of alcohol was pretty strong, but they didn’t seem to have booze on them.

“All righty, then.” Richie stepped on the throttle.

The back end came out but he held the thing balanced, and then pulled out with a snap.

“Yee-hah.”

“Here, man. You’re cool!”

Richie looked over when he had a second, and saw something in the kid’s hand.

“What is it?”

“Mushrooms!”

“Oh, I don’t know, man.” Richie cursed inwardly.

And of course the kid wouldn’t take no for an answer. Now there was a joint burning in the back of the car.

“Ah, fuck it.” Richie grabbed them.

“Left! Left up here.” Dud had left it a bit late, so Richie did a couple of s-type fishtails under braking on the
greasy road, and both of them took gasping deep breaths.

With the joint smoking in his mouth, Richie looked over. Roscoe had his hands braced on the dashboard as Richie nailed the intersection perfectly, and then let the tail hang out as he accelerated up to eighty-five kilometres an hour. He chewed on what seemed like a pretty big handful of mushrooms, hoping he could spit it out when they weren’t looking.

Lowering the window, he got it down about three inches before Dud spoke up.

“Oh, man, I’m freezing.” Richie put it back up again.

The car went sideways in a strong gust of wind. They were on sheet ice for a moment. Richie caught it with a flick of the wrist. He had the wad of mushrooms jammed up in his cheek. There was already an edge to him, he could feel it.

“Don’t kill us, man!” Dud was laughing. “Holy, fuck!”

“No, don’t worry You’re riding with the best. This thing handles pretty good.”

It was a Ford or something. It had rear wheel drive, and an automatic transmission and a big, rather loose V-8 engine up front, with overhead valves by the sound of it, and the thing handled okay. The roads were atrocious, but the car was in its element, especially with Richie’s strong hands and sure confidence behind the wheel. Richie wasn’t afraid to break it, perhaps that was the thing.

“Ahhhh!” The guys gasped as he held a long, four-wheel drift through a curving section of the road.

“Oh, Jesus!” Dud grabbed the seat back as he saw the curve switch back the other way.

Richie was laughing at them the whole time.

“You asked for it, suckers. Do up your belts!”

“Whoa.” Roscoe groaned as Richie flicked her to the right again and they drifted through the next curve at something over seventy kilometres an hour.

“Where are we?” Dud looked around.

“Where’s this party?” Richie passed the roach.

“Three or four more blocks.” A wild-looking Roscoe hung on to the handle over the door.

Finally they were pulling over. Up ahead, seventy yards or so, Richie saw flashers and it looked like the ubiquitous cops had someone stopped. Roscoe stuck his head back in and without fanfare shoved something into Richie’s upper right jacket pocket.

“What…?”

“Don’t worry, it’s just a doob.”

“Hey!” Richie had an inspiration.

“What?”

“There’s someone in there that wants a cab. Tell them I can’t wait.”

Roscoe yelled at Dud, just heading in the door, and Dud looked back with a nod and a wave.

“Thanks, man.” 

Richie grinned, pretending to listen to the cabbie radio down at a low volume. Somebody stuck their head out the front door of the house as Roscoe went up the steps. She waved at Richie.

“Don’t go! Don’t go!”

“Well, for fuck’s sakes, hurry up then." Richie watched the police car up the road.

He saw the officer get in his cruiser, and sit inside with the light on. There was no other action up there. Situation not resolved yet, he figured, but it would be soon enough. On New Year’s Eve, they had to have pretty much every available car and officer on duty…happy, youthful voices caught his attention again.

The car rocked as a bunch of them got in. A pretty little blonde girl, all of five-foot three and about fifteen years old by the look of her sat in the passenger side.

“Money up front. Somebody already tried to rob me once tonight.”

“Aw, you poor man.” The girl stared at him with big, shiny dark eyes. “You must have been so scared…”

“What? No, I beat him up and threw him out.” They all laughed and giggled and there was a whole lot of young faces staring at him in the mirror.

Richie resolved to shut up for a while and just drive.

***

“Please, ladies, please don’t give me no trouble.” Richie groaned as the third one in a row giggled and tried to show him her tits. “Aw, come on!”

“You’re a nasty old man.” Her name was Sandy.

