Preludes...

Ha

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 09:31:13 GMT

Sleep deprivation is funny. I almost fell asleep like 6 times during this.

I can’t can’ sleep
Until I have some answers.
Can’t sleep yet can’t sleep yet have to push on, push on, push on. Got to pussshing when darkness stehnks iare there any answers waiting for me, deep in the darkness? At the point where you cav never be sure if the attactedeu2eu2ooo.’.’.’’,,, this is fascinating shit, I look at the words and half of them are coming from nowhere; my brain so badly wants to shut it all down that it is advances Now , gog- dream on and keep tying, yeah? How do you like to type when you’re sleepy off your ass oh, well I like to play golfand I also eat meatload, o how is it that most of this seems perfectly lucid when I wirete it, now theres all this extra crap goig o
Eoeueeeeuuuuuuuuujjjq don’t worry about it
This is a cleansing process. Just don’t listen to any relaxing music or you will fall right asleep..
I think if I hadto have ao conversation, I would like… be weir. Sottttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt
tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt
ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttshoes the pattern on the bottoms of them vary so much, yowonder if there’s ever a cobbon thene and thought…!Yeople n
Inconherent spaghetti. That is twhat thipage in.ohhhhhhhhhhhmoanps
Now you almost want it to happen. Come on, you say make me sleepy. I can resist it. I’ll resist it and revel in it simultaneously; I’m that good. Not true. Prungsossss
Ohp, nope, the tired nezz done.. you – rearrange the landscape. Mach it look richer, more fasional

Randall Begins

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 23:46:46 GMT

A slightly revised but still horrible story from my ENG90 class. This is kind of the prelude to a story I wrote last year; it's down a few entries from here.

