David Dubrow

Author

Coronavirus Stories: “You Will Never Return”

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My little family has developed a kind of COVID-19 mythology to gamify the unusual circumstances of the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic. We’re aware that this has hit many people in the worst possible ways, and our hearts go out to them. Splitting the difference between limiting the spread of the disease and limiting the economic damage has proven to be a massive challenge to our leaders, such as they are. Here’s a dramatization of the mythology we created. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

—

FEBRUARY 8, 2020

“Did you bring a snack?” Jonah asked.

I shook my head. “No. You just had breakfast like an hour ago.”

“So?”

“So so.”

“Ugh.” Jonah wiped sweat from his forehead with the hem of his Pikachu T-shirt and moved further ahead on the forest path. “I’m line leader.”

“I’m the light turner-offer,” I called.

“There aren’t any lights.”

“So?”

Next to me, Rose checked her Apple Watch. “Almost closed a ring.”

“Nice,” I replied.

Around a bend we reached the wooden tower that loomed over the marsh beyond. I craned my neck to watch people climbing the four flights of stairs to reach the top.

“Are we going up there?” Jonah asked.

“If you really want to. Didn’t you guys go up there last weekend?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Let’s see what’s here at the bottom,” Rose suggested, so we went around the tower, inspecting the stanchions and concrete foundation sunk into the ground. Spider webs glistening between the beams told us that few people walked under it. Jonah found a piece of scrap lumber and leaned it against a stanchion, claiming that in doing so, he helped build the structure.

“What’s this?” Rose said, and pointed a little further, deeper into the woods.

In a small clearing, someone had used Spanish moss, stones, and branches to construct a small-scale crop circle of concentric rings. It was a neat sort of pattern, so Jonah stood in the middle and held out his hands, pretending to be beamed up by extraterrestrials. I took a few photos, and we walked back to the car before Florida’s heat and humidity drove the last bits of fun out of the nature walk.

We didn’t think about it again for several weeks. We didn’t think we had to. Jonah standing in the middle of the circle was just a bit of fun.

SATURDAY, MARCH 21, 2020

Jonah had been out of school for the first full week of the Corona pandemic, and we were still adjusting to the societal upheaval like everyone else. Despite the necessity of social distancing, we needed Vitamin D, fresh air, and exercise, so we went to our favorite park for a walk. At all times we were careful to maintain a six-foot distance between us and passersby. Jonah and I made a game of it, sometimes going way off the path to avoid getting near bicyclists and joggers (we called it playing “Zombie Apocalypse”).

After Frisbee catch and other messing around, we again found ourselves at the base of the lookout tower.

“What happened to the UFO circle?” Rose asked.

We hurried back to the clearing to find that the strange symbol was gone. No trace remained.

“Huh,” I said.

“Oh well,” Jonah said.

“Did you do anything to it?” I asked him.

“No! How could I? We all just got here.”

“Well, you stood in it to begin with,” I said, peering at him. “Maybe…”

“What?”

“Maybe it was a dimensional portal. Maybe you took us to a parallel universe when you went inside.”

Jonah’s brow furrowed. “Maybe. But I didn’t mean to.”

“It wasn’t long after you went in there that the Coronavirus became a big thing here. We’re now in the Corona Universe, where it’s a major pandemic. I think in our original universe it stayed small.”

Eyes widening, Jonah nodded. “And…and remember when we got back home that day, people started talking all weird? Like garggha-arrrgle-arg.”

Rose uttered a low chuckle.

“Yeah,” I said. “But we must’ve gotten used to it and understand them now.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, look,” I said. “Let’s try to get back to our original universe. I don’t want to be in the Corona Universe anymore.”

Jonah frowned, nodding. “We have to build another portal.”

We wandered around the area, looking for rocks, branches, and Spanish moss. There were plenty of branches, but no rocks or moss. Usually, there’s Spanish moss everywhere in our part of Florida. Where the heck could it—

“Hey!” Jonah shouted. “I found something.” He held up a pine cone and squinted at it. “There’s writing! It says, ‘You will never return.’”

