var msg = new Array();
insert = new Date();
today = insert.getDate();
msg[0]="I had brought along a laptop and a book, Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. I trust that very little of the Eco-esque penetrated into Rice Barge Coolie. If it has—well, we learn from the masters. I once rented a video of The Name of the Rose and thoroughly relished the film version: Sean Connery as a medieval monk, William of Baskerville. Then I had to read the book. I held on to a yard sale paperback for eight years, and just finished it for the second read. Starting takes time. And I would some years later take a crack at Dan Brown's DaVinci Code—pale stuff when held up against Eco’s. read more >>"
msg[1]="The dog, a border collie, was waiting by the parking meter. She was staring at a spot in the sky, somewhere above the heat exchanger on the roof of the Pick N Pay supermarket. She threw back her head for a lonesome shivering howl, a primal coyote crying down blood from the moon. read more >>"
msg[2]="The deep winter snows had turned Depot Square into an isolated plains village. Ed Crowley was a retired brakeman from the Soo Line. Not really old as railroaders go, he was in his mid-fifties and waiting out the years to his pension working at an inside job—night telegraph operator. Ed had done some long hauling on the CB&Q—the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, on a transfer crew riding the Northwestern tracks to Ashland, Wisconsin. Ed was crippled with arthritis that twisted his hands and wrists. Thirty years in the yards in all weather had done for Ed as a brakeman. The only parts of his hands that he was still able to articulate were the index and middle fingers before the first joint. With his wrists turned in he would yank at the patch cords and make their weights rattle in the falls, looking like a praying mantis going at its dinner. read more >>"
msg[3]="My old neighborhood, St. Agnes parish, was Crazy Joey Gallo's turf. You cleaned up after. One piece of litter—a candy wrapper, a cigar butt, and he'd have your guts for garters. Like kiss your ass goodbye. His mother lived over on Wyckoff Street. Not quite Brooklyn Heights, but close. The real estate speculators who hoped to cash in on the Brooklyn Renaissance dubbed it Boerum Hill. read more >>"
msg[4]="St. Velcro™ had a nagging feeling he had forgotten something. He squinted myopically. No, he had always stood here on a precipice at the banks of a wide muddy river. read more >>"
msg[5]="What happens to a Sci-Fi or Fantasy story after it has been published—the remainder pile, a sporadic reprint, oblivion? Without the helping hands who get a well-deserved accolade here, the heavy lifting would have been overwhelming. Typically the afterlife of a tale consists of gathering dust until the writer's heirs and assigns shred it for packing nick-knacks and other writerly impedimenta. Not quite the half-life of linoleum. Hence onetinleg.com. To misquote Walt Kelly's Pogo: We have seen the future and it's not yet... The call, dear reader, is yours. read more >>"
msg[6]="Winter smelled like wet wool, oatmeal and coal oil, and lungs gurgled with persistent coughs. When it snowed, the mud of the dooryard was dotted with great, plashy wet flakes, piling into drifts in a day; the brown mud seeped up as the coal smoke seeped down. Wind-blown snow exposed striations of white, black, and brown eddying in the gritty film that covered all outdoors. Soot clotted on the snow, the walls, the curtains, and in the lungs. Two kitchens and four stoves—the soot and ash filtered into every room of the house. read more >>"
msg[7]="It was the usual workday. I arrived at the radio station, plumped the book bag with my lunch, Maalox and humorous magazines on the control room table next to the Associated Press computer station, and headed to the coffee service. My name is Robert Hunter, professionally Rob Hunter, except for a year in the late 1960’s when I was Tom Mitchell, a house name. WSAR in Fall River, Massachusetts had bought a jingle package and, before it arrived, Tom departed. I became Tom. read more >>"
msg[8]="The goddess got a far-away look in her eyes. She searched the middle distance, a shepherdess seeking lost innocence. Wrist to brow she felt for a fainting couch with her spare hand. 'All events that will or would ever occur in each and every universe or imaginable universe from the innards of the dust mote to the googolplex of stars have already happened. All and at once at the moment of creation.' She leaned backwards, then fell down. 'Shit! There should have been a velvet couch.' read more >>"
msg[9]="Libby Pease is my favorite person out of all of Willipaq County—an evocation of the usually broke and always hopeful denizens of, perhaps, just perhaps, Washington County, Maine—living free and wild in their very own Yoknapatawpha. The Libby tales became a triptych and she picked up a spiritual counselor, a 400-year-old medicine man. Ah, but Libby's interlocutors, even as Doctor Who's companions, had to start somewhere. William Powell was the first choice. The Carnegie Repertory Cinema—three floors down under Carnegie Hall where the subway (57th St. Station, a loop on the Q line) passed by on the far side of plush-covered walls—ran all the Thin Man movies back-to-back one weekend a month. The big sliver faces and the discrete drapery of Myrna Loy’s shimmering dressing gowns got me hooked on the Thin Man and Myrna Loy. read more >>"