Randall

This time it was a black, hulking Suburban, pulsing with a primeval beat as it blinded us with its headlights. As it shot past us, someone leaned out of a side window and shouted, “Get a job!” We kept our eyes lowered. That was usually the easiest way to deal with them.
This used to be our road. Six miles of quiet, tree-lined highway. The only road between the southern end of the city and our sad, beat-down little town of Rock Haven. Sure, the road went past Rock Haven and the abandoned limestone quarry, but there was nothing to see for forty miles past our town so the road belonged to us. Every day we’d pile onto commuter buses that stopped outside the lonely Shell station, and ride the six-mile stretch of Highway 7 into the city for school. We’d stay after, flipping through the clearance racks at the Good Will stores, lingering around the seedy warehouses-turned-concert-halls in hope of the occasional free ticket, or walking through the expensive shopping districts, grinning at the shining lights and the polished cars rumbling at the stoplights and imagining ourselves worthy of such material glory.
At some point, someone smashed the S in the Shell sign, so now whenever someone on the #144 bus looks out the window at the Rock Haven stop, they see a glowing yellow-and-red sign that says “hell.” We didn’t mind. We thought it was a good joke. Nobody except locals ever came to Rock Haven, anyway. Highway 7 belonged to us, remember?
That was before Broken Oak opened for business. Broken Oak, the newest of several ultra-luxury housing developments to spring up around the perimeter of our city, and this one had landed on Highway 7, just ten miles beyond Rock Haven. Within months it was filling up with playboys and bankers and heirs to corporate fortunes the size of supertankers, and before we knew it, Highway 7 wasn’t ours anymore. Now it belonged to the rich and powerful, and especially their spoiled children, who tore up and down the road almost every night on their way to the clubs and dance halls of downtown. The cops didn’t even try to patrol Highway 7 anymore. I guess it’s because people that rich just have too many connections to get stuck with anything. They have lawyers and friends who make the reckless driving fines and the DUI convictions slide off like water off a duck. No one can mess with the Broken Oak kids, which is why Randall and I kept our eyes low whenever they passed. It wasn’t worth trying to be defiant.
Every ten minutes or so, we saw the headlights of some Broken Oak clique headed into the city. It was about two-thirty in the morning, and we’d been walking since one. I was cold. My leather jacket kept my torso warm enough, but I wished I hadn’t worn the skirt. I didn’t wear skirts often, and though I liked this one, with its very retro plaid pattern, they apparently offered very little protection from the cold. But then, I hadn’t anticipated that we would miss the last bus and have to walk home.
I looked at Randall. He didn’t look cold. He was wearing an old Carhartt and faded black jeans. He did look tired, though, and even paler than usual. His shaggy red hair hadn’t been trimmed in a long time. I wonder if we would have had any better luck tonight, asking for payphone money, if Randall hadn’t looked like such a cretin. One of them had actually laughed at us, as he climbed into his pretty blue sports car. “You wanna call mommy?” he jeered. “You want my pocket change? Sorry, plebs. I use a credit card,” he had said, and slammed his door.
“People are such assholes,” I said.
Randall laughed. “You always were an astute one.” Another car roared down the road, this time a lowered sedan with blue-tinted headlights and one of those ridiculous fins that hover over the trunk like the tail of an airplane. The driver gave us two long, rude honks as he shot by.
“Case in point,” I say.
“Did you recognize that car?” Randall asked.
“No?”
“It’s that Civic. The black one. He comes down our street at night all the time, and snakes around all the potholes…”
“Oh. There are a lot of nice cars that do that, aren’t there?”
“Yeah,” Randall said. He laughed to himself. “The shiny little ones, that slip around the potholes, and then the big, tough ones, the Hummers and Suburbans and the Dodge Rams, that roll right over them.”
I shivered. “Why do they come down our street, anyway?”
“Who knows? Maybe they like the potholes. Or the scenery.”
“Oh, yeah. Because rotting apartment buildings and bankrupt pharmacies are just soo fascinating.”
He grinned. “I bet it’s even more than that. They leave Broken Oak and come to drive through our shithole to remind themselves how thankful they ought to be. It reminds them of how lucky they are.”
“How pious and mature of them.”
“Oh, you know those spoiled rich kids. None pious-er.”
I had known Randall for a little over a year. We met at our high school, during a fire drill, when we were all standing around like turkeys on the football field. Randall was sitting cross-legged, reading a book that I recognized, so I complimented the author and then we started talking. I don’t know. Sometimes, you find someone who’s just easy to be with. Or maybe it was just that we didn’t have many other friends, and both needed someone to talk to.
I looked up at the stars. We could only see a narrow strip of sky, bounded on both sides by the tips of evergreen trees, but the night was clear and the stars were out in force. I wriggled deeper into my jacket. “I can’t believe that guy called us plebs,” I murmured.
Randall shrugged. “Whatever.”
“He was such an asshole.”
“It’s not really his fault.”
“He was so rude!”
“He can’t help that he’s an insensitive, spoiled brat. You know, maybe he could have grown up to be a really nice, considerate guy, except that his parents were cruel, and made him turn selfish and mean.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
Randall grinned. “Who’s to say? Maybe I’m right.” A car was coming up behind us. I don’t know anything about cars, but this one sounded powerful, with a low, sexy rumble. Randall glanced over his shoulder. “Oh, shit.”
I looked back. The rapidly-approaching headlights were wavering back and forth.
“He’s on the wrong side of the road,” Randall said. Then his hands were on my shoulders and he was pushing me onto the gravel shoulder. “Move,” he said. “Run. Run.” Behind us I heard the screech of brakes, and then our long shadows cast by the headlights leapt out to the left and Randall pushed me down into the gravel. We rolled, side by side, elbows up to cushion our heads. The sound of the car’s engine was deafening. Tires squealed, and then there was a hiss and our backs were pelted with flying gravel and we cringed, thinking our lives must surely be over.
When we opened our eyes, it was almost quiet. I could still hear the car’s engine—that’s how I knew I wasn’t dead—but its roar had softened to a slow rumble. Beside me, Randall groaned. “Are you ok?” I asked.
“I think so.”
We stood up slowly. My knees stung, and my back burned from the spray of gravel. I brushed some chalky gray dust from the sleeves from my jacket.
The car that had nearly trampled us had, remarkably, come to a stop safely on the road, perhaps fifty feet beyond us. The engine was still running. Then the driver’s door opened, and a thin figure emerged, and walked unsteadily towards us. “Are all you guys alright?” the figure called. It was a young man. He sounded drunk.
“Yeah, we’re ok,” Randall called back.
“I’m so, so sorry,” the guy shouted. He was getting close to us, close enough that he shouldn’t have to shout. His steps were uneven, and he was walking more of an S than a straight line.
“Really, it’s alright,” Randall said. “We got out of the way.” Then he whispered to me, “Look. It’s the same guy, from earlier. It’s Mr. Credit Card.” I peered at the poorly lit face. Randall was right – it was Mr. Credit Card.
“I’m so sorry,” the guy repeated. He stopped a few feet from us, along the white line at the edge of the asphalt. His head swayed back and forth, and his eyes were wide. He wavered, as if about to fall, and then promptly sat down on his rear. He put his head in his hands. “I probably shouldn’t be driving,” he said. “Shouldn’t be driving right now.”
Randall looked towards the guy’s car. The engine was still running, and the driver’s door hung open. “No,” he said. “You definitely shouldn’t.” Randall looked at me. I shrugged. He shrugged back. “We should help him,” he whispered.
“But he was such an asshole,” I whispered back.
“That doesn’t matter,” he whispered. Randall knelt, and put an arm around the guy’s shoulder. He paused for a moment, and then said, “Let us help you, buddy. We can drive you home. Where do you live?”
“Two-sixteen,” he murmured. “Broken Oak.” He raised his head and looked at us, his eyes searching. Randall hid his wince. “You know where Broken Oak is?”
“Yeah,” Randall said, his voice soft and compassionate. “We know where Broken Oak is.”
“Great,” the guy said with a sigh. Then his eyes focused on Randall’s Carhartt jacket, his faded jeans, his messy red hair. The guy’s eyes narrowed. “Wait, aren’t you the—the—you’re those kids from the city, begging…” the corner of his lip twitched up, just barely, but both Randall and I saw it. In the next instant, I saw Randall’s look of painted compassion twist into shock, then hurt, then anger.
I’ve never seen Randall angry. To be honest, it scared me badly. He’s always such a calm, happy kid. I guess that’s how it goes, though – the calm ones don’t snap often, but when they do, it happens fast.
“Yeah,” Randall said, his voice hard, “We’re those kids. And you’re that kid.” He stood up. Mr. Credit Card tried to get to his feet as well, but he lost his balance halfway and felt back onto his rear. “I’m sick of it,” Randall said, and put his foot on the guy’s shoulder. Then he shoved, hard, and the guy rolled out flat onto his back. “Come on,” he said, grabbing my arm. He took off running towards the car, pulling me with him.
“What?” I shrieked. I looked back, and Mr. Credit Card was still on the ground, trying feebly to raise himself up. “Randall, what are we doing?”
“Taking the car.” We were already there. He grabbed the edge of the open driver’s door. “Randall, what are you thinking?” My voice was shrill.
He climbed in, and sat behind the wheel. “Get in.” I couldn’t believe this was happening. “Go around and get in the passenger’s seat, Isabel.”
I went. Unable to think, I started walking, and just as I reached my door Randall revved the engine. The sound, deep and throaty and bestial, sent shivers down my spine, and when I opened the door my fingers were shaking. Somehow I had turned giddy, giddy and fearless and now I grinned like an idiot. I sat down, and slammed the door behind me. Randall was grinning too, his anger gone, and his hands gripping the steering wheel.
“Go!” I squealed. I was giggling, uncontrollably. “Go, go, go!”
He revved the engine again, lightly, testing its power. Then he lifted the clutch, and in that amazing, lurching moment, when the great engine grabbed hold and shoved us forward, I knew how Prometheus must have felt to steal fire from the gods.

Aurora

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 23:42:25 GMT

An exercise in strangeness from my ENG90 class.

He was in the bathroom, brushing his teeth, when the earthquake hit. Quite out of nowhere, the water in the toilet bowl started sloshing about, and then the walls and the floor started jumping about as well, as if trying to shake off a bug. Logan panicked, swallowed a lot of toothpaste, and then jumped into the bathtub to ride out the storm from there. A few seconds later, the window of his hotel room exploded and he winced at the sound. The sounds got worse after that, and he had to close his eyes to shut them out.

This was how Logan’s day begun. Clinging to the sides of a bucking, rolling bathtub on the eighteenth floor of the Luxor resort hotel and casino, in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. It was just past seven-thirty in the morning. Logan felt sick.

When the shaking stopped, he lay still in the bathtub and counted to sixty before getting out. The bathroom seemed okay. A few things had fallen to the floor. He seemed okay, except that his mouth tasted like toothpaste. He picked up a plastic cup, peeled off the courtesy plastic wrap, and opened the tap. Water sputtered out momentarily, then stopped. Logan scowled at the faucet, and a thin streak of mocking burgundy flashed across its steel surface. Logan sighed, tossing the empty cup into the sink, and left the bathroom. His suite was a mess. Every wall hanging had fallen. The TV had pitched off its stand and landed facedown on the carpet, followed by bits of drywall and a mess of torn-out wires. His bed had broken full of holes, and he could see the sky beyond it… no, not that, the bed was covered with glass from the window, and the shards reflected the light from outside. His suitcase lay open at the foot of the bed, and it was full of glass as well. But that reminded Logan: where was the briefcase?

