Israel
has
swim-
mers,
as do the Palestinians.
Zion
does
not
need
swimmers; it just needs to disappear.
One
can
only
wish
the Palestinians could swim away from their hellfire.
But
they
can
only
quench that fire with all of the blood they’ve been swimming in.
They
should
not
have
to swim away, in red or blue; for Israel needs to disappear, no blood or water for land.
Please don’t forget to check out my new novella, The Targeter, published by AlienBuddha Press! Here you’ll find an excerpt from the novella, describing how the protagonist, stoned out of his mind, is having a reverie in which he imagines himself experiencing a divine birth comparable to the mythical birth of the Buddha. Here’s a link to the Amazon page, where the paperback costs a mere US$14.46.
I have a short story called ‘The Portal’ that will be published in this charity anthology by Dark Moon Rising Publications. Like my short story, ‘The Harvest,’ published in this anthology by Alien Buddha Press, this collection is also focused on conspiracy-oriented stories.
A woman high on LSD stumbles into a portal that takes her to an alien world with human collaborators who are helping the aliens colonize the Earth and steal its resources. She’s come back through the portal to Earth to warn her friends about what she’s seen. But is it real? Has she really seen these sights, or is it just part of her drug trip? Is there really something out there to worry about, or is she just going insane, as her friends think she is? Read and find out, when it’s out!
Other talented authors in this anthology will include David L. Tamarin, Megan Guillams, J.C. Macek III, Walter Wiseman, Dawn Colclasure, and John Bruni.
All you believers in dark plots against us by the elite, check out this anthology when it’s published. I’m sure you’ll love it!
My surreal novella, The Targeter, is now published on Amazon. It’s a quick read, only 111 pages, including the ‘about the author’ page. It’s also only US$14.55. Here’s the link to the Amazon page.
The novella is about a despairing 40-year-old English teacher from the West but living as an expat in Taiwan who–due to his apocalyptic, potentially nuclear, WW3 predicament, in which a civil war in China has made his home a warzone–has given up on life. Feeling there’s no way out of his situation (he’s estranged from his Western family), he decides to get drunk on bourbon and stoned on pot, ecstasy, and ketamine. In his stoned stupor, he begins a long reverie of himself as a quasi-Buddha figure (‘the targeter’ is a pun on Tathāgata, and it reflects his wish ‘to hit the target,’ or not sin), a comparison of his own life events with the mythical biography of Siddartha Gautama (he calls himself Sid Arthur Gordimer). As the war draws closer and closer to him, his being under the influence has made him blithely indifferent to the fact that, wandering out in the streets where the gunfire and bombing are going on, he’s walking right into his own death.
I wish again to thank the publishers of Alien Buddha Press for putting my short book in print!
They’re Conspiring Against the Alien Buddha Too! is now published on Amazon, and here’s a link to it. My short story, ‘The Harvest,’ is on page 52 in the anthology. The paperback is $16.99.
Other writers who have written great stories and poetry for the anthology are Aishwariya Laxmi, E.W. Farnsworth, Lynn White, L.B. Sedlacek, James Schwartz, Zachary Kocanda, Mark Heathcote, Tulpa Fedrodianna-McAngophora, Robert J.W., (my story comes next in this order), Joan McNerney, Andrew K. Arnett, Brian Simmons, Cliff McNish, D. Rudd-Mitchell, Robert Walton, J. Rocky Colavito, Joseph Farley, Bryan Franco, Nick Romeo, Buck Weiss, James Dorr, Mark Lipman, Brendan Jesus, Roberta Beach Jacobson, Shannon O’Connor, and Collin J. Rae.
Please go check out this great anthology, now that it’s out!
This is to announce the publication of a new anthology of short stories about conspiracies, called They’re Conspiring Against The Alien Buddha Too! It’s being published by Alien Buddha Press, the same people who published–in a poetry collection–a few poems of mine, namely ‘Gaza’ and ‘Stomping,’ and who will publish my novella, The Targeter, in a few weeks, too.
In this particular anthology of short stories, I have one included, called ‘The Harvest.’ Other writers in the anthology are Aishwariya Laxmi, E.W. Farnsworth, Lynn White, L.B. Sedlacek, James Schwartz, Zachary Kocanda, Mark Heathcote, Tulpa Fedrodianna-McAngophora, Robert J.W., (my story comes next in this order), Joan McNerney, Andrew K. Arnett, Brian Simmons, Cliff McNish, D. Rudd-Mitchell, Robert Walton, J. Rocky Colavito, Joseph Farley, Bryan Franco, Nick Romeo, Buck Weiss, James Dorr, Mark Lipman, Brendan Jesus, Roberta Beach Jacobson, Shannon O’Connor, and Collin J. Rae.