msg[10]="Raw pork—schlach—is an old Milwaukee delicacy. Or was until after the All-Star Game when half the parishioners of St. Stanislaus got wiped out by toxoplasmosis from contaminated pork. That was July 8th of last year, 1947, a Tuesday to allow travel time over an extended 4th of July weekend. Joe DiMaggio of the Yankees was in the outfield along with Ted Williams from the Boston Red Sox. One hell of a game—Ed and I listened to it on the radio at the Antlers bar—the American League took it 2-1. The St. Stanislaus church picnics were always held during the All-Star break. Six hundred died, but Joe DiMaggio escaped the stain of blame and the buffet caught the rap. read more >>"
msg[11]="'I have been out of things. In... limbo? Heaven, hell? A gray place with vapors. Rather like a hot springs health spa. But without the health. No whole grains and celery tonic. No colonics, upper or otherwise, I fear—high or low. Not much fun, in short. But I am certainly revivified. I don't feel a day over forty-one. That is the age at which I died. I was garroted and stabbed by a pair of burly policemen and buried in Brooklyn. Coney Island, under the boardwalk.' read more >>"
msg[12]="A disc jockey’s life is a permanent disconnect—imagining an audience while staring ahead and counting the holes in the same Celotex wall tile over and over. The resulting numbers are always the same. Every time. Pete Myers was a friend some forty years ago. We were flat, dreaming of a world where we could be round. read more >>"
msg[13]="I had brought along a laptop and a book, Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. I trust that very little of the Eco-esque penetrated into Rice Barge Coolie. If it has—well, we learn from the masters. I once rented a video of The Name of the Rose and thoroughly relished the film version: Sean Connery as a medieval monk, William of Baskerville. Then I had to read the book. I held on to a yard sale paperback for eight years, and just finished it for the second read. Starting takes time. And I would some years later take a crack at Dan Brown's DaVinci Code; pale stuff when held up against Eco’s. read more >>"
msg[14]="Level with me. You believe I am a figment when I am only a story that got better with the telling. The telephone syndrome—travelers from the Land of Cathay chat with African merchants who talk to a Turk, the Ottoman natters to a Tatar mujhik who spills the beans to an itinerant Italian who in turn goes home with a marvelous tale of what he expected to see in the first place and tells the homefolk what they already knew. I am an article of faith. This is how legends begin. I might have begun life as a simple giraffe. But I am here with you. Now. Deal with it. read more >>"
msg[15]="Charles Scott King and I leaned on the bar, lost in the wonder of frozen lemonade dished out by Red Margolis, bartender at Martin's Bar, 59th and Broadway, as a substitute for whiskey sour and collins mixers. At work, across the street, Central Park was spotted with fall reds and slick, sickly silver and gray: native maples and sycamores. The year was 1962 and we all worked at the same radio station. If you accepted as an operating premise that anything west of the Hudson was camping out, the RealLemon Red Margolis concocted his whiskey sours with had made it in stages from the Caribbean to Jersey and thence Manhattan by a kind of reverse osmosis. read more >>"
msg[16]="The day the Illuminati—secret, sinister—reentered my life Harold Junior pulled up in his rusted-out Lincoln Continental as I was checking my mail. Our mailboxes, down by the road, do double duty as street addresses too, here in rural Maine. Harold's huge domestic battle cruiser had been bought cheap and came with a titanic appetite for gas and oil. But it never had to go far, only start. And it plowed through drifts that would stall a Jeep. read more >>"
msg[17]="MP3 downloads released under a Creative Commons license. They're free. Copy the files as much as you want, pass 'em around. All I ask is that you don't alter the file or sell it. To download—right click 'download' and select 'Save Target As' or 'Save Link As' depending on your browser. To preview a story just click 'stream.' The audio versions of the tales from Onetinleg.com will be appearing here as studio time allows. Hint: you can stay ahead of the curve by clicking the 
symbol to initiate a podcast. read more >>"
msg[18]="'Jesse Ventura,' said Lucian Hobart, known as Lucy. A cat that walked at his feet looked up questioningly. 'I recall a picture of him in his wrestling getup. With a nice blond with her boobs out.' The cat was a Burmese shorthair as far as anyone could tell. She stalked small things in tall grass, ate dry kibble and was a vegetarian by choice. Sixteen mousetraps hung by strings from the handlebars of Lucy’s walker. read more >>"
msg[19]="There once was a golden age when I was barely old enough to slip in under the tent flap and into the show. We now call it the golden age of the pulps. The pages were raggedy-edged and they were expensive. Well, twenty-five cents mostly, but they were thick. Tales of wonderment and awe, a life of adventure and romance down at the corner drug store. Good stuff. read more >>"
