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Playing Scrabble with Turtles

5/16/2022

Coming (Fairly) Soon: Playing Scrabble with Turtles

My next book will not be a work fiction, though some will doubtless read it as such.

Since 2003, I have off and on been involved in a long project with an old friend of mine. Rosemary Lombard, nee Douglas, emailed me the day before Thanksgiving those many years ago, telling me a bit about her colony of turtles and tortoises. She gradually let me in on her very private project of teaching them to do quite humanoid things—like drawing pictures, reading, and other things We humans like to think only we can do.

Now, for the first time, I’m making public a short film showing her turtles (and tortoises) in action. This 33-minute piece can be viewed on YouTube, under the title “Rosemary’s Turtles.”

Watch it at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wODXEXZ3qNs

I’ve finished a draft of the book and expect to have it ready for publication in the not-too-distant future.

Paul Enns Wiebe

from The Church of the Comic Spirit

4/7/2022

Lustlieb: Exactly ten years later, March 31, 1978, I go back to the same little town, Bliss Beach, and check into this sleeping establishment--

Prince: The one whose name slips your mind, except for the word Motel.

Lustlieb: No, that one is boarded up “By Orders of the Local Constabulary,” quote unquote, so I settle for a Motel 6.

Prince: A real motel.

Lustlieb: Right. So I settle for a real motel, check in, then stroll down to the local café for a bite to eat and something that has the right combination of chemicals to wash it down with, all the time being in a state of deep spiritual despair, thinking about Michelle and wondering whether I am still on her schedule or whether I’ve wasted the last decade of a perfectly good life learning a dead language that’s not gonna do me or anybody else a damn bit of good.

Prince: Lots of people could identify.

Lustlieb: Then I sit down in a booth with a plastic seat split down the seams and look over the menu, which is sitting up straight and tall between the salt andpepper bookends, and suddenly there is a sound as of a rushing wind and my personal angel of the Lord appears at my elbow with a pencil behind her ear and chewing Wrigley’s ﬁnest and she wipes off the leftover hamburger and Heinz products from the last customer and asks for my order.

Prince: This was Michelle.

Lustlieb: Right, and this time I’d give her about an eight.

Prince: Whatta you got against waitresses, Al?

Lustlieb: I demand a certain level of class in my angels.

Prince: You’re like God in that respect. Go on.

Lustlieb: So I place an order for a Waldorf salad and a Manhattan, just to see her reaction, and then I ask her when she gets off work and what her plans are for the evening. Her reaction is, she scribbles down my order without batting an eyelid, then she says she gets off at ten but she’ll appear in my room at the Motel 6 at the stroke of midnight, ﬁrst she’s got other business to attend to.

Prince: She show up on time?

Lustlieb: She’s half an hour late, but I don’t mind, I’m busy perusing some material placed there by the Gideons.

from The First American Pope

4/4/2022

The waitress came and distributed food. She removed a greasy tab from her apron pocket and placed it midway between her two customers. She left. The two customers eyed the tab warily, and Benny chose this moment to resume their conversation.

“These things go in cycles because the universe itself goes in cycles. If I remember correctly, that was the main point of the course. The professor explained that the universe, vast though it is, occupies a limited amount of space. So if it wishes to move around, it has no other option than to go in cycles. Being restless by nature, the universe is always on the go. Therefore, cycles. In case you’re wondering, I believe he got that bit of information from a book.”

from Just Another Dead White Male

4/1/2022

“Who’s a famous Romantic poet?”

Mildred Budwieser looked across the queen-sized bed at her husband. She was sitting up straight and he was slouching, which was bad for his back but he did it anyway, just to be contrary. It was Monday evening, and she was requesting help on the daily Bugle crossword.

“How many letters?” Ed stared straight ahead at the screen, where a family of four was approaching rapture over an improved version of a major brand of tacos. But he could not appreciate their ecstasy. He had had a bad day. That afternoon his boss of two weeks had mortified him by accusing him of being a dead white male. Not in so many words, but. And just twenty minutes ago, during “Jeopardy,” his wife of forty years had humiliated him by pointing out that Alaska was not a continent.

“Eight letters,” said Mildred with a yawn. “No—nine. Two words. The second letter is an O.”

from Crazy Were We in the Head

3/31/2022

Great-grandma was a true Reisender, which, we were regularly reminded, is the German word for traveler. In her lifetime she’d covered half the world, from Prussia to Russia to the heart of Asia to Kansas and finally on to Idaho. She’d been born in old Prussia back in the middle of the nineteenth century and her family had moved to Russia when she was a young girl. Before coming to America she’d been married to Great-grandpa in a Muslim mosque out in the wilds of Central Asia, which is a story in itself. At the time I didn’t know the details; in fact, the whole thing was a big secret. Grandpa told us kids we were too young to understand, so after we looked up “Muslim” and “mosques” and “Central Asia” in the encyclopedia Karen and I came up with our own theories. I dreamed up the idea that Central Asia was the ancient version of the Wild West and that Great-grandpa had borrowed a horse or two that didn’t belong to him and when this was discovered, he and Great-grandma decided Russia wasn’t the best place to raise a family after all and became outlaws. Karen had it figured that Central Asia was the ancient version of Reno; it was where you went to get married if you jumped the gun and this happened to be reported to the preacher. But our theories were just guesses. And they didn’t account for that mosque.

