CEP00000003   123.45 Stories - table of contents

136 1000-word stories written in the idle summer in 1998 – approximately 170 pages long

These stories were written in one mad, energetic summer.  The project started when I realized that my pile of “notes for potentially intriguing story ideas” had become quite large.  I had amassed over fifty or sixty.  During a long period between jobs when I was living my wife’s family’s house in Japan, at a time when I could barely speak any Japanese, I found that the thoughts and words flowed.  I decided that it would be a good idea to flesh out the thoughts I had scribbled down and see what become of them.  I would limit myself to 1000 words, just to see what became of my ideas.  I also thought that 1000 words was a good length for a short story, that being about the length of the average magazine or long newspaper article (which is also what most people prefer to read over fiction anyway).  I kept track of the dates the stories were written on.  On one mad day, I actually wrote ten stories, which should be about 10,000 words.  During the course of the project, several other ideas came to mind, and the whole thing expanded somewhat.  After the stories, I decided to add some appendices: words that intrigues me, concepts that amazed me, synonyms that set me mind on fire, as well as some recent poems I had written.  Now it is groaning under its own unwieldiness.  I hope to some day take the best stories and actually turn them into real stories, although it might be true that the better tales in the collection stand as they are at 1000 words.

To read samples from 123.45 Stories: 

Table of Contents includes:

137 short stories
90 poems
various glossaries

go to:
Stories
Appendix I: Unfinished Stories
Appendix IIa: Words
Appendix IIb: Synonyms
Appendix III: Ideas
Appendix IV: Poems
 

Stories (with dates and descriptions) :

