ABANDON ALL HOPE! - cheerful humor for impossible days
by Clyde James Aragon
ABANDON ALL HOPE?
Yes! And this new collection of humorous short stories by Clyde James Aragon --- ABANDON ALL HOPE! cheerful humor for impossible days --- will make you wish you'd done it sooner.
In this new book, you will learn of the problems involved in solving the murder of a king in Macbeth, P.I., detective to the Middle Ages; to the travails of Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov trying to get his subject to cooperate in Pavlov's Cat; to the story of a man who loses his chile-cooking crown and then goes mad trying to regain it in The Fall of the House of Estrada.
But wait! There's more: Dr. Sherlock Holmes chases the evil Professor Moriarty across London hoping to halt his fiendish candy-coated pill substitute plan in The Pill School; Doc Holliday and the Earps valiantly fight fish rustling in Shoot-Out at the O.K. Fishing Hole; and scientists and military leaders work feverishly to stop the Nazi threat by making a decent cocktail in The Manhattan Project.
In all 20 stories of glittering mirth designed to make you
ABANDON ALL HOPE!
$9.95; 8 1/2" x 5 1/2" paperback; 150 pages; Humor - short story collection
Cliff Zone Books ISBN: 0-9648641-2-6; LCCN: 00-092523
Here is the Table of Contents and description of the stories in ABANDON ALL HOPE! (and below that, sample material from the book):
1) Macbeth, P.I. - ye olde detective story involving angry ghosts, rhyming witches, a flummoxed sheriff, a right randy queen, and, of course, murder most foule
2) Shakespeare's Wife - forget Francis Bacon, Samuel Johnson, or Christopher Marlowe. The one who wrote Shakespeare's plays was his wife
3) The Taming of the Pirates - Woodes Rogers finally brings order to the Bahamas with a yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum
4) The Life of a Lexicographer - the unabridged version of dictionary maker Noah Webster's life
5) The Day the Great Painters Got Their Computers - why Vincent Van Gogh really cut his ear off and why Steve Jobs isn't talking
6) Pavlov's Cat - forget the dog, the real story was the cat
7) Shoot-Out at the O.K. Fishing Hole - Doc Holliday and the Earps were just trying to protect a good fishing spot
8) The Manhattan Project/a 40s memory - before there was the atomic bomb, there was the Manhattan
9) Dr. Plant, Come Quick! - the emergency room physician at Harold's Houseplant Hospital fights valiantly to keep his dying patients alive
10) The Philosophers' Club - ruminations over life in a laundromat. Can we ever really know absolute white?
11) The Coroner - what if the medical examiner for Los Angeles was a graduate of archaeology school
12) The Sad Story of Corky the Snowman - a chilly Christmas tale to warm your heart
13) The Fall of the House of Estrada - a man loses his chile-cooking crown and vows to regain it
14) Fruit Tales - heroic drupes and pomes save lives all around
15) The Sweet Life - instead of hanging out in dingy, smoky dives, private eyes take their cases to a very different locale indeed
16) The Inventors - Don Alberto awakens to a day "that smelled of carnations" in which everyone is busy inventing things
17) The Pill School - Dr. Sherlock Holmes chases the evil Professor Moriarty across London trying to stop his fiendish candy-coated pill substitute plot
18) How Cecelio Guante Got Into the Hall of Fame - if you don't have talent, there's always the supernatural to help you get ahead
19) The Ten Billion Names of Salsa - when the Aztec goddess of chile wants the names of all known salsa collected, well, you might as well do it
20) The Incredible Shrinking Doctor - you should never test your experimental radioactive arthritis medicine on yourself
and now here is sample material from ABANDON ALL HOPE! - cheerful humor for impossible days by Clyde James Aragon:
THE DAY THE GREAT PAINTERS GOT THEIR COMPUTERS
Paris was alive with creativity that summer.
It was the summer we had anticipated when we got the news that our computer orders had been filled and that we would soon be receiving them. All of us --- Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Seurat, Cezanne, even Van Gogh who spent most of his time eating sunflower seeds --- quivered at the prospect of easier painting.
