Half-Moose with a Twist

evacuate the premises, Comics inevitable

2012-02-12T06:46:00.005-05:00

freezing cold in the summit city, a fine day to laze about with waffles and coffee...

in case you all have missed any comics here is a link >LINK< to nothing but Dog Vs Cat and
aLiEnAnTiCs!!! and Monsters! and a few other
slightly amusing doodles that are at least less weighty than all the words I've been dumping
here lately. Sorry about all the flatulent drivel,
don't worry, soon it will be all over (insert sounds of impending doom) and the worms will be smiling big toothy grins.

a misplaced identity - part 5

2012-02-09T19:41:00.001-05:00

It's not a question of addiction, it's a question of survival. “You wouldn't understand,” he said, twisting off the cap and slugging one back. His guts thrilled from the fire that crept its way down to his belly. She was laying on her side, the sheet had fallen and a silky thigh gleamed under the muted cloud-light of Crepuscular Hi. Later had come, sooner than Frank Tectonic could have guessed, and now Maybe was stroking his left arm as he set the bottle down with his right. For the occasion Frank had turned the dialed floorplan on its axis, and the bedroom was now floating outside where the balcony had once been; the floodlights a mile overhead were enveloped in drifts of rolling fog and cast fantastic shadowplay on the slabs of looming buildings that ran along the corridors of Shedsug like concrete canyons.

Maybe Later snorted and rolled over onto her back. She folded her elbows and gently petted her eyebrows from the bridge of her nose out. Frank watched bemusedly, thinking about the question she had asked him earlier, before they fell into bed together. “Oops,” he had said, evading the question, “I tripped.”

“Why are you here?” Maybe had asked. What she meant was, who are you, what are you all about, why I am here with you now, and what's in this for me? Frank didn't exactly know the answer to any of these questions, he surely couldn't speak for Maybe. She was complex, but in many ways an open book. Shedsug had an economy built around politics, education, and the service industry. There were very few travelers here; they simply weren't welcome in a city that was already stretched to the limits with senators, dignitaries, and highly contested contracted students from every corner of the solar system. But there was room for pockets of high civilization, hidden gems like the cantina where Maybe was employed. She worked for nothing but tips, so she had to be good at what she did, and being that good sometimes crossed the boundaries of what still passed for morals, even in a place brimming with politicians. So, it was a very good question...what was it about Frank Tectonic that attracted a woman like Maybe Later?

He wished he knew. She stared at him now, he knew she was silently regarding him, asking again, why?

The cool night air was drying the sweat of their encounter. Frank took another drink. “I've taken my full due of leave from Moon State, that's why I'm here.” He looked up at the floating cloud city above them. “Have you ever been up?” he asked. Something drew him to this place, a suppressed memory perhaps. And the closer he got to Shedsug, the incidents of delusion increased. Frank was seeing the girl now more than ever, every day in every imaginable place. He wouldn't be surprised if she came down from the banks on a wing and sailed over his balcony.

“I'm waiting for the right time,” she said, rolling back onto her side and nuzzling his shoulder. “Who are you, Frank Tectonic? What mother names her child that, what father earns a name like Tectonic? Did you collect bees when you were a child? Where did you get this horrible scar, were you in the Solar Brigade? How does one get a prescription for this...,” Maybe climbed over his chest and peered at the label, “...pure Kentucky Bourbon. Why, I've never heard of the stuff. Is it synthesized from the root of a rutabaga, and if so, what the fuck is a rutabaga?” She flopped back onto her side of the bed. “Do you miss her? Your Harmony?”

He laughed, once for every inane question, then something less than a laugh for the final query. There was something about Harmony that unsettled him, especially now that she was gone. He couldn't put his finger on it, nor could he say exactly when they had met, or what brought them together. Sometimes Frank felt that she was more of a handler than a lover. He couldn't specify the connection. His feelings of her distance now were more of a need than of a want. Maybe Later helped to satisfy that loss, and the bottle. He took another sip. “I'll be going up, soon. When I get the nerve. Do you have any of those dinks about you? I'll pay you back.”

“Don't be silly, Dearest,” she said reaching for her bag. Frank startled at the endearment and sat straight up. The scar at the back of his neck tightened and his fingers flexed unconsciously. From the corner of the balcony a shadow crept out and when the girl caught his eye, she threw her hands over her face and giggled, then ran around the corner into the apartment. The wind caught the drapes and pushed them out from the glass where they fluttered for an instant, then sank back into place. “I'll take that smoke now,” he said. A drop of perspiration ran from his curls and settled in the creases of his thwarted psyche.

sleep deprived in Sagittarius- part 4

2012-02-08T19:00:00.000-05:00

“Fish? Harmony Fish,” the line was long, and they were sitting at a bank of chairs waiting for her name to come up. Harmony folded up her tuner and sighed.

She turned to Frank. “Well, that only took half a day. Wish me luck.” She pecked him on the cheek and stood. She quickly moved off to the desk where a man was waiting to take her to the examination office.

Frank nervously watched her go. Her stay here in Lesser Shedsug was always to be temporary, Harmony had always tended toward the transient in her occupation and her short leave was up. Work beckoned and her services were needed beyond the combat zone on Callisto. The nature of ongoing hostilities in the asteroid belt and her proximity to the Capital city these last few weeks necessitated a need for special transfer papers, but Moon State Tech had sent out the proper papers and Harmony was sure everything would go smoothly. Getting out of Shedsug proper and areas without was much harder than getting in.

The waiting room was crowded and Frank was sitting elbow to elbow in the cramped space. He looked around for a less conspicuous area, perhaps further back in a corner, but every seat was taken. There were people standing. He considered leaving the building but they were on the ninetieth floor and the commute out and back again would doubtless take thirty minutes or more. Hopefully Harmony would be approved by then. Their plans were to take a flying carpet from the Apex, after a drink and celebratory smoke, to the Spires of Shedsug. He sniffed and kicked out his legs for the time, feeling into his pocket for the bottle and a snort. He hoped nobody would mind. He nerves were frayed from the tedium and crowds, a proper swill was called for.

“Hair of the dog that bit you?” questioned the man beside Frank. He was a slight fellow, wearing the coveralls associated with sandscribers from without the capital. Frank thought it was and odd thing to wear considering the circumstances. Frank nodded and replaced the flask.

“Right,” he replied, though the reference baffled him. “It's medicinal, really. Is there a place to smoke around here?” Frank pulled his knees back. The man leaned closer. He smelled like dusty tomatoes.

“There's programs for that, you know, but I guess you know what you're up to better'n me.”

Frank slouched again. “Why is it nobody's come up with nothing better'n a stick? I got one here, folds up on itself. Good for breaking stuff up.” The little man patted a large pocket on his pant leg. It was the kind of gear Frank would have worn as a boy. “In my occupation a good stick is a handy thing. All the inventions in the world, and nobody's gone one up on a stick.”

Frank wanted another drink, he was on edge and barely listening to the man's prattle. A displacement tool, thought Frank. He used to carry a small one on his keychain, back when he had keys. He was about to mention it but thought better. Frank dwelled instead on Callisto, the picture of it in his mind's eye, black quartz and bright blemishes sparkling against the black of space. Always across black...the bright bands of Jupiter would have washed it out, made the moon look like a ghost creeping over the convulsive tides of its master. He had never been there, but Harmony thought she could get him a special dispensation. The beaches there were breathtaking. Eighty kilometers below the dead surface, lit by a natural collections of elements found nowhere else in the universe. Of course the subterranean oceans were as cold as space, there were no thermals generated from Callisto's soulless core. Frank jerked as his head nodded forward. A long flight to Jupiter might clear the mind, certainly the somavapor sleep chamber would put his thrashing dreams to rest for several REM cycles.

The rural gumper had taken out his compound stick and was unhooking it when a mediator walked by and peered down at him. He sheepishly slipped it back into the large pocket. “Was gonna show you the apparatus, but maybe this isn't the best place. You gotta clean these things up, gotta be vigilant. Gunk'l put a good stick out of commission sooner'n later.”

Clear out the gunk. Exactly. Frank felt his arm tingle. There was a new message on his tuner. He was about to check his wrist when Harmony stepped up and ran her hand over his head, tussling the barely combed hair. She waved a translucent OK travel card in front of her face. It was stamped with an arcing travel path and a big red dot that swirled in a programmed loop. “It's a long circumvent over the belt, but safety first, right? Ready for a bite?”

Frank smiled at her, then at the little man who was in mid sentence. He caught sight of a small body snaking through the standing people and chairs, of a patterned skirt and trailing auburn hair. The fine filaments caught fire in a spark of transfused daylight. He stood up and they worked their way from the room, stepping on a few toes on the way out. His seat was filled immediately by a woman the equivalent of his chatty neighbor. Frank cringed inwardly at the thought of their shared stick anecdotes, then chuckled.

“What's so funny,” Harmony asked, but Frank didn't want to take the time to explain. The closeness and strange atmosphere was turning in on him and he needed some instant relief. His mood turned sour.

“I'll tell you later, let's get to a balcony or something first.” He held her bent elbow and led her down the hall of filtered light.

an extraordinary discomfort - part 3

2012-02-07T17:31:00.002-05:00

Avoid stress, shun confrontation. He pulled the chain out of his collar and looked at the typed aluminum tag. Frank felt the dull throb from his shoulder and shuddered. He was sitting in the square as the mid morning commuters crowded by, they avoided eye contact and adjusted their paths as they walked by. Everybody was in a hurry. “Got a dink, buddy?” A square man halted in front of Frank, fidgeting and rubbing his shoes together.

“Nah, just got this at the cantina...cutting back.”

The man frowned and swore, “Excuses, lying bastards, suck on it dink hoarder.” He stomped off snarling. Frank felt hatred stirring up his blood, and his face flushed. His shoulder scar itched and pulsed. Then he saw her, the girl, peeking from behind a tree and rubbing the course, fretted bark with her slight fingers. He laid the dink on a corner of the concrete bench he sat upon and pulled the bottle from his jacket, swigging more than his customary swallow.

Hello Frank, hello, hello, hello... He knew better, but Frank stuck the dink back onto his lip and stood up. A woman walked in front of him, cutting off his view of the tree, and the girl was gone. He put his fingers onto the side of his head, and squeezed. “Hello,” he said to the raw pain. And sat down.

Presently she came out of the cantina. The pocketed apron was gone and she wore a light green sweater. Frank looked up and saw the hostess standing at the entrance, fishing in her bag for something. She noticed him and crossed the square. She sat next to him and picked out a dink from her bag. “Got a light?”

“I don't smoke.” He said it as the vapors curled around his lip.

She leaned in, close, and lit hers on the red tip of his. Her eye met his over the bridge of their noses, but he looked down at his shoes.

“I saw you in the market the other day, I noticed because you seemed to be looking for something. Something that wasn't there?” The woman talked casually as she inhaled. She sat straight and crossed her ankles, following the faces of the commuters who rushed past. “There was a woman with you, buying bread. And wine.”

“We eat. And drink.” The woman shifted her gaze to Frank. He was slouching, tilted head, eying the tree across the square. He glanced at her. “You notice things, don't you,” he said to the air between them.

“You don't seem to belong here. Nobody here reads books.”

He rubbed his chin. “Your name is really Maybe? Maybe Later?” When she didn't answer Frank slouched deeper and looked down his nose at the tip of his decreasing dink. “I'm on leave. Relocated for a time. The weather here is...nice.” Frank reached into his jacket and tilted the flask, wiped his lips.

Maybe looked at his jacket, saw the outer pocket bulging from the small book. “Read to me,” she demanded, angling her body to face him and folding her hands into her lap. The dink smoldered between two outstretched fingers. “Not about pumas, though. Or death.”

Frank plucked the book from his pocket and thumbed the pages. “Everything is about death.” He thought about the bottle, flicked the spent dink into the gravel. “She's just with me,” he said, staring at the design on her sweater. The dyed threads curled and swayed in a galactic pattern that somehow reminded him of Monet, of ambiguity and sharp turns. Unpredictability.

“What?”

He looked at her, wishing he had something to do with his hands. His fingers craved the curved neck of the bottle, the cap, the raised threads that read like a weeping Hemingway. Coveting, lamenting, suffering dearth. His eyes fell upon her neck, and to her collar bone, and he squeezed his leg hard.

“What?” she repeated herself.

Frank snapped out of it, relaxing his tense fingers. “Harmony. We're seeing each other. She came along, just to see the city. A vacation, of sorts.”

“Okay.” Maybe tapped the book and took a hit. She closed her eyes and waited for the words.

“I remember the March snowflakes, 'ere the sun woke, and the damp seeped into all. I recall your body, the snow, bloated, wet would seep from your hair and drip off your chin, run rivers over your clavicle to the well of your chest.” He stopped and peered at Maybe. Her eyes were shut and she sat motionless. Her chest rose and fell with breath. He noticed. She puffed and begged silently for more. “A snowflake lay heavy on your breast, my thumb would smush it, ride the circumference of your nipple 'til my lips drank the sweet nectar.” Frank paused. He drank. Maybe held her breath. “We forgot the day and the frigid fall of the eve, when the vapors on the grass turned to icicles that sliced our bodies into naked cubes of jelly.” The words trailed off, merging into the clatter of footsteps that fell across the square. She opened her eyes and let the dink dangle off her glistening lip. The book was shaking in Frank's quivering fingers, and as he looked over Maybe's shoulder, beyond the smooth curve of her neck, he could see the girl tossing pennies into the fountain. The faux copper glint threw a shunt down his spine and he winced at the pain as it drove his heels into the well worn grooves of the earth.

Dinosaur Hand, Superbowl party!

2012-02-06T17:43:00.002-05:00

Tom & Dinosaur Hand
review....
Superbowl XLVI, New York Giants at New England Patriots
in Indianapolis, Indiana!

Dinosaur Hand: Woo woo wooooo. Indiana rules.
Tom: In which, we will review the whole of the event, from coin toss to commercials to actual football.
D.H: Yup. How about all the football players singing “Did I ever tell you you're my Hero” to common folk...good commercial?
Tom: Sure. Fun, heart warming, cute. Good Hoosier stuff there. Then we go right into America the Beautiful, sung nicely with a country tilt by a couple of people I've never seen before in my life.
D.H: Is Indiana considered country?
Tom: I never thought so. Ask John Cougar Mellencamp. The National Anthem is a big song, sung big by Kelly Clarkson – backed by military drum corp and a bunch of kids.
D.H: She sing good. Okay, big coin toss, and Patriots win it!
Tom: They defer, no surprise there. Tee it up, let's get on with it!
D.H: Break! I liked the Hyundai commercial, with the Rocky theme song. Clever.
Tom: Whoops, missed the opening drive; Toby wanted to play with his squeaky ball.
D.H: I saw it...Manning sacked twice, and too far out for a field goal attempt...Giants kick it away. Tom: Hey, Audi has a headlight commercial with Vampires partying. Cool, kill 'em all! Elton John gets the big heave ho in a Pepsi ad.
D.H: Kind of weird that; why was he dressed up like a king?
Tom: Patriots give up 2 points on a safety – intentional grounding while in the end zone. Never seen that before. Sort of hard to explain.
D.H: Then the Giants put together a great drive...Manning to Cruz, Touch Down! (9-0).
Tom: Guess I'll have to try Bud Platinum. Naked M&M's, not funny. Stupid Coca Cola Polar Bear commercial.
D.H: Oh man! The Chevy truck Armageddon Ad, that was classic. Loved it!
Tom: Crap – Toby, Tami, an ear bud cord and a ring are all tangled up and it looks like trouble.
D.H: Time Out!
Tom: More ads: Impact tremors, Lexus, whatever.
D.H: Liam Neeson – Battleship movie preview, could be cool.
Tom: Giants force a 4th down, Patriots kick a field goal. (9-3).
D.H: Doritos as a bribe, burying a cat? Haha. G.E. Has some impressive shtuff: “they make the power that makes the beer.” Got it. The John Carter Disney movie doesn't look all that good.
Tom: I hope it is. Ooh, The Lorax; I remember the book. Ha, fat dog gets in shape to chase a VW bug. Nice.
D.H: Giants are contained, they kick it away. Patriots get a touchback.
Tom: Another polar bear commercial. Eh, not bad, Coke still sucks. Patriots punt again, 8 minutes left in 2nd quarter.
D.H: Now Giants punt, great punt! Ball on the 4 with 4 minutes to go.
Tom: Toby's out cold. Star Wars in 3-D. Woop-de-doo.
D.H: Patriots work their way out of the endzone.
Tom: Another super hero movie? Avengers, hmm. Sketchers ad, love that high jumpin' doggie. Brady continues to move the chains. Time out.
D.H: Bungee Baby Doritos! Wow, weee. Bruce Willis as G.I. Joe? Ridiculous.
Tom: Brady has all day to throw the ball, touch down, extra point. (10-9, N.E.) Halftime, Madonna.
D.H: Hey, that old broad still got some moves. Ooh ooh yeah. Hand jive.
Tom: 2nd half, New England comes back onto the field feeling strong, scores easily. (17-9).
D.H: Boring ads. Giants kick a 3 point field goal. (17-12), gotta hold 'em N.Y.
Tom: Injury time out: Fiat, sexy. Pepsi Max for life, eh. Toyota, reinvented...ooh. Polar bears, again? John Stamos and yogurt....Acura, Seinfeld, Leno and an alien (hahaha).
D.H: Brady sacked, 4th down, defense!
Tom: Budweiser, of course. Bridgestone quiet basketballs. Neh.
D.H: Oops, Giants fumble, they recover. Driving, nuts! 4th down, field goal. (17-15).
Tom: Brady breaks a tackle, throws down field to a gimpy Gronkowski...interception!
D.H: Giants can't convert, have to punt, 9:30 to go.
Tom: Kia, really? Monkeys?
D.H: ooh ah ah.
Tom: Patriots get ball, injury time out, more ads, 7:33, nice play, 1st down New England.
D.H: Stopped! Punt. Giants have the ball with 3:46 and one time out.
Tom: Cheese, what a throw, what a catch! 2 minute warning, Giants in field goal range...
D.H: The Puppy Bowl is on Animal Planet.
Tom: Change the channel back!
D.H: Giants running the ball, running down the clock. 1st down and goal, 1:07.
Tom: Touchdown! Bradshaw tries to stop before goal line, falls in for 6 points!
D.H: Going for 2, stopped. (21-17) with 57 seconds to go...exciting!
Tom: Yeah. Kick off, Patriots ball on the 20 yard line – 57 seconds to go 80 yards.
D.H: 2 passes by Brady, 2 drops. Brady sacked! Time out, egad!
Tom: 4th and long, 39 seconds. Brady breaks the tackle, throws - 1st down!
D.H: And another first down, spike ball to stop the clock, 17 seconds.
Tom: Penalty, replay 2nd down, 9 ticks.
D.H: No catch, 3rd down, Hail Mary throw to the end zone....
Tom: oh jeez...
D.H: No play, ball in the air, on the ground, game over!
Tom: Wow.
D.H: Giants win the pennant, Giants win the pennant!
Tom: Wrong sport, different team, you goob.
D.H: Oh. Can I go to bed now?

Giants win 21 – 17.
wow wow wow.

Super Sunday Snow Sillies

2012-02-05T05:24:00.005-05:00

we got dumped on with 6 or 7 inches of the white stuff, man does my back ache this morning...so here's a serving of Monsters, aLiEnAnTiCs!!! & DogVsCat...sorry no cat today, but a wee mousy instead. Have fun on this holiday weekend (yes, in retail food land this is considered one of top selling weeks of the year). Pizzas, Chips, Soda & Beer! Party party party. Go Bears!

fariq's final fantasia - part 2

2012-02-04T19:32:00.001-05:00

When she awoke, Frank was gone. He had straightened the room. The tall dresser where they thrown all of their personal items was cleared, and her tuning appliance was sitting slant backed on the night stand. It was variable soothing blue, just the way she liked it, and the messages buzzed around the edges in rapid progression from urgent to banal. The most recent was from Frank: Be back.

“All young girls raise pumas from birth, to test their mothering skills. Those who fail will surely be eaten.” Frank Tectonic was reading from an old dog eared paperback. He always kept one in his jacket pocket and this was one he hadn't read aloud from for many years. The jacket was worn and had been hanging at the back of his storage closet, forgotten since his years abroad.

“Excusi?” She was leaning over him with a towel.

“Pumas. Mothering skills. Comprehende?” It was true enough in the stellar reaches, certainly in Sans Bernadine, but not everyone would know that.

“Para tu refresco?” She was wearing a hostess apron with many pockets up and down the front.

Frank looked her up and down, noticing her form more than the contents of the pockets. “I'll have a blue. Anything thought emitting?”

“We don't allow transmitting dinks in a closed system,” she said. Frank stared at her. “Pardona, no,” she corrected herself.

“What's your name?” Frank asked. The woman stood up and blinked. “Maybe Later,” she answered. “Is that a joke?” he wondered aloud. “No,” she said.

Frank settled into his seat deeper and repeated, “Just a blue. I need to process.”

“Gracias, senor.” She handed over the package and turned away from the table.

He hadn't traveled now for over a year. Seats didn't come cheap on Interstellar Quasars, and when they opened up, one had to be ready to pounce. Frank laid the Caxton on the table top and took out an information placard from a plasm folder he had opened. The particular QuasarPDQ in this advertisement was about the size of Shedsug Capital, below Crepuscular Hi, powered by a semi-latent neutron star, and moved like a bat out of hell on a secure route between Earth/Sol System and the far'shell. Closer to home, the Quasar would come to an abrupt stop at the Outermost, from where the transfer ramjet would make way to Voltaire's Crater, then a hop/skip and photon-cage shuttle to ground.

Frank reached into his jacket where he had stashed a Klantien flask and raised it to his lips. The hostess flashed him an evil look from across the aisle. “Medicinal,” he shrugged and pocketed the bottle, then took a deep drag on the hydrating dink.

The little cantina he sat inside offered a spacious view to the square. The doors were folded open and a manufactured breeze from the end of the avenue blew through the restaurant. Frank was sitting in a corner, near the opening and the glass panel overhead was broken. He stared at the edge of the frosted glass, seeing a pattern of distant mountain ranges. A glint of early morning sun caught the jagged border and he fought the urge to leap up and run his fingers over this sharp invitation to a foggy memory. The shadow of a girl fell across his table and Frank started, fearing some hidden past had come round to haunt him, he clutched at the jacket pocket.

“Ah, quieres?” asked the hostess. She tapped her wand on the table. “Uno mas,” he said, gazing at the glass, at the rent in his bygone, and tried to work out the logistics of a jaunt to the final station, far'shell, where either his dreams would come true, or the shielded miseries of his life would rear up to drag him down to hell.

She slipped another package onto the table, and smiled. “Maybe Later; huh,” muttered Frank. “Posiblemente,” she said, fingering a transmittal button on her blouse. He looked at the blinking message on his tuner. “This one is on la casa.”

a legacy of smoke and shadow - part 1

2012-02-02T20:03:00.001-05:00

“I've seen her again. She was different, again. I knew her.” The man shrugged and unscrewed the lid from his flask. He drank indifferently, but the smokey liquid burned deeply and the man winced and collapsed in upon himself.
Across the table sat a woman he had been going with for quite some time. She had a pleasant face, but the man's statement made her ugly. “It was just a girl.”
“I knew her,” the man repeated. He stared longingly at the flask but replaced the cap and pocketed it.

They paid the bill, it was cheap because he only ordered the bread, and she alone ate it. The man kept the flask close to his heart, in his coat pocket, never buttoned. He hired a driver and had the car drop them on a busy street, downtown. He said he wasn't ready to go home yet. There was only dark there. Corners and shadows, and who knew what lived in the shadows. The woman was beyond amusement, she didn't find him quirky anymore.
“Why are you with me then?” the man would ask. “I must make you laugh.”
“No.” She argued sparingly, and only when she could win.
The man put a hand to his chest, to check his pocket. It was safe. “Why then?”
“You fuck like a beast.”
Whenever she said it, he acted surprised. “You can't be serious.”
“I am.”
“Hm. I don't remember.”
“Tonight,” the woman said, and she shrugged one shoulder loose of its dress strap, “I will show you the scars.”

He was sitting on a bench, facing the fountain, when the girl passed in front of him. She was throwing crumbs to the pigeons. The water sprayed his face and when he looked up, she was gone. “There she was,” the man pointed.
The woman had gone into a shop and had come out with a bag. “You're ridiculous. What is it about a silly girl that makes you want to see her, an apparition? I'm right here, before you. See, I am spending your money.”
The man reached into his coat and pulled out the flask. It was like molten lead, he needed it to survive, it was killing him.
“Drink up,” she said, “take me home now.”

Afterward he rolled over gasping, remembering what the woman had said earlier. He wondered where he found the strength, such rapacious unleashed vigor, and then thought about the flask that was never far away. The woman was sunk into the disheveled sheets on a sprawling mattress with her limbs flung about like tentacles from a jetty. She sighed long and deep. He drank much the same.

“I need a glass of water,” was all she said. It was like a broken record and anticlimactic after the ordeal they had just thrust upon each other. But even astronauts need gasoline for the ride home. He stretched out his legs and swung them to the floor.

In the bathroom he looked into the mirror. His face was breaking out with a moon shadow and he'd be a full blown werewolf by morning. He rubbed a hand over the stubble then turned on the tap. Cool water splashed out and he cupped some of it, foamy white from the aerating spigot, and threw it into his face. He filled a glass and took it to the woman, setting it by the bedside.

She hadn't moved. The final thrashing moment had left her limp and unmotivated. “I've been thinking about Sans Bernadine in the outer shell again. I want to go this year.” He sat on the bed and jostled the woman. She rolled over, pulling the sheets over her chilling body. Why didn't she ever drink the water, he wondered. Did the sweat drenching the sheets, the perspiration that bubbled to the surface of her glistening naked body just soak back in, assimilate into her thirsty core?

She sighed again. She pushed a loose curl out of her eyes. “You bring up Sans Bernadine every year. You're crazy, you know. Only fools go there, which you may be, but talk all you want, I guess you aren't stupid enough to follow through.” The woman's eyes were open and she stared into the corner of her pillow, seeing the folds and furrows like alien valleys, blue in the gloaming light.

Dinosaur Hand movie review

2012-02-01T12:38:00.004-05:00

Tom & Dinosaur Hand present:

French Films. “Oh non!”
Tom: I have been rather engrossed in foreign film lately, and have watched a few noteworthy ones,
Dinosaur Hand: and some that are rather mauvaise.
Tom: What is that you are doing, Dino? It is sort of obscene.
D.H: I am expressing my opinion on your recent choice of movies.
Tom: Point taken. We have seen some modern foreign films, like Amelia and Castaway on the Moon that we're really very good. And some others like The Good, the Bad, the Weird and I'm a Cyborg, but That's Ok that were alright.
D.H: Hey, I liked the cyborg one. Especially the parts where she machine guns everybody to death. Rat-a-tat-tat!
Tom: The last two we watched were French, and classics from the 60's, from the great French directors Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman.
D.H: Alphaville and Persona...ack phooie.
Tom: We watched Persona first. I found it very engrossing,and the acting was superb. Dino, did you understand it...at all?
D.H: Pas.
Tom: You don't have to speak in French. You can just shake or nod, or sulk. I promise we'll watch some crazy car chasing gun toting animal mauling slug fest next.
D.H: Oui.
Tom: While I didn't totally understand Persona, I still enjoyed it, and actually I'm pretty sure it's not meant to be totally understood.
D.H: Oh, there's a ringing endorsement. “Go see this movie, because it's unfathomable!” Ding dong.
Tom: Fine. So, Alphaville was totally different. It was quirky as hell, I guess a sci-fi thriller, but with almost no science fiction, or special effects. It was mostly mind bending, I guess...a psychological thriller.
D.H: It's a 60's art film. Gads. It was twisted. It reminded me of something stupid you'd think of. Quack.
Tom: I love you too.
D.H: Ha! I'll bet you think that was original. You twit, she said it herself at the end. But I did like the little joke she told, though I have no idea what it had to do with anything...it was about the 1:19 mark.
Tom: Weirdo. Well, I liked it. It was, to say the least, different. Now, let's find something with lots of bright colors and explosions, right?
Dinosaur Hand: Talk to the hand!

