Wednesday 17th December 2003
Me again....
-----Original Message-----
----- Original Message -----
One rainy afternoon, I was driving along one of the main streets of town, taking those extra precautions necessary when the roads are wet and slick.
Suddenly, my daughter, Aspen, spoke up from her relaxed position in her seat.
"Dad, I'm thinking of something."
This announcement usually meant she had been pondering some fact for a while, and was now ready to expound all that her six-year-old mind had discovered. I was eager to hear.
"What are you thinking?" I asked.
"The rain;" she began, "is like sin, and the windshield wipers are like God wiping our sins away."
After the chill bumps raced up my arms I was able to respond.
"That's really good, Aspen."
Then my curiosity broke in. How far would this little girl take this revelation? So I asked...
"Do you notice how the rain keeps on coming? What does that tell you?"
Aspen didn't hesitate one moment with her answer:
"We keep on sinning, and God just keeps on forgiving us."
I will always remember this whenever I turn my wipers on.
Isn't it distressing to know that when you forward this message you will not send it to many on your address list because you're not sure what they believe, or what they will think of you for sending it to them.
Funny how I can be more worried about what other people think of me than what God thinks of me. Are you thinking?
Are you going to send it to two people? Are you going to send it at all?
Or, are you just going to delete this very profound message?
In other news, my wipers broke last night. I'm not sure what's wrong with them yet. I turn them on, and they make it a couple of inches before dropping back down, over and over. On the bright side, I'll bet it costs less than ten thousand bucks to fix them; so I'm covered.
So I took a couple of weeks off, for a change. Just in general.
So, there's some news.
The big event is probably that Cope the Varanus indicus managed to die yesterday. I'm not sure why yet. I don't think it was a temperature issue, since Twitch the Iguana was in the same room with about the same mass, and she's okay. So that leaves everything from the possibility of an insectivorous V.indicus eating something carrying some sort of insecticide to the outside chance that she was just old. I assume that V.indicus live for about twenty years, like most varanids; other than that, I just know that Cope was already an adult when we got her two years ago, and that someone had lost her some time before that; she was found wandering about Denver Metro and taken to a reptile shelter. So, for all anyone knows, she was already in her twenties at the time.
So, there's that. Leaving us only to pretend that, somewhere in heaven, a monitor lizard is having the time of her afterlife scurrying about, biting into a bunch of christworshipping morons.
Which is almost enough to cause you to believe in this shit. But not quite.
Here's something you never see these days. The Spam of the Day. But it's time. My stuff, as always, is in red....
From: jstubbe [jstubbe@mdvl.net]
To: Adele Smith [aksmith@mdvl.net] Since this has zilch to do with me, I'm assuming that something@gremlin.net was hidden in the CC field.
Date: Sunday, December 14, 2003 8:45 PM
Subject: Fw: windshield message
From: Jackie Carnes
To: Debbie (E-mail) ; Karen (E-mail) ; Linda (E-mail) ; Patti (E-mail) ; Rob (E-mail) ; Tammy (E-mail) ; Therese (E-mail) ; Tracy (E-mail)
Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2003 11:01 AM
Subject: FW: windshield message
Lemee guess: praying to some deity or other....
You named your kid after a vegetable?
Call the boys at Mensa: we've got another one....
This guy could learn a lot from a six-year-old....
That Daddy's a moron.
Who in hell would produce a sentence like 'The rain; is like sin'? William Shatner?
'Sin'...uttered...must...panic....
Have another beer....
'Mommy doesn't know where I touch you, does she?'
That, forty days from now, only drunks will have survived.
'Daddy: I was kidding; no one actually believes in fucking deities anymore....'
So it's condoned, at least.
PreFlight Agenda: keys, ignition, seatbelt, clutch, reverse, sunglasses, wipers, incoming sin...good to go.
I don't bother with beliefs; I deal with facts. Like this one, from gremlin.net/disclaimer.html: You the Visitor agree to pay US$10,000 to the webmaster in a timely manner if you claim that a deity exists. Unsolicited EMail [spam] received by Gremlin will be assessed a $500 annoyance fee, in accordance with current antispam laws; all submissions automatically become the property of gremlin.net and cannot be returned.
Those are diametric issues.
Oh hell yeah; this is the funniest thing I've seen all day....
Nope; I'm dropping it into the folder marked $10,000 to remind me to bill you for this bullshit.
This same 'tard sent me another EMail, entitled Fw: Fw: A Different Kind of Prayer; but Norton caught a virus in it and killed it; so I'm not sure what that was all about.
So. What else is new....
I haven't finished the new book yet. Which is strange, since I started it about two weeks ago. I think I finished Chapter Two. I think also that I forgot how to write a book.
Strangely enough, I haven't actually written a novel in about three years. I'm not sure why. Possibly because I've got other things going on here. More probably because no one ever lets me do it. The only thing worse than the idiotic question 'Is that a computer?' turns out to be 'New book? What's it about?'; and I get that a lot these days.
And it's not a fair question. I've got the book pretty well worked out, of course; writing it down is essentially just a matter of getting all the right words in the right sequence. But I don't quite know what it's about, really. Which is to say that it's about hundreds of things; I'm not sure which specific thing is technically the primary issue.
I guess it's about people. Different types of people. Each responding to stimuli in its own way. Kinda like every other book ever written. The stimuli are varied. If there's a Central Evil [apart from most of the actual characters], it's probably the plague itself. Or, really, that's what people will infer the Central Evil to be.
So, that's the new book. Pandemic, unless I come up with a better name for it. Which I might eventually manage. It's basically a story about how the world in general, and a number of characters specifically, deal with the [hopefully] scientifically defensible outbreak of a new disease. Kinda. Also, it involves zombies.
Yup. I'm actually doing it. With the scads of research I did for stuff like Deadache [which I'm still kinda working on, but which relies on the efforts of people who aren't particularly working on it] and the everforthcoming SiteoftheLivingDead.com [which can now also be found at SightoftheLivingDead.com, for those who don't get it], I finally figured out a way in which something like Night of the Dawn of the Day of the Return of the Revenge of the Plague of the Noun of the Living Dead could actually, viably happen. And, believe it or not, Romero, who is reportedly the first to admit that he has no idea what could ever cause zombies to occur in nature, damned near pegged it in 1968 whether he knew that or not.
That said, I'll keep the rest to myself for a while. Partly just in case the basic plot device allowing for a zombie pandemic turns out to be flawed somehow. So far, it works pretty well. In fact, the only thing concerning me about it was how damned obvious it really was. And, since Ockham's Disposable Razor tends to be utter bullshit, I'm still keeping an eye out for a more complex explanation to surface.
Still, the story is actually about the characters themselves. It always is. And, so far, I'm really pretty happy with my little creations. I look forward to killing them off. I work in mysterious ways.
More later....
--Gremlin