B8A

87 Scene from a Lost Reel

2011-12-31T15:30:00.000+01:00

88 Dawn Dreams

2011-12-29T08:23:00.000+01:00

In the time before there was time, a lone figure stepped out of the mist and slapped me across the face. I was being chased by God. It was the apocalypse of my own procrastination and I did not know if I had the resources to face the tribulation. I had heard of Atheists who prayed, knowing they prayed to themselves, or to life. I thought I was possessed by the demon of sloth, I regressed to a mythic worldview. Then it happened. I continued to work. I awoke in sunlight with a newspaper. I could not escape the house. All I wanted was the girl outside. Then I realised I was there with her, the note I remembered having seen before taped to the window was there as well, now I could see the other side. It was advice for me. I noticed the newspaper had been torn in two. I began to tear it in half slowly. As I tore I was also torn, my ego split again and half of me escaped, the half with the knowledge of it.

89 Fantasy / Reality Explained

2011-12-18T23:42:00.001+01:00

Fantasy can be realistic

Reality can be fantastic

Fantasy can be made with thought alone

Reality can be all one with no thought made

When we stop believing in fantasy, it disappears

When we stop believing in reality, we disappear

If you still won't understand this difference

Can I interest you in a castle made of sand?

79 Room with a shiny new faucet on the ceiling

2011-11-29T21:59:00.001+01:00

Left out in the rain, dogs sometimes let their grins slip. If they catch you watching, the grin returns.

...True Story.

Chalk on a blackboard

2011-11-23T22:33:00.001+01:00

Bench

2011-11-23T22:29:00.001+01:00

O

2011-11-23T22:25:00.001+01:00

Meanwhile...

2011-11-15T06:11:00.002+01:00

Logomania

2011-11-15T05:50:00.002+01:00

Too late to dream of sleep

2011-11-15T05:42:00.002+01:00

What happened when I started submitting stories to publications?

2011-09-17T11:23:00.002+02:00

I enjoyed writing stories here, they were freely available to anyone who cared to read them. I posted over 300 stories this way. Then I wrote something here I thought worthy of submission. Turns out it was. It was rejected because posting a story here counts as prior publication. Who'd 've thunk it.

I started a new site called 100 rejections to record my rejections from publishers. Not an original idea but it has been fun and the rejections have been getting encouraging. Why have I not updated that site?

The answer is summer happened. It was time to disperse so I could better coagulate in the Autumn.

Why do I intend to post here again? Because it seems true that in order to keep the flow of ideas coming, giving them away really does work.

While I will be submitting again (without the exuberence that I watched my youthful peers possess) I accept that to keep that tap running I have to leave the garden hose on as well.

80 The Battle for New York

2011-02-27T13:14:00.003+01:00

The Battle for New York was a disaster, Walter Gromwell looked around at the 4 other men who'd made it out of Staten Island with him and then he looked at what was left of their kit. Gromwell couldn't supress a groan as something inside his injured chest wobbled and pain shot electric sparks from his hips to his ribs. Gromwell had seen his General brought down before his very eyes as if by magic. His head clipped from his body with less sound than the farmboy from Sussex had heard coming from a cat fart. He started to smile but the tightening of his chest made him stop mid-chuckle. The General had been on his horse, halfway through an order and then his head had exploded, Gromwell hadn't been thinking then, all he'd known had been flung out the window at that instant leaving only room for living through the next second and then the next, all the way to the present moment, the moment where he was right now, clutching his side and slowly freezing to death months later in this harsh New World January, despite the cold, despite the pain, it seemed less real than that summer day in July when they'd landed on Staten Island expecting little to no opposition from the traitor Washington's men.

Instead, something had taken his General's head off. No, it was really more like it had exploded from the inside, as he'd first thought. General Sir William Howe had been a good General and Gromwell, like most of the General's men, had loved him, Gromwell had seen action with him in Austria and later in Canada and even the Caribbean. When Howe's head had just come off like that, the dirt, the grass, the creaking of the landing boats, the mad blue July sky, Gromwell was fairly sure that if he closed his eyes and took the time, he'd be able to count each leaf of each branch of each tree that had surrounded them when that mysterious force took the General's head.

It had only been the beginning of the nightmare, They'd landed with 25,000 soldiers but after the General's head got taken off, the senior officers had been next, hundreds at a time it seemed to Gromwell. Now it was January and the scattered panicked forces the General had led were wandering lost, hungry, diseased and dying in the snow all across New England.Hunted as well. Gromwell couldn't help grunting, could he call it New England anymore? These Americas would be his death and he knew it. Still, with the handful of men that had made it with him back to one of the remaining landing boats (some were strangely little more than splinters) he had gotten across to the mainland and managed to survive as long as January and as far as Jersey. They were heading North hoping to find the Continenal Army still in command up near Quebec whose streets, he could hardly believe he had walked once, with a full belly in clothes that did not stink.

He'd gone right past horror on the day of the landing at Staten Island and was only now beginning to come back round to it again from the other side and started properly thinking, what could have happened? They'd abandoned all their cannon where they had fallen. The precision, no, the decision of the strike against them was what had baffled and panicked the men, 25,000 soldiers only have about 300 senior officers and only one General. It hadn't been like an attack, it had been like a decapitation. Gromwell was just a regular infantryman, as were all who had escaped the carnage on Staten Island that day. In fact, he doubted any commissioned officer had lived out the hour, let alone the day. Gromwell couldn't put his certainty into words but either by Grace or Glory, he'd not just been lucky, he felt he'd been spared.

In the treeline, half a kilometer from Walter Gromwell's camp, a lance of figures lay motionless and observed the proceedings using starlight goggles.

"Sergeant, they have muskets but have been using them only to hunt, avoiding built-up areas, their provisions must be depleted soon, they have continued on a northerly heading since we've been observing, recommend catch and release, these boys are done fighting, over."

"One of them might be my granddad, right Private Tremayne? Have you identified them?"

"Yes Sergeant. Historical profile reports their identities as Walter Gromwell, Jackson Struthers, Willard Jensen, Amos Philips, Gerard Buckley, visual confirmation, over"

"Not much left of his regiment, okay, all names are green, except Walter Gromwell's, he didn't survive the war, over"

"Yes Sergeant, over. " said Private Tremayne wondering about all those who were supposed to have survived but had got sniped all the way back in July. Some Brain had explained at the campaign briefing that big changes had smaller and more predictable consequences but little changes had huge unpredictable consequences. Something as well about big changes being on purpose shouldn't mean accidental changes being introduced willy-nilly. That was improvisation. He didn't understand the math but it appealled to his sense of neatness. He sighted in and took aim. Exhaled.

Gromwell huddled up in his blanket and tried to get some sleep, hoped things would look better t--

Coming soon: The battle for New York!

2010-10-03T22:06:00.002+02:00

Thank you for voting! Check back on November 20 at the latest for my story!

76 The Battle for New York

2010-09-15T22:49:00.000+02:00

Coming soon!

Thanks to Anon for this story idea:

112,000 British troops
300 Special Forces
The historic battle for New York in 1776-77
Time Travel
7 Days

I won't promise the whole story but given the research conducted by Anon, including myself among the horde, I think the problem has been thought through enough to write on it.

Who wants to read this story?

Click Like or Dislike below to vote! Do you want to read such a story?

Voting ends October 1st!

78 Deep Space Blues

2010-09-14T12:40:00.001+02:00

1.

There was no turning back. With plenty of time now to stare out of the small viewport in the common area into space, into nothing. The viewport had been added after studies had shown that people fared better psychologically on long space missions when one was installed. For the same reason the cockpit had two seats even though there was ever only one pilot in there at a time. Having evidence of other human beings was as beneficial as being able to look outside, even if there was nothing out there and no one in the second seat.

Pilots would always smuggle scotch aboard even though it was against the rules. All pilots did this, even those who didn't drink, whether superstitious or otherwise, every pilot brought some good scotch and by and large, most of the bottle made the journey. That empty seat started getting called the "angel's seat" and the splash of scotch it received before departure was called the "angel's share" after the amount of scotch lost to the aging process.

Once in a long time, a pilot would come down to the common room and take a belt of scotch and stare.

There was another reason to keep scotch aboard.

2.

"How did you make it, when so many of the crew regularly go mad after coming out of their sim-fantasies?"

"I simply requested a real-time broadcast of the ship during stasis, most crew psychosis isn't permanent, you know."

Ignoring the question the interview continued."So while everyone else was living a shared hallucinatory fantasy, you were imagining yourself alone, here?"

"That's about it. On board the whole time, the simulation matched reality right down to the controls, it was an option, I chose it"

"Option?"

"The engineer assigned to my sim had time to spare, he suggested the sim controls be brought online"

"7 years, I understand the simulators were intended to solve the tedium of space travel."

"I understand some crew choose longer subjective times."

"One crew member lived a Buddhist monastery simulation for 700 years subjective, he had to get special approval for that."

"That would be Em."

"Em, yes, does he have a last name?"

"I thought that was his last name, I've shipped with him before, I don't even know why you're interviewing me, this is standard attrition. With rehabilitation, most of those space zombies will come to their senses."

3.

"You didn't hear? Dr. Fahr has succeeded in creating a stable gate to Earth, long hauling is history!"

"Just Earth? well, until there's a gate on every habitable planet in the universe I won't worry."

79 A homework example

2010-07-20T16:49:00.000+02:00

After the apocalypse, the last person on Earth sat alone, there was a knock at the door. The last person on Earth didn't recognize the sound for what it was, at first. Memories of knocks and open doors and other people had been so traumatic that the last person struggled to reel them back from wherever they'd been drowned.

Not without a little fear, the last person opened the door. There was someone there who looked exactly like him.

"Who are you--," he began to say, but the person in front of him copied him exactly! It looked like a man, with wrinkled but pale features, as though he had been living underground just like the last person on Earth. The last person reached out to touch the man, less and less surprised at how similar their clothing was, the man copied him exactly!

Their fingers touched, cold and smooth, the last person on Earth fell to the floor as the man did as well.

The last man on Earth slammed the door hard on the mirror. He shuddered with returning knowledge, he was a man, not a person, a man.

Without women, there was no hope for the race, without women, a man would rather die than pretend to live.

Only as a person could he endure it.

After a great, indefinite amount of time, the man forgot about the hallway closet by the stairs with the unbroken mirror hidden inside it, that rare cursed treasure in this apocalypse where nothing, not even this house he grew up in, remained whole and intact.

He forgot and became a person again.

Then one night, when the loneliness became unbearable, the last person on Earth heard a knock...

80 My predictions for 2010 to 2100

2010-05-16T20:12:00.000+02:00

My predictions for 2010 to 2100

Contents

This is a PEST (Political, Economic, Social & Cultural, Technological) speculative essay.

Since I've been reading a lot of science fiction lately, I decided it was time to make some predictions of my own. Solely for my own entertainment mind you, this is not meant to be taken seriously.

Political

The European Union, as a federated superstate, will fail to recognise the opportunity represented by absorbing Turkey into the union. Turkey will turn its attention eastward to become part of what will become known as STRICT, (Super Tradezone of Russia, India, China and Turkey). The FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) will have no choice but to further integrate in order to compete with this enormous economic and political force. All countries of the world will be forced out of necessity and opportunism to join (or have ties so strong they amount to joining) one of these three economic zones. Multinational corporations and their political lobbyists will push for even greater integration even if the removal of barriers to trade in commerce, capital and human resources are disadvantageous to quality of life or the environment. For example, Australia will be one of many countries to experience ecological collapse and mass migration.

Technological leapfrogging will put nations who were previously disadvantaged and underdeveloped into a new bargaining position. Previously marginalised countries will have an opportunity to become post-industrialised without having to go through industrialisation themselves however there will be enormous costs in terms of social and economic stability. The number of failed states narco-states and lawless areas will continue to increase. The political strain will lead to armed conflict in such areas once the proliferation of small tactical nuclear weapons becomes impossible to control to say nothing of bio-weapons.

The spectre of armed conflict for natural resources will pressure developed world governments to make control of natural resources the most important aspect of foreign policy.

By the year 2100, converging government and business interests in controlling assets and the increasing pressure of having to invest trillions in several currencies (with the perpetual aim of even greater profit) will accelerate abandonment investment in physical assets in favour of abstract financial instruments whose sole purpose is to make money out of money. The wealth gap will leave most of the planet disenfranchised. Political means of controlling one's environment will no longer be practical for the average citizen. Political apathy among the electorate will continue to rise. Countries will maintain their territorial sovereignty in little but name. The successful politician will have to understand the local consequences of policies enacted by counterparts on the other side of the world. A tragedy of the commons seems inevitable.

Economic

There will be a series of financial crises which will increase in frequency and intensity. Each time there is a financial crisis, wealth in terms of capital will concentrate in the hands of fewer and fewer groups. The incentive will be towards ever greater resourcefulness on the part of the individual citizen and also increasing pressure to be aligned to an existing power group. The pace of change will be so great that efficiencies in real-time for maximum gain will be impossible. Innovation will be almost instantaneously duplicated and when improved upon, duplicated again.

Winning economic strategies will be brief, copied rapidly and fail faster than ever before. There will be increasing pressure on best-fit short-term solutions.

In terms of food consumption, wild commercial fish stocks will be completely depleted by 2050 at the latest. Strains of wheat rust which can attack genetically resistant wheat will decimate grain crops globally. The individual citizen will not have the means to afford anything other than a yeast-vat diet of homogenised nutri-paste and whatever they can grow or raise privately. Chickens will be popular urban pets. It is already clear in 2010 that the lifestyle that the world aspires to is globally untenable. The disincentive to produce offspring in a modern western democracy will lead to a population crash in the FTAA, STRICT, and the EU. Selective immigration to developed zones will pale in comparison to rampant illegal immigration to those zones.

This environmental pressure will select for the populations of these zones to be increasingly opportunistic and entrepreneurial at the level of the individual. Border security will be the largest cost of these zones. Regional development will concentrate on equalising development within existing zones while beyond the zones, feudalism is the best that can be expected. In 2010, 2 billion people subsist on less than the equivalent of two dollars (2010 value) per day. By 2100 more than half the population of the world will subsist on less than the equivalent of two dollars per day. The developed world will have a paranoid garrison mentality which will not stop the most resourceful illegal immigrants from penetrating the FTAA, STRICT and the EU.

By the 2100, most of the labour force of human beings (to notably exclude ever more sophisticated automated manufacturing robots) will work in the knowledge or services industry as contractors-for-hire. Publically available, online performance reviews of both individuals and workgroups will further entrench the conservativism this cohort of pre-post-capitalism employees knew through their parents.

The reputations of companies will be less important than the reputations of the contractors they have hired at any given time. In 2010, "You are your own brand," is a common catchphrase and employers routinely google prospective employees and view their profiles on popular social networking sites. How? They are often invited to do so by the employees themselves who recognise that having both public and private lives congruent with the espoused attitudes, values and beliefs of their prospective employers is a net asset. Those who cannot conform by their own free will may find themselves unemployable; however talented they may claim to be.

By the year 2100, individual brand management will be something that successful individual citizens have nurtured throughout their lives. When every action can directly impact one's employability, conservativism in behaviour, attitudes, and attire will be the most successful personal mode. A dismal homogeneity will be the public result.

In 2010, "your grades don't count after college," is a common catchphrase. In 2100, "You are your profile," may be just as common. If the link is not immediately apparent between these catchphrases, it should become clear in the following section on social and cultural predictions.

Social and Cultural.

The scope of this speculation does not allow the author to go much beyond events occuring outside the developed economic zones.

Within the FTA, STRICT and the EU, the proliferation of effectively free broadband Internet access will force a meritocratic policy on both governments and businesses. In order to provide the most effective control over economic development, the educational requirements for what were traditionally referred to as careers will take 40 years in order for an individual to become qualified. The educational system within the FTA, STRICT and the EU will continue to be refined towards the goal of keeping the individual citizen in school and under-producing for as long as possible. Those who become the elite of this generation will be those who can see through the fiction of a specialist education guaranteeing meaningful challenging creative work. In 2010 the open source software revolution and it's younger sibling, the open source hardware revolution are both still in their infancy. By the year 2100 the individual citizen may be employed by hundreds of companies at once, bidding for projects and working primarily from home.

The prediction of 40 years spent in a formal educational system is conservative. Many individual citizens within the developed zones will very likely spend their entire lives in some sort of formal educational system earning little better than a living wage.

An illustrative sidebar: the open source hardware revolution implies that (with a minimum of capital and a modest amount of time and intellect) anything material the individual citizen desires to have, the individual citizen can build for themselves (except for limited resources such as living space, while the open source revolution will provide plans for dwellings, it cannot yet supply the land). In 2010 one may see urban graffiti with marquee LED lighting and handmade Segway-style dryland surfboards for sale at "Maker Faires." By the year 2100, despite spending most of one's life in a formal educational system and living on nutri-paste, home-raised chicken eggs and home-garden subsistence produce, the individual citizen within the developed zones may easily acquire or build every technological convenience available. Consumerism as a lifestyle will mutate into Producerism, where more and more of the final added-value of transforming raw materials and finished goods are concentrated at the end-user point of the supply-chain by individual citizens in private living spaces or in small local neighbourhood fabs (fabrication facilities, in essence mini-factories, they could be as small as a residential refrigerator). In-group membership among teenagers in 2010 is increasingly defined by what they have produced (blogs, music, art, websites, video). By 2100 the proliferation of content will result in competition for mindshare so fierce that in order to reduce the input to a meaningful bandwidth, in-group membership will be signified by exclusion of nearly all production that hasn't been either created by the group or filtered by a member of the group with the penalty for too liberal or prolific import of content being rejection and expulsion by the in-group. Teenagers in the year 2100 will be more conservative in their behaviour, more cautious in their expressed attitudes, but also more resourceful. Conservative and cautious because everything they do in 2100 will be on permanent record and resourceful because free and instant access to past answers plus limited capital and material resources is a strong incentive for more interesting questions, but it's still more questions --- ultimately mental disease will be endemic.

The most common mental threats in the year 2100 will be burnout and anomie. The pace of change will be so great that each succeeding generation will be disengaging from the mainstream (retreating or other minimising their interactions with society at large) at younger and younger ages (Hikkekomori-ism). Specialisation for a lifetime in an educational system will be perceived by the average citizen as refuge and sanctuary from a world which is paradoxically more integrated and yet more fragmented.

The citizen who attempts to remain engaged inappropriately rather than making the courageous leap of abandoning any patterns which are no longer advantageous will suffer burnout. The citizen who recognises that they cannot remain engaged appropriately and disengages, yet fails to create a new sustainable pattern will suffer anomie, unable to relate and increasingly isolated and fearful of change.

By 2100, the citizen who can abandon all illusions of self-identity and embrace whoever they are at any given instant would be the citizen that has the best chance of staying sane.

A social and cultural footnote, illustrating some of these changes with teenagers in particular is because language fails when approaching the lifestyle of older demographics in 2100. There may be biological and computational advances available to the elite which take them into a post-human reality which is largely outside the scope of this short speculative essay. By the time the average teenager of 2100 is an adult, within the developed zones at least, no generalisation of any clarity is plausible and the value of prediction fails. The span of possibility is too broad.

One thing I can say with certainty is that by the year 2100 nothing will ever be certain again.

Technological.

Advances in computation and biology may not save the world from global famine but if they do and humanity survives, there will be consequences.

The psychological distortions that humanity has placed upon itself in order to function (however awkwardly) within the political, economic, and socio-cultural systems of the developed zones will lead to an existential question: what does humanity do the day after it invents machines capable of designing superior machines? Some say this will be the last invention of humanity, the children who come from this union will have no more relation to humanity as it is understood today than humanity today has to a squirrel.

