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In addition to administering ia(¶), Quimby directs operations for his boutique hypermedia design firm Studio Hyperset, manages a raging narrative creation/consumption habit, and co-edits SCRIPT (from Studio Hyperset Media). He's published work in Bright Lights Film Journal and other publications and can be reached at oqmelton@gmail.com and on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter.

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  Quimby (Admin) - Las Vegas, NV 2:18 am on February 28, 2010 Permalink
  Tag(s): mr. fox   

  “Capitalism,” he said, “is best practiced without compassion. Like war and triage, it’s hell and, as such, suffering can be kept to a minimum only by targeted, urgent, and efficient action. Ventures are best undertaken deliberately, quickly, and with raiding instincts. No matter how brutal the action, if it brings about a swift, money-generating result, one must prefer it above all others. Long-term misery can be alleviated only by short term suffering.

  “There is no happiness, and you must dispense with that fairy tale. This is our system, and these are the rules. You should feel no guilt in playing by them or using them to your advantage since you neither engineered the system nor wrote the rules. As an inevitable player, your choice at birth was victimization or conquest, exploitation or exploiting. And this remains your choice until the day you die and they wrap you like fish in the Stars and Stripes.

  “Like the Phoenicians before us and every pirate since, commerce is every American’s birthright and the lion’s share of our identity. The various mechanisms of trade speak to us like an oracle. And the oracle tells me that survivors and outcasts like you and me make the best capitalists.

  “Street urchin rappers, abuse victims of every variety, psychopaths who scheme their way into Cadillacs and Armani — only the wretched refuse, the the homeless, the tempest-tost truly yearn to breathe free. And capitalism, I’ve come to tell you, is the mother of these exiles, lifting her lamp beside freedom’s golden door.”

  
   
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  Quimby (Admin) - Las Vegas, NV 6:28 am on February 15, 2010 Permalink
  Tag(s): barnabas fang (4), the pirate (3)   

  He’d been in exquisite pain for some time before deciding to meet with Dr. Fang. A chiropractor friend recommended Fang in an enigmatic note: “The best strange doctor I know of.” And while his Yale-mind kept editing the note (projecting a comma into the lacuna between “best” and “strange” and adding an “-st”), the man knew the omissions had been intentional.

  On the ride down to Venice, he listened to a report about the effects of money on the human brain. (“Like cocaine,” one researcher said.) The night before, he’d used a butane torch to leech silver dollops off one of his bars, bringing a few ounces of the misshapen slivers to pay Fang. Listening to them jingle on the seat beside him, he thought back to the great businessmen romps of the ’80s, where powder-white blow mixed with currency ink and pheromone-laced woman sweat to create the most intoxicating concoction known to man.

  Fingering the labial slivers beside him, he knew the researcher was right and, for a moment, considered turning the car around and reintegrating the silver into his horde. But when his chest seized again, he decided to continue south toward the astral splendor of Angel City and the “best strange doctor” Barnabas Fang.

  
   
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  Quimby (Admin) - Las Vegas, NV 6:16 pm on January 25, 2010 Permalink
  Tag(s): the retiree (2)   

  Sitting by the great lake, he thought back across the years: to roles, to productions, to lovers, to locations. He’d had too few independent adventures, and he judged himself harshly for that. He could have made time. There had certainly been enough money. (Such largesse! And for what? Only entertaining!) Now, he’d never see the top of Everest or walk in the steps of Alexander. He’d most likely never see the Serengeti or Antarctica or the Tierra del Fuego or, or, or, or.

  But no matter, he thought. He’d had a life filled with all sorts of riches. And he knew that if someone had approached his younger self — that beaming boy of 22 who’d stepped from nowhere into the sonic boom of Los Angeles — and told him what to expect in perfect prophecy, he couldn’t have faced it. The life ahead would have evaporated him like a white, nuclear light.