They were all yelling their names and phone numbers at him and he was pretty sure one was stripping in the back seat.

“Cops!” He yelled and someone screeched.

The car heaved as they all shifted around back there.

“Yeah, I’m a nasty old man, all right. But I just don’t have time. Besides, I got a wife and three kids.”

“There’s no cops! Have a drink, mister.” A breathy voice came right up close in his ear.

Two or three cans of beer fell out of her massive purse, he could hear them clanking around in the back. There were more laughs and giggles, and the smell in the car had to be experienced to be believed…all of that perfume, and makeup, and hair spray, and underarm stuff…five of them, for crying out loud. Cans of beer landed on the seat beside him.

“Oh, Lord, where is this party? Maybe I will go in.” Every so often he giggled, aware that he sounded kind of stoned.

It seemed to take ages, as all of them were already drunk, but finally they navigated their way into a massive subdivision, all curving streets, cul-de-sacs, and crescents without end. By the time they all got out, it seemed like a lifetime. The actual trip wasn’t that far. Richie had a handful of fives, tens, coins, little slips of paper…a piece of tinfoil with something in it, hopefully not gum. He looked up, stunned, to see a bare ass right in front of his face. It was right inside the car window.

“Thank you.” Richie made a quick lunge, kissed her left buttock and then took a sharp little nip.

“Oh!” She went spinning away. “You bastard!”

“Yeah!” He grinned. “Thanks for the beer. Have a good night, and don’t forget to call again.”

“Bye, sugar.” She smirked impishly in farewell, and blew him a kiss.

“Bye, Sandy.” Sirens drowned it out.

Three fire engines roared by and pulled up to a house just up the street, and a cop car was right behind them. The smell of hot and highly-illegal teenage pussy still lingered, at least in his imagination.

Richie put it in gear and got the hell out of there. No one had even noticed that he forgot to trip the meter! Maybe no one cared.

***

Richie couldn’t believe his luck. It was getting surreal, or perhaps he was just hyper-alert…

The next couple waved at him from a front porch as he was going by. He remembered to trip the lever. They sat in the back and hissed at each other, or endured a deadly silence, for the whole trip. That one paid exactly five dollars, and they gave him a ten-cent tip.

“Happy New Year’s.” The lady had a brilliantly insincere smile.

“Thank you.” Richie wondered what the hell was their problem?

***

Richie saw the scene through the brightly lit windows of the Area 51 bar.

Some guy was falling against the glass doors, which sort of burst open as he went down and through, and then there were two big beefy guys still throwing kicks and punches at him…

“What the? Jesus!”

The guy leapt to his feet and bolted straight for Richie.

Before he even had time to think, the guy, stinking of booze and big enough himself, was in the front seat beside him.

“Drive!” He barked, all insane-looking and angry as all hell. “Take me home! I’m going to get my gun!”

“Aw, for fuck’s sakes.”

“Take me home! Take me home!” The man was right in Richie’s face, glaring at him, blowing little flecks of spittle all over the place. “I got to get my gun!”

“Where do you live? I need to know where it is.” Richie said it reasonably enough, but the man was having none of it. “How can I go there if you won’t tell me?”

“Just fucking drive!” The customer pointed dramatically forwards out the windscreen. “I’m going to get my gun!”

Sighing deeply, Richie figured this one was not only a freebie, but also a big waste of time.

***

Richie managed to drop the guy off in front of some apartment building by pulling to a stop, reaching over and yanking on the door handle, and then giving the asshole a hefty heave-ho.

The stupid drunken bastard fell out onto the curb and just lay there cursing as Richie drove away.

“Screw you, you fuckin’ asshole.”

Richie was just pulling up to an intersection when he saw a forlorn figure, again he saw the desperate look. A young woman in a mink coat got in when he pulled up.

“Hello.” She announced it so brightly. “My boyfriend’s a pig.”

“Where’s the party?” He asked, slightly jaded, what with all of this cab experience under his belt.

She gave him an address and he asked her how to get there.

The snowflakes were coming down even harder and he belatedly snapped on the meter.

“I’m just new here.” But she was to show no mercy.

And here was another one! The crazy woman, a nice-looking blonde in her late twenties, had her legs open, she was fingering herself, and she was gasping in pleasure…

“Aw, lady. Seriously.” He sighed deeply.