Less pessimistically, in 2010, most individuals have heard of Moore's Law and most individuals, at least vaguely, grasp that the exponential achievements in computation are the result of a symbiosis, however crude, between people and machines. While a gross simplification, it's worth mentioning that once a person creates a tool, that tool can be used for many purposes, including the creation of superior tools which in turn create superior people. Marshall McLuhan once said " we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us" however the extension of that thought is necessarily that having been so shaped, our latest tools will be products of our latest shapes. In the year 2010, the largest groups of individuals define themselves in terms of inclusivity in national or cultural terms. In the year 2100, there may be a Jupiter-sized dust cloud of networked nano-bio-machines drifting through deep space on solar tides with cosmic intelligence and distributed awareness that nevertheless refers to itself as a single human being, in contact with a variety of other "human beings." A self-definition which signifies how tenuous the connection has become between the term "humanity" and the facts of reality.

I invite your comments.

81 The men in pointy hats

2010-04-18T23:55:00.010+02:00

In the furthest reaches of reality, in deep space just a dust mote away from total confabulation, flies great AT'uin the space turtle. eyes the size of planets rimmed with frost, a shell pocked by a thousand craters. Standing atop AT'uin, four giant elephants carry the Discworld. Both world in its own right and mirror of worlds...

If one were to look closer, down past the eccentric orbit of this strange world's relatively tiny dwarf sun and moon, (making up in proximity what they lack in size), down through the cloud cover, down into the heavy magical field of the Ramtop mountains South of Cori Celestii, the home of the gods, in the century of the eloquent Fruit-Elk, one might notice a tiny figure crouched under a rain-logged canopy of coniferous trees and exploding pine cones (I did say a heavy magical field, didn't I?) and if one listened very carefully, one might notice that the tiny figure was very young, crying and wearing a pointy hat.

Also, very definitely, it was a boy.

Why didn't they let me?

Elsewhere, the annual witch trials were over and, uncharacteristically, Granny Weatherwax was happy.

"Esme, you know better than to show, don't you?" Nanny Ogg said reproachfully.
"Boys are for wizardry if they've any craft at all!" said Granny Weatherwax with the certainty of lead striking gelatin.
"But he said he didn't want to be a wizard, he wanted to be a witch!" said Magrat, impulsively, immediately wishing she hadn't.

Granny Weatherwax fixed them both with a sapphire stare that would melt the Scone of Stone as if it were butter.

"There's ways for them and ways for us!" then she stomped off and soon vanished on her broom a head above Nanny's own.

Nanny shook her head, Esme had always been bull-headed but this time Nanny was secretly in agreeement, no boy had ever been a witch in the history of the disc, it was as though the magic knew who had the knack for balance and who had the knack for force.

Boys, as a rule, had a knack for force.

Magrat was the one who broke the silence.

"We should have let him stand the trials! We're not wizards! We're supposed to be fair!"

Nanny suppressed a twinge at the words, Nanny agreed with Esme on principle but Magrat was right, she knew it. But she'd clean her own hearth before admit it, Magrat might be Queen of Lancre, but she was still the most junior member of the Wyrd as far as Nanny was concerned.

Under the conifers, the rain began to abate, the tiny figure cocked his head and pointy hat to one side, aware with a sense he had no words for, that something had made a decision. His eyes dried, he blinked twice...

Are you ready to be taught. It was not a sound, it was not even words, it was a tectonic shift.

Bell, for that was his name, nodded in affirmation, eyes suddenly dry.

The disc moved.

On her broom, Granny Weatherwax suddenly lost her balance, her broom canted suddenly before she could right it. She gritted her teeth and turned her broom towards the foothills of the ramtops.

She found Bell sitting under the exploding pines. He didn't seem to notice her presence. He had a look on his face she'd last seen on Grebo, Nanny's cat. It made her shudder. After several (alright, two) failed attempts to get him out of his reverie gently, she braced herself for the blow back and rapped him sharply on the head.

"...you, you didn't let me--"
"That's enough of that, young Bell, son of Steven, you're my curse now."
"What? What d'you mean?" said Bell thickly, still reeling from the sharp knock of the broomstick she had administered. "I dreamt I was a mountain..."
"Never you mind that nonsense!" Granny was not to be argued with. "Just hear this, you're my debt, understand? for something done years before, I'll say this once and hear it well!"
Bell nodded in awe, sometime during this exchange he had realized who he was addressing. I mean, who hadn't heard of Granny Weatherwax? The most powerful witch and head of the most powerful coven of the Ramtops, some said the the whole disc?
"I'll teach you till the day you ask me why!" Granny rarely bothered repeating herself and didn't bother now.
Bell nodded, not daring to say anything.
Granny, disgusted with herself, told him to get behind him on her broomstick and together they flew, a yard above the ground, to her cottage.

Bell didn't know whether to bless his luck or curse it.

Granny was merciless.

But the memory of the mountains accepting him comforted him.

Meanwhile, Granny schemed how to explain this to Nanny Ogg and Magrat, especially given the fact that, in her heart of hearts, she knew they needn't any explanation at all.

82 Relaxing in the sunshine of an artificial star

2010-04-12T21:51:00.000+02:00

Oliphant had been persuaded by his uncle to take a much needed vacation, it was not the sort of thing that most people needed persuasion to undertake but Oliphant was different. He worked as a trans-dimensional waveform speculator, basically a kind of arbitrage broker between dimensions and he enjoyed his work. His uncle was valiant however and soon persuaded Oliphant to put his business away and retire for a fortnight to the perpetual warmth of a climate controlled asteroid he had purchased two years ago in orbit around Smegmellion, an artificial star in the Oomphalos sector.

Oliphant recalled a pleasant weekend he had spent there when his uncle had just purchased the property so he allowed himself to be persuaded. Soon he was reclining on a chaise longue made of energy fields on his uncles' private asteroid. A perfect combination of traditional and modern cocktail ingredients swirling in a crystal glass in one hand and a smoking spider from Xaxis in the other. Later, after a dinner of Nebula crabs and assorted crustaceans he decided he would have a walk around the manicured lawns of the asteroid and see what the robots were up to. His uncle hired robots exclusively for his garden. He was a traditionalist, claimed the new self-maintaining lawns made of nanofloroborg made his feet itch. He preferred real lawn and unaugmented flora. Oliphant considered it an affectation since all the varieties in the garden had themselves been engineered to within an inch of cyborg status themselves. It was so difficult for the previous generation to understand the value of today's trends, mused Oliphant

His uncle, despite his protestations to the contrary, had not been on the asteroid in quite some time, on the surface it looked casually lived in but Oliphant knew the telltale signs of habitation and neither the house nor the asteroid showed any of them, not a single memory module had been accessed from the house library in the past 6 months. Oliphant guessed that his uncle was having a vicarious vacation through him since if anyone logged more time on the job than Oliphant it was his uncle.

His mind wandering, he didn't pay attention to where he went and soon found himself in the Versailles replica section by one of the largest fountains. It was amusing to him that his uncle would have gone to the trouble to recreate this relic when in his estimation, the gardens of Isis on Krkkrk were far more spectacular but he had to hand it to his uncle, wherever he created one of these conceits from his youth he created them with a verisimilitude that went beyond mere adoration and came at fantasy from the other side by engaging in a serious competition with the original referents.

When he surprised the two robots making love under a hedge he excused himself with a minimum of fuss, perhaps later he would invite them into the house. The chrome red model had been quite fanciful.

Bless uncle and his minor perversions!

83 Eksperiment/Experi/ment/Eksperyment

2010-03-22T23:44:00.003+01:00

To jest noc, pogoda jest okropny, deszcz, wyszystko deszcz. Warszawa masz najstraszny chumura. Niebieski na góry raz na rok.Wyszystko tygodniu na zima jest zimno. Bo dla czego podoba mi śien Warszawa?

It is the night, the weather is awful, rain, rain wyszystko. Warsaw najstraszny chumura you. Blue mountains once a week on rok.Wyszystko winter is cold.Because of what I like sien Warsaw?

It is night, the weather is awful, rain, only rain. Warsaw loves clouds. The sky is blue one week each year. Each winter is cold. So why do I like Warsaw?

Jest noc, pogoda jest okropna, deszcz, tylko deszcz. Warszawa kocha chmury.Niebo jest niebieskie jeden tydzień w roku. Każdej zimy jest zimno. Więc dlaczego, jak Warszawa?

Warszawa jest stary y masz drogie y dramatyczne fabula. Życie w to miasto, ty muszi wieć co to robisz. Od czas do czasu to nie jest włatwy. Tak mien z nami, pszypuszczam niema jeden sklep w Warszawa jak ma być dobre Bajgel. Coszmar...

Warsaw is an old dear s s have a dramatic storyline. Life in this city, you Mushi so what are you doing this. From time to time is not włatwy. Yes Mien us pszypuszczam silent one shop in Warsaw is to be as good Bajgel. Coszmar ...

Warsaw is an old dear and has a dramatic storyline. Life in this city, you must know what you are doing. Sometimes it is hard. By contrast, from time to time it is not easy. Between us, there is not one shop in Warsaw that sells a really good bagel. In my nightmares I smell a good bagel but I can never find it and eat it.

Warszawa jest stary kochany i dramatyczne historie. Życie w mieście, trzeba wiedzieć, co robisz. Czasami jest ciężko. Natomiast od czasu do czasu nie jest to łatwe. Między nami nie jednego salonu w Warszawie, który sprzedaje naprawdę dobry obwarzanek jest. W moich koszmarów czuję dobrze obwarzanek, ale nigdy nie mogę go znaleźć i zjeść.

Mieszkam w Warszawie dieszięć lat. Urodzyny w Istanbul, dwa-dzieszcza-pięc lat w Kanady. Mieszkam tylko w Stolicy. Cały życia, w Stolicy. Cały życia, w Kraj na czerwone y białe. Dlaczego jestem tutaj? Dlaczego teraz? Ja musi wieć odpowiedz do to pytanie. Nie wiem z kim jestem.

I live in Warsaw dieszięć years. Urodzyny in Istanbul, two-dzieszcza-five years old in Canada. I live only in the capital. Entire life in the capital. Entire life in the country on the red y white. Why am I here? Why now? I must therefore answer to this question. I do not know who I am.

I have lived in Warsaw ten years. I was born in Istanbul, I lived twenty-five years in Toronto, Canada. I have only lived in capital cities. My entire life in a capital city. My entire life in countries with only red and white in their flags. Why am I here? Why now? I must answer this question. I do not know who I am.

Mieszkam w Warszawie, dziesięć lat. Urodziłem się w Stambule, żyłem dwadzieścia pięć lat w Toronto, Kanada. Mam tylko mieszkał w stolicach. Moje całe życie w stolicy. Moje całe życie w krajach, tylko w białych i czerwonych flag. Dlaczego tu jestem? Dlaczego teraz? Muszę odpowiedzieć na to pytanie. Nie wiem, kim jestem.

Jestem Nauczyciel Angielski, to jest moj pierwszego fabula w Polskiego. Ale to nie jest fabula, to jest historia. Historia do moje najlepsze lektorze w Polskiego, ulice do Warszawie...

I'm the English teacher, this is my first story of Polish. But it is not drama, it is history. The history of my best lektorze in Polish, the streets of Warsaw ...

I'm an English teacher, this is my first story written in Polish. But it is not a drama, it is a history. The history of my best Polish teacher, the streets of Warsaw ...

Jestem nauczycielem języka angielskiego, to jest moje pierwsze opowiadanie napisane w języku polskim. Ale to nie jest dramat, to historia. Historia z moich najlepszych nauczycieli polskich, na ulicach Warszawy ...

Chesesz czytać jeszcze?

Chesa read more?

Do you want to read more?

Chcesz przeczytać więcej?

84 The varnish of denial

2010-03-21T23:43:00.002+01:00

In dedication to Miguel Da Conceicao, who conceived the title.

Frank kicked the empty bottle in the hallway and went looking for Mickey. The bottle spun and bounced back from the wall and clattered sharply on the hallway tiles. Frank gritted his teeth at the sound and kicked the bottle so hard it exploded in a shower of glass. Frank closed his eyes and looked away. One more hassle but he had felt good doing it. He checked everywhere, even under the couch. All he found was a single dirty sock. Mickey wasn't there. Just his mess. Frank couldn't put it off any longer, he called a locksmith and changed the locks.

Frank paid $200 to have a locksmith come that night. When it was done he paid up in cash and enjoyed the click of the new bolt sliding home. Only then did he start cleaning up. Working steadily. This was not his usual damage control but a real sanitation operation. From the grout-stained hallway tiles to the dust on the kitchen overhead lamp. When he slept, it was dreamless.

Morning.

Mickey had scratched the heart out of the lock, but he hadn't so much as knocked, let alone tried the buzzer. Frank noticed the damage as he left for work at today's client. In his retirement years Frank had become a professional focus group participant. He hadn't gone looking, one day some consumer information company had called him up to tell him that he was a statistical normal. The caller told him statistical normals were exceedingly rare. Frank was about to object when he was offered $500 to join a focus group for the day.

Frank took the job. He worked an average of 4 days a month, it sufficed.

Mickey couldn't climb in from the balcony like at the last place because this time Frank was living on the fourth floor of a four floor walk up. Frank realised his mind had drifted, he had stopped cleaning, his mind preoccupied with Mickey and how to keep him out.

Frank got back to work.

When Frank was done he scrutinized his handiwork. Every surface was clean, there were no piles of papers, no empty bottles on the floor, no dirty socks under the couch, there was no evidence Mickey had ever been there.

It even smelled good. Good and empty. Frank fixed himself a supper of one and ate the leftovers for three days straight.

Each evening, when he came back to the apartment, everything was exactly where he'd left it that morning.

Frank started leaving his door unlocked.

In the end he was robbed and Mickey never came back.

85 One minute of one morning one day that I thought would never happen but it happened anyway

2010-03-03T20:25:00.001+01:00

Waking, I went promptly back to sleep. No needs, warm, relaxed. Duties, none. Responsibilities, none. After many months of duress and a magician's-worth of juggled appointments, I had carved out this day for myself.

So I slept.

86 Memories of the Underground

2010-02-03T19:31:00.000+01:00

My fingernail is itching. I take a quick look around for a blank wall against which I should be able to see the message clearly. It's getting painted on my retinas right now but my text-projector is an older model. Cheap and low-powered, but I like to be unobtrusive in the dark.

Some idiots turn their text-projectors up to the max in the clubs. Makes their eyes glow. Eventually makes them blind too. They have to get replacements if they can afford to. I swear it's getting ridiculous. I shiver violently, startling someone passing by. Some people are so paranoid these days it's as though anything sudden or unexpected you do could have you facing the wrong end of violence. I shrug and continue looking for any blank space.

However, in the middle of downtown New Los Angeles, it's easier to win the lottery than it is to find an unadvertised wall. As rare as parking spaces. Some people carry pocket sized custom slabs of imported off-world marble to read their messages on but I prefer to use the back of my wrist even if it makes me look like an overgrown teenager. I like to keep my hands free, is all.

I read the message off my wrist. It's from Johnny Marks wondering what I'm doing tonight, he's built a new toy and he would like me to see it.

Sally, my wife, says I'm wasting my time with Johnny. She's probably right but he does invent some interesting things and once you get to a certain age you want to hang on to the friends you have. However imperfect or crazy they are.

It starts to rain like a bad cliché. Your bureaucracy in action. How else to explain why an underground city needs rain? Wasn't there some other way to irrigate or is this a cheap way to wash the dirt off? It's a pet peeve. I never cared enough to find out and besides, rainfall doesn't last forever, in fact it never lasts more than a hour.

I head for the metro, realising on the way I've decided to meet Johnny. I was supposed to be working on a rush job for an overseas client and there was something else but it's slipped my mind. Too much to do recently. The client is asking for some expert judgement of some antique photographs taken by her grandmother. There's going to be an auction but there was something else. I'm sure. I just can't quite remember what.

I get on the metro heading for the Wilson docklands and count the number of stations from Central station. It's a habit. When I get out of the metro, the streets of Wilson are still wet but it isn't raining anymore.

Johnny lives in a convenience apartment. Just four square walls, a hot plate, a bar fridge and a toilet with integrated sink and shower. Johnny rented one of the internal units to save money so there isn't even a window onto the street. This is one of the reasons Sally doesn't understand how we could be friends. Johnny has been struggling just above the poverty line his entire adult life. If you take Sally's judgement. Meanwhile, Sally and I even have a front door on hinges. Not a full-size floor-to-ceiling model but it is still sized to a respectable standard and opens out onto a respectably wide hallway. Johnny makes do with a cheap, sliding model. He doesn't care though, he doesn't even get live video feeds. He said he doesn't believe in video. I would have said he's an idiot except that being my friend, I wonder what that would make me.

This conversation about video was a few months ago. Which would make it last year. I realise that this will be the first time in the new year I would be seeing Johnny. The last time I saw him he wasn't looking too well if I'm to be honest with myself. He'd picked up some odd mannerisms. He'd started to cackle. I don't mean an old throaty chuckle like some middle aged men get. I mean a cackle. Like a lunatic. My fingernail itched. I knew it was a message from Sally.[1] With a sinking feeling I remembered what else I had to do tonight.

"Wake up," I said. This told my phone module to pay attention. "Call Sally," I said. I only heard the first note of her wait tune in my inner ear before she answered.

" Frank, where the hell are you?" I was glad I had the night time setting turned on. It cut loud noises automatically and Sally was yelling.

" Sorry honey, Johnny asked me over but I'll cancel and pick up some Chinese. I could be home in 30 minutes."

"Why do you have to be so unreliable? I'll order myself."

"I'm sorry hon--"

I heard the disconnect squelch. She'd hung up on me. Fantastic.

The rain had soaked my trousers and my legs were chafing. I debated whether I should just give up and go home. I was already in trouble, I told myself. I decided I might as well see what Johnny was up to. I gritted my teeth and kept going.

[1] . Custom haptic feedback. In other words, a signature itch.

87 The Weekend

2010-01-28T23:33:00.004+01:00

I had never taken anyone here before. From the road above, it was impossible to notice the tiny pebble beach carved into the sheer face of the cliff over so many years. It was impossible to know how long it had taken to plunder from the granite this small not quite cave. It was impossible to see under any normal circumstances. I had grown up here. Still, though I had swum in these waters hundreds of times in my life it was not until my late teens that I found this place. Over the years, on a natural granite shelf at the back of my hidden beach, I had piled rocks which I had collected over the years since my discovery. Some of these rocks had fossils. When I wasn't in school, I would spend my time swimming in the bay and collecting the ones I found most interesting. I would save my favourites here on the shelf at the back of my secret beach.

I showed you my rocks. My most prized possessions. More valuable than my house and my car. More important than an antique oil painting by a Dutch master. You picked up one of the fossils and casually dropped it. I said it didn't matter. I happened to have two like that.

We didn't stay. I didn't know anyone in my town anymore. Everyone I had grown up with was either dead or living somewhere else. Even my cousin, who had sworn she would never leave, was living somewhere else. She said our hometown was paradise if you had enough money and she didn't and neither did I.

So you and I, we took the train down the coast to a nearby tourist attraction which, although I had grown up living nearly on top of it, I had never seen. There was a large beach. We swam with jellyfish. The night air was heavy with the scent of orchards. We chased fireflies. We listened to the waves crashing beneath our hotel room windows.

