Dave's Fiction Warehouse

A fter 15 years of the Internet, I thought I’d heard from pretty much everyone I’d ever crossed paths with since being born. But the other day there was a comment on a video I’d uploaded to YouTube: “did you attend Flathead H.S.?” I recognized the name. We’d been close friends during my freshman year. All the girls back then loved the way he danced. Once he was helping work cows at my folks’ ranch and got kicked in the chin by a calf. He said he still had the scar. During our brief e-mail correspondence that was pretty much the high point of our shared memories. It was good to know what became of him, but I don’t think we’ll be staying in touch. No reason we should. Internet reconnections are like that: you are delighted to hear from somebody and then in the awkward span that follows you realize there’s a reason you lost touch. His dad was in the Air Force and got transferred the following year. My folks moved not long after. Neither of us ever thought to write. That’s OK. When you rec...

I got a FitBit. Have you heard of these things? Susan Orlean mentions them in the latest New Yorker. It’s a little pedometer not much bigger than a quarter; you clip it to your shorts and it keeps track of how many steps you do in a day. The magic number is 10,000, or about five miles. As I understand it, if I do that distance every day for several months, all the ladies will be lifting their tops whenever I pass by. Or at least not averting their eyes in disgust. Ten thousand steps seems like a lot, but so far it’s not been hard to hit the goal. It turns out most people, unless they’re bedridden, get a fair number of steps just living their boring lives. At my house, for example, I go up and down the stairs about 100 times a day because I keep forgetting why I went up there. So all I need do is make up the difference by getting out and hoofing it for an hour or so. The FitBit syncs automatically to my computer and iPhone, so I am rewarded by these immensely gratifying smiley faces wh...

T he first post I ever wrote here was about The Sopranos, HBO’s series about the New Jersey mob. At the time I was annoyed by the ending: an abrupt black screen that said “hardware malfunction” a lot more than it said “this is a fitting end to one of the most groundbreaking TV shows ever made.” That was six years ago. I mention it because I recently watched The Sopranos again for the first time since then. This time I viewed the episodes three or four at a sitting, instead of waiting a week between shows and six months between seasons. We got through the whole show in three weeks or so. It was a different experience. The condensed viewing schedule makes the story less episodic, more novelistic. The characters and their relationships become more clear. Even the hated dream sequences seem somehow less self-indulgent. On the other hand, I quickly went from disliking Tony’s kids to actively despising them. One more accolade for David Chase: A truer portrait of asshole teenagers, circa 2005...

I was reading about this guy Sohel Rana, who made a fortune supplying cheap clothes to cheap Americans. Turns out it’s not that hard to get rich in Bangladesh, if you pay your workers nothing and thumb your nose at the basic costs of keeping them alive. One of his factories collapsed the other day, killing more than 1,100 people. He’d been warned the day before that the building was a death trap, but decided to roll the dice. The collapse was a mixed blessing for Mr. Rana. On the one hand, there are a lot fewer people expecting to collect their 10 bucks for the week. On the other hand, pretty much everybody in Bangladesh now wants him dead. I thought of Mr. Rana when I was reading this other thing, about the Koch brothers fine-tuning their spending plans for the 2014 midterm elections. After the ass-kicking the Kochs suffered in the last election, the Pollyanna in me wanted to believe they’d go back to the traditional way of projecting political will: voting, say, or being tiresome ...