At the freight station, Camille Pissarro summed it up when he said, "At last we will be freed from the Renaissance." It was a statement we all agreed with. For us, that period had been a bit too stuffy.
Soon we were back at our studios unpacking the shipping crates and setting up our machines, positioning monitors, stringing wires, connecting printers, plugging in light pens and digitizer tablets. We were lost in a Wonderland of cardboard boxes, silica gel, and foam peanuts.
Too bad we didn't have electricity.
But we soon got it by running a line from Emile Zola's house. He had been wired years ago when he bought his first word processor.
We were all quickly caught up in CAA --- Computer-Aided Art --- and went through ream after ream of printer paper. There were simultaneous experiments in ray tracing, bump mapping, spatial texturing, and anti-aliasing. There was also keen interest in ribbon changing, too.
As the summer went along, our rendezvous point became Pere Tanguy's art supply and hardware shop on the Rue Clauzel. What a wonderful place it was. Where else could you get oils, canvases, easels, nails, hammers, and cement at such reasonable prices. We loved the place. That and Tanguy let us use his Cray X-MP whenever we wanted.
It was here that I was elected by my fellow artists to organize an exhibition of our new computer-generated works at the prestigious Salon de Garage, a site where all great avante-garde studies eventually ended up. We passed the hat to pay for a little advertising and chose the last day of October to make our premiere.
As the coordinator of the exhibition, I took my duties seriously and wrangled commitments from all I talked to. Only Claude Monet balked, claiming he had a firm offer to show his material in Rouen.
"I'm going to wow 'em with my fractal images," he repeated time and again. He would soon come around after his deal fell through.
As we toiled toward the cool days of October, problems appeared. Georges Seurat was finding his computer system inadequate in meeting his painterly vision. He confided to me that, "I thought pointillism would be a snap but now I realize that it's all in the pixels. Pixels, pixels, I need more pixels."
Alfred Sisley also complained that he was having trouble getting the hang of a mouse. But it was Van Gogh who captured our sympathy when he told us of problems he was having with his Macintosh gear.
"They stiffed me," he told anyone who would listen. "My sunflowers look like daisies."
After repeated attempts with Canvas failed (though he disregarded suggestions that he turn his machine on first), he sent Steve Jobs his right ear. The other he mailed to Gauguin for his part in persuading him to purchase the equipment.
Not that there weren't moments of leisure and mirth amidst the frenzy of technological activity. For one, we all relished our weekly softball game with the Nabis.
And jokes. Here is a favorite of the time:
"Where is Cezanne?" Mary Cassatt asked one evening.
"He is down at the city yards gathering information for a series of light pole drawings he wants to do," said Renoir.
"Typical of a post-impressionist," quipped Cassatt.
We had a hearty laugh at that.
(sample from ABANDON ALL HOPE!)
# # #
THE PHILOSOPHERS' CLUB
You would not think that the Happy Gleam Laundry on Whitmore Street would have been such a hotbed of intellectual activity, but it was, it always was.
Within the cinderblock building with the peeling white paint, amidst the aroma of steam and water softener, was a world in which rationalism battled empiricism, idealism fought positivism, where naturalism wrestled openly with existentialism.
It was in this bubbling environment of noisy 50 cent dryers and clacking, expanding hot water pipes that the day's intellectual activities were about to begin, brought on, as usual, by the most innocent of remarks.
Or, as the determinists would say, the little things would lead to the big things.
"Damn it!" swore Mrs. Hall at the loaded washer in front of her. "It took my money again."
"The impetuous will of Schopenhauer's universe," said Mrs. Pergola, as she folded washcloths.
"Sometimes it takes all your money, sometimes it gives you more change than you deserve. That's the way it works."
"Couldn't it work elsewhere? How am I going to clean these socks? They're gym socks not argyles."
"Schopenhauer was fond of saying that dirty socks reminded him of muddy symphonic compositions," said Mrs. Pergola.
"Schopenhauer didn't say that, Chopin did," said Mrs. Tuttle who'd been eavesdropping ever since Mrs. Hall had sorted out her whites.