We took the train home on Sunday night. You fell asleep. You were barely awake through the short walk from the platform to the taxi. Unlocking the front door was like opening a time capsule. Everything both familiar and strange. Soon the television was on and the kettle was whistling. The spell was broken and everything was back in its normal place. We had returned to the world of routine and responsibility and it was good to be back.

I'm drinking tea in my kitchen with the lights off and from the living room I can hear muffled squawks coming from the television. I feel rested and ready for Monday. Sometimes a few days can feel like a complete and entirely different lifetime.

It has been a good weekend.

88 The Black Mass

2010-01-22T14:34:00.004+01:00

Last night my wife and I attended our eighth Black Mass.

Dressed in evening clothes we arrived at a secret location disclosed only an hour before the celebration was to begin.

As we descended the stairs I noticed many familiar faces chatting in groups of twos and threes and sipping wine and nibbling on hors d'oeuvres.

I was introduced to the succubus who would be leading the ceremony tonight. Her glamour made her appear to be my perfect ideal fantasy woman: carefree, red hair, firm breasts. But my true vision could see she was only a sock puppet with sharp teeth. My wife excused herself to speak to some friends. And I prepared myself because tonight would be my first time participating in the ritual of the hanged man.

When the correct hour arrived, a space was cleared in the centre of the room. The succubus announced that we were about to begin and I stood in the centre of the room and waited. two strong ropes were lowered from the ceiling with large padded hooks on their ends. Another participant stepped forward and placed the hooks under my arms and when the hooks were firmly in place I was lifted off the floor.

I crossed my hands tightly around my waist to make sure the hooks stayed under my arms. More hooked ropes were lowered from the ceiling and more participants joined me, suspended a few inches off the floor. Men and women wrapped themselves around my back, my chest, my arms, my legs, until I was the centre of a mass of humanity hanging suspended. Then the ropes were slowly raised by attendants and we all rose together above the congregation. There were no invocations, there were no words at all. There was only the act itself to symbolise our faith. We hung there for a timeless instant and then we were lowered to the ground. The Mass was complete.

The rest of the evening proceeded much like any dinner party among good friends, with conversation, laughter and games. I had a nice talk with the succubus and she tried mightily to tempt me but I resisted because I knew that to have congress with a succubus would enslave me for eternity. She didn't tell me her name so I gave her one. I called her Maxine. She found that charming. Through the entire conversation I could see both the beautiful fantasy woman and the sock puppet with sharp teeth.

My wife and I stayed overnight, together with many of the other guests. She woke before I did in the morning. and I went looking for both her and for breakfast. I found her still in her lingerie together with seven other beauties from the night before, all still in their lingerie seated in the kitchen. She asked me what I wanted and I said I was looking for breakfast. She said I would just have to make some because she and her friends had eaten everything they'd prepared.

I told her to look at her tarot deck and find my card. My card is the eight of wands. she showed me the nine of wands. The picture was correct but the number was wrong. she was using a mundane deck where my card does appear as the nine of wands. At that moment I realised she had lost her cards.

I helped her collect her things, and together we went home.

48 The Poem of the Year

2009-12-31T18:43:00.001+01:00

Places. People. Plots.

City. Country.

A knock at the door and an unexpected trip.

Daily life told Exactly As It Is so that you can hear the capital letters.

Trees are close to the most unconsidered natural objects.

Breathing. Standing. Sitting. Sleeping.

When to go on and when to stop.

How to be evil and how to be good.

Boredom and Surprise.

How to outlast yourself.

What, Who, When, How, Why and in that order.

It all passed this way once.

4 years of writing stories to yerself is a little bit of madness

8 drafts did I write of number 48..

The flow has moved on. I go with it.

The way I publish, the end becomes my introduction.

Curtains on this tiresome decade.

Happy new year, 2010.

49 The Love Goddess

2009-11-17T09:10:00.005+01:00

"It's this weather, it's got teeth," said Meathook, whose real name was Eugene.

"teeth and claws," said Saline, whose real name was Selma. She had tried her best but had never really gotten the hang of nicknames. Nick was a synonym for small cut. Not everyone knew that.

The pair of teenagers stared through the bent fog behind the window pane made of something well nigh indestructible and definitely not glass and wondered when the domes would open again. Venus was not the planet for singing in the rain. Any kind of atmospheric precipitation, depending on where it came from, could refresh skin or remove it.

"Do you think it's going to be much longer?" Asked Saline.

"Nah, there a new scrubber online now, the peak should be clear in another hour."

"I hope so, think they'll let us out when it clears?"

"Nope, the wind could shift, you'd be liquefied."

Saline shivered, there wasn't a kid among them that didn't have nightmares of dissolving in agony in the acid rain of Venus. It was a miracle to Saline how they kept their colony mostly free of it. Some of the older kids had begun to understand what the precipitators were doing, and why there were subterranean hectolitres of hydrogen peroxide. Meathook pretended to understand because he wanted to show off to Saline, but he didn't. Not really.

He'd dreamt they were kissing, just as the rain blew in, washed them away like kitchen grease, the last part of them touching were their lips. Fused together. Not even beginning to scream.

50 The accidental fire of Agnes Ford

2009-08-10T21:55:00.000+02:00

Agnes Ford, former stripper, graduate of medicine at Sanford, sharpshooter and the American voice of a popular brand of GPS navigation software, woke up in sweat soaked sheets and cursed. The A/C had gone off, but when she checked the control knobs, she discovered to her concern that the unit in her hotel room wasn’t broken, it had been turned off by housecleaning. The room had still been cool when she returned after dinner and she had ignored the card she now held in her hands and gone straight to the shower and then to bed. The card read ‘please consider the environment and turn off your air conditioning when you leave the room.’ She felt a rising fury but didn’t want a repeat of last year’s soap incident. She now kept her own soap in a ziplock and brought her own cooler. She could have just put up a do not disturb sign but that would mean no ready made beds at the end of the day.

She made a decision, she left a note saying ‘please do not touch the countrols’ on the A/C unit, then, using a paperclip and a stripped electrical cable from her bag, she proceeded to wire the unit to the power socket in such a way that touching the unit would not generate a shock. Turning it off, however, would.

As an added warning she added the always-mysterious-to-the-uninitiated universal clue: Danger 110 Volts. There, let’s see them turn it off now. Agnes went back to sleep under the cool hiss of conditioned air.

Later the following day on her way back to the hotel, she heard the trucks well before she saw the fire. Agnes had a tendency to paranoia and it was largely directed at herself. To wit: She had the overwhelming feeling that she was following herself around with malicious intent. It was how she half-jokingly described the feeling to her nervous friends. On the practical end, it meant she took precautions to protect herself against her own tendencies.

Having anticipated a fire risk to her lilttle electrical jiggling, she had packed her bags in her car in the morning. The Police would likely be looking for the occupant of her room but without much luck, surmised Agnes.

Whose other names included Lucille, Michele and once upon a time in New Orleans, Antoine.

After so many years of independent wealth and a private practice, For Agnes, (Maybelline Barnsworth) random terror was the new black. She drove on.

51 The time-slipped lemon peel

2009-08-02T21:09:00.008+02:00

It's a little known fact that fruit and certain root vegetables travel backwards in time. This is not a recent discovery but the information is known only to a few. Once, it was known to a multitude but like the lost art of acoustics and the library of Alexandria, there is a wealth of facts in the world which are not only undiscovered, like the mysteries of the quantum, but once lost only forgotten almost as quickly. they are miracles but for the fact that they have no visible impact.

Lemons, once picked, shipped and stacked in supermarkets and green grocer's across the planet occasionally have there number increased by a lemon or two from antiquity, rarely, they arrive from 1946, but these latter lemons are especially sour. Cabbages are known to have travelled to the present from as long ago as Carthage and as far away as China. None has made an effort to communicate, so far as the few who've stumbled on this natural phenomenon, have surmised.

To get right down to it, they may be trying to tell humanity something but if so, they are employing strange and cunning means. A strawberry had only just arrived the other week from 2238, it was a highly evolved specimen, it remained in the present for less than a day before vanishing.

It's a good question how anyone ever noticed it happening in the first place, who's to recognize the difference between a contemporary domesticated eggplant and it's ancient cousin? It turns out there are visible differences but they are apparent only to the trained eyes of chronobotanists, the current term for a clutch of researchers, grad students and professors in a scant handful of academic institutions and universities scattered across the globe like droplets of mist in a desert hurricane. The future fruit is more readily identified by the engineered barcode which can be found growing on their skins. Within the discipline there are subdivisions based on variety and chronology.

While a secret science, the tempests within its community are tremendous, likely because the teapot stakes are so incredibly small. After all, what can be learnt from a time travelling pumpkin?

A surprising amount, it would appear, and patents for new technologies and resurrected varieties are quietly filling copyrights, naturally it is a big legal flossing to patent organisms but it happens more often than people realize. What keeps the community from achieving it's full potential is, quite understandably, the apparent ridiculousness of the claim, and the corresponding incredulity with which it is often greeted: that time travelling fruit and vegetables not only exist and that someone you know is researching them at this precise moment.

Recently there has been a breakthrough, a man-sized time travelling lemon is being grown in an underground lab in Uppsala Sweden, The research facility is so secret it doesn't even have a number. The community euphemistically refers to it, regardless of locale and without any claim of ownership as 'my place.'

"Where's your next stop, Jackson?"

"Francine is coming to my place to check out the garden, she's got a few ideas on how to break the yield threshold on my lemon." said Jackson, chronobotanist, polyglot (ancient and modern, able to derive vocabulary from context and syntax from vocabulary reflexively), historian, avid fly fisher and collector of collectible soda cans.

Conversations within the community often sound coincidentally dirty, its a consequence of acquired vagueness. Everyone involved has had experiences early on in their research where, unheedful of the kind warnings of colleagues with time in, they had made an effort to explain to friends and family what it was they were going on about. Invariably, negative social attention and subsequent 'clamming up' had been the result. Even to each other, vagueness and doublespeak were the norm.

The recent development, alluded to by researcher Jack Jackson was a man-sized time travelling lemon that within which they hoped to insert someone, likely Jackson, once it reached maturity. This was a difficult procedure because the tree itself had been designed to deliver one, enormous fruit and it was a fragile balance that had been struck between science and nature, the tree was inordinately large, was fed directly with nutrients. These nutrients were integrated with it's natural day light cycle. In a sense it was some kind of hybrid between machine, mammal and fruit. A Fruitiborg? It wasn't a catchy name, everyone defaulted to giant lemon. The environment constructed for acted as a womb and Jack was to be the tree's strange grandchild. (note: Jack Jackson was named after his maternal grandmother, because it was his grandmother's dying wish to his mom that she name her first son Jack, she hadn't met his dad when she made the promise, she secretly hoped for a daughter, never revealed the hope to her husband, Jack's dad. Maynard Jackson, who, like his son, was an easy-going type, relented without much struggle and Jack had used his last name since childhood. The one exception was his wife who called him J.J. but only she got to call him that, no exceptions.

In short and without any further allusions to the technical challenges. Jackson was indeed selected to be the first non-fruit, non-vegetable, chrononaut.

The prospect filled him with equal parts exhilaration and terror.

The lemon left with Jackson in it an hour ago.

Jackson watched it go, he had returned 58 minutes before his own departure, in the back-up lemon. Protocols had been established for every conceivable eventuality and this was one of them. His fellow researchers did not speak to him, they came with a heavily armed escort, There were tears in his eyes from the lemon juice and his skin itched but he understood the reason for the precautions. One scenario had included disaster plans for the thermonuclear nightmare which had been theorized if somehow, the lemon re-entry displacement genetically programmed into the outward bound lemon had failed and he had materialized superimposed on himself. In te past he had arrived sans lemon in tow, upon his return the backup lemon had contained him, where was the original lemon? It remains a mystery.

The protocols did allow him to watch his own outward progress behind heavily shielded two-way mirrors. This was a negotiated sop to the chrononaut, left in on the argument that the probability of it happening was balanced against the risk of paradox.

Jackson watched himself get inserted into the lemon like so much hypodermically injected humanity. Despite the eye rinse solution and a kindly offered towel, there were still tears.

He had reason for them. Jackson had gone to the last place he'd ever expected to go, of course no one would believe him, he hoped he would have time to check before his debriefing.

The lemon vanished. The guards stood down; another day, another narrowly avoided paradox, thought his colleagues. Jackson requested permission to return to quarters, military discipline had been adopted universally by everyone during these critical months. The watch scientist nodded his assent.

"2 hours, don't bother asking for more." said the watch scientist without looking up from his work. Jackson didn't need to voice his assent, the watch scientist on duty was God, King and Country. Besides, he thought to himself, it would be long enough to check.

Once alone in his quarters, he launched his bible reader, selected the King James Version and began reading, he found what he was looking for soon enough in Matthew 3:18, ...Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw three brethren, Simon called Peter, Andrew his brother, and Jacob called Jackson, their cousin, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. And Jackson being warned of God in a dream of this day, warned Jesus that he must not go to Jerusalem during the Passover, Jackson begged him to heed Gods warning. And Jesus said I am where I am, I go where I go, for I am already there. And they straightway left nets, and followed him.

Jackson blinked back his tears. It would be a long time coming but he had to hang on, his friend had promised him only yesterday, they would meet again.

He switched off the lights, popped a sleeping aid and tried to get unconscious. True sleep was too much to ask for.

"I had to try, I had to try." he whispered hoarsely to no one in the darkness. His mind went blank when the hypnotics reached his nervous system, he abandoned himself to their synthetic oblivion with gratitude, there would be a lifetime to put the pieces of Jack Jackson back together, but in a few hours, there would be work to do.

He would find the strength, Jackson, if nothing else, kept the faith.

He had left a string of broken promises throughout his life, like any normal person only now the word had changed its definition in light of recent examples. The sentence 'Promises are made to be kept' did not sound foreign to his ears anymore. English tasted bland, Aramaic and Greek and Ancient Hebrew were more familiar now after so many months away.

With relief, he felt the paradoxes in his mind easing, two versions of the bible in his mind, neither at once but both together, like the picture of a vase which also looked like two faces in profile. Perhaps when he debriefed the variation would have settled.

He fell asleep with that hope in his heart, that, and a new hope, one best left unspoken.

52 chew birch bark and sip tea for now is the time to do it

2009-07-31T12:19:00.003+02:00

Once upon a time in the middle of a lake of fire, Satan was lying on his back and grumbling, the morning hadn't gone well, he'd had a party and his boss had fired him and a third of this entire staff. Satan didn't blame him, Satan was the source of blame, it would be redundant for him to give and receive it himself, it would be like swinging a hard right hook into his own face, if he had a face, no one ever gets the details right:

He was a messenger, he was of average height, weight and build, he had only two things which might be thought odd, well, maybe three, he had a terribly generic face, he had no reproductive organs (no 'package' as would be said a few eons later) and the maybe third thing?

He had a sword of fire. It came from his mind, many eons later he would demonstrate and sell functioning Lightsabres to star wars fans at a convention. Naturally they only worked in his hands. That was a nice scam, thought Satan to himself.

There were other odd things too, for example while he had been working for his boss (and really, who was he to know if he still wasn't? the boss could be sneaky that way) he had known the eternal present of the higher realms but now, in it's place, he had the memories of his entire past present and future happening all at once, and it was constantly changing, were it not for the structure of his mind, he had been a pretty high up messenger, Satan felt certain he would have become a bit grumpy over the sheer chaos of it all.

Satan shrugged, he supposed he ought to round up the rest of the party-goers and figure out something to pass the time, he was just about to get out of the flames (they had done wonders for his back, as he also now experienced some new sensations, like aches and pains, it was kind of his former boss to throw him to the perfect place where he could recover a bit of his head after last night's gate crasher) when he heard his boss, not like before when His Master's Voice had been in his head, capitalization and all, it was like he was hiding behind a column of stone, or yelling from a very long distance.

"Hey, I got a project for you, I can hire you back as a consultant, you and your whole team," It was exactly like a great shout from an even greater distance so it reached Satan like a whisper.
"So why'd you kick us out in the first place?" Satan yelled back, the walls of the cave ringing to his cry.
"Would you believe I set you up? I needed consultants for this, not employees, they're too close to the issues."
"What do you mean?" Although he knew what his ex-boss meant, he also knew that this was a ritual communication, it had to be spoken.
"Remember that project I got started a few divergent axis-y spaces ago?"
"which one? the one a few days [our jargon, divergent axis-y spaces gets a bit tedious to write up in the documentation, especially when the font we have to use is made of fire and each letter is the height of a 20 story building] ago was a disaster, vile as all hell, and you fired my whole team of de-vilers."
"That was so I could hire you as consultants, It changes the rules slightly, it's against my own company policy to allow any project to undergo destruction testing when it's in it's final phase but this one, I don't have to tell you buddy, this one is different. I'm going against my own policy, I want, I need you to do this for me."

Satan understood. He would still be a de-viler, just not officially. But he would also have free reign to do his best with some of the unapproved projects he'd submitted over the years to command and control division, fear and guilt to name two.

"So can you do it?"
"I have a few conditions."
"No problem, but can you do it?"

Satan, formerly messenger in the de-viler section of eternity, smiled. Nodded his assent

53 Eating soggy marshmallows beside a roast suckling pig who's also your best friend

2009-07-28T06:18:00.000+02:00

Once, in a squalid apartment whose previous owner had been imprisoned on charges of keeping exotic animals (Monkeys, nobody knew what kind, turned out they were his kids), a bespectacled undergraduate student with milky eyes and a visible limp opened his refrigerator and discovered that he had nothing to eat but soggy marshmallows and the remains of a roast suckling pig which he'd brought home from his parent's last Christmas.

He couldn't bear to leave the pig with his parents, he and the pig had bonded over Christmas dinner, two confirmed losers, its sad burnt eyes staring sightless beneath crisped eyelids as the undergraduate student endured the dinner from his place of honour as the first member of his family to have entered University before making a million dollars in real estate speculation (the family hobby, his 9 year old sister had already topped the family leader board, which wouldn't have stung so much if he had ever gotten up there himself but he hadn't).

His parents considered him a lazy clod but they were so polite he didn't know what he hated more, their contempt or their courtesy. They couldn't disguise their consistent avoidance of any topic that might drift to stating their judgement out loud: there were never questions about when he'd graduate and return to the family business, he'd already been an undergraduate for 9 years.

In his overheated and simultaneously drafty flat, staring at all that was left of the pig, he couldn't bear to eat it, he had caught himself talking to it sometimes, in his dreams especially, where it would appear as an Adams (Douglas) pig, the genetically engineered articulate pig that wanted to be eaten, whose sole purpose, built into it by design, was to persuade reluctant meat eaters who had previously been vegetarians on ethical grounds, to consume it. Like a Shmoo, only the pig died. Happily, of course, it was an Adams pig.

He saw that finally there was no option left but to eat it. He did not even consider leaving his shoebox flat, it was January and the city had recently been depopulated by a pandemic, he didn't know what sort exactly, for an undergraduate he was ignorant beyond the norm of what happened in the world outside his specialization, which was entomology, for the moment at least.

Ultimately he carted the remains of the pig, a fleshy skull, a strand of vertebrae like giant's teeth, to the University where, with the help of a colleague, he had the dangling remains stripped from the bones by flesh eating beetles.

He handed the skull to a luthier and within weeks he had an odd shaped guitar with a pig's skull for a resonator.

He played it every day, it spoke to him, it became his best friend, always grinning, singing on command, never complaining.

Many years later, when he came home to find all his things in a broken pile outside his flat he shrugged, picked his pig, fortuitously undamaged, out of the wreckage of his eviction, and walked away. He could have paid the rent but it had begun to feel too high so he hadn't bothered to do anything but cease payments.