1-the Man Who Was Afraid to Read a Book - May 17th, 1998: mysterious books turn up all the time, he’s afraid to read them.
2- the succubus/incubus watches people - May 17th: the succubus and his history of manipulating people’s sex.
3 - watching a million porn, the Japanese virgin - May 17th: never knowing what is behind the mosaic
4 - Touching the Inner Alien - June 12th: about life, and God, the contemplation of friends and people and hate…
5 - I Love Myself - June 12th: the recycled translated story crossing the earth, bringing doom…
6 - the Faux Reporteur - June 12th: he’s becoming a better lover and so is she, so they begin to hate each other.
7 - I Once Had A Woman - June 14th: making love in all the strangest places, desperately…
8 - We're out of toilet paper - forever!  - June 14th: the metaphysics of society and toiletpaper
9 - Watching the Death of Ivan Ilyich? - June 14th: different literary realities
10 – A Nice Place to Live, But I Wouldn’t Want To Visit There – June 15th: would you still love me if I had no arms or legs - and had scales all over my body?
11 - Terrified of the power of machines - the Ghost of the Machine - June 15: machines hate him and want to destroy him.
12 - Good Surreal / Bad Surreal - June 15th: as the title says
13 - More Sophistic Truisms - May 15th and June 15th: conversation fragment full of sophistic truisms
14 - I Dreamed I Dreamed - June 16th and before: hallucinatory story about repressed memories.
15 - Do As You Must (or You Must Do) - June 15th and before: burbling ramble about the nature of friendship.
16 - the Obsoluut Happening - still June 15th: the same events occur over and over again, yet each time you learn more from it and take its natural conclusion further.
17 - Another Hunter Hunting - June 17th: fax story about job-hunting, friendship, and murder.
18 - A Certain Type of Circular Logic - June 17th: can you split an atom?  Ponderous piece about intelligence
19 - I Am Not Alive Unless I Can Speak - June 20th: telephone conspiracy and revolution vs. the telephone “other.”
20 - Give The Proceeds To Charity Or Give Me Death - June 20th: strange story – reading from the book about something happening, then it really happened.
21 - The End of the Girl as She Knows It  - June 20th: babbling tale of post-apocalyptic credit society
22 - Nights In Hell - July 21st: an alien comes to my village, and I go to the alien village
23 - The Somnambulist - July 21st: dream life and real life merge: “I dreamed you punched me last night.”  “You did.”
24 - A Loser Among Losers - June 21st: absurdist tale of a mind that doesn’t understand real objects
25 - Writing in a Shell - June 21st: Leonard’s mother writing to Leonard in Havana, etc.
26 - See Through My Thin Disguise? - June 22nd and before: the Jesus of China
27 - Poets for President - June 22nd: what would happen if we ever elect a poet as president instead of an actor?
28 - the body/mind: a clever disguise - June 23rd/24th: Will the mind ever kill its enemy – the body?
29 - Horny, I'm Home - July 24th: 20-year sex fantasies of pregnant women, nurses, teachers, linked to divorce and abuse.
30 - the Follower/the Swallower - I Never Learned the Trick - June 24th: toilet fantasy with the floating head that passes by.
31 - The Hitman of Love - June 24th: dire tale of the AIDS assassin.
32 - Living Life Backwards - June 24th: backwards version of “the Hitman of Love” with a happy ending.
33 - the Metempsychotic - June 24th: the foetus aborts itself, afraid of the world we live in.
34 - Male motherhood: hot for the 2020's - June 24th: faux reportage about male pregnancies.
35 - Mickey the Louse - June 25th: a season in a mouse suit at a famous theme park and his adventure with the mouse groupies it attracts
36 - the Village of Disease - June 25th: sexual initiation rites in liberal isolated villages.
37 - Get Thee To A Monastery - June 26th: the man who leaves his family and enters a sinister monastery.
38 - Hell-o'-Kitty - June 27th: the existential discussion about dreams between the detective and the man.  “You could have been immortal… was it worth it?”
39 - the Attractacus - June 27th: the man is confronted by the son he abandoned… if that’s who he is.
40 - aman,aP lan,aC A nal,P A naM A - June 27th: surreal story about language surfing.
41 - bankheis.txt - June 27th: unusual scenario about Peter and Ravi robbing a bank.
42 - Pastoral Afternoons - June 27th: strange, sinister romance: John married a girl, all she wanted was a car.
43 - The nation of Gamblers - June 27th: sinister fantasy about a nation of gamblers
44 - The - June 30th: “I imagine a man…” surreal story (a la Borges) about imagining a man…
45 - Forty Acres and A Moscow Mule - June 30th: surreal drug gun fantasy in Moscow airport
46 - s(G)lutting - June 30th: the teacher whose language gets worse while that of his students improves.
47 - Venom in the Sac - June 30th: the medieval prophet who spoke of the future Germany.
48 - the Rara Avis - June 30th/July 1st: the hand that kills the sleeping husband by lulling him into a very deep sleep…
49 - the Horn'ed Shadowy Figure - July 1st: Watson fingers Holmes for the crime…
50 - the Sub Rosa - June 1st: the existential submarine Rosa and its crew that doesn’t exist.
51 - Albert the Eponymous Johnson - July 1st: renaming the famous anti-hero, surreal, time travel.
52 - the Rara Avis II - July 2nd: the self-taught scholar of Chinese in intellectual and moral debate with the Japanese scholar.
53 - the Broken Thumbnail - July 2nd, 3rd: the group of mad writers who live out their own tales of murder as a group project.
54 - the Third of July - July 3rd: the rich man manipulates his wife and his friend.
55 - the Rara Avis III - July 4th: existential tale of alienation in Tokyo – film censor begins to censor out the world.
56 - the Fourth of July - July 4th: the friend of the rich man manipulates him and his wife.
57 - Lassie Fair, Fair Lassie - July 4th: cute tale of the waitress who can’t remember what she said, who mistakes reality.
58 – a Glass of Orange Jews - July 4th: Philosophical ramble on my mother-in-law’s tatchi-nomi.
59 - Rara Avis IV - July 5th: the testimonial of the original silicon inhabitants of earth and the fall of their civilization.
Fifty-Nine – horror fantasy: the man who wants to make himself Gregor Samsa and turn into a cockroach.
60 - The... - July 6th: meta-fictional tale: a writer gets mysterious letters from a sinister fan.
61 - Hypothetical - July 6th: surreal fantasy – the rival minor gods create rival civilizations and wager which one is better suited to survive.
62 - the Time of the New Romans - July 6th: cathartic abstraction story – the writer of the encyclopedia of alienation can’t make people understand or care about what he has written.
63 - SF - July 6th: bizarre romance – a man falls in love with both parts of a hermaphrodite.