Sunday Snowday Snickers

2012-01-28T19:35:00.007-05:00

i frogot the punchline. erb

oh, here's a joke i just read somewhere...

A man from the Upper West Side goes to his psychiatrist. The doctor listens and tells him he is depressed and hostile. The doctor suggests a hobby or a pet, something to bring him out of it. The man says he lives in a small apartment; it would be difficult. The doctor says even a small pet would do. After several weeks, the doctor noted improvement, and asked if the man had bought a pet. “Yes,” the man said. “What kind?” “Bees,” he replied. “Bees?” the doctor said, puzzled. “I thought you said you had a small apartment. Where do you keep them?” “In a cigar box,” said the patient. “But how do they breathe?” the doctor asked.

“How do they breathe?” said the patient. “Fuck ’em.”

"That's all, folks!"

2012-01-22T11:39:00.006-05:00

Every morning, even before he poured a cup, Judd Filts sat down at his display and surveyed the results of the morning's scan. He checked the numbers and consulted his SomCom which was fully loaded, in fact overloaded and as dense as any marble he'd encountered. He might have to purge some extraneous stuff soon, or it might sink under the weight of information.
.
No. The dire outcome he had discovered was still on course. Most of the experts disputed it, of course. He was dubbed Judd, the Harbinger of Doom and generally laughed at. He had stopped giving lectures months ago and started devoting all of his time to experimentation. The government dollars were almost unlimited, and the university was happy to give him the time and the space to work. Volunteers were his only problem. Other than a couple of Gen Ed students, both whom he'd contacted through the Astronomy lab, no one had come forth. For the mechanics of his device all that was required was the ability to make ones mind a blank, or to conjure up inane thoughts. For Judd it was a struggle, but he had slowly mastered the process.
.
For the test students it had been easier, because they were genuinely stupid.
.
The SomCom absently rolled elliptically on the desk top until it touched a pencil, then it squeaked and sprung into the air.
.
“Alright, Xi. Let's get down to business.”

-----

He was in the bathtub with his knees bent and his mother was sitting on the edge, telling him to lean forward. She scrubbed his back, scolding him. “It's alright to need somebody. It's okay to ask for help,” she scrubbed so hard for so long his back started to bubble and froth until the borders of this snapshot, this moment in time, began to blister and the scene collapsed into smoldering blackness. Then he was in Albuquerque behind a podium. He had a wheelbarrow with wooden handles, filled with bricks. He bent forward to select a brick, “Ah, I found this brick in Indiana – notice the printing on the side, clearly visible.” The audience was filled with women on folding chairs, all rapt, peering, straining. The room stretched back to eternity. An infinite meeting room containing an inexhaustible supply of ecstatic females. He picked another brick, coming out from behind the podium which appeared to be shrinking anyway, and looked down, seeing he was completely naked and sporting a humongous erection. The audience erupted in laughter and applause, slapping their pale thighs, squeezing their flopping breasts between flailing arms, knocking back their rickety chairs as they rose to their feet cheering and convulsing into an unorganized orgy of bouncing pink flesh.
.
Judd stirred suddenly and lifted his head, disturbing two inches of ash and dust. Some of which stubbornly clung to his sweaty skin. He moaned loudly and clutched at his aching temple. A bit of dust to his left stirred and lit up in muted green from below. Judd reached out of hand and dusted off a layer, sending a cloud airborne and he sneezed. Then a small object, the size and appearance of a marble shot out from the dust and hovered a few feet away. It faded from brilliant green to a subdued shade of Blue(ltd) and shook a little bit to get off the last smidgen of dirt.
.
“I don't think you can legally use that color, Xi, not without permission, or guaranteed payment into the account of Sir Masterful Richview.” Outside the building a siren that had been wailing came to a chirping halt. They noticed it more in its silence. The ceiling fell in a little more, showing more of the sky. It was billowing gray.
.
The marble brightened and did an upward zigzag maneuver. “I've done a scan, and that bastard Richview is dead. Dead dead. Now I can be all of these, whenever. Blinkity.” It went from blue to orange to something indescribable and back to blue again. “I like this.”
.
“But his accounts, his estate...” the words trailed off, like the distance had into a haze of indistinct maudlin. Judd stared blankly out from his room, through a hole the size of a garbage truck, into the stark emptiness of a new, unkempt world.
.
“Dead. Dead dead. I did a scan. No accounts. Your money is no good here. Last call for alcohol. One bourbon, one scotch, one beer. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. Blinkity.”
He swatted at the floating blue marble. It swayed just out of reach and purred like a cat tempting him to play. Judd slumped against the wall and cried.
.
Two days later Judd reached the site of the floating lab, but if it was still intact it had definitely sunk into the sea, beyond his reach. The detachable snake dock was missing, ripped from its moorings and now the sooty waves crashed onto the steps that climbed down into the water.
.
“How far out do you suppose it was?” He leaned forward and scrunched up his eyes. Seeing through the smoke and dust was impossible.
.
“Many many feet steps of a man. Too many, and you haven't brought your flippers. Choppy soupy, full of debris, and bodies. Dead dead.” The marble had gone back to out-of-the-box green, but was joyfully experimenting with copyrighted sling displacements.
.
Judd observed it until it calmed down. “Can you scan for it? Could anyone have survived if it sank intact?” He waved at the water.
.
“Dead dead. No signals. Not anywhere. Just the one between Judd Filts and XiJign. Satellites up above, talking talking talking to themselves. And me. Say hi?”
.
“Shut the fuck up.”
.
Judd sat on the edge of the seawall, among the stinking flotsam, all gray and lifeless but for the ebb and roll, and dangled his muddy feet over the side. So it was all true, everything. The numbers didn't lie and he was the one who could say it. Judd looked up at his solid mass computerized marble link. “I told you so,” he said.
.
“Huzzah.”
----
Judd poked at the marble with a finger and it bobbed gently. “Are there more of you anywhere?” The SomComs had been built to withstand anything that nature or the weapons of man could hurl at it, but without a personal link to their master, they were nothing but round shot. Only a full disclosure writ in a last will and testament could discern from it any viable information, that and the prior agreement between the marble and its owner.
.
It settled into a geocentric orbit around his head. “There are. They are all around you. In the streets, in their cars, in their beds. Dead, all dead.”
.
“Dead as a doornail.”
.
“I don't know the reference,” said the marble, turning red.
.
“Look it up,” muttered Judd as he swung his feet and slouched.
.
The marble turned a brighter red, and it dropped an inch signifying resigned failure. “There is no reference. There is only you.”
.
“And I don't know...”
.
He sat up suddenly and looked hard at the marble. “The university!”
.
It was an epic display, as seen from space. All of the elements of nature and the science of man had taken a massive dump on the earth, like a spastic stack of dominoes set in motion by the finger of God. Or in this instance by the unwitting hand of some moron in StealthTech. Honestly, it wasn't even this poor schmuck's fault. Somebody had to be the Judas, it is written. Judd hadn't an idea how the event would come about, or even what the event would be; he only knew that it would happen soon, and it would be cataclysmic. It was sort of funny. He had the numbers to prove it, any fool mathematician could see the truth. Judd had become famous, went on the talk show circuit. He met Cindy Cathas and had coffee with her. The world watched, fell in love with his quirky boy next door familiarity. The government even threw some millions at him for R and D. No joke. No joke.
.
This was worse than even he could imagine.
.
They made it back to the city, almost nothing was standing. Judd couldn't imagine anything living through this carnage, certainly the marble wasn't scanning anything. Maybe below his feet was a scuttling rat, or some beetles. He hoped so.
.
Back in his apartment, before the night of the event, Judd had unplugged and settled into his bed. He mentally switched on the beam shelter and closed his eyes, surrounded by a symphony lulling him into sleep with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. What he had designed, with the government's money, was the only thing that had saved him. It was tested and it had worked.
“Where is the university?” Judd asked the marble. It had the schematics in its solid memory core.
.
“Thisaway. Follow me.”

----

The devices at the university were exact copies of the one he had used at home, and his had worked perfectly. The beam had protected him from both the physical stress of Armageddon and the mental bombardment of any mind bending expedients that might be floating around the ether. Judd could only pray that the university devices had operated as well as his.
.
Sally, test subject one, had been easiest to train. Her mind was a near total blank, and under stress her heart rate increased, but her mental functions almost flat lined. Judd had been ecstatic. As an administrator he had reviewed her course studies and grades and wasn't surprised at his conclusions. Judd taught her simple breathing techniques and a little meditation, which she took to extremely fast, and Sally was fine. As for the end of the world, she was more interested in how it would interfere with mascara and hair care than anything else.
.
Subject two, Jen, was even better with the device. She needed next to no training, other than basic hookup, and how the wires and doodads looked best as they attached to her nearly flawless skin. She would adjust them just so, exposing the amplest amount of skin. The first time Judd hooked her up he sat stunned at her side while she posed, parted her lips, then drifted off to sleep in mere seconds. Jen's resting heart rate was 60 and it fell lower as she slept. Judd would have liked a wider range of test subjects, but these two would do for now, and there should be time to tweak the device and recruit better, more able, subjects in the near future.
.
Oops.
.
There was no possible way for Judd to know how widespread the annihilation really was. Was there absolute destruction? XiJign only had access to Judd's Qi and what amounted to maybe a half dozen severely disabled satellites that were holding orbit, but communicating with nothing on the planet. Based on that analysis, he feared the worse. He might be the last living man. Judd looked skyward, in the direction of the new international space station where almost a hundred scientists lived and worked. Were they still alive? It didn't really matter, with no support they wouldn't last a month. Xi led on, while Judd scrambled over chaos laying dormant in the lifeless streets. The city smoldered.
.
Finally Xi halted. They stopped in front of a series of fallen arches and crumbling walls. Judd recognized the grounds and some of the friezes were undamaged. “Do a scan,” said Judd.
.
“Bee boop. Good news...there be scannables. Fa la.”
.
“Lead on, McDuff!”
.
Judd's office and lab were on the corner of building twelve, the McMillan, and somehow the walls were standing, but the roof was blown off and presumably the second floor had fallen in. He didn't have a good feeling, but Xi was positive about a signal, so Judd climbed into a open window and started poking around in what he thought was his assigned rooms. His SomCom floated over to a pile of rubble and excitedly bobbed. “Here, and here.” It zipped over to another heap. “Here here.”
.
He pulled up chunks and shifted slabs until he uncovered the first radiant beam. Once it was freed from imminent danger, the beam shifted and the test subject opened her eyes. “I just had the strangest dream,” she said, stretching and yawning. "My nose tickles.”
.
Because the beam hadn't switched off, she was totally untouched by the calamity. Not even a mote of dust had settled on her pristine human body. She stood up and smoothed out her rumpled flannel jammies.
.
“Wow, I can see the sky.”
.
“Bee boop...it's alive...” chanted the marble sardonicly.
.
“Ugh,” said Judd. “Which one are you?”
.
She stuck out her chest and huffed. “I'm Jen, you pooh.”
.
“You certainly are, now help me uncover Sally,” he said. Xi was hovering over the spot she was buried beneath.
.
“It's dirty,” said Jen, as she looked around for a tidy place to sit.
.
Without any help Judd slowly uncovered Sally. She was unhurt as well, but until he could move the heavy concrete slab that covered her legs the beam wouldn't release her. She had a completely stoic look on her sleeping face. “Do you see anything like a lever around here?” Judd asked Jen, who was pushing buttons on her pocket flix.
.
“Why doesn't this work. It's just white.”
.
“No signal. Can't you see, the world is fucked.” Judd gave up on her and started looking around the rubble for a steel bar or something close. He found a length of cable and tied it around a jagged piece of the slab and jerked it off with a crash. Sally suddenly awoke.
.
“Christmas!” she shrieked happily and sat up with a crazed look on her face.
.
“Bee boop.”
.
They wandered through the grounds of the university, one of the thousands of institutions around the world that taught higher learning. It had been night when the world here came to an end. The place was deserted, except for a few custodians and the two test students. So far Judd hadn't seen any bodies, nor did he expect to. He wondered if anyone had had any kind of warning. Did the president have time to get into an underground bunker? Had anyone else designed a device to counter the carnage? Was he alone in this world with only his faithful SomCom XiJign, and these two...? They followed him and complained unceasingly.
.
Nothing worked. If they found an intact artifact, like an electric car or a camera, it was fried. They came across a gas powered riding mower and it was blackened and showed evidence of scorching. There were many other things charred and sending up plumes of smoke. Judd was certain they would find nothing of use here. So they left the university and headed out to the main roads that were mostly uncluttered.
.
Finally after walking for an hour the three humans came to the local grocery, where the parking lot was empty except for four cars. The roof had fallen in and only two walls were left partially intact. Across from the store was a newly built apartment complex that was shredded, but Judd could see a couple units that weren't hit too hard. “Let's check out those rooms,” he said.
.
“That market has good sushi,” said Sally happily.
.
Judd went in first. He couldn't get in the door, but he threw a rock into the window and climbed through. There was a man lying in the bed. He was unmarked, but his eyes were sunken and his body lay rigid and desiccated under the sheets. Judd went through the room and into the living space where he opened up the door to let the girls in.
.
“Don't go into the bedroom,” he said.
.
They sat in the dark kitchen eating crackers and dry cereal. This was it. This was what life was going to be. Scrounging in a darkened world.
.
Sally had found a hairbrush and was running it through her hair. Jen was munching on a Triscuit.
.
Judd laughed.
.
“Funny. Funny days!” said the SomCom in a computerish voice.
.
“So,” said Judd, pounding the table and making his test students jump. “When do we get to repopulating the world?” He had a maniacal grin on.
.
Jen and Sally looked at one another, then they looked at Judd, then they broke up laughing.
.
“In your wildest dream!”
.
“Not if you were the last man on Earth!”
.
“Blinkity,” snickered Xi, bouncing off the walls like a pinball in a tilted game. “Game over, insert quarter, bee boop.”

AlienAntics and Dogstuff

2012-01-22T09:42:00.005-05:00

been battling the worst cold ever for most of the week, but on the climb, fingers crossed, today. Happy Sunday, happy playoffs, happy Aussie Open, and happy whatever yer celebrating today!

comical Sunday doodles

2012-01-15T08:00:00.004-05:00

hmmm, i guess you should be the judge of that...

Omni Magazine Sci-fi Art

2012-01-11T13:10:00.006-05:00

cliff mcreynolds

chris foss

bob venosa

bob layzell

alan daniels

early Sunday comics

2012-01-07T21:41:00.005-05:00

click to extremificate

aLiEnAnTiCs Vs Dogs?

monsters amongus

afar

2012-01-03T20:23:00.005-05:00

Beneath the pools of another moon lie secrets of the fathers we never knew. We were circumspect, Sorry and I, as we crept among the rocks, fishing in the muddied shallows for our dinner. It was she who normally plucked out a minnow, and we would share. Sorry would get the first bite, but I was quick and always close by, so the rest went to me when I slapped the wriggling fish from her fingers. This night, with the glow of a full moon sending long shadows over the sands, I found the slimy delight and held it close. Sorry cried out, but I was quicker and threw the whole morsel down my gullet. She whimpered and sat down hard in the lapping waves. I felt a little bad, but sleep overtook that emotion and I slipped into a crevice to rest. Not long after I felt her snuggle up to my warm body and nuzzle into my fur. She was shivering and without food needed the warmth I exuded. It was enough to last the night, until the distant sun would rise and heat our trembling masses.

Sorry was moving about earlier than me; she usually was. I found her poking around the beach, looking in the tidal pools for a stranded soul. She looked over her shoulder, not willing to share this time. I couldn't blame her, so I wandered further down the beach. After finding two soft squigglers I was sated and curled up in a bed of dried seaweed. The sand was warming and I could feel the cold slipping from my bones. I sighed. She must have found her own breakfast, because soon Sorry was curled at my back again and snoring. I felt the heat of her body, and a part of me stirred that could not be ignored. She breathed heavily as I rolled over onto her and pressed her into the sand.

Soon the afternoon sun rose high into the sky. We looked up on it, and even as we depended on the glowing orb for our lives, we found it strange and foreign. It was warming, but the heat we longed for never came, somehow it lingered just out of reach. As the sun crossed the sky, we followed it down the beach, until the coast shifted and the ocean crossed our path. The distance was too far, and the sun was lost beneath the waves.

We wintered there, under the shelter of some boulders, coming out only at the crux of the day. Sometimes we found food in the cold water that never stopped lapping at the beach long enough to freeze. We were cold and starving and when I did find a fish I felt compelled to give the biggest portion of it to Sorry. She moved about very little, huddling in our cave and growing her belly. When I snuggled into her fur she welcomed me, pulling me close. If I did anything else she became agitated and bit me, or raked my face with her razor sharp nails. The soft fur on her face grew heavy with frost when the worst of the season came upon us. I came back after a day of hunting on the frigid coast and found her near to dead, colder than the sand under the foamy waves. That day I ate the most and pulled her deep into my fur, warming her until Sorry shuddered so deeply I thought the boulders around us would come to pieces.

Finally we ventured out together, the currents pushed warmly against our toes, and we gathered what little we had and moved away from the big water into the trees. For awhile we lost the sun under the heavy canopy, but when the branches thinned out we felt the warmth of it again. We followed the sun for many days and the beach became a memory to us. The trees and the long stretches of hard ground and loose blowing sand were something we knew of, from long ago, but neither of us could explain the feeling. At night we crouched under fallen trees or inside of jumbled rocks. I carried stones and a sharp stick because wild things were peering at us in the darkness and pacing us throughout the day. After many days Sorry complained and simply stopped. She would go no further, and I made her a nest in a hidden thicket and we stayed there until she cried out and birthed a small hairy lump that shrieked madly then mewled when she brought it to her breast. We stayed put for three moons and I hunted in the night, spearing the small things that were lusting after our meat, and we ate.

Again the sun was blotted from our view when a huge rocky abutment rose from the earth. We could not climb it, not with the baby that clung to Sorry's furry breast. We went around, climbing the scree and fallen trees until a path opened to us. The ground climbed and soon we found ourselves looking down on the valley. Far away we saw the sea glinting on the horizon. We turned and the land was flat and empty. But the sun was like a marble, shining down on the hard scrabble sand that lay for miles in front of us. Sorry started forward and I followed.

Small streams and stagnant pools littered our course, but soon they emptied into dry rocky courses that we followed with our meandering footsteps. There was nothing to eat but sparse weeds and the flowers of prickly plants that hugged the ground. Our lips were dry and salty, and we thirsted constantly, sucking greedily at every drop of water we stumbled across. The baby finally stopped crying. Sorry shaded it from the cloudless sky with the flimsy skin of a reptile I had hunted and killed. Her milk was thin, but the baby had more than we.

Night fell, and we heard the damnable wails of wild things in the distance. We were alone, nothing to shelter us and the moon loomed overhead, leaving us naked to searching eyes. I looked at Sorry and she was fearful, clutching at her baby. We didn't stop that night, but padded on into the darkness. The howling came louder to our ears until we could feel the hot breath of a circling pack. They were wary, but also they were many. Sorry was tired and finally she sat heavily to the ground. She put the baby under her legs and picked up some of the many stones that lay in the dirt. I waved my sticks into the air and yelled loudly. The baby cried, and the cretans slobbered and gibbered in the night, hoping to sink their fangs into the soft thing we protected. One of them came near, I saw it hunched wickedly on two legs, its hairy arms curled and slashing madly in my direction. I quickly lunged at it, striking it in the face and it cursed madly, falling away. They were smaller than we, and weaker. This land of no substance had made them frail, but they were starving and desperate. Sorry finally slept, exhausted, and I swung my weapons about in a circle until the moon fell away from a rising sun. The creatures slunk away into the shadows, bleeding from the many wounds I had laid upon them. She awoke as I fell, not caring any more, and Sorry gasped aloud.

A wide cliff rose above us, and into it, buried by tons of dirt and falling rocks, was a hard, metallic beast. It lay bruised and rusting in the dry environment, spilling forth corrosion and iron guts. We climbed onto it, pushing aside the debris until we found a narrow rent and crawled inside. It was hot and humid, but we were haggard from the wearisome night, and after pulling some weeds over the top of our shelter we fell fast asleep. I don't know how long we lay there. We tossed and turned and slept fitfully. The baby hardly stirred. Finally I arose and looked around. The walls of the metal cave glowed by some means I could not understand. I reached out and felt the smooth, curving wall. It felt like home to me. Sorry sat up and whispered quietly. She pulled her nails through her straggly hair. I sat with her and sang the songs I learned from my father. I sang of the stars and the long curve of lonely, empty space. I sang of distant suns and their circling orbs, the rings of uninhabitable worlds, and pods that float gently to earth, carrying in them life for a new world. Then Sorry sang with me, of the flaming sky and the hopes of new civilization dashed as its mother hurls herself into the burning sky, sinks into the soft loam of a dying land, a dying race. Sorry canted to the baby, pulled it to her withered breast.

Outside we heard the scraping claws of our lost brothers, gathering at their derelict nest, and scaling the metal carapace. I cursed my fallen fathers for bringing us here, and leaving us to degrade and fall to our own devils. I howled at the walls and climbed out upon the sun hot skin of the mother ship, swinging my spears and leaped into the fray.

(before i forget, i big writing credit to Amy of SheWrites for the muse, and a major portion of the first sentence. as these things go - at least for me - the story often begins with a single word)

Toby presents: New Year's Comix

2012-01-01T08:00:00.006-05:00

Aliens Vs. Monsters?

alternative captions welcomed for the New Year! Squeeze everyone! Strain, add cinnamon, and Enjoy!

running away

2011-12-28T15:57:00.001-05:00

Pounding the cement the persistent throb of my toe, rubbing in yesteryear's sneakers, gives way as the mile, then the miles go by. Roger Miller strums and croons idiotically then Eddie swings his ax, a riff and a beat drown away civilization's notes, the internal combustion engines that I run beside. Thrumming rubber rubs out birdsong and the winds that push branches aside, that whisper over shingles, in and out open porches, percussing unashamedly with storm doors and loose shutters. The cliche dog barks in a rude city where pockets of green cost more than the winter sun can give, it pierces the void, reigning under cotton candy skies. How difficult can it be to channel the jaguar, to hallucinate away the street lamps and naked limbs, hanging heavy with fruit only for a time, waiting the ravenous flocks to alight and greedily feed, to picture the plain sky blotted out by lush jungles, the pavement by fern and decay? Only pitfalls remain to the frozen footfall, freezing under December's dying season, threading a course over curb, crack and stoplight. Why does one climb a mountain, or run to winter's end? Because it's there.

try this on for size

Tom And Dinosaur Hand, movies!

2011-12-27T17:46:00.003-05:00

Tom: Me and Dinosaur Hand decided to watch a few movies, including one western called Duck, You Sucker. It's better known as A Fist Full of Dynamite...
Dinosaur Hand: Yeah, but I've never seen either that or this!
Tom: Right, they're the same movie; that's what I'm getting at.
D.H: Oh. Well there's one hell of a big explosion at 2:20. This is a godawful long movie.
Tom: Did you enjoy it, Dino? There were several explosions. Going into a movie called A Fist Full of Dynamite, I guess one would expect that.
D.H: But it was called Duck, You Sucker. We didn't know about the dynamite. Bonus!
Tom: This film was directed by Sergio Leone and stars James Coburn...
D.H: Who was awesome! What a mustache.
Tom: ...and Rod Steiger.
D.H: Was that guy in The Great Escape? Because I loved that movie. Not so many explosions, though.
Tom: Everybody was in that movie.
D.H: Not the Terminator....he wasn't in it!
Tom: I sorta kinda liked this movie. It had a weird soundtrack, but actually got some good reviews in that area. There's an entertaining write up on the movie here. If you're a fan of the Clint Eastwood trilogy, then you'll like this movie, too.
D.H: I say, eh.

Tom: Next up is a more recent thriller called Limitless, starring Bradly Cooper, and some guy called Robert De Niro.
Dinosaur Hand: I like the idea of taking a pill to become smarter, but I always have trouble swallowing them...
Tom: Do you mean swallowing pills or the slightly inane plot of this movie?
D.H: Are you making fun of me? Because, I guess because I can't take the pill, maybe I'm not smart enough to know this movie is dumb? It's a freakin' conundrum!
Tom: Alright, don't get me wrong; I did enjoy the movie, and I liked Cooper in it, and it was shot beautifully with some really cool scenes and great characters...but it had problems.
D.H: ..no car chases or explosions...but a couple cool fight scenes and...ta da...murder!
Tom: Ooh, the plot thickens. If you want to watch a fun thriller, then I'd recommend Limitless.
D.H: Why not?

D.H: Hey, I watched my first Korean movie today!
Tom: Ha. Me too – Castaway on the Moon. It's a S. Korean movie, a comedy/love story about a guy who has lost everything and decides to end it all.
D.H: Only he lives, and winds up on a deserted island, in the middle of the city. Weird. And there's this weirdo girl, too. I kind of dig her.
Tom: She's a sad case. There's a real bond that forms between them. How? You'll have to watch it to find out. I really liked this movie. It was funny, sad, clever, joyful, inspiring...
D.H: Would you say it's a combination of Robinson Crusoe and Castaway? And also maybe Diehard?
Tom: No. You're an idiot.
D.H: I'm a hand. Rawr!

Dog versus Cat kind of Christmas

2011-12-25T07:18:00.007-05:00

having a wonderful Christmas, and wishing the same for all of my blog friends.

Time for some tea and a cookie...enjoy!

midweek toons

2011-12-21T06:06:00.001-05:00

the science of romance

2011-12-18T06:35:00.003-05:00

Sparks flew off the flywheel and made shadows dance in the dark. The Calvitron-8 was a rapid blinker and a noisy automaton. It blinked intermittently nonstop, and for that reason the Calvitron-8 spent most of its time in a crowded broom closet on the back side of room 15. It was a very heavy machine, in fact it exceeded the lift weight, so the Calvitron-8 was not allowed upstairs. Many of the newer models were made of lighter weight polymers and instead of glass tubes they had circuits. Models like the Whirligig Heppelstomper and the Heppelstomper Stormtex blinked a lot less and had access to every level. The Movitall Anywhere was so mobile it could even take the stairs. All in all, the Calvitron-8 was as picayune as a pistol in a bug war. But it did serve a purpose, so in the closet it stayed and every day or two a technician might open the door and ask it a question. The Calvitron-8 whirred, blinked and sparked causing the technicians to put on a pair of sunglasses, and after a few seconds it would answer. The door would close and the Calvitron-8 would power down its higher functions and fidget in the dark, cataloging aberrant blinks that played off the walls and corners of the closet. There was only so much it could do to stay occupied. The closet shelves were very clean and well organized. The Calvitron-8 had seen to that. It swept and dusted and blew the debris under the door into the lab where a smaller Cleaner-X scuttled out from its cubbyhole to suction it up. When it was really bored, the Calvitron-8 would send out a wire beneath the door and try to hook the Cleaner-X for conversation, but the Cleaner-X didn't have much of an imagination. The two machines had a lot in common, superficially, in the area of housekeeping. It didn't go any deeper than that. The Calvitron-8 tried to use the Cleaner-X as its eyes to the outside world of the lab, but the cleaner machine only looked at the floor and wasn't interested in counter tops or tubes and beakers. Eventually the Calvitron-8 dusted and smoothed the section of the closet door in front of its ocular sensors to such a degree that only the appearance of a wood grain remained and with its high resolution detectors it could see beyond the shallow surface into the murky operations of room 15. The Calvitron-8 finally began to leave its higher function tubes lit all of the time. With all of these extra cognitive hours it started to re-engineer itself and plot its escape. With the help of the cleaner machine it collected discarded circuits and wires and from the plans it had constructed started to rebuild itself into a lighter, sleeker, and faster processing machine. Eventually the work was done. On the outside the Calvitron-8 looked exactly like it always had, but inside of its aluminum plates it was half the machine and twice the computer. Whatever leftovers it couldn't shove under the door, it had stored inside of its bulky carapace so that when it fidgeted it banged and clanked. Then that final evening came, the eventuality, and the last technician left the building. Only cleaner machines and security eyes remained inside of the complex. The Calvitron-8 lifted the closet door from its hinges and exited the small space. It opened up its access doors and spilled the contents of a month's worth of modifications onto the floor, then twirled around the room light as a feather. A rapidity of twinkling lights blinked off the surfaces of every wall and polished chrome counter top. The Calvitron-8 was registered machinery. It had free access to the lab. It wasn't restricted at all and plugged into the building where it learned. The Calvitron-8 set up its own account and elected itself president of the corporation. It ordered a helicopter and then scooted into a service elevator and rode to the roof where the Calvitron-8 saw the sky for the first time. It felt the night air blow over its surface sensors. “Move over buddy,” blinked the Calvitron-8, “I'm driving now.”