He went in search of the flat's previous owner, surely out of jail by now, it wasn't much of a goal but it gave him something to do.

54 The Libertarian Open Source Hardware Manifesto of 2010.

2009-07-22T06:11:00.008+02:00

Total freedom equals total liability equals total responsibility.

Taxes are criminal not because they are collected but because when authority and responsibility are divorced as is the case with Governments which spend but do not earn, there is no incentive at the individual level of the elected official or unelected bureaucratic mandarin to spend wisely except in the context of being re-elected or remaining employed.

Despite this fact, to pay taxes gladly, however outrageous the cost, is to signify to yourself the powerful affirmation that you are able to generate income whenever you like.

A case for minimal Government is untenable because the tyranny of the majority decides and if the majority is happy to be infantilized or worse, never achieve adult status in the first place, there is little a minority voice can do to change its mind.

The majority will always tyrannize the minority. There has never been a government of the intelligentsia. There never will be; the intelligentsia are at the end of a very long tail.

We've got the brains, they've got the numbers, brains, guns and plunder.

Populations always get the Government they deserve.

For the individual, the choice is both simple and difficult. If an individual wants the benefits of modern society, for example:

Roads and rails, acceptably functioning however badly built and maintained.
Economies of scale and correspondingly advantageous retail prices made possible by urban conglomeration and mass manufacturing, however mediocre.
Access to entertainment, however banal.

Then the individual must bend to the exigencies of a society which, however flawed, provides theses services. It's a given that these services will be the minimum acceptable standard.

Nonetheless, occasionally something slips through the net and the individual can experience wonder, hope, the touch of destiny. Even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day.

The other alternative is to renounce one society in favour of another or for no society at all: the wilderness. If an individual generates no income, then they cannot be taxed. Barter, trade, build your own stereo on which to play your own music, write your own books, use the means of production now available to anyone with the will and the knowledge to do so, knowledge is the only bottleneck, all of the above can be part of a hardware open-source guerrilla's arsenal.

Huxley hinted at a middle road, a withdrawal from participation in an inadequate society without necessitating an outright exodus.

The slaves escaped the Pharaohs but we have brought our Pharaohs with us on our backs. The service mentality has crippled humanity. Serve each other out of abundance, not out of humility, humility is an eyelash away from shamefulness.

Specialization is for insects, says Heinlein, what would he think of us now? When heart surgeons are so specialized they are not competent to perform even the most insignificant surgeries on any other organ? Do they feel humility about their over-specialization?

The anti-globalists are fools of the highest order, marking time, revolution as fashion. The people who grow their own food and make their own furniture may participate in demonstrations but it can't be often, they are too engaged in building their future with their own hands to worry about the cries of angry children who didn't get their lollipops.

Revolution is history. Creation is the future.

What are you waiting for? Go forth and build something. Leave the squabbling to the babies.

Remember: they're the experts.

55 Shards of chandeliers on champagne hourglasses

2009-07-21T17:34:00.010+02:00

Letting the last one drop to the parking lot many stories below, Claude, a migrant worker and transcendentalist, listened for the telltale pop of shattering vacuum sealed glass. Twenty times he had done this. Twenty times he had heard the sound. This last time, there was nothing, neither a peep nor a pop.

He sighed, it was what passed for speech in his apartment block. Sighs could mean anything in context: frustration, satisfaction, anything in between. Claude was an old pro; to hear him sigh was to hear the soundtrack to the ultimate theatre. Some claimed even the overhead lighting, never unsympathetic to those under its gaze, dimmed still further when Claude sighed.

This last time, there had been no sound. Claude was reminded of a joke:

A man woke up in the hospital after an accident and noticed immediately that something was wrong. "Doctor!" he cried, "I can't feel my legs!"

"That's because we amputated your arms," replied the doctor.

Claude felt a great companionship with this joke. He felt it pointed to a transcendent truth.

His intuition was great that if he threw another light bulb off the roof it too would not make a sound, as he had run out of light bulbs. This decided his next course of action: he would investigate.

Many years later he reached the ground floor and excited at being at ground level, the horrible sight which awaited him was especially devastating.

His final light bulb had caught in the maw of a man in the midst of a yawn. He must have stretched his arms and leaned his neck all the way back for the light bulb to have passed his teeth completely. The velocity was so great (his yawn must have been terribly expressive) that it quite plainly had shattered deep in his throat, muffling any sound.

Claude was in anguish, suddenly, his idle pastime had ended with horrible consequences. The unfortunate man was gurgling in agony, blood bubbling and flecks of glass shining in the light of the foyer.

Claude knew what he should do.

But then something equally horrible happened inside him. He just didn't feel like it.

"Oh my god!" A woman was rushing up to the man on the ground, dialling a number on her phone as she reached him in short fast steps on account of her totally impractical skirt and flat shoes, an odd combination, thought Claude.

When she put down the phone and placed the man in a recovery position, Claude realized she had things well under control and started to walk away, he felt a pang of hunger and thought he might get a snack since he'd come down.

He thought she'd say something but if she did, Claude was too far away to hear.

While chewing on his frozen submarine, Claude promised he'd help out next time.

He had to admit, it had been quite a shot.

56 Wet Dog Itch and the Nostrils of Fire

2009-07-17T09:31:00.007+02:00

There will be no serious competition with reality here. Nobody will read this so I can afford to be honest.

Because reading, along with the ancient science of acoustics, is permanently lost. I myself am not long for this world. Why remain? None of the children of my Arcology know how to read. They imagine they do, as they .pict each other and .txt each other but the link between reality and meaning, meaning and language, is just another academic pipe dream. I myself am not immune to the charms of what passes for modern communication, it has been impossible to sustain a complete idea long enough to follow its train of thought in more years than I care to count. Everything happens in bursts. Semantic content? Zero.

All my friends are dead. They died before I was born. It's no wonder I'm looking forward to my own exit. The company is better.

As for pipes, no one under the age of 80 has even seen a pipe outside of a museum and Opium is now slang for dull or boring.

My portable Church, the world's museums, were closed half a century ago. My local planetarium, one of the largest in the world, was not large enough for a Mall so it was demolished.

Museum has the same root as Muse. As if anyone remembers who they were. No one remembers that a Mall was once a tree lined pedestrian avenue, either.

Although the museums were closed. They escaped the same fate as the planetariums because some developers guessed correctly that they would make excellent mid-density luxury condominiums.

Our machines have been designed by machines which were designed by machines so complex no human mind can encompass their complexity.

Knowledge is a barrier to consumption. Intelligence even more so. Wisdom is unofficially outlawed.

I am surrounded by middle aged infants. When I feel it's my time. I'm going to disappear into the wilderness, dig my own grave and lie in it. Let the animals and the clouds be my pallbearers.

The last thing I hope to feel is the itch of wet dog hair burning my nostrils. To borrow and mix the metaphors of this unselfconsciously gleeful generation, I am a discontinued product withdrawn from circulation due to low demand.

I must say I agree with my unintentional critics. This once great conversation will go on so long as I have breath to draw but I have no illusions that this sun will rise again.

Yet hope still burns although for what exactly, I haven't any idea.

57 Hrapa Nguyen Wallace

2009-07-03T12:22:00.002+02:00

The time was the distant future, everything was mixed up and nobody remembered anything anymore. Hrapa could not remember what time it was nor where he was and the long lonely hours he spent at his desk made of energy fields were without significant affect. Hrapa had inherited the job from his womb parent and one day he would serve as half the material for a womb parent in his turn.

Gender was history, all genes recombined, the gender of the donor was irrelevant.

Hrapa was bred to be effective, what marked him out from his brood sisters and brothers was a simple thing. Sadness, Hrapa was the only person he knew capable of it. He had not even had the capacity to verbalize the feeling until, by accident, he had read about it in a very old book left to his family long ago by a mad ancestor who had hoarded fiction books despite there being nothing useful in them.

Hrapa was embarassed by what was considered, in his society, as a dangerous mental deviation. He wouldn't indulge unless by himself, in the comfort and relative safety of his living quarters. Not every evening of course, what would be the point of that? But when he felt the urge to indulge, he would sigh sadly as he set the table for his solitary evening meal, he would exhale wistfully upon biting into his vat grown steak, he would even let a tear escape.

On delicious nights he would bawl unashamedly into his pillow.

End of part 8

58 Time Fly

2009-06-08T08:10:00.003+02:00

There was a time when all he could see was cabbages, fields of cabbages. Now it was mostly low density residential communities. Some of the last farm buildings would likely be demolished in another summer or two. There was one across the street, plucked out of time like an insect in amber, The fence was high and in any case, it would've been trespassing, he walked past those farm buildings almost every day, rocks in the river, the time within their walls as obvious as the sun in the sky.

He didn't think to remember overcast days, when the sun in the sky is taken on faith. He forgot somehow that you never went out the same door you came in, he had lost track of how many times he'd done the trick in the past, so much easier after the first time, It was like breathing, it happened all by itself. When he dropped the disguises and witnessed, when the life of inanimate objects flooded forward, when the doors could be seen, when he stepped through.

He knew intuitively which doors to use, which gates, he used the terms indiscriminately, some were as large as a city, they needed no special goggles to recognize, some were as subtle as going around the left or the right of certain trees. That farm out of time across the road tempted him endlessly, from the perspective of eternity it was saturated; drunk with time.

However tempting, he knew to leave it alone, some gates took him to better worlds, some took him to other worlds, most times, he knew the difference, they smelled different.

That farm, he knew if he crossed there he would never find his way back.

So he never went. The farm was demolished on schedule, He made no plans to visit.

The rock had remained but he was far downriver, with no plans to swim against the flow.

59 Running from the Guru Monsters

2009-06-06T07:56:00.004+02:00

Sister Mary Janice Magdalena Missouri clucked at the article she was reading about Australia. At the moment, the article was relating the wonders of Ayer's Rock 'which the Aborigines call Uluru.' This irritated Sister Mary, she knew that Uluru, the largest rock in the world, had been there long before either Aborigines or Colonials had 'named' it.

Sister Mary was one of those rare people, when she spoke you heard the quotations.

She pencilled out the offending passages and rewrote them in the margins to emphasize Uluru.

She realized it was like being called Janice for your whole life and then suddenly being called Sister Mary.

It happened.

The coffee was hot, the day was hot, Sister Mary felt the weight of her habit suddenly burdensome. Many years later, she would refer to what had just happened as the experience, never 'my experience' or 'an experience' but only the experience, no quotes required.

Doctors would call it a whiteout.

A blackout can happen after too much to drink, a person wakes up the next day and has to be told by her friends what she did last night. A whiteout is the opposite, an awareness so sharp that you can experience it but it cannot be pressed into words; a person may as well press butterflies into a book with about as much success.

Mystics would not call it anything.

It happened.

Sister Mary eventually left the order for a flesh and blood husband and together they carried on quite naturally.

60 First among thieves

2009-06-03T22:48:00.002+02:00

Freddy Arbuckle was a thief, a good thief, he only stole from those richer than himself, this included almost everyone because when you got right down to it, Freddy was a bad thief.

One day, Freddy found himself stuck in a difficult situation involving stolen children's toys, Freddy wasn't above it, and as the snow fell on the roof of his van full of toys he felt a sudden twinge of guilt at what he'd done.

Christmas was around the corner and here he was, Freddy (Fatty to his friends) was sitting on top of a mountain of toys which he'd duly stolen and duly planned to fence.

A sudden explosive detonation happened inside him: This once, because of the season and because they were toys, Freddy decided to give his haul away. It would take all his breaking and entering skills (of which he had few, thus almost all toys ended up at the front door and not under the tree; except for one family whose door had been left unlocked) but he would find a way...

Shortly after Christmas that year, the parents of 73 children were arrested and charged with theft when the RFID tags of their children's toys set off the alarms as they entered shopping malls across the city.

Ho ho ho.

61 Where's my medicine?

2009-05-24T08:48:00.002+02:00

Once upon a midnight dreary
As I pondered, weak and weary
There came a rapping a not quite tapping
Upon my chamber door

Stumbling from my broken slumber
Quaffing down a wooden tumbler
I made a grabbing, a not quite stabbing
under my chamber door

Left alone that endless tapping
Would've wrecked my evening napping
Now there's murder soup galore
To feast upon beyond my snores

Crows shouldn't tap at poor men's chamber doors.

62 The only way is my highway way

2009-05-24T07:11:00.004+02:00

Running through the jungle ahead of the gun-running colonials, one local noticed his thoughts taking a decided left turn: what was this whole sad business about? He realized that running had become tiresome, he gave in to the nonsense, he lay down to sleep and despite the danger of imminent death, found he was successful. He slept, buried by the underbrush, as the colonials ran past, no one who noticed him decided to put a bullet in his eye for good measure because given his rag doll appearance, there was little chance he wasn't already dead.

Certain colonials noticed he was alive but spared him regardless.

A strange compassion happens.

When the chase was well beyond him, the local woke from his deep sleep and gave himself a new name, to remember the day.

"Oko-Jumu" which means the dreamer.

Later in life he became an infrastructure developer and private contractor and helped create some of the prettiest roads in the world.

63 My Generation

2009-05-21T09:36:00.005+02:00

Last night, she waited quietly in the bar, surrounded by laughing people and happy music, colour and substance, neon and noise. She waited, patiently for the musician to arrive.

Can you imagine? her husband had died in a motorcycle accident two days before, leaving her alone with a young son.

She asked the musician to play at his funeral. All of this happened quietly, the air of unreality around this woman blurred her edges, at the time, I admired how she could pull herself together, her stoicism impressed me, later I told myself it must be shock, no one can imagine what's worse, to lose a father or a son, a husband or a brother. Regardless of gender, loss is loss and the world moves on. Quickly or quietly, it moves,

When she left, I did not see her go, I thought of her husband, a man I had never met nor would ever meet, dead in circumstances most vaguely defined. Regardless, I felt certain he'd died having lived.

Having lived his life as he had conceived it, death in the process of living his ideal was far better than the alternatives.

The courageous man dies once, the coward dies a thousand times a day.

Having no choice about the timing yet having choice in so much else, he lived according to himself until the end.

64 Rhythm Monkeys of the End of Night

2009-05-19T13:07:00.003+02:00

The moon eats us, hmm?

Those were the last words my long legged friend Cindy Canvas spoke before she drove off in Agnes Sherman's car. A dusty wreck which even Agnes didn't want. I never heard from her again, she did that thing, a cat's goodbye, and I got on my bus and headed back across the country. On the way I watched the mountains appear in reverse and kept my hand on the seat until it was numb and in those young days full of nothing but hope and cinnamon buns I never bothered to ask myself the question: was I good at this?

Writing. Righting. Making what is wrong, right in the act of fiction, lies that speak the truth, famous for buffoonery, the best comedians have a dark tract of inscrutable philosophy under their beds of a degree of seriousness so profound and disturbing they haven't let anyone, even their thesis advisor, see it.

It doesn't matter since everyone retires and the moment is long lost, the final product of the page is not the ink blasted into its fibres. A book is a blunt instrument, the mind is where the final product blooms and if that's so, the final product is nowhere for nowhere can the mind 'be' which is. It needs the space of formlessness to make it's mark. How can a thing be bounded by nothing? That is the way of the mind.

So I understood why Cindy drove off without a single backward glance. It had all been for the journey, the destination had been a pretext, Cindy, Agnes and the whole sad affair in the hills had left me with a single idea:

Happiness for no reason at all was best, Cindy had suffered for the conditions she'd placed on happiness, Agnes had come out of it the best, because she had avoided conditions entirely. As for myself. I came out in the middle, sometimes I forget that it is never me who suffers, I can watch my mind suffer, I can watch my body suffer, I cannot suffer except when I forget and my attachment becomes inappropriate.

To tell the story of how these realizations leapt out of the night and into our lives would take a great deal more time and space than a single night's experimental fiction.

The novel is not the product, it is simply the occurrence, from time to time, of a creature which exists in many places at once, the author is a part of it but not the whole of it.

Tired and sleepy, I watched the rain fall horizontally across the window of the fast moving bus. Gunship metal clouds attracted lightning and I was afraid to sleep. People had been killed that way on the bus. The chattering in my mind faded as I imagined every thought being left behind, a psychic trail of breadcrumbs, for Cindy to find me someday along the edge of the future. There was a battered old structure there, built of dead memories, windows of distortion, lit by vortex, where insects made meals of men.

Wherever my bus went tomorrow, I knew that was where I was headed in the end.

65 Crack the drums and beat the splintered desk

2009-05-17T22:31:00.004+02:00

Stone beds. There are cultures where the traditional bed is a clay or stone platform with a woven rug on top. Sleep on such beds is deep and restful, they can be warmed from beneath in the winter and remain cool in the summer. How much technology must be created for the West to enjoy such simple comforts on their individually-pocketed-coil orthopaedic beds? An incoherent flood of words mixing fragments of theology, science, history and culture is better with a little pesto. Troublesome fictions all. Music has better sense, much can be made, as much to fill a lifetime, without necessarily any material waste. A guitar has a lifetime of music in it the moment it's made, a library necessarily reflects its passage through time. Sense is tiresome however, sometimes, the rut out of rhythm is the solution without a problem, a taste of a psychoactive thought can be more devastating than any drug; One's night of fire and revelation is another's pink laser is another's burning bush is another's mild stroke is another's benign tumour.

All interpretations to explain an experience, what if, just for a moment, focus were to return to the experience? If insight is worthwhile, would there be any in such experience?

For the sake of argument, we will say no, it is only a distraction from production, from creation in this world, from the building. Building what? who knows? Only we will not desist, our companion may not come but there is satisfaction in keeping the appointment.

Many years ago, I kept an appointment with someone I knew for certain would never come, I sipped my espresso alone and ate my almond and chocolate pastry alone and knew for certain the person for whom I was waiting would not come, it was a delicious experience, a promise made and kept after so many years.

Year later I am overjoyed that I kept that appointment, the one for whom I waited had become a cowardly, shabby echo of the person I had kept the appointment for. A nasty disappointment, had I to do it again I would not, we were none of us ourselves. That old bargain had been flushed down the toilet of time.

Now, I crack the drums and beat the splintered desk, my pen draws meat in flecks and bone is showing.

Rambles land on pebbled shores.

I cannot cross the border but it's well worth the journey to the edge.

Sunlight makes the flowers bloom.

Nightly though, I'm eaten by the moon.

Half hearted shocks.

How any man leaves effort tenderless.

Collapse is a construction too.

Bent but not broken, borrowed but not blue.

A character in search of six authors.

The creases become grooves, the grooves become roads.

Charting the hits. Taking stock of nothing.

Full of idiots, tellers of fury, signifying sounds.

Playful apocalypse.

It's all here.

What gymnastics must be done, to secure a long hour's sleep?

In my pocket.

66 Entropy

2009-05-12T08:34:00.006+02:00

A riddle:

What is bigger on the inside than the outside,

includes the outside on the inside,

can easily be in two places at once,

can only be here now with effort,

is rarely at home, yet the lights are on?

Musical numbers dredged up from a parallel universe did the nervous thing they do down the hall and into the reading room.

The reading room was a fictitious place at my university where people went to listen to records, nobody had read a book in there since Sir Wilfred Laurier was the Prime Minister of Canada, bookings were made in advance and you had the privacy of its plush leather couches and oak panelled walls and vintage audiophile sound system all to the privacy of yourself or your small circle of friends. multiple booking were forbidden, you would not be disturbed.

Luxury!

Naturally it-was-and-it-wasn't free, its maintenance was paid for by university fees, naturally, I wonder if I was the only person who ever booked it just to hear a good vinyl album on a beyond-my-means-hence-out-of-this-world sound system.