I want to thank Red, Dave, and any- and everybody else involved in Alien Buddha Press for including ‘The Harvest’ in this publication. Remember, Dear Readers, to check out this book on Amazon on the 4th of July, a date so easy to remember!
This is my new novella, originally published chapter by chapter here on my blog, but now you can gain access to all the chapters easily without searching my blog’s archives.
It will be released on July 14th on Amazon. It’s a quick read, only 111 pages, including the ‘about the author’ page.
It’s about a despairing 40-year-old English teacher in Taiwan who–due to his apocalyptic, potentially nuclear, WW3 predicament, in which a civil war in China has made his home a warzone–has given up on life. Feeling there’s no way out of his situation, he decides to get drunk on bourbon and stoned on pot, ecstasy, and ketamine. In his stoned stupor, he begins a long reverie of himself as a quasi-Buddha figure (‘the targeter’ is a pun on Tathāgata, and it reflects his wish ‘to hit the target,’ or not sin), a comparison of his own life events with the mythical biography of Siddartha Gautama (he calls himself Sid Arthur Gordimer). As the war draws closer and closer to him, his being under the influence has made him blithely indifferent to the fact that, wandering out in the streets where the gunfire and bombing are going on, he’s walking right into his own death.
I want to thank the publishers of Alien Buddha Press for putting my short book in print!
Al was relieved, for the vast majority of his date with Hannah the following night, that she’d never brought up the subject of meeting his family and having dinner with them. She’d never even mentioned it in her texts or phone calls that day, prior to their date.
The fact is, she was worried herself that he was going to try to get out of the family get-together again.
Still, as he was walking her home in her neighbourhood, and they were holding hands and looking up at the stars, admiring their shining beauty, she knew she had to bring up the dinner sooner or later. So she took a deep breath and looked at him, having noted his thinly-disguised nervousness right from the beginning of their date.
“So,” she asked, “have you talked to your family about me going over to your home and having dinner with you all?”
She felt his hand jerk in hers and saw his whole body shake in a set of spasms.
“What is it, Al? Surely it won’t be that bad for me to meet them. Have you talked to them about it at all, or not?”
“N-not yet,” he said. “But I w-will s-soon.”
“Al, you had all of last night after our date and all day today to talk to them about it. Why are you delaying it?”
“I-I told you before. They’ll bully me and make me look stupid in front of you. I don’t want you to see that. I’m really sensitive about it; it really upsets me when they do that.”
“Oh, sweetie,” she said. “I told you before. If they treat you badly, I won’t see it as a fault in you. I’ll see it as a fault in them. After the one dinner, I won’t have to see them again. I won’t want to.”
“Please, Hannah. This is so hard for me.”
“Surely it can’t be that bad, Al. It’s just a dinner.”
“Can we please just not have the dinner with them? Everything is so nice when it’s just you and me.”
“This isn’t about them having a low opinion of you, is it, Al?” She was getting angry now.
“It is, it is, Hannah. It’s just as I said.”
“I don’t think so. They don’t like you dating a non-Chinese, a non-Asian, and you don’t have the guts to stand up for your girlfriend!”
“No, no, it’s not that. It’s…”
“It’s…what?!“
“It’s…well,…”
“If you truly loved me, you’d stand up for me, and you’d get them to grow out of their xenophobia.”
“My family isn’t racist at all, Hannah!”
“Then what is it?”
He remained silent for several seconds.
“Well, whatever it is, Al, you’re hiding something from me, and no relationship can ever work if either of the people involved is hiding something from the other. There has to be openness and honesty for a relationship to work, and if you can’t be open and honest with me about your family, then I guess we should break up.”
“No, no, no! I love you, Hannah, more than anything!”
“Then you know what you have to do to prove your love to me!”
He took a deep breath. “OK, OK. H-how about…w-we have your whole f-family…come over?”
“My whole family?” She sneered at him in disbelief. “We just went from you not wanting me to meet your family to my mom, dad, brother, and me meeting them, all in one fell swoop?”
“Well, I f-figure i-if I have to go through you meeting my family, w-we’d might a-as well have our whole family meet them, all at once, and just get this all over with. They’ll all have to meet each other eventually anyway, right? And after that, you and I can just be together without w-worrying about whether or not my family likes you, whether or not they respect me, or if your family likes me or my family. You and I will still have each other, and that’s all that matters, right?”
“OK,” she said slowly, still looking askance at him. “Are you sure you want us all there?”
“Yes, I’m a-absolutely sure,” he said.
“Really? You still look a little nervous about it.”
“Well, I am, ’cause my family will make me look stupid in front of all of your family, but if you don’t care about that, who cares if your family cares about it, right?”
“Still, it might make you a little too uncomfortable. I don’t think they should come; only I should.”
“Well, think of your family coming as me making it up to you, f-for my reluctance to have you meet my family.”
