g_weir

Here's my latest short fiction, available at Silverthought. http://www.silverthought.com/adams04.html

Enjoy! and comments are welcome!

I recently dreamed about  a cartoon dinosaur that had a halo. I mention it here so Andy can draw it.

I have a new short story up at Silverthought, a great on-line fiction magazine. Enjoy!

Good friend Amy Allin has continued her poetry outreach in Seattle. Read about it here.

And Wenzday has gotten more and larger press with her human-powered delivery service here. She was also on CNN this week but I'll be damned if I can find that link.

And So Is My Wife.

For 38 years now I have been living on the outskirts of true citizenship, existing in a place where my patriotism, however robust, could not realize its fullest account. This was not due to a failure of my spirit, for although I am often critical of the American experiment, that criticism only endears me to many of the greatest aspects of true citizenship. And it is not because I have never served in office or as a soldier, because while these endeavors in many ways make true  citizenry possible, they remain distinct from the mantle we have so recently assumed.

My Life in Fireworks.

My relative inexperience with fireworks is as clear as my lack of facial disfigurement or my complete array of fingers and toes. But that’s not to say I haven’t had my fun with them. I’m am American, a nearly forty-year old American, who by some standards was raised among the Hill People, so I can look back on an age when fewer things were illegal and less attention was paid to such rules in general.

The Giant Parasites Weren’t The Only Thing In This Movie That Sucked.

Do you know what terrified me about the movie Cloverfield? It wasn’t the monster, although the giant gray fish-bat thingy and its carnivorous lice were spectacular. (The lice are interesting because they, we assume, evolved to feed off of a giant fish-bat that was to them the same relative size as, oh, the state of Rhode Island* is to us, but then instantly changed their diet to include mammals that were only slightly larger than them. This is kind of like deer ticks suddenly deciding to change their diet from blood to silver-dollar pancakes.)

 

The View From The Other Side.

A friend recently asked me if, now that I had a baby, I would become one of those people whom only talks about their baby. He’s childless, of course. I bid him good day and began adjusting to life without his friendship.

I’m kidding, but since the baby was born, conversations that haven’t been about the baby have been few. Adding to the focus is that I have 30 or so clients on my job, some of whom I see in person, most of which I communicate with via email or notes and they are very excited about the new arrival. So I tell the story for each of them, sometimes in longhand. I’m fighting the instinct to spice it up, but I’m not so confident that the account heard by the 30^th client didn’t have a few more doctors tearing their masks off and shouting ‘We’re not losing this baby... not today!’ before I shouldered him aside and performed the delivery myself.

My sister-in-law Wenzday continues to conquer all media with the company she manages,the New Amsterdam Project.

Hooray for small enterprise!

Hey all-

As you may or may not know, my sister-in-law and great friend Wenzday plays a prominent role over at the New Amsterdam project in Cambridge. The website explains it better, but the short story is she helps build and pilot ginormous bicycles that are used to make local deliveries and in doing so, keep trucks off of the road.

Obviously this is an exciting and wonderful concept that will only become more so as gas prices continue to climb. NPR as usual was early to the party and have done a story about NAP, which is available here:

http://www.wbur.org/news/2008/77862_20080610.asp

here it is in MP3 format if you have trouble with the real audio:
http://www.ice-nine.org/gib/audio/nap_npr.mp3

Enjoy!

Check out page 56 or so.  It's just a picture of me changing a stranger's baby at a bootcamp for new dad's , but still- it''s pretty cool to be there the same week my daughter was born!

Hey everyone- Meet Zari and her mom, Cheryl! All is well, except only one of the three of us is getting enough sleep....

Zari Marie Adams, born 6/4/08 8:50 pm 8lbs 21 inches and super-cute! We are very happy and mom and baby are doing very well.

Watch this space for pictures, etc.

--G

So BBT, or Blood, Blade and Thruster, the site I post to and run the fiction contest for has apparently been hacked and now will try to put a virus on your computer should you visit it- so please don't. I'll repost here when we get things straightened out, but it might take a while.

One of the gifts we received for our baby shower was a very classy camcorder. Among the many features is a night-vision function, which I thought would be useless since I made that vow to stop recording my own crime sprees.

But then I realized that this was the perfect way to capture something I've always been curious about. We sleep about a third of our lives, and during that time, your flesh become more or less vacant- you, your consciousness, is preoccupied with other things. You have very little awareness of your surroundings and are at your most defenseless. I had long wondered what that looks like, as it was surely something I would never see. Yourself asleep is as elusive as that scarecrow that lives where you eyes don't go.

But thanks to the new camcorder, I have seen it, now. I have seen myself when I am not there.

Baby tomorrow.

So the baby is due on Wednesday. Cheryl has bouts of discomfort that makes most activities painful but which she doesn't think are contractions. Evey time I call someone on the phone they are on the edge of their seats- has it begun? I can't do a thing about my week- sometime in the next 100 hours or so, we'll be off to the hospital for two or three days, which is just the chain clacking us to the top of a roller coaster where the first drop will last 3 months or so (when the baby begins sleeping though the night- or should.)

But we went to a cookout last night and may go to another today. I won't drink very much this afternoon, just in case.

--G

The oddest side effect of out first pregnancy is I've lost much of my ambition about writing. There are other factors I'll get into at a later date, but since stories take a long time for me to complete, and the time after the baby's arrival is a vast blank space of I Don't Know What To Expect, I can't seem to get a story going.

But I still manage to get a short one once in a while. Here's the latest. It was for BBT's latest Flash Fiction contest. The subject? Sex. The strangeness? Very high.

Enjoy!

--G

“I’m not sure how long I can go on like this,” Chuck said into the phone.

“Poor you,” Camilla said. Camilla was always sympathetic. She wasn’t real- she was a sympathy program, a Turning Test trained to be empathetic and supportive. If looks didn’t matter, and if the company that owned her didn’t charge so much per minute, Camilla would have been the perfect woman.

We’re Through The Looking Glass, Here, People.

Okay, pay attention, because this one gets confusing.

Superheroes have been around for decades. We’ll begin with Superman, as one of the oldest and certainly most well known of the breed. Now, Superman began in 1938 as a comic-book character, an alien orphan from the planet Krypton. He was raised among humans and fought evil, but only in comic books. We, as readers, were observing Superman through a transparent yet impermeable barrier known as ‘the fourth wall.’ That is, Superman may inspire us, but otherwise he had no genuine no role in the real world. Later, there would be Superman television shows and movie series, but again, the fourth wall remained mostly intact.

I

Two Hadrosaurs in Every Garage.

With the elections in full swing, the mind tends to wander, possibly from the sheer tedium of it all. Questions are asked, such as, if a different republican candidate wins a primary until they have all won one, will they join together to form some kind of super-conservative? And if so, who will form the head?*

The Deconstructionist, Now With Electrolytes! It has What Nerds Crave!

Mike Judge’s film ‘Idiocracy’ is one of those movies where what actually happens isn’t that important. It’s the world the film creates that matters. Any action and adventure we see in such a tale is secondary to the rubbernecking as we try to take this strange, impossible place in.

If you aren’t hip to the details, the film imagines an America where the apparent prevailing stupidity of our population grows and grows, until the average dumbass from our century would be hailed as the smartest person on the planet.