I stared at him. “Oh, no.”

He threw the pine cone into the woods. “What?”

“Our doubles. Here in the Corona Universe. They lured us to this spot in our universe, then switched places with us, stranding us here.”

“So they’re in our universe,” Jonah said. “Our original one.”

“Doing God knows what,” I agreed.

Rose sighed. “So now we’re stuck here.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Guess we’ll have to make the best of it.” I peered at the place where the portal had been. “Well, let’s find a place to sit down and rest.”

Jonah led the way to a bench. “Did you bring a snack?”

“Yeah. An orange.”

“Cool.”

 

The End…?

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Coronavirus-Inspired Bits and Pieces 3-19-2020

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The world is gripped with concern about COVID-19. From mandatory quarantines to overcrowded hospitals to rising death tolls, the news is grim. What makes it worse is the drip-drip-drip of information every day: we’re not in control of this, and it shows. The federal government, local governments, and you and I are feeling our respective ways through it all, with varying degrees of success. We know intellectually that this will be over one day, and that we’ll come back from it, stronger than ever. Of course we will. But until that special, magical day comes when our normal lives reassert themselves, we have to get through the now. And the now isn’t a feature film-style montage of families playing Jenga, fighting and making up, eating meals together, and having video chats with Meemaw and Papaw. The now is filled with days, and those days are filled with hours, and those hours are filled with minutes, and you have to live every one of them. When those minutes are tinged with worry, it’s difficult.

Staying occupied helps. Nothing makes time fly faster than staying occupied. You know this. Binge-watching television shows isn’t the same as being occupied, but you do what you have to if it gets you through the now. I love TV as much as anyone; a casual search through this site proves that. But these days I’m watching less television in the effort to do things that don’t involve just sitting around.

Praying is also good. Pray for your family, your country, and the people in your country. Businesses have closed because of this. Some of them permanently. Decent people who work hard every day to build something they’ve always wanted to create are going to lose it all, if they haven’t already. I wish it wasn’t the case. I wish a nice, fat check from the federal government would make everyone better. It won’t. Help who you can where you can how you can. The uncertainty is dreadful, yes. But worse is the certainty of personal financial ruin.

I’m writing this not because I have information that you haven’t already installed into your personal hard drive, but so I can read this a year from now to remember what it was like when we lived in the now of Coronavirus. My son’s school is closing for a month, if not longer. My wife’s working from home for at least that long. We’ve stocked up on food and essentials in the hope that we won’t need them; our Hurricane Kit already has vital stuff, so we simply topped it up. I’m praying that in May or June or even sooner we’ll all of us be standing in a sea of canned soup, beef stew, and tuna, exchanging cooking tips to punch up the flavor of Progresso Chickarina for a light summer appetizer before the neighborhood barbecue.

—

You want to support your local restaurants because they’re taking it in the shorts during this isolating time, but maybe you like to cook at home, too. So here’s a recipe for brisket that’s so good it should be illegal. I can’t believe it hasn’t been banned yet: Nach Waxman’s brisket recipe.

What’s amazing about this recipe is not just that it makes the best brisket you’ve ever had, but it requires no extra liquid: the onions and brisket do all the work. Tremendous beefy flavor, and the slices are fork-tender without disintegrating into little bits. You don’t even need to make it with brisket. We’ve tried it with chuck roast and it comes out just as good. Any tough slab of beef will do. To make it even better, you can add more carrots and whole cloves of garlic: they give it a little sweetness that really works. If you try this out, you won’t go back to the slow cooker version with onion soup mix and beef broth again. You won’t have to. Don’t wait until Hanukkah to make the tastiest brisket available: do this now.