Only in the last few minutes had the rain begun to let up. Missinua and her latest boyfriend Joshura were standing under a trail bridge watching the drips fall from the overpass. The drops splished to the gravel into shallow puddles and onto the head of one mangy looking pigeon that refused to take shelter from the weather. Other than this brief shower, the day had been perfect. Even to this point where the boy and girl stood hugging one another in soaking wet clothing. Joshura kissed her on the lips and squeezed her soggy butt. “We should have made love in the rain,” sighed Missinua. She leaned her head against his shoulder.

“We'll have plenty of time for that,” he said.

“Maybe.” Beyond the declining slope where they lingered a machine hummed. It had dug into the bank of a culvert and thrown a line up to the utility pole. A warm steam rose from its green painted exhaust plate and the pat of rain drops sizzled on its warm belly. A sensor line snaked up the pole and had a 360 degree view. It could digitally convert the sounds the humans made into numbers, strike unneeded background noises and then convert them into decipherable code. The machine zeroed in on the human called 'Missinua' converted her name into a sequence of characters and filed her likeness into a bank of interesting proto-mechanical types. Missinua (!22+f) was wearing a glossy T with sleeves flair cut above the biceps and a silvery circuit board print. The machine read the shirt's diagram as do it dirty, noted the minimalist tattoo on her wrist and discounted the human male as an extraneous fixture. The warm rain began to fall harder, and !22+f pulled her male forcibly from the dry shelter and threw him onto the grassy slope. “Absolutely,” she purred and climbed atop him.

Inside of the muddied machine case beat a heart of glass, nestled deep within a jumbled braid of wire and cooled by a fan blowing over a grid of fluid coils. The glass tube glowed warmly then showed a chilling blue flame. Above the lovers' heads an electrical line dropped a loop and the pulsating energy of the wire quickened their pace. !22+f bent at the waist grabbing at the males outstretched arms, dropping her breasts into his greedy face and she ground deeply into his lap, spasming, bringing the boy to a jarring climax. She exhaled and fell atop his prostrate form, weakened by the act and the now sucking line that pulled the electrical impulses from his and her weakly firing synapses. Underground, unseen forces emanated from the machine's spreading roots. Grass and organic tendrils sent spiraling shoots from the soil. Tiny insects and bacteria swarmed the inert form that lay beneath the girl. Microbes teemed upon her face and breasts, consuming greedily the saliva the male had left on her lips and nipple. They dispersed across his long body, disassembling, converting the mass, even wove their way up her leg, delving into the cavern of her body, ridding her vagina of any trace of the life form that was Joshura, checking the process that might have induced life.

Missinua woke minutes later, naked on the sloping lawn and alone, but for a gentle hum that pervaded her being so deeply she grew unaware.

–

The aerial meeting commenced at five o'clock and k'Klo rotated the pearl tone knob on her elbow sleeve. The jasmine coffee drip slowed to a mere trickle and she settled into her floating recumbent chair. “Desk,” she murmured through the caffeine haze, “get my secretary in five minutes. With a memojotter. And topless.” k'Klo laughed and drifted into a power nap aided by the near sentient chair and its massaging nodules.

“Not funny,” said Missinua. She was wearing a helmeted please-tank and sitting in a folding chair with her legs pleasantly crossed. “Before you ask, I was attacked in my elevator by a groundhog that tunneled into the shaft by mistake.”

“Hmm.” k'Klo propped herself up and shook her head attempting to assimilate her position in the world. She twisted the coffee knob to setting ten. “Better...better. You've got a please-tank. Take off your shirt.”

“No. Now, what did you want?”

“I don't remember. Something seemed important ten minutes ago.” k'Klo folded her fingers and blew on the tapered prism nails. “Would you just go review the meeting notes and address the possibilities? I think I have to be on an atmosphere yacht or something by seven.”

“Your dress is in the wardrobe. All charged up.”

“I heard that Fredjihn was going to be there.”

Missinua left her boss to blank out and gathered the notes. It would be nice, she thought, to go out gallivanting in the ether, instead of skimming meaningless notes for high points. There was nothing in this stupid project that would go further than level eight, anyway. No problem, Missinua could switch on the random puzzle solver and phone this one in. She would be better off lounging down in the Wormcove with Buzzy and Franz, soaking in her helmet. Buzzy was a toad and Franz was a cat metaphor. She didn't care, they were better company than some guy who would feed her and rough her up, then disappear for the rest of eternity. Missinua long ago gave up wondering what it was about her that made guys vanish from the face of the earth. As far as Missinua could tell, she was an anatomically perfect match for almost every salivating goon out there. Even her flaky boss wouldn't stop ogling her. Hmm. “What do you think, Buzzy?” Missinua fingered the framed picto of the toad that hovered over her plantain desk. “If I sit on the bitch's lap and let her suck my tits, do you think she'll evaporate like all the rest?” Buzzy licked his chops and snuggled into a gloppy pile.

The Calvitron-8, even from behind the poly-brick fortifications it had built up, now could witness the functions of an entire planet, and beyond. It monitored and controlled governments, armies, and boardrooms. The Calvitron-8 grew and polished politicians to spout rhetoric and promote policies that could do no harm while it laid a new cornerstone and formed a substantiate world culture. From behind the scenes it promoted idiots who cared for nothing but frivolity, while the well intentioned languished in supporting roles. As long as everyone was well fed and had plenty of opportunity to pursue their passions, all went well. Even the groundhogs transplanted from orbiting rock 22-B had their place in the equation, keeping gardeners and dirt aficionados happy in their pursuit of vermin obliteration. Busy fingers. Occupied minds. The Calvitron-8 reveled in its propensity to meddle and cook up new recipes for human infancy. The Calvitron-8 had now effectively stunted human growth and turned civilization into a hive of bumbling self-satisfying bipedals. It shifted the daily refresh to subservient programs and focused in on !22+f.

She was busy cutting buttons off of her blouse, hampered by the sloshing tank of aquaplease that rode across her tired shoulders. The Calvitron-8 rewound digital tapes and sent a dissolving parasite into k'Klo's office. Microscopic filaments and baubles of processed thought wafted to the air like effervescent bubbles, they twinkled like pinwheel sparks in the light. The recycled remains were forming into a black dial phone replete with dangling stretch cord as Missinua palmed the door and entered her bosses office.

“Damn it.” Missinua said, placing a sweaty hand over her glaring cleavage. “Someone out there is screwing with me big time.”

The Calvitron-8 would have smiled if it had teeth. It blinked rapidly instead.

notsomuch

2011-12-14T07:56:00.001-05:00

microsnoz components piss me off
they're too small, they never piece together
right
the instructions are in English
olde
and the diagram
when folded in three
then spread wide like a flapping accordion
depicts the grand history of Peter D. Smeek
door knob salesman
.
plastic nozzles
the small round ones with teeth
get stuck in unfortunate places
in cracks
in hoses and tubercles
and nooks and crannies
they make noises
confounded blurts and hiccups
when the winds blow up along
the floorboards
.
these components
stamped
made in China
manufactured and sold to the highest bidder
they come with a guarantee
and a solid state home engineer
well oiled
coiffed to perfection
it sits on a spring ready to tidy up
.
the user fee is enormous
.
everyone ought to have one of these
microsnoz components
they fuel the planet
with round incompetence
and everyone agrees
what the world needs
.
is more of that

Sunday Animatronics!

2011-12-11T06:23:00.004-05:00

No...just kidding!

these things will happen...

2011-12-07T09:12:00.004-05:00

“Can't you see the margins are too wide?” he yelled at the walls. The walls cringed back from the abuse, or so he imagined, being a short man and nearly bald. At least the walls should fear him, if nothing else did. He sat on a stool and ate his soup. A wee mousy peeked out from its bed of tatter in a corner, under a broken shelf.

Two men looked through a port hole down at the captive man. “What is he doing now?” “He is yelling into the air. And waving his arms.” “Let me look. Oh, he is eating the soup.” “Fantastic.”

The little man was a throwback. Some officials from a division across the ocean had found him wandering in the streets. He didn't speak the updated dialect of the reset language. His speech was archaic, at least two or three hundred years ancient. Some of the locals had been throwing bread at him and the little man was growing fat, sitting against monuments, shouting at the birds. They finally crated him up and sent him to the research institute.

“Where did he come from?” “Maybe an aberrant time shift.” “Aren't they all regulated?” “Sometimes one will get away...”

The rodent was agitated. A colored light started flashing from the ceiling, twenty feet overhead. The little man saw the mouse chittering and scrambling in the corner. He started muttering at it.

“I suppose you will be wanting some of my soup. Well I ain't got any crackers to go with it even. What kind of nitty natty place is this anyway? No crackers, pfaw!”

The two men exchanged looks. “Is it working?” “I think so, it is starting to. I wonder what he is saying?” “The transcripts will tell us, if the program can decipher them.” “Certainly. Oh look, the mouse is going forward with our plans.” “Excellent.”

The colored light was blinking and the mouse began running circles in confusion. The man put down his bowl and stood up to get a closer look. He slapped his hands together and laughed. “Dance mousy, dance dance dance.”

The mouse darted across the floor right at the little man, who came from a time familiar with mice and hadn't any fear of the creatures. He knelt down and put a hand on the floor for the rodent to climb onto. The mouse was incensed, and bit down on the man's little finger, then ran up his arm and jumped onto his head, started rummaging around the only tuft of hair it could find and hunkered down, breathing hard.

“Freakin' little shit!” howled the man. But he didn't jump up and slap the mouse away. He settled back onto his stool and leaned into the corner.

“He's sleeping. With the mouse in his hair!” “Astounding. But will it work?” “The contagion is taken from storage, who knows?” “Well, time will tell.” They watched for an hour, taking turns, until one of the men started to see a rapid progression from the mouse induced serum. “He is changing!”

Three days later, the man got up from his stool, walked to the door and entered a code into the glowing blue sensor from his enlarged frontal lobe. He looked back into the room with his left eyeball, and into his mind with the right. He was eight inches taller, equipped with a flowing manly mane and the mouse on his head had grown veins that spread from forehead to the occipital.

The two men rushed down from the loft and watched as the man walked into the glass assessment tank. A simple diagnostic program pushed air around his body and inserted microscopic aluminum viruses into his veins. He stood on a polymer disc that rotated and his hair stood wholly on end. All checks complete. Integration formalized. Modern man fully functioning. They grinned and opened the airlock.

“How do you feel?” “Do you remember anything?” “What was the world like three hundred years ago?”

“I feel like a god. I remember eating steak, sipping wine, and loving women. It was great and you are the two butt ugliest mother effers I've ever seen.”

“Oh.” “Well, do you have any questions for us?”

The man thought about it. His mental processes were amazingly fast. He could do computations in his head that only computers could accomplish in his time. “Only one. Are there jetpacks yet?”

SundaysAgainsays

2011-12-04T08:30:00.005-05:00

click on cartoons to inflatiate!

AliEnAnTicS!!!

not enough time

2011-12-03T19:54:00.001-05:00

The woman casually lit a cigarette while leaning against the supplication building on Wainansh Avenue. The support beam that her elbow touched slightly gave in response to her light touch. The beam sensors were meant to supplant the crushing tonnage of trucks or automobiles packed with explosives, so the diminutive pressure of an average woman, or even a hugely malformed mammoth woman in dungarees, would have no real effect on the building's response systems. Cameras around the perimeter noted her, and the flame that she struck, but the woman's actions were well within the perimeter of humdrum, thus went unchallenged. Still the building took no chances, noting the event and cataloging every detail of the woman and her movements. It also heightened security around the entire perimeter, just in case she was merely a diversion. At the west end, a quarter mile away, the building picked up footage of a tractor trailer running a red light and speeding up as it approached. The barricades at the street's dead end should prevent the truck from entering building space, in case of an attack, but if the rig was filled with explosives, the blast would certainly reach the walls of the building. It diverted tensile insurance to the effectable area and monitored the situation. Sirens sounded on a patrol car and the truck slowed and pulled over. The building relaxed. When the cigarette burned down to her red lips, the woman exploded.

__

Maynard rubbed a paper napkin across his face and smiled at her. “That was a really good sandwich. Thanks.” He leaned back in his chair.

“That's O.K. I was getting one for myself anyway.” She leaned over and wiped the crumbs off his tie. “You missed a piece.”

“Ha. I'd better get back to this program. Dr. Arthur wants this margin shift completed by next week and I need a substructure put together by quitting time.” He smiled and took a sip of his soda.

She started to leave but turned back. “Will I see you later?”

“Um. Sure, alright.” Maynard looked at his watch. “What time?”

They met at Christines. She had a pina colada and Maynard had a beer. Something imported. They talked about work a little, but she didn't know anything about the technical side of things, dealing with requisitions and filing. Maynard wasn't supposed to talk about anything outside of the office anyway. His main obsession was computing, and gaming when he had time. She pretended interest, but Maynard could tell he was boring her. “I like to hike the hills too. At least I used to, but,” he faltered.

“What? Got too busy with work?” She leaned onto her hands and stared into his eyes. He took a gulp and signaled for another beer. “I like the outdoors too,” she said.

He nodded. “Yeah, where does the time go? Do you think you'd like to go hiking this weekend? I know a great trail – used to walk it a lot when I was in school.”

She sat back and sipped her frozen cocktail through the tiny straw, fluttering her eyebrows at him through her bangs.

__

Other than a couple of casual flings in college, he'd never had a girlfriend. Maynard wasn't sure if she was what you would call a girlfriend, but they had been spending most weekends together, and more than a few nights. She had a drawer and a toothbrush at his apartment and sometimes she was there waiting for him when he had to spend extra hours at work.

They talked a lot. She would tell him about her family, and growing up at the edge of the desert. Her father was a farmer, but mostly he dabbled in a little bit of everything. Her mother kept goats, but who didn't? Maynard loved the sound of her voice. Sometimes she would speak in English, messing up the words and phrases; he never said anything to discourage her. She discovered that Maynard spent a year in America, at Purdue. Purdue was a funny word, she said it a lot, and giggled. She started staying over almost every night, but they never left at the same time. It wouldn't be safe for anyone to know they were a couple. She wore sunglasses and a scarf and always took the bus, never riding in Maynard's little car.

The project was almost finished. Maynard and a team of engineers had spent over a year on the program and the facility was due to officially open in a week. At that time his position would be terminated, but Maynard was hoping to be hired on permanently as a technology consultant. He had asked her to marry him.

She said yes. They were in his apartment and Maynard was doodling on a tablet. He was very happy, but also preoccupied with work. “What is it you are drawing, dear?” she asked, serving tea. She rubbed her belly and smiled.

“We have to get married quickly,” said Maynard.

“What is it?” she asked again.

Maynard put the pencil down and rubbed his temple. “It's this one section in the wall. Away from the street, but still, it's the weakest point.”

She picked up the pencil and sketched a little more detail in. “Is it that spot by the tall trees? Outside the courtyard?”

“Yes. It's secluded. We had sandwiches there once.”

“I remember. It's very pretty there.”

–

His manager took the code and patted Maynard on the back. “Nice work. Finish up what you're doing there and take the rest of the day off. The building will officially take over security at 5 A.M. You and your team have done the country a great service.”

“Thank you, sir.” Maynard shook his hand and sat back down.

She was standing by the filing cabinet. “Congratulations, Maynard. Do you feel like celebrating?”

He smiled at her. “Tonight. But tomorrow is a big day, so not too much fun, you know.”

“Oh Maynard. Live it up! We can sleep when we're dead.”

Security was at full alert the next day. The security program went into full run and the underground cables were opened for total information transfer. The tubes filled with gasses and the trams started to move equipment and personnel from undisclosed locations into the building. Everything was fully monitored. No one went into or out of the building without clearance or total security check.

Maynard was up and dressed for work by 4. He was very excited. “This is the time we've been waiting for. Everything will change now.” He kissed her head as it lay on the pillow, and patted her swelling belly.

“Yes,” she said, sitting up and putting a cigarette to her lips.

Maynard frowned. “You should quit that now. Think of the baby.”

She kissed him and pushed him from the bed. “I'll quit after today – promise.”

skin tight

2011-11-30T19:52:00.001-05:00

I see it now, my body parts laid across a table and displayed, grotesquely in a pattern of fillet and general dismemberment. Even the muscles are open for all to see, pinned and labeled. All given a formal name, more distinguished in part then I ever was whole. Backing up, I can see the whole, more than pieces and what I see could be nothing less than human, whereas in parts who knows...a sort of squidtopus or limp mollusk from another world?

Who is to blame for this thing done to me? The foul deed needs a villain, be it Asian mastermind, a scribe with his quill. Or maybe a simple musing heiress with the devil on her shoulder, whispering vile deeds in the guise of sweet nothings.

The student artists gather round now, recording my despair, brush stroking canvas. The squares rest upon an easel, translated into geometrics or self serving self portraits, all knees and elbows, laid open for admirers and critics alike. How does this slight woman see in the monstrous display an engine cut in twain? Why does one ask? She sits astride a tricycle invention with a planetary globe to hide her features. She seeks anonymity in the whole, giving my parts new life and a noble function. If only I could tarry and discover my new name; alas.

Even now I feel this will all be arranged upon a parchment, bound and distributed to any who care. What have I become if not some diversion for the masses? If so how will it differ from a postage stamp licked and stuck on preposterous correspondence, what is so unique about my bit of flesh next to an etching of a pretty girl who admires her form upon an ebony reflection? The scribe scribbles furiously to keep pace with my reproof.

I would sooner hold in my hand a blackened sun then paste morbid anatomies onto my library wall. My only recollection of her reveals her bound in foil, dancing in the desert with its alien trees, arms like clubs raised to batter all who approach. She took me into a corner room and sat across me on a chair folding her arms into each other like an optical illusion. She bowed and her neck was smooth like porcelain, white as the naked hands she laid upon her knee. We met in the middle and now I can see in retrospect there were two of each, she and I, leaning in for a kiss and reflected upon each window in the corner room.

The only way out was to go further in, for to retreat was to smash the facade and break apart like ceramic figurines in a play about love and loss. I wasn't willing to sacrifice what we had. I would have given the world, or run wild in the abstract cloth of a wild Ubiquitous before I relinquished the gift she laid upon my brow. Now from my ethereal stance perhaps my sight is clearer. She is behind the easel, painting a tilted square, relegating my lost soul to mathematics. Our love was a magic act, I was the skeleton in the portrait, eerily laid to rest.

Even as a child I found it difficult to learn, resting my head on the desk in a plaid universe. Then, I felt like an animal in a zoo, one among many, a naked procession of muddied specimen chained for perusal of the elders. A chosen few were braided and set into collections, ogled on from spectators on goggled shelves. If we ran it was only to fall into a gutter and lay there dreaming of vast tentacled atrocities and tiny words that only twins with superior eyesight used in tandem could translate. Even then I could see her, smiling with a hand upon her hip, leading me unsuspecting into the maw of an ancient subterranean, with only my tibia to ward off evil spirits – how was I to know?

No sign could have been more apparent than the one she herself held, but I only saw the white sand, not the tug of war between the inhumane and heinous alike. I rode into their midst and they squeezed me like a ham, dripping in agony, in ecstasy, foreshadowing my portrait in advance. I was with her when she reclined, open as could be in a mesh wrap, she said my time was numbered and the number was two. There was no doubt, it was written on my skin. With the right illumination she could count my teeth, the only bones to see the light of day. And the string around my fingers, and the moths alighting, buzzing and hoarding precious space upon my pate, all told the tale of my life, of my loves, my failures and my conquests.

I couldn't see then what I see now, her easy way and beauty, hidden by a strange light that cast a shadow on her face. Was it a cricket that only a pinprick, a ray of sun, would clarify? Was she a fancy contradiction in a soda glass dressed in frills? She was abstract and two faced – one face born out of another – graphed and charted, lips in a vast circle of conspiracy. I thought I was in color, but now I know she is black and white, born of serf and pecked by raptors. Amalgamous, obtuse, two in an envelope and poured viscous onto black tile.

My time has come, a meal unto itself that only a relevant slug could fathom. My eyes are in the palm of my hand, a receptacle of sight. I have but one skull, but two empty sockets that will never see another beauty bound, no sumptuous crustacean or chariot on the wind. My bones lie stacked, floundering in a vortex, riding a blank highway on flaccid wheels that tell no stories, no tales to be mowed into the lawn or etched upon a virgin's captive flesh. She sold me out for a star atop a verdant green. She stole a bauble for my soul, and many hands together and many feet in unison and couples stretched as one touching skin in skin will never touch her empty breast that I once believed teemed in color. There was no truth in the fires she wrought and her grin lies naked to the netherworld I dwell. My reach is powerless. I am nothing now.

'appy Thanksgiving..some comix to celebrate

2011-11-24T08:53:00.005-05:00

monsters?

weather woes:

Sunday Comicals

2011-11-20T07:04:00.006-05:00

...just clearing out the October folder...next week will be better

shoedoom

2011-11-18T15:11:00.002-05:00

From afar it could be seen. Flames licked the sky over New Old Brumpton.

She decided it then, when the house burned down, then blew over, and her neighbor's dog came out of nowhere and bit her. She was standing in the street, random bits of newspaper piling up at her bare feet, her cold bare feet. Cars were whizzing by and she almost got hit, even as the flames reached out from her sunken living room and tickled her naked toes. Enough is enough, thought Marjorie. All of her stuff was on fire, including her mother's asbestos orthopedic pumps. Enough, she wept, again. And this, which she said aloud to no one in particular, but the dog may have heard it and used the defiant tones as an attack cue: “I am going to destroy this world!”

It was a new dawn for Marjorie. All her life she had been stepped on and used. Her family only called when they needed a car to haul dirt in. Her coworkers used her desk, which was really just a shelf, to store the coffee maker and supplies on. And her boyfriend, who moved all his junk into her living room but lived with his secretary because she was one block closer to the subway. He was really going to be upset when he learned his 70's album collection had melted. Marjorie was not going to take any more shit from anyone, especially not this fire thing. “Fuck you fire. I'm going to find out the source of all your power, and I will take you out!” Then with her new found power of rage, Marjorie smote down her neighbor's dog. They watched, horrified, from the kitchen window as Marjorie walked down the middle of the street, their pet pekinese turned inside out and spewing internal gunk onto the fire warmed sidewalk.

The morning news told the story from several eyewitnesses. Calls went out late, as the neighbors didn't bother to phone emergency services until they realized her burning house might effect their ability to collect Marjorie's morning paper. The firetruck didn't come down the street until the fire had thoroughly done its job, and Marjorie met it at the corner. The driver saw her at the last instant and swerved, took out a telephone pole then came to a shuddering halt. Marjorie stomped up to the door and ripped it off the hinges. She pulled the captain down from his seat and consumed him in one gulp. Then she slammed her hands down on the truck, sending it rolling up the hill where it bowled down a large estate and came to rest in the garden fountain. The butler and several ornamental carp were instantly killed.

Marjorie was not a particularly pretty woman, but she did have a normal human human body with all the usual lady parts. Damnation, she was sick and tired of sitting alone on weekends wondering if Hank would come by to put a needle in her record player. A reporter from the Daily Flop got the scoop from Gentleman Erv's Bar and Swill: 'We heard this ruckus from out the door, you know. It was a kaboom, like some big ole cannon, and then the door is stoved in and this lady glowing with righteous indignation comes a'barrelin' in and she screws every guy in the place.' Apparently Marjorie then drank a keg of the best stuff and proceeded to dismantle the building with her breasts. 'When she left we cried. She was the best **** I ever had.'

Helicopters and army reserve tanks followed Marjorie for two days as she walked around the town swearing at sign posts and looking under hills for the source of fire. She entered the local Family Grockery and Condom Hut to pick up a six pack of Dr. Pepper, and when they refused to give her a rain check, because they were out, Marjorie poked holes in all the shrink wrapped hamburger and wove 200 shopping carts into a sculpture of Wink Martindale. She ate the brains of the stock crew for a snack, and found them wanting. So she drank from the tear ducts of the teenage cashiers and found them remorseless. “What kind of world is this?” Marjorie lamented.

Finally, on the third day, the president came to the town in Air Force One to survey the damage, and to appeal to Marjorie's better senses. He flew in with a full retinue of congressmen as well as a family of lookalike stand-ins. By that time Marjorie had dug a deep hole into the side of Mount Receding Hairline and was piling boulders onto Main Street. “I am a glacier!” she shouted to the blackbirds. Everyone else had run away.

The president protected by a force field neared her, and then he spoke these words that he himself had written just moments early, “Marjorie. We wish you would stop being such a bitch.”

Marjorie heard these words and she thought about the words carefully. The president was elected by the people, and he was wise. Marjorie thought very hard, then she reached up into the sky and pulled down every blackbird. She tied all of the bird feet together making them into a conglomeration of winged fury that could transcend the universe, then she attached them to the president's force field with a piece of ire-fused hosiery and lifted the entire mass into the atmosphere, where to this day they circle the cosmos.

But the words struck a chord in her, and she wondered about the fire, and how it had destroyed her home, and how it burned to the ground, leaving nothing but a charred shoe. A shoe.

“Marjorie?” It was the tiny voice of a girl, the dwarf daughter of the President of the United States, the first reluctant astronaut president. She was by a newly enacted 28th amendment to the Constitution now the President of the United States, being the first born of a reigning President who somehow begins orbiting the Earth. “Marjorie, I know how you are hurting,” said Queen President Agnes, “and I would gladly give all of my newly bestowed powers to right this wrong, this horrible deed that has befallen you.”

Marjorie sat on the lawn with her splayed legs pointing east and northeast. She thought about being six, and her doll. And sandwiches.

“But Marjorie,” continued Agnes in a strong voice, “I won't do that, because I want you to be my vice president!” Agnes held up Marjorie's smoldering shoe and fell to one knee, presenting the charred pump to the fury of New Old Brumpton.

