Dana Blankenhorn

The Coffee Man, A Short Story

Note: This story emerged from a small brainstorm. We know that climate change is driven by over-use of fossil fuels but what if, instead of an invention that burns coal or oil, someone had invented a machine that just sucked energy out of the air?

With just a tweet of encouragement from a well-known alternate history writer, I set to work

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The old man put on his “Juan Valdez” hat, a term his young employees did not understand, and walked slowly into the greenhouse, a sling across his left shoulder, the basket against his right hip.

The delicious fruit, with its precious stones, awaited him. His hands shook in anticipation.

Carefully, he pulled down a branch and picked only the ripest, reddest cherries, placing them one-by-one in the basket. It took him nearly an hour to fill the basket, not due to his age but to his care, for he avoided all the green, unripe fruit that had long been pulled routinely by those desperate for what lay within.

By the time his young workers arrived for work, chattering in a half-dozen languages, the old man was sitting at their shared lunch table, picking fruits from his basket like an aged chimpanzee, stripping off the thin fruit layer with his teeth and gums, then carefully placing each seed beside him in a dish. Satiated, he hefted the remaining fruit in its basket and placed it in the hopper of a processor.

The fruit had an intense, citrusy taste and a grape-like texture. He rubbed his hands together after emptying the basket, then smelled them with pleasure. The fruit not only tasted great, and energized him, but left a waxy residue which made his hands look younger. The fruit would be separated from the stones, dried into a pulp, and become a second harvest for the greenhouse.

His workers would go through the greenhouse today harvesting from several trees, separating the red fruits from the green, and processing them all so that, when the seeds were dried green, then roasted, they could be crushed to create what was now the most expensive beverage in all the world.

Coffee! Glorious coffee!

A Santa Story

Recently I woke from troubled dreams to find myself with white hair, a long beard, and a troubling impact on small children.

Little kids would look up at me, wide-eyed.

Their faces held a mixture of awe and fear.

I knew what they were thinking.

I gathered some of them together and told them a story.

Old Man on The Mountain

About once a year I write some fiction. This year I completed an entire novel, The Reluctant Detective Finds Her Family, now available for the Amazon Kindle and on Amazon Unlimited. It will also be available as a paperback.

But I also like to write short stories. Here is one. Enjoy.

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When Spencer Tracy made The Old Man and the Sea, he was 58.

The child watching that film saw him as unimaginably old.

But time passes. Today the child is a man. Today the child is an old man. Today the child is 63.

I hear you say, 63 isn’t old. Sometimes, it’s not. When the old man is sitting behind his typewriter, when he’s imagining himself in his dreams, when he is enjoying a drink with friends, 63 is not that old at all.

When he stands up, however, it can be very old. When he looks in the mirror, after a shower, he sees Santa Claus, complete with the distending belly. It’s not a jolly sight. So, like Spencer Tracy in the movie, he does things to defy his age.

The Second Debate

The second debate in the race to control heaven, between the Virgin Mary and Satan, was getting off to a rocky start.

For Mary.

“Why am I not 50 points ahead of you?”

“Because I’m smart,” retorted the Prince of Darkness. “Every angel wants to be like me. They want to have my freedom. They want to have my wealth. They are tired of reporting to some feudal lord on high, and eating the same stale, tasteless wafers.”

“The wafers are not stale. They’re the body and blood of…”

The Reluctant Detective is Good Summer Reading

Hey, fans!

I have a new work of fiction out on Amazon.

The Grail

(What follows is a work of fiction. I wrote it early this year, in about a week, after a weekend vacation to Asheville, touring artists' markets. Hope you like it.)

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It was a simple thing, I thought, something fun to have.

A cup or goblet, made of clay, and fired with a simple limestone-colored glaze. I saw it in a storeroom, by the workshop of an artist who was now working, instead, on cartoonish wiener dogs hipsters could hang on a wall.

The price was a snip, $19. I asked what inspired her to make it. She didn’t answer. All she said was, “It’s on sale,” as she wrapped it in newspaper.