—

For a Zen approach to cooking and baking, take a look at Apron’s YouTube channel. Minimal music, no talking: just a recipe performed with clear competence. All in close-up so it’s a Mr. Hands approach to instructional video, but it works. You don’t need to know who Apron is. You don’t want to. Don’t ruin the magic. Just watch. The yeasted banana bread is my favorite. There’s something to it that draws you in: the faint kitchen noises, the imperfect English subtitles, the little pat of her whisk against the egg yolks to break them before she mixes. You can’t look away. You want to make the same recipes that she does, but her simple perfection, the lack of any wasted motion, is entirely daunting. This is how an angel would make doughnuts, or french toast, or sandwich rolls in the kitchens of Heaven. To even think about eating her creations is to commit sacrilege.

Or maybe I’m just going stir-crazy.

—

As we work out the details of everyone being at home at once all day long, I try to find the time, concentration, and quiet needed to write anything but blog posts about food. I’ll get it sorted. My problems are insignificant compared to what’s actually going on.

My friend A.J. Powers showed me this brief passage from C.S. Lewis. I think you’ll appreciate it.

Take care, and God bless you and your family. I’ll talk to you next week.

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2019: The Year in Review

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What can you say about an entire year? Nothing terribly tragic or awful happened to me or my family in 2019, which I’m pretty happy about. If I didn’t have politics as a hobby I’d consider it a generally uneventful year in terms of world affairs.

I released two books in 2019: Appalling Stories 3: Escape from Trumplandia, which is a satirical novella I co-wrote with Ray Zacek; and Appalling Stories 4: Even More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice, a short story anthology with several authors. Overall, I’m pleased with how they both came out. Trumplandia is a very funny book that skewers both sides of the political divide, though the left more strongly than the right. Appalling Stories 4 gave me the opportunity to work with a number of different writers and allowed me to expand the mythology of the Bee-pocalypse I wrote about in stories like The Bitterness of Honey and Dear Dad.

I also created the Chirper, a Twitter alternative exclusive only to this site. It’s on the sidebar. Check it daily.

I continue to work on the science fiction adventure series I mentioned in Another Bleeping Podcast. It’s taking longer than I’d expected, but as much as I try, I can’t grind out a novel a month like a number of more successful writers. I envy their success; they’ve found an audience and can serve it. My plan is to write three or four novels and release them, more or less, all at once. The expression “Man plans, God laughs” is apt here. We’ll see how it goes.

For a proper review, let’s take a look at the ten most clicked-on posts of 2019, in reverse order.

10) Sportswomanship: This is a satirical flash fiction piece I wrote for another website that rejected it for being too controversial, so I posted it here. It addresses transgenderism; women’s sports; and Megan Rapinoe, Sports Illustrated‘s 2019 Sportsperson of the Year.

9) Battlestar Galactica 1978 – An Overview: I re-watched the original Battlestar Galactica program and offered my thematic and qualitative analysis. The show brings the huge difference between 1970’s TV and today’s TV into stark relief.

8) Let’s Talk About Blumhouse’s The Hunt: Here I discussed the controversy behind the horror movie The Hunt, which told the story of wealthy progressives hunting deplorables, and how the deplorables fight back. A follow-up post described director Craig Zobel’s reaction to the controversy and my analysis of his reaction.

7) Why Meadow Died – A Review: This is a discussion of Andrew Pollack and Max Eden’s book Why Meadow Died, which describes the run-up, circumstances, and aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in February 2018. Andrew Pollack’s daughter Meadow was murdered by Nikolas Cruz, a mentally ill, intellectually deficient man whom law enforcement was aware of, but did nothing to stop.

6) The Stranger -K-drama Review: I analyzed the South Korean legal drama The Stranger, and talked a little bit about why I’ve eschewed all Hollywood-produced media released in the year 2000 and after.

5) That Time I Became a Real-Life Hollywood Villain: In this post I talked about the dreadful TV movie Deliberate Intent, which dramatized the First Amendment-weakening Hit Man case. My employer was sued by a slip-and-fall lawyer because of a book we published, and Hollywood chose us to be the bad guys instead of the murderer.