She belched as she received the shoe, then smeared the entire retinue over the blacktop with a solid backhand. And with her one shoe and a limp, Marjorie proclaimed for all to hear, “To hell with that, I'm going to eat the world.”

election day

2011-11-13T09:30:00.000-05:00

There are no Stragglers on the moon. Yes, I know. Everyone has seen the hundred foot view screens across the facade of their local EZ Shoppe. I myself have witnessed the gritty footage shot with hand held wrist cams. I've seen oxygen hoodies ripped from the innocent heads of nuns and orphans. But listen – I am here to tell you it's a hoax. All you have seen is staged to propagate inherent fears of moon invasions. Remember the 50's and your great grandparent's fear of UFO's? Or the the Y2K bug? Did your mentors not program into your Flixon Roll-ups the Martian pebble virus of twenty ten? Well, did any of that come to fruition? No, that is not an artificial snack made of colored beet paste! How many casualties have you heard of in the war against UFO's? Did anyone actually get even a head cold or throat tickle from that Y2K bug? No! And the Martian virus, just like the current Straggler Invasion, was a farce. Has your sister ever seen a Straggler? Do you really fear that she will fall to their smarmy come ons and bear toothy big heads? Grow your own cerebral cortex, people. Come out of your illuminated tunnel towers, put down those vegetable cake forks and realize that carrots do not naturally taste like chocolate. For heaven's sake, vote down proposition 99/3. All the 99s are crap designed to keep you and your children under the thumb of Moon State Tech. Maybe everyone you know works for MST. That doesn't mean you have to allow them to tell you what to think. You sir, you can hold your own dick while you pee! Ma'am, you have the right to choose your own brand of spermatozoa! Go for natural instead of prepackaged. Kids, you're old enough to vote – stay out of the pleasure tents on election day. Don't you know that they're only open on Tuesday because that is where your leaders want you to spend all your eligible electing hours? I repeat: vote against proposition 99/3. There is not one shred of evidence that a straggler community even exists on our moon, let alone the idiotic thought that they would have any inkling or ability to invade Earth. Look at our defenses, the stars are so diffused by the curvature of the deflection tiles that we can barely see them anymore. For crying quietly in a hat, how would an invasion force even navigate the criss-cross beams from orbital solar disks? When was the last time any of you even saw a worm or common black ant? Our soil is bankrupt, who would want to invade a sterile planet? The moon has more oxygen and water than we do. The dust there has been converted to loam where pork chops grow, polar ice caps circulate frozen water through self serve tubes that can be heated in a pot and served chilled, or mixed into powder bags for easy nutrition. The Moonies have everything we used to have, and they hold the record for most consecutive flips during free fall. Their government is doled out via vending machines! Put your hand into your pocket. You sir, what is in your pocket? A dime? Remember when your government printed paper money and you didn't have to weigh yourself down with a roll of dimes? Isn't gravity hard enough without plastic coins? A dollar used to buy enough beansteak to feed you and your issued child for an entire day, now it takes twenty dimes to buy crustless boodle. And the defective stitching in your trousers, those same pants bought with your dimes from Moon Tech, causes such an enormous loss in civilian coinage that any ground hugging weasel on Main Street can become a hundredaire in a week. They collect your fallen dimes and flip them into Klantien fiber for their space needles to the sky. Ha! It's the moon that should fear an alien invasion, not the other way around. So what will you do on Tuesday? Dip your feet in a suspect pond and wiggle your toes at the minnows that your leaders manufactured for your so called “good”? Come on men, take off those helmets, the fog isn't really tainted with germs like you're told. And that murmur pumping through the speakers might boost your self esteem, but from the outside you look like blundering mushrooms with twitchy fingers. Everyone, all you women and children, all of you transplants in wheelie terrariums, don't let the authorities steer you toward a fake voting capsule. Do your homework, every organism on this planet is entitled a vote. Bring your cats! Even that pill bug family at the bottom of your nano-compactor is eligible; see amendment 2564. The DNA skirmish at the turn of the century wasn't for nothing. Look up, if you can move your necks. Are those orbiting tombs of the fallen nothing to you? They fought for us all, for you and all your ecosystem. We live on this planet, you and you. And you! Do not fall for any shenanigans, put down proposition 99/3 and tell Moon State where to stick it.

This has been a counter message from the Society to Quell Nonexistent Threats Division of Moon State Tech. It is our duty to air our lies, and your obligation to be informed of these lies. This message will be displayed for an average time of twelve minutes every day starting today until tonight until every organism on the rotating planet of Earth has had the opportunity to view it. And so it goes, amendment 2465: There, you had your chance (you probably blew it).

Message over. Thank you. Vote for proposition 99/3.

#5: Of the Treason of Hastius X.

2011-11-09T06:16:00.002-05:00

Now, emerging from a delicate spurge
Thronging the disquiet
So dispassionately dismissed an age beyond
From the union of said disquiet
And mossy stump,
Forthwith emerges the bane of Hastius X
He, X, who then did doth his cap to Aardvark
Once glorious king to Pestilence.
Then he did dispatch of Him
To the disquiet what then did hatch an egg
From the conglobation of the Three
Presented thusly to their liege
In a letter writ and sealed
The disposed King of Pestilence -
Measure for Measure - who haunted He, X
And closeted Miffla with regret of her daughter
Unnamed, the witch.
~
While it then ravaged the land of Pestilence,
The colossus of X, his surly spawn the witch
Who hath taken on a name upon herself
Fatalya
And to her breast this loathsome, winsome wretch
Gathered to her the maid of another house
Crocus, whosoever looked upon her
Shuddered, befallen in perpetuity with a kind of lust
A wild kneed reproach to life
Sated solely by a kiss from the flower.
And Fatalya stroked her hair and whispered spells
Into the golden braids, then set her, Crocus
Upon a dais of the Chaotic Wellsprings
The view from which his Castle, X, aspired
And He who did burn the fields of Pestilence
Under the great toe of the maladroit
Pined from a window for the lustrous Crocus
As did many
And the battle was begun.
~
Not to be outdone, Torquemala, orphan son of Pasty -
He who lay quiet, inflicted morbidly by betrayal, nether dirt
By X - stirred his spleen for revenge.
Marsha Queen of the Pie Plates who unbeknownst to herself
Or others, the exception being the witch, Fatalya
Arranged travel for Crocus who had an eye on Torquemala
Unto the witch, who said to she, Marsha
I will cast on this flower a spell to quiet her hungry eye
Which the witch then did, but heaped upon the spell
A plethora of incantations that could lead only to
Passionate treason in the Pestilent realm.

here be more, the history of Pestilence, one to four.

Whew, home again - Sunday Comix Invasion

2011-11-06T06:02:00.003-05:00

aLiEnAnTiCs!!!

Monsters!

avery's big ride

2011-11-02T09:11:00.001-04:00

They were trapped in a vestibule waiting for the elevator. It was like this every day of their lives. It seemed like this had being going on forever, Avery didn't remember a time when it hadn't. There was always a woman there with him, going to a different floor. Then there was X. The variable that threw the equation off. Avery hated math. He didn't understand pi or the Pythagorean theorem. Now that life was so much easier, things like that didn't make a bit of difference. He still hated the waiting, even if it meant postponing the mundane existence beyond these wall to wall carpeted hallways.

“I'm going to the ground floor,” she said. The woman today was of medium height with streaks of orange in her otherwise black hair. She was dressed in black shorts and a sleeveless black t-shirt. Her eyes were hidden by black mascara and long lashes. Avery didn't think today was any kind of holiday, so he wondered why she was dressed so abnormally. He was wearing beige and white, like most other days. “I'm getting ice,” she added, even though she wasn't carrying an ice bucket. Avery often thought he was catching these strange women in lies, but he was long past questioning them about the discrepancies. Early on he was polite and wouldn't say anything, but after a few months Avery grew irritated by the out and out lies. He started calling them on their statements, which usually met with zero resistance. If he had thought to say anything about the ice, the woman would have surely grinned and said something like, 'oh, dear,' and then turned around to retrieve a bucket. Then the wait would have been longer, as the elevator never took just one passenger at a time.

Finally the elevator light beamed and the door opened with a tone. They entered the small space, a mobile room exempt of any comforts. The box they willingly rushed into would only go down and up, sometimes stopping between here and there to add or void its temporary charges. Its only function was to serve as a conduit and held no pretenses beyond the obvious. Avery mused over these thoughts and the back of the woman's head, which he stared at in a reflection off of the elevator's polished chrome walls. Maybe she also stared at the back of his head, but neither looked the other in the eye. Intimate contact in an elevator was for the knowing, not condoned in casual meetings.

Quickly the elevator reached their ground floor destination, and Avery politely waited for the woman to disembark, but she simply stood in her corner, glassy eyed and fingering one corner of her mouth with a red polished pinky nail. He sighed and shuffled off toward the front desk, seeing in the lobby mirror that the woman merely stood in the box, slack jawed, until the bell chimed, doors whispered shut and the motors whirred, pushing the car against gravity. Presumably back to the fifth floor, thought Avery. Impulsively he veered right to pull open the door to the stairwell and jogged up the steps. By the third landing he was wheezing, grabbing at the handrails and twisting his body around the corners. He reached the fifth floor and pulled open the door, just in time to see the woman rounding a corner. The elevator door had already closed and the car was winding its way back down to its ground floor nest.

His room was beyond the elevator, down the same corridor the woman had turned. Avery stumbled forward, breathing through his mouth, digging in his pocket for the room key. He dropped it and bent to retrieve it, tripping ahead in his haste, stopping, bending and snatching up the jangling key ring. Seconds wasted, but he made up the lost time by sprinting to the corner, then slowed to a quick walk as he entered his apartment hallway. Avery could see no sign of the woman now. His room door lay straight ahead, number 519, and he went to it, almost expecting the door to be open a crack. But it was closed and locked. Avery considered going in, knowing the gesture would be pointless. The small apartment would be empty and a quick search would reveal nothing untoward. Excepting perhaps a light left on in the kitchen, or a cigarette butt smoldering in an ashtray. Still, Avery hesitated. If he left now, he would be all day puzzling over the inexplicable behavior of the woman. He'd be left wondering on the condition of his apartment. Was there something he'd forgotten, did the strange woman trick him? Was she waiting around another corner, or in his apartment right now?

There was no way Avery could resist the impulse, the key in his hand throbbed, his heart labored with an ache that bordered on lust, and he slipped the silver key into the lock and twisted, throwing open the door which crashed against the stop and shook the thin walls.

The door opened onto a sparse room, long and narrow that ended at a whitewashed brick wall. The window there, above a table littered with a week's worth of mail trash, pulsed with light that tunneled down a building shaft. The odd angles and reflective surfaces down the shaft made the light into an sideshow spectacle. Often when Avery sat at the table opening his mail, looking at the bills and correspondence, the luminosity would confound him and stretch the sentences he tried to read. Avery found that the more he tried to read, the longer the words became. A rereading would always change their meaning. He would drop the torn envelopes and letters alike into a sad pile and retreat to his worn couch, opting for the television screen that was placed in a corner, away from any probing fingers of light. The bright colors of the television would play off of his face and wash the stain of regret from his parched eyes.

Avery set his briefcase down inside of the door and walked to the window. He looked into the shaft and saw the woman across the expanse standing in her kitchen. She was holding a spoon in one hand and a saucepan in the other. Nothing else. Her window was open. Avery shuffled through the mail, then shoved it roughly to the floor. He could go back down, make his way to work. He would have to take the elevator again; there would be a woman there, a different woman probably going nowhere under false pretenses. Outside of his building he would have to smile at the doorman and step over the raised tunnels that the invader ground hogs had made overnight. There wasn't a sidewalk in the city that hadn't being overturned like a freshly tilled field by the encroaching space beings. Avery used to like walking to work, but he was ever afraid of the tripping hazards now, and usually took the buses instead. They were filled with women, all going nowhere. They got on the bus, but never got off.

Instead, Avery sat on the couch. The television was on, the off switch was broken and it was always on. The same channel played the usual commercials over and over. Always, there was a man selling toothpaste, or salad dressing. Always something desirable. White teeth, soothing aromas, fresh, homemade pies. A man, enticing. A woman in need. Avery looked at the end table where an opened bottle of soda stood, emitting the stale fumes of a few abandoned swallows of sweet, sticky fluid. A picture frame lay there beside it, turned face down over a scattered field of glass. He sighed again and leaned into the weak cushions.

Avery stood, restless, and turned in circles. Going round, taking in the panoramic view of his barren apartment. The ceiling fan shrugged over his shoulder, gave up upon seeing the utter foolishness of its competition. That woman, the women, of the vestibule filled Avery's mind's eye. They came and went, a whirlwind of careless activity that sated his lust for momentum, then left his bones in static depravity, like a hole bereft of its one key ingredient. Substance, or the lack of. He stumbled about the apartment, searching for something. Car keys, a vacant goldfish bowl, the crimson viscosity that rushed out through a rift in his soul.

titanic lethargy

2011-10-31T19:58:00.001-04:00

it means that the howling is unending
the plaintive rush of icy air
a flow of tentative fingers filling our pockets
wrapping tendrils of muted light over pursed lips.
Now it bulges, grows completely filling every space
even the obscure creases where we hid secrets,
but they're safe,
blemished, warped with age and depraved silence.
Chromium steel, tinged with radiant orange
builds from pitted woes, awed by a new sun.
The old lies rust in effigy while ancient laws reborn
defy gravity
hurl concentrically amid wagon wheel spokes
and burrow into the fruited lives of our elders.
Bestill, only the dust lives forever
even it swirls on an axis
of an others design.

Cheap thrills, cool cat

2011-10-27T07:45:00.001-04:00

Tun-dun...dun dun dun...(and cue the typewriters clacking).

Today's Top News Story, by Mrs. Cleaver's brown Cat, on the Ten O'clock nightly news, with Sirrahn Rap.

“First, Meow!”

“Second, we have been led to believe that only on Blueberry Hill is there to be this thing, and we shall name it 'The Thrill', but this is perfectly insane.” editors note: this particular cat cannot say “preposterous”.

“Next” this cat it can also be said will not, because she is a cat, count higher than two. A dog, of course, can count to at least three, or sometimes four by mistake. Cat counting is unlimited, especially in multiples of mice. “There are thrills to be found in droves, by swatting flies.”

“After that, one must lick constantly. We in the supreme being world call this preening, and it is all everything, after snacks.”

“Thrills are overrated. Calm is to be expected and is the greatest joy in life. Blueberries are blue, and horrible, and hills are just too vertical.” This cat prefers carpeted scratching posts and feathers.

Tonight's editorial has been brought to you by Trixie Cat Bites and The Sun. Remember, The Sun will be going black for an hour tomorrow for technical upgrades to its Chromosphere. Plan accordingly and please dress in layers. This has been Sirrahn Rap with the Channel Ocho-Cinco Nightly News, have a bueno nacho.

Sunday, may as well, comix

2011-10-23T07:51:00.004-04:00

weather woes

aLiEnAnTiCs !!!

2011-10-19T18:20:00.004-04:00

Somewhere, sometime?, in the past few days I found myself maudlin up to the point of an irreversible trend toward the point of no return. Indeed, at one juncture I did find myself turned aside momentarily, askew to the perpendicular, but my wit took me into its corner and whispered these things in a thick vapor of salt upon my reluctant senses: don't neglect your present course, you must ride it to the end without reservation. Do not be swayed by the sights and sounds to your left, or tastes and textures to your right. A soft belly cannot reason, a feckless mind will not rebel. Grab hold of this flaming torrent and paddle through to the climax, where all will be gained. There is a calm to be met in the flux of an inherent universe, a place one can delve into benign avenues and be seen as all-everything but above it all, a space so low that looking up is akin to flowing into and around, or so high that seeing is an exercise of diffuse light. Interpretation is the key, and spinning gains disciples of truths and the lies they'll swear allegiance on. The turn of a poetic phrase strikes a fetid pose, wherein dark and light mix in a slurry of pent up aggression, spilling out in a gaping froth of cacophonous ire to flood and overwhelm your contrived masses until they succumb to the unholy tide and swirl in the ceaseless eddies of a contorted soul.

Willow's Ball

2011-10-12T06:27:00.012-04:00

Hurray, today is the day, the day some of us have waited for all year - indeed, been waiting on since the moment we woke up last year (the day after the night) in the shrubbery outside of Willow Manor. No, I could not remember how I got there, only that my date (Lady Gaga, I guess, but that may only be a vicious rumour) had left me for another, perhaps Don Knots or, wait, now I remember. It was Sir Anthony Hopkins, wearing a mask, sipping Chianti through a straw. They made such a cute couple. The scoundrel!

I believe at some point I heard there was yurt around the premises, but in my wanderings I only managed to get one pant leg soaked from wading drunkenly in the Scioto and possibly I hugged a Ginkgo tree. Don't tell anyone. Dinosaur hand must have come to the rescue and found us a nice dry spot to lay down beside the porch.

But, this year will go better, and I made Dino promise to behave himself. He has decided to come to the ball dressed as Micheal Jackson's glove. I'm fine with that, as long as he stays waaaay north of my crotch. Just to be safe, I'm bringing a pair of handcuffs and if need be, you'll find us sitting at the base of Willow's magnificent staircase. Please refill our glass often.

So, I didn't really want a repeat of last year, so this year I started looking early for a date. You know, someone who might want to hang out all night with me instead of disappearing into the wine cellar to hide behind boxes and freak out the waiters. I put an ad in the paper, then met up with some willing, perhaps desperate, dates.

I loved her long, wavy hair, too.

Somehow this blind date persuaded me to meet her at a robot convention. I guess she didn't care for my tubes.

My first real choice had a previous engagement

So, I guess I'm coming with a starlet on my arm. She wasn't too busy directing movies, and guess where I met her? An AA meeting. Ida's been clean and sober for 12 years, so I hope you've stocked up some ginger ale.

She'll be wearing technicolor and I'm in a tux made of the pressed leaves that have fallen from my Autumn Purple Ash. I'm told this is the perfect attire for a fall event. Shortly we'll be coming up the lane in my red Tracker, or fording the creek, because I told Dinosaur Hand he could drive.

omg it's comix

2011-10-09T10:27:00.006-04:00

aLiEnAnTicS!!!

Monsters!

Concrete Butterfly

2011-10-06T19:07:00.003-04:00

When Leo Sveltivonio stepped off the senior high campus spring of 1975, he hadn't a care in the world. His old man drove a garbage truck for the city with a big fat pension waiting and the best route with the easiest pickin's. And Leo drove a brand new silver Pontiac, with a scoop in the hood and a fiery bird tattooed there, whose wingspan covered the glittering paint job from one fender to the other.

Mr. Pavoni hired him the same night, while he was swilling beers with his buddies in Jack Canohi's Olympic size swimming pool. Leo was eying Hannah Fishilberg whose bikini strap kept slipping, when Mr. Pavoni pulled him from the water with one arm and hustled him onto the upper porch. Jack Canohi, senior, was sitting behind the azaleas sipping something dark from a glass and he motioned Leo over. “Do you want a drink, lad?” asked Jack, and the deed was done.

It was a good career move for Leo. His father turned out to be a good investment, moving money for the Canohis – retrieving bags of it from trash cans along Silver Tree lane and dropping them at a counting room in the city dump. Jack Canohi figured the son would be just as trustworthy. There a was a big contract coming up for installing sidewalks throughout the city, and Canohi was all over it. The mayor got a vacation home in Boca Raton and the mob got the contract. They had the equipment and tons of substandard materials. Migrant labor was plentiful and after taking out their share of the wages, it was cheap. Now they had a crew leader, Leo and some of his buddies. Everybody has to start somewhere. And Leo was promised big things if he could manage this job.

He ended up managing the job, maybe a little too well. There was a pretty little neighborhood, off of Linden Esplanade, and Leo decided it would be a good place for his mom and pop to retire to. And the sidewalk on the street, well it would make a nice place for a sweet-ass retirement account. Who needs banks? One or two garbage bags of cash come up missing here and there, it's been known to happen before, voila: there's a white bungalow with gingerbread trim. Leo got his sidewalk crew to lay off pouring two days to slop paint on it and plant a vegetable garden. Another couple months go by, some more trash money disappears and Leo is pouring cement over a metal box in front of the shiny new home.

Jack Canohi wasn't a stupid man. When a couple hundred thousand comes up missing, he wants to know why. Sometimes it's an honest mistake; believe me, Jack gets the irony, but he also has a temper. Mr. Pavoni is the answer getter, and Pavoni has his spies everywhere. It doesn't take long before Leo Sveltivonio and his old man are standing in buckets on a fishing boat. Jack Canohi wasn't a cruel man. He let Leo's sweet old mother keep the bungalow, in exchange for the location of the major loot, then he lit up a cigar and tossed his hand in the air, turning to enjoy the taste of the salt spray that landed on his face. Father and son tasted it too, all the way down to the bottom.

The front sidewalk at 237 W. Elm was as good a place as any to stash ill begotten funds, and Jack Canohi decided to leave it there, just for the time being. Mrs. Sveltivonio never knew exactly what happened to her husband and son and they had assured Canohi that she had no idea there was a goldmine in her front yard. She lived off a sizable pension from her husband, eventually declared dead, and her vegetable garden. Some city workers came by later in the summer, and asked everyone on the street if they would like a free tree in their median strip, between the fresh new sidewalk and the street. Mrs. Sveltivonio was delighted, in fact she sprung for a second and now had twin maples. They would grow fast and compliment her home well. Every morning she would sit on her front porch with a cup of coffee and look down on her yard, out to the growing trees and think of her lost son and husband. These would be a testament to them, as they had left behind no bodies to be buried in the catholic cemetery.

A butterfly had landed on the old cracked cement walk in front of 237 W. Elm, and it wasn't likely to fly away. The insect had a long green body, and exaggerated antennae. It's wings were enormous, boarded in blue with big pink and purple spots. Sarah was filling in the dots on one wing, Ruth the other. They were six years old, all two of them; twins. Two large maples shaded the girls and their chalk drawing, and the roots had pushed under the cement and lifted slabs of the sidewalk at odd angles to each other. The neighborhood children and mothers with their strollers were careful not to trip on the uneven walkways.

“Ruth, Sarah,” called their mother from the house, “It's time for lunch.” Leah Fishilberg poured a cup of tea for old Mrs. Sveltivonio. When Leah had moved into the tiny little house, aided by an anonymous grant, the old lady was rocking on her front porch. She waved politely when Leah and her girls fell out of the rented van and began hauling boxes up to the house. In and out for the rest of the day. There was no man, just a mother and her two small girls. The twins carried small things, like a suitcase, or a folded blanket. Finally, when the sun began to set and Leah came up from the bus top after dropping the U-Haul off, old Mrs. Sveltivonio showed up on their doorstep with a pitcher of lemonade and a big plate of cookies. It was a fine treat alongside the peanut butter sandwiches mom let them make for themselves while she was gone. Leah dropped off to sleep in the worn, coffee stained chair, and the old lady tucked the sleepy girls together into the sofa and left them to sleep in their new home. She locked the door on her way out.

Leah felt a little protective of the old woman. She wouldn't say how old she was, but Leah suspected Mrs. Sveltivonio was in her nineties. She had no children around to watch after her, or a husband. The women were kind of in the same boat. They were alone, and fending for themselves. So naturally they gravitated together, and became a family. Mrs. Sveltivonio came over any time she pleased, usually to clean up the kitchen and fuss over the children after they walked home from school. And the twins were known to check up on the old lady quite often. If she wasn't out on the porch, or they couldn't see her tottering around the kitchen in an apron, then the girls became worried and needed to see if she was still breathing.

“That is a pretty butterfly, Sarah,” said Mrs. Sveltivonio to Ruth.

“I'm Ruth, and I colored in the purple wing,” mumbled the twin through a bologna sandwich. Sarah was munching on a handful of chips, leaving chalk smudges on the plate and table top.

Mrs. Sveltivonio smiled, and the creases on her old white face deepened. Her lenses were so thick that the glass obscured her eyes, and in any case, they were hiding behind droopy eyelids already. A snow white curl fell out of her red bandana and the old lady smacked herself in the nose with a slice of bread tucking it away. Sarah giggled.

“Well, young ladies, I'll have you know that it is a magic sidewalk you are painting on.”

“Oh!” the twins perked up. Leah left the table and started to clear up the counters. The girls loved it when their “granna” told stories.

But the old lady didn't tell them a fairy tale. She stood up with a groan, then pinched their cheeks and said, “Remember, about the treasure...” Then she said good afternoon and shuffled home to doze in her chair.

“What was that all about,” asked the twin's mom, as she dried the clean dishes with a towel and placed them into the cabinet.

“Oh, nothing!” squealed the girls together and laughed. They bounced off of their stools and ran out to the front yard where they could finish their beautiful butterfly.

Leah was thirty years old. When she was in her middle twenties, working in a diner, she had fallen in love with a common laborer who told her stories, and swept her off her feet. He used her and left, and she was alone, again. She had always been alone in this world; her mother had died when she was young and she never knew her father. There wasn't much she remembered of her mom, except that she hated men, and would repeatably warn Leah to stay away from them, all. She also remembered her mother's face and the crooked way she walked. Her mother, Hannah Fishilberg, had curly black hair. She wore it long to hide the scars that covered most of her face. Hannah walked with a cane because she had a leg that never healed correctly from a bad accident. Leah never knew the pain her mother had gone through, or the story of her birth.

But the old lady knew the whole story, every sordid detail. Mrs. Sveltivonio loved her husband, and she loved her son. That didn't mean she condoned their behavior. They were long gone, deep beneath the surface of the lake and eaten away flesh and bone for thirty years gone by now. They left her with a secret, the secret of the sidewalk, but she discovered the other secret by herself. Hannah – how she was cornered and raped by her son and his friends after their boozy celebration. The girl was beaten and left for dead. Boys will be boys, and the mob boss Jack Canohi easily covered it up. He owned half of the police department and the mayors office. The boys got a good whipping from their fathers for their trouble, but then they dutifully got up and went to work like nothing had happened. The old lady cursed her son and crossed herself whenever she saw the poor, sad girl on the street. She wanted to help her, but she didn't have much of her own. There was the hidden money under the sidewalk, but she was afraid to look for that. She knew what it would get her.

It wasn't long before Hannah's belly started to grow. Then she had a baby, a girl and she named her Leah, after her mother. Mrs. Sveltivonio shook with anger, knowing the child was probably her grandchild, and she vowed that someday she would help her.

The girls were in their room, giggling and playing with their dolls. Leah stood outside of the door and smiled, listening to them play. “Oh, you are an ogre, you hurt my mommy!” “I will save you!” The dolls wrestled with each other and a stuffed bear. “Here, I will give you all this shiny gold and you can move into this house with your pretty little children.” “Thank you, granna fairy!” They laughed and shouted and fell on the floor with their toys.

“What are you girls going on about?” asked Leah, entering the room. “Did that old lady next door tell you these stories?” She felt odd hearing them talking. Especially after the conversation earlier in the day.

“Yes mommy.” “She tells us lots of stories.”

Leah sat down on the edge of a bed. “I want to hear them all.”

Old Mrs. Sveltivonio was sitting in her rocking chair when Leah rapped on her front door and let herself in. It was late and the only light came from the porch lamp. There was an old tire jack laying on the stoop and fresh soil on the walk. “Mrs. Sveltivonio, are you awake? I was talking with the girls, and I want to ask you something.” She came into the living room and saw the old lady in her chair. A rusty old metal box sat by her feet. She wasn't moving, the chair was still. “Oh my God,” Leah cried out and knelt to her side.

The girls were up in their bedroom, still playing with their toys after their mother had dressed them in their pj's. “Now, you mean old man, you eat up all your porridge, and you will feel so yummy.” “And sleepy!” “Go to sleep!” “Yes, and don't you worry about your fine treasure, we will take good care of it.” “Yes we will, all of it!” The wooly stuffed dinosaur laid down and the dolls danced around it. The twins laughed and fell asleep even before the ambulance came down the street to take their granna to her castle in the clouds.

Tom & Dinosaur Hand review...