I thought no more about it. I was giving my wife our hundredth honeymoon, a weekend in the North Carolina Mountains. There were other artists to visit, and the Google Map on my phone was buzzing in its cradle. We had to move on.

Advice For a Young Fiction Writer

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 37 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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While on vacation recently I learned that my daughter Robin, in addition to her talents studying urban wildlife, is also becoming something of a fiction writer.

This caused me, while still on our cruise ship, to write the following, which I now offer to the rest of you in hopes it helps, just a little, with those struggling to write good fiction:

Dear Robin:

Fiction is hard. Wish I could do it better.

Anyone who starts in to write fiction is in for a lot of hard work. Creating worlds, stories, and people who never really existed is the most difficult task you can imagine -- it is a feat of pure imagination. Anyone who does it, anyone who succeeds at it, becomes a hero in my book. 

Here is what I've learned, and often failed to apply, in writing fiction.

The Human Art of the Con

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 23 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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One of the strangest lies I hear is that some con artist or other acted “inhumanly” toward their victims.

 In fact, the con may be the most human act there is. Because it is based on the one thing that most separates us from other animals, story-telling.

 Civilization begins with story-telling. Whether it's in cave paintings or the words grandparents give grandchildren, indicating a past before the kids' own births that was different from the present day, it's story-telling that defines us as human.

 A con man is telling a story. And the first person they tell that story to is themselves. They are their own first “victim,” and their most important one.

Round Two of the Copyright Wars

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 13 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I have been following the copyright wars since their inception, in 1997. I watched the passage of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, and the No Electronic Theft Act.

Both had a similar aim, to keep people from stealing making and re-selling copies of material subject to copyright, now that technology allowed for clean (or nearly clean) copies.

My sympathies here are purely with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and blogs like Boingboing, which hate these laws as attacks on freedom of speech, of association, and the free exchange of ideas.

Why God and Religion Seem Incompatible

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 1 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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No one knows the nature of God. We each take the final step alone, and no one has reported back anything but an emptiness or a bright light that drew them in briefly, before life in the form of a science-taught doctor pulled them back.

Faith replaces understanding. We choose to believe this or that. And faith is organized through religions. Faith represents “revealed” truth, stories that may be true or may not be, but are believed by their adherents because we're all afraid to die and we all want answers before we go.

There is nothing wrong with faith, but religions are human institutions. As such they are subject to the same forces that drive businesses, universities, and states. You're either growing or you're dying. A business that stagnates starts to die. Without growth you go backward. The process can seem invisible, to those inside, but it's an inevitable unraveling in every case.

You grow by getting more. More money, more power, more customers or adherents. To grow you contend. You must be aggressive, even ruthless at times. The result is conflict. Those who lose conflicts die quickly. Those who withdraw die more slowly, but they do die.

This is true for religions as it is for businesses. You grow or you die. Just as men grow, then die, religions must grow in numbers, grow in wealth, and grow in power, or they die.

Trouble is, this is incompatible with the nature of God. Sure, I said that's unknowable, but almost everyone agrees that the nature of God is not human, that human nature is not God's nature. What makes you successful in building an institution is not what brings you to a higher understanding of God. Any man or woman of faith will tell you that.

So Buddhism was driven out of India by the more aggressive Hindus. So the Bahai' and Zoroastrians were driven out of Iran by the more aggressive Muslims. So animism was driven out of the Americas, and Africa, by more aggressive Christians and Muslims. So it is within Christianity – passive groups like the Quakers, Unitarians and Episcopalians lose adherents to more aggressive, fundamentalist sects that demand more of their members and constantly evangelize for more.

Powerful religions make demands of their adherents. To grow, they make more demands, and demand more adherents. They demand obedience. The power of a religion is directly related to the amount of crazy stuff its leaders can convince adherents to do. Acts of greed, of brutality, or murder, are routinely committed in the name of religious power, and these acts go unpunished. In fact, groups that don't engage in these acts fade away, they lose adherents, they die.