Thank you for visiting Camp Strange, my little corner of the online world. This site contains a collection of some of the stories I have written over the past 6 years since I first began blogging at the now-defunct Beauty Dish, as well as new stories. You can read some of my funniest Avon Lady …
Author Archives: Birdie
A Love Letter to Star Trek
This is too soon to write this. I should wait a few months, maybe a year, take time and coffee and dreams and let it finish whirling around my neural net. But Star Trek is all about the temporal anomalies so here I sit. One year and a couple months ago, on Star Date something-or-other, my …
Data’s Dog
Data, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s android science officer, shared his starship quarters with a sleek cat named Spot. Data wanted to be human, wanted to understand what makes some of us choose chocolate over vanilla, what makes us giggle when tickled, the strange and etheric connections that tie our species together. A cat’s fiercely …
Fossils
Sunday morning I packed one of those paper grocery bags with blood oranges from my backyard tree, a handful of shelled walnuts in a plastic baggie, a few cans of good ginger ale, a bag of homemade corn chips, a package of fig cookies, and I stuck it in the back of my van. I …
This Old House
I’m working on the This Old House issue of my regional arts magazine, and in the process of writing a story on penitentiary tiles, I began to think about my adopted home town, Las Vegas, New Mexico.… ——- My hometown in New England held a node on the Revolutionary road. Most of the townspeople — …
I Come in Peace
A man called my cell phone. I didn’t catch the call, heard the ring as the shower pelted me with heat and hope. He left a short message, just a macho first name and telephone number. I stood in the bathroom, heat pouring from my hands, dialed his number. “Hi! Is this Rocco? This is …
The Day Scotty Saved the Future
James Doohan died yesterday. My two young boys would tell you he played “Scotty” on the Star Trek original series. They would tell you he ruled the Engineering department, carried more brains and guts than tools, and knew how to massage life into fading dilithium crystals. They would tell you how he saved the Enterprise …