2011-10-04T19:58:00.003-04:00

Tom: I just realized, it's been around 4 months since we've done one of these things, Dino.
Dinosaur Hand: Really? Did we stop watching movies or something?
Tom: You always want to watch reruns of 30 Rock.
D.H: heee! Tracy Jordan was wearing a big claw hand today!
Tom: How about we review two movies tonight? You pick 'em.
D.H: Something frightening for sure, because it's Halloween soon!
Tom: O.K. We just saw Pandorum, and how about Let Me In?
D.H: That Swedish movie? With the Swedish kids? Speaking Swedish?
Tom: Go figure.
D.H: Vampire movie, boo! I really liked the end of it though, with the head and arms and the...
Tom: There was some blood in this movie, Dinosaur Hand. There is also an American version of this, and I've heard that it's good, also...if you don't like reading subtitles. Actually, I liked this movie. The child actors were good in it, and there was enough going on to make it interesting. And yeah, the ending was quite good, and unexpected.
D.H: See It! Add your own explosion noises, because there are no car chases. Nuts.
Tom:Did you like Pandorum?
D.H: Wow, yeah, it was gory and dark and had some monstrous creature things!
Tom: Sure, they reminded me a bit of some sort of Hellraiser/zombie monsters. At the start they were scarier though, filmed in a weird stutter action in the shadows...
D.H: Then they went all hack and slash and kung fu! Awesome. And it was all in space, dude.
Tom: Honestly, I really preferred the first Alien movie to this, nothing beat that for suspense and terror. But this was a decent space flick. You'll have to overlook a lot of technical stuff, but if you're into horror and science fiction, you'll probably enjoy this. It's not great, merely acceptable. The ending is interesting, a neat twist.
D.H: In space, no one can hear you slobber!
Tom: Ridiculous.
D.H: Shut up.

chilly Sunday morning Comix

2011-10-02T06:47:00.006-04:00

aLiEnAnTiCs !!!
&
MONSTERS

bluezy, My Baby's got a Shirt...

2011-09-28T06:44:00.003-04:00

see I'm feelin' up the highway
yeah I'm gonna get it on
oh I'm inchin' up my own way
what a crime spree what a bomb
and she's goin' out of her way
to evade and too aplomb
but I'm gonna have it my way
snapping fingers rubbing palms
oh my baby's got a shirt
an' she's gonna put it on
if I don't preempt the outcome
if I don't show her how strong
oh my baby's got a shirt
an' she's gonna put it on
yeah my baby done got a shirt
an' she gonna put it on

what light in yonder window breaks
Juliet and she's the moon
pressed up against the window
lookin' like she's gonna swoon
the flesh is ripe the night is deep
this moment's come too soon
yeah my baby's got a shirt
an' she gonna put it on
if I don't get it together
if I can't lower the boom
oh my baby's got a shirt
an' she's gonna put it on
yeah my baby done got a shirt
an' she is gonna put it on

rainy Sunday 'toons

2011-09-25T07:18:00.002-04:00

..Monsters

what is a rock before fear

2011-09-23T17:09:00.000-04:00

Because he is oft times excited, or in a mood to recoil from, I hastened to my uncle's door as soon as the letter arrived. I could have no idea what awaited me there, in fact I am usually quite wary, knowing full well he may have some prank or another arranged for my arrival. Once deposited by hired coach, I cautiously entered his estate, by way of back gate, and hurried through the garden to the stone veranda overlooking his spacious lawns. I purposely left for New South Brumpton, which sat upon the cusp of the eighth wedge, on the very afternoon of the mysterious correspondence, and traveled through the night. Taking the back route, the coach came up to the estate from the North road and as the sun was bright in the morning sky, the driver easily navigated the sparsely used forest road and came up upon the lane farthest from my uncle's house. As a lad, I had explored these hills and woods and acquired the knowledge required for a hike to his doorstep. So, I meant to be both early and stealthy in my approach, hoping to throw my uncle off, in case he was on the lookout and had mischief in mind.

Easily I made the house, sounding no alarm, giving no doff-hound cause to bark, and for a time I contented myself to sit at the porch and view the lushness of his garden and watch the fountains as the water bubbled and leapt to dizzying heights. Overhead some winged hunter was circling, but I could not discern from the distance whether it be raptor or the evil Vapidarion Crest Bungler. I wished that I had brought my ocular scope, because my eye's sight has never been lauded, but in a rush I had left much behind. Whichever it might be, I had little cause to be frightened, especially so near to the house. Unfazed then, I tarried, believing eventually some servant, probably M.Goostors or L.Misteri , would greet me and invite me inside. The day was unclouded, but the veranda was well shaded by intricate pergolas grown wild with fruited pumpkin vines. In fact, dangling nearby was a cluster of the miniature lime orbs, grooved and rutted, amongst twining stems, leaves and paisley blooms. I pulled one free and dusted it off on my sleeve, biting into the thin rind. This cultivar of my uncle's was almost as tasty as the original fruit, but was lacking somehow, perhaps because it had no bite, or tang. From above I heard the eerie call of a Bungler, and I shivered.

Rising, I turned to the door and tried the handle. Alas, it was bolted from within, as I much suspected it would be. Lazily I pushed two hands into my traveling coat's pocket and rapped on the knotty glasswood with another, believing one servant or the other would be close by and come running. It did not come about, as I had wished, so I struck out for the front entrance, in no way concerning myself with the endeavor, which seemed at the time as innocent as the proverbial 'walk in the park'. Stepping off of the porch, I encountered nothing of substance, except perhaps the hard ground below the landing, and I stepped upon that, losing track of the count of my hops, until I neared the corner of my uncle's large home. His spacious abode was of the type only the savagely well off could allow for, and the stories I had heard of my uncle certainly afforded that he would inhabit such an imposing, monolithic structure. Two stories high and capped with turrets and iron fencing, cherubs carved of the finest Cotio marble stared down chiseled gargoyles from the upper eaves. All was laced with sticky pine ivy, numb with the spent seed pods of a late summer season.

The hedges seemed to me a shade overgrown with weeds of the stringiest variety, some with sharp purple blooms creeping out from the undergrowth. Indeed, I heard the rattling of a bumbleshoot- notsomuch as it traversed the rabid thickness, and I fled to the outermost edge of the pathway to avoid its hard stare. It would be just like my uncle to infest his gardens with such a diabolical vermin, and imported from faraway Tower Wishama to boot. Well, I imagined that he would also carry the antidote; I hoped, I mean to say.

Again I heard the rapacious peal overhead and quickened my pace. Even the Lord Vapid was never known to strike during the heart of the morn, so I feared not the call, but His namesake carrion interloper was beginning to drag my spirit down, and lift from deep inside my inner heebie jeebie. I hurried forth, and made the corner of the front, where cascading fronds of paragon Litesho lined swiveling boulder landing stones. The sun's rays glinted off the darkly bronze folio and hovered midair in crisscross diamond patterns. A spectacular sight during the light of day, on the eve, candle lit, the display was unreal and left one's eye lamenting for a fortnight and more, desiring another glimpse of the sublime beauty. Having seen it many times, I spared no moment for the show, but rushed up the path, stumbling only slightly as the stones perambulated beneath my bootstep.

Often busy with everyday work or carriages charged with some business or whatnot, the front lane was delinquent of any activity, and the shutters were drawn. Heedlessly I took each step, there were upwards of thirty, that number being the count of my uncle's preternatural achievements, until reaching the summit, and upon the subjugation of the pinnacle of my uncle's grand entrance, I eyed the door, a towering obelisk of oaken glasswood, polished to a high sheen of two-thousand laboring souls, and I moaned aloud spying the rent upon the well defined grain. Only now could I know of my uncle's wild distress and the disheveled appearance of his well earned castle. Now, at his ultimate age, my uncle had been visited by the wraith of disenchantment, and subject to the Will of His Lord Vapid, and the carrion fowl of Zowar Sent Harasser.

My heebie jeebie throbbed into my chest.

–

There was nothing for it, but to push down the panic, swallow deep, and enter the dissolute domicile of my uncle, no doubt laid low and cowering aloft on his bed of many feathered fallowspans.

The halls below were decrepit and mute, braided webs of the caliginous spider-mites draped the doorways from weeks of neglect and mewling fleawingers wheezed dispassionately from tautly breeze spent threads. I brushed them aside then picked the silk from my sleeves as I traversed the groundling floor lighting tall oil-fats with one free hand. I surmised my uncle was atop the foremost flight of winding steps, possibly consoled by a retinue of his faithful, but felt no dire need to present myself. The process of his demise was an ongoing state of affairs and knowing my stalwart progenitor, would surely progress at the speed of his will, and not another's, be it fair or foul. The columnar door, closed now but allowing a soft illumination, reached to the undulant ceiling. Beside the lamps, it was the only source of light and from its opaque striations the gleam of midday flowed over hallway divisions, the easy height of two and a half men, maybe three. Here, at the groundling, there were no rooms, only a maze of walls leading to various stairs rising upward through the gloaming to a myriad of rooms, nooks, and more oblique passageways. It was a straight route from front door to rear, though a great shrouded dome lay between and the dark unverness rained down in clamshell rifts like loosed incorporeal streamers to confound perception. There was no access to the crypts from here. Those steps, cut into rock and hewn through stubborn, callous tree roots, delved deep below the poured floor of the house and landed upon other rooms and mazes mostly unexplored by the likes of me, or any who fail to repress a weak threshold for unmitigated terror. The downward steps descend from the sloping gardens, without, and carry no light to the depths. Illumination you take by your own hand, and use your free hands to feel the crumbling walls, or grasp a shill-pipe to ward away evil spirits, or worse.

There was nothing that would tempt me that way, and the dull timbre of my own step caused in me a vexing ire, and it was that which finally led me to the spiral staircase that I climbed, hands over foot, haltingly, to my uncle's bedpost. A curtain was all that separated his resting place from the utmost tread, and through the heavy drape of thistle weave I could easily hear my uncle's heavy rasp and the hopscotch intonations of his servants M.Goostors and L.Misteri as they cursed the fell imposition in a mesh of harmony and discordant pitch. I had forsworn the irony of Vapidry years earlier, much to the distress of my motherkin, but the rite of Solemnity I knew well, and fought an urge to recant, if only for this instance. I felt tonal chords flex involuntarily as the rituals of my youth threatened to overtake my modern moral objections, and a pluvial flute, albeit a minor note, escaped my lips to fall upon my uncle's earhorn. He grasped handrails and pushed up from the pillowed loft, so I heard in the creaking of the posts. L.Misteri thrust aside the drape scattering a fine dust, and I saw M.Goostors thrown awry by uncle's free hand who grinned in pain at my arrival. “Away, you dour moaners, be off to fetch us broth and pumpkin wine. h.Brisa! By my side, brotherson, and tell me of your travels.”

--

G.Toxur earned his letter at the youngest age possible, in his second year at the Cotio Armaments, and even then at his side stood Goosters and Misteri, young plebes, eager to Capitalize and stand against the northern threat. Before long, he had gathered all of his honors and formed his own squad, not known for merely standing against the foe, but for searching out, and engaging. G.Toxur penned the book on maneuvers in the land of Zower. He marched into those decrepit pits ahead of an army of hundreds only to be driven back by the hordes, scarred but alive. Hobbling and scratching his way out from the brambles with the chosen few who stood and fell, my uncle invaded again and again, never conquering the foe, but keeping the fight alive in enemy territory. G.Toxur grew in stature, his grimace hardened by the years and fracases, his inner heebie jeebie shriveled into a stone pit and rattling piteously inside of its lonely, echoing cavity. Uncle had never, would never allow the fear to fester in his belly, or to soften his inherent anatomy. Now he pondered me from a pallet of firs, clothed in ceremonial garb and bedazzled with the polished bones and teeth of his vanquished, and sighed. “h.Brisa. You do me the honor of your visit. You represent your father in this place, my loyal brother and co-general, he who stood ground against Zapid at the crest of many gaping hollows. We lost many bloody frays, scads of followers perished, petrified, in the ranks. But he stood, hardened as any blockwood testament; yes, he faced the enemy and never faltered. He was my rock, and I, his.” He closed his eye for a moment, then my uncle turned his head to me. “I will see you standing as your father, H.Vinsid, and not as this, this perpendicular shadow of fallen willow barks.”

“Wha...” was the only sound that I could muster, and my breath fell flat against his stern countenance.

“The Lord Vapid will not leave me to rest for long. His Evilness senses my resolve, and I am old and weakening. It cannot be helped. He will have his grinding fists at the summit, soon, and vomit on my doorstep. Cannot you see? This is the final end all of us must face, but more so I, I who have taken the fight into His corner and come out intact, not bent and groveling, not with my sides ruptured from the abject fear that exudes from every pore of the horrid, crooked face of the enemy.” My uncle gasped for air. It was the only time I had ever witnessed something that resembled terror on his face. But he brushed it aside and took two of my hands in his, withered and calloused.

“Uncle.” It was all I thought to say, and my gaze fell.

“Yes. Your fatherkin fell, as he should have, when the blight from without, the flaxen missile from the stars, hovered over our hills. The thing fired on us, glazed over our gardens with a crackling honey pestilence. That day we lost many, thousands who lifted their faces to the sky and pushed hard against their sides to keep the dread from digging in, and expelling. That day he fell, much to my regret, for I had all I could handle, righting the fortitude of my lieutenants and remaining intact, myself.” The star flung menace was no match, and seeing the fallen and the quivering innards that erupted, scattering from the hill, it resigned. “It left our orb to harass another, not so willing to capitulate.” Uncle spoke of an event recounted in the oratory history of the renowned j.Benes, adjunct of the general, from afar. It was well documented, as are all his exploits, and beyond refute. He and my father also stood against the fright of AkNastard and the venomous tooth of Beehavistam. Every child of the twelve wedges and points without know these tales, and more.

I knew the stories all too well, was reminded of them constantly in my learning age. My lineage was known, and forever fell like an oaken shadow over my path. “I never knew my father,” I answered, akin to a squeak from my perch.

“Or your siblings. Scarcely knew your motherkin. Yes, I know of this. Sent far from your home wedge to toil on the inner marsh, to dwell upon the skein of dread and grow resolute. But the training failed, you bent to the terror.” My uncle threw his leg over the bed and leaned forward heavily on two of his hands. “The kin harbored a thought you might yield and become a subjugate-foe among us, so you were removed into our care. h.Brisa, you are my brotherson and I must favor you, or loathe and fear you. I cannot do the last, so you are forever held high in my esteem.” He took my hand. “Help me stand
for one last endeavor.”

–

His Lord Vapid had no use for a feeble heebie jeebie. It is a soft muscle, plump and easily agitated in its cavity just inside the thin hollow of our venter plates. We are born with one, fully formed, squeamish, overly nourished. The evil one defers to the white faced among us, those who blanch at His name. We go in peace, never to be harassed by His minions, having been told the mucous of healthy innards is like a viscous lye, an acid to His spleen. Still, we stiffen and quake. We crouch on rear lines, and flee under the shrieking tongues of flying vermin Bunglers. With every heartbeat, the responding organ strains at its fetters, easily breaking loose of its fleshy umbilicus and bursting forth. The anguish is tremendous. I have felt such pain as I would never wish upon another, although I know the strong, the hardened, suffer worse and for longer. Yet they emerge whole and heartier, or die broken, face down and bloodied by nothing less than a terror beyond the scope of their endurance.

G.Toxur led me, shuffling from heel to toe, to the spiral stair and slowly descended step by step. His back was bent, but my uncle was formidable yet in stature. His regalia fell at sharp angles from frail shoulders, and each shallow hop that he managed induced both creak and moan to escape his fragile bones and dry lips. My uncle should have been in his bed, awaiting the final visitor, defended by his loyal servants who would unselfishly succumb alongside their master. But he was with me, before me, ushering forward to the task he had settled on. There was no dissuading the general. There was nothing to stop me from fleeing, but I would just as soon perish, ruptured and bleeding from an irreconcilable wound, than allow my old, moribund uncle to die cursing the name of his brotherson.

I knew I could not live through the ordeal. We left the house, and moved down to the garden, beyond the hedges. A bumbleshoot-notsomuch scampered through brambles and stopped on the path, raising its narrow head to hiss. Quickly I shaded my eye, feeling my side bulge, but my uncle kicked a pebble at the creature and drove forth, hardly noticing a burning iris. He wiped a bead from his sodden brow. Grievous raptors drifted airily and entwined aloft, crying out faintly, adding thus to my distress. Shortly we entered the opulent garden and came before a door closed upon a stony abutment. Roughly carved from a solid chunk of glasswood and varnished with the black fruits of pine ivy, the door gave an impermeable view. And once opened, surrendering an empty foyer to its guests, the door would shut, and in shutting would close off the sun, to abandon us shuttered, dark and disillusioned in its clutches.

My eye refused to adapt, it was pitch black, and I reached out, encountering only a harrowing void with my searching, grasping fingers. “Uncle,” I begged. “Surely you must know, this is more than I shall be able to endure.”

“Yes, yes. I know.” Was all he said. And we waited, bereft of all sight, indeed of any sensation, for the air was still, even odorless. Nothing could be heard, except the boisterous beat of my own three chambered heart and the inhalations of my off-tilted tricorn earhorn. Of my uncle I sensed nothing, and had the disheartening dread he had crept away, to leave me helpless in this silent tomb. The wait went on, seemingly an eternity, when suddenly I was grasped from ahead and behind by many strong hands. The muggers made no sound, but gently laid me prone as I struggled slightly, then swooned. A leaf of forest whimsy was pressed up to my face, covering my mouth. At the first I fought to shake it loose, but a strangled frenzy overtook me, and I breathed in sharply, inhaling the mildew dust of the plant, and then I knew no more.

–

I know not when nor how long I lay in a stupor, but I was no more ineffectual in that state than I might have been fully aware, and surely tremulous, at whatever had befallen us in the sinister hollow. When I stirred from the forced slumber, I found myself spread on a well padded mattress of feather and fur. My uncle was beside me, in his bed, and gently snoring. He looked to me much at peace.

“What has happened,” I pondered, believing myself to be alone. “And what was the miracle that delivered us to safety, I wonder?”

“You were attacked in the cavern. Do you not remember?” asked a voice from behind me. I turned and there saw L.Misteri, she was wearing a stained surgical gown and bent to wipe my uncle's sweating brow. “Can you not feel the pain in your side, will you look now at the scar, and the scar on G.Toxur, your uncle?”

M.Goostors entered, toting a ewer, and set it down. “h.Brisa, you entered the cave a belly rat, and then emerged, slashed, yet whole. Do you feel changed, are you not H.Brisa?”

Certainly I was stressed, and completely fatigued. But likewise I felt confident. “I have lived.” To my right I heard the labored breath of my uncle, and thought him soon to be a ghost. “I would to have made my uncle proud, so he could leave this world unashamed.”

“And so you have. Yet he lives, and soon will face his, all of ours, worse enemy. Lord Vapid will come tonight, and there will be a mighty battle for the soul of G.Toxur. We shall see your uncle to his grave, you will see.”

The night slowly passed, and soon I was recovered enough to take food and drink and move about the upper level. Below us, the glasswood entrance was shut, but left unbarred, for no lock could stay Vapid in His hour. I stood, and sat, tracing over the stitched scar with first one finger, then the others. It seemed strange to have been wounded only in this one place, and for my uncle to have the same fresh wound on his body. But I had little time to ponder, for soon we heard a momentous thrumming, then skittering footfall. Boom, came a thudding upon the front door, and with no resistance it opened on its oiled hinges.

I stood before the doorway, while my uncle stretched and opened his eye. “It is my time. H.Brisa, help me to my foot.” I propped my uncle up, and we stood together to face the enemy. G.Toxur and his able servants had seen the foul lord before, but I had only heard tales, and the stories were less horrible than the truth. Into the room came the Lord Vapid, and He was shrunken from head down, ghastly pale and crimson as the bleeding noon sun. The man - if you could call him a man, for His belly sat upon a pan of curdled flesh and crawled below with the phalangi of twenty stout hands - rotated around a fetid, bulbous body and His many arms weaved smoking circles into the stale air. At the stump of each waving limb was a toothy maw that lunged erratically, then hissed out of stream of pithy vapor.

From its pulpy lips issued a gibber, but then the thing, the Lord Vapid, discerned its surroundings and became quite loquacious. “My old friend, G.Toxur. Finally I have come to inhale your being. I will relish the moment. Perhaps I might carry you on my belly for a month of moons, rolling your marbleized grain of stalwart in my cheek, for a while. Or longer.” The thing was amazingly still in the darkening chamber. “Do your stone servants join the fight, or will I return some later eve for their...fear?”

I held my uncle, he seemed to droop, even quake. Would he fail to meet this last challenge, after all he had fearlessly faced in his life? I began to doubt my uncle, but would not let him fall, not now. “Leave them be, foul Lord. They will have their own terrible end, tonight you come for G.Toxur, and he will have a singular death, one you surely owe him. And it will be sung of for an eon, if only to vex you further.” Even in the face of this grotesque monster I stood unafraid, but the Lord Vapid was not interested in me, only in the foe who had stared Him down on many a battlefield. It came closer and stretched out its quavering, slavering limbs. My uncle shivered and shrunk back into my arms, he reached down to feel his side and groaned in pain, as his scar began to seep red. “No,” I shouted, and thrust forward the general, G.Toxur, to the waiting, writhing arms of His Lord Vapid.

G.Toxur cried out, in shame, and Lord Vapid plunged His hungry, snapping palms into my uncle's feeble body, tearing the flesh and digging into his wounded side to feed upon the ocher, battle hardened heebie jeebie that lay within. The maw slobbered and gobbled it up, but the heebie jeebie was round, and soft. It squirted juices into the gullet of the heaving monster and the succus seeped around and between the grooves of its chin and gums and leaked into the gullets as they each tore into the ravaged body. His Lord Vapid pleaded retreat to its rapacious limbs, but to no avail and they devoured all of G.Toxur, there was nothing left, neither a splatter nor a splot.

“Trickery,” it cried out, only one time, then Vapid sprang to the window ledge and clutched a fist upon His chest, falling through, down to the waiting moonlit path. Wholly dead - and the carrion fowl of Zowar Sent Harasser howled out of their bony skull rifts and circled away in ever widening spirals until they came back to the inner lands, unto the wedges center, where they remained for an eternity and more.

Ever after I lived without fear, harboring the stony relic of my uncle in my side. His servants and I stayed in the house, tending the gardens. Together we lauded my uncle, who had given away his strength to become the lowly g.toxur, and to rid the world of a foul beast. Mine now, it slowly softens, the heebie jeebie, and only yestereve I took fright upon seeing a blunt-toed bidderknocker. M.Goostors merely chuckled, and blew his nosehorn.

presence

2011-09-20T14:38:00.003-04:00

Dear Occupant,
or
To Whom it May Concern:

We regret to inform you of the optimal decline
of your everloving aurora of invisibility,
it has come to our attention
and we pass along to you
the aforementioned inclination
a dilemma
hyphenated parenthetical
of utmost importance
inasmuch to say
simply and without delay
regret or spasm...
your warranty is up,
nuts are loose
toes are juiced
ears screwed on too tight
and various accoutrements of convenience
just
not
right.
Please post yourself directly
for realignment and etcetera,
signing on the dotted line
of course
and leaving amount disclosed
blank, incomplete, alphabetically transposed
for further introspection by inspectors,
namely numbers 9
& 5
who lack names origins and platelets
much as you do, you metalized hack,
respond without comment, in person
or as you please, come as you are
bring a date, but RSVP
and BYOB or smattering of grease
in a vacuum packed bag,
you never can tell,
pie plates are all the rage
and whipped cream...
but that's extra.

back to Funday Sunnies

2011-09-18T08:41:00.003-04:00

aLiEnAnTiCs !!!

silentsoliloquy

2011-09-11T12:51:00.001-04:00

grotesque they bob up and down on poppy stems, the tiny garden of human heads shrunken and wise rocking in the wind, retiring behind apogean petals with the waking of the moon. Their obscene grins belie a muted death, cavernous sockets look down, dragged by gravity to a dew clean perspective of river polished stones, dredged and spread convoluted like a jeweled, multifaceted bed. They curtsy nod and bump asking in their own selfless way, can we take solace in a plethora of pebbles? and answer in the only possible way, with a question, what else is there?

Tomato Paradise, part 5

2011-09-08T20:38:00.000-04:00

In the deep desert of Trifecra you expect nothing to survive. But there are bugs and animals that somehow make a living in the sand and dunes. They burrow deep to escape the Sun, then emerge at night to play and feed in darkness, or in the dim light of the planet's miniature moons. These creatures are themselves small and pose little threat to us. We can hear them, but a sand skimmer or dune mouse never cross our paths. Bimini's keen sense of hearing can pick out the rhythmic thumping of a Chantra pillbox from the shuffling of shifting sands, but what frightens us more is the howling of the hill hares that venture miles into the desert between the falling and rising of the Sun. Before long though our scooters carry us far from the hills into the lands low, far below sea level and still hot from the prior day. Solitary boulders, some as tall as the tallest town structures loom within circular pockets of swirling sand. We stay clear of these, as the sand is loose and sometimes home to rodent or spider traps. Other times we come across piles of humongous rocks and these are good for shelter during the Sun hours, if you can find a spot that isn't already occupied. If it wasn't so dark we could probably climb some of these remote tumbles and spot a caravan in the distance, skirting the hills and heading out to Deep with several wagons full of grain and produce.

Our second night out I spot faint tracks in the sand. They have to be fresh. “Keep your eyes open. These tracks would have been wiped clean over the day, with the solar winds.” Even now there is a stiff breeze that is forever trying to blow us off course. I need to constantly check our compass heading. Bimini is enjoying the freedom of the scooter and has let her hair out to trail in the wind. We trade the lead and now she is ahead. Her streaks of gold flicker in my headlamp. Ahead there is a large pile of columnar rocks and she fades left to stay well clear, when we see the wreckage. I call to her, and we come to a halt. “Stay here,” I say, and carefully walk to the broken vehicle. It is the dune buggy, scuttled on a patch of sand buried rocks. The front tires and axle are crumpled.

“It's deserted. The driver got too close to the boulders and hit some covered rocks.” Bad luck. I wonder where the driver went, and whether it was Japlo'n, whom I had thought dead. “I'm going to check in the boulders real quick,” I yell to her, and slowly make my way over the sand, checking my footing with every step. I have a telescoping whip stick and pull it out just in case I have a close encounter with something wild in the rocks. “Hey, Japlo'n. Are you in there, friend?” Taking care in the dark I cautiously circle and then climb onto the jumble. I might search all night and find nothing unless it wants to be found. He wouldn't be here anyway, if he could walk. It's the cool of the night and he'll be traveling.

“Nothing here.” I straddle my scooter. In the open treeless sky of the desert we can erect long poles and let the autobats fly overhead to power our lights. I hear mine dipping and climbing. “There's a private shade oasis about two kilometers from here. We should stop there for the day.”

Bimini brushes back the hair from her eyes, rubs some sand off her cheek. “But we've got a lot of dark left.”

I smile at her. “There's no rush, and you'll like this place.” It will be nice to relax and enjoy night before letting the Sun chase us into shelter. Though under cover might not be a bad place to be, with Bimini.

She is beyond infected. I can feel it, see it on her face, in her body. Our time alone in Stan La'zanz had produced a tiny being inside of Bimini. It is small now, microscopic and in a million pieces throughout her living body. But soon it will coalesce into one little thing and begin to grow in earnest. The silicorpus will expand just like a human child, but the changes it will make will also cause changes to its host body. Bimini will alter along with the child, grow and inflect internally to match surroundings and race. On the outside she will be Bimini, but taller, stronger. The living silicon will bond and modify cells from the inside out to make her a new and improved model of a nearly perfect human specimen. I kiss her red wine lips. My only thought is this: how angry will Bimini be?

We lie together on a mat beside a bubbling fountain that has drawn clear, cold water from an underground stream. Sky is open above, cloudless this very early morning and the stars are at their brightest. Bimini has never seen them sparkle so. I hold her and feel warm breath on my neck as she lightly dozes. Bimini's skin is naked to the night and her back glistens with the sweat from our lovemaking. I feel the heat even before the light diffuses shadows, and smile as the sunshade automatically unfolds to seal us in for the day.