“Maybe you should forget about driving and come to the party.” She turned to gaze deeply into his eyes. “You might get lucky.”

“No, really, please, I can’t do that, I’d lose my job for sure.” Richie blushed furiously, wondering what this one was on.

By the time he managed to talk her out of it, and dropped her off in front of some upscale apartment building, Richie had a little over three-eighths of a tank of gas left and about seventy-five bucks, three cans of beer, a doobie, and a small chunk of what looked like crack. A few phone numbers, mostly illegible…

He pulled into a deserted parking lot for a moment.

He had a coat, which he discovered in the trunk. It was a little dirty, but it was a coat. There was a piece of luggage in the trunk, but he dumped the woman’s clothing out of it in a small strip mall parking lot. Lost and found, and lost yet again.

Richie still didn’t have a plan, but it was only ten-thirty, the snow was falling like crazy, the roads were icing up, the town was going crazy, and the mushrooms and the joint were taking effect. One thing for sure, he couldn’t just sit there, in an empty cab, on New Year’s Eve for very long. He jumped out and had a piss against the rear tire, watching in hopeless disbelief as yet another cop car zoomed past with siren blaring and lights going. The one thing he could not do was to panic…he needed to piss real bad.

All of a sudden, he heard shouting from not too far behind him.

“Aw, no.” Someone shoved some kind of a crazy-coloured plastic badge in his face, yelling incoherently.

“You’re fucking busted.” The man shrieked, grabbing him by the collar and suddenly slipping on the ice. “I am going to beat you senseless!”

Richie went down right on top of the man, cursing and wriggling, desperately trying to catch his fall and maybe even to get away from the son of a bitch without ripping his pecker to shreds on his open zipper.

***

“Take us to the cab company! You’re all busted.” The big, loudmouth male in the passenger seat shouted for the seventeenth time.

Three well-dressed, adult people sat in the back, another male and two women, all of them drunk and all of them threatening him with legal action, arrest, or just assault. Richie shook his head in disbelief as another cab came up beside, honked the horn, and then the driver shot him the finger.

The guy rolled down the passenger side window and spat in his direction.

“You fucking cocksucker!” The guy yelled, raging at the awful fate that had befallen him.

Richie just shrugged and slumped down further in the seat.

Stolen fare!

“Not my fault, man. Just my luck!”

“Shut up or I’ll kill you!” The male in the back seat shouted as the ladies giggled.

By this point, he was driving aimlessly around in circles with the meter going while they berated him endlessly.

“Why were you hiding in the bushes?” He surprised himself with that reasonable tone. “Is there some place you would like to go, ladies and gentlemen?”

They gave no answer to that one, all he got was just more abuse. If the guy hit him, Richie was going to take him outside and beat him within an inch of his life…this night was getting out of hand. He would have gladly taken them anywhere, but no one would listen to him, not even for a second. Apparently, from all the cursing and shouting, they had been waiting for a cab for over three hours.

Richie found that all this somehow put his own little problems in better perspective.

In an amazing stroke of luck, Richie saw a sign up ahead.

“Acme Cab! I’ll bust every one of the bastards!” Bully Bob was apparently some sort of guard at the jail.

Richie didn’t recognize him, and thank God for that. The man’s ID was right there on the seat beside Richie…the vehicle rocked as they all went boiling up the stairs and into the building, a small white frame house on a side street in the poorer end of town.

On an impulse, Richie half got out of the vehicle. The sign on the roof of the car said, ‘Joe’s Cab.’

“Hey." He grinned. “Serve ‘em right.”

Richie got out of there, noting a strange smell, and a quick glance over his shoulder showed him some kind of pale coloured Tupperware bowl sitting on the rear seat.

“I hope that’s macaroni salad.” He muttered. “Now all I need is a little salt.”

Richie heard a sound nearby, a loud thumping that seemed to come right up through the seat.

It had to be a train.

***

Eleven minutes later, Richie sat in a seat on the far side of the train as it pulled out of the station. He wore his big overcoat and a red ball cap pulled down low. He had three beers, a joint, and some other knickknacks, including a jail guard’s ID. He had a suitcase with a cab company jacket in it. He had twenty-seven dollars left. He had a bowl of macaroni salad all to himself. A pretty good buzz was really starting to kick in.

