Three things for Freaky Mad Friday.
First, stay safe out there, people! At grandpa’s for Thanksgiving, last night during the Pats – Jets game we saw an awesome news clip in which an overexcited dude caught in a mob of wild-eyed shoppers waiting for the early holiday sales at a K Mart started yelling — on camera — that he would stab any motherf****r who pushed his kids again. Boy, is that a store I want to swarm! 🙂
Second, trying to get into the mood, I’ve knocked the Kindle prices of The Frozen Sky and Long Eyes down by a buck apiece. That’s like 30%, guys!! Whotta deal!! Swarm!! Swarm!!!
Third, here’s a sneak peek from inside Long Eyes — the afterword from the story “Pattern Masters.”
Enjoy…
The technology is dated now, but people still use cameras with film, and I continue to see photo processing departments in drug stores.
“Pattern Masters” is one of two stories I wrote before my wife Diana and I went digital. Because I’m a disturbed monkey, I constantly wondered what would prevent me from taking an envelope full of pictures that weren’t mine. The drawers where the photo department keeps the finished envelopes are self-serve. They alphabetize them. You’re supposed to find your own, then bring it to the register with the rest of your shopping.
The cashier never bothers to check whose name is on the envelope. He just rings it up.
So… Would other people’s photos be more interesting than mine? Were they having better vacations, bigger homes, crazy sex on camera, or training ninja dogs able to walk a high wire above gasoline-soaked flaming metal spikes?
All writers are voyeurs. We like to get into other lives and times, or we wouldn’t be writing, and most artists I know are the same. Whether they paint, sculpt, act, or sing, we share that urge capture some aspect of the human experience.
Eventually I got to know the girl in the photo department enough to ask what she saw. “This must be an interesting job,” I said.
“Sometimes,” she said. But mostly she just sat by the same machine, wearing the same white gloves, looking at almost-the-same groups of people standing in almost-the-same groups and smiling.
I thought that was interesting, too. There were patterns in our lives that most of us didn’t see — only the girl at the photo counter. Mundane or not, the pattern was there.
One of my childhood friends is a sculptor. He’s gone on to design artwork, statues, and other structures in city parks, inside libraries, in front of Target stores, and at the tram station outside the Denver Broncos’ stadium, but first he suffered through a long stretch of poverty as he developed his portfolio and his reputation.
As a wedding present to Diana and I, he presented us with a four foot salmon left over from a fountain he developed for a sidewalk near California’s state capital buildings.
“This is cool,” I said. “Can we put it in our yard? I mean, is it weather-proof?”
“It’s cement mixed with epoxy,” he explained. “If it was bigger, you could use it for a shield against a nuclear blast.”
So that’s how Sauber’s statue was born.