No Hope for Gomez! (17 page)

Read an article about a group of scientists in Geneva who developed a device capable of capturing and containing the human soul!

I was stunned. Never thought I’d see the day.

The jokers made their prototype in the shape of a camera.

Tests are ongoing. 

-- Gomez Porter, blogspace entry.

Epilogue

Blog entry: Weird guy came into the store today. Said he was looking for NoHope72. Took me a while to realize he was addressing me by my online auction handle. I asked him what he wanted and he told me he’d come for the Hicks. He’d won it in a bidding war on eBay.

I pointed him to the storage room. “You’ll find it in there,” I said. “It’s probably sweeping the color off the floor tiles.”

Blog entry: Weird guy returned from the storage room, pulling a struggling Hicks along behind him. “This the Hicks?” he demanded.

“That’s the one,” I said. “He’s a little old, a little strange looking, but I assure you he’s still in mint condition.”

Weird guy wouldn’t hear of it. “This is not what I paid for,” he complained. “This is not at all what I expected!”

“Look,” I said, “I don’t know what to tell you. That’s a genuine Hicks right there, make no mistake. Never had any complaints.”

Weird guy prodded Hicks, then pulled up his nose. “He smells funny,” he said.

“What do you expect, buying secondhand crap off the internet? You think you’d get a deal like that on a brand-new Hicks? Of course there’s going to be a little bit of a smell. Comes with the territory. Now take it or leave it!”

“But I already paid up through PayPal.”

“Well, I guess you’d better take it then.”

Weird guy ruffled Hicks’ jacket, checked his pockets, then conceded. “Guess I could try him out for a while.”

“That’s the spirit,” I said. “And don’t sweat it, if it doesn’t work out, you just throw a new pair of pants on him and sell him for a profit.”

Epilogue 2

Blog entry: Sombrero guy kept coming to the store. Sometimes wearing the actual sombrero, sometimes wearing a fedora or a hairnet. I decided it was time to confront him again.

“Are you in love with me or something? Is that why you keep hanging around my store?”

He looked shocked. “What?”

“You know, can’t sleep thinking about me, writing my name in hearts on your lunch box, that kind of thing?”

“Of course not.” He glanced about the store nervously. “I like girls,” he said, “women. All kinds. I’d rather date my own grandmother than you.”

“You sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!”

“So you’ve never felt the need to, say, buy me flowers?”

“No!”

“Candy maybe?”

“No!”

“Ever thought about me on Valentine’s Day?”

He shrugged. “Well, yeah,” he said, “maybe, but that was a coincidence. It didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t romantic.”

I closed my laptop and put it away. “So help me out here,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“Well,” he said, “don’t take this the wrong way, but there’s so much wrong with the world today, you know? The ozone layer is deteriorating, there are too few vitamins in our food, job security is a thing of the past, there’s nothing on TV and even that comes on late and interspersed with commercials, it’s nearly impossible to find a good book, girls never like the right guys, people aren’t nice enough to each other but the one time you’re in a hurry some idiot wants to start up a conversation, you can’t find a game of Frogger to save your life, new TVs are cool but it takes forever to change the channel, everything that makes you feel good is bad for you, everything that is good for you tastes bad–”

“Hold on,” I said, cutting him off. “Let’s get back on topic here, shall we? Why are you stalking me and what’s with the odd clothes?”

Sombrero guy shrugged. “I’m just saying, with everything going on in the world, it’s so rare to find anything good, anything halfway decent. When you discover something worthwhile among the rubble of modern society you have to latch on to it.” He shot me an apologetic smile. “I had this feeling about you the first time I came into your store. You seemed like an interesting guy, leading an interesting life. I thought we could be friends…”

“Friends?”

Sombrero guy nodded. “Yeah, do you know how valuable it is to have even one good friend?”

I did. I asked him, “And the suit?”

“It’s easier to trust someone in a suit. A suit has an air of pre-approval about it.”