His whole life lay ahead of him. He saw that very clearly now. Didn’t he deserve a second chance? Richie was no worse than the rest of them, and who knows? Maybe even better than most. You could say it put getting caught with a half a bag of dope into perspective.

A man approached up the aisle, apparently floating an inch above the carpet, which seemed to go in waves as he walked. It was the conductor. Everything had a weird air of unreality about it.

“Welcome to VIA Rail. How are things? Is there anything I can do?” His voice boomed unpleasantly, reverberating softly inside Richie’s head.

He stood there expectantly, with his eyebrows raised in inquiry, his posture slightly bent, and his hands held behind his back.

“I could really use some salt.” Richie Algernon sighed in regret and relief. “And a plastic spoon, maybe. That would be just about priceless right now.”

***

Blackfoot: 'Train, train.'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBP15lRprPs

The morality of immortality.

(Morguefile.) After 17,000 years of poverty, she has every reason to despair.


“Beauty is a gift which is seldom despised, except by those who do not possess it.”

The trouble with immortality is that it’s forever. It's also riddled with moral questions.

In a world where most of us have to work for a living, we would never be able to retire, for how could anyone possibly save up for a retirement that would last forever? Unless the reader is able to live on two bucks a month, the sort of income that you would have to have and the sort of contributions that you would have to make, are astronomical. How do you intend to pay for that immortal early retirement?

In a world where newborns all received some treatment at the genetic or molecular level, thus conferring immunity to aging, or disease, or congenital defect, the working classes would be doomed to perpetual slavery. Now, as things stand, after five or ten years of service, you might get a big raise and finally be on top rate. But in future, that would be the rate for the rest of your life—no employer will up your rate of pay every year for the next five hundred or a thousand years. It would get too expensive for them. Unless people began to look at business differently, the odds of any employer being around in five hundred or a thousand years are very slim. The attitude now is to get your money and get out while the going is good. No one ever thought of a company as somehow meant to provide continuous employment, for as many people as possible, forever.

The trouble with immortality is that our teeth wear down. Our eyes go. Our knees break down. We suffer sport and work-related injury. The cost of keeping a body going, whether with new knees, or hips, or lenses, or teeth, over the long haul, would be considerable. And not to extend this immortality to all human beings is clearly discriminatory. Imagine how people in third world countries would feel about a bunch of immortal ‘westerners’, when they only get to live thirty-five years, and have to spend much of it walking back and forth to a stagnant, muddy water-hole with plastic buckets.

The inequities are too immense to be borne morally. Oh, and if the rights of an unborn fetus trump those of its living, breathing mother, surely the not-yet-conceived have some rights as well, especially as our desire for immortality is mostly based on selfish concerns. We're too special to die. We want to see what happens next. We're afraid we might miss something.

Think of a world where you, a relative newcomer, want to run for election, yet your opponent has had ten thousand years to build up a political machine and a network of diehard supporters in key positions. He has plenty of time to do it. He saw you coming and has time to prepare.

In a world of perfectly stable population, there might not be any deaths and no births. What would happen to the economy, if we concede that the economy is sort of driven by the needs of the human life cycle? Our economic health is predicated on a perpetual cycle of growth, expansion, decay and contraction, one which over time has incremental growth. Surely that much is self-evident.

In a previous blog post, I mentioned the notion of a ‘moral base-line.’ The one I chose was completely arbitrary, but in a future world where we were immortal for all intents and purposes, it’s pretty obvious morality might change. With no need to replenish the species, once the exact optimum number of beings was in place, the price of immortality might be gelding.

In an immortal world, there might still be accidents. Someone with a bad back injury might have it forever, and suffer from it forever. Mental illness might still arise from time to time in the population. There is an environmental component to certain types of mental illness. It’s not all ‘bad genes.’ The sufferers would suffer from it forever. There would still be inequities. The stupid would conceivably remain stupid forever, and the smart would have a perpetual advantage. In a world of fixed population, the right to have a baby would be worth a lot of money. The chance doesn't come up very often. Someone has to die by accident or suicide, or murder...or in a war. There would be all sorts of criminal attempts to manipulate the system, for even the stupid must admit that people have a kind of instinctive need to procreate--or fornicate, if you prefer that term.