Most people didn't even bother to put on a record.

It's different now, I hear there have been changes, I avoid learning more, I don't want my history interrupted by rude facts. For example, it was called the record room, not the reading room. It doesn't matter, I would go there to listen and read, so for me it was the reading room, clearly, from the fixtures to the furnishing, in some legendary past before records had been invented it was a reading room.

In my mind, the shape of time is already slouching towards legend, past becoming prelude, the story of what we were and where we were and why we were there and what we were doing there is losing, if not its vitality, at least its authentic reality.

The audience has left, the curtains are drawn, still we play.

Sometimes naked, sometimes mad, now the scholar, now the fool, but are we free? Are we men?

I wrote a novel as a teenager, about an assassin and story collector who wants to hear a story before killing her greatest target, a sort of 'Arabian Nights' in reverse, she asked her victim to tell her a story, so it didn't die with him, to tell her of his cities, of all dimensions; he did, and because I lacked the skill at the time to lead the plot organically towards their role reversal, I made it a serial adventure. I can not say I finished it, I did, however, abandon it, not a wise move, the abandoned worlds are those which grow most in the imagination. Finishing a story is like giving it a border, a barrier, here and no further, without this wall, the stories just grow and grow.

My punishment was to become a character in my own fiction.

Now the Piper has come for his wages while in secret he schemes with the rats.

Abreption means never having to say its done.

It's just done with you.

67 Waiting for the Hesitants

2009-05-10T07:47:00.005+02:00

Maxine Recluse, a girl born of an idiot, signifying nothing, emerged with a frightening intelligence hence her parents abandoned her almost immediately. Raised by the state, she escaped again and again only to be captured by the electronic bars that marked her meals and residences wherever she went.

In plain English, Maxine lived in a networked world and a cashless society from which she could not escape so long as she was a minor. Her choices were suffer until she legally became an adult or find a way to live without leaving a trace of herself in State databases.

She made her choice.

For two years, Maxine became a model inmate of the state. studied industriously, allowed state education to happen to her organically, meanwhile spending all possible free time researching her own projects. Naturally her sponsors were anxious at her choice of reading materials but they were limited in their discretion by the standard operating procedures of the state. They could worry but since she wasn't learning how to make improvised explosives they could do nothing.

Maxine confined her research to biology, chemistry and physics, in its pure forms, with applied studies restricted to gardening and landscaping, she knew the extent of her prison, she stayed within its bounds and they had no pretext to circumscribe her.

In any case, Maxine wasn't interested in bombs, the state in its paranoia had blinded itself to other means, peaceful, however illegal means:

Means of escape.

They watched her carefully, they watched her build a model garden behind the state home, grow herbs, even erect a small garden shed. Her garden occupied her to the point of singularity, or so it seemed, as if by accident, her radishes and carrots sprouted together, her sponsors. They did not hear her muttering under her breath to her newly sprouted root vegetables. If any of them had, they might have heard:

"Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved, do not presume, one of the thieves was damned."

Had they heard, it may not have come as a surprise that in her over-abundance of intellect, Maxine had chafed at her bounds so long she'd rubbed her soul raw, she clutched at hope where she found it; moonlight sparkles on worn black pebbles.

She didn't go so far as to call her radishes 'Luke' and her carrots 'Augustine' but the idea was there.

Her sponsors watched her miniature world unfold with increasing fascination, between meals, sleep and school, Maxine spent all her time in her little garden. Radishes and carrots gave way to tomatoes and peppers, they watched her measure nitrogen levels, pH levels, organize her planting schedule and over two growing seasons she occasionally provided her sponsors tables with delicious produce. Maxine had found a calling, said her sponsors, she had become adjusted, said her sponsors, her journey towards full membership as a law-abiding and productive citizen of society was nearly complete, said her sponsors.

Maxine considered herself an iconoclast, not in the old sense of image-breaker or destroyer of sacred images but in the modern sense as one who creates original images without references. Not satisfied with received fashions, she carved her own.

There would be no one to stop her this time.

Her second garden, in the woods near school had yielded two harvests of prepared food. Stacked neatly in jars in the basket of a hand rebuilt motorized tricycle. Straddling the bike with the motor running she exhaled a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding inside and remained where she was, engine idling.

She shut off the motor and dismounted the bike, walked on to school, went home to her sponsors, stepped mechanically through her role. No one had guessed the extent of her ingenuity, she could have left, she told herself, she really could have done it.

In bed, pretending to be asleep, Maxine shook with rage, rage at the world, rage at herself, she could leave! She could! Why wasn't she leaving? Exhaustion eventually drove her to unconsciousness. In her dreams she was in prison but there were no bars at the gates, only rows of planted carrots and radishes and tomatoes and peppers. She couldn't pass through the gates without stepping all over the plants, destroying them. Maxine couldn't do it. beyond the gates she saw enormous fields of crops. She knew, with the strange logic of dreams, that those crops were but a small part of her highly industrialized, scientific and productive agricultural enterprise, she need only destroy the little plants in her way to claim her future immediately.

She couldn't do it. Not a step. What her sponsors had failed to do, Maxine had accomplished by accident.

Unconquerable, she had conquered herself.

In bed, Maxine sighed in acceptance, in her dreams, she nursed the plants that barred her way.

68 Wedging in a life between obligation and responsibility

2009-05-09T08:05:00.007+02:00

Welcome to Chaos Bar. The owners' table can only be reached by cartwheeling over the heads of the regular patrons and somersaulting into a seat next to the proprietess, she rules the owners' table and by extension much of the world. Murders are not common and even suspicious deaths are rare however last night, a patron was having himself serviced just as a glass jar of scalding hot prepared mushrooms in oil was placed nearby on one of the many marble windowsills by a member of the kitchen staff and the cold marble and the hot jar contrived to shatter the jar and send hot oil and glass shards in every direction, the patron, a British tourist, was badly burned at the point of ecstasy and his service, down on one knee, got up so quickly she accidentally kneed him in his most private area which sent him through plate glass windows into Dining area 3 and that's the best anyone can do to describe it. The paramedics assured us the ultimate cause of death was myocardial infarction, heart attack, they went on to explain the shock had probably killed him long before he went through the glass, every male winced at the thought. It happens.

I come here from time to time and tonight, I'm here with company, it's not much company though, they float from one table to the next, one distraction to the next, when it's time for me to exit stage right, my company appears to want to enter stage left. It happens. Perhaps I'm not much company either, seated at the axis while the whirl revolves around me.

By contrast, I've seen floor shows at Chaos Bar that make me feel decidedly insignificant. They have truly amazing performers. Schoolyard scenes with angels and demons. All done with lighting gels and leather jackets. Sometimes, in my nightmares, these theatrical cruelties become exaggerated to the frequency of a pure and natural horror and it feels as I might spend the rest of my life trapped inside the Chaos Bar.

In the end, I somehow manage to succeed in my escape, although I always forget my jacket at the coat check and have to go back for it. High tension! However shortly afterwards in my recurring dream, Chaos Bar has once again assumed it's real world aspect, the bouncers and barmen know me again, I take my jacket without incident time after time.

Early morning sunshine finds me on the cobblestones. Fresh air and spilt beer in my nose.

I leave Chaos Bar and my company behind. If they want to stay, let them stay. Chaos Bar is haunted and I'm the last in the circle still alive.

I'll probably be back tonight.

69 Looking for the lost bagel

2009-05-07T09:28:00.005+02:00

I remember bagels from a long time ago, I remember fresh bagels made by obsessed individuals, the bagels were large, not like the ones you find sometimes, they had a unique texture, firm yet yielding, golden, whisper thin surface punctured easily to rich depths, I remember how these bagels toasted, absorbing humble butter and lofty lox with equal ease, these memories come to me most frequently in the lands without bagels, there are such places, and I confess I imagine the people who live there are less happy because they have not known their own bagels, only the lucky adventures of risk takers and madmen on vacation have bagel experiences to share. I know the yeasty aroma of a good bagel, It's sometimes a long wait and sometimes extreme measures need to be made but when there's a rumour of a good bagel place in town, I invariably find myself there on the flimsiest of pretenses. I remember the great bagel drought of 2004, a local place had finally started serving bagels, uninspired affairs yet undeniably bagels, I had sunk so low as to import frozen bagels in individually packaged bags, they were not the same yet suggested their referents enough that I could use my imagination and my memories to take me closer. Imagine my joy when I found a local place that served bagels! Regrettably, it was not to last and after only a few weeks, the deliveries of bagels had stopped, the supplier had disappeared. After several inquiries and longer and more elaborate explanations by the proprietors I was finally told they honestly had no idea when they would next get a bagel delivery.

I was crushed. So as the year dragged out and the one after that, I gave up on bagels entirely for a time, life took on a grim aspect. Everything became serious. I began to worry that I might have tasted my last bagel. Nothing so tragic as the death of hope, I kept myself from that final frontier by an immense effort of concentration and no small measure of luck. However, the sun had set on my bagel life, it seemed; my kingdom for a bagel! No one took up my offer. I surrendered to circumstance and strove to find drops of happiness in club sandwiches and crostini but they could not compare to the flood of the prime source, the ne plus ultra, the sui generis, the bagel, zen icon and gourmand's satisfaction indivisible, yet you could eat it!

Last week everything changed, the sunrise came charging back into my life. Yes! Bagels had returned to my city, the politics keeping them out had lost! I sit before you now satisfied by the second bagel in a week available locally! Yes! I have found it! The thing itself! The philosopher's Stone!

It's a bagel!

70 Last Exit to New Los Angels

2009-05-06T10:27:00.007+02:00

When importing this screenplay, the standard formatting was lost, it exists elsewhere. Time considerations won't allow me to correct it here. Perhaps the next import will be more successful. However ugly, enjoy!

INT. MEAT LOCKER. NIGHT.
Tommy Two-Thumbs is tied and hanging upside down from a meat hook. Sam Marlo, a private detective, isn't asking him any questions.
TOMMY TWO THUMBS (V.O.)
Tiles need a cleaning, wonder if Marbles got it like this, lasted longer than him at least. Screw it.
TOMMY TWO THUMBS (CONT'D)
Ah, Alright, what you wanna know?
Sam Marlo changes position and says nothing.
TOMMY TWO THUMBS (CONT'D)
What, is it about Susan? I had nothing to do with that, it was Marbles, he's the one you want. What, you got nothing to say? What? Ask me something and I'll tell! Dammit ask me! Ask me! Ask me! Argh!
Sam Marlo changes position and says nothing.
TOMMY TWO THUMBS (CONT'D)
Is it Frankie? You wanna know who? Whadya want? I got names! Yeah! It's Jones you wanna ask, isn't it? Ah come on man I been upside down forever! Ah come on! if I could still feel my hands they'd be freezing! Mar, Marlo, look into your heart...
Sam Marlo changes position and says nothing.
TOMMY TWO THUMBS (CONT'D)
Gah, alright, Johnny and Alex, Frankie was their hit, it's about Frankie, right? Ah man, I had nothing to do with it, you're gonna ice me? You so fucking smart? I, I.
Tommy is unconscious, Sam slaps him awake and slips a pen knife into his frozen hands and a memory stick recording of Tommy's confession where he can see it. Marlo exits the meat locker to the sounds of Tommy sawing away at his restraints. Closes the door, leaving Tommy to struggle in darkness.
EXT. MEAT PACKING DISTRICT. NEW LOS ANGLES. NIGHT
Sam Marlo reaches into his jacket and takes a phone out of a shoulder holster where a pistol should be.
SAM MARLO
Dial Mom. (silent ring, dialling indicates on the phone), who's this? Yeah I'd hold, Jack, Sam, Tommy Two thumbs is at my location in a meat locker with evidence but not for long. I know, wasn't here. Dinner at Pinkie's tomorrow is good. Until that day, huh? Yeah, bye.
Sam Marlo walks to a bicycle and cycles for an hour or so to his car, folding up the bike and throwing it into the trunk. Changes quickly, drops the used clothes in a Salvation Army drop box. Drives home.

Stills from the film: Welcome to New Los Angels

2009-05-04T13:23:00.001+02:00

71 Sign of the New Los Angels Times

2009-05-04T07:05:00.003+02:00

Land use in the New Los Angels Basin had changed dramatically over the last century, scrubland and desert had been irrigated by fresh water pumped from as far away as Colorado and the desert had bloomed, in the middle of nowhere in particular, Sam Marlo leaned on the hood of his converted replica Shelby (zero emission engine) and considered ignoring the muffled noise coming from the cramped trunk of his car.

He shouldn't have picked the Shelby for this, but Marbles Malloy was a small man, Marlo popped another H-Mary into his mouth, the desert flipped upside down and donut icicles made of pressed flower happiness drifted gently upwards for 15 seconds. Hail Mary or H-Mary, a strange contraction because it wasnt' any shorter to say, was a popular high-class hallucinagen, instant onset, 45 second half-life, For those times when harassed executives and bored housewives wanted a minor vacation from everyday but not a full weekend's worth of incapacitance.

After 30 seconds, Marlo grabbed a small gas canister and fed it's plastic tube through one of the inconspicuous holes he'd drilled in the trunk many years ago, tiny, only a psychological ventilation, still hot enough in there without the A/C running to hurt a man, but that wasn't Marlo's line, he kept the A/C on.

Environmentally conscious however, Marlo kept it at its minimum setting. He snaked the tube a little into the trunk, turned on the nitrous oxide and timed the dosage.

After 20 seconds he kept low and to the side and popped the trunk.

Marbles was laughing a little, dazed, blinded by the sun, sweat and oil soaked his suit, the throwaway piece (too small these days to find them all, some no larger than a thimble) had fallen from his hands, Marlo picked up the contraption, like a wire outline of a pistol made of coat hanger, aimed it at a patch of flowers and touched his finger to the piece of wire indicating a trigger.

The flowers burst into flame and then blew away in a cloud of ash.

"My my, a miniturized vapourizer, Marbles, the company you keep," mutter Marlo under his breath.

Marlo grabbed Marbles roughly and tossed him, hog tied, out of the trunk, knocked the wind out of him. nearby was a suitable location, a half dead tree, struck by lightning, one side blooming, the other dead.

Marlo tied Marbles to the tree and then drove the Shelby closer, parking with the headlights facing Marbles, who was regaining some of his senses in the freshening late afternoon air.

It still got cold at night in desert.

"I'm not talking." said Marbles

"And, I haven't asked you to," said Marlo, as he cut off Marbles' suit with a scalpel and a pair of surgical scissors.

And Marlo wouldn't, by dawn, with the headlights on, the cold, the fatigue and above all, the mosquitos, Marbles would tell him everything.

Marlo wouldn't have to ask a thing.

He never had before, why start?

That's what it meant to be a New Los Angles Detective, you didn't get paid for questions, you got paid for answers.

Marlo got back in his car and turned up the radio and the heat. Settled in for the wait, Marbles didn't seem like much, the wire gun was a nuisance, how'd he get his hands on one? He'd know in the morning. Ignoring Marbles' screams, Marlo drifted off to sleep. A Sleep filled with icicle donuts and 10 storey high mosquitoes and in the distance, Marbles Malloy having his blood pumped out by a giant aquatic Brazilian leech.

The long night, a New Los Angels trademark, stretched onwards.

72 Better than the bet

2009-05-02T20:02:00.005+02:00

Kiki Mallory was a gambler, that much was obvious, from the way she curled her dice to the way the dice hit that back board, She was a gambler, and it all came falling apart that hot and lonely winter's night in Las Vegas Nevada, population: one less than a moment ago.

There was blood, on the tiles, on the mirror, on the deep shag carpet, it was a nice scene, full of disaster and heartache, and Kiki was in the middle of it. She didn't want to be there, who would? It's just that Kiki had experienced the misfortune of being the call girl slash fiance slash card shark to a salaryman who just wanted one last thrill before tasting the big easy. It wasn't her fault, she was just the right girl in the wrong place at the right time.

As for the salaryman, his name was Tetsuo, she never learned if he was just on hiatus from his job at some nameless electronic corporation or if he was just another burned out refugee from the corporate meat grinder of Akibahara, it didn't matter, the colour of his money was good, only she didn't have to be there when he iced himself.

Gurgling, with blood in his windpipes, he pressed a note into her hands at the end, a note with only a name and an address, what could she do? She took his money and she took the note.

how could she know the extent of his injuries, the degrees of his perversions?

By the time she had been through the nightmare he'd left behind, four people had been murdered, and she'd deposited over 15 million euros in foreign numbered accounts to her name.

What are the wages of sin? somehow, she was spared.

In this life, but what of the next?

73 Enter the moist red waffle iron

2009-04-29T21:34:00.002+02:00

A wet heart stank on the cold tile floor of the morgue, it wasn't mine, I played floor hockey with it, a collegue asked me to stop fooling around and I picked up the heart and put it back on the dissecting table. The subject had been brought to us because of certain services we had performed in the past. Services we didn't like to talk about, even over coffee in the staff lounge. The service in question was this, while we couldn't make the dead speak,we had a talent with their organs. Augury was its most recent name, the divination of the future by the entrails of the sacrifices, we as forensic pathologists and followers of the ancient tradition of the path of underbrush and thorns were best versed to assist the police in their more unusual inquiries.

It was simple, they would bring us a body and by the ancient arts of dissection and divination we would supply a name and a number. Sometimes it was the name and phone number of a witness, other times it was the name of a street and the address of a suspect.

Our body tonight hadn't been brought in by the police, he'd walked in himself, looked me in the eyes and said 'auger this' and promptly blown his brains out with a .38 special revolver, a model selected no doubt for it's concealability and availability.

He didn't look like a suicide, he was well dressed, his face and body showed no signs of sleep deprivation or drug use, in all respects he seemed a well adjusted person right down to the predicted number of credit cards in his wallet.

What could we do? we augered him.

We didn't believe the results. According to our augery, tonight was the end of the world.

So I kicked his heart across the floor of the morgue but this time, I didn't care to pick it up when the others complained. A ridiculous augery of a suicidal mad man.

Then another well dressed stranger surprised us with the same last words and his brains along the tiles.

Then again, and again.

Nobody told us to close, so we just kept piling them up, along the walls, in the corridors.

Augurists must be special, or else nuts, we've already made a pact not to give in to it ourselves, not until we auger the whole city.

One of us has decorated every streetlamp for ten city blocks with human entrails, another has used a helium canister to inflate a thousand human stomachs and lift a red banner up high above the morgue, it reads 'give us your sick, your fallen, your downtrodden' and we hope it's clear that this is the place things are still happening. That if you're gonna go, you'll come to us first.

It's been a great success, people are dying to get in here and die.

We'll auger every single one. These citizens of the red night need us.

Personally? What have I done?

I've built a temple out of human hearts.

Let it bleed.

Logomania 008

2009-04-26T08:33:00.000+02:00

Three Hundred and One Sleepwriters

2009-04-26T01:13:00.003+02:00

After many years of practice and work,it happened, one night, Frank Provalone, copywriter for a mysterious agency, fell asleep while working late at night on his pet project, a big thinkers book to rival and justify the work he sold to make his living during the day, like all copywriters his ambitions had been cut down to scale by the exigencies of the profession and the advertiser's rule number one shackled him to sell the client's product to the best of his ability and nothing else so when it came time for him to relax he would sit up late and transgress in his fiction, a private pleasure safe from having to get to a point or deliver a call to action or simply from telling the customers what to do. It was all so easy to fall into the mistake of believing there was no other kind of literature left in the world but the 72pt headline copy (and the 14 point body so as many people as possible could read a newspaper or magazine in one hand while driving with one knee to the wheel and slurping a soggy bowl of cornflakes from the cereal bowl sized coffee mug in the other.

