[via Joeri]

Using one of my old toothbrushes and a tool I’d made out of a bicycle spoke, I carefully removed the folder from the stratum labeled “office cupboard”. It contained short stories and poems dated “1993”. They had been printed on a machine that called itself a text processor and printed using this cartridge that looked like a cassette tape only smaller, which held a plastic band from which the pigment was transferred to the paper using a technology we no longer understand. “Pressure,” perhaps, or “heat,” or both. There were several copies of each story and each poem, indicating that the author had intended to send them out to potential publishers; the fact that they were still in the folder indicated that

1. he had worked somewhere where he could use the copier for free and had therefore made more copies than he could ever use and/or

2. he had given up

They were all written with an antiquated cuniform script.
Some were not so bad. This was a surprise. Normally, finding old stories is like finding old love letters, they make one cringe. The stories included the last one the author had written back then, before his kid was born rather early (the stuff was dated 1993 but that was just the date everything had been rewritten and copied; some of the poems may have been more recent, but carbon dating puts the last story at around 1989, just before the kid was born. We’ve mentioned this here before. The story came true, just in a different way than expected, that freaked out the author and he stopped writing. Someone else had a similar experience, or not, and writes about it better.)

The Internet has its limits. I was doing a search to find out whether the person who has apparently confessed to 48 murders in the Green River Killer case is a Republican, but found nothing. Obviously a big cover-up.

Ted Bundy was, though.

I’m currently using Version 2.63 of MT to run this site. My question for those of you with knowledge of this sort of thing is, look, because see, this being November, I’m writing the two novels, and since I’m very used to typing into a blog interface I’m posting them to Pain Suit, right, the chapters, and the ones that I have time to rewrite a little I even publish there, despite the fact that they’re just rough drafts. Anyway, I just wrote a chapter there in which a logger takes his axe one winter and chops his son’s cello into tiny bits, but when I tried to save it, it vanished. So my question is, does this version of MT have a crap filter installed or something?

I nearly posted this story in the comments here but realized at the last moment that it had nothing to do with the internet, besides the fact that I shall now tell said story on the internet, and refrained because we don’t want to look like a corny old guy on someone else’s weblog do we.

I was visiting a friend back in the days when nearly everything happened exclusively in real life. I was visiting a friend, in fact staying at his house for an extended period. I won’t say that he left me to my own devices a great deal, but I did spend a fair amount of time watching his pet squirrel run in the wheel mounted in its cage. It was a rather small cage, and being a squirrel the animal had lots of energy, and spent a lot of time running in its wheel, and I spent a lot of time watching it – being a lazy human I had less energy, at least relatively so; or perhaps merely more indolence.

One day my squirrel-watching was interrupted by a blonde woman who, well, not “burst,” and not “barged” … who “entered the room with a certain dramatic flair” and announced to everyone there (at this point I had reached a stage where I watched the squirrel closely even when other, potential conversation-partner types were in the room) and announced, “Boy do I ever hate American men.”

I sort of looked up, then went back to my squirrel-watching, thinking, “it’s you and me, little buddy.”

I also thought, “wonder if all Austrian women are like this.” (I should interject at this point that this took place in Austria, you see, a stone’s throw from where we now live. Well, a bit further. How far is a stone’s throw… fifty meters would be a good toss, wouldn’t it? Depending on stone and wind conditions? More like thirty stone’s throws from where we now live, but by car it takes just a couple minutes, it’s very near. But it was a long, roundabout story between that meeting and moving into the house where we now live.)

And that’s how we met.

The squirrel’s cage squeaked, faintly but constantly.