Where could it have gone? He spun around, searching. It was just a small, simple, dark object, it could be hiding anywhere… oh. It was on the table, right where he had left it. As soon as his eyes locked on, the briefcase bloomed golden. Smooth yellow light flowed from its corners, formed a halo around it, obscured it in a golden haze. He laid his palm on its cool leather side, and let out a sigh of relief. Purple, for royalty and luxury, seeped out of the case and wound admiringly, seductively, around his fingers. He almost couldn’t see the case anymore, for how brightly it was shining. The light was intoxicating him, and almost blinding – he looked away. He didn’t want to see what he knew would appear next. He knew what happened when he looked at the case for too long.

When he had first seen the case, last night in the casino, it had taken some time for its aura to develop. It was just a case, after all, sitting next to the leg of some man in a cowboy hat playing Texas Hold ‘Em. Logan had been at the bar, sipping a White Russian and studying the players at the closest table. There was a young man with a thin beard and beady eyes, with a woman in a sparkly blue dress wrapped around his arm. He looked rich, and the woman looked hawkish and greedy. Logan decided the woman only clung to the man for his money, and he saw cords and tendrils of gold and green—the colors of money—bonding the two together. The next player was drunk, a lonely young business man probably, and he glowed a foolish shade of red to match his flushed round face. The third player had his back to Logan, so Logan could see no aura. And then there was the cowboy, who was obviously the richest. Logan could see it in the jaunty way he tipped his hat back and smiled between rounds, as if he knew it didn’t matter he’d lost this one, because all the money in the world would be his sooner or later. He was arrogant, and he glowed bright green.

Then the cowboy man lifted up his case and opened it on his lap. Logan could see what was inside: it was poker chips, lots of poker chips. There were some of every color, including a row of the $5,000 “chocolate” chips that came out only very rarely on most tables. The cowboy pulled a few chips out, mostly from the lower denominations, and then clicked the case shut and returned it to the floor beside his leg. Logan let out a long, slow breath. There must have been upwards of $200,000 in that case. As he studied the case from his bar stool, it began to glow. It grew a halo the color of pure gold, and as he watched, the halo grew bigger and bigger. Tendrils of the golden haze snaked off from the case, and wrapped around the neck and hands of the cowboy man, feeding him power. There was so much in that case, so much potential, so much power. Logan saw veins of purple, for luxury, bursts of white, for fame, and swirls of red-orange, for excitement and fun, all the fun he could have with the wealth in that case. Logan looked down at himself, and saw a thin band that reached out from his chest to wrap around the case and its owner. The band was the deep-sea green of pure envy.

In his suite, with the broken glass and the humiliated TV, Logan couldn’t even remember how exactly he had managed to steal the case. He remembered seeing an opportunity—maybe it had been in the casino restroom, or the bar, or the restaurant—where the cowboy set the case down behind himself, so he couldn’t quite see it, and Logan’s green band of envy had pulled him forward. He remembered seeing nothing but red, red flushing out everything but the golden, welcoming case, red giving him terrible panicked tunnel vision as he walked hastily away, and then turned a corner. He couldn’t see anything, couldn’t think at all. The red panic was overpowering him. The case felt hot and heavy in his hand. Somehow, he made it to the elevator, and through the red haze, fumbled his fingers over the button marked “18.”

He let out a breath. He leaned up against the cool metal side of the elevator, and the red haze began to clear away. Then someone coughed, and Logan started. A man was with him in the elevator. It was a big man, in a dark suit, and he stared straight ahead. Logan studied him fearfully, wondering if the man had seen anything. What if, he wondered, what if it’s a security guard, what if it’s a policeman, what if he saw me? What if he grabs me? An evil aura sprung from the man, red and black, spreading from his back like demonic wings. Logan recoiled against the wall of the elevator, his eyes wide. Black shadows flashed over the man’s eyes, hints of recognition, of suspicion. Red mist billowed from his mouth and nostrils. He knows, thought Logan, pressing himself harder against the wall. He knows, he’ll turn me in, he’ll catch me, he’ll…

A bell rang, the sound terribly loud and alien in the silent elevator, and Logan’s vision flashed completely red. He was quivering, sweating, his knuckles white around the briefcase’s handle. He shut his eyes, to make the redness stop, he knew justice was only a moment away—

“Is this your floor?”

Logan opened his eyes. The demon of justice, still red and black and saturated with the knowledge of his guilt, was looking at him with dull eyes. Logan’s mouth opened and closed. He glanced furtively to the right. The elevator doors were open, and above them glowed the number 18. Logan swallowed, and glanced back at the man. The black and red wings were drooping and fading away, and red mist no longer ran from his mouth. Wordlessly, Logan managed a curt nod, and hurried from the elevator.

That was last night. When he had brought the case into his room, and locked and bolted the door behind him, his fear had dissolved, and the golden light from the case had made his suite glow like a palace. He had laughed, capered, jumped around, hooted happily. He was safe. He had won.

Now, he was sitting on the edge of a bed covered in broken glass, looking warily at the case on his table. He missed the bright, pure gold of its shine from last night. Now, when he looked at it, he saw a whole mess of colors, discordant with one another, boiling around each other in an angry mess. Veins of black and yellow wrapped around the case’s handle. Guilt. Cowardice. Fear. Midnight blue, blurred with traces of red, hung in a heavy cloud above the table. Capture. Trial. Justice. Punishment. Guilt. The golden halo still lingered, but it was sickly color now, a nauseating yellow-green. Stolen money. The colors swayed and danced before him, pulsating, making him sick. He couldn’t look away.

His doctor had told him this would happen. He had said the visions would grow more intense when the emotions did. He had said the visions wouldn’t tell him anything; they would only show him what he was already feeling. Personifying Emotion-->Color Synesthesia, he had called it. It was a lifelong, incurable condition, he had said.

Someone pounded on the door, and Logan jumped. The door flashed red, then blue, then it was swirling red and blue like the lights on a police car. Logan knew he was finished. The police were here. The pounding came again. “Is everyone okay in here?” A voice shouted.

“Y-y-yes,” Logan called back, his voice shrill.

“Everyone has to evacuate the building. There’s been a major earthquake,” the voice called. Then it was silent. A few seconds later, Logan heard a faint pounding on the next door down the hall. He bit his lip, and looked at the case. All the colors were melting together, turning muddy. This wasn’t going to be easy.