  Instead, he’d walked into the light ignorantly. And perhaps that was the only way to have lived it and survived. But finding himself at the end of it all, living beside this cool, dark lake under heavy clouds seemed a grand irony indeed.

  This wasn’t retirement; it was exile.

  
   
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  Quimby (Admin) - Las Vegas, NV 9:55 am on January 24, 2010 Permalink
  Tag(s): the couple (4), the retiree (2)   

  There was a time when everything he said made news. Once, he’d given an enthusiastic “Yes!” to a question he’d not actually heard and, as a result, found himself pilloried in the press: as a heretic, as a racist, as a womanizer, as any number of (un)flattering things.

  But all that was in the past, and his declining years were to be a gift to himself. Far from the hurley burley (always alien anyway), insulated by money accumulated over years of fame and the luxury it bought, and anonymous for the first time in five decades, the man now lived only to observe, imbibe, reflect, and stroll.

  Walking in the mid-morning, as was his custom, he thought back to breakfast where, at his hotel’s café, he’d seen a man and a woman dining while wearing Venetian masks. They’d lift the masks long enough to take bites but otherwise sat silently, in perfect porcelain coolness. One mask covered in moons and stars, the other with suns, the man remembered the couple’s symmetry and then, thinking of nothing much in particular, continued along the shores of the lake.

  
   
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  Quimby (Admin) - Las Vegas, NV 4:40 pm on January 13, 2010 Permalink
  Tag(s): the couple (4)   

  Having been told so many false things, what could he do but stare silently at her? Across the table, he knew she felt the same way. But the woman kept talking anyway. How could she, he wondered, add false thing to false thing, expecting him to do the same, and still keep going?

  Eventually, he stopped processing sound of any kind. The waiters shuffling across the boards, the other diners sipping coffee, the street musician nearby — it all faded away. Even her words — lies anyway — decrescendoed into a flat hiss. And not even that, really. Just the sound of her lips smacking and her teeth tapping.

  It was then that he began thinking of abstraction and those damned Venetian masks.

  She, though, asked what he wanted for desert for the fourth time. Receiving no response, yet again, she told her companion that she’d been sleeping with the waiter. Unreceptive, the man across the table — hers for the moment — wasn’t aware that a lie without malicious intent had finally passed between them.

  
   
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  Quimby (Admin) - Las Vegas, NV 9:48 pm on January 3, 2010 Permalink
  Tag(s): barnabas fang (4)   

  He always worked in silence. No music, no chit-chat, no ringing phones. Outside, beneath the OMD sign facing Oceanfront Walk, he advertised this, suggesting the silence aligned his practice with Indian and Japanese masters who had a greater-than-mortal understanding of chakras and ch’i and what have you.

  Of course, they were expenses too. Phone lines and secretaries to answer them, satellite radio subscriptions. But these worldly concerns featured less prominently in Dr. Barnabas Fang’s presentation of himself to a paying public.

  The name was a pseudonym: something less frowned upon in OM circles than it was in the AMA. Coupling an edgy, but WASPy-enough forename with an Asian-esque surname created this Steampunk masterpiece that perfectly matched the vials, root-medicines, and far-side-of-the-world bric-à-brac littering the office.

  Of these, colon-cleansers and horrid-smelling liquors were principal components of the medicine he practiced. And business, in Venice, LA, CA at the dawn of 2010 was good and getting better.

  
   
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  Quimby (Admin) - Las Vegas, NV 7:11 pm on December 30, 2009 Permalink
  Tag(s): in maghreb (2)   

  Daily Brief:  North African Field Office
  Attn:           Chief Officer

  For your immediate attention, sir. Perhaps valuable, perhaps garbled nonsense. I’ve edited slightly, inserting capitalization as well as characters not typically sent via wire, for your reading convenience.

