Dave's Fiction Warehouse

  The Trump tribe abides I hate giving money to politicians. Mostly because I’m cheap, but also because I always thought the best way to support a candidate was simply to vote for them. The problem is that certain corporations and billionaires and super PACs don’t need to vote. All they have to do is unleash a tsunami of cash every couple of years and trust that the resulting tsunami of lies will convince about half of Americans to vote against their own best interests. So far that’s worked pretty well.  So, yeah, I just sent a few bucks to Kamala Harris’ campaign. That might be counterproductive; experience has taught me that any time I have money on the line, the outcome will be the exact opposite of what I dearly desire. It’s been that way with athletic events and  pop-culture betting pools  and – with few exceptions – elections at any level. Still, just showing up to vote doesn’t seem like enough. Not this year. Not with Trump and J.D. MiniTrump and all the MAGA ...

The many moods of Jeannie C. I ’ve mentioned before how sometimes random songs come out of nowhere and get stuck in my head. There the song will stay for days or weeks, its various verses on infinite loop until another useless memory arrives, just as mysteriously, to replace it. It seems to happen a lot these days. I blame it on getting older. Maybe at a certain stage in life the brain decides it’s time to start clearing out the attic. So it rummages through the sagging boxes of memory, once in a while holding up random items for inspection: You want this? You sure? Maybe you should listen to it a few million times before you decide. This time the song is “Harper Valley PTA.” It’s been lodged in my head since before Father’s Day. Don’t ask me why. It was a dumb song in 1968 and it’s a really dumb song now. If there’s ever a ’60s tune I would gladly purge permanently from all recollection, this is it. Well, that and “MacArthur Park” (also from 1968). And yet my brain is humming as I w...