Bacteria

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 09:46:27 GMT

This story is so very typically me.

“And what’s in there?” the reporter asked.
The doctor gave him a sly smile. “Oh,” he said, “you’ll like this.”
The reporter had indicated a large metal box, with a sheet of glass covering the top. It sat in a corner of the lab, on a low table, and a single ceiling light shone down on it, almost ominously. “Come this way,” the doctor said. “I’ll show you.”
Inside the box was what appeared to be a miniature landscape, or a model of a continent. There were tiny mountains, with tiny rivers along their sides, there were plains, and canyons, and forests, and a large lake that took up fully a quarter of the box’s area. The reporter brought his face close to the glass to look more closely. “Wait, is the water…”
“Yes, it’s real water. And it really runs,” the doctor said.
The reporter studied the tiny trickle running down the side of a six-inch mountain. “Are you telling me this is like a biodome, or a, a terrasphere? Is that what they call it? Like, with its own weather, a complete ecological system?”
The doctor shook his head. “Unfortunately, no, we can’t create weather systems in a model this small. The water is taken up to the mountains by little pumps, and we turn on sprinklers once in a while to simulate rain. But the mountains are real rock, and the dirt is real, and all the plants growing in the dirt are also real.”
“It’s beautiful,” the reporter said.
“Thank you. I did much of the landscaping myself.”
“Well, that’s fascinating, Dr. Carter. Thank you for your time; I’ll phone you later if—”
“Oh no,” the doctor cut him off, “Don’t leave yet. You don’t know what this is yet.” He rapped the glass top with a fist.
“I… don’t?”
“No. It was not a demonstration of plants or landforms. It was a biological testing ground, Mr. Walsh. Animal life.”
The reporter hesitated. “Oh yes?”
“Yes. It’s a fascinating story. Do you have time?”
Mr. Walsh checked his watch. “Well, sure, I suppose. Go ahead – what kind of life are we talking about, doctor?”
The doctor waved the question away with a hand. “Let me start at the beginning.” He cleared his throat. “We’ve been experimenting with breeding and culturing exotic strains of bacteria for quite some time now. We use an accelerated sort of natural selection process to force the strains to mutate and adapt. We pit one strain against another, and let them fight for survival. We impose various conditions, various environmental challenges, et cetera, and then we run contest after contest, and every time, the best competitor wins.”
“That’s remarkable.”
“Over time, it means we bred what we call a ‘champion’ strain – bacteria that excelled at adapting to its environment, expanding its population, and defeating any competing lifeforms. And, with every ‘fight’ we put this strain through, it mutated a little more, becoming even hardier, and even more aggressive. Now,” he said, gesturing broadly at the box, “What you see here is what we called the final test. We designed this environment as a different sort of challenge for our undefeated ‘champion’ bacteria. There was no competing strain of bacteria in this challenge; instead, the environment itself was specifically designed to be challenging and inhospitable. There are only a few places in this box that have the right combination of water, food, and warmth for the bacteria to prosper. In the mountains, for example, it’s much too cold for them, and in the canyons, it’s much too dry. Also, in many of the areas, we planted a type of moss that secreted a substance that was extremely lethal to the bacteria. The purpose of all this was, of course, to put the bacteria in an evironment where it would barely be able to survive, let alone prosper.”
The reporter leaned over the box again. “Where is that moss? I don’t see any here.”
“Quite right. The moss is completely gone now. Remember, you’re seeing the aftermath of the experiment.”
“What happened to the moss, then?”
The doctor smiled. If it hadn’t have seemed so strange, the reporter would have said the man looked distinctly proud. “The bacteria wiped it out.”
“Did you expect that would happen.”
“No. What our bacteria accomplished surpassed all expectations. Look,” he said, and pointed at an area along the edge of the main lake. “Do you see a dark patch there?” The reporter looked. Yes, he saw it – a faint black stain, as if a pen had burst there.
“And what is that?” he asked.
“That is the spot where we placed the original colony of our champion bacteria,” the doctor replied. “When the experiment began, we expected the bacteria would manage to spread only very slowly, if at all. But look,” he said, pointing at one of the mountains. Now that the reporter looked closely, he saw a similar black stain, centered around the tiny stream but covering a good portion of the mountain’s rocky side. “And look here,” said the doctor, pointing out a canyon. “You can see the same dark patches throughout the box, on the mountains, on the plains, in the forest—what’s left of it, that is, the bacteria devoured more than half of it—even under the water in a place or two.”
“I’m having trouble following you,” the reporter said. “These dark areas, are those the bacteria?”
“No. They are what the bacteria left behind after living there.”
“Oh.”
“What you see, Mr. Walsh, is evidence of a bacteria that managed to live where it should have died. This bacteria somehow found a way to neutralize the poisonous moss, or perhaps it developed an immunity to the poison. It found a way to eat the moss—this is a strain that has been bred on beef broth and sugar, mind you—and then it ate half the forest as well. This bacteria found a way to live in the dry canyon, and on the cold mountains. This bacteria, Mr. Walsh, excelled absolutely, taking over its environment completely, an environment that should have nearly killed it. Do you understand?”
“Well, yes, I suppose… But what are the black stains, if they aren’t bacteria? And where did the bacteria go?”
“Unfortunately,” the doctor said, “We haven’t been able to study the black residue up close. What we have concluded is that it appears where the bacteria exist in great quantity. The black areas spread over time, as the experiment went on. They were like markers, almost, showing us how far the bacteria had penetrated into the harsher areas of this little world.”
“Do you have any guess as to what the black substance may be?”
“We have several. It could simply be a new byproduct of their digestion processes. It could be something that they secrete, that has some effect on their environment. Or it could simply be an indecomposable element of their bodies, that is left behind when they die and accumulates over time as millions of them populate an area. We don’t know.”
“And what about the bacteria themselves? What happened to them.”
The doctor sighed. “We were all very disappointed, actually. Everyone in the lab was so impressed with the bacteria’s progress. Every day they would come by to see what new land it had conquered. In the three weeks of the experiment, our bacteria went from being a tiny blip here,” he pointed at the black stain at the edge of the lake, “to populating something close to 80% of the available land area.”
“So? What happened?”
“Then one day, it just stopped. The black areas—by which we were measuring the bacteria’s progress, remember—just stopped growing. Stopped completely. At that point, we had to be so cautious about opening the box that it took us several days to learn anything.”
“Wait – cautious? Could you explain why you were cautious?”
The doctor gave him a long look. “We created a super-bacteria, Mr. Walsh. Can you imagine the possible consequences if such a bacteria escaped this lab? It can grow anywhere, eat almost anything. It spreads quickly, it adapts quickly. Outside of a tightly contained environment, it might prove unstoppable.”
The reporter tried to laugh, but the doctor’s expression was too serious to allow it. “Doctor, a bacteria, surely… there’s bacteria everywhere.”
“Not like ours. A bacteria like this could potentially take over the world.”
“No.”
“I’m perfectly serious.”
“How is that possible? At the very worst, you know, if it started to spread outside the lab, and I don’t know, chewing on walls and asphalt or something, we could just spray everything down with disinfectant, or hell, call in the Air Force to drop napalm on it.”
The doctor shook his head. “Based on how rapidly this bacteria mutates and adapts, it wouldn’t be long in an open environment before it could become airborne. And as soon as the wind catches a few individuals, and carries them a few miles, well, there goes your quarantine or extermination effort. In all likelihood, if this bacteria ever got out, by the time we knew anything it would be spreading far too fast for us to stop it.”
“Wow. That’s certainly a grim possibility.”
“Indeed. Thankfully now it’s quite impossible.”
“Why is that?”
“Because they’re all dead, Mr. Walsh. Every last one of our champion bacteria. Their line is extinct. According to the tests we did after the black stains ceased their expansion, the air in the box had become heavily polluted with toxic gases – gases that the bacteria must have emitted.”
“You’re saying the bacteria—”
“Poisoned itself. Yes it did. The toxic gas production may have been a side effect of one of the bacteria’s recent mutations. Regardless of how it came about, however, the air became saturated with the gas, and as soon as it hit a certain threshold – the bacteria couldn’t live any more.”
“So they all died.”
“All of them.”
“But isn’t it true that—especially with bacteria—there are always a few who are different? Which are immune to the toxin, or adapt somehow?”
“Oftentimes, yes, that is the case,” the doctor said. “But we have a way of scanning for bacterial life – by picking up certain radiation that their cell bodies give off. And I can tell you that there is not a single bacteria left alive in that box.”
“Do you have any other colonies of the ‘champion’ strain?”
“Nope. We intentionally kept only one – and that’s the colony that we put in this box. That’s the end of them. No more.”
The reporter gazed at the faint black patches and streaks, that lay like dead deflated ghosts on the miniature landscape. “It seems sad, doesn’t it? That something so virile would bring about his own demise.”
The doctor shrugged. “Not really. Something that lives so aggressively as that bacteria did is bound to meet an early end. Ah, well. That’s all I have time for, Mr. Walsh. Thank you for visiting.”
“And thank you for showing me your lab, Dr. Carter. I most enjoyed it.”
“I hope you did. Take care.”
“You too.”