"Did he?" said Mrs. Pergola.
"Yes, in a letter to some orchestra in Vienna."
"That Chopin," said Mrs. Hall. "What a card."
"Indeed," agreed Mrs. Tuttle. "Schopenhauer would never have found anything to laugh about. He was a pessimist. He could have been an Optimist but he wouldn't put down dues to join."
"You know," said Mrs. Bundle, pushing her way into the conversation from across the room, "sometimes I lose a sock and then I wonder, did that sock really exist."
"Personally," said Mrs. Chance who was sitting near the entrance waiting for her machines to finish, "I think the drains here swallow socks. Especially cotton ones."
"You are assigning the essence of evil to the drains?" queried Mrs. Tuttle.
"What else can you conclude," responded Mrs. Chance, chasing off a fly. "I think the plumbing here is quite malicious."
"Spinoza would say that evil stems from a lack of knowledge. Nevertheless, you can't talk sense into a drainpipe," said Mrs. Tuttle.
"Well, I don't know, but I'm tired of the dryers shrinking my clothes," said Mrs. Hall.
"Wouldn't shrinking clothes give further proof that we don't live in an infinitely-expanding universe but one destined to contract and collapse and Big Bang all over again? Aren't we condemned to forever repeat this day? Isn't the concept of free will meaningless when you're faced with the repetition of reality?" said Mrs. Chance.
There was silence in the laundromat.
"Well?" she asked. "Isn't it?"
"That means we're damned to replay this day again and again and again. Over and over I'll lose my money to this machine. Over and over I'll wish I'd married Hank the boy who worked in that filling station in Phoenix. Today he's got a house, a carport, and a washer/dryer in his utility room. This is insane. My life is being run like static cling!" exploded Mrs. Hall, her eyes wide and foam dribbling out of the corner of her mouth. "Is this all there is to life? Is predestination all you have to look forward to?"
"Mrs. Hall," said Mrs. Tuttle, pointing to machine No. 6. "Your load's finished."
"Oh, thank you."
(sample from ABANDON ALL HOPE!)
# # #
THE MANHATTAN PROJECT, a 40s memory
Before the outbreak of World War II, through spies and intercepted messages, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was shocked to learn that Adolph Hitler was working on a better-tasting schnapps, possibly one using the tantalizing flavor of Black Forest cake. Refusing to be upstaged by the Nazi menace, and sensing America's inevitable entry into the war, Roosevelt moved to counter this horrific development all the time fretting, "How are we going to get people to fight for freedom if they don't have something superior to drink?"
He pressed his closest aides for answers and they sought out the most brilliant minds in the scientific community for advice on improving American drinks.
In this air of crisis, they queried Albert Einstein who in turn brought the problem to the attention of fellow physicists Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller.
It was already an established fact that the Manhattan, a drink developed in the mid-1800s, was in dire need of improvement, especially with U-boats prowling the seas, making it next to impossible to import Angostura bitters. Something had to be done.
Thus was the Manhattan Project born.
Colonel Leslie R. Groves, soon to be General Groves, a graduate of West Point and fresh off his success in designing the Pentagon, was named officer in charge and assigned the difficult task of overseeing the project. He, in turn, brought in Robert J. Oppenheimer, a brilliant physicist from Cal Tech, to ride herd over the many scientists who would be employed. It was through Oppenheimer that the greatest assemblage of physicists the world has ever seen was brought together. This group would later go on to develop the atomic bomb but first things first.
Los Alamos, New Mexico and its secret-shielding mountains was chosen as the base for their operations. It was also decided to open two other labs, one in Oak Ridge, Tennessee which would be the home of clandestine stills and utilize the expertise of longtime moonshiners; and the other in Hanford, Washington where ice would be made for the project.
Employing the theories of the Danish scientist Niels Bohrand Max Planck, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch showed that acrid impurities could be removed from gin. However, would this ground-breaking work carry over to rye whiskey?
This question preoccupied Oppenheimer in early 1940 and he brought in Enrico Fermi and Emilio Segre to work on the problem.
