The Kicker

"Sorry, you must have me confused with someone you can relate to emotionally."

I have this recurring notion that we all experience colours differently. Their actual names mean very little, being nothing more than signifiers. But when that lights hit our rods and cones, are all of our brains processing it the same way? Does my green look like your purple?

A Question of Aesthetics

Surplus Here! Get Your Surplus!

Damn, I should have gone to the university's surplus sale yesterday. Sure, they weren't advertising the overhead projectors I so desperately want this time around, but gosh, it's such a shit show slice-of-life. The greatest thing ever, there is a short story hiding in that place, waiting to be let out.

A Novel Idea IV

Something something something something:

The Collector: After a long weekend vacation, a group of four friends flip their car driving back and die. One of the four (The Collector) is confronted by a mysterious stranger (The Devil) just outside of the crash site. Luckily, he is able to make a deal with the devil, figuratively speaking, and trade his soul, literally speaking, to this mysterious stranger in return for their lives back just before all the crashing and dying. Later, our hero (The Collector) is able to hit on this girl he likes who was also in the car with this soul-selling fact ("You don't remember this, but..."). Anyway, after she rewards his heroism carnally, it turns out that he didn't sell his own soul to save their lives, but rather the highly-coveted and extremely rare soul of Robert Johnson which the protagonist (The Collector) had purchased at garage sale and which the Devil had long sought after losing it in a poker game.

A Novel Idea III

Postmodernism requires particularly postmodern interludes:

You are watching a film. Spanish, with English subtitles. The lead character in the film, she is watching a film. English, with Spanish subtitles. The universe folds in on itself. Time begins a new. Light travels up to the same distance as just before. You don't notice a thing.

A Novel Idea II

Again, probably not something anybody would want to flesh out to the extent of novel-length:

In the interest of realism, my virtual reality has a virtual reality unit in it.

A Novel Idea I

Well, maybe not a novel but a short story. Here goes:

It's a detective murder mystery. Dead bodies start showing up around, I don't know... town, the country. Maybe it's something that has caused the FBI to be alerted. That sort of scale. Anyway, there seems to be no leads. Nothing connects the victims--except all victims have a patch of skin of missing from their corpses. Now these aren't the same patches on every victim. No, they come in different shapes and locations but they're generally of a rectangular nature.

So, eventually (I don't know, page 3) the killer gets interrupted and has to flee the scene of their crime post-haste. In the process, they leave behind the patch of skin and surprise, surprise it has a tattoo inked into it: a word (the word is not especially important in itself, just the idea of it being a word, but it could be made into a metaphor for the story-at-large, blah, blah, blah, meaning, meaning, blah).

Anyway, some quality sleuthing and quick googling later, and it turns out all the victims are participants in Shelley Jackson's short story Skin. The text itself is dying, disappearing. Oh my, now even our fictions are fleeting. Anyways, the detectives contact Jackson, but no more clues are forthcoming.

Take a break for more detective work, etc.

Since the nature of the project, the detectives don't have access to the short story or its list of participants or there's too many or something convenient like that. But one more google search later and there's someone tattooed close by. So the detectives just plan to keep an eye on this person: surveillance time! Witty stakeout dialogue!

The detectives are involved in a chase with the killer, possibly involving rooftops, and voilà, they pin the killer down. Anyway, one old man Wiggles unmasking later and the killer is revealed to be: shock of shocks, Shelley Jackson.

Ms. Jackson then delivers the story's parting words.

"I'm not the Shelley Jackson who wrote Patchwork Girl.

I'm not that Shelley Jackson."

So consider that released into the ether. Have with it, ether.