Dave's Fiction Warehouse

B efore I forget, Happy Halloween. I’ll be happy when it’s over. We have about a bushel of candy ready to go, and I guarantee you it will be gone before the kids quit coming. Something about this Springfield neighborhood, the big porches and the wide sidewalks. A holiday like this, maybe it is a little too pedestrian friendly. Still, the wife gets a kick out of it and the weather here is always mild enough to sit in a rocking chair in one’s shorts. I drink a little wine and ponder the Halloweens of my youth, when all the costumes were homemade. Not that it mattered. Usually nobody saw the costume anyway because you had to wear a parka and mittens to ply the streets of Somers, Mont., at that time of year. Anyway, if you like that photo above, here are a few more from back in the day. They’re referred to as “creepy” and “disturbing,” but really, they capture the old-time essence of Halloween, before every kid could afford a store-bought costume based on a movie character or a video game....

W hen the subject comes up, which is often, I always remind people that Florida is not necessarily the weirdest state in the union. I’ve lived in quite a few states and they are all weird in their own way. But lately, I’m starting to wonder if Florida might not deserve some special distinction. Not just because it’s the home of rogue pythons, bugs the size of parrots and Rep. Ted Yoho. I’ve been reading T.D. Allman’s Finding Florida : The True History of the Sunshine State. Even if you toss out half of what he says as hyperbole and screed — which might be wise — it’s hard not to conclude that rational people should probably seek their fortunes elsewhere. The history of Florida is bleak indeed. It’s a long yarn involving geology, climate and human rapaciousness. Allman sums it up thusly: “People are constantly ruining Florida; Florida is constantly ruining them back.” According to Allman, it started with the Spaniards, who came ashore 500 years ago looking for gold in the only area in N...

T he zombies of " The Walking Dead " have the reflexes of Play-Doh, zero tactical awareness, and a top speed of 1.2 miles per hour. Yet somehow they are able to take down major characters week after week. That’s just one of the problems I have with this show. I’m coming up on the end of Season Three via Netflix and there are so many new faces it’s beginning to feel like Saturday Night Live. Longtime cast members keep exiting the show in entirely foreseeable ways — nearly always involving the snapping dentures of the undead. In a zombie-rich environment, is it really so difficult to remain alert for zombies shuffling up behind? These are not ninjas, creeping stealthily from tree to tree. Walkers grunt and moan and tend to trip over discarded items. But even after dozens of episodes, the living still tend to become so dreamily preoccupied that the undead can easily get within eviscerating distance. Or, if our seasoned veterans do take flight in a timely manner, they run straigh...

The bridge of the Starship Enterprise W hen I’m not blogging, which is most of the time, I am cooking things on the grill. I do it so much that recently I bought this expensive Weber to replace the cheap piece of crap I got a couple of years ago. Two or three seasons and it was falling apart. Yes, the barbecue season in Florida lasts roughly 12 months a year, but still. Anyway, this Weber is the Cadillac of grills. It turns out that being able to regulate the heat is a real plus. With previous grills, I had essentially two choices: ambient outside temperature and about 700 degrees. You had to keep an eye on things. Risk a trip indoors to freshen up your drink and you might return to find that the hamburgers had gone supernova, the skewered vegetables reduced to curls of ash. A nice, medium heat makes more things possible. Cooking on planks, for example. I’d often seen friends do this and secretly regarded it as a dumb affectation. But for stuff like fish and shrimp you can’t beat it. B...

"The tramps were burning a sofa in the fountain.” I 've always laughed at that line, from Charles Portis’ Masters of Atlantis , for its precise allegory of a civilization brought low. He’s talking about a mansion once magnificent enough to warrant a fountain; now here are some barbarians igniting the furniture for no particular reason. It’s better than “Ozymandias,” really. John Boehner I thought of it again while reading this piece in the New York Times. It explains how the government shutdown is not really an outgrowth of stupidity and foolish pride, as you’d think, but is the explicit goal a years-long strategy by certain of America’s uber-wealthy (spoiler alert: The Brothers Koch) to persuade the ignorant to destroy their own comforts. It’s a nice bit of reporting, and depressing too, as all good reporting should be. I know smart people can persuade stupid people to do pretty much anything, but I’m still a little fuzzy on why billionaires like the Kochs even care whether t...

H ave you been collecting Bill O’Reilly’s series of historical tomes? He’s hit upon this formula that churns out best-sellers like autumn leaves. The formula is this: “So-and-so got iced. According to Wikipedia, here’s how it went down.” Then he pays some guy to tart it up like a thriller and cranks open the money spigot. So far we’ve got Killing Lincoln , Killing Kennedy, and now Killing Jesus. Next Christmas he’s going to package them as a boxed set: Killing Time: Everything You Wanted to Know About Some Notable Deaths But Were Too Freaking Lazy to Look Up on the Internet. Do I sound envious here? Not me. I salute any man who can make a great deal of money restating the obvious. At the very least, O’Reilly deserves credit for getting the basic idea, making a few notes and then paying some other guy to write it. I can picture poor Martin Dugard, his name forever in smaller type, going home to his kids at night and saying, “What are you looking at? It puts food on the table.” To be hon...

T his will be a rant about the government shutdown even though I don’t understand much about it. That’s kind of how I roll: Always ready with a knee-jerk opinion even if I have very little to base it on. Here’s the way it looks to an ignorant man: A certain minority within the Republican party has decided that the Affordable Care Act, which passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law and was later upheld by the Supreme Court, will ruin this country. So instead of waiting for that to happen, they’ve decided to ruin the country themselves. A preemptive strike, so to speak. A matter of principle. This small cadre of freedom-loving Americans knows that canceling government for a few days won’t quite accomplish that. That’s just the short game — a few geezers have to turn around their motor homes at Yellowstone and drive away cursing Obama. The real firepower gets rolled out in a couple of weeks. That’s when these stalwart defenders of liberty will refuse to pay the bills Uncle S...

I know: Nobody comes here to get the final analysis on Breaking Bad . But I can’t say goodbye to the best TV show ever made without saying something about it. Those of you who’ve never seen the show are free to to go. I promise, my assassins outside won’t track you down later. First of all, memo to David Chase: This is how you end a critically acclaimed series. Vince Gilligan and his crew executed the long-awaited finale just as brilliantly as every episode before it. Here’s the thing about that ending — Walt on the floor, Jesse racing away into the night and Lydia realizing the inadequacy of her humidifier — it didn’t leave you wanting more. You were left with a pretty good idea about the fate of every character that mattered, and all of those fates seemed fitting. The episode does have its critics, certain aesthetes and artistes and ignoramuses who may have cheered when Jeff Daniels won an Emmy for Newsroom. Some complain that the ending lacked realism, that it pandered to an unwashe...