A biological Ice-Nine…... blah blah blah. An allegory for the human race… oh my, aren’t I clever. By the way, we’re all going to die in a flurry of bad-nasty massive storms brought on by global warming. Yay. I feel like I just wasted a lot of time...

A One-Trick Pony at the White-Horse Fool

Sat, 07 Oct 2006 00:12:02 GMT

The White-Horse episodes (there are two of them now) don't really count as creative writing. Mostly they work as vehicles for my tinkering with my own mind.

He walked in looking sorely confused. He stood near the door, which had closed behind him, and scanned the room nervously. “Sorry,” he said, to the people at the nearest table, “I think I’m lost.”

They told him he wasn’t. He was still thinking about that when a waiter came up, and quickly ushered him to a table. “Would you like some hot spiced wine?” the waiter asked.

“Um…” said the man, still looking distracted.

“Of course you would,” the waiter said with a smile, and departed.

It was at this point that the man noticed he was not sitting alone. He was at a booth table, against the wall opposite the door he had entered from, and across the table from him sat two men. They were leaning forward, with their elbows on the table, and each had their hands wrapped around a mug of the Fool’s famous spiced wine. They were watching him.

“Welcome to the White-Horse Fool,” one said.

The other one took a long, slow sip from his mug. His eyes never left the newcomer. Then he asked, “What brings you here, friend?”

The waiter brought wine, and then more. Ten minutes after that, he was refilling their mugs for a third time. The newcomer was explaining himself, and his dilemma, and with every sip of wine his tale grew a little more passionate, a little more dramatic.

“I feel…” he was saying, “I feel like… well, you know, it’s one of those things that makes perfect sense to you, but when you try to say it out loud, it just…” he paused. “I’m tormented by this, okay? Like it’s all I can think about, like my mind is devouring itself, like my life won’t start until I tear these rocks out of my path.”

“Look, Pony,” one of them said—they had taken to calling him Pony—“first of all, there are no rocks.”

“What?”

“You made them up. I don’t know why, I can’t tell you that. But if you didn’t put them there, then who did?”

Pony hadn’t thought about that. He looked down into his mug. “But…”

“No,” the man across the table told him, “you’re wrong. There are no rocks.” The man leaned back, against the wall of the booth, and sighed. “Look, no one’s perfect. Can you accept that? No one is perfect, and you’re not ever going to be perfect either. Get used to the idea.”

“No, it’s not about that!” Pony shook his head emphatically. “I’m not trying to be perfect.”

“Oh, yes you are. You’re trying to build yourself into some kind of shining crystal tower. You dream of being superhuman. No wonder you have trouble feeling close to other people; if you’re trying so hard to be unlike them.”

“Well…”

“Do you think I know myself? Fully, completely understand myself? Do you think I know what truth is, what matters in life and what doesn’t? Do you think I have a single absolute answer?”

Pony felt abused. “No,” he said reluctantly, “I presume by your tone that you do not…”

The man across from his tipped his mug high, and set it down empty. “Right. So I’ll tell you what I do know: I know that I like the taste of this wine, and the more I drink, the better I like it.” There was a pause, and Pony wondered if that was the end of the lecture, but then the man continued: “So drink up, Pony. Allow yourself a little vice. Have some wine, have a good time, and forget about your stupid fucking rocks.”

The one-trick pony had no counterargument. He drank his wine. And then he began to write, right there at the table:

I wish I had a white horse,

With a white wonderful mane

And hints of gold here and there,

And I wish it could fly.

I wish I wore a cape of red,

That swirled around black boots,

And cracked as I rode the wind

To the cheers of crowds below.

I wish my eyes were a deeper blue,

I wish my smile could break a million hearts,

And I wish that they would watch me fly

And wish that they were flying too.

I wish that they would watch me, and say,

“Oh, isn’t he wonderful!”

I wish that they would weep for me, and say,

“Oh, if only I could be like him!”

But I haven’t a horse, and

I’m too clumsy for a cape,

And horses certainly can’t fly,

And neither can I.

