Dave's Fiction Warehouse

With citizens like these... H ard times need good songs. The Great War had “Over There.” The Great Depression had “Brother Can You Spare a Dime.” World War II had “We’ll Meet Again.” And now, with Covid-19 roaring back, it feels like we need an anthem too. I nominate “Wise Up,” by Aimee Mann. The song came back to me yesterday, just after I canceled the family vacation rental I’d booked for a week in September in Seaside, Ore. I know; the song was written in the ‘90s. But like everything sad these days, it seems pretty apt in 2020: It’s not going to stop / ‘Til you wise up I think she was talking about substance abuse, but it sounds kind of like the Einstein quote:  “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”  Which aptly summarizes the National Strategy since April: Ignore it. Transitioning in July to National Strategy 2.0: Ignore it some more. Let it burn. Let it consume the old and the weak and the merely unluck...

'W ell, that was some weird shit." President George W. Bush's unscripted reaction to Trump's 2017 inauguration speech may well be his most memorable words. They may also be the truest he ever spoke. They certainly describe everything Trump has done since then. Weird shit indeed! It never ends, does it? Take last night (July 3) at Mount Rushmore: Trump again reveling in dystopian fantasies of culture war and forced-perspective photographs suggesting his own smirking visage would look pretty good chiseled alongside the other four.    Now there is the stuff of nightmares: if Washington had been Trump, we'd have abandoned  the Revolution after the first month. If Jefferson had been Trump, the Declaration of Independence would be eight incoherent  tweets with more exclamation points than actual words. If Roosevelt had been Trump, we'd have no national parks. If Lincoln had been Trump, we'd be ... well, Confederates at the very least. Somehow I imagine the Trumps...

I used to not mind grocery shopping. But now every trip to the store involves a certain amount of resentment and homicidal rage. That’s one more effect of the pandemic: It makes me uncomfortable with my thoughts.  Here in Jacksonville, the Republican mayor has finally decided that maybe masks aren’t so bad after all, and recently announced a citywide requirement that masks must be worn in any enclosed public space. Well, he didn’t announce it, preferring to decamp while aides got the word out. I assume he wanted no video evidence of him saying such a thing. Trump worship is a cruel mistress.  Still,  praise be. Tremendous breakthrough. If such a rule had been in place two months ago, maybe Florida wouldn’t have hit 10,000 cases a day last week. Maybe we’d be looking at the end of this, instead of the beginning. But better late than never, right?  The problem is, the extreme Trump wing of the Trump party remains determined that mask-wearing is an affront to God. The m...

F or us, the pandemic started March 13. We went out for pizza. No masks then, but no hugs or handshakes either. Seated well apart. Talking about the coronavirus, I opined that we might get together again in a month or so, when things eased up. I thought we’d have a clearer picture on how long this thing might last. More than three months later, a clearer picture has indeed emerged: It’s not as bad as we feared. It’s roughly 20 times worse. All these monotonous weeks since, hunkering down, avoiding crowds and stores and freedom-loving mouth-breathers brushing past in the Publix aisles, and we’re not just back where we started; we’re several steps behind. Daily covid cases in Florida today were pushing 10,000 for the second day in a row. To think we were freaking out not so long ago when the daily number reached 1,000. We only go to stores where they mandate masks. Around here that’s down to Costco and Trader Joe’s, although yesterday Trader Joe’s seemed to be shrugging it off. ...

A hole in the very fabric of time D uring these uncertain times, you may find yourself borrowing jigsaw puzzles. I hate to borrow anything, but I don’t own any puzzles, and looking online I see that pretty much anything rated age 6 and above is back-ordered to around 2025. Some neighbors were nice enough to loan us a few. We worked on them for days, only to find at the end that pieces were missing. This grates at my soul, of course, but it also creates an ethical dilemma. Should I inform each owner of the missing pieces when I return the puzzles? The problem with this approach is that it might suggest that I am either mighty choosy for a beggar, or that I am ungrateful for the loan. Also, it might create the suspicion that I myself lost the piece in a drunken stupor and am seeking to evade responsibility. I’ve also considered returning the puzzles without mentioning the missing pieces. Few people are likely to reassemble their own puzzles any time soon and thus they’ll be unlikely to n...

O ne little-discussed provision of the pandemic relief bill is that all ad copy and commentary must begin with the words “during these uncertain times.” So. During these uncertain times, I’ve been reading a lot of Agatha Christie. I got the idea after my favorite podcast host, Phoebe Judge, decided to read a chapter a day of Christie’s first book, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles.” I’d read most of Christie’s work in my teens and 20s, but I hadn’t read this one. And I’ve been a fan of Phoebe Judge’s “Criminal” podcast for the last few years. Something about an old-fashioned drawing-room mystery delivered in Phoebe’s lovely, measured tones: It’s a comfort. You know, during these uncertain times.  Agatha Christie was at the height of her powers between the end of the Great War and the start of the Cold one. Then her distinctive style — the intricate plots, the clever dialog, the overabundance of red herrings — gave way to a wave of gritty noir populated mainly by mobsters, psychopath...

W e’re about a month into this now. Amazing what you get used to. Amazing what’s changed and what hasn’t. We’re still eating pretty well. (Thanks, WalMart Pickup!) We still go for walks and enjoy the good weather. We got through the wretched Tiger King, but still have a long queue of books and Netflix recommendations from equally bored friends and family. We’ve still got Zoom, with all its dropped audio and hilariously frozen screens. For the wife and I, the only pandemic-related injuries are the ones sustained from biting our tongues when the other does something dumb or annoying. Maybe a little uptick there. Such is life under lockdown. For us, at least, the real casualties of COVID-19 do not yet include people we know personally. Knock wood. They say the next couple of weeks may be the worst. That’s when all the folks who were partying and playing grab-ass long past the early-March warnings may find out firsthand if this is Rush Limbaugh’s “common cold” or something more dire. To pa...

  T here’s no need to read any of this. We’re all going through the same thing, all reading the same stuff on the internet. I can’t offer any fresh insights on American life in the time of Covid-19. I’m just writing here because I’ve finished the new season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and the last murder mystery I had on the Kindle ( The Perfect Couple , three stars). So. Pandemic, huh? As it happens, I also recently finished a book about a pandemic ( Severance ) and I really didn’t expect to see the book’s premise played out in real life — or for another few years at least. But now it’s happening everywhere and we must all deal with it as best we can. Here in Jacksonville, we’ve spent the last 10 days hunkered down, washing our hands like the Macbeths (stole that line from a New Yorker piece) and exploring the wonders of grocery delivery. The last time I went to a store in person was to pick up a prescription at WalMart. I didn’t really have a cold, but I did cough into my elbow a f...

I owe Mitt Romney an apology. Of course he’s never heard of me and never will, but I’ve long been one of those snide, cynical voices on Facebook and Twitter, quick to ridicule the man as an out-of-touch plutocrat (running against Obama in 2012), a soulless opportunist (dining at Trump Tower in 2016), and just another generic kisser of Trump’s ample ass (2018 up to about three months ago). Most recently, I’ve mocked Romney as the Susan Collins of Utah: given to faux concern and soulful hand-wringing, but unable to actually DO anything but furrow a brow as Trump trashes and torches his way through every check and balance the Founding Fathers imagined. I take it all back. Today was Mitt’s finest hour. He identified Trump as what Trump is, and he didn’t mince words: “…a flagrant assault on our electoral rights,national security and fundamental values. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive destructive violation of one’s oath that I can imagine.” Preach...