4) A Message to the Covington Kids: I wrote this at the height of the Covington Kids controversy, where congresspeople, Hollywood, and the entire news media mobbed and even threatened a group of high schoolers for the crime of being harassed on video by the Black Hebrew Israelites and a stolen valor Indian named Nathan Phillips.

3) News 10-30-2019: An uninspiring title, but the post explained my exit from Twitter and provided news about two books in the Appalling Stories series.

2) Social Media and Politics – The Endgame: In this lengthy post I described what happened to my friend R.M. Huffman when he got doxed by an angry social media mob over a Tweet.

1) Culture War – DC McAllister and Yashar Ali: Further proving that Twitter is a cesspit, I was one of the first and only people to give a fair and honest appraisal of what happened when left-wing journalist Yashar Ali attacked right-wing writer Denise McAllister on Twitter, and the pile-on that resulted from McAllister’s reaction to it. Later, I wrote an analysis of the dust-up that was also well received.

So far, I’ve been successful in posting at least once a week for the entire year, which is a goal I set for myself in the early stages of creating this blog. Let’s see if I can continue the streak throughout 2020. Thank you for reading. God bless.

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Appalling Stories 4 Cover Reveal

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The short story anthology Appalling Stories 4: Even More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice will be released in December 2019.

This installment of the series has got a tremendous line-up of authors telling stories that the woke gatekeepers of traditional publishing would find problematic at best, and, well, appalling at worst. From disturbingly hilarious tales of body horror to hardcore action to sci-fi adventure, you’re bound to find something that trips your trigger. Includes my newest story in the world of the Bee-pocalypse, with a first-contact twist that you’ve never seen before!

Here’s a sneak peek at the table of contents:

And here’s the awesome cover, illustrated by J.WAR:

I’m honored that Denise McAllister, cultural commentator and author of What Men Want to Say to Women (But Can’t), wrote such a terrific foreword to this book; she’s incisive, clear-thinking, and a terrific writer.

Appalling Stories 4: Even More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice will be ready in time for the holidays, so save room under the Christmas tree (or next to the menorah) for your copy!

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Armageddon: Know Your Drug Dealer

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(You are looking at my Chirper feed, aren’t you? It’s like Twitter, but so much better!)

I included stigmata in my Armageddon trilogy because I figured that if you were going to describe a Biblical apocalypse, with demonic possession, angelic visitations, and holy relics, you should also throw in associated supernatural/Judeo-Christian phenomena, like people afflicted with the Wounds of Christ. For storytelling purposes, it wasn’t enough for those with stigmata to just bleed: the agonies they felt also gave them psychic abilities like prognostication and knowing when a holy relic or demonically-possessed person was nearby. The Wounds always hurt, but the pain increased in proximity to the supernatural.

Once I got that squared away, I had to decide who to give these Wounds to. I wanted those afflicted to be a kind of living holy relic, highly sought-after by the forces of both Hell and Heaven. Some religious people would get the stigmata, certainly. But I also wanted to inflict stigmata on other people: ones you might consider undeserving. Unlikely. Non-believers.

To make things interesting, I decided to have my stigmata-afflicted character be a drug dealer, and I named him Ozzie. From the outset, I wanted Ozzie to go from a bad person to a less-bad person. He would become a hero, of sorts, and a believer in Christ through sheer pragmatism. The third book in the trilogy is called The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel for a reason: Ozzie becomes the titular Holy Warrior. The least likely holy warrior you could imagine. A murderer and thief, a peddler of drugs, a gang member who would kill you for looking at him the wrong way, or even the right way. A cruel man who never smiled, not once.

His transformation throughout the novels is something to be read rather than described. But in creating Ozzie, I had to work out who he was. You could just hang a label on someone and call it a day: he’s a killer. A gangbanger. Whatever. But it doesn’t invite you to look deeper, and as I needed Ozzie to be an important character in whose head you’d be staying from time to time, I had to work out his details and background.

