Loading ...Daydream Believer as Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35
She was thankful for the storm that hit Thanksgiving weekend and the subsequent others of December. She was not, however, thankful for those she heard complaining about them. While a small percentage of the county’s residents had legitimate reasons to worry about flash flooding, those she heard bickering alongside her cubicle did not and so they were the real nuisance. This place needs rain like a kid needs a dream. In the sunny biodome that San Diego so often is, these rare, elemental belligerences are welcomed. A genuine season’s greetings had rattled her from her desktop afternoon slumber as the wind-powered rain pelted the office windows. For a moment she thought she was still dreaming . . . Read more
Fiction Fix: Fusion
This article is a contribution from our fiction series writer Michael Dykstra
There was a part of him that actually wanted another firestorm to hit the county. The previous two had rekindled his affinity with this most forging of chemical reactions. During the cool autumn evenings of his childhood he stared religiously into the fireplace as if it were a kind of prehistoric television set. The multitude of programming a single burning log could broadcast had always impressed him as each wavering flame channeled its own tune of being.
The real love affair sparked when he went to Universal Studios and experienced Backdraft during his fifth grade field trip. Never before had he encountered heat in such an intimate way. The intense sensation felt on his pre-pubescent skin was enough to send his biorhythms into overdrive.
During his middle school years, while his friends were busy flirting with girls, he found himself at the heart of a different sort of love triangle—the three components needed to start a fire being fuel, a source of ignition (most often understood as energy released in the form of heat), and oxygen—and so he did his best to stay somewhere in the middle. He spent hours drawing blueprints for innovative potato gun designs when he should have been solving for the value of x. But his precocious mind could see that math was really only valuable when it was placed into the appropriate, scientific context. And so shooting a flaming potato a half-mile became that context. As did burning bathtubs, melting old sneakers, devising makeshift flamethrowers from cans of hairspray and Pam, making tennis ball bombs with strike anywhere matchsticks, and so on.
By high school his pyromania had started to smother a bit. What before was an exponentially hotter relationship fizzled lukewarm as curves of a different sort began to take shape in the blueprint of his entrepreneurial mind. One curve, in particular, became an obsession. And it belonged to a woman by the name of Carmen San Diego.
Sunless Horizons
A short story by Michael Dykstra
The marquee read “Happy Hour 4-8, $2 Coronas/$1.50 Tacos,” at the Horizon Casino Resort. Horizon’s happy hour was what one might expect on a Tuesday night during South Lake Tahoe’s rather subdued fall season.
A half-dozen or so middle-aged men drinking beer and watching college football on digitally enhanced televisions. No matter how enhanced the screens, the lives of the men at the bar would enhance no more than the lives of the hookers chain-smoking coyly at the pulsing slot machines, the junkie cocktail waitresses squeezing into outfits unsuitable for their aged skin but too strung-out to notice, the anonymous Johns salivating for the leftover buffets of women with fake names, the dealers coaxing greed comfortably for days without ever seeing the sun, or the bartenders dressed in referee stripes to camouflage their boredom with slurred conversation.
D and his two friends, Trevor and Kyle, were new to the South Lake Tahoe scene. They had made the drive just days before from sun drenched San Diego and now found themselves in the cold, dry high air of the Sierras. The bronze tans that each had effortlessly acquired during the summer months had already started to fade. These twenty-something, college graduate dreamers had toyed with the notion of extending their glory days just a bit longer by moving up north for the long awaited snow season, delaying the reality of career life just a bit further. While natural snow is somewhat scarce to the San Bernardino Mountains, those of Tahoe are gluttons for heavy snowfall.
Kyle starts out with three Coronas, to himself. D and Trevor go for a few tacos first, then a beer. Kyle is on a mission to get tanked, his first guzzled within seconds. The tacos look pretty good to Kyle, but he isn’t interested in eating; his is a strictly liquid diet.
“So what you guys wanna do tonight? Just cruise around and scope this town? It’s inevitable that I’ll be gambling tonight.”
“Yeah no crap Kyle. I mean you are in a casino and I know you can’t just sit in a casino and not gamble. That wouldn’t fit your notorious MO,” Trevor replies.
IF ART IS WHAT YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH: Audrina Patridge and the Infectious Disease of Celebrity
©Glenn Francis: www.PacificProDigital.com
As Pacific Classic Day wanes, a bleeding sunset pours generously upon Del Mar signaling the unofficial end of summer. For some of the 42,000-plus attendees the party is just getting started. With Audrina Patridge hosting a cause celebre just down the street at the world class L’Auberge Hotel, there is sure to be plenty for a guerrilla journalist such as myself to observe and eventually divulge. I envision Audrina as many probably do, three-quarters naked chowing down a hearty Carl’s Jr. Teriyaki Burger, her still buzzing bikini commercial fresh on the mind. I’ve come to crash her party and see if this ‘It’ So Cal belle is worthy of the hype her August 944 cover shoot has generated.
Mingling with celebs is somewhat new territory for me and so I hearken back to all those dizzying A-list parties one encounters in the typical Bret Easton Ellis novel.
Nicole Kidman Undergoes Sex-Change…But Only in the Movies
Photo from 'Rita Molnar' via Wikimedia
Nicole Kidman has been cast to star in an upcoming movie, ‘The Danish Girl.’ Based on the real-life transformation of painter, Einar Wegener, the film is about the first person to undergo a sex change operation. The film has been adapted from David Ebershoff’s bestselling novel also titled ‘The Danish Girl.’
Einar Wegener was born a male and married Greta, an artist, in 1904. Einar first began his transformation when Greta needed a female model to pose for one of her paintings and Einar stepped in. The success of the painting made Greta encourage Einar to continue posing as a woman for her paintings.
In 1930, Einar decided to change his outer appearance to match his inner persona and underwent several operations to become a female. He was thought to be intersexual, born with both male and female organs. This was confirmed during his surgeries.
After his initial surgeries were a success, Einar Wegener changed his name to Lili Elbe and had hopes of becoming a mother. In 1931 she underwent a fifth operation in which doctors attempted to transplant a uterus into her body. The operation proved to be fatal, however, and Lili Elbe died three months later at age 49.
Director Tomas Alfredson will have a tough time ‘butching’ Nicole Kidman up. Kidman’s slender physique and feminine features will be a great challenge to overcome when trying to portray her as a man. Charlize Theron was originally set to play the role of Einar Wegener’s wife Greta, but dropped out of the project. Nevertheless, director Alfredson remains excited and focused, saying “We have been in talks for close to a year, and we are soon going into production.”
