Published Thrice, Car Accident, and a Death
This is a posting of three very different events.
First the good news. Last week two different magazines and two highly prestigious contests honored my writing. For starters, my story about mind-uploading, “Everywhere After All,” won Honorable Mention in the L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Contest. This is the premiere science-fiction competition in the world, the Wimbledon of the genre. I am deeply honored.
A day later, two poems of mine were published in The Eclectic Muse. They never sent me an acceptance letter or email, but rather shipped several copies of the magazine to me with my poems already included. While unused to this breach of etiquette, I was nonetheless delighted by the surprise.
Another one of my pulp adventure stories was accepted in Astonishing Adventures, and a very talented artist is illustrating it for their next issue. Set in the early ‘30s in Shanghai, it combines several adventurous elements including Triad gangs, Near East assassins, treasure maps, a dangerous artifact, and an uncharted island of mystery in a tribute to the bygone serial pulps. It is titled “Dragon of the Veil.”
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Had a car accident this week. Kid flew around the a dark corner at 60 mph in the freakin’ rain and clocked Donna and I while we were returning from our favorite Indian restaurant. I avoided the head-on collision by half a second.
Our ancestors, having survived a scrape with a mammoth, must have seen those terrible tusks for several nights afterwards. I’ve been seeing the piercing headlights of that other car for a couple days now.
The impact came midway along the driver’s side of my vehicle. The combined momentum sent my car careening across the road towards a telephone pole. I pulled the wheel farther, and we avoided the pole and came to a stop by a wooden fence. In the enveloping silence which followed, one plank of the fence popped out at plunked against the ground.
It happened so fast there was no time to feel anything. I found myself calling the police. Then, after Donna forced me to promise not to kill the other driver, I went to confront him.
No alcohol, no drugs. Just the reckless driving of the young.
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The above incident is about a near-death.
This final part is about a real death.
I resent the very idea of mortality. I eagerly look forward to the completion of the Blue Brain project, which has the very real promise of one day being able to store a human mind in perfect replica – neural synapses with all their memories, thoughts, and dreams. And why not? Future mausoleums would be waiting rooms wherein a disc containing all your data would wait for the technology to regrow bodies and then download your loved ones. No one would die, ever again.
But in this future world, maybe we’ll have better ways of treating the abusive, the terrible, and the poisonous among us.
The day before Thanksgiving, someone Donna knew died.
I don’t believe in lionizing everyone who dies. I don’t believe in refusing to speak ill of the dead.
I do believe in honesty.
This person of whom I speak was a monster. She was a parasite of the lowest order and brought misery to everyone around her. Emotionally abusive to her family, a thief and liar to those she worked with, and a toxin to her environment. These people are rare but some families can point to an example somewhere among them. These people are destructive cancers who fester, feeding their engines of self-destruction at the expense of those around them. The clinical word is sociopath.
We don’t like to admit that there are people like this in the world. And when forced to, we might blame the things they drink or the pills they took.
Drink and pills are merely the outward habits of an inner problem. No amount of pills made this woman the monster she was. She tormented her family and shattered a good many lives. While others may choose to “pretty up” the deceased, I refuse such dishonesty.
Not all deaths are a travesty. Some are a relief.