64 - the Walker Walking - July 8th: the man who can’t think unless he’s walking.
65 - Turner Says - July 8th: the suicidal man can’t remember anything, so he asks his wife to write his thoughts down…
66 - Maze-life - July 8th: conceptual piece about the maze people and their maze, the importance of maze concepts, etc.
67 - Newton Says - July 8th: surreal description – the harder he tries to run, the slower he moves.
68 - Piecemeal - July 8th: surreal fantasy – a broken man, he finds out that parts of his body are being replaced for money…
69 - Live Transmission from Charon - July 9th: post-nuclear European escapes to the empty American wasteland.
70 - the Master Plan - July 10th: sinister romance – criminal from America returns to his woman, all of her friends hate him.
71 - the Traveler Traveling - July 10th: hallucinatory story – the Russians are British, the Germans are Russian, the Brits are German, etc.
72 - I've Never Lied To You - July 10th: philosophical fantasy – every five years another rebirth, “But even that is a lie.”
73 - The Unutterable - July 10th: linguistic fantasy – computer geek re-creates the words of an ancient Chinese curse through computer analysis and computation.
74 - the Impermanent - July 10th: sinister meta-fiction – the stories re-write themselves and threaten the writer.
75 - the Un-forgetting - July 10th: the bum on the run from the forces of nature.
76 - Genius Loci - July 10th: meta-fictional story – confused writer acts out his new murder story before he writes it.
77 - Language, Myself - July 10th: absurd fantasy – one by one the language of the people around him becomes unintelligible.
78 - Woh - July 10th: linguistic fantasy – a farmer suddenly begins speaking more and more Chinese.
79 - the Box o' Virus - July 10th: a Pandora’s box of all the computer viruses of the ancient world vs. our sick society.
80 - Justice On Trial, Again - July 11th: meta-fictional fantasy – his art becomes his life, he becomes a character from his novel.
81 - Large Breasted Mama - July 11th: meta-fiction – more literary analysis of books that don’t exist (Polonius Incident, etc.)
82 - the Bridal Chamber - July 17th: meta-fictional fantasy – my relationship with my wife improves as she becomes unstable.
83 - j'Pense Donc j'Suis - July 18th: the man abandons his old life, begins a new one by blotting out his old life.  Is eventually compelled to search his past so he uses the “repressed memories application” program to search and recall.
84 - the Look - July 18th: In a cold world, he is haunted by a vision of a girl he saw once in a subway.
85 - the Omni Bust - July 18th: in his uncle’s library he discovers a diary that describes his life perfectly.
86 - the Brothers of the Sisters of Merci - July 18th: the convoluted love scheme – two twisted couples.
87 - the Pyre - July 19th: the unusual ritual – at the funeral they burn the whole house, then the whole neighborhood.
88 - Number 3674 - July 19th: the fake family – his family becomes estranged, so he abandons them and searches for his real family by blood type.
89 - Number 3675 (Nyuugata) - July 19th: dreaming lots of dreams, collecting 123.45 of them, the story
dissolves…
90 - Number 3676 - July 19th: three starts as a story about farming the land.
91 - Number 3677 (the Internationale) - July 19th: loneliness in the brothel of international women.
92 - Number 5678 - July 19th: the drifter can only think of the nonsense set phrase in his head, until he gets drawn to somebody.
93 - I Thought You'd Be... Taller! - July 19th: surreal duel fantasy that blends film with reality.
94 - Tales of History and Imagination - July 19th: surrealistic war murder fantasy – the same child murder situation recurs.
95 - the Syllogism - July 20th: bizarre murder investigated by a bunch of detective fiction writers.
96 - Es Gibt Kluge Leute, Aber Nur Bloede Gruppen - July 20th: a group of teachers become violent before class one day.
97 - Glitter From the Gutter - July 20th: surreal fantasy – he loses the important disc, the gutter swallows it, his life is ruined.
98 - Yes, Well, That is Your Opinion - July 20th: strange fantasy about master/slave mentality.
99 - Please Read the Next Story First, Please - July 20th: long harangue about backwards criticism.
100 - Paling Enesis - July 20th: two writers meet at a wedding ceremony and talk coyly about conspiracies.
101 - "Cabbie..." - July 22nd: drunk stumbles into my car and thinks it’s a taxi, then goes on a murderous rampage.
102 - Mermaid Sushi Cannibalism - July 22nd: strange person introduces me to the world of the illegal underground gourmand society.
103 - La Plus Important c'est Gateau - July 24th: utterly strange internecine fantasy.
104 - the Community - July 24th: story about all the Johns I’ve known.
105 - the Autocide - July 24th: young couple kill themselves, their mothers artificially inseminate and give birth to their own grandchildren.
106 - the Repeating Crime - July 25th: the same act of sabotage is repeated on the same street in Kyoto.
107 - the Lying Photographer - July 25th: surreal story about new photographs of old situations.
108 - N. Tropy - July 25th/ 26th: my enemy entropy and how I can run towards him but cannot touch him.
109 - Sexual Anthropologists - July 25th: quasi-report on the rituals of three sex-tribes.
110 - Mentally Promiscuous - July 25th: cerebral story of couple falling in love with images and thoughts and “love.”
111 - Heaven in Me - July 26th: the new mystic of corruption and his pilgrimage, his enemy…
112 - Daijobu - July 26th: splitting up the male and female half and flying off and away
113 - the Twins - July 26th: convincing the child that he is Hitler.
114 - Bait - July 26th: We bait information in each other’s diaries.
115 - the Re-run - July 26th: stupid guy writes story, then can’t rewrite it after it is destroyed no matter how much more intelligent and intense he gets.
116 - Paper - July 26th: paper money, books, stories - the writer just can’t do anything to get published.
117 - the Fable, the Table - July 27th: making a real table and carving a table of contents on it before beginning to write.
118 - Appendix 1/Unfinished One-Page Stories - July 27th: analysis of unfinished stories and the world’s shortest story.
119 - the Urusaibakari Sanctum - July 27th: mock political thriller – U.S. wants to take over Japan…
120 - Crotch - July 29th: realistic voyeuristic adventure - the guy who drives by the couple in the car and the fight that ensues…
121 - the Fah-Cucumber - July 31st: all about the black days, and the black days’ effects on the black days.
122 - Nervous Habits - August 1st: J.P. hires me to watch him, then frames me.  A story about the framing story.
123.45 - Doraterror - August 1st: serial killings that hatch out of the phone club.