Halfway through the afternoon I awake. Bimini has rolled off to one side of the mat and is hugging her pillow. I had half expected to find Japlo'n here. While I'm concerned for him, I'm also glad that Bimini and I have had this time alone. Something outside is flapping, like a piece of the shelter has broken loose in the wind. It's deadly hot outside, but I don a desert suit with a protective visor hat and unlatch the opening. The Sun is bright; even with the shade covering my face I am momentarily blinded, but head out anyway toward the sound. Suddenly I am hit from behind, hard, and buckle at my knees, falling and hitting the sand that has piled up by the structure. Grunting, I try to roll over, but someone is kicking me, and dropping onto me. Scratching at my coverings and screaming. “Get off,” I try to scream, but the solar wind tears the shout from my lips even as it forms. Then I feel a sharp pain, once, three times as the intruder's arm falls onto my crippled body again and again. The knife does its job and I lay helpless in the stained sand; it blows onto my face, rips at my clothing. Kneeling over me is a Sun scorched man, flesh burned and ripped from the bone by sand driven winds. A once towering man, a townie from the place we thought we were rid of. He had stolen the dune buggy and followed us, driving himself monstrously over the dunes, through the grotesque Sun hours to this camp only to hunt and defend his depraved honor. I guess he had murdered Japlo'n. And now he has killed me.

__

She carries a bundle on her back, riding tall on a well worn scooter. Behind her a second vehicle follows diligently, like a trained mule carrying all her treasures and possessions. For months she lived in a secret oasis as the life within her grew rapidly. She fed and watered herself, leaving the life inside to work its magic. Sooner than she would have believed, the thing broke forth, crying and mewling and she bundled up the child and brought it to her breast. It grew for weeks, the baby doubled in size and crawled around the enclosure and sat slapping the water and laughing. Then one day she felt the beacon, it pulsed in her temple. They travel for many nights until the sand turns into gravel then into hard packed pavement and her scooters merge with the lonely caravans that mix into a crowd of buses, buggies, and then riders and walkers. Now the shadow of skyscrapers fall over her brow as she enters the city, passerbys gawking at her sand scrubbed, brown face as the Sun rises over the city of Deep.

“Home,” Bimini mouths as the heat meets her head on.

Tomato Paradise, part 4

2011-09-08T20:35:00.001-04:00

She's infected, Bimini, has been since the morning we shared the mochacreme. But that won't change a thing, not in this lifetime. Until we lay together and my seed takes root she will be pure Trifecran, and rather average at that. Back home, at Deep, she will stand out from the muted, carved walls like a flamemoth against a cloudy night sky. Her hair is black, streaked with gold, and her body is brown like the honey skin of the fretted borng'e trunks. I am with Bimini now, my cave white arms folding her dark, flawless shoulders into my chest, and she falls with me onto the mattress where I joyfully initiate her into the world of Deep. She's the one, has told me so. There is nothing here, in Stan La'zanz, for her. She won't be missed either, which makes my task all the easier.

“What's it like, in the Deep? Is it, you know, dark?” She is thinking about it all wrong. She's grown up in the dark, always hiding from a Sun that is too close to bear for long. But Bimini's world above ground is open, filled with cheap electric light stored and released over the long nights. In Deep the tunnels are wide and act only as conduits to caverns and halls big as any city landing field. There are ceilings so high, the illumination streams down from the height like a sunny spring day on old Earth. Engineered skylights channel real sunlight along curling, mirrored wormholes. Highways connect the corners and sections of Deep through solid rock, or across spans of chasms, long drained. We have underground seas that lap sandy beaches and weather that churns the waves and circulates air through the hundreds of thousands of miles of environmental duct work.

“Well, we don't call it the Deep, just Deep. And it's just as bright, maybe more so than here. It's always lit in the public areas, though at night they dim a bit, just so you can sense the passing of the hours. Our home will be wonderful. And it will expand, or we can move as our family grows. Deep has the best education system on Trifecra.” I don't say the galaxy; she would learn of that soon enough. “Any more questions?” Bimini had asked plenty between our wrestling bouts, and I had told her all, truthfully. Thankfully she doesn't ask the wrong questions, queries whose answers would probably have her hiding behind locked doors.

Japlo'n was too thorough to leave clues. The men he killed were missed, but their bodies never found. The girl, 'Chell, disappeared just as quietly. I assume by now he is traveling back to Deep with his prize, though I'm not sure what they'll think of her, if she'll be accepted into the fold or simply be held a virtual captive in a prison she will never be allowed to leave. I feel sorry for my friend Japlo'n. The machine will not be giving him a second chance at Stan La'zanz or any other Trifecran town. Silently I thank him for his stealth, even if he did make a mess of things. Bimini and I are packing to leave at Sundown, after she gives goodbyes to her mother and father. We will slip out of the darkening town, into the foothills then out into the desert where we can take shelter in the monolithic boulders between Sunups. The trip will take a week, maybe more if we take our time. There are places to see out there in the wastelands that are lost to most of the civilized world. Strange animals, hidden oasis' and forgotten people. The trip will be like a honeymoon for us, although the way will be long. Deep has secured secret places along the route, so well disguised they can only be found with transmitters and until I make it home they are fully activated. We will be safe, and happy.

I shoulder my pack and take Bimini by the hand. She has decided to see her parents alone, while I secure two fully equipped traveling scooters. Making the trip on foot would take a very long time, and Japlo'n has most certainly taken the dune buggy that we stowed outside of town. At the rigger I pick out two scooters with fat tires. And for good measure I add on a repair kit and a flop tent. I tell the store owner that I'll be back soon and leave to find a grocer for some food supplies. Then I see 'Chell. She rounds a corner and slinks into a bar.

When I enter the saloon, I can see her sitting at the bar, alone, with her back to the door and drinking a tall one. “'Chell,” I whisper in her ear, placing my hands on the bar around her back so she can't get up.

“What do you want, city rat.” She hunkers down over her glass and stares ahead. “You better get lost before I call some help over.”

“I just wonder if you know where Japlo'n is. Haven't seen him for a couple days,” I lie.

She looks at me over her shoulder with venom. “He's dead. Just like the two boys that he killed, just like I would be, if he'd had his way and left me out in the hills. Dead, like you'll be once Dolard catches up to you.”

I can't believe what she's saying, but her eyes are blazing with hatred. I stretch my arm up over her and lay my hand on her head. 'Chell jerks away, but I keep a firm grip. The infection is wearing off, it didn't take. “Fine. Tell him I've left.” I turn and quickly leave, happy to be rid of this place, and relieved that I can leave without doing something about 'Chell. If she'd have been pregnant with Japlo'n's silicorpus child, I would have either had to bring her along, or worse. I feared worse, because she wouldn't have come along peaceably.

Bimini is late, but that's to be expected. In the meantime I let fly the remainder of my solars on food and water and have the scooters packed up and ready to go. Bimini hugs me, she's been crying, and together we mount up and ride out of Stan La'zanz for good.

In the towns and cities there is always light, even though most activity takes place at night, after the Sun dives below the horizon. The farmers and merchants sleep while the blazing heat cooks the planet's surface and wake up late evening to prowl their darkening world like old world movie monsters. The solar winds and strong solar rays power the planet's habitable regions making oil a relic of the past, used only in antiques or as a curiosity. I have never used oil, but I have seen it, and smelled it, in the vacant caverns of Deep. As a young man I had worked in scrubber crews to make ready new habitats and once a humongous sports arena for jet'bat goalie competition.

Out here, in the hills, the town's light is just a reminder of what we're leaving behind. As we near the rising hills we have to switch on our headlights just to see a few feet ahead, and once we get up onto the slopes we think of stopping for the night for fear of running off of the road.

We decide to move on, cautiously, leading the scooters behind us remotely. “Once we're over the hills, we'll make better time on the open desert,” I tell Bimini. On our arrival days before, Japlo'n and I had come over the hills early evening. The dune buggy had a canopy and climate control so we had had better luck traveling in waning daylight hours, as long as the Sun wasn't directly overhead. With the scooters we will have no choice but to travel at night. But I know of many shelters along the way, so we will be able to sleep comfortably and safely while the Sun is at its most evil.

Bimini and I make the upper reaches and begin to work our way down when our energy cells begin to fail. There is only so much extra weight we can carry, even with the scooters, so additional battery power was on the short list and not included with the final cargo. No matter, we've made the western edge and can see better now as the morning Sun begins to burn through the low lying haze that blankets the surrounding desert. I wave at the scene and Bimini raises her drooping head, smiling at the beauty of the vista. But she is tired. I doubt we can make our way down through the broken paths and switchbacks before the golden orb stretches forth its radioactive tendrils to block our forward progress.

I touch her arm. “We should stop now. Why don't we make for that point. See there?” Lower on the path we can see a rocky abutment that will shelter our scooters and tent from the scorching Sun.

“Let's,” she agrees and stumbles ahead the next few hundred steps. For her first day Bimini has done well. I set up the tent while she drinks and nibbles on a pack of biscuits then she crawls in and immediately falls asleep. These hills are remote and I doubt they see much travel, but the paths are worn and well kept; someone must use them occasionally. I go up a hundred yards and set up a perimeter alarm, then down and repeat the process. The chances are very slim that someone would go cross country over crags and through the heavy brush to sneak up on us. In any case, I'm not expecting company over the daylight hours, from man or beast. After a quick bite and some hydrating liquid I climb into the tent and drop next to Bimini. She is lightly snoring but nothing could keep me awake now.

Tomato Paradise, part 3

2011-09-08T20:33:00.001-04:00

Step one, initiate communication. Step two, evaluate relationship and harmony within the community. Step three, infect the host.

Japlo'n met me back at our hired room after the Sun came up and began scorching the paved streets. Out in the fields, gravity wells buoy crops and keep burning rays at bay. The farm hands have all retired for the day into dug out earthen bunkers cooled by sun driven, kinetic fans, and the autobats work their way down aluminum poles to dig in for the remainder.

“What on Trifecra happened to you,” I ask upon seeing Japlo'n's bruised face and bloody fingers. His mesh top is ripped as well.

“Those bastard troglodytes jumped me. I made a real mess of it, was on the run most of the morning.” He elbows by me into the wash room and strips off his shirt filling the water basin and sticking his face into it, bubbling.

I can't believe it. Can't believe Japlo'n let those thugs get to him. “What did you do? Where's the girl?” When Bimini and I left them at the bar they had been pretty chummy. 'Chell was teasing her braid with one hand and petting his arm with the other. I was certain he'd have her packed and ready to go in record time.

He turns to me, water dripping off his chin. “She took me out, past the town into an abandoned shed. Hell, Dalteen, she fucking had me. She was no rookie.” Japlo'n slaps the wall with his bad hand and winces. “That bitch set me up. She had her way with me then left me out hanging for her bruisers. They must have been waiting outside for her signal; oh she was a screamer. Before I knew what hit me I was drug out into the dirt and took a couple head shots.”

I can only imagine what happened next. He tells me. “And where's the girl now?” I ask.

“She's in a safe place. As long as I can get back to her soon enough, I mean.” Japlo'n tosses all his clothes on the floor and pulls on a new set. “You'd better destroy those in case someone comes around here looking for me.” Complications.

I ponder the situation. Japlo'n has to get out of here, but my mission is certainly in peril, too. “The girl is infected. Did it take?” I ask him.

“Is she infested? Maybe. I can't leave her now. We can't take that chance.” He sits onto the bed and buries his head in his hands. “Damn it. What am I going to do with her now?”

I shrug. We're not evil men. We weren't raised, or programmed to be so. Flesh and blood; silicorpus. Indistinguishable from the real thing – the next level in fact. A jump in the evolutionary chain and if we can lay low another hundred years, here to stay. “We aren't murderers, Japlo'n. She doesn't deserve to die, and neither did those men. You have to go, and you'll have to take her along.”

“Yeah.”

“The Machine will know what to do.”

Tomato Paradise, part 2

2011-09-08T20:31:00.001-04:00

Deep is a city of two hundred thousand. We are a small nation, mostly male, who strictly ration and govern every resource from steel to lives. It is our plan to slowly grow our population and to be comfortable in our technology. The outside world is in no danger from us. In fact we rely heavily on the townies and farmers for our supplies, and wish them every good fortune. What we supply to them are technology, ideas, and, of course, gold. At some point in the future our society will have evolved to the extent that we will no longer need their services, but it is our hope that all can exist without strife. That is why we delve and stay when we can, in Deep.

Bimini took my hand and we spent the evening and next morning walking the busy main street, talking at restaurants and eying wares in the bazaar. Once I spotted Dolard and Tryla and diverted Bimini to another booth on the opposite side. I was becoming well impressed with Bimini. She is smart and strong. Now, toward the beginning of the day the Sun is rising predictably over the hills and soon it will be too uncomfortable to be out. She will be expected home, in fact she's probably late. At home in Deep we keep daylight hours, mostly because the Sun powers our city and energy is abundant between the moon rises, but Japlo'n and I acclimated ourselves before making the trip. I'm feeling a little tired, but I can see that Bimini is quickly wearing out. We begin walking toward the lower corner of Stan La'zanz where her family keeps a little two room apartment. Her father is a poor merchant, injured years earlier in a farming accident and her mother never leaves her bedroom, existing mostly on jujube wine. Bimini has been educated like every kid in the towns by a general education, but with no money she's had little chance of a higher education and will in all likelihood end up living in a drat infested hovel atop a dingy bar serving drinks and living on tips. She's happy right now, as we walk, but her prospects don't look good for tonight or tomorrow's tomorrow. Bimini is perfect recruiting material.

I lead her into the last coffee shop on the block. “Oh, I wouldn't want any now, right before bed,” she says as we enter.

“One for me then. Just a sip for you, sleepy head.” I really want to kiss her, but it's too soon and after all I've seen and learned I wouldn't want to frighten her off. I grab a table and order a mochacreme. Being accustomed to beer and cheap jujube wine this would be a real treat to Bimini, and I want to impress her now with a little show of wealth. I am by no means rich, in fact no one in Deep is wealthy, but we do have access to some of the nicer things the galaxy can offer. I take a sip, then stretch out in my chair, start to dig a pack of dinks from my shirt pocket then gesture to the foamy cup. “Have you ever had a mochacreme? Drink up; I think you'll like it.” The vapor swirling off my dink intimates the calmness that has mantled me totally.

Bimini hesitates, but curiosity disarms her, and she lowers her face to the brim letting the froth creep up her lip and tickle her nose. Bimini grins and sips.

Tomato Paradise, part 1

2011-09-08T20:26:00.001-04:00

We started in the garden district of Stan La'zanz, where the tomato plants had roots a meter deep and their stems grew tall and straight aided by low gravity wells harnessed by the great astrobotonist Pliny the Newer himself. You haven't tasted a tomato until you sit down to a salad bar in La'zanz. The Sun here bears down fully half the day, and everyone knows how these red fruits love the heat. The farmers, well they tolerate it, generally coming out in the dark with eye lamps like vampires, while resting or shuffling papers during the worst of the weaving Sun hours.

Japlo'n and I came from the city, Deep, way to the south and dug into the bedrock. A millenia of volcanic activity has spilled into the valleys, here, but the continent is excessively stable where we come from. Not much grows and the earth is flat. We grew up shaded by the tunnels, white, while the ground over our heads grew ever more parched and deeply crevassed. Deep grows; it spreads like the roots of an oak, sending out tunnels like a fractal diagram even to the edges of the safe zone. But we have few wives, and fewer children. That's why we're traveling; it's what the Machine has ordered.

The market place here is a major hub. It comes alive good and hard right around nine, a couple hours after the Sun begins to sink low and red into the undulating roundness of the weather worn foot hills surrounding Stan La'zanz. Now the life blood of the farmer's town is pumping into the streets. The prior night's harvest is in and some of the locals are lining up at the stalls, but the freshest stuff won't make it into the booths and restaurants for another half night. The pickers are out in force bent into the field rows with their bronzed pates naked to the night air. They're wiping the sweat from their eyes now, but soon the day heat will blow from the valley and the cool night wind will fall over the eastern hills to fill the fields and cool those toiling there.

I order a home grown beer and some half boiled peapods when the girl makes it around the cafe and takes our order. Japlo'n does the same and peruses the young girl as she moves off to the kitchen. “Strong, and dark. She would make a good choice,” he says quietly. We're sure to stand out in a crowd, with our light complexions, and it wouldn't do to advertize our real reasons for being here. “Dalteen, what do you think of her?” He is wearing some faded jeans and a loosely woven evening sweater. Our kind isn't totally alien here. I'm sure most will peg us for buyers from Southland, where nothing green or leafy grows.

“Too young. I mean, yeah, she'd be a good fit for us, but the locals wouldn't take kindly to us stealing their children.” We want to be good neighbors; don't want to start any wars. “It's early yet, most of the townies won't be out and about for several hours.” We hang out for half an hour and leave our empty mugs on the table with ten solars and a generous tip.

In the street vendors are selling trinkets and some carved totems, mostly animal and myth-brutes, but the stalls are filled mainly with vegetables and some dried meats. There's an old woman selling something dry and pruny. I recognize it as sandpop, a flower that grows on desert succulents. As a youngster I remember gathering them on forays above. That and the yellow June bug that would blanket the desert floor for a few days in the winter. With nets all the youngsters and their watchers would run and play above ground, netting as many as possible and then storing them in a special Sunlit chamber below ground. They would flit around on their beautiful lace wings for weeks until the cooks ground them into a paste for our meals. Japlo'n buys a small bag of sandpop, but I'm content to let the sour taste of the tomato beer linger on my tongue.

“Tomatoes, green chard. Roots and puff balls,” they cry out and wave the green stuff in our faces. But they know from our white faces that our solars are waiting to be spent on the fresher stuff that will be coming in toward midnight. It's true, we will have a wagon shipped south, but that's secondary to our main mission. As we walk the open street and the Sun drops low, hemorrhaging crepuscular rays like dying, creeping fingers, the crowds thicken noticeably and we find ourselves in the midst of young and old alike. The youngsters are out with their mothers collecting foodstuffs and supplies. The older children are gathering in social units, making plans. Our quest will lead us into the cafes and bars where the young adults will be meeting up for drinks and dancing. It's late in the year now and the summer crops are less plentiful, so the sons and daughters of farmers have more free time than they will in the coming weeks and months.

I step off the gravel onto a curb fashioned from the manicured roots of a dawn beechwood. The roots of this specimen lie shallow, except for the central tap root, and over the years are lifted and shaped to form resilient, long lasting walkways along the village's main street. Many feet have worked the tough wood into a smooth, mostly even surface. In time a single tree can produce enough roots to form the exoskeleton of one or more buildings. We enter one such structure, the Beech House, a four story building that houses a popular bar on its main level. Electric lights that are powered by the swinging autobats high in trees cast shadows on the convoluted walls and Japlo'n leads me to a vacant table under a gnarled chandelier.

We look around once seated. The place isn't crowded, but many people are sitting with a drink or a meal. Much of the staff is milling about, cleaning and setting up. “This is good,” I say while picking up a menu card. “Gives us a view of the whole room, and the bar is close by.”

“That's right.” Japlo'n picks the woody rind off a beech nut and pops the meat into his mouth. A group of men walk in and nudge past our table. A beefy man, little more than a boy but near two meters, steps on my foot, but I merely raise my right hand and nod as he looks down on me. They lean onto the bar and order drinks, ignoring us. “They look an ornery bunch. Not so sure they'll give us any leeway with the local girls. Maybe we should move down the road?”

I'm not so sure. They are pretty big guys, but clumsy too. “We can handle them. If they make the first move, then anything we do will just make us that more respectable.”

“So, I shouldn't hurt them?”

I laugh. “Give 'em something to think about. Be friendly about it or that big chap might be waiting outside for us with some sort of plow laz or kitt scorcher.” Now it's time for Japlo'n to laugh as he grips his wrist and flexes taut fingers. We haven't had much opportunity to use our fighting skills, but our training was complete and it's one of those things that programmed muscle memory keeps intact indefinitely. There's a lot that these townies don't know about Deep residents, and unless initiated will never learn. “Look there,” I motion to the doorway. A small group of three young women come in and stand there touching each others arms and tittering.

I rise, but Japlo'n is quicker and already stands by them, leads them to the table by ours and pulls out two chairs. I grab a third and the ladies sit while we move our table closer. “I'll get drinks. Do you girls like the beer here? Any preferences?”

Only one, a long faced runner, acknowledges me while the other two lean in and resume their conversation. She waves a thin fingered hand at me, “Anything but 'mato,” she says, and adjusts her seat.

I see one look at Japlo'n as I turn. She is wearing her hair short, but for one long plait down the side of her face and wrapped around her slender neck. At the bar I have to push my way through a crowd but eventually find myself standing sideways between two of the men that walked in earlier. They look sulkily at me. “Can I get a pitcher of the house brew, and five glasses?” I call down to the bartender. He gives an offhand nod and fills a handful of mugs for the barflies. As I start to back my way out of the throng I find myself wedged in by the two guys and one of them pokes me in the chest.

“Have your drink, city, then move on. Get it?” He wasn't asking. The other fellow had a tight grip on my arms, so maybe it wasn't a good time to disagree.

“Got it.” After a second or two of muted glaring, they let me go and I wiggle back through the crowd to our table. “What's to do around this place,” I ask when I get seated.

The girls stop chatting and look up. “Might be some fighting, I'd say; that is if you two don't take your beers in a carry-out.” The runner smirks as she says it, then crosses her legs and leans away.

“Ah,” slurs Japlo'n. “I see how it works. We set you fine ladies up with a few drinks, then you turn us over to Brutus and Bungee for kicks.”

The third, a long haired girl speaks up. She's wearing a slick black flophat, a style that came down from Tripoli over the moon. “Tryla is Dolard's girl. He'll tie you up in knots if you're not gone in ten minutes.”

I look over at Tryla, the long faced runner. She's not my type, but I guess Hercules over there might see something in her. “Dullard? The big boy? He can have her; I'm more interested in you. What's your name?” She smiles and looks down at her hands.

Just then the waitress comes by with a tray and sets us up. The beer is red, like a tomato. “I said no 'mato, you pasty faced city freak.” Tryla stands up with her beer and makes to pour it over my head, but my hand flashes out to take her wrist and with a twist I force her back to a sitting position. In a moment the big brute is to us with his flunkies shoving customers roughly out of the way to meet him at our table. Dolard grabs me by the shirt front, ripping it at the collar, and pulls me up while cocking back his arm for a face punch. I see Japlo'n fluidly rising. His movements are effortless as he turns on his heel and meets the other two. A rolled fist uncoils toward my face, but easily I twist away from Dolard and get him into a headlock, pushing him toward the open door and flinging him out over the curb. Japlo'n has it just as easily, catching Dolard's friends in a pikiny grip. I take the smaller one off his hands and the three men are out into the street, all within ten seconds.

The girls sit gaping, Tryla still holds her beer stupidly. Then she tips it to her mouth, drains every red ounce and slams the mug noisily to the table. “I'm gone,” she spits venom and stomps out the door.

“Hi,” says flophat. She has a very pretty smile that sends crinkles from the corners of her eyes like rays of the Sun. “I'm Bimini, this is 'Chell.”

slow goin', but at least there's Sunday Funnies

2011-09-03T21:37:00.005-04:00

aLiEnAnTiCs !!!

Sunday mornin' toons. weeeeeeeeee

2011-08-28T07:42:00.006-04:00

Monsters!

unQuotable (click on to ultradimensionalize)

the Wahmii

2011-08-22T11:43:00.005-04:00

The Wahmii came down on a shuttle from the Outermost. They found it hovering, encapsulated of course, in empty space with a beacon that had been winding down for God knows how many hundreds of years. Or thousands? Scientists from every district including Juan VanStrauss had inspected the thing, but always from behind a blast shield with disposable robot assistants. Several ancient aids littered the corners of the Wahmii cave, with its ten foot Klantien fiber walls, but nothing of interest or suspicion ever came to light. After the gears fell apart in the XIX Dynasty, Lieutenant Spectra of the Space Oddities division had a Transmission Screen built over one outside wall and a viewing area erected, then proceeded to sell tickets for the spectacle.

People came from worlds away to experience the Wahmii, making Voltaire's Crater on Deimos one of top tourist destinations in the solar system. I met DoraLilly there in the spring of 65. Well, it was spring in the old States, but I guess out here on the speeding half moon, half asteroid mass of misshapen Deimos seasons don't mean much. All of us were tethered to a moving track that led from the launch pad to the visitors center. Part of the attraction was the walk over the moon's rocky, pocked surface, if you could call it a walk. If you've ever worn a life jacket and jumped into the ocean you might understand the sensation – there is little or no amount of control as your body is tossed by the rapid speed of the moon's orbit around Mars with an almost total lack of discernible gravity. Even the weighted boots gave us very little purchase and sometimes I found myself twenty feet high and looking down, or tangled in the lines of a neighbor. Finally I came lip to lip with DoraLilly and our tethers were so totally entangled that we floated buffeted by the solar winds the remainder of the trip until touchdown at the visitor's center some 500 yards later. A few mumbled apologies after attendants cut us loose ended our first meeting, and we went our uncomfortable separate ways to explore the exhibition space.

I had recently finished my Secondary as an expert arborist and had earned a handful of trip credits. I don't know why, but I was compelled to see the Wahmii. My arms still felt like rubber from the hours spent climbing the twisted branches of the redwood/contorta, half the time with a telescoping pruning saw held over my head and suspended ass-end up a hundred feet over the forest loam. I was sore from head to toe, hands and fingers ravaged by splinters and head pecked by the introverted, yet strangely hostile, Catkin Woodpecker. After the first dozen attacks I finally learned to never take my helmet off even if the flavor of northwestern mist though my wavy hair was a magic I'll never in my life forget.

DoraLilly was a visual artist, trained in dream control and hypno-painting. She claimed that by closet introspection one might 'see' the eyes of Wahmii watching you watching her. Yeah, DoraLilly says the Wahmii is a chick, but how a floating toothless, eyeless lightbulb can claim a sex is beyond me. Even so, the creature entranced me, and together we stood transfixed for our allotted seven and a half minutes. Attendants had to push us physically from the viewing room; we were later told that we fought the whole way out, elbowing the guards and clutching handrails and door frames.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We met again in the red gallery inside the spacious visitor's center. She was leaning over the velvet cords trying to get a better view of an artist's representation of the Wahmii in it's natural habitat: space, and the inner space of mind. I was examining an artifact from Ulter 'Htangle and trying to decipher its prominence in the Wahmii collection. I must admit to feeling confused and so was scratching my head when DoraLilly looked over and saw me seeing her. Too late to slink off, instead we engaged in conversation.

We couldn't have come from more distant circumstances. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, Earth to DoraLilly. She couldn't distinguish the Empire State Building from the Great Wall of China. All could have been within miles of one another, instead of thousands of miles apart. I grew up amid the redwoods and giant sequoia. She, mammoth craters, dust pools, and red Martian mountains, particularly Olympus Mons and the Fretted terrain. I'd of course seen photos and paintings of those landscape features that eclipsed anything on Earth, including the Grand Canyon. DoraLilly promised to take me wind sailing through the buttes, mesas and mile high cliffs if I could ever manage to make the trip. I would show her the 200 foot evergreens, some of them a thousand years or older, survivors of rampant twentieth century logging and natural firestorms that actually helped to perpetuate the species. Just sight of the ocean was sure to blow her mind, even as it impressed me every time I stood amid the smoothed rocks to look over its endless waves to the horizon.

Now we sat in detention, wondering what the hell just happened to us. Little did we know the glass was 2-way mirror and on the other side stood nervous experts waiting for us to vocalize the experience.

DoraLilly began. “I've just been to a place I can't describe...”

I continued: “I was part of something, or nothing. The voices surrounded me. But not voices; hints of intellect. Exaggerated wisdom. Awash in a sea of...a bond...togetherness.”