  “In days past, someone else took notes STOP Today, it falls to me STOP Silence STOP Muffled voices STOP And then, clearly, Man A: ‘That’s not the deal we agreed upon’ STOP Man B: ‘First we let go of class and things get really interesting’ STOP Man A: ‘The deal requires no hierarchies’ STOP ‘And anyway I’ve jettisoned the hold petty opinions once had over me’ STOP ‘Can you say the same’ QUERY No response STOP No response STOP The men exit STOP This is all I saw and heard”

  The identities of men A and B, as well as that of the privileged man, remain undetermined. There are burnt lacunae above and below this fragment, but my man says he can just make out the words “Addis Ababa” where the addressee would usually be listed.

  I myself can see nothing and suspect he’s just trying to impress me.

  How shall we proceed, sir?

  J.C.

  
   
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  Quimby (Admin) - Las Vegas, NV 6:58 pm on December 24, 2009 Permalink
  Tag(s): driving north   

  He drove all day from some forgettable place, itself a random destination randomly chosen from another forgettable place. Only the cardinal line mattered. North, at all costs, to the world’s last unpoliced borderland.

  Midday, he exited US 89 and scuttled the car off Montana 17. Though he drove it off-road for more than a mile, it might eventually be found. He knew this and accepted the risk. The car, though, would never be driven again. He’d seen to that.

  Crossing the 49th parallel at dusk, he still carried that greasy bundle. No one but him knew what was inside, and, for a thousand miles, he’d scared off inquires with a horrific Gwynplaine smile.

  To this point, their stories, in fact, are not so different. And in time, their fates will prove virtually identical. But this man, for whatever he may know about L’Homme qui rit, cannot avoid the Comprachicos, the men-who-are-wolves, or the sea.

  For now, though, the thread remains uncut. Waterton Lake recedes in the distance, the cold dirt underfoot suddenly belongs to Canada, and the man considers veering West for the first time in a very long time.

  
   
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  Quimby (Admin) - Las Vegas, NV 8:22 pm on December 23, 2009 Permalink
  Tag(s): in the desert   

  Like the Baptist and Moshe before him, the man knew his god was a desert-dweller. But it never occurred to him to look for יהוה so far from Sinai and the Levant, certainly not in the deserts east of Los Angeles.

  But after a wild-looking Nazirite swept through the beach cities, citing ancient Kenite thought, it seemed like a good place to look. “Shaddai looms over the dry mountains half a world away,” the Nazirite said. “Surely he looms over the ones in our own backyard.”

  It was late August when he finally set out, before the sun came up, too early to hear the day’s weather report or its prediction for Santa Anas and increased brushfire. He hadn’t brought anything but water and lavash and soon both ran out.

  Delirious, the man wandered for the better part of a day and then one more. Smoke thickened; and on the wind, he began to feel the peculiarly dry lap of nearby flame. Mumbling the unspoken name, the man veered like a drunk and took his last earthly steps into a Joshua grove.

  There, shoeless and trembling, he embraced the bushy flame.

  
   
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  Quimby (Admin) - Las Vegas, NV 8:42 pm on December 20, 2009 Permalink
  Tag(s): the couple (4)   

  She told him not to ask after the exotic, but when he did anyway, she explained, “It’s nothing but that which one doesn’t understand.”

  Unsatisfied, he replied, “But we’ve traveled to so many places and seen so many things. What could be alien to us?”

  “Nothing,” she said, smiling. “Nothing, I suppose.”

  Both exhaled in a long silence. After a few minutes, she spoke again:

  “Take Venetian masks, though … ”

  “What of them?”

  “Have you ever seen something so beautiful? Half-hidden by cloak hoods beside the Grand Canal at Carnival time?”

  “No, but we’ve never really seen that.”

  “I did once, as a girl.”

  “I’m corrected,” he said, “How can I compete with an ambassador’s daughter?”

  She took a step back, and he thought she was preparing to faint again, but she pirouetted instead.

  “I’ve got you,” he said, grabbing her out of the air.

  She looked up at him and smiled. “When I was a girl, those masks were exotic.”

  “And now?”

  “I’d have to see them again to be sure.”