In the meantime, General Groves oversaw shipment after shipment of green olives and Gibson onions. He was also building everywhere and bunkers went up as fast as cement could be poured.
The problems this group faced were daunting especially since they didn't have a reliable Manhattan recipe. To obtain one, federal undercover agents were sent to New York where they spied discreetly on bartenders. From this came several promising formulas.
Clipboards began to fill with massive equations and new theories as scientists went to work calculating the mathematical needs of the project. A blackboard was even shipped in from Max Planck which not only gave proof to the existance of photons, but demonstrated that Vermouth was held together by powerful atomic forces.
(sample from ABANDON ALL HOPE!)
# # #
SHOOT-OUT AT THE O.K. FISHING HOLE
Living in the Old West was always perilous but more so when poor sportsmanship and six-shooters combined to create a lethal atmosphere. This is the chronicle of such a combination and is written as both acknowledgment of historical fact and as cautionary tale.
The story of the gunfight which took place in Tombstone, Arizona has been rudely misrepresented in film, books, and Chamber of Commerce brochures. The whole event did not take place at the O.K. Corral but at the O.K. Fishing Hole, a limpid pool of water some miles out of town.
It was a fantastic clash of egos and brothers between the law-office Earps, and the cowboying Clantons and McLaurys. And it dragged in their allies like Wyatt Earps' friend Doc Holliday and Billy Claibourne, pal of both the Clantons and the McLaurys.
The animosity between the two groups had been brewing ever since Tom McLaury had pulled a 12-pound trout out of the O.K. Fishing Hole beating out the till-then record of 10 pounds caught by Morgan Earp the previous spring. To make matters worse, notoriety and excitement overshadowed both when Doc Holliday pulled out a bass-like fish from the cool, dark depths of the fishing hole and at this discovery, Billy Clanton had sourly exclaimed that the fish had been planted and wasn't from there at all.
From these slights and accusations sprang the kind of one-upmanship which festers over time and mutates into vendetta. This was the Wild West and you could freely indulge in a grudge with no one to stop you.
As stated, trouble had been brewing and it was further boiling over in the area of fishing rights. The Clantons and McLaurys haughtily defied the authority of Virgil Earp, Tombstone's marshal, by refusing to show fishing licenses whenever asked, demurely replying that they only recognized the authority of John Behan.
"He's a sheriff, you're only a marshal," mocked Ike Clanton, which only served to enrage Virgil and Wyatt, as well, who was then serving as assistant marshal.
To make matters worse, local ranchers were up in arms over an upswing in fish rustling which was plaguing them at the time. Often, Virgil had investigated, finding signs that either the Clantons or the McLaurys were behind it. But though he found plenty of circumstantial evidence, he didn't have enough to pin any of it on them. Of this problem, he complained bitterly to Wyatt saying, "I find fish bones in their pockets, pieces of gill on their clothing, even dabs of tartar sauce on their upturned mustaches but that's all. You can't arrest a man on that. What you need is red-handed proof."
Virgil had sought that kind of proof in an undercover assignment at the local hatchery, coming away with only a couple of truants and a disappointingly small tarantula which had crawled up his pants legs during one of those stakeouts. He had to do it, though, as fish rustling played hell with a rancher's livelihood even as the long, tedious hours of waiting irritated his own hemorrhoids.
It should come as no surprise, then, that in this corrosive atmosphere fish would create the hate and fish would trigger the deadly, killing affair that awaited them all on October 26, 1881.
(sample from ABANDON ALL HOPE!)
# # #
sample material from ABANDON ALL HOPE! - cheerful humor for impossible days by Clyde James Aragon
$9.95 paperback
available from CLIFF ZONE BOOKS
1808 Cherokee Road NW
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87107
**** RADIO PLAYS! - several of the stories in Abandon All Hope! - cheerful humor for impossible days have been performed as radio plays on KUNM-FM by Albuquerque Radio Theatre. These include The Philosopher's Club, The Sweet Life, and The Pill School. They have also done another radio play by Clyde James Aragon: Death of a Salesman - the short version.