Okay, so he’s a drug dealer. What does that mean? Where does he deal drugs? How does he get them? What does a drug deal look like, exactly? It’s not like you go to the mall and pick up crystal meth at a kiosk. And if he’s in a gang, what kind of gang? How is the gang organized? What’s his role in the hierarchy?

I never bought drugs outside of a pharmacy, so I had no personal experience to draw from. So I had to do research. As this is a fictional character who happens to be in a fictional gang, I drew the vast majority of my cues from fiction: books and movies. New Jack City. Training Day. American Gangster. Blood in, Blood Out. Colors. I pored over news articles and interviews of drug dealers in and out of prison. Over time I got a vague picture, but the details eluded me: I couldn’t just borrow characters and situations from other people’s work.

So I had to make it up. I created a New York City drug gang, from the boss of the city to individual territories within certain boroughs. The territory bosses had free rein within their turf, but had to send their monthly cut to the borough boss. Independence with limits. Once I had the hierarchy, I could plug in various characters, who then had their roles to play, including Ozzie.

Some readers told me that they found the gang stuff to be pretty realistic, but I didn’t tell them that I made it up myself, according to how I’d run an illegal drug operation. In the end, it worked: it provided the necessary framework for both character motivations and story, and how things turn out for Ozzie was dependent on how he started out as a territory boss in Brooklyn, New York. Ozzie, being a cunning sort, used his clairvoyance and precognition to great personal advantage until…well, you’ll just have to read about what happened in The Blessed Man and the Witch.

And if writing doesn’t work out, I may have career options in the field of extralegal intoxicant distribution. We’ll see how it goes.

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News 10-30-2019

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I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Twitter for some time, in the same way a drug addict has a love-hate relationship with heroin.

In August of 2014, I wrote about my somewhat naive observations of Twitter a couple weeks after joining the platform.

In June of 2017, I described how Twitter is the worst thing ever devised, calling it “the mirror of my worst self.”

In November of 2018, I advised readers not to quit Twitter.

Today, I quit Twitter. Actually, I did it last week. More specifically, I stopped reading Twitter except for DMs. Twitter is a time-sink, it doesn’t sell books, and it’s horribly poisonous. I contributed in small part to this toxicity, but no longer. When you find yourself arguing with teenage wannabe transsexuals about anything, let alone the disturbing confluence of gender and politics, you’re in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. I’ll still have my site post to Twitter, but that’s the extent of it. I very much enjoyed kibitzing about non-book/non-political issues with friends, and I’ll miss that. But I don’t miss the rest of it.

—

The print version of Appalling Stories 3: Escape from Trumplandia is ready for purchase in the Amazon store. If you have even the smallest hint of a sense of humor, you will laugh at least a few times reading this short novel, written by Ray Zacek and yours truly. There’s sci-fi action, Native American culture, searing political satire, and almost fifty rude names for the President of the United States. Love Trump or hate him, you will dig Escape from Trumplandia. And if you don’t, Amazon offers a money-back guarantee! I think.

—

Appalling Stories 4: Even More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice is on track for a December 2019 release. I’m really excited about this one. Here’s the back cover copy:

Buy this book before they ban it!

With Woke Progressivism corroding every American cultural institution, there’s only one place to find the best of the new literary counterculture, and that’s here: the Appalling Stories series.

In Appalling Stories 4, we skewer the left’s sacred cows and make burgers from the carcasses. You’ll find tales of hilarious Hollywood degeneracy, disturbing dystopias, Green New Deals gone black, old-school treasure-hunting, and much more. Triggering, microaggressions, macroaggressions, punching down, punching up, punching Antifa: like the old spaghetti sauce commercial says, it’s in there.

And it’s all fun to read. We’re not preachers or pundits: we’re entertainers, and we keep you on the edge of your seat, glued to every page.

Just don’t ask us to unstick you.

Closer to the publication date I’ll give you a sneak peek at the Table of Contents and let you know who wrote the kick-ass foreword.

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