The Chronicles of Charlie: The Assassin Who’s Not Very Good At His Job
Dan | November 29, 2006
I rode my bicycle to school yesterday, as I usually do when it’s not raining and I don’t have a pressing reason to dress nicely. The ride is about seven miles, up and over the hill near Laguna Honda Hospital. After armoring up (thermal tops/bottoms, gloves) and riding through Stern Grove (and avoiding [...]
Dan | November 27, 2006
The New York Times went ahead and released their Notable Books 2006, and I have read…
Zero. None.
I generally agree with what Jessa says about it. Why are Pynchon and Stephen King on there? I can pretty much guarantee that King’s best work (anything from the late 1970s comes to mind) was never a Times notable [...]
Dan | November 26, 2006
I went off the grid for most of the weekend, even turning my phone off for a couple of days (and how weird is it that I consider that particular piece of information to be strange; there’s an argument somewhere that we’re all too-well-connected. I’m not exactly sure what the argument is, but I think [...]
Dan | November 22, 2006
Celebrate!
Etc. I’m hanging with my parents over the holiday, so…not a whole lot of Internetting will be happening around here. Instead, I’m going to be reading (physical) books. I just finished The Omnivore’s Dilemma, will be diving into A is for Alibi for class, and have a couple of other things to hit over the [...]
Dan | November 19, 2006
Guy Stuff is back. Although it turns out I really didn’t take it down. Anyway, the link to it is here. You can also get to it from the link on the right. Eventually I’ll redirect the old subdomain, but I want to test the whole novel (click through it and make sure it makes [...]
Dan | November 19, 2006
I woke up the next morning at seven-thirty. It wasn’t my fault; five months of working for Brianna had forced me into a normal schedule, and my body was still having a hard time differentiating between the weekend and the other days. I got out of my twin bed to the noise of Brianna and [...]
Dan | November 19, 2006
Late spring in western Massachussets is about as good as you can get—it really looks like a Whitman poem mixed with just the right tinge of Robert Frost. I was driving out with Brianna in a Ford Escort that we had rented from a decidedly downmarket place in Allston—Robbie’s Rent a Roadster. The guy had [...]
Dan | November 19, 2006
I woke up by myself. It felt strangely good. I remembered the clock reading 11:35, and that was about it. It was now a quarter to ten, and I was going to be late for the meeting unless I hauled some serious ass. Showering was out of the question, as was breakfast. I threw on [...]
Dan | November 19, 2006
Our two geeks came back about a half an hour later, both carrying backpacks. Barry had a six-pack of Coke in his left hand.
“What’s that for?” I asked him.
“I need the caffeine if I’m going to be doing some hacker work,” he said.
I gestured around my head in a circle.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Coffee doesn’t [...]
Dan | November 19, 2006
I woke up in the morning to a pounding at the door. I looked at the clock, and looked again to make sure that it indeed read 7:15 a.m. I was in bed, naked but for a pair of boxer shorts. I sat up when Brianna walked in, and the sheets sloughed off of me [...]
Dan | November 19, 2006
“Hey, what’s going on?” asked Emily.
“Hey,” I said. I was paralyzed. Did I come around and give her a hug? Did I go for another kiss? At twenty-five, you’re really supposed to just know this sort of thing, but I hadn’t even the beginnings of a clue as to what to do. So I stood [...]
Dan | November 19, 2006
We met up in at TeaLuxe in Harvard Square on Friday at about eight. TeaLuxe is one of the few establishments in Harvard Square that I actually like; they have several hundred specialty teas from all over the world, and they you can either walk up a metal spiral staircase to sit on the upper [...]
Dan | November 19, 2006
I spent Thanksgiving in a daze. I had thought about going down to visit my parents in northern Virginia, but they didn’t want me flying down because of the possibility of terrorist attacks, and they didn’t want me taking the train because they were convinced that Amtrak would go out of business while I was [...]
Dan | November 19, 2006
“Shit,” I said. I had stopped in the street, right next to a circle of old guys who were standing around spitting on the ground.
“You god tat right!” said one of the men, emphasizing his point by hawking out a huge yellow one onto the concrete next to a substantial pile of drying human mucus. [...]
Dan | November 19, 2006
“Is this Jon’s Place?”
The speaker was a woman in late middle age. She looked pinched and angry, carried a leather attache over one shoulder and a clipboard in one hand.
“Yes,” I said. It was the Monday after my night and morning of uncertainty with Emily, and I was still tired. I bit back a very [...]
Dan | November 19, 2006
Emily ended her story by staring into her drink, talking softly enough to force the two of us to lean forward in order to hear what she was saying above the noise of the crowd that had moved in while we were talking. We were sitting on either side of her, and both of us [...]
Dan | November 19, 2006
“Pete, Emily, Emily, Pete.”
“We’ve met,” Emily and I said in unison.
“Oh, shit,” said Brianna. She paused. “Damn.”
We sat there for a moment, three people standing in mid-Autumn on Massachusetts Avenue in front of the Red Line stop, looking at each other. I was a little deflated; I’d been promised a new night with [...]
Dan | November 19, 2006
I stopped by my local video store on my way home from the T station,. The video clerk tonight was a long-haired guy in a black T-shirt and black jeans who would look at you from over the top of his glasses if you rented something that didn’t meet his approval. I dropped off a [...]
Dan | November 19, 2006
And so it was that I entered the holiday season surrounded by obnoxiously happy people who weren’t single. The city of Cambridge started to string the street lights with faux holly and little bulbs a week after Halloween. I spent an afternoon looking for a candle holder, went to Pier One, Urban Outfitters, Crate and [...]
Dan | November 19, 2006
“That’s some wack shit, man,” said Jason between bites of an everything bagel with honey-walnut cream cheese. He was weird about that; the bagel was ours but the cream cheese was from Finagle A Bagel, because he wouldn’t eat a bagel with plain or lite cream cheese. It had to be flavored.
“Tell me about it,” [...]
The Spellman Files (The Spellm...
Shriek: An Afterword
The Wind in the Willows