from Alone in a Dark Wood

3/30/2022

Delores was a safe, comfortable subject. He could say a lot about her, especially as she way in her younger years. She had passed all his criteria for a wife. His seminary colleagues had approved. Though she had a plain face, she was then fair of form. His professors had delighted in her; Ed Milton had said with conviction that she was “made for the manse.” His mother had been pleased that he had had the sense to select someone who was majoring in Home Economics at the state university; she also confided to him that his father wouldn’t have exercised his usual veto, would indeed have seen Dolores as the comparative, if not the superlative, of herself. So Dolores it was, by popular demand. It helped that he himself had been attracted to her—she was so sensible, seeing the world as it really is, as a place prepared for the exercise of their moral obligations. He could discount his sister’s warning, “If you ask me, Dolores is a whiner, a real bitch,” on grounds of sibling jealousy. So Delores it was. Solid, if not spectacular. Reliable, if a little shrill.

from Sacred Books & Sky Hooks

3/29/2022

In 1970, Corky and a young woman named Annette Hall were married in a Mormon temple. They moved into a home his father had built for him in an affluent neighborhood of the Salt Lake Valley at the base of the majestic Mount Olympus. Not long afterward the couple had two children, he lost interest in the Church, began to meditate in the basement den—at the time he thought of these exercises as relaxation—and he and Annette started to see things “from two totally unrelated perspectives.” In 1974, the two were divorced and he was doing his meditations in an apartment.

A year later, Corky says, “I was just having a regular old life like everybody else has. I would go to the clubs in town, and dance, and have a few drinks, and party and get involved with different people,” one of whom was a woman named Chris Miller, whose religious preferences seem not to have been preserved for the ages.

On October 28, 1975, while sitting on a couch in Ms. Miller’s apartment, Corky was supposedly visited by extraterrestrial beings he came to call “Summa Individuals.” This visit led to his founding of the religion Summum, which he registered with the IRS as a nonprofit organization. On orders from the extraterrestrials, he claimed, he began to construct a small pyramid-shaped temple in Salt Lake City. In 1977 Summum initiated a student organization at the University of Utah, making it possible for Corky to conduct classes for night students; he later claimed that after two years of these classes, almost twenty thousand had become members of Summum. Using volunteer labor and donations, his pyramid was completed in 1979; it was to serve as a sanctuary, a classroom, a winery, and a repository for the mummies of Summum devotees and their pets. In 1980 he changed his name (again legally) to Summum Bonum Amen Ra, though he was commonly and informally known as Corky Ra.

from Hotel Adios

3/28/2022

So maybe I should begin this spiel by lettin’ it out that I got myself a business degree from one of them SoCal colleges. Or maybe I should cut the big talk and be truthful, like Grandma Lark tried to teach me, and say I didn’t even get into that program. The reason? Grades from my ancient past, when a C- was a C- . . . Or maybe it was the test scores . . . Could’ve been the essay, and of course that screwed-up interview . . . Could also be they thought I was on the downslope from the big six-oh, that’s always a possibility, or so says my lawyer, Ms. Leticia Ladrona. After which she sports an Esq., which is how she wants to be known by her clients and, lest I forget, her fellow bandidos. That would’ve been lawsuit worthy, she’d said, except it’d be hard to prove, due to my grades and test scores and essay and prolly my interview, which I thought was goin’ okay if not super till they shut me off after maybe five minutes, prolly because they weren’t all that dazzled by my answers to their dopey questions, goin’ by the laughs I caught wind of after they suggested I leave and leave I did but put my ear to the door hopin’ not to get caught, and caught I was not.

Who knows why? Point bein’, I didn’t exactly get in.

from Dancing Over the Rays of Light

3/26/2022

Considering the fact that my surroundings were generally of an inferior quality, I concluded that I was not in heaven. Considering the fact that my feet were presumably cold, I was not in hell. And considering the fact that my walls were not adorned with an icon of the Virgin Mother, I was not in purgatory.

Having refuted the supposition that I had once been a senior citizen, I turned my attention to the remaining possibility, namely, that I was now a senior citizen.

I ran my fingers over my face and discovered wrinkles. Exploring further, I found those wrinkles to be deep. “Aha,” I informed myself, “I’m old!” I ran my fingers over other parts of my body and found that I had no breasts. A hypothesis formed in my mind. My fingers kept exploring. Soon my hypothesis was confirmed: I was a man. I conflated my two discoveries and concluded that I was an old man. Then, after a long interval of exploration, I found that, though I was an old man, my male parts were in satisfactory if not superior working order.

from The Church of the Comic Spirit

3/25/2022

What Father Alazon Lustlieb discovered on April 1, 1978, in that hallowed cave overlooking Bear Lake, was a set of twelve ancient sheepskin Scrolls, neatly arranged within the folds of what he later described to his four disciples as “a very old briefcase.” When we pressed him for an estimate of the age of that briefcase, he judged it to be four thousand years old, “give or take ﬁfty years.” He conceded that this was an estimate, and that the angel Michelle had provided him no information about the history of the documents. He added that the probable reason for her silence on this question was that, in order to preserve the aura of mystery with which divine manifestations are always attended, angels do not reveal the minor details of their revelations to prophets.

The briefcase, he emphasized, had never been opened. He veriﬁed this opinion by citing the expert testimony of a certiﬁed Beverly Hills locksmith (he could not remember her name). Once she had disengaged the rusty clasp, Father Lustlieb said, he paid her, quietly left the back room of her establishment (secrecy, he emphasized, was extremely important), went back to his uncle’s mansion, stole unobserved into the wine cellar (secrecy again being the motive), opened the briefcase, and found a trove of twelve ancient sheepskin Scrolls, all of them perfectly preserved. Each scroll was secured with a royal blue waxen seal, on which was stamped a single Ur-Hebrew word, aleph $ taw, for which there is no English equivalent. Each seal was also stamped with a tiny Ur-Hebrew number, indicating, he surmised, the order in which the Scrolls were to be translated and positioned within the ﬁnished text.