“But the sandals?”

He sighed. “Well, some people don’t like suits. They think suits make you look self-important. The sandals convey a laidback-ness the suit is incapable of.”

“And the sombrero?”

“I thought maybe the suit and sandals were too much, so I wanted you to allow your subconscious to give me a chance.”

“By wearing a sombrero?”

“Well, Gomez, you’re from Mexican descent, aren’t you?”

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all my reviewers for selflessly donating their brains – and general sanity – for me to test early versions of this novel on. It can’t have been easy. I know many of you suffered greatly for my ‘art’.

Special thanks also to Mr. Carlos Rodriguez Vega for making this project feel more like a collaborative effort than typing away in my dungeon usually does. He also deserves praise for being the first human to put an unfinished piece of cake up for auction on eBay (why let it go to waste?), for pencilling the original altered Thinker image used on the original cover, and for not trying to kill me every time I suggested an alteration (in fact, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone I know for not trying to kill me so far (with the exception of Dave, my neighbor, who’s clearly been trying to kill me.))

But, first and foremost, I’d like to thank you, the reader, for buying this book and telling all your friends to buy it. Your efforts are nothing short of heroic. You are all, very obviously, the brightest hope for our species!

Please don't hesitate to leave a review, I read them all and they go a long way to keeping an author in business ;)

Regs,

Graham

grahamparke.com

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Unspent Time

Warning:
reading this novel may make you more attractive and elevate your random luck by about 9.332%
*

(
*
These statements have not been evaluated by anyone of consequence.)

From the award winning author of ‘No Hope for Gomez!’ comes a collection of 20 impossible tales.

The realm of Unspent Time permeates the cracks between the past and the present. It’s made up of pockets of ‘should have been’s and ‘might have happened’s. It’s time that was allotted but never spent. This is the home of the stories that could have been.

Such as the story of Kiala, whose aunt and caretaker disappears one day, leaving her as the sole Huntress to battle the giant octopi to feed her village.

Or the revealing tale of Goki Feng Ho: the ancient Chinese art of decoding the meaning of car license plates.

And the heartbreaking story of the man responsible for designing the color scheme for the insides of your shoes – as he toils away in obscurity, his work impacts society in ways we’ll never fully comprehend.

And let’s not forget the story behind Unspent Time itself, the metaphysical ramifications of which will leave the scientific community feeling, well, mostly indifferent about it for decades to come…

“Captivating. Each story fired up my imagination.” – Alan H. Jordan, author.

“Extremely witty and clever writing that contains keen insights into human nature.” – California Chronicle

Sometimes I'm so Smart

I almost feel like a real person

The blogger followed by Gomez for dating advice returns in his own adventure.

-Ever wondered why you can’t call a girl the next day?

-Or what the friend-zone is really for?

-Or why the divorce rate has mysteriously tripled since the advent of deodorant commercials?

Leverage has, and he’s spent the last decade decoding the answers. Now he’s ready to warn the world at large and win over the love of his life using his insider knowledge.

Up until now life’s been a struggle for Leverage. It’s always seemed a little harder on him, a tad more unfair, extremely more unkind. But he might just catch a break.

And it’s about time. He’s a 38 year old fiscal accountant still living with his mom – a mom who refuses to file for a temporary visa before entering his bedroom (never mind filling out the forms in triplicate, which is the only number that makes sense from an administrative viewpoint.) And his dad was the victim of a freak accident 30 years ago. An accident that somehow made him, his clothes, and his personal belongings disappear into thin air. Still, Leverage can’t help but wonder when he sees a face in the crowd;
Are you him? Are you secretly checking up on me?

Now, together with a band of almost-trusted followers, he sets out to conquer this life-thing once and for all. And along the way he teaches us why our immune systems are likely to cause our first divorce, why women suffer from a collective shoe addiction, and why cloning might well be the only road to global happiness.