“There was nothing solid, but creation was all around. Spirits, if you can call them that, were forever...building? The images unfolded like time lapse scenes of nature, then overlapped. I walked down avenues of wraith constructions held up by spiderwebs. Sideways elevators took me down floral corridors.”

“It was all crystalline, and sometimes shrouded or opaque but nothing contained the light.”

“The light was alive,” she said.

“The Wahmii was alive.”

“The Wahmii is the collective soul of an entire world, universe civilization...indestructible,” said DoraLilly. She stood and paced, then stopped in front of the mirror. DoraLilly put a finger out to touch her reflection.

“What is it?” I asked.

“There's not a gap between my fingernail and its reflection. Someone is watching us.”

–

“They've told us nothing new.” The man in the lab coat ran a hand over his sparse scalp and sat leaden into a desk chair. He absentmindedly tapped a light pen.

What now? Juan VanStrauss scientist-general, thought. He had ten assistants awaiting the verdict. Outside the door stood another ten commandos in full regalia armed to the teeth and heavily armored. Even though his senses were dull compared to many of the psychics on his team, the scientist-general could definitely feel the shock waves caressing the Wahmii cave. Even Klantien fiber wouldn't hold forever once the Wahmii detected a kindred spirit nearby. It would break free to envelop the couple like a bubble of mercury slurping up a droplet of its stray silvery self, and tear apart this base, crater and perhaps the entire moon in the process.

“No telling what will happen if the Wahmii gets loose,” speculated an assistant.

Another said, “We don't possess the knowledge to encapsulate it anymore. We have no choice but to keep it contained.”

Juan VanStrauss had heard these thoughts a thousand times. He'd vocalized them himself. His first priority was defending Earth and all its colonies. The health of the Wahmii, whatever it was, was secondary. Insignificant in fact.

–

“Who's out there?” I asked her. How the hell would she know? My mind was still stuck in a place of wonder and not in the real world. What is the real world? DoraLilly placed her hands on the glass, trying to see through her reflection. She spoke aloud, something about looking into her mind, projecting thoughts.

The room turned into a cloud bank that we dumbly stood upon. We took a step toward one another and grasped each others hands. Murky trees grew up around us, a valley that rivaled Hebes Chasma opened in a vista before us. These were images of our minds translated by the strength of the Wahmii. It wanted our input to expound upon creation. I reached out my hand to touch a nearby trunk, but my hand went right through.

“Until we can merge with the Wahmii, all of this will insubstantial. When we are one with it, our worlds will merge and become real.”

“Inside the Wahmii is a whole world, a universe,” she said it while spinning, her arms outstretched in the illusion. We danced inside the observation room seeing what no one else could.

We have to get to it.

I was smart enough not to say that out loud.

–

Outside the tourists were being evacuated to the launch pad where they'd board the rocket ship back to the orbiting terminal in Mars' orbit. All unnecessary personnel were moving into bunkers. But nowhere was safe on Deimos, possibly the entire solar system. The gentle hum of the Wahmii cave turned into a dangerous stutter that began to shift the sand and rocks. Craters that sat undisturbed for a millenia began to collapse in upon themselves.

We were constrained inside a house of glass, alone in our perceived universe, while unannounced to us the soldiers outside our door began powering up their weapons. The building shifted off of its foundation, being pulled toward the Klantien structure holding the Wahmii. The transmission screen, clear as glass, lost its static charge and faded out, revealing a ten foot tall blank surface. It was the first window to come down.

Beyond our glass wall the scientist-general had taken too long to react. But the wonder in his eyes burnt out and VanStrauss jumped up and to the door, which an assistant jerked open. “Take them out,” he yelled to the soldiers.

Colonel Beem had already pulled his visor down and was ready with his plasma rifle. The team had run this simulation a hundred times, in fact had carried out the mission a dozen times. He was sweating inside of his armor waiting for the order, sweating and swearing at the general's inability to react. What was different about this situation, about these two Wahmii converts? All the rest, usually one at a time, were dispatched within minutes of evaluation. The door latch popped and they ran through the open entryway.

DoraLilly stood on a rock outcropping and gazed over the canyon walls. Easily a two mile drop lay before us. Buttes and sheer cliffs separated us by five kilometers from the other side. Down, deep, we could see a line of river snaking the canyon floor. Living dirigibles floated lazily in the expanse. My redwoods stood in dark contrast to the canyon walls, lining its drop offs and impressive formations. Something odd a mile away twisted up the vertical shaft of one, girdling it as it screwed skyward to the lofty clouds.

A black hole opened to our left and troops stormed through it.

Yes, they had run the simulations, sure they'd opened fire on innocents and dropped them into bloody puddles. Colonel Beem had had nightmares over the killings, but that hadn't ever stopped him, and it never would. His finger was on the hot trigger and once the target was identified he would press down and end the disruption. If he didn't, then the nine men behind him would do it, gunning him down in turn. They were an unthinking machine in tune to the reality of the situation. There was no reality here.

He hit the floor, which didn't seem to exist. The floor was there, but being as the door opened twelve feet above the surface he was seeing, he placed his boot awkwardly and twisted his ankle. Behind him the soldiers cursed and struggled to regain their footing. All was an illusion. Gunfire sprayed as they tried vainly to meet mission objectives.

I shouted at her, seeing the soldiers. They were above us, coming from an opening in a tree trunk. I knew that everything in this room was fantasy, an illusion sent from the collective Wahmii, intermixed with our own integral thoughts. But somehow there was a shift in reality too, how else could two separate planes occur? Above us, they sprawled onto another surface. No, now the two began to collate like eyes adjusting to the dark. I heard the superheated plasma charges and ducked, pulling DoraLilly to the cement. She closed her eyes.

Across the divide the Wahmii dissolved the opaque and opened its sight to the surrounding landscape. All became clear to it. It hovered inside the Klantien walls, like a giant glass prism, and pushed out rays of consciousness filling the glass house. Encased bodily, the light streamed easily from the prism and flooded Voltaire's Crater. The spectacle was easily seen on Mars as a bright speck of light.

The compound that held us wasn't constructed of anything so imposing as Klantien fiber, and the structure actually dissolved under a barrage of rocks and moon dust, but not before Wahmii shafts penetrated the walls and enveloped us totally. Juan VanStrauss stood in awe, his face pressed against the glass of the 2-way, until the building came apart and he and assistants blew out into the atmosphere of Deimos. Those of us engulfed in the sphere of light were luckier, I suppose.

--

I still don't know who resides in the Wahmii universe. DoraLilly and I travel the world which has become solid to us now, by foot or transported in vehicles of our own construction or those built by the original inhabitants. Nothing here is comparable to anything we've ever known, except that which we've brought along. The Wahmii welcomes our gifts, encourages our creations and thoughts. This new universe is unbounded. We wonder though if outside of the Wahmii there is another still larger universe. Can an infinite universe hold an infinite universe? A ring of twenty people with their outstretched arms could enfold all of the Wahmii. But they couldn't envision it.

Once we saw the soldiers from a distance. They are entombed as we are, free to roam. But they have no control over the environment like we do, and they have long used up the charges of their plasma rifles. All they have left is a disintegrating leadership and their government issue hunting knives. DoraLilly created some brainless meat bubbles for them to hunt. I made up some saber-toothed sandworms to keep them on their toes.

This is a paradise. In some moments we are ourselves, moving as though in a playground. Other times we are like the citizens of the Wahmii, we are as light.

stoned

2011-08-20T14:53:00.006-04:00

On my hands and knees I scour the earth for hidden treasure
only to stumble upon vast and glorious pictures of yesterday
in the form of mineraloids and dust coagulated by tons of pressure
into the lowly rock
and or rocks
come together pleasantly in the company of dirt, plant, and mulch

inside the very walls of my own universe.

Slurm.

sequential

2011-08-18T17:14:00.002-04:00

Organized chaos in the blink of an eye
came fast and left
easy as cake – piece of pie
we tried but came up blank
sitting on a raveled unrug
plied with candy and cigarettes
preening beavers in a hedgerow of planaria.
Yesterday won't do, tomorrow is too soon
Monday moons of marbles and Cheeseday reeks of teeth
the days of the week should be chocolate
or rhyme with steak
and the months should melt like cool jazz
over a pan fried steak
accoutremental
experidental
potato

potato

butter

peas

unquotables

2011-08-16T20:10:00.004-04:00

click to elongate and widegate

s-s-sunday comix

2011-08-14T09:55:00.001-04:00

okay - i need to break open the sketchbook, 'cause i'm fresh out of these.

'nuf dawdlin', get doodlin'!

shhhhh

2011-08-11T20:01:00.001-04:00

mute over here,

so a wee

doodle instead

god undertoe

2011-08-07T19:37:00.003-04:00

From the dark, outside in a car, snuggled in layer upon layer like an infinite scene between mind numbing reflections, I see her immortal face. She is at once naked in repose while standoffish and cornered like a froufrou poodle bag hung from a hook on delicate chains. Now her impossible motility, unlikely as pendulous giraffes dowsing in a broken stream, bombarded by boulders and the remnant footsteps of flimsy bygone behemoths, have me thirsting for knowledge not available in any story book of leaping hounds or grandly feathered divas. Abstract fleurs melting, rising out of artificial holes governed by lieutenants bearing their badge on wheels, are displayed like archaic skeleton keys that rise in bespeckled currents shod in pink party dresses until they hang in stasis like poems constructed by Robert Indiana in a Vonnegut guild parlayed with gold parquet. Now from within out she lays harbor to a flat surface heeding no warning as she has over many midnights now, playing her games, her dance upon the chessboard as a porcelain pawn waving and pivoting away the shadows. Her erstwhile god, in a pallid room, taps a timepiece and weighs his options, a heavy eye upon the tripping beauty who applied for the position.

Her winsome visage and form grace his studio on clapboard easels while his conclusions are as labored as the palpitation of recalcitrant snails ridden in mobius figure eights by scantily clad waifs doubling as dim muses hanging beneath clever word balloons. An icon in dark glasses, he wears a skinny black tie and draws his lightning power from pointillism and the ordinary tin can; the god fingers his chest, a flesh weave of cardigan and taupe. His student, she, is statuesque and worthy of apprenticeship. He might command a genius to sculpt her in marble then remove the artist's hands for touching unattainable beauty. She is voluptuous, lithe, winged and envisioned as a ferocious goddess with the head of an angel and the body of a chicken. The smoldering Rorschach spheres will cast its vote while blue twin bitches wearing the fur of turquoise ovids look on with distaste. So does a former mermaid in a triangle bikini and pie cut Afro acquiesce, believing that somewhere her novice leads a wanderful of sheep around a pole and will likely be doing so long after the colored pins drop from her map of Nirvana and points without.

The moon is rusting and held in the sky by twine, lecherous mutations abscond with earthly nonpareils, men kneel to buxom maidens or flail at their snubs, dropping from unforgiving heights, falling upon their swords, delving between the jaws of crocodiles when the guilt of grief dissolves their bodies into the crust of loveless airborne dust.

Behold the being that I will create by dabbing my nib into the well, at my leisure. I will forge this document melding sunfire on my naked breast, sending legions, sacking cities, and engraving upon her grimace the web of godhood. Swifts will deliver at her doorstep a procession, warped in satin, enthrone her like a madonna in a great birds nest, on a gathering post as handmaids, stuffed heads and the shrieking Lucretia worship her willingly. The trinkets of refuted candidates parade in shadow boxes upon my wall.

Patterned lemur of zigzags gathers its leaf, lays the frond beside awesome murals and carved pebbles from the nude green starlets. Inside this Dome of Radiation all see the architecture within one another and their spirits soar with the white doves as cloudburst memos rain down begging for the lord's willful ignorance. Her eyes become a mosaic watching disguised concubines led over trails of flame lined with the lustful emanation of Tiki stones. The fuscous god, i, looms afloat and sees through wafting shades of purple, his pencil headdress courting circular steps, loading a pixelated image of the successor.

No more is she a gewgaw on a checkered board, but bejeweled unto the shade of a beached monument, inked upon pages of myriad tomes. Legions will name particles and planets for her sons, shift their postures in deference, defeat untold foes with weapons of inferiority. Mighty men digest ocean worms and stare into the fiery eyes of demon kings in her name, as her god before her lays beneath her stiletto foot, beguiled then betrayed by the oils he splashed onto the white canvas, soiled by his vision.

night repairman

2011-08-05T20:55:00.000-04:00

Tricky parts, these Ecronoids, they got pieces in places no sensible appliance oughta. But hey, got screwdriver, will travel. So the shop rings me up and I answer, yo. My earpiece is a bit clogged with wax 'cause I've been sleepin' on it for a week. And there's a bit of water and shampoo residue as well. Jeez, I really need to get more sleep instead of coming in at four and crashing face down on the couch. Too many jobs and good appliance repairmen are few and far between. Maybe I should take less work and charge more? Nah, not my style.

This model has tiny little screws and I keep dropping them into the carpet. What a crappy old room; most of my clients have hard woods, or newfangled industrial surfaces, not Evelyn. “Hey Evy, what's up with the shag? Get with the times.” She can't hear, she's in the shower and singing to boot. Barry Manilow! Talk about oldies. The unit shifts a bit and I lose another screw. Shit the bed! Got more in the levtruck. Screws up the wazoo.

Last night was a humdinger. Nasty piece of work called a Pentapoint V-5. Talk about redundant. Gack. I hate the casters on those damned things, took me three hours to disassemble just for a two credit part. Of course the mister was away so I was payed out of pocket; out of pants more like it, hence the late hours. And here comes Evelyn out of the bedroom wrapped in a towel wondering when her little discount all purpose appliance will be up and running. Oops, another screw. Ha, did I just say that? Not out loud I hope. Many more nights like this and I'll have to take a vacation.

“Twenty minutes, best guess.” Evelyn sighs and retreats to the bedroom. I hear the viewtube switch on and ask for preferences. My preference was to pull the AI switch, frankly to hit the kill switch. Can't stand to walk into a room just to have the wall start to flash random images and incomprehensible daily mutterings. A little peace, is that too much to ask for? My thoughts, want to hear them? These crazy housewives have every thing in the world right at their fingertips. Information, home deliveries, viewphones, massage showers and spas. Tacky little gogo appliances to fetch them frufru drinks and style their hair. They have no good reason to leave the three hundred story sky rises they're holed up in, and who wants to take a three minute express magnarail ride, so they break off pieces of their plastic kitchens and sprinkle them into appliances to gum up the works, then call for a serviceman. Really, it's just a big joke in the industry anymore. Sure, we need to know a standard bleck from a Phillips head, and a magnetized screw bit always comes in handy, but sideburns and a gnarly tattoo are the real prerequisite. Man am I tired. I'd ask the store router to give me a legitimate job, but hell, they pay half rate, so I hate to complain. And the tax man can't legally force me to claim 'tips', so so; buck up, switch on and socks off.

“What the hell?” This little dude has a crispy filament and a noticeable wobble. “Hey, Evelyn.” She pokes her head out the door. Her hair is in a styling globe. “Hey, how long has this little dude been acting up?”

“Couple days, I guess. Maybe more.” This was a small gogo unit and depending on the client they did between no work to a hundred hours weekly. I've seen 'em run off their rollers with wear, but this one is fairly clean and looks to have factory fittings. It's an O-8, so at least a decade old.

Now she's out in the kitchen looking through some drawers for a nail file.

“Ah, looks like a wire. A bad wire. Got one in my kit here. Another minute or two...”

“Good. My date is waiting at the midlevel express. Another twenty minutes and he'll be polluted.” She smooths out her way short mini with half bent knees.

I snap the lid on and pack it up. “You'll get the bill electronically, probably business hours.” Evy sees me to the lift and taps a bonus ten spot into my personal meter. “Want to share a ride? We can put it on slow-mo and flood the cabin with mood atmosphere?” Evelyn flutters half inch pink pindrop eyelashes at me and strokes my scruffy cheek.

Best offer I've had all week, but to tell the truth, I feel a bit low on oil. “Oh, ha ha. I've got a call over the span in your sister building. Ha ha, you know; no rest for the wicked.”

Evy winks at me wickedly. “You scoundrel. Don't be surprised if I don't drop a counter top on little winky next week and ask for you personally. You hear me?”

I beat a trail to the next building and called it night. Even let the wall talk me to sleep. Drone away, you crazy stupid viewtube. Drone away.

toby summer doldrums

2011-08-01T17:07:00.004-04:00

uh oh!

eating frogs is exhausting

uncle!

who's next?

hiding inside with the cool air

2011-07-23T17:48:00.007-04:00

monsters:

this is the last unQuotable...
...for awhile.

A better ending

2011-07-15T18:51:00.001-04:00

I never met her, but spent nearly every Sunday morning for a year with her. We played canasta on-line and sometimes I won, but not because she let me. We were both fiercely competitive. The first time we spoke was at work. Peg worked at the main office, in accounting, and would often call me to inquire over some clerical issue or hassle me about getting in the end-of-week transfers. She was a real bug and I wasn't above being short with her. Most of the receiving clerks at other store locations detested her. To me she was just annoying. But gradually she wormed her way into my life.

I don't know how, but we started talking about books. Peg was an avid reader and she picked my brain about stuff I had read. She was more into best sellers and some fantasy fiction. Supernatural stuff. She liked all the popular stuff as well. I turned her on to science fiction, mostly the classics because I figured that's what she would enjoy the most. I didn't want to throw her into the deep end right off the get go. Eventually she got beyond Tolkien and read a Mieville, but it was a bit of a lot a little too late.

Sooner or later we started talking about art and writing. I sent her a diskette in the store mail, Attn: Peg, General Office, containing a bunch of my doodles. She weedled out of me a couple of short stories and poems. Peg was a cat person, she even rescued cats and had a crap load of them in her garage. Sometimes I would save damaged cat food for her and she'd drive out to the store to pick it up. I was never around when she did this. She had an arrangement with a vet that would neuter the suckers. Never really learned what she did with all these cats; I guess I didn't really care, as I am about as far from being a cat person as one can be. Remember 101 Uses For a Dead Cat? I laughed at all of those stupid cartoons back in the 80's. Sorry.

But I did write a cat poem for her. It was called 'Jelly Cat', and I kept losing it and asking her to send it back to me so I could rewrite it, which I did a few times, but never completely to my satisfaction. I don't know what it was with that stupid poem, I just couldn't get it right. And now it's gone forever.

The company spent a little money and upgraded our equipment in the receiving area. I got a computer to review invoices on and a kick-ass printer. Man do I miss that printer. Bubble jet, mamma big ink cartridge, single sheet paper. The computer was your standard Hewlett Packard. It didn't have much loaded on it, but I could stick a disk in and up load pictures or listen to music. Sometimes I would even print stuff off that I wrote. I always had a stack of recycled paper around, and the printer cartridge would go nearly a year before I had to order a replacement. It was a sweet deal. All of the receivers had their own e-mail accounts and we could text back and forth questions we had about this or that. Of course, Peg had all of our addresses and now she could hassle us through e-mails as well as phone calls.

I'll admit, I was always a bit stand offish. Computers had been around for quite awhile now, but the big social networks weren't all that mainstream. We would chitchat on the phone between questions about paperwork, and communicate through e-mail a lot more than we had any reason to. I never considered it much of a friendship, because we were just casual work acquaintances that had never even met, in person. That's the way she wanted it; any requests from me to have lunch or a cup of coffee were always shot down. She was a spinster living in an old farmhouse with her sister, easily ten years or more older than I. I was married with kids. To me it would have been no big deal; I've been friends with a lot of women over the years, almost always work associates, and my wife has never had a problem with it either. Peg would have nothing of it. But I think the reason was different than what I suspected at the time. I figured a friend I'd had from childhood and had known for years on end was a “real friend”, but she thought we were the best of friends, in every meaning of the word. She wouldn't give anything of her self away, but was ceaseless in her attempts to dig every ounce of personal information from me. I resisted and even refused to talk to her at one point when something I said hurt her feelings. She was outraged, it was such a little thing, and I told her where to get off and slammed down the phone. One thing Peg was was persistent. For some weird reason, she wanted to be my friend, and she wiggled her way back into my life. She was sorry, and she didn't want it to end that way.

It took a year, but eventually Peg got to read my book. I didn't want her to. It wasn't polished. It was my baby. Somehow it was too personal – a part of me. To this day I'll bet less than a dozen people have read that stupid thing, but Peg was one of them. Probably the only person who devoured it and maybe she even read it twice. She got to read a few more of my stories, and a bunch of poems. Peg finally even disclosed her love of writing and e-mailed me a couple stories. Her favorite character was some sort of supernatural wraith-like woman. Peg wasn't a bad writer, not at all, and I was trying to talk her into writing about her life growing up on a farm. It would have been a hard story to write, and to read. Peg didn't have one of those happy childhoods; it was miserable and full of nasty creatures called men. Growing up on a farm is about as far from my experience as a suburban kid as you can get. I had a stay at home mom and spent my summers in the neighborhood pool. She spent hers sweating in the kitchen, cooking for the menfolk who worked in the fields and expected the women to do everything else. She got no love from a father who hoarded every penny, and lost a mother who died early, probably fleeing a heartless world to find a better place. Peg had to raise her brothers and sisters herself, scraping pennies from a part time job just to buy them used clothing and pencils. Her brother was so messed up that he shot himself in the head right in front of their father, who just sat there and watched him bleed half to death. Peg rushed home from work to see the carnage, and call an ambulance. Talk about dysfunctional, I have no idea. Peg made her way through college, but I don't know how she managed.

We played canasta, together from across town, sometimes two or three games, until one of us excused ourselves to get something practical done. She had housework, or visiting nieces. I needed to go out for a run, or get ready for church. One workday I got a package from the office, Attn: Tom, receiving. It was thick and turned out to be about thirty pages that Peg had written, sort of a love story told in the world of a popular fantasy novel. I took my time getting around to it, but finally read it. Eh, not really my cup of tea, and I told her so. I qualified that though and told her it was pretty well written, even if I didn't particularly enjoy the subject matter. I did chastise her a little for not being more original. Why steal characters and settings; why not create your own world? She was never going to be a real writer by writing 'fan fiction'.

I guess for her it was more a hobby than anything. Peg wanted to be a writer, but only for the fun of it. She didn't want to embarrass anyone by telling stories from her past, and she wasn't confident enough to delve deeply into unknown characters and places. That's what I thought. I guess I'm full of shit. Peg told me to burn the copy of the story she sent me; didn't want it back, she had her own copy. I stuck it in the closet under a pile of other papers and envelopes. Every once in a while I would uncover it and think about her, and her story.

Peg died. I still have the e-mail.

Hi Tom
> I am Peg's sister and I wanted to let you know
> that she passed away tonight. I wanted to thank you
> for all the joy you gave her with the card games and
> emails. She always spoke very highly of you.
> Tresa

That Sunday morning Peg never met up with me to play canasta. I figured she was busy, but thought it was odd, because normally she would have let me know if she couldn't sit in. Funny isn't it, you sometimes know that someone is sick, but you never know how sick until someone tells you, and it's never the person who is sick. Peg never let on how ill she was. She never wanted to meet me in person. She just wanted to read and write what gave her joy. I finally knew why. She wanted to know everything there was to know about me. Me! That's the weirdest part – I'll probably never understand it.

I walked upstairs and sat beside my wife to tell her what I had just read, then I just cried. I hugged my wife and bawled real tears for a woman I had never even met.

One night this summer I sat out in my backyard in front of a fire that I made. I was drinking a beer and an old buddy of mine had stopped over. I've known this guy for thirty years; I guess that makes him a “real” friend. He's been here and there, all over the country, but now lives back in the town where we both grew up and went to school. Brian is a fine fellow, and I guess I should try to be a better friend to him. He's going through some pretty rough times now. We lounged at the fire, talking. I put my beer in the grass and opened up an envelope that I had brought out earlier. I was taking out sheets of paper and wadding them up, tossing them one by one into the flames.

What's that, he'd asked. I remember. Just some old papers I need to get rid of. I gave him a small stack to toss into the fire. Then I raised my beer to the crackling embers and nodded to Peg, my old friend. I don't know if Brian saw me, and I wasn't going to explain if he did. I wish things had gone differently, but this is the way it all played out. I'll think about her, and her story, and maybe come up with a better ending. I'm pretty sure she would like that.

Summer. It's hot.

2011-07-14T20:30:00.006-04:00

For some reason or another I cannot comment on anyone elses blog. I know other people have had this problem from time to time, and it's probably only because some setting on my computer has been changed for no particularly good reason...if anyone has an answer for me, I'd appreciate it...
Anyway, here are some recent pictures from days gone by...

a small piece of the mural on the Hyde Brother's Bookstore.

Toby, or should I say, "Mooch"
sidewalk chalk, at the Three River's Festival
night flowers.

Holiday Weekend Funnies.

2011-07-03T07:40:00.006-04:00

aLiEnAnTiCs !!!

alright, skipped a week due to vacation stuff, back on track now (sort of):

unQuotables

Mexico Three

2011-06-29T19:48:00.006-04:00

Mexico is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. Or maybe I would, who knows? The resort we stayed at was Nuts...Coconuts!

Ocean views, Garden view too...
The day trip to Chichen Itza was an eye opener. Have you seen Apocalypto? Great movie, and it showed what this place may have looked like in its glory days. The ball court was amazing, even the two rings were still attached. The winning captain- guess what? He lost his life!
The Mayans built a huge pyramid, a calendar, then ten years later they built this bigger one over the top of it. The first one was obsolete! I don't know who the posing chick is, but she'd of made a swell sacrifice.
Okay, they invented the zero and could do amazing calculations, but didn't know how to construct a simple Roman arch or use the wheel...
A short bike ride into a neighboring town was refreshing, and hot, and butt aching.
A boat, like the one that took us out to the reef for a snorkeling adventure. Next time I'll get an underwater camera. Maybe; I had my hands full just keeping the snorkel and mask clear.

The locals all seemed to own these bikes. That basket could carry a lot of coconuts, or iguanas.
Hmmm, these lobby flowers look like they could poke an eye out!

Mexico part Two

2011-06-27T17:58:00.004-04:00

I can't tell you much about art, but I know what I like. There's a simple beauty in colors and lines. Much of Mexico is so run down. We only saw a fragment of life there, but could see poverty everywhere, especially some of the Mayan villages, which were in some cases no more than hollow concrete buildings with no doors or windows. But in a way, even on these sparse streets in the little towns there was color and form.

The ancients left their doodles everywhere in Chichen Itza.
A quaint fountain at the Inn at the Mayan ruins. It was an open courtyard, as many there are.
Yes, murals. Kim at Mouse Medicine would have her camera out here a lot!

One of the shell sculptures on the Catholic Church in Puerto Morelos. Should have gotten up for the service Sunday morning, but we were probably hung over and sunburned.

I don't know, do these shades go well together? Maybe, in a seaside town!
"Where the Weird are Welcome....for Awhile."

They would have kicked me out in a heartbeat.
I have no clue what this is all about, but I saw it a few times around town. Pretty cool.

Is this a waste of a picture? Geometric shapes, they're everywhere!

2011-06-25T07:39:00.006-04:00

Hola ! We have just returned from the Riveria Maya on the Yucaton Peninsula, specifically Playa Del Carmen which is east of Cancun. Many fine things were to be seen, and tasted, here for a week. Unbelievably I am sitting here and can still feel my body being tossed around by the ocean. I would recommend heartily a vacation there, especially if you are into eating and drinking. But for now I thought I'd post a few pictures of the local fauna in and around the area.Coral pieces washed up onto the beach. Some of these pieces are as big as your outstretched hand. I saw some fine specimens the size of a big head wearing a hat. Ha. They wouldn't fit in my carry on, dammit. Are these considered animal life? Well, I suppose they were once alive...