Appendix I: Unfinished Stories

1 - (Non Compros) Mentis... - August 1st: John and her drink whiskey and investigate life.
2 - Pater Sinica... - August 1st: my Chinese father (unfinished)
3 - the Courvoisier... - August 1st: the beauty contest in the train car.
4 - 12-year-old Whiskey in the Shade... - August 1st: destroying his wife’s peace of mind by punching holes in her condoms.
5 - Catechresis and the Glenlivet... - August 2nd: corrupting the corrupt and bringing them all into the same hell.
6 - the Prime Sounder... - August 2nd: the first piano and the monkeys that play it.
7 - Noise... - August 2nd: the car and the noise filling the world and how it fuels our hatred...
8 - the Javanese Wife... - August 2nd: jokingly speculating that there is a plot, then being drawn into it because it is real.
9 a - Fiction: Not Fact - August 3rd: strange conversation about infidelity.
9 b - Taxi... - August 3rd: strange drunken taxi ride.
10 - Sunaku Graffiti... - August 3rd: an evening in a bar and bathroom graffiti.
11 – Roll of Worms – June 10th, 1996 – the old long-dead friend and the old roll of film of his I develop… and the threats he leaves on it.
12 – the Note: Ich bin ein… - June 11th, 1996 – suicide and John F.

Appendix II:Words

acrostic - Aether - ambiguity - anaphora - antihimeria - antiniomy - antithesis - bathos - catechresis - catechumen - diacope - enallage - encomium - epanepsis - epanorthosis - epistrophe - epizeuxis - eschatology - etiology - eureka - evil - heresy - hyperbalon - ineffable - isolcolon - je ne sais quoi - logomachy - metamorphosis - metempsychosis - Monism - onotology - palimpsest - pallindrome - palingenesis - pathos - periphrasis - poetry - polyptoton - prosopopeia - satyriasis - sophism - soteriology - syllogism - synchronicity - syzygy - tervigersate - thaumaturgy - transubstantiation - truth - tu quoque argument

Appendix IIb: Synonyms

Divinity - Heaven - Devil - Hell

Appendix III: Ideas

Albigenses - Alchemy - Bogomils - Cabala - Cathari - Dualism - Emanation - Existentialism - Gnosticism - Hasidim - Mandaeans - Manichaeism - Mithraism - Paulicians - Theosophy - Zoroastrianism

Appendix IV: Poems

Poems 1 to 88 (all untitled)
Book Titles that Might Have Been
Modern Haikus
 

To read samples from 123.45 Stories:


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