What if you were born ugly? You would have to go through all of eternity with that face, or that body, or that blemish. We might begin to see our bodies as something to be improved upon, and even with immortal life, it seems as if we are never satisfied.

The notion that eternal life would somehow guarantee happiness is nonsensical. A person who had been having hard luck over the past 17,000 years might have some legitimate cause for despair.

The idea that she has all of eternity to make good and get it right and finally enjoy some kind of abundance in her life might not be of all that much comfort at the time. If she’s got a hungry belly, she might be looking at a long time before the situation is rectified.

Try telling a bunch of voters in some future world that their poverty will be forever, and see how far that gets you. I think that’s why so many poor people smoke. They don’t want to live forever.

“Not like this, anyway.”

As we get older, time seems to go by faster and faster. If we were immortal, I’m convinced this psychological phenomena would change, and our personal time on this Earth would seem much less precious. There would always be a tomorrow. We could afford to procrastinate.

We would lose any sense of the value of time, and the ultimate expression of that would be to lose any sense of the value of human life.

Clearly, this would affect our moral outlook and the way it manifests itself in our behaviour toward each other.

Naveed.

(Bluewater Bridges, Wiki Commons, by 'optionbooter.')


Naveed clung to a vertical girder in the dimness, a cluster of other grey-painted I-beams slanting upwards right and left. A small satchel was tucked into the corner where they all met in a massive gusset, liberally planted with thirty-five millimetre bolts.

Pinned by several powerful lights, he waited, lungs aching from exertion, and sobbing for life.

The top of the bag was open. The gusting wind high over the river sucked out a page and it flew off like an avenging angel of death, intent upon some mission of punishment far below.

Naveed’s white-rimmed eyes stared pitifully up into the faces of the emergency responders.

“It’s proof—proof,” he yelled in despair.

“We’re just trying to help you,” called Jim Melshevik, the negotiator. “What’s this all about?”

He found it hard to be reassuring when hanging over a chasm of several hundred feet, and yelling at the top of his lungs at a crazy man. At his present weight of three hundred and forty pounds, bending over the rail at all was something of a miracle.

He huffed and puffed, and then tried again.

“What’s this all about?” he shouted weakly down to the man known as Naveed.

“Proof that genetic engineering and hormone-enhanced agriculture is causing Americans to get really, really fat,” shrieked Naveed, his rising hopes threatened by a gust of heavy rain.

***

“Did he just say what I thought he said?” asked Staff Sergeant Paul Monnopo.

“Yes!” said Jim, a highly trained psychologist, and the hostage-negotiator, suicide talk-down guy, and duty shrink at the hospital on Jones Boulevard.

“So what do you think?” asked Paul.

“Kill him,” advised Melshevik. “He’s obviously not going to shut up about it, and he did say he has proof.”

Staff Sergeant Monnopo drew his service revolver. By standing on his tiptoes, twisting his upper body, and tucking his belly carefully to one side, he leaned over the rail.

Melshivek waited patiently, but no shot came and the sergeant popped back up for air. He put the gun away, noting the raised eyebrow. After a minute of deep, slow breathing, he was able to talk.

“He saved us a bullet,” he said, giving Melshevik an old-fashioned look. “We’ll have to get one of the smaller men down there and recover the papers, but I think we’re all right.”

Sergeant Monnopo reached up and pressed the button on his transceiver.

“All right, he hit water, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s see if we can wrap this up tonight,” and with a nod to Melshevik, the good sergeant strolled back to his cruiser.

“Phew,” muttered Melshevik. “That was a bad one.”

Naveed came so close to getting away.

The consequences of a successful departure just didn’t bear thinking about. The worrying part really wasn’t his job, it was merely the reason for it.

Looking idly over the rail again out of morbid curiousity, he saw lights and boats milling around a common point. Men with poles and hooks were hauling in a sodden form, draped in Naveed’s long white raincoat.

Wrapped up like a douche, another runner in the night.

With a wink and a nod at the firemen rigging up some brave volunteer to go over the rail and grab the bag, Jim Melshevik headed for his own Escalade. His thoughts were already elsewhere. It might be a good idea to grab a double box of French fries and gravy, and maybe a foot-long barbecued sausage on a stick while he was in the neighbourhood.