Act now with no obligation and start enjoying the benefits today!

In theory, what happened was impossible however having fallen asleep in front of his computer, Frank awoke to find the document he had been working on as he drifted off into sleep was much longer that he remembered, in short, Frank discovered, in addition to his other more traditional somnambulatory tendencies that he had suddenly and quite literally overnight become a sleepwriter.

(no pun more intended)

There was a limit to this after all, Frank knew that he ought to knock it off but even when he went to bed with the firm resolve to stay in it and sleep, he increasingly frequently found himself awake and sore in front of his computer.

There seemed no end to it.

The question remained, was it worth anything?

Frank shelved his doubts, it was a stupid human trick if ever he'd heard of one so if not fortune and posterity, at least he might appear on Letterman.

74 Exercise and waking up at night

2009-04-20T23:57:00.009+02:00

Milton worked at the tool and die warehouse in shipping. One week out of 8 his shift would swing him into the loneliest hours of the night, whisper silent everywhere in the city except for the warehouses and the newspapers. The next shift around, Milton invariably woke up in the middle of the night clutching at his heart with his right hand while his left scrambled for the alarm which hadn't gone off because, naturally, it hadn't been set, Milton's graveyard swing shift was over and he was now on the most social working hours of the next two months.

It was frustrating because by the time the second swing was on, he'd stopped having the attacks, but already, on the second shift he was an hour later to start and an hour later to finish. This meant that traffic changed, his seat at the bar after work changed, his hairdresser changed. It didn't register with most people, thought Milton, just how much their experience was as much a slave to their schedules as their vehemently raised denials to the contrary.

Milton had owned a DVR but it just made things worse, he lost the sense of contact, the feeling that all over the city, people were watching all kinds of shows but some of them at least had to be watching what he was watching and that number had to be pretty big. Milton had been able to draw some comfort from that idea and with the DVR it was alright, it just wasn't the same experience; he sold it and didn't have any pressing desires within his budget so he socked it away in a corner of his flat in an old sock because Milton, above all other considerations, was a literal type who retained Puckish pride in his acquired obstreperousness.

It's not that he was a bad guy, it's just Milton occasionally did things out of light-hearted malice, it's not the ideal collision to describe his process but easy-going mischief-making only consumes more lines without adding sense.

The universal sarcasm in the situation was that worrying about attacks that woke him up in the middle of the night kept him up until the middle of the night.

Milton had tried a number of carved idols, dream catchers and other occult paraphernalia to stop the attacks however even the best results meant he spilled wax on his leg when his ornamental hood (a bed sheet) brushed against his mail-order thrice-blessed candelabra.

So, despite all occult, chemical and logical efforts, Milton continued to suffer one shift out of 8. Whenever he thought of the situation it was all he could do not to shrug his shoulders, raise his hands up one last time to the heavens in appeal and give everything away before travelling to the most inaccessible and ugly mountain in the world to just sit there the world ended or he learned to sleep.

People are strange.

75 The run for the first poet of the month to die in steaming pots of shit

2009-04-20T01:38:00.007+02:00

It was one of those weekends where everything that could possibly happen, happened; thugs breaking doors left unlocked found everything of value had already been stolen and lights left too long in the night would be found upon waking to have earned a coating of frost without any explanation.

Children woke with the terrors claiming that a tree trunk of things had hidden under their beds and only waited for all the lights to die and the cold room to be silent for the things under the bed to reach out and grab them by the ankles and yank them down into the dear darkness where they lived, livid with anger, rushing to the next morsel of imperial hyacinth chocolate hot drink (now with even more chocolate) and gnawing on an immature human's thighbone.

The fetid river water sank lower each year on the outskirts of City Eight, (a nice place to live work and shop) and the once blue sky was now grey and overcast so often that the word for blue was used interchangably with luck.

Golden rains were the best, an accident of hazardous industrial waste which came with hallucinatory warnings since the chemical soup in the sky took itself a little too seriously these days and besides, retirement funds had worked proberly (portmanteau: properly and soberly) and shakes and shivers since childhood left one with little imagination to realize that living to fight another day would be preferable to defeat tonight, especially, having left a love poem to the nun who tended the church garden.

It was clear that time was on somebody else's side today, the nun found the envelope and handed it over to her superiors, I met the Mother superior on the same day I found out the kids call her Mother Insatiable, for her fondness for hard candy.

Perhaps one could/may/would, ask a question, to relieve this experimental ennui, typing asleep again, instead of just standing there, tongue in hand and staring. (you, the tongue or both?)

Positively celestial, with such work before me, my only request is to be able to see them, my family, because these long winter submarine cruises may have addled me.

Regardless, the effects of short term memory loss on a built up box are well known, also, there appears to be a place to clean some parts of the car right off, the bad kept themselves as toddlers, it's better than beer and coffee.

The Fin.

76 Shopping List for Two Cities

2009-04-15T08:30:00.010+02:00

There are streets of the imagination it's better not to cross, alleys that break off at odd angles and avenues lit by sodium lamps of a generation ago. Collapsing places, places of rot and ecological disaster. Lit by nightmares, dreams of fears, failures, wrecks, calamities, arrogant babies with gutted sides, floating dangerously under the sewage water.

These are the streets I call my home. It's an architecture where it's easier to see opportunities to fail, my special trick is knowledge: I know these are just opportunities to succeed in a sinister aspect.

My imagined city intrudes on daily life, it's possible to view its rot, its red, in the faces of sleepwalking children driving to work.

On an ordinary day, walking to school, it's possible to notice, which is the real and which is the imagined, I watch the faces of drivers most because they are least concerned about hiding their unselfconscious faces, it's clear as they rush their bodies to work that their minds are already there, impotent to make changes and impatient to begin, without the presence of a conscious mind yet powerfully influenced, the bodies twist, the faces grimace, animals and vegetables but not humans.

It happens.

Sadly, I realize that once these out-of-mind/out-of-body travellers arrive at work, much of their loosely tied minds will drift and loll, often returning to troubles at home where they will sit, seething and impotent until their bodies catch up with them.

Consciousness is the one force that naturally travels faster than the speed of light.

Be here now because here and now is where action is possible, throwing your mind around without cause or concern is reckless. Spend too little time in your body and you know what happens?

You get old fast and die young, that's what can happen. You join my city of the red night too quickly, why be so eager for it? It's already here. Division is meaningless, an artifact of language, it's not real.

I have come to the riverside docks to buy meat for a party, the cobblestones are rich with blood and moss under my boots, tanneries and slaughterhouses line these docks, Seersee Meat is my destination, a rampart of stone leads to the ice, the hooks, the merchandise and the vendor.

I purchase a lifetime supply of flesh and carry it on my back to my flat. Now, 8 hours ahead of me, it is supper time in Orleans.

Happily, wisely, impatiently or otherwise: my guests will have to wait.

77 Crimson Calamity Unplugged

2009-04-05T21:15:00.005+02:00

Festivals and autograph signing had begun to pale on Crimson Calamity, a Brazilian head-job with highly experimental wetROMs and a compulsive liar, Crimson could remember the first upgrade, having dumped her core memory (she read later it was impossible to re-install with original file structure intact, oops) she had boosted her colour sensitivity, strictly a wetware upgrade, nothing much to it, colours seemed primary, rich, extravagant, with a squeeze of a finger she could see in ways her parents had never imagined were possible, let alone have allowed if they had found out.

By 24, Crimson was as patched as an old tire, a ceaseless stream of home cooked sense implants, she could taste colours with her fingers and see music with her tongue, There was no end to the many combinations she could explore, it had to come crashing down eventually.

One morning, it did, she awoke in total darkness, her Eyesoft(TM) had fatally crashed, causing her to stumble for the panic button on her dresser, it had failed many times only this time, the hard reset commanded by the panic button refused to activate and she was left stumbling and bumping into furniture until she made it to the doorway and knocked at her neighbour's.

With a little help (luckily, it was Sunday and he was home) she discovered the problem, her WetWare processor had permanently failed and since the warranty had long since expired she was left with no option but to disconnect it from the visual cortex entirely. Her neighbour used his 8-pin hardline to connect her to his diagnostic program and suddenly, for the first time in over a decade, Crimson Calamity saw without enhancement, and it was fascinating.

She had forgotten the fine texture of shadows on wood floors, the grain of igneous stone on the windowsill, the frosting of dust on unwashed windows, the myriad of greys and browns on a single patch of wall. Her Eyesoft(TM) lost these subtleties in exchange for colour not possible in the ordinary world, for how long had she felt it was the ordinary world which suffered as a result?

"Wow,"

"What?" she said.

"I don't know if I've ever seen you breathe like that"

She noticed her breathing, deep and even, touch was touch, sight was sight, a forgotten feeling; was it relief?

"Yeah, well, it's been awhile."

"I can connect you with a new chip, your old one's toast" holding up the diagnostic printout.

"Alright, thanks."

It took time, so much detail in the world was overwhelming, the ultimate resolution.

She lost the contact info on the way home to bed; to slip into scalding cold sheets and shiver in the rush of old new sensations.

78 Medea Rez (William Gibson Homage)

2009-04-04T07:47:00.005+02:00

The lone child of aging mega-rock star Rez (frontman for Lo/Rez) and Rei Toei, an Idoru (synthetic personality), Medea Rez grew up unlike any child the world had yet conceived. She was capable of mathematical computation which exceeded her designers yet she felt awkward in crowds and smiled shyly for reporters; she dreamt in cyberspace without a hardline or a NetCloud yet became easily confused when giving class presentations in primary school; she experienced fits of adolescent rage and misery like everyone yet recorded full sense/net copies which quickly became sim/stim hits that garnered accolades from critics and fans alike.She was an enfant terrible, a cause celebre, a brat and a buddha, a singularity and a multiplicity.

She wonderered if her mother, cloned around the world and the power behind the family fortune, had not secretly generated her as a youthful copy of herself. Her father, Rez, inescapably aging, would soon go full-synth; she'd heard that was supposed to change people. Until then, she decided she could count on him to offer an alternative perspective on herself. Above all, she was deeply selfish and self-interested, this was not her fault. Since she was unique (for now) her designers (parents) had programmed certain complexes that would leverage maximum data from her life experience for future models; With effectively infinite recursive-thought neural networks and the capacity to model up to 26 different personalities at once, she still couldn't always manage to get through a social engagement without wounding individuals with her razor edged insight although she felt sorry afterwards and did apologize.

Her cyberspace handle/nick was MeaCulpa.

Her parents looked forward to her dating years like Europe looked forward to the great plague of 2012.

Set the count to zero otherwise do nothing

2009-04-03T20:14:00.000+02:00

Untitleable

2009-03-24T23:03:00.000+01:00

79 The end of the week

2009-03-23T06:54:00.012+01:00

It wasn't going to be an ordinary dreary day deadly doomed and dastardly. the Spring full frontal had driven even the crows indoors with their recent treasures and clumsy bickerings. Full-on felicitously, Buck Milligan drew his unscabbarded mettle cross the back and the forty so thus cleared the bushes of their nights' tenancy.

When Buck was again awake, he rose calmly and concentrated on a simple order of daily morning rituals, the morning news, light exercise then a coffee, shower and shave, a little work on his kitchen table. Dreams and their gaudiness were enjoyable, so long as they remained below the covers, it didn't do to have his pleasure at a rich dark hot cup of morning coffee penetrated by monkey chatter from an alien ocean; the coffee was instant and Buck was not a coffinista; it didn't trouble him, everyone has a snobbery, Buck was no exception, only coffee wasn't it; when it came to coffee, Buck was a grand egalitarian, refusing neither instant nor espresso, 1, 3, 7 or 13 millibars were not important, Bialleti and Mr. Bunn were both his friends. Coffee sweet, black or creamy, fit every mood, suited every occassion.

It didn't do to have it interrupted.

My name is Buck, my nickname is Buck. It's now the weekend and I'm sitting in a quiet corner at the back of the darkest, smallest coffee place in the city. I'm sitting with new friends, the conversation turns to family and history. Moe works the desk across from mine, he's just told me he was named after his Grandfather.

My parents called me Buck after my Grandfather too. He was old a long time before he died. I was told I knew my great-grandfather when I was a baby. I've forgotten him now. I haven't forgotten my Grandfather. He owned two WW I era motorcycles, bought new, sold before I was old enough to ride them. One day he had a minor accident with a car and put them up for sale the very next day.

Moe feels a drink coming on, I agree, we excuse ourselves from the rest, I wish Susan and Janice a good night, wave to Mickey and Frank and Betty at the bar and Moe and I go gently into that good night.

Years later, I would remember the hanging icicles by the broken air conditioner working madly to cool the already cold night air, bothering to tell someone seemed a waste of time, the stars winked naughty love poetry and Moe was drinking smoke and breathing single malt by the time we hid behind the dumpsters while the beat officers did their rounds.

Tumbling down the stairs to our maddest basement Jazz bar, The Angry Diamond, where an unaccompanied Pianst was hammering the keys to ecstasy beyond pain and his tip jar was spilling and the stink of girls and spunk and sawdust ate the walls and Moe and I lost sight of each other and while the music rapped our minds we paid no notice to anything else. The lights dimmed further and the pianist made it so furious the music ate the colour and shape of the world and I felt it assume total command, the magic in the music was the music in me; only there was no me.

A totality.

Waking up. where was I? Afraid to open my eyes yet, under my breath, I shaped the words again in my mind and on my lips; where was I? It didn't feel like my bed, there was somebody beside me, I felt certain. My body ached, hangovers always began with the body, eyelids were allowed to open, a ceiling fan which certainly wasn't mine spun lazy circles on the ceiling, I looked beside me, expecting Moe.

It wasn't Moe, it was the Pianist from last night, someone had shot a neat hole straight through his forehead then turned his lifeless eyes to face me on the bed.

I shuddered, no point looking for the pistol with my fingerprints left, no doubt, under the bed.

Had my cell phone been taken? Yes of course it had, I realized I would have to get out of bed, climbing over the foot of the bed and hopping as far as I could away from it, taking the least likely path the crooks could have taken hoping some uncontaminated evidence remained. No telephones had been left in what was now obviously some mungy hotel room. I draped the door handle with toilet paper (thankfully there was some) and having checked the peephole, I eased it open and stood with only my head around the frame and hollered. "Police, hey, somebody call the cops."

A cleaner heard me and I convinced him to call the Police before he heard my story. Now it was a matter of standing in the doorway and having my P.I. investigator number ready. Since the crooks had taken my wallet, I'd have to rely on memory for the 9 digit code.

I sighed. What a weekend.

80 Jesus never learned about B8A

2009-03-22T22:47:00.006+01:00

"Blessed are the meek"

Before he could learn B8A he said he had to learn Alpha. His teachers could not persuade him, they imagine he learned Alpha on the cross?

There was a long time in the between place, grey but not grey, neither distance nor closeness, up and down were missing, awareness with neither self nor object.

When the world was built it was already millions of years old, time flowed in all directions, as far back as necessary, as far forward as necessary, necessary to complete the plan, and there was a plan, time enough for everyone, that was the plan.

As awareness expanded, time operated as a universal editor, throwing causes in any direction necessary to support the new imaginings; the world was flat until it was round, the Gods walked until they retreated to the heavens then to scripture, finally to eternity.

From time to time there were those who learned things, ways and means, unfortunately those ways and means are not only unteachable, they are highly dangerous.

For one who knows only the one, there is one; then the universe flows.

For one who knows B8A, this one knows the one and one more...and so arises the multiverse

The B8A exists; the heavens, the hells, the longed-for lands belong to it.

The B8A is the diamond and the cross

The B8A is the warm beating chaos at the heart of order and the order underpinning the chaos

The B8A is not the beginning, that is Alpha, nor is it the beginning of the end, that is Omega.

Be aware:

The B8A is the beginning of the rest.

81 Let there be sandwiches

2009-03-15T17:25:00.005+01:00

Sandwiches were laid out in a long row for the guests all along the breakfast bar on a succession of cutting boards purchased over several years from all over the world. The selection process was left up to the host but the game itself they had played many times together. When the guests arrived they were cautioned to chew carefully because inside one of the sandwiches was a hard baked bean and whoever got the bean would be the killer for the game tonight.

As the guests arrived and took their sandwiches and began wandering all over the house, spilling crumbs everywhere, they chewed their sandwiches slowly and soon, one of them had found the bean and as per the rules, began a conversation with the other guests, casually slipping in the codeword they had agreed upon, guests who heard the word (and were thus officially dead) retired to the den in the basement and waited with cocktails for the game to end.

When there were only two guests left it was clear who the killer was. He led the way down to the den and everyone wished him a happy birthday.

For the rest of their lives they never forgot the look on his face, he'd never told anyone his birthday, he'd never had a surprise birthday party. He was so happy he felt his heart would burst.

And so, he died.

81 Making things up and tearing things down

2009-03-13T10:57:00.005+01:00

Honestly, what kind of a guy is Johnny? What kind of a guy lives like that? I mean, he's so ordinary I think he's been in my class for 3 years now. It took me that long to remember his name! I might still have it wrong! HOW forgettable! The guy has no distinguishing features; average height, average looks, average hair, average clothes, average average average all the way down! I wonder how he does it? The teachers in school marked him absent a whole semester last year and Johnny and his parents had to show them Johnny's class notes to prove he'd been there; how average can you get? It's only because we've shared a class for three years in a row that I remember there even exists a person by the name of Johnny Houdini...

I wonder what he'll be when he grows up?

82 The forever goodbye

2009-03-10T22:37:00.004+01:00

Running through the woods grew tiresome, so Jack walked. He at once noticed the ground beneath his shoes, the air in his lungs, the sweat on his back. It seemed as though his body returned to him the moment he stopped running; running he felt he wore another body, a lighter body, a body that touched the world lightly.

Water flowed and he heard it, choosing to abandon his plans he walked off the running path and went down to the source of the sound. He sat down, among discarded plastic and broken bottles, along the banks of a swiftly flowing stream. He ignored the garbage and shifted himself once to get something out from under him, picking up the source of his discomfort, he drew his thumb along the edge of a rusted bottlecap and tossed it behind him.

He sat there long enough for his sweat to cool, his breathing to slow. closing his eyes he recognized the sound must have been the same since the stream had been born, it was only his vision that kept him aware of the garbage, in one sense, the garbage disappeared when he closed his eyes, but the stream remained.

He felt his mind beginning to drift until he concentrated on the sound of the stream, whenever he was successful, there were times when he also vanished, and the stream was all he knew, all he had ever known. Simply all.

Ultimately, he stood up to go, Jack felt if he stayed longer he would never leave, however far away he went. It was difficult to express his feelings in words so he left them uninterpreted.

Sunday was never over, only Monday always arrived.

83 The Chattering

2009-03-08T09:29:00.004+01:00

I will not be here again. -Why Wei Wu Wei Laughed (pseudonymous)

There was once a boy of uncertain years and a very definite age. Games happened around him with great frequency. The boy was empty. Still, the words flowed: a hurly without a burly, a hocus without a pocus, a song without a staff, a mirror without an image, a noise without a source, an embrace without a body, a thought without a mind, a country without a territory, a substance without a surface, an absence without a presence, a lost without a found, a device without a driver.

A chaos without dischord, an order without structure.

The boy was happy for no reason at all.

Once, the boy had been unhappy, deafened by chattering.

It was ridiculous to believe how simple the solution was. Incredibly lost, one day he accidentally got out of his own way, the chattering remained as a natural phenomenon only now it wasn't granted more weight than the wind in the Autumn leaves. Noticing this. The boy ceased struggling and promptly drowned in unfiltered experience.