Hell,

Bloody hell.

All I want is to fly.

One of the men across the table, the helpful one, reached over and grabbed Pony’s paper, and then read the poem aloud. He smiled. “Well,” he said, “at least you’re being a little more honest with yourself.”

Pony shrugged.

“It’s a start,” the man reassured him. “It’s a good start.”

“This is all fucking ridiculous,” the other man said.

Strangers 2

Sat, 07 Oct 2006 00:03:32 GMT

It turns out that Livejournal sets a very low ceiling on post sizes - so I'm posting part 1 and part 2 separately. Anyway, here's part 2. It's incomplete, as in there are several pages missing from the end, but since I have no idea when I'll get around to finishing it, I'm posting what I have for now.

FORGOTTEN CHILDREN

Carver was having trouble believing just how loud it was inside the rover. Maybe it was the fault of the terrain – the violently uneven ground seemed to be wreaking havoc on the four-wheeler’s suspension. When they had hauled the vehicles out of Storage, Carver had remarked on how ancient they looked, and the mechanic with him had laughed. “These things are older than you would believe,” he said. “They haven’t been used in centuries – you should just be happy that they still run ok.” Carver was glad the vehicles “ran,” but really he was still getting used to the idea of a vehicle with wheels. The rovers simply seemed absurd – and, as it turned out, they were noisy. But then again, maybe Red was just deaf. Carver tried again, and practically shouted the words this time:

“Did you remember the soil probe?”

Red finally looked up. He was a muscular man with a big, blocky chin. “What?” he shouted back.

“The soil probe!”

Red grinned and pulled a small device from his breast pocket. “Of course I have it. And I’ve been checking about every five minutes to make sure it’s still there.” He gave the probe a kiss, then grinned at it. “And may you bring us good tidings today, little probe.”

Carver leaned back against the unpadded metal of his seat. They had brought many probes, and many instruments—the compartment was packed so full of crates and specimen tubes and survey equipment that Carver wondered if he and Red would actually be able to get out when the rover stopped—but it was the soil test, which would be performed by that tiny handheld probe, that he was most concerned about. It was impossible to predict what minerals, and in what quantities, were present here, and if the test results didn’t fall into the narrow range of acceptable possibilities, well… that would be a very big disappointment for everyone.

“You wanna take a look, chief?” Red was looking at him, and pointing up at the small, sealed hatch on the ceiling.

Carver scowled. “Don’t call me ‘chief.’”

“No, I like it.” The big man was grinning at him. “It’s an endearing title. Looks good on you.”

“If you start calling me ‘Chief,’ I’m going to call you ‘Lickspittle.’”

Red laughed. “Lickspittle?”

Carver didn’t like the situation one bit. Red was only trying to lighten the mood, and he appreciated that at least, but if this expedition ended as a failure, he certainly didn’t want to be the one stuck with a title like “chief.” “No,” he said, “I am not going to call you Lickspittle. And you are not going to call me Chief. I’m in charge for today, just two hours, and that’s it. OK?”

“Alright, alright, sure.” Red looked disappointed. “But I still think ‘chief’ is a cute name for you.”

Carver stood, and tried to look up, but the ceiling was so low that he couldn’t tip his head back more than a few degrees. Then the rover must have hit a particularly large bump, because everything jolted suddenly, and Carver’s head smacked against the rim of the ceiling hatch. He lost his balance, wavered for a moment, and then found himself right back on his seat, with a bruised head and a sore rear end. “So,” he said a moment later, rubbing his forehead, “Now that it is very clear that I am not your chief, I order you to help me open this stupid hatch.”

Red complied, and though he proved little better at keeping his feet in the bouncing compartment, the two men soon had the hatch open, and Carver climbed up to take a look around.

They were visitors to a strange world. Carver looked back to see the other three vehicles of his little convoy. They were new and strange to him too, but at least he could recognize them; he could point one out and say “that’s a rover vehicle, it runs on an electric battery and it’s made to carry people and their gear across planetary surfaces.” But when Carver looked around at this alien landscape, he couldn’t discern a single damn thing. He couldn’t tell where one object ended, and another began. He couldn’t really tell what was inert, and what was living. Everything just sort of… mixed together. There were no straight lines or hard edges or boundaries. To add to his confusion, giant white blobs were hanging far above him, and for some reason he couldn’t see any stars. Instead, the sky was a nauseating, opaque blue-green, as if they were trapped inside some enormous plastic bubble. Carver shivered. This was his first time on the surface of a planet, and he wasn’t so sure he liked it.

At least the air was breathable. One of the things that they had been able to inspect was the planet’s atmosphere, and to everyone’s surprise it had turned out to be perfectly suited for human respiration. But now that he was actually here, breathing it, Carver wasn’t so sure. He was used to air that was computer-controlled, carefully filtered and regulated and always pure. Here, though… who knew what was floating around, mucking up the air supply? The rover’s back wheels seemed to be throwing a lot of particles up, for one thing. And what if there were—

That thought was cut off suddenly when Carver noticed something he definitely didn’t like: the rover was slowing down. He stuck his head down through the open, but his eyes had adjusted for the daylight and he couldn’t see anything in the dark compartment.

“Red?” he called. “Why are we stopping? We’ve only been moving for five minutes.”

The voice that came back sounded weak and faint – not like Red at all. “I asked the driver to stop.”

“Why?”

“Feeling sick.”

Sweet Yeera, this could be bad – very bad. They had certainly discussed the possibility of encountering alien pathogens, and the operation protocol arranged for all the men to have a full scan and disinfection as soon as the operation ended, but they had only been on the ground for five minutes. If there was an agent in the air capable of making a man sick this quickly, then they might have to call for an evac immediately. Damn, thought Carver. Can bacteria truly work that fast?

The rover came to a stop on the crest of a small hill, and Carver dropped back into the compartment to open the door for Red. The big door formed the entire back end of the rover, and it was hinged at the bottom. As it opened, a tripod with some heavy instrument attached to its top fell out one side and flopped onto the dirt. Carver had no idea what the thing was for, in fact, no one knew how to operate about half the instruments they had. They had just brought everything.

Finally the door came all the way down, and Red staggered out. The big man was pale, and his mouth hung open slightly, as if he was short of breath.

“You ok, Red?”

“I feel like crap.” He sat down on a corner of the ramp, and put his head between his knees.

The other three rovers had caught up to them, and now they came to a stop as well. Three more back doors opened, and as Carver watched, men staggered from each one, clutching their stomachs or panting heavily. One of them took two steps from his vehicle, sank to his knees, and threw up spectacularly. It looked like one or two others would soon follow suit.

