electronictales

The other night I solved a mystery that has been plaguing our neighborhood. Over the last year there has been a rash of cat disappearences. My next door neighbor, alone, having lost three of his cats.

I was awoken from my slumber about 4:00 AM by an unearthly yowling, hissing and spitting. After leaping from my bed and yelling out the window in the hopes that whatever nocturnal fracas that had erupted in my backyard would break up, I once again heard a series of yowlings and spittings.

I made the trek down the hall and through my darkened kitchen, illuminated only by the luminescent glow of the clock on the microwave oven and I threw open the sliding glass door onto the second story back porch of my abode that overlooks a large back yard hedged up against a couple acres of woodland.

As I threw on the porch light I stepped outside and found myself a couple of feet away from a wild and hungry bobcat- tan and white in color, with teeth bared and claws extended, its clipped tail bolt upright as it lunged for my black cat, Turbo.

Turbo ran through my legs and leaped up onto the porch rail. The bobcat looked at me and decided I was much too big to eat in one meal and turned tail, disappearing into the darkness so quickly that I could scarcely see him go. I examined Turbo and found him completely unharmed by the incident.

Immediately I presumed that I had solved the mystery of the disappearing cats. The bobcat had obviously been hunting the domesticated neighborhood felines for sport and food and had done quite a bang up job in thinning their population. However, the next day I went out on the back porch to fire up the barbecue, something I like to do on a frequent basis, when I noticed a scattering of bobcat fur still left on the porch, and it seemed to me that Turbo had gotten the better of the situation.

Then I started thinking, maybe it wasn't the wild bobcat that was thinning the local cat population after all. Maybe Turbo had been the culprit all along...

This afternoon while driving through town I saw the driver of a blue chevy take a right hand turn with a cell phone firmly clamped to one ear and his other hand on the wheel. His one-handed grip slipped and he nearly broadsided a white van waiting to make a left turn.

The driver of the white van was quite angry, but had some difficulty in honking her horn in a timely manner since her hands were currently engaged with her cell phone.

It seems that there is some sort of poetic symmetry to the whole incident. But I could just be high on exhaust fumes from three dollar a gallon gasoline.

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I'll be posting some excerpts from the Dire Planet novel in the near future.  Hopefully, to induce a few of you to pick up a copy of this slam-bang sword and sci-fi novel that was published by Rage Machine Press.  I'm currently working on the editing portion of the sequel, which is titled Exiles of the Dire Planet.