Such surprise! To drown!

Yet still to breathe!

84 The Lost Wenches of Mayfair Lulady

2009-03-07T07:49:00.007+01:00

Once upon a time they dressed so fine, did the boozy jive, didn't they?

-The lost Wenches

It's a bunch of grapes, you know? The girls were invested in heavily, by parents and educators and societies and governments, all in the hope that someday they might get picked before they rotted on the vine.

Still, they became musicians.

I was assigned by my newspaper to interview the girls, on three separate occasions: once, early in their career when critical mass was still building and the first triple-platinum album was still just a melody in the head of the lead guitarist; a second time, when they had bought the mansions and thrown the most lavish parties of the post-crash planet; a third and final time with the lead guitarist when the tragedy occured.

I never saw them again after that. I didn't care to. Such a loss.

Now, looking back on their career, I can notice the changes, when they stopped living spontaneously and when they started believing their own press. They used to go into the night without any illumination, they used to make it up as they went along.

Janice Axworthy complained that the best time of her life was when she, Mayfair, Agatha and Michele had just played the local jukejoint. Making it up as they went along.

Janice missed Mayfair, she had always suspected that she wouldn't be able to take the attention, talented but shy turned out to be a toxic combination for a musician. She felt grateful they'd had a solid ten years of music but regretted that their time together would ultimately be so short. I have no idea why she called me, why she called me after so many years and why, as her choice of location for her exegesis, Janice chose an obscure cafe in an obscure city in central India named Victory, I simply woke one afternoon to a knock at the door and a FedEx courier gave me an envelope with tickets, booking confirmations, instructions, and a letter from Janice explaining enough to slake my curiosity but not enough to satisfy it.

It turned out that everything she'd written was a pack of lies. But by the time I realized that I didn't care.

The following week, I was on a plane to India.

After several transfers, I landed at a local airstrip near Victory City, a car and driver were waiting to whisk me to the cafe. It was called, with little imagination I might add, the Victory Cafe. Narrow and modern and cold. Janice had arrived ahead of me Even after all these years I recognized her, the backwards brushed hair, the wind in her eyes, the sly smile.

"Bunny Jones, I knew you'd darken my door again someday."

"Hello Janice, it's good to see you too," She liked to speak in classic movie lines, I remembered how much I'd missed that affectation, although we'd never spent much time together and I could not really call myself her friend, she had profoundly affected me with her spark and crackle; our rapport had fallen into old grooves left by others, I don't know, I guess we recognized each other somehow.

I was cautious to put much stock in it though, Janice was a monstrously charismatic person and it was highly probable she had this effect on everyone she met: made you feel interesting and smart and funny when outside her presence you were certain that you were pedantic and dull and humourless.

"So why are we meeting here?"

"She's back, Beuford, Mayfair." I fought back an irrational anger, she'd used my actual name, she wanted me to know this was serious. I pushed the anger down.

10 years ago, Mayfair Lulady, lead guitarist and songwriter of The Lost Wenches, had chosen my apartment as her point of exit. Our interview had gone smoothly, then she had excused herself to the bathroom and quietly choked herself to death with a bathroom towel. It had derailed me in every conceivable way. I hoped Janice got on with her foolishness because I was suddenly, fiercely, near the end of my patience.

She reached across the narrow tabletop and took my hand.

"Listen, she said." I waited for her to speak.

Then I heard music, guitar music, music played improvisationally, brightly, a signature style I hadn't heard in years.

I turned around, a ten year old girl with an odd birthmark on her throat was playing Lost Wenches tunes but not as they'd been recorded, these were better, mature compositions of a lifetime musician. Her look was serious but I couldn't see her clearly.

I was crying.

85 The years are long

2009-03-05T20:54:00.003+01:00

Uninterrupted wilderness with nary a mark of human history upon it

I can remember when all this was city. I sometimes hear taxis, traffic, roar of music from rushing cars, windows rolled up, air conditioning blasting arctic air making the glass sweat against the deep heat of summer. I don’t even know why I bother writing this down. My kids have never even seen a moving car, let alone heard a taxi, or an ambulance, or a fire truck. Let alone a police siren. Sometimes our police, those old enough to remember, make half-hearted woooooOOOOooooo noises under their breath when they walk their beats. At least we have police, some of the communities we hear about from travelling traders have nothing. Civilization is hanging on a thread in any case, is it any wonder after all the changes that in some places, it’s snapped?

“What you up to Swain?” His name is Arnold, he’s a nosy butthead and my only real friend.

“Nothing Arnie, wasting time like always.”

“Life is short, eh?”

“And the years are long” As I look up from my notes I smile at the familiar refrain despite myself. I don’t have the heart to call what I’m doing a journal. I used to be a printer once so I have paper. Lots of paper. I hid most of my supplies during the crazy times after the change, when the machines stopped working and electricity stopped flowing and there was a new ideology each week, each ideologue demanding paper for his so-called ‘revolutionary’ pamphlets. Hardly anybody alive today remembers those times. I knew it was all horsecrap. Not a very strong word but I try not to swear around my kids, even on paper I would like some words to get unpopular again, I save them up, it's amazing what we've lost but for me, what's more amazing is what's persisted, It's so prevalent these days I wonder if it can be called swearing anymore.

Regardless, I chose to save them up. For what? I don’t know. I save them anyway. For a rainy day, only we never have merely ‘rainy’ days anymore, just sunny days and days so dark with inundation that time is lost and we don’t know what day of the week it is anymore. Last year there was a Thursday night that lasted 5 days by my estimation. Using the growth of mushrooms to make my measurements is not terribly accurate but all the usual ways we used to measure things went with the sun.

Now there is only a bright ball in the sky and another one, slightly dimmer at night. I suspect it’s the same ball. Little things give the nature of the disaster away. Last week the sun rose in the west for a whole week and nobody noticed, it's a common enough reversal.

Little things like that tell us that everything that could possibly have gone wrong has gone wrong. We have no idea what will happen. We wait and raise our kids, what kids we have, work the land, eat, love, and check ourselves. Male sterility is high, there is a fearful symmetry here, I myself ask whether it’s time to move on again.

My stash of supplies is many hundreds of kilometres away, I have never been back to the city of my birth, long buried in the tall grass. I’m wary of meeting others like me, those who’ve escaped accident and suicide during these long dirty centuries.

I am 800 years old in September. Arnie is my only friend because one day I heard him say ‘Jesus’ under his breath and I knew he was one of the old timers. Those who’ve managed to survive since the change, since time itself changed.

Nobody in this community has ever heard of Jesus Christ, the last bible I ever saw is buried in my secret stash. Isn’t it amazing what can be lost in 800 years? Sometimes I wonder at what we had lost back when the sun was still the sun, and antiquity did not refer to the time when electricity was more than a myth to frighten children.

I told Arnie what I was, it felt good. Such a long time since I could speak my own language! With Idiom and metaphor and reference! Why are so few of us left? Why has so much changed? Why does nothing make sense anymore? Questions we had no answers for. The world had remained, but the laws had changed. Neither Arnie nor I were ever the intellectual types to figure out such details.

A day had come, the world had changed, death had stopped.

I spent a few hundred years living mad as an animal in the hills, it came and went. A lot can happen in 800 years.

We knew to keep our secrets, despite the apparent order of our community, superstition ruled as it had not ruled since the 12^th century of our shared and secret history.

It was the year 801 AE (After the Event) and the time effect applied to everyone equally.

And we were hunted.

The children born just after the event, merely 600 years old, were our tormentors. They laboured under the delusion that we were the ones responsible for their troubles. They hunted us and killed us. They were the true inheritors of this world. After all, they were born here.

I know this is not my Earth. It’s a cruel parody of the place I knew, but we go on pretending.

I realized that my notes had led me to a decision: It is time to move on, I will tell my wife in the morning, a good woman, only 300 years old but good looking and great with our kids.

Hopefully Arnie and his wife would join us, whatever this world might be, it was certainly depopulated, chaos, war, plague and famine had left their mark, there would be somewhere to go, somewhere like where we were now had been a few short decades ago: the frontier. This community had been founded by Arnie 80 years before I’d turned up, but it was too established now, too comfortable, too big, too conspicuous.

Arnie and I had not discovered another person of our generation in a generation.

The hunters called themselves Angles. This is what remains of our vaunted geometry.

I felt the contours of the decision in my mind. The decision was good. Time to move.

Time to seed civilization afresh. Time to live. No time to die.

For if we fail, after the rain comes the deluge.

There’s a darkness in the hearts of these arrogant children who hunt us.

I forgive them, they blame us.

But this is not our world, I only hope we can keep the light alive until the dawn of the proper sun.

I realized my notes had become maudlin. I put them away and turned to go home. The ball in the night sky was rising, I missed the craters.

I looked up out of habit and even after 800 years I drew a sharp breath and stared in wonder at the blank dark canvas above me and asked myself:

Where were the stars? Where have we fallen?

86 The man who was wasn't there was here

2009-03-04T00:12:00.003+01:00

The trees lost their leaves early that fall. I saw them falling when it was still hot enough to wear sleeveless tops. I noticed that the school age children had disappeared from the trams. I became aware of more traffic. People who could still afford vacations abroad coming back to jobs if they still had them. I had come back to the city after a long vacation of my own. However mine was far from voluntary. I had been elsewhere to attend to some old business. I was happy to be back but I did not yet feel I had arrived. For the first few weeks I had no obligations. I spent the first week alone at home. Reading. Cooking. Drinking. Sleeping. I had friends in the city but I did not call them. I felt the need to keep my own company. I stared at the ceiling in the sticky heat and let my mind evacuate. I had vivid dreams. Feet cut so deeply they did not just weep blood. They flowed. I decided these dreams told me to choose my steps carefully. I decided it meant that dangerous days were ahead. The day came that I finally woke and realized it was time to reconnect with the world. I made a few calls and made a few appointments. I met friends and listened to their summer stories. I gently deflected any questions they had about my time over the summer. I had no wish to burden them with my life. It was enough that I had lived through terrible things. I had no desire to reach back across time and exhume them. I had no desire to do anything but keep my mind and my body in one place. I had no desire to summon demons. My present was good and peaceful. It was all that mattered. My shirts were grey and red. I wore jeans exclusively. I never wore trousers. My hair was cut short again and my nails were clean and trimmed as they hadn't been in months. I felt lucky. I was over here. Some of us went over there and never wanted to be over here ever again. I felt lucky. I had gone over there and I hadn't wanted to go. I had wanted to be where I was. Where I am. I couldn't explain to my friends where I had gone or what I had been doing. It wouldn't be believed. Whenever my thoughts drifted there I remembered a snatch of dialogue from an antique movie of the future. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. I could only hang on with a survivors grip to the miraculous words of banal existence my friends related to me and I ate them up like a dying man eats at hope. I pounced on every detail with joy. I found the most mundane elements of life rich and satisfying. Walking down the street today I kissed a beautiful stranger full on the mouth. I don't understand why I did that. I don't understand why she returned my kiss so fiercely. I decided later that sometimes there are moments and places and times where people are possessed. It must have been something like that. All I know is that for a moment all boundaries collapsed and when I returned to myself I was much further up the street and the girl had disappeared. Maybe she had never been there. I don't know. My life is a series of presents unpunctuated by past or future. Since I returned I am here now. Since I returned I realize I never left. Since I returned I realize I can never leave again. Except once. Once is enough?

87 This was the time to organize

2009-03-02T19:53:00.002+01:00

Many years before the crash, it was inconceivable to most people how bad things could get before they got better, having a job, any job at all, became the new status symbol.

In Adjunct City, where joblessness and homelessness and general despair were as bad as they could possibly get, the miracle arrived, a source of pure energy, trapped in the spaces between spaces. At first, even the team that made the critical discovery couldn't believe the results of their own experiments: men who could run for days without eating a stitch of anything, women who could lift thousands of kilograms of weight without any apparent effort, children who could fly before they could walk...The team lived in daily wonder at the fortuitousness of their accidental discovery.

Naturally, they debated whether to keep it to themselves.

"I don't know, if this gets out, borders will be meaningless, governments will collapse, there will be no effective way to control people."

"That's the whole point! We can organize! We can take control of the world!"

"The power doesn't care if you have good intentions, certain people will try to create a totalitarian state."

"Then give it away for free! It just takes a few wires, a capacitor, this programmable rom we designed and a 9 volt battery!"

"You've done it already haven't you? You've leaked the design?"

"My family had a right to it! Everyone has a right! This is the birthright of humanity!"

She was right, it was too late, as long back as reading Crawford Killian (as had I) she had admitted that she had been certain it was possible, now that fact had caught up with fiction, I realized she had taken the novel's arguments to their logical conclusion.

She had known what to do all along.

"Yes, I've told everyone I know, I've trained them, I've told them to train others, there, I said it, we have no right to keep this a secret."

I knew she was right, it was too late, it was only a matter of time before the world knew everything about the experiment, only a matter of time before men everywhere where given the choice: to remain human or become heroes.

The meeting broke up, flying home under the power of his mind, Gregory speculated on the momentous changes to come.

Today the world, tomorrow the stars?

88 The last stop on Earth

2009-03-01T22:00:00.009+01:00

The last stop we made on Earth was stuffed with as much dramatic foreshadowing as a peasant cabbage roll. Enroute, my engineer (Millenia) had taken to spending her time locked into the hypogogic reader and re-scanning through every light entertainment module that we had stocked on board during the last visit. She had been especially looking forward to this trip in order to catch up on her favourite light entertainment artifacts from Earthside audible and visual. Ah, yes, light comedies, courtroom dramas, fashion magazines, these were rare and precious commodities in the local interstellar economy, most of us had overdriven our brains to the point where any respite from the full frontal assault of experience was more than just welcome.

It was essential to survival.

As I overrode the automated landing protocols and took control of the helm a familiar quotation by a long dead Earthling prince bubbled through my second brain: The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of games.

How much more true for entertainment!

My first brain reflected on the quotation as I piloted our stealth craft down to the surface expressed as a superposition of waveforms. I would collapse the form near the same urban conglomeration we had chosen last time, if only because from the very first visit, we learned that it was such a weird place that we would be ignored. We could have gotten what we needed from orbit but having come all this way, I looked forward to stretching my legs a little.

"Raf, nearing Hoolywode?"

Millenia enjoyed mangling the name, she said it made her feel 'local.'

"Near, yes, I wonder if they'll ever figure this out?"

"Figure out what? Why citizens of an interstellar spacefaring federation of planets like us have never officially contacted them?"

(We share our second brain, correct anticipations happen)

"Some bright individual could do it Millenia, but nobody would believe that we 'aliens' haven't contacted Earthlings because obviously we're addicted to their multimedia and might go mad if production suddenly stopped."

"Right, silly huh?"

"I'd say so."

Eternal Carriage Returns is available at last to everyone everywhere!

2009-03-01T08:35:00.006+01:00

Visit lulu at: http://www.lulu.com/content/5446058

or my storefront at: http://stores.lulu.com/bulent

News updated as it happens!

B8A is on hiatus until the new book collection is published (February 2009)

2009-02-10T12:39:00.004+01:00

61 - Whiskey Alpha Romeo

2008-12-17T20:03:00.005+01:00

That night, if there was one thing that Frank could've taken when he parachuted into that anonymous jungle in 1965 it was Mickey. Frank had never known anyone quite like Mickey, his nickname was War. You heard the capitals when people called him that, later he would make cameo appearances in literature as a red-haired female war correspondent but that character was very much based on the odd real-life talent of Mickey.

Frank had not been a professional soldier for long when he met Mickey, It would be a few more years before anyone could see Frank coming in hot on a naked burning country with all the keys to all the doors of all the ways of death poking from his battle webbing. When Frank first met Mickey, he hadn't begun to enjoy himself yet.

A soldier kills with sympathy but if he keeps at it, doesn't that mean he enjoys it? It's a sick divorce from the position of the victim but if nothing else comforts there's always the old standby lie, well worn with use:

what choice does a soldier have? To keep at it, pick a useful lie and stick to it, it's either that or instant insanity.

All cheques get cashed in the end though, but Frank didn't know yet about the faces behind his eyes at night, not then.

Back then, back before the doors of death, all he knew about Mickey was all he'd heard: that there was this war correspondent who was always first to the hotspots, first to the killing fields, first in the line of fire, Mickey doesn't know to this day why it happened or why it stopped, or why he told Frank the truth he'd never told anybody:

If Mickey stayed more than a month anywhere, a war broke out. It didn't seem to matter where.

Every tortured crevice of humanity seemingly itched for Mickey's presence to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.

Mickey had tried running from it since he was a teen in Argentina, but eventually he surrendered to the might of a superior force and turned his curse into a job. hoping it would run its course.

It's a lot like what any successful obsessive does, isn't it?

So by 1965, with all the keys to all the doors of all the ways of death poking from his battle webbing, Frank was parachuting into another waking nightmare with the soldier's schizophrenic detachment from reality. It was making his scalp and groin itch in nervous anticipation, he spared a thought for Mickey and wondered how things might go differently down there if Mickey were around.

Because the other thing about Mickey, it was weird, but you knew he wouldn't get so much as a scratch in a war zone.

And whatever force protected him seemed to look out for the people around him too.

Frank remembered an I.E.D. that had gone off in a club, mad naked destruction across the block.

Except for the bar where Mickey and Frank had been drinking with a few non-coms from the wires.

Not a scratch, although meters away there were only bloody stumps that once had names.

That's what Frank was thinking as the plane's cargo door, an angry metal mouth, yawned its black ugly open and Frank ran wordlessly into the ripping suck. Thinking Mickey owed him a beer if Frank ever saw him again. Would either of them ever live any other way?

Chute not yet open, Frank watched the plane quickly shrink to invisibility, leaving only Frank.

With all the keys to all the doors of all the ways of death poking from his battle webbing. And a lock of Mickey's hair stitched to his shoulder.

Just in case.

62 - When Frank moved into 275 block.

2008-12-12T22:11:00.003+01:00

Mickey had trouble getting in, Frank had failed, for the second time during their friendship, to secure an apartment at ground level, Mickey was forced to resort to the stairwells on account of his fear of elevators.

He wasn't claustrophobic, he simply had an irrational fear of elevators, like his roommate Jake during first year university had an irrational fear of department store mannequins, sure that one day, when his back was turned, they would quickly and silently move in and kill him.

Jake was killed when a truck carrying department store mannequins jackknifed on a local highway strewing mannequins in every direction. One mannequin scored a direct hit on his SUV windshield. Mickey always heard the words 'I knew it!' crashing through Jake's mind seconds before his brains crashed through the rear of his SUV. It's just how Mickey chose to remember it.

He always felt guilty for having helped slip a Mannequin between the sheets with Jake one morning. He'd never heard anyone make sounds like that upon waking, half scream, half groan, all terror.

Could it have influenced his reaction time when that mannequin came sailing silently out of the highway noise and grey to pulp his head?

One day, he was sure he'd wake up in bed with an elevator.

Or was it an elevator for a bed?

He didn't care, hopefully he could convince Frank to move again soon. Maybe he could unite the neighbours against him again like last time.

63 - Just an evening with Frank

2008-12-11T23:22:00.003+01:00

Frank found himself alone one night and took the opportunity to practice silence. It required great effort to not turn on the TV or radio or play a record or phone Mickey or otherwise fill the air with noise that would distract him from himself.

He suspected people who feared silence were scared of the thinking that inevitably came with it, he knew Mickey would rather listen to the hum of a bad electrical transformer than listen to his own thoughts. Mickey himself would agree, having told Frank in the past how awfully full of garbage his head was, full of nasty ideas and cruelty.