The four drivers had climbed down from their cabs, and they stood about helplessly. Carver noticed none of them showed any symptoms. He also felt fine. And it seemed that some of the other men were only mildly effected. Strange, he thought. Maybe some of us have a natural resistance to the strain? As the more or less official “leader” for this trip, he felt obligated to walk among the men and ask them how they were feeling. All of the sick men had all sat down, or were at least leaning against the side of a rover. Carver went to the one who had thrown up, who now sat cross-legged on the ground.

“It feels a little better, now,” he said, looking up. “It was like… like when you’re a kid, you spin around really fast, until your head gets all light and you fall over? It felt like that, kind of, except it just kept getting worse. But I think that once we stopped—” he coughed, and spit. “Now that we’ve stopped it doesn’t feel so bad.”

That was odd. If the nausea was caused by a fast-acting bacteria, there condition should only be getting worse. But now Carver looked around, and saw color returning to many of the pale faces. Maybe it wasn’t bacteria after all. Trouble adjusting to the atmosphere, maybe? He was just glad the sick men seemed to be doing better.

Everyone was thankful to be out of the cramped, bouncing rovers. It seemed they were savoring the stillness of the solid ground beneath them, although—Carver bounced slightly on the balls of his feet—this ground wasn’t exactly solid. Kind of squishy, really. After a lifetime of walking on metal floors, the soft soil felt distinctly strange.

“We’ll rest here for a few more minutes,” Carver announced. “Then we need to push on.” Ah, well, he thought. It should be no surprise that surface expedition like this one would be full of surprises. He looked up again at the opaque green sky. It was so bizarre. And then the surface itself: Carver still couldn’t begin to make any sense of what he saw. There was simply too much, and he had never seen natural landscapes up close before, let alone plant life. To Carver’s untrained eye, the jungle around him just looked like some sort of very ugly soup.

Then a voice called out, “Look at this!” It was a man standing by the third rover. Carver and several others rushed over, and the man pointed a finger at the side of his rover. “Right there,” he whispered.

Something was moving along the rover’s metal skin. Carver looked close. It was a small, brightly colored form with six tiny legs. Incredible, Carver thought. It had a head, with large eyes, and a sleek, hard-shelled body that tapered neatly to a hooked point. The body was striped with bands of red and black, and from just below its head hung two long pieces of transparent film, as if it was wearing a cape. The creature was hardly bigger than Carver’s thumbnail.

“Is this what the encyclopedia meant…” someone started.

“By ‘higher-order life,’” Carver finished. “It must be.”

No one had ever seen a “higher-order life form” before. The encyclopedia stated that humans were only one of many types of higher-order life, which no one had ever really understood. There were humans, and then there were bacteria. No one could imagine any life form that fit between those two extremes, and the encyclopedia offered no examples, so the topic had always been the subject of curiosity.

Well, here we go: a non-human form of higher-order life. Incredible. Carver studied the little creature. Did it have a nervous system, a circulatory system, a digestive tract, and various endocrine glands, all inside that tiny shell? It must. It was moving, on legs, at it had eyes and a head, all just like humans.

Evolution, Carver recalled. That was another encyclopedia topic that had been extremely vague, with no examples and no pictures, but Carver had understood the general idea. This creature… evolved, from bacteria. Just as humans did. So we are not alone, then, are we?

He reached out to touch the delicate creature. They were brothers, he and it, and he wanted to feel the touch of a fellow form of intelligent life. Amazing, how far this creature has risen, He thought. How far above bacteria it is, how close to us.

But before he could touch the creature, it moved, too quickly for Carver to see. He heard a faint buzzing, and the little thing was gone from the rover. “It’s… flying,” someone said in awe. Carver turned around, and there it was, hovering in mid-air right in front of him. The transparent sheets on its back must be wings. The creature floated through the air between the men, its little wings buzzing all the while.

“Amazing,” someone said. There were murmurs of agreement.

The creature landed on one man’s bare forearm and folded its wings neatly behind itself. The man, Terris, was a friend of Carver’s and the driver for the second rover. He grinned down at his tiny visitor. “Hey, little fellow.” He looked up, joy and wonderment overpowering him. “This is the most amazing discovery…”

Before he could finish his sentence, the creature flew off again. This time it did not linger, but flew quickly away towards the jungle, and within a few seconds it was lost to sight.

Red, now fully recovered from his sickness, spoke: “I guess that’s the problem of intelligent life, isn’t it? We only get to see it when it wants to be seen.”

“Yeah,” Carver agreed, “bacteria never runs away when you’re trying to study it. Too bad, isn’t it? I wonder what made it fly off.”

“Wait,” Terris said. He grabbed Carver’s forearm and stared off into the distance. “Can you hear that?”

Carver heard only silence. “Hear what?”

“Listen.”

Several seconds passed. Then Carver heard it – a barely audible, high-pitched moan from far in the distance. Startled, he looked up and tried to find the source, but in a moment the mournful sound faded, and was gone. Carver looked at his friend, and their eyes met.

“What was that?”

“No idea,” Terris said. “Wait a moment; I think it’ll come back again.”

Two seconds later the sound came again, just as before.

“Yeera,” Carver whispered, hoarsely. “What is it?”

The eerie sound lingered for several seconds, and then just as it began to fade, another cry rose up to join it. This second cry only lasted a moment, and then silence returned.

The other men were listening, too. Some of them pointed their heads towards the sound, and a few looked at Carver. He could only shrug at them. Then the sound came again, rising up like some distant siren, and before it had reached its apex another siren joined it, and then another. The wail was now clearly audible.

“I think,” Terris said, “I think it’s getting closer.”

Carver was confused, and hopelessly inexperienced. Too much was happening that hadn’t been considered in the planning sessions. That sound could be anything, anything at all. And it was still getting louder steadily. He could see the fear growing on the men’s faces. The wails were coming continuously now, loud and sharp and menacing. Carver was not accustomed to dealing with fear, and now he felt it overpowering him. He was suffocating, burning up. An ancient response was awakening inside him: the desperate need to get away. Whatever was making those noises, he didn’t want to be here when it arrived. “Everyone back in the rovers. Now!” No one hesitated to comply.

Red sprinted with Carver back to their vehicle, and as soon as they were inside the big man slammed a fist against the “Open/Close” button. The ramp began to rise, at an agonizingly slow pace.

At the head of the cargo compartment, a small window sprung open, and their driver’s face appeared. “Carver! Where are we going?”

