Author Archives: Kyle Kimberlin

expectations and emergencies

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Back on June 7, I submitted via e-mail a piece of short fiction to the 2008 Noozhawk Fiction Contest. The prize, had my little vignette not succumbed to presumptive failure to thrive, would have been a scholarship to the SB Writer’s Conference, which starts this week. The conference has gotten so prohibitively expensive that I wouldn’t even consider paying to attend.

At this price, if they resurrected Faulkner and Frost to teach at the event, sure. But lesser mortals now holding forth have overestimated their message.

I won’t be attending the conference, and not because my story didn’t win, though it didn’t. It simply disappeared. Poof. Sucked into a void of abject indifference. Not so much came back as a “submission received and deleted, you hack.” Reminds me of a scene in one of the Star Trek movies: the teleporter malfunctions while people are being sent. Their molecules are scrambled horribly. Somebody says to Kirk over the communicator something like, “Sorry Admiral, but what we got back here didn’t live long.” Cracked me up.

I didn’t enter the contest expecting to win. I submitted just because writers write and sometimes you have to move something to the Finished pile. And I wasn’t expecting flowers in consolation when I didn’t. I’m just saying, it’s unprofessional. Inconsiderate. Regardless of their opinion of my story, nobody should be ignored. Besides, I know it’s OK writing, if they don’t. Know what I mean?

A boilerplate response text could be pasted into a reply and sent in seconds, free. I took the time and care to format and submit my humble piece as requested, and kept my covering e-mail brief and polite. Futility.

Any writer will tell you, get ready for rejection. I can handle it, but this isn’t that. And this isn’t my first rodeo, he said, channeling Bush. I have been to town enough times to know you don’t go to the whorehouse lookin’ for true love, and you don’t send your writing to strangers and expect to find it there either.

The weird thing is that I’ve searched the writers’ conference site and I can’t find any indication that judging ever took place or that a winner was selected or announced. Maybe things fell apart. That’s happening lately.

I saw a crazy dangerous possibly drunk driver on the highway the other day, so I dialed 911 on the cell. Nobody answered. Can you believe it? “All operators are busy,” at 911! That was a first for me. I finally gave up; the car was long gone, and I couldn’t have told them where to look anymore. Thank God nobody had stopped breathing or was bleeding to death.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre….

Wild Bill

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James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok, famous gunfighter and gambler, was only 39 years old when he died in Deadwood SD, in 1876. He was shot in the back of the head in a cowardly attack, and died holding aces and eights.

I find it interesting, because in the movies he’s generally been portrayed quite a bit older. As here, by Keith Carradine, in Deadwood.


Carradine is 59, but he can still wear his guns, is my point.

code 3

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I saw something beautiful today. On my way home from Santa Barbara, just at sunset, I was coming through Montecito. The sky ahead in the east was darkening. I looked up and saw a fire truck pass ahead and above me on an overpass, its right lights spinning in twilight. As I had the windows closed and the AC on, the fire truck was silent.

One of those moments, you know?

Happy Bloomsday

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Bloomsday is a commemoration observed annually on 16 June in Dublin and elsewhere to celebrate the life of Irish writer James Joyce and relive the events in his novel Ulysses, all of which took place on the same day in Dublin in 1904. The name derives from Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses, and 16 June was the date of Joyce’s first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, when they walked to the Dublin village of Ringsend.

Happy Fathers Day

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Here’s Dad …

THE FISHERMAN

is walking to the sea
at dawn in the purple
of a storm that passed on.
He turns to move on rocks
down to the water
at the base of the pier.

Seals sleep like dogs
in the wet sand, dreaming of men.
But a man will sleep in a moment
dreaming of waves that rise up
like lions digging graves
for the dead.


In the shadow of these cliffs
the day stays dark and cold
with a westerly breeze
on the back of his neck
and his net too small for stars.


So I am sleeping peacefully
dreaming of mountains and snow
while he fights his line
for the rise and fall
of silent seas and angry boats.

His life is a small fire
built to cook fish.


© a long time ago
by Kyle Kimberlin


wasted

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Sometimes I go to the kitchen, make tea, and forget that I did. I’ll look down an hour later and see the cup sitting there like a sad, dark eye. It reminds me of these lines from James Wright:

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Waste is a kind of sin. Isn’t it better that God strike down an apple tree – that an orchard of blind apples goes up in flames wrought by summer lightning – than that one pinkish Fuji rot in my fridge?

There is something about waste that transcends cost, that surpasses infinitely the sum of its matter. It’s a failure of love, a failure of life. The apple, ripe with its Biblical allusion, was born to be eaten. It’s the only way it can live on; an apple’s eternity – and often an idea’s – depends on such subsumption. This tea, which I am still drinking despite its tepidity, is far too close for comfort to the ennui of a late spring late evening, failing to write or to thrive.

I mean it would be that way, if it really was that way. Maybe it’s not. Maybe I’m just a little bored and in a mood to watch myself write. (Some bigtime words in this post.)

And my tea got cold, is my point.

your tax dollars

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I just saw on the TV that the FDA is broken had can’t do produce inspections properly. The FDA claims it needs $275,000,000 to hire 490 new people for its staff, so it can inspect our food and keep it safe.

Excuse me?

That’s almost 600 grand per person. Why would it cost $600,000 to hire a food inspector? Let’s try this:

$60,000 per year salary, two weeks vacation, major medical and dental.

Now you can get 500 people for about 4 million, instead of 275 million.

Why are the inmates running the asylum anyway?

hiding in plain sight

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Well this is cool. Hanging out in Starbucks in Carp, drinking a mint tea (already over-coffeed for the day) and working online. It’s nice that they finally got around to taking care of their customers with a little Internet hook-up, but I still have to question their methods.

What Starbucks has done is to make another deal with a major telephone company for limited access to select customers, when they should have hooked up everyone for free. I had to put money on my Starbucks card, register it (and there’s the rub), then sign up for AT&T membership. That’s free enough, but still could have been better.

I have been in coffeehouses where the wi–fi was open to anyone in range, though you were expected to buy something of course. At others, I was given an access code with my purchase, and that was cool too. The advantage to these approaches was anonymity. I didn’t have to give anyone my name and address, as I did on the Starbucks site today.

So I wonder, when I logged on here at the store, was my exact location revealed to some database, accessible by the FBI, the NSA, CIA, or some other misbegotten, misanthropic progeny of the NKVD and the Spanish Inquisition? We are being watched, you know. Some of us are, and none of us is safe from it.

Thanks, Starbucks. And the tea is a little weak.

story submitted

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This morning, I submitted a little story to a contest. If I win, I get a major award. I should say if it wins. That would be nice.

Would you like to read my little story? Very well. It’s called A Shadow of Himself.

An excerpt:

The sun is going down. The lights in the station and the street come on. Now he stands and leaves his bag on the ground and his old coat on the bench. He wants a little more of all of it, this place where he has grown and been loved, lost everything, and found this hour of peace as the daylight fades.

two quarters

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A young boy enters a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, “This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.”

The barber picks up a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, “Which do you want, son?”

The boy takes the quarters and leaves.

“What did I tell you?” said the barber. “That kid never learns!”

Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store. “Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?”

The boy licked his cone and replied, “Because the day I take the dollar, the game’s over.”

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