“Oh, Al, that isn’t necessary.”
“I think it is. Our whole families should meet each other, as a test to see if they’re cool with us being together. If they don’t approve, fuck ’em. We love each other, that’s all that matters.”
They’d now reached the front porch of her house.
“Well, OK. We can have the dinner tomorrow night, at about…8:00?”
“That sounds good. Can your whole family make it?”
“They should all be free, and they’ll be happy not to have to cook their own dinner, and they all love Chinese food. I’ll tell them about it as soon as I go inside, so you tell your family we’re all having dinner together, OK?”
“OK, I’ll tell them for sure. I promise.”
“Great. We’ll see you at your home tomorrow night at 8:00. If there’s a problem, text me, as I will you if my family can’t make it.”
“Sure. Good night, Hannah.” They kissed.
“Good night,” she said with a smile, and she went inside her house.
Al just stood there for a few minutes, frozen on the spot.
I hope Hannah and her family can forgive me, he thought.
“Oh, there goes Al again!” his older brother, Freddie, called from the top of the basement stairs. “In the basement, talking to himself.”
“Shut up, Freddie!” Al shouted. “Go away and mind your own business! I’m busy!”
“Yeah, busy talking to yourself,” Freddie said. “Freak!”
“I’m not talking to myself. I’m praying to the ancestors. You know that, you faithless scum!”
“I know you still believe in that stupid old religion, which never did the family any good, and which we all left behind in Asia, ’cause we aren’t backward-thinking, the way you are!”
“My praying to the ancestors is the only thing keeping the family’s bad luck from getting any worse.”
“You’re the only one giving the family any bad luck,” Freddie said. “You’re a stupid, spastic loser!”
“Go to hell!” Al shouted. “Leave me alone!”
“Leave me alone!” Freddie said in a mocking, whiny voice.
“Will both of you be quiet?” their father shouted from the living room. “Freddie, get out of the basement and help me move this desk. Leave Al to his silly praying, if he must do it. Cut out the noise, and give the rest of us some peace!”
“Freak!” Freddie shouted at Al, then slammed the basement door.
“Asshole,” Al whispered, then he sighed and looked back at the altar. He closed his eyes and started to concentrate on the spirits.
He breathed in and out, slowly and deeply.
He listened in the silence of the dark room, waiting for a sign of the spirits’ presence.
Finally, after about half a minute, he heard a hoarse, feminine voice, speaking in Chinese.
What do you want, boy?
“Po?” Al said, his voice wavering.
Well, what is it?
“I have a girlfriend,” he stammered in Chinese.
How sweet, the old woman’s voice rasped with sarcasm.
“She w-wants to m-meet the family,” he went on. “Please d-don’t cause any trouble w-while we have dinner together here. I love her v-very much.”
How touching. Why should we care about your personal problems, boy? Your family abandoned us years ago. We became demons because of your neglect. Your weak attempts to placate us are far from enough to compensate. Why should we do anything kind for a worm like you?
“What can I do t-to ease your wrath? What do you want me to do t-to ensure that she and my family can have a pleasant dinner here together, with no bad luck, no disasters of any kind?”
There was a long silence.
“Please, Po. What do you want from me?”
Po paused thoughtfully in silence a little longer.
He opened his eyes, then said, “Po?”
A glow of light appeared weakly at first, then it grew larger and brighter. Finally, he saw an apparition of an old woman in traditional Chinese clothing, a red Qing Dynasty dress with an ornate, light-blue headdress. She looked like a bride at an old wedding.
As pretty as her clothes were, though, the look on her face was anything but pleasant. It wore a scowl and piercing, malignant black eyes that looked at him as though she wanted to kill him, slowly and painfully.
He was afraid to ask again, but he knew he had to.
“What do you want me to do for you, Po?”
Have the girl’s whole family come here for dinner.
“Her whole family?”
Yes. Her mother, father, brothers, and sisters, if any.
“Why h-have all of them come, Po?”
Why not? If you want to marry this girl one day, don’t you think it’s right if all of both families meet and get to know each other?
“W-well, yes, but…”
But what? What could be the problem? Now, Po was grinning. What could possibly be wrong with that? Families should be close, shouldn’t they? Her words implied his family’s neglect.
“O-of course, but…what do you want to do with her family?”
What we spirits will do with her family is none of your concern, boy. Just make sure they’re all here, and don’t interfere with us while they’re here. If you want to live a long and happy life with this girl, with us never troubling you again, then you’ll do exactly as we wish without question. Give us her family, and you’ll be free of us forever. I give you my word.
“But, Po,” he said as he saw her image slowly fading away, “at least give me some idea of what you plan…”
Give us her family… Her voice dissolved in a reverberating echo, as did her apparition.
He just stood there alone in the darkness, shuddering.
Infinite Ocean 
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