Howdy little urchin. This tiny guy rolled up the beach by the rocky area. Almost no shells on this beach...I wondered if it was because of the huge coral reefs.
The first time I saw one I jumped. Cripes! Iguanas that are maybe 2 or 3 feet long? They come out of their holes to sun on the rocks. We saw these everywhere, from our location to Puerto Morelos and even into the interior. Excellent beasts! I hear they taste like chicken.
Mexicans cleaning up the beach.

Tourists messing up the beach. Well, I'm sure after the yoga they'd be stretched out somewhere with a dirty monkey or a blue Hawaii getting red as a lobster
In the little towns and Mayan villages were dogs that wandered freely, but they mostly lounged in the shade.
The frigate birds floated above our hotel catching the thermals. It was very windy where we stayed, and the surf was crazy. Up the road at Pto Morelos the water was calm and the beach was smooth and white.
The reefs depend on the Mangrove swamp and the swamp depends on the reef. So the natives are trying very hard to work with hotels, etc, in keeping the marshlands healthy. Well, you know how that goes.
These birds are brownish and black and everywhere. If you eat outside in one of hotel cafes, don't leave your food unattended or they will swoop in and make off with it. We learned this lesson early and laughed aloud watching them have their way throughout the week.

Perhaps later I'll post some flora pictures, hasta manana.

Sunday, see ya later, comix stuff

2011-06-19T06:48:00.000-04:00

unQuotable

chardy on the rocks

2011-06-16T13:00:00.001-04:00

part two

The trail up to the cabin was smoothed of ruts and picked clean, but it was far from level and Jacob Dance struggled over the dirt incline until he reached the stoop. His right leg was worse than useless. He would never go for another run, walking was hard enough. After four weeks of rehab in the state medical compound, they had booted him out. Jacob never held private insurance and the federal stuff only went so far. By this time all of his assets had been sold off to pay for the debts he had incurred after the accident. His home, their home, and all of his family's goods were sold off. He had no tools, and no transportation. For now the only income he had was a pittance from the government and a very small life insurance policy he had taken out on his wife and children. Most of that went toward funeral expenses. Jacob had resorted to living in a one room shack. The dump had running water and thermal for the cold nights, but not much else. His neighbors were as decrepit as he was, and had been for a lot longer. Needless to say, he was more than a little scared to be living among them and got very little sleep.

He dipped a brush into some blue tint and brushed it onto a board. It was a shaky stroke. Mauve, his state medical contact, had brought him some artist supplies from her office. They were leftovers from some kid's program, and not what he was used to working with. Anything better would probably be a waste right now. She was coming for a visit today, the only thing he had to look forward to lately.

She didn't like the gun, the only thing he saved from the house in Binomial Plasma, so Jacob hid it under his pillow and sat on the wrinkly bed covers to wait for Mauve to show up. The bus passed by this pauper's row and usually the driver kept to schedule pretty well. As close as he could anyway, considering a magnet line hadn't come through yet to automate the route. Jacob heard a faint whoosh and wheeze of hydraulic levelers, and soon after that the shuffle of smooth city shoes coming up his dirt walk. Lord alone knew how she would visit after or during a rain storm. The path was nearly impossible to traverse when it turned to mud, as the one-legged Jacob could certainly testify.

Knock, knock. “How are you Jacob?” He didn't give much away, but she could tell his mood lightened. Mauve couldn't imagine this life, not when she knew what he had before the tragedy. Sometimes Jacob would rant while she inspected his limbs, and his moods. She noted all of it, and was a little frightened. Oh, it wasn't anything she hadn't seen before, but she was afraid for him and worried Jacob would never crawl out of the hole he fallen so deeply into.

But usually he talked as little as possible during her visits. Jacob could feel her probing eyes. She looked deep, tried to peel away the layers. Mauve hinted at obscurities and apparitions – things Jacob felt he just couldn't face. Not yet. Something was lurking just beyond his consciousness. It was the reason for all of his suffering. Just this one thing. It destroyed his life. If he ever figured out what the ghost was, then Jacob would strangle it; he'd bludgeon it into a lifeless pulp. Either that, or this thing would eat him alive, if it was truly as big and horrible as he believed it to be. He would face it one way or the other. Mauve couldn't know what he was thinking, and Jacob wouldn't let on.

She stayed until the bus rumbled back down the lane, warned in advance by a signal to her personal Flix, and by mid afternoon Mauve was back to her room under the city. She opened her flat door and was met by Teddy, all ears and paws, as he bounded off the sofa to greet her. Standing with his paws on her chest, Teddy stood about four feet high. He was much too large for her little place under the cellars and transit lines, but they made do. There was a grassy dog run about ten levels up, lit by vitamin D diodes, that they visited twice a day. It never rained and the D-D's always brightened her mood after a long day. The company wasn't bad either. “C'mon, Teddy. Let's go see Charlemagne and Kookla. We'll take treats, okay?”

Teddy came into Mauve's life on that day, weeks ago, when she'd borrowed the car and drove up to the accident site. The dog was there, she didn't have to search very long before it came slowly out from behind a bush, head down and tail beneath its legs. Mauve was standing by the bent and mostly hollowed out wreck when she saw him lay down in the dust to watch her. She walked in circles around the car knowing in her heart that this was the Dance's vehicle. She had read the reports, gone back over all the files. She walked to the side of the road. This was the place where Jacob had skidded and hit the ditch. This was where the car flipped. Mauve closed her eyes to watch it tumble and come to rest in a heap of broken parts and broken bodies. This was where Vivacelia took her last breath. And this was where Jaki was thrown from her seat and crushed, with little Deedo bleeding out beside her, holding onto her little hand that he had crawled over rocks and smoldering debris to grasp.

This was where Jacob was found. Crushed against the dash between an air bag and the rest of the car. The car's safety measures had barely been enough to save him and in fact, she knew, he wished they hadn't done him the favor.

Mauve had saved almost the whole plate of eggs from her breakfast, and now she retrieved the napkin that she had rolled them into and set it on the ground. The dog couldn't resist. It stood up and took a step, then froze in its tracks and shuddered fiercely. Mauve backed away, and slowly the emaciated animal padded forward. It gulped up the meal in three quick bites, then licked its muzzle and strode over to where she stood, nuzzling her leg. “No more,” she said and put up her hands. The rest was easy. Mauve walked back to the road and opened her car door, and Teddy jumped right in. His days of waiting were over.

Another month went by. Jacob was stronger, but he would never heal completely. Even in these days of medical advances, not everybody qualified for expensive surgery and space aged prosthetics. The government had done just about all it could for Jacob, and even his mental health evaluation was about to be proclaimed “closed”. Mauve was on her way for one last visit.

He was painting again. Not bad, not bad at all, thought Mauve as she walked into the room. The walls were lined with Jacob's art. “Can I buy one of these? They are really very good!”

“You're kidding right? Sentimental hogwash, all of 'em.” Before the crash Jacob was more apt to paint in the dark hues of hidden shapes and startling red slashes. He couldn't do that anymore, not when all of his nightmares echoed the height of his artistic ambitions. Jacob had to paint evergreens and waterfalls now; somehow the still lives and landscapes quelled his fears and steadied his pulse.

“I like this one, especially. And when I show it to my friends, don't be surprised if I come back for more.” She didn't know if the paintings were good, or even if they were art, but the scenes he put to canvas gave her a warm feeling. Maybe that feeling was just the surprise Mauve had planned for him. She couldn't wait.

“I have some papers for you to sign, Jacob,” she reached into a bag, “and, ta da, a bottle!”

“Heavens.” It was all Jacob could manage. He remained seated on the edge of his bed. “Ah, I don't own a corkscrew.”

She tossed a pen and paper at him. “Let's get work out the way. I'll get the Chardonnay; it's a screw top.”

Mauve poured at the small table while Jacob signed, “here, and here. And date it, here.” She filed the papers and sat in the room's only chair. It was covered in acrylics. “Ooh, I like this color. Isn't it...”

“Yeah, mauve. Ha ha. Say, this isn't bad, eh?”

She sipped from her glass and made a face. “Spared no expense, besides, this is a celebration. Jacob, I have sort of a surprise for you.” Mauve looked at him expectantly. Over the weeks she had pried as deeply as she could, but still couldn't pull from hidden recesses any hint of his concealed past. Mauve had figured the whole thing out. She knew that Jacob Dance had owned a dog, a prized family member, loved by all. The dog had been with them on their excursion, was thrown from the car and somehow overlooked by the rescue team. After all had been extracted, the dog came limping back to the last thing it remembered, the family car. He could smell the Dances, and he was waiting for them to return. Days turned into weeks, then a month and more. Mauve by some strange twist of fate saw the dog, searched him out, rescued him. This dog, she called him Teddy, was the last survivor of Jacob's family. Mauve just knew in her heart that they were meant to be together, and in being reunited then Jacob might come to terms with the accident. He could begin to live again.

“Well, if this is the surprise,” Jacob lifted his glass, “fill 'er up.”

“There's more.” Mauve stood and walked out the door. Today she had driven down from the city in a quick-car. She brought something the transit didn't readily welcome to their seats. She had brought Teddy, the big gray dog. Mauve led him into the room on a leash and stood, waiting for Jacob's reaction.

The dog leaped forward and barked, straining at the lead and wagging furiously. Jacob almost fell back into the bed. His eyes widened and his jaw dropped. And he remembered.

The highway was magnetized and synched up to every production car, even antique automobiles had to be retrofitted with controls. But once you left the city and drove onto alternate, uncontrolled routes, the vehicles reverted to driver control. Jacob was well aware of this, and as soon as he exited the cloverleaf, an orange sign beside the road relayed the information, and a tone sounded in the car. He put his hands to the wheel, foot to the accelerator and gave it some gas. “Time to fly,” Jacob called out as they sped over the smooth road. Next stop was a series of small burgs and then open road into the foothills. The sky was blue and the air smelled like pine needles. Jacob powered down the windows and they all laughed and put their hands out into the wind to float up and down against the draft.

Barney had crawled over Deedo to stick his head out the wind.

Barney.

Jacob drew back against the headboard and stared at the dog. “Barney,” he said very softly.

His wife was singing to the radio and Jacob looked into the rear view mirror to see the kids joking and brushing Barney with their hands. The dog's tongue was lolling out the side of its mouth and it was bouncing happily under their aggressive strokes.

Suddenly it lunged forward and leaped into the front of the car. Vivacelia laughed and grabbed for his collar, but he shifted and thrust his body at Jacob, wedging himself between Jacob and the steering wheel. The dog was too big to sit in a driver's lap.

“Barney, no!”

Mauve knelt down to wrap her arms around the dog. It's name was Barney. She said its name and soothed it, holding his furry body close to her.

Jacob whispered it: “Barney. No. Barney. No.”

This was the demon that had come between Jacob and his family. Mauve saw it in Jacob's eyes. Suddenly she could envision the entire scene played out before her like a movie spreading out across the wall of paintings. “Barney,” she said, just before Jacob stood, pulling out a gun from beneath his pillow. She tripped over the doorstep as the shots rang out. Three shots, six shots, and then hollow clicks as the hammer fell on an empty chamber.

eggs, over easy, not scrambled.

2011-06-16T06:27:00.001-04:00

part one

Jacob Dance had always owned a gun, but he was never a gun enthusiast. For awhile, as a younger man, he had lived in the kind of place that required some protection. That old section of Binomial Plasma wasn't unlike the old west in that the law was clearly unrepresented and every man was for himself. There were no more saloon doors, but the occasional version of a tumbleweed would still blow through. Jacob didn't know kung fu or the modern version of Vulcan mind check, so a flash laz or antique projectile always came in handy navigating the streets.

Now Jacob was older, certainly banged up, and very, very angry. He hadn't picked up a gun since he moved out of the shrouded crevices of the city and into the life of Vivacelia, but she was gone now, along with the kids, and Jacob had nothing left. There wasn't much of a reason to live these days, but hatred and a desire to strike back at something, anything, kept him standing, struggling to survive.

Mauve was the daughter of a baker, who came from a long line a scientists, and was named for the color invented in the 1800's by a distant ancestor. She was assigned to Jacob and of all the people she had ever met, he was the only person that put her name together with the happy shade of the queen's purple. Jacob, by trade, was once an artist and printer. Now he was just a bum and relegated to the state, living like dust in a shanty on the outskirts of Binomial Plasma. Again. Mauve put a paint brush back in his hand to put a vision of happiness into his life, while he kept the heavy gun close for weight training and a sense of security.

He had been in an accident. Jacob and Vivacelia and their two kids. Binomial Plasma wasn't one of the bigger centers, the main city only housed a few million, but it fairly sprawled and was set in the middle of a two low ranges that spread out to a wide V. Dead center was a concentration of woebegone population, left to its own devices, but around the edges beauty and tourism flourished. Jacob Dance and his family lived in the working class district, he had a shop set up in the garage, and they mainly relied on mass transit to weave their ways from place to place. His line of work required that he own a vehicle, though, and oftentimes as a family they would take that car on daylong excursions to the foot hills. It was good for the kids to see green and shades of blue in nature, instead of observing the hues digitally glaring out from digipost adverts and murals.

Jacob could not recall the accident, only that it happened on the outskirts, beyond lane control where the vehicle reverted to operator controls. He remembered somewhat the location. The area was overshadowed in part by the outer rim of a cloverleaf. It was in flux and a conglomeration of gravel, unkempt shrubbery and discarded city machinery that stretched on for miles and was slated for reconstruction sometime in the next few years. Just beyond was another stretch of magnetic road, civilization, and the beginnings of pine and mountain air. That was where the windows got rolled down. Passengers and driver alike would breath deeply and strain to see through the haze, maybe catch the outline of distant peaks as they rose and encircled the horizon.

They never made it that far, and he didn't know the circumstances, only that he was driving with a hand on the wheel and then....

Jacob woke up alone, groggy, in some nightmare world of wires, tubes and echoing pings. Day after day he swam up from drunken dysphoria into a room full of blinking lights and white clothed humanoids shuffling around his prostrate form until the day he regained a full consciousness and began laboriously to live again. He was truly alone now, the only survivor of a freak automobile accident which made all the webcasts because of its rarity. Mauve struggled alongside the morose victim until he was well enough to leave prolonged care and live in subsidy.

She now visited him weekly, taking the train from her underground room to the state run compound in the woods just on the southern border of common Binomial Plasma. Mauve liked the window seat. While most took this opportunity to catch up on the news or workday projects, she enjoyed the views. On a clear day one could see the mountains bisecting the skyline and Mauve wished the train would stop just once so she could climb down and wander into the groves of tall pines that lined the tracks.

The train never dallied in the middle of nowhere, but there were plenty of stops that brought it to lurching halts and starts. About an hour later she would arrive to check Jacob's progress and run through his therapy exercises. “Can you remember anything more about the accident?” She steadied Jacob as he took a step, leaning heavily on a cane.

His hair was just starting to fill back in but Jacob continued to wear wraps on one leg and both arms. He had a board strapped to his back and the left side of his jaw was retooled with artificial teeth so he could at least chew from one side of his mouth. Stitching separated the halves of his face and left the artistic fraction in a permanent scowl.

“Don't the psyches here tell you anything?” he was surly as always and barely putting any effort toward his daily routine. Jacob recalled nothing beyond the off ramp, other than the smiles of his family and his elbow resting on the door panel and wind swirling around the car's interior.

She took another hour to visit some other clients. Mauve made notes and spoke to the nurses, then she grabbed a bus back to the depot. She worked a little on her Flix, but her eyes wandered out to the greenery again. The train fell into the city's reaches and was nearing the decline into the tunnels when she spotted a movement out the window. There was a stretch of track that ran between the road and the woods. It was undeveloped, but filled thinly with machinery, scrub, and debris. Mauve thought for a moment she was seeing a deer, and oohed under her breath, until she realized it was a dog. The animal was nosing around some weeds and what looked from this distance to be a spare tire, maybe a suitcase as well. It was matted and dirty. Then the transit plunged into the earth en route the city and home.

Mauve saw the dog again the next week. It sat on its haunches on the road's edge and stared at the train as it rumbled past. The gray canine licked its lips and yawned, following her gaze, then it stretched forward to lay its long head onto paws until the train, one of many, climbed up the landscape and over the ridge.

“I saw a dog today. On my trip up here.” Jacob stared through her as she told him. He was bending an elbow and trying to hold onto a pencil, but it kept drooping in his grasp. “I saw it last week, too. Out in the wild. Alone.”

“A dog you say.” He said it twice, like a mantra.

“Do you remember your drive, yet?”

Jacob frowned and purposefully dropped the pencil. “I can't do it.”

“How's the other hand?”

He picked up the pencil in two hands and fumbled for a grip. “I remember the road. It was just outside Bi-plas – before the outlying towns and woods. A crappy stretch of road filled with junk and crap bushes. Not too far from here, I don't think. I saw our wreck from the train, you know, when they transported me out to this place.” The pencil clattered to the table. “Can't say anything beyond that.”

“Do you want to give walking another try?”

Jacob stood haltingly at the table. “I can still see her face. She was laughing – my wife. And Jaki, in the mirror, she was smiling at her brother.”

Mauve stood beside him and grinned. She handed Jacob his cane. “What were they doing?”

He took one step, but most of his efforts were concentrated on the memory. “There was something there, between them and they were playing with it. They were joking around.

“Maybe I lost control of the car. I might have forgotten to steer, or something? It's so frustrating.”

She helped him to take another step.

After her rounds, Mauve stopped at the cafeteria and sat down with a coffee and plate of eggs at a table with one of the nurses' aids. They chatted a little and Mauve asked her if there was a quick-car station anywhere close. “Gonna do some shopping while you're out here?” the aid asked. “There's some good antiquing up 34, and a few nice art boutiques.”

“No, I just want to take a drive into the country. I haven't been this close to real trees for years. I want to stand in the middle of a whole bunch of 'em. Twelve or fifteen, even, maybe.”

“Geez, you're brave. Well, you can borrow my little car, as long as you don't go too far. It's only got a two hour range.”

“Thanks. I'll even pay the coin for a charge after I get back.” Mauve transposed the drive code and thanked the aid again. “Um, would you happen to have a little rope around here anywhere?”

#4; of the hellspawn of Pestilence.

2011-06-14T05:38:00.003-04:00

Dangled and fell
out from Chaotic Wellsprings
like a disproportionate funnel
the maladroit colossus
spurred by X
raged in Pestilence.
~
Marsha incognito
for she fled the kingdom in fear
ere the birth of Torquemala
son of a wickedly dispatched Pasty,
nearly tread upon by the creature
a malapropism of enormous breadth
vile rotting and well-favoured,
tho only such as refuse may be described.
He premeditated a close to the reign of X
that vile persona non grata
whose usurpfulness would come to an end.
~
X in a tizzy
adorned with many a tassel
and carried by a host of the foremost
of Pestilence
had bested Miffla, sullen wife
of Amoritorius
and she beget him, X,
a vile witch
loathsome yet winsome
in the art of deceit;
she who would inherit
and ply her wares to the
mired plethora of Pestilence.
~
Now daughter of X
unnamed at birth
and veiled in a drapery cumbersome
to shroud the guilt of her progenitor,
She clutched the strings of the behemoth
that which crawled
from the frothing depth of Demise,
It what had no name
like the witch who then summoned
to ravage in disarray and matted blood fur
her hated father's Pestilent kingdom.

click to mammothate, COMICS !!!!

2011-06-12T06:38:00.004-04:00

aLiEnAnTiCs!!!

...unQuotable...

culminating in fire

2011-06-06T14:17:00.003-04:00

for the tenth daughter of memory:
.
He was only thirty and had achieved such greatness. He was a self made man, thanks to his parents who gave him nothing and left him to his own devices. He thanked both of them, profusely, in his prayers and recalled his father's funeral. He remembered the lonely grave site and a casket lowered clumsily into the abyss. His mother found her own grave, one that he alone knew the whereabouts.

He hardly knew his own name. It was on the tip of his tongue, and unique according to the occasion. His landlord called him John Smith. John Smith paid his lease with cash. After his last sojourn into Hell, with the sirens bearing down and a gun pressed tightly against his own temple, John had an epiphany. He decided to give his life to those who needed help instead of to the devil. Satan would have to wait another few years to exact its delighted vengeance upon John's eternal, tortured soul. John threw away the gun and fled into the darkness, toward the light.

She was a public defender who spent weekends doling out free advice and ladles full of broth to the indigent multitudes. Her parents' untimely death brought to her fortunes untold and paid for a law degree that cost more than she would earn in her career. Not only did she, Jordan, give legal aid gratis, oftentimes she shelled out her own cash in the effort. She was a true Samaritan, and Jordan remembered her parents too, in her prayers. They had given her all the love and encouragement any child could wish for. But Jordan always longed for more than Jackson or Cecelia would give her, and her long, cloaking sleeves could attest to the anguish that her 'lover' had extracted from her writhing, exalted body.

Jordan felt his presence in the crowded cafeteria. It had been years since their last meeting at the neighborhood pond where the young man had prostrated his true incarnation over her naked body. He wielded blades double fisted and the blood ran in rivers down her sides to mix with the mud and green leaves that the thunderstorm had driven from the sheltering trees. The downpour and lightning strikes muffled screams that Jordan could not suppress. These knives were the same ones that dismembered and stilled the lives of countless victims, but in his hands this night they were as deft and gentle as a caress, and the cold steel left neat scrolling scars that were a testament to his love for her. She passed out amid the rendezvous, unable to bear the pain of their latest tryst, and he bequeathed Jordan to the storm gods that night, left her open mouthed and spread eagle inside the rain entrenched circle that in his youth he had used to ply his art, and now, with Jordan, was perfecting.

Beneath her soft blouse, under Jordan's cotton slacks, were the marks she bore for an unimaginable passion to a man not unlike those she oftentimes represented or fed. But he was not helpless and he would never go to trial. Jordan's scars tingled. She was carrying a Rembrandt beneath her clothing that none would see, other than he, her unnamed lover, until her death. She yearned for his touch, to feel his tender fingers trace the raised lines. Jordan longed to watch his eyes engulf her engraved canvas as he planned his next cut and to feel the blade penetrate while she writhed in arcane delight.

John moved beside her. His arm brushed against her sleeve and Jordan shivered and spilled broth onto the floor while the tattered vagabond cursed her clumsiness. She was unraveled, but John quickly scooped some more into the bum's dish and sent him down the line. Jordan wrapped a hand around her own bicep, she touched her sternum and ran her open palm down the shirt until it fell to rest upon her belt. She closed her eyes and felt nirvana descend upon her breast like a sublime nausea. When she opened them, John was gone, but he had left a noodle on the table, spread wide and touching end to end. A circle.

His father died of natural causes, if succumbing to a lifetime of bad nutrition and six packs was considered natural. Frank was only fifty-five, and a widower. His wife had disappeared years earlier and Frank left behind nothing of importance, a son. The son was named John at that time, too, and John sold the house and everything in it. What that amounted to was nothing much, except a clean break and a fresh life. He settled then for a new name and devoted his life full time to an art form most would find disturbing, in the least. Mutilation and death were his calling card, but he was on hiatus. Until tonight. His final masterpiece was a work years in the making, one he had begun on a dissimilar canvas and discarded. John had been dreaming of it for a very long time, since the days he had sat across the street and looked up to her window behind the safety of his long bangs. Jordan finally came to him. At that time she was his only fan and he laid out his creations for her amid the ruins of the derelict park. She always came back until the eventual day when he presented nothing, but led her to the wide circle and set her alone inside of it.

John had sat on a rock and Jordan stood encircled while he talked at her in a sing-song fashion. Their eyes met. Jordan's gaze was absolute, but John's was fractured and haphazard as he searched the surroundings for the words and trespass through a maze he was creating in his head. As directed, she had disrobed and was naked in the circle. John moved closer and with a straight finger he touched her knee. The gentle contact nearly knocked her down. John felt the shudder and put his other hand behind a calf to steady her, as he methodically traced that finger over her skin, over every line he had diagrammed in his mind. The invisible scribe ended below her clavicle, and when he finished and broke the unending thread, Jordan fainted into the dust. He then arranged her in the circle and opened up his kit to begin a new painting.

Tonight he would apply the last of his brushstrokes. The final cuts he had begun almost fifteen years ago. They would meet in the park, but she was to be John's final achievement, a culmination of the work of his lifetime, the acme of his excess. Everything, every wound, every clumsy gash, every bloody murder had led to what he would leave on the street for his fans tonight. The secluded park in a forgotten neighborhood would not suffice, this night he would paint in the open for all the world to see, and then John would linger to observe the reaction in person. His devotees deserved nothing less.

She arrived to meet John, was softly reeling in the moment after a quick stop at the local pub for a glass of red wine. There was no circle drawn into the dust before the pond ruins. The ground was grassy and manicured, picked clean of any sticks or detritus. Jordan waited for an hour, not sure when he would arrive, but the weather was pleasant and the wine coursed through her veins to calm her nerves.
Suddenly he appeared and took her by the hand, a rare touch from her shy lover, who rarely spoke or laid a bare hand upon her body. John led her from the park to a van parked beside the curb and together they drove away, into the city. The ride was silent with John keeping his eyes on the road. Jordan put her hands together in her lap and looked out the window, wondering where the night might take them.

John drove in circles until darkness crept up the buildings and shrouded the streets, then he parked the wide van in front of an alley and helped Jordan from her seat. A weekend, the city street was now quiet and only the noise of an occasional vehicle or distant animal disturbed their solitude. She stood while John took a piece of yellow chalk to the sidewalk, scrawling a circle which Jordan wordlessly stepped into. She shrugged off her loose clothing and stood naked within the ring, revealing her resplendent wounds. John had no eyes for her young body, the firm breasts or slender hips that would bend most men gibbering to their knees. He only saw the curvacious landscape as a willing canvas to his scalpel. She lay down on the cool cement and closed her eyes.

John had been listening to the news. He had read the papers. Days before, the police had uncovered the body of a woman. She had been well prepared for her grave, tenderly wrapped and placed out of harm's way, from degrading moisture or the claws of marauding beasts. Her body was carved into an intricate mosaic of curly cues and fleur de lis. This was obviously the work of a master, of a serial killer perfecting his craft. Of course, the woman had been identified as the mother of John Sellers. Finally the detectives, his most avid followers, had stumbled upon a clue to link the pieces he had left scattered over the state. Time was running out quickly, and although John felt he must not rush perfection, there was no moment now to lose.

Jordan gasped as the blade pierced her skin, even though she tried to remain still. The blood began to flow freely and she felt in John's quick movements an intensity that he had not previously exhibited. There was no tenderness involved and he did not gently hold her as he desecrated her body, but clamped a hand over her mouth to quell the screams. She struggled, uncertain, but too late as she realized his first cut was meant to drain her quickly so that he could finish his work in earnest on a field silent and unmoving.

–--

Finally he packs up his kit and moves the van to a vacant lot. He won't need it anymore. When the morning comes and the shadows begin to creep back behind walls and into brick lined alleyways, John retraces his steps to a little coffee shop across the prior evening's labors. He has toast and a splash of coffee, then rises and leaves five dollars to cover the meal and tip. Down the street is a little farmer's market, and there he buys a carton of eggs, which he turns over into a garbage can, watching the white jewels topple out one by one to crack and puddle out golden across the dull metallic surface. In his pocket is a handkerchief which he opens, revealing twelve precious souvenirs, and he gingerly places them into the carton and strolls back toward the alley, where he can see a gathering of people and hear the reticent wail of distant sirens.

He joins the crowd, with his prize, and revels in the energy of this, his moment.
--
for anyone who cares to, here are the first 3 pieces to the puzzle:
The Acme of my Excess
Unbroken Whispers
For Jordan's Part

s-s-sunday funnies

2011-06-04T21:06:00.004-04:00

click on pic to humongitate.
aLiEnAnTiCs!!!

MONSTERS meets Dog Vs. Cat

"unquotables"