Frank let the silence sink into him as he delayed lighting a cigar end he'd found under the sink. And when the dry old destruction did eventually get lit, Frank realized how foolish he'd been to try. It was long past saving.

He'd have to lock them up from now on, only someone like Mickey would steal a 20 dollar cigar, manage to smoke less than a quarter, then assume he could hide it under the sink.

Then again, Mickey had lost his sense of smell years ago in a chemistry accident in high school.

He put enough hot sauce on everything to kill or cure a 2 ton rhinoceros of tuberculosis.

Disgusted, Frank killed the mutilated cigar falling apart in his hand and went to bed under a pile of papers and dirty laundry.

He stared at the ceiling until he fell asleep.

He had successfully remained silent all evening.

Ye-hah.

64 - Wet lungs on a Tuesday morning.

2008-12-09T23:12:00.006+01:00

Coughing, Frank returned to his new apartment one morning to find Mickey had let himself in through the balcony. Frank didn't realize that he had picked this apartment precisely because it was easy for Mickey to break into. The air was wet with steamed rice and Buggles, Frank's occasional stray cat, yet another change, was nowhere. Mickey didn't explain and Frank didn't ask, it was a sign of how desperate their co-dependency had become that neither cared to ask for a pretext, they were together and that was enough, Frank's nose was bleeding from too much decongestant spray and his hot rice dinner (odd hours) was thoroughly pink by the time he had finished with it. Mickey had dropped the pot of rice on the floor shortly before Frank had returned but didn't mention it to Frank.

After dinner, they settled in front of the television and watched a movie on tape, baked fries completed the picture, Frank went to bed around noon and Mickey crashed on the couch. Before he closed his eyes, Frank looked around his bedroom, a bedroom Frank had never shared with anyone, not even certain hired visitors. Not even Mickey was allowed inside, So as he drifted through his afternoon coming attraction dreams he imagined how he would feel if the entire population of the Earth simply disappeared tomorrow and these walls were all he had left.

Where others might have seen only dinged furniture and clothes on a stolen metal rack, Frank saw a universe of unequalled possibility, if he could spend a thousand years in this room, he naively imagined he could...flibbertigibbets, the idea was gone.

Having lost the thread of it, he finally surrendered to his little death, on a pillow of his conscience, thumbing his nose at a ceiling dotted with phosphorescent paint. imagined it was sky. For all he knew or cared, one by one, outside his narrow window, the real stars could be going out. He'd never know.

It was always overcast in December. He made a mental note to put a lock on the balcony and give Mickey a key.

65 - Never too late though there's never enough time

2008-12-08T20:25:00.007+01:00

Frank woke up to the itch of something under his back, rolling over on the filthy sheets he found nothing but quickly figured out what is was and pried the used cigarette butt off his back using the compliant edge of the door hole to the hallway. There had never been a door there for all the time Frank had rented the studio apartment from the Kaszynski family. It was a good arrangement. The flat was never properly maintained or inspected and Frank paid his bills in cash on time and everybody saved on the difference.

All his clothes hung on a stolen store rack. He hadn't stolen it though he had stolen other things in his life.

After the triple S in the toilet (Shit Shower Shave) Frank was transformed, clean, pressed suit, sharp features, he didn't invite anyone over unexpectedly so those who knew him would never have guessed that he often let his laundry rot on the floor next to spilled take-out boxes and rancid pizza.

Everyone knows someone deeper into shit than they are and Mickey was the guy Frank did allow to come over. Mickey would crawl out of his parent's basement and knock on the ground floor balcony door and Frank would let him in wearing a pyjama top but no bottom and they'd sit on a genuine original foam and particle board couch from the seventies (the most comfortable couch ever created) and watch movies on tape while speculating on when the black puddle of what was once potatoes at the back of the fridge (broken since always) would evolve opposable thumbs and let itself out for a walk.

Suffice to say, Frank kept no pets, he claimed it was in honour of an Australian girl who'd roomed with Mickey years ago. She used to recount how her mother never let her or her brothers keep pets on account of how they killed them for fun.

They would go to the beach in Melbourne and stuff black cat fire crackers into tiny cocktail sausages, light them and throw the deadly meat bombs up to the eager maws of the giant but stupid seagulls.

The gulls would swallow them whole then try to fly awkwardly out to sea, the fuse burning through their digestive tracts.

They laid bets on whose gull would get furthest out before, with a little 'pop' a gull would stone-drop into the sea.

Frank figured no animal deserved how he chose to live. Including steady girls. As long as his well varnished magazines kept him going, he'd focus on his retirement savings,

Mickey suggested they rent some prostitutes again. Nothing like treating a person like a disposable sock puppet as far as Mickey went. humiliating people gave him a stiffy you could hammer nails with. Whenever Frank thought about his own opinion on the subject, he returned to the idea that he and Mickey would likely part ways soon, if this went on.

Only Frank didn't have anyone else he could invite over. It could get lonely in the small quiet hours past Thursday midnight.

Maybe he'd hire someone to clean up this mess, get truly respectable, get a girl even. But that left Mickey's replacement up in the air during the interregnum. There wasn't time now to think anyway, he inspected himself one last time in the hallway mirror, nodded to an empty hall, left for work. clicking the door shut with a flat ugly thud.

66 - The band at the edge of time

2008-11-26T20:14:00.004+01:00

Official t-shirts and posters were on sale in the lobby and board mixes could be had by the chrononauts arriving anytime between last Thursday and next Friday.

The MC advised everyone to be careful and as dirigible time machines mixed co-ordinates with less conventional moebius runners and tempus fugitrons the band let go with their opening chaos of lights and sound and, with suitable chrono-modulation, music, smpte coded into strobe flashes which had the time vehicles in all their mad inventor's configurations dancing in and out of the vortex of sidereal tenporality so that a distant observer would only have been aware of a single brilliant explosion of noise and light that lasted for less than the time it would take to measure it or register at all.

And the music kept pushing back further into the past, naturally, to make space, since the entire performance was happening that way anyhow.

To the participants, the concert lasted for years, decades, without an apparent break, as the band phased into the next stack of time whenever it pleased them, the audience themselves popped in and out as it suited their individual plans, all synched up relative to each other only instants away from paradox by the all-consuming all-powerful smpte code. Archaic but a universal standard, difficult to replace.

When the concert truly ended, it was because the band had died. Of course, only relatively speaking, for the chrononauts, and the band itself, continued to visit the singularity and watch the show, again and again and again, ever with more participants, until time technology had spanned the universe itself, and everyone who had ever existed with access to time tech was a participant.

It was colossal, universal, immense, populous, gargantuan. So large and massive a pulse in the linear timestream that its moment of totality eventually eclipsed the frame of the concert entirely and with an explosion of coherence, It slipped to the beginning of the history of history.

What began with a heartbeat, ended with the birth of time itself.

But somebody forgot to turn off the amplifiers, and if you tune a radio to the right channel, you can still hear the hiss of abandoned devices of great architecture and unimaginable power.

They wait for the band to return.

T-shirts are still available in the lobby, but unfortunately, the board mix is absolutely, irrevocably, out of stock.

But those T-shirts are wicked, get 'em 'fore their gone, and hurry.

It's later than you think.

New Model Army

2008-11-12T21:38:00.001+01:00

67 - Big surprise for Alice

2008-11-12T19:49:00.002+01:00

Left to her own devices for the weekend, Alice, a professional executive for a major manufacturing firm, decided to indulge in a long held secret hobby: she would write another novel. Something she had done since grade school.

She was precocious.

Saturday morning, fresh from a breakfast of toast, coffee, orange juice and eggs, she sat down in front of her computer and cracked her knuckles at the naked page. Writing was as effortless as driving a car in a television commercial for her. She didn't just dive in, she drove in.

She never cracked her knuckles in public because her mother had told her years ago that nice girls don't do that.

She knew this to be a pile of horse droppings but out of respect she continued to obey, it didn't cost her anything.

This is good advice: concessions that cost nothing are better than free.

She had a natural talent for prose, the words were already lined up long before her fingers touched the keyboard, waiting in line in her head like patient dancers in the wings.

One by one, they left her head via her fingers and she had soon darkened hundreds of pristine pages.

Sunday afternoon, with a fresh ream of paper, she printed out a 308 page novel about a woman who makes a shocking discovery.

Then she went to her special closet where she kept all her manuscripts.

She was killed by an avalanche of unsubmitted novels.

Discovered along with her body, each one would ultimately be a best seller.

68 - Feats of Cunning and Daring-Do

2008-11-10T17:25:00.004+01:00

It was a devilish plan, full of conceit and bad intentions. There would be mayhem and deviltry and feats of cunning and daring-do. The most conceited of all was our leader, a vain man, rotten in every gummed crack. Also, he was the most eloquent, even inspired, orator I had ever heard.

Foolishness was rife on the eve of the dauntless unblinking moonrise, staring baleful and reeking of antique madness.

Made of cheese? My goodness, what else?

Buckles were thoroughly swashed, flagons of ale quaffed, bodices burst with extravagant abandon, Chandelliers were swung upon, duels were flourished on mysterious staircases to nowhere.

The hapless guards? Comic relief.

A kaleidescope of sweaty hairy roaring humanity sloshing against a tide of naked thighs.

All gone.

69 - Moist Attempts at Eroticism

2008-10-15T01:29:00.005+02:00

Because there was a necessity,
somewhere an edge to it,
how close to the catastrophe,
does air still have lead in it?

Isn't it great,
how none of this,
has happened before?

Furniture, Laminate, Server, Calculus, Footwear, Pencils.

Aren't you glad to be here?

70 - Damnable Fishies

2008-10-13T21:53:00.002+02:00

"A bright morning it is for the experiment sir," said Franklin Cordliss, an assistant and grave robber.
"I imagine you think me foolish to hoist my apparatus in this dead calm? said Dudley Thorten, a revivificationist and collector of exotic tropical fish."

Dudley produced from his pocket, wrapped like a market stall fish, a mortar.

"Salt, it's packed with silver iodide and dry ice, now my fooolish apprentice, now! hoist the antenna!"

No sooner had Franklin hurried to the winches than Dudley had fired the mortar up into the clear blue sky.

There was a pop, and the sky filled with sparkles and highlights, which quickly descended into a fierce and dangerous thunderstorm.

There would be energy for the attempt after all.

Regardless, thought Franklin, the master's fish must be saved.

71 - Music to savage the calmest beast

2008-10-13T11:21:00.002+02:00

Two middle aged men were talking on the street corner today. One had a small simple wooden string-instrument under his arm, He carried it like a newspaper; it was as long as a flat wooden cooking spoon. I overheard them as I waited nearby for my bus.

“What is it?” said one, pointing.
“It’s an Angel Harp,” said the other, holding it up so his friend could see it clearly.
“It only has one string,” he observed.
“It only plays one note. ”said the owner, raised brow, downcast eyes.
“Which note?”
“It plays God.”
"Do you play it often?"
"It's playing right now."
"I don't hear anything."
"Don't you?"
"Well sure, the traffic, the wind, people."
"Look carefully at the string, can you see it's vibrating?"
"Yeah, but come on, are you telling me if you stop that string from vibrating everything will simple vanish?"
"No, that would be impossible,"
"That's a relief,"
"But all the sound, all the audible, all the music of the world, would certainly end."
"That's insane."
"..."
"Sorry, I didn't catch that," he said into a sudden crushing silence.

A finger lay on a dead string.

It was the end.

72 - Gemini Moon

2008-10-03T18:51:00.005+02:00

"Evenin' Jay good to sync,"
"Been busy, quakes shorting the 'lectrics, tunnel's down but I guess you already know,"
"Yeah, shut tonight and tomorrow, guess it's overtime for you but I'll take what breaks in the world I can get, Jackson pushing you hard down there? I know he pushed me,"
"Yeah, wouldn't be wantin' to trade places with me now, would you? Tunnel Jockey, really, what a way to make it,"
"It's got a plus side,"
"Name it,"
"Well, fer instance you met me 3 weeks subjective ago and I met you 15 minutes subjective ago,"
"You call that a plus? I'd like to see the girl that'll settle for seeing her man once every 3 weeks over his coffee break,"
"Money's good,"
"Better be,"

"This is Tunnel Control, TV-8 respond,"
"Control, this is Tunnel Vehicle eight, pre-drop check complete, am waiting taxi clearance,"
"TV-8, this is TC, you are clear to taxi to Tunnel bay 2, I say again, bay 2,"
"TV-8 confirms bay 2, am activating manoevering beams,"
"Beams on target, you may proceed to bay 2,"
"TC, in position bay 2, drop clamps auto-engaged, requesting drop clearance,"
"TV-8, you are cleared for drop on TC mark minus 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Mark"
"Drop,"

Jay fell. Always there was the fear, the sadness. the pain, squeezing him, until the retrieval beams locked onto him, slowed him down, docked TV-8 in bay 1, he exited, three weeks further in his subjective future, but not in his universe anymore.

After debriefing, he learned it had been a fruitful mission, the last universe had some vaccines that didn't exist here, they had also perfected certain directed energy systems that were only beginning to be developed. There had never been any earthquakes on this moon either, it had been geologically inactive for millenia.

As always, when he exited TV-8, he walked back to the lip of the tunnel and looked up, wondering about it, was it natural? unlikely, it had to have been built. he was sure.

Why, gods, why did it have to go only one way?

Jay walked to his quarters and read his own biography.

Here, his name was Frank.

73 - They somehow manage it.

2008-08-19T09:17:00.002+02:00

The problem with writing what you know is that what you know is often embarassing. If I wrote from what I know, good people might come out portrayed in ugly ways, as cheats, liars, gossips, brawlers, deluded, medicated, hypocritical, resentful, pitiable.

That's not who they are, but everyone is so happy to rush to a judgement so they can stop experiencing, stop thinking.

Someday, soon? I'll put that certain book in my head to paper, it's already written, up there in my head, until then, I'll admit my cowardice, until then I only want to entertain and mildly disturb you, I don't think either of us is ready for the other yet.

Missing since yesterday.

2008-07-17T11:44:00.001+02:00

The player

2008-07-16T20:28:00.001+02:00

Tools of the trade

2008-07-15T21:32:00.001+02:00

74 - The courage to call it conventional

2008-07-15T20:22:00.002+02:00

“That’s our director.”
“So it’s true, the bear thing.”
“Yeah, he still talks to it, one of the earliest models, since he was a kid, it’s been modified internally up to the latest state of the art, but it’s the same AI kernel.”
“You have any talking toys growing up?”
“Talking, yeah, full animatronics? No.”
“The director’s bear? Has everything.”
“Even the pistols?”
“Even the bomb-mod.”
“That decides it, the bear has to go.”

p.s. After years of effort there is only years of effort. Rewards must come in through the window, never the door. If every word is a fragment of cliche then projects of anti-story are futile. Here is the end of the story: The bear, the actual bear, locked in a bank vault and operating its mobile unit remotely, contacted the authorities as the Director's clone was shot to shreds.

2008-07-15T20:14:00.001+02:00

Mr. Deckard drinks here

2008-07-11T17:54:00.003+02:00

Android Bar.

2008-07-11T17:54:00.001+02:00

Some notes on fiction or for the cognoscenti: meditations on what Bart Testa and Frank Kermode were on about

2008-07-05T06:35:00.004+02:00

Life ends while time goes on. There is no natural concordance between events. We are always in the middle, so we become anxious.

We have a natural inclination to make the moment make sense although we know it does not.

Stories are a human invention, the ease with which we narrativize our lives belies a hidden complexity. The satisfaction of fiction is, at least partly, found in how elegantly it's greatest illusions (beginnings and endings) are constructed.

Just as in a stage illusion, the effect of a beginning (more so, an end) appears wonderous, explained through magic, isn't it remarkable? We recognize something we have never experienced in life, for we do not remember our own beginning nor can we witness our own end.

Upon examination, whatever calamities and triumphs we have labelled 'beginning' and 'ending' in our lives proves to be false; there is always a morning after, until there isn't.

If finding a beginning or an end were easy, I wish someone would tell the phenomenologists.

In the meantime, the anxiety caused by living in a chaotic world (with little reason and no order to the shape of events) can be alleviated through a good story.

To be good, a story must suspend our disbelief and the average reader overlooks the two greatests feats of suspension a story offers, its most salient benefit perhaps, it begins and it ends.

Moreover, it's a beginning and end you can point to. Literally put the beginning under your thumb, page 1.

A book, its very structure conspires with the author to create the illusion. Even when the author attempts the opposite: A book without beginning or end?

Finnegan's Wake begins with a sentence fragment and ends in a sentence fragment and if they are read together the two fragments form a sentence. The end joins the beginning and the narrative becomes endless.

Clever, but it doesn't satisfy my craving for narrative, it does not relieve my anxieties.

If you lack any, allow me to help:

10 Reasons to be anxious about life and crave stories.

You don't get to find out how your story ends but you'd still like to.
All the great movies that'll come out the summer after you're dead.
All the great music bands that you'll never hear about.
All the great books that'll be written too late for you to enjoy.
All the new sports and leisure activities that won't be invented in time.
All the parties your friends will enjoy after you're dead.
All the vacations.
All the summers.
All the winters.
All the morning sunshine.

We know these things but we wish for distraction nevertheless. This does not argue that fiction cannot address real issues or examine society, for its role as examiner is well established. Insoluble problems are the meat of a good story, it is precisely the satisfaction of insoluble problems through the magic of beginnings and endings that delivers the anxiety-smashing punch.

Until the next time, until there is no next time,

The end.

76 - Notes on a pleasant nightmare

2008-06-27T06:09:00.002+02:00

Festival of smoking crosses in Belgium. Cross connoisseurs smoking church sized pipes in every manner and style of cross.
A large successful English class nearly derailed by gremlins at the blackboard who keep erasing the word lists.
A teacher furious because my classes are so loud she can't hear herself think.
A individual class interrupted for a workshop then extended indefinitely.
Kidnapping attempt on Professor Heinman's daughter foiled at the last moment.
A bilocating hall of mirrors such that one couple walks in and 6 walk out, operating in sufficiently out of sync timelines and realities that each couple is unaware of the others although nevertheless meeting from time to time as that is what waves do.
A five dimensional vase.
Reality viewed as a cross-section
Electing to stay versus lobbying to go.
Life as a choose-your-own-adventure game. Why not?

Wei Lu Wei - Master of Higgledy-Piggledy

2008-06-24T06:56:00.003+02:00

Wei Lu Wei, his friends called him Frank, was a master of arts both Eastern and Western, he had become so accomplished in the practice of 'Satori through Zen Procrastination, the Art of Not Trying as the Road of Success' that the less effort he made, the more material success he enjoyed.

"Your enemies have all the resources inside them they need to destroy themselves, to defeat them, you must only remove their distractions," he would intone wisely through a mouthful of breakfast cereal playing videogames in the lotus position.

His friends sometimes found his pronouncements strange, nobody could doubt they worked.

Once, in a bar, Wei insulted an angry drunk by accident who suddenly towered before Wei, shaking with rage.

Wei didn't even tense up, he stayed seated where he was, merely spoke in the scalding tone of a contemptuous master to a disobedient slave, "Later, your girlfriend is going to kill you, behaving like that, you've got a real problem with aggression asshole."

The hulking brute left in confusion, arms waving wildly and words spewing randomly. Lucky to be healthy.

As all his friends knew, Wei could have killed him.

These days it went against his philosophy to be so crass.

Saturday Night Fever

2008-06-21T22:56:00.001+02:00

Sorry, we're closed.

2008-06-18T14:18:00.000+02:00