msg[20]="Maine is big on signs. As I have written elsewhere in this blog, I live on a fjord, a fresh water river that connects with the sea—the Bay of Fundy, eventually the Atlantic Ocean—and turns brackish twice a day as the tidal surge backs things up just like the tenement plumbing that serenaded us in Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal basin: 'Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time,' a saying attributed to C.S. Lewis of Narnia fame. read more >>"
msg[21]="Harry had studied the Mudman's early recordings, slowing them down to pick up the difficult passages. At the bottom of the grooves, struggling against a tidal surf of record noise, lay genius. These recordings, the Mudman's grip on history, had been made at an Alabama prison camp in the 20's. The Mudman had killed someone at a card game. With an axe handle. read more >>"
msg[22]="You probably picked up this tale expecting one of those conspiracy theory tell-alls. I mean from the title and all. Nope. In the middle of the Twentieth Century mysterious things were still reported in the Southern Highlands. However, in real life, hauntings, hexings and supernatural doings were as strange to the post-bellum South as pit barbecue, Winn-Dixie, Dr. Pepper and Royal Crown Cola were familiar. Well, there was this one item about an exploding deer that got buried in the back pages. read more >>"
msg[23]="Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. James 4:2,' said the man in the doorway. 'The Bible is a almanac of failed good intentions, Sister. You can help me; I am asking. Here, accept this as a further token of my sincerity. Your chastity is safe with me, I am a Democrat.' The visitor produced a large fruit basket, beribboned and covered with cellophane, of the kind often left by a well-wisher in a stateroom of a great ocean liner. read more >>"
msg[24]="'She lured me to my death. Dear Necrophilia Jones—she was such a cozy little piece. I was smitten; what could I do but follow the call of the glands. I allowed myself to be murdered. Anything else would have been unfeeling, insensible. That's French. Nekki was a dancer in the Roxy chorus, a showgirl. Breasts like a renaissance whore, tight blonde curls. What we called a flapper in those days. A veritable heart-stopper, sister. She had that indefinable something, a je ne sais quoi. Tammany. I was as corrupt as any of the 'em. More than most.' read more >>"
msg[25]="I came from Wytopitlock, where I was living at the time, down to Mattawamkeag on the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad one day to buy myself a hound dog. Up to Wytopitlock we was having a run on long-legged rabbits then, I didn't want none of these short-legged dogs that can run all day and not move any. I wanted one with rangy pins that could get close enough to a Wytopitlock rabbit so he'd exert himself and know he was chased. The short-legged dogs we'd been using was no good at all, and I says to myself, The Hell with that! read more >>"
msg[26]="The deep winter snows had turned Depot Square into an isolated plains village. Ed Crowley was a retired brakeman from the Soo Line. Not really old as railroaders go, he was in his mid-fifties and waiting out the years to his pension working at an inside job—night telegraph operator. Ed had done some long hauling on the CB&Q—the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, on a transfer crew riding the Northwestern tracks to Ashland, Wisconsin. Ed was crippled with arthritis that twisted his hands and wrists. Thirty years in the yards in all weather had done for Ed as a brakeman. The only parts of his hands that he was still able to articulate were the index and middle fingers before the first joint. With his wrists turned in he would yank at the patch cords and make their weights rattle in the falls, looking like a praying mantis going at its dinner. read more >>"
msg[27]="Nunzio Calabrese did not think of himself as a bad person. He loved his mother, most black people because the insides of their mouths were so pink, and his pigeons. He flew his pigeons from a rooftop. He felt joy at their tight formations and gratitude when they returned to his lure, a scrap of red bandana flown at the end of a bamboo pole. Where a lesser man would unburden his sins at Confession or between the polished pillars of a willing woman's thighs, Nunzio partook of the freedom of the skies. He was a born killer. read more >>"
msg[28]="Fred Splendid was developed in the 1980s, a backward-glancing homage to the 1960s Chickenman (Dick Orkin) radio comedy series (He’s everywhere! He’s everywhere!). The commercials were the best part. read more >>"
msg[29]="St. Velcro™ had a nagging feeling he had forgotten something. He squinted myopically. No, he had always stood here on a precipice at the banks of a wide muddy river. read more >>"
msg[30]="When I began the The Return of the Orange Virgin almost 30 years ago, I had an all-over queasy feeling that the damned thing would move in and take over my life. So it did. Fast forward to 1993, and a typescript that weighed in at twelve pounds and 800+ pages. I figured it was time to go back to the beginning and actually read the thing. Yuck. read more >>"
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