Dave's Fiction Warehouse

It's probably not art S ome miscreants have been spray-painting penises on the streets of our neighborhood. The Facebook reactions have been interesting. Some decry vandalism and the harmful effects on children who may pedal by. Others see vibrant guerrilla art, part of the rich tapestry of life in a supremely chill neighborhood.  I’m somewhere in the middle. Not really vandalism, since nothing is broken. And I doubt it’s going to corrupt anybody. I mean, they are supposed to be dicks, but the technique is so crude they could just as easily be abstract alligators or inexpertly rendered Amazon logos. If it’s art, it’s strictly seventh grade. We still don’t know the perpetrators, but I’m pretty sure we can rule out Banksy. As far as neighborhood color goes … yeah, whatever. I find the painted dicks about as cool as the fast-food trash we see so often in certain parks and corners of Springfield. Neither the dicks nor the trash represent an ethos so much as the absence of it. In any ca...

W henever I go to a Wal-Mart to pick up a prescription, I am reminded that what you save there you eventually surrender in dignity. But it happened to be the first place with available appointments for the Covid vaccine, so my vigilant wife arose early and booked it online. When I arrived at the appointed hour, a number of lines had already formed in front of the understaffed pharmacy counter. In the middle were eight chairs arranged in parallel rows, like a pretend bus.  These chairs were supposedly reserved for those who had just gotten the vaccine and were waiting the required 15 minutes to see whether it would kill them or not. But I am a cynical man, and I suspected most of the sitters had been there awhile and were just taking a load off.  The standing lines were comingled with people dropping off prescriptions, or picking up prescriptions, or waiting for the vaccine. No one seemed sure which line was which.  My personal rule of thumb is that whenever there is more ...

I n Barry Levinson's 1990 movie " Avalon ," there's a scene where the aging patriarch sits down in his easy chair in front of the TV.  The camera remains stationary, but there's a slow cross-fade, and at the end of it  we see that several years have passed. The old guy is still in the chair, still watching TV, but he has gotten much, much older.  His golden years have passed without notice into full decrepitude. It's a poignant moment, but also kind of scary.  Over the last year of Covid isolation, I've felt something like that.  Each day is much like another, lived by rote and routine and the occasional Zoom call. Each day I think we're keeping things together pretty well, but at the end of each day I reflect that I'm in the same place I started -- both literally and figuratively. My TV is mostly the computer; my easy chair is this same Herman Miller Aeron I splurged on 17 years ago. Since August I've been flying around in the virtual world of...