Carver’s head was spinning. He had never felt so out-of-control as he did now. The rear door was still half-open. “Just go!” he shouted. “Don’t even wait for the door to close, go!”

Then Red noticed the large tripod, still lying on the ground outside.

“Wait!” he cried. “What about the… the…” he stopped, not having any idea what to call the thing.

“Forget it! We’re leaving.”

The driver punched the throttle, and the electric motor whined sharply, but the rover went… nowhere. Behind them, Carver saw a huge plume of dirt and rocks spew up into the air. The driver saw it as well. “Oh,” came a mutter from the cab, “wheels.” He adjusted the throttle, the motor’s whine lessened somewhat, and the rover leapt forward.

Carver worked his way to the front end of the compartment, doing his best not to smash his head on anything as the rover bucked and rolled. He stuck his head through the small window to the cab.

“Drive to the first site,” he told the driver. “It should only be a few more klicks.”

“What then?”

Carver had no idea. “We’ll see when we get there,” he managed. Then, over the rumble of the tires and the clanging of the suspension, came that terrifying wail, distinct and menacing. The driver tightened his grip on the wheel. “I’m going up,” Carver told him.

Red tried to protest, but Carver ignored him and opened the ceiling hatch. Instantly the compartment filled with the wails from outside. They were louder now – much louder. Without a pause—pausing would have allowed the fear to take control—Carver thrust his head up through the opening.

At first, there was only the terrible, terrible noise. An endless, deafening screech assaulted his ears and made his head throb. Next, there was dust. That was all he could see behind the rover, a thick cloud of dirt particles thrown up by the rear wheels. He peered into the haze, with one hand holding him out the hatch and the other clamped firmly over an ear, but still he could make out no distinct shapes, not even that of the second rover.

Then, right at the edge of his vision, he caught motion off to the rover’s left side. He looked. Oh, sweet Yeera be merciful.

It was big. Bigger than any man. It had four legs, and it was keeping up with the rover easily. And all four legs seemed to terminate in long, shiny claws. Oh, this is bad…

If that tiny winged creature had been a “higher-order life form,” then this beast was a demigod. A great red eye gleamed above an open mouth filled with jagged teeth. Beneath its coarse, dark hair, Carver saw heavy muscles that flowed like mercury with the beast’s long, easy bounds. This thing could tear a man in half without even trying.

And somehow Carver got the feeling that “this thing” was looking directly at him. He couldn’t see anything in that red eye, but the creature’s head seemed to be cocked towards him, and it was keeping pace with him just a little too precisely. If it jumped… Carver looked again at those fearsome teeth. I hope it’s not thinking—

The creature leapt straight for his face. Carver shrieked something indeterminable, released his hold on the rim, and dropped back into the cargo compartment. Before his feet touched the floor, the whole rover rocked with a heavy impact on its left side. Carver landed badly, twisting his ankle and smashing a knee on an upturned crate. He ended up half-sprawled on the floor. Oh Yeera, get me out of here.

The driver cursed. “What was that?”

Carver found his footing and slammed the hatch shut. The automatic locks clicked into place, and the wails became much quieter – but they were still out there. And it sounded like there were a lot of them.

“This operation is over,” he muttered. Then he shouted to the driver: “Call the angels. We need to get out of here, now.”

“Affirmative on that.” The driver reached for the dash-mounted communicator, and put a little more pressure on the accelerator pedal. Carver cleared a mess of survey equipment from his seat and sat down heavily. Across from him, Red threw up.

Failure, failure, failure. The expedition was ending before it had even properly begun. Carver knew there was nothing he could have done, but still he felt responsible. We should have anticipated this, he thought. We are the children of the eternal ships, and we’re letting ourselves be humiliated. Another impact rocked the rover, this one from the other side, and the right wheels almost left the ground. We should not have allowed this to happen. *******Well, he thought, maybe this is what the weapons are for.********

He worked his way up to the front of the cabin to speak to the driver. “Are we making it alright?” he asked.

“Hope so.” The driver didn’t glance back. He was leaning forward intently, and his knuckles were white on the wheel. “Based on the map, we’ll get to site #1 in just a minute.”

“And do we have an evac?”

“Hex is coming.”

That helped a little air into Carver’s chest. A ship was coming down. And Hex was the most respected captain in the fleet. We’re all going to make it. Carver reassured himself with that. An angel is descending to carry us all away. We’ll all escape this place.

Then he noticed something: the sounds were fading. He could still hear the wails, but now they were almost drowned out by the clanging of the rover’s suspension. By the time they reached site #1, the wails were completely gone.

Site #1 was a broad meadow covered by short green grass and spotted with a few shallow hills. Sites #2 and 3 were similar. They had selected the sites from orbit, and planned a route so that the rover teams could inspect all three in one trip.

“Hex says they’re still about sixty seconds out,” the driver called.

“Take us right out to the center of the site,” Carver told him. “We’ll wait there.”

The rover’s suspension was much quieter on the flat ground of the meadow. Carver could hear the wails again, but they were muted and distant. As soon as the rover came to a stop, he peeked out of the ceiling hatch, but the air was so full of dust he couldn’t see a single thing. He heard the other rovers, though, making their way up to join his, and in the distance the wails were faint but persistent. Then the dust began to settle, and Carver turned his eyes skyward.

There it was: Hex’s ship. Its sleek steel hull was resplendent in the sunlight, and as Carver watched the massive shape swoop low over the meadow he saw clearly why they called the ships “angels.” As an expression of power, as the zenith of human technology, as a home – they were perfect. No journey could exhaust them and no force could challenge them. The shadow of the great ship swept over his rover, and Carver felt his fears dissolve. He smiled helplessly, and quietly thanked Yeera that he was a Child of these eternal ships.

The ship now hung almost directly above them. Rather than actually landing—captains tended to be superstitious about letting their ships touch ground—Hex lowered a long ramp from the cargo bay in the ship’s belly. Carver checked to see if the other rovers had gotten into position. Yes, they had—oh, sweet Yeera. There were only two of them.

Where was rover #4? Carver dropped from the hatch and leapt to the tiny window. “Where’s the last rover?” he demanded. “Get them on the comm!”

The driver looked back in surprise. “What do you mean, where’s…” His eyes widened. “Oh, no.” He grabbed the comm unit and hailed the missing rover. There was no answer.

“They’re not responding,” the driver said, uselessly.

Carver didn’t know what to think, didn’t know what to do. He felt himself locking up. The operation was supposed to be over, they were supposed to be safe now—

Then a panicked voice came through on the comm: “This is Rover Four, we—” a fearsome metallic clang drowned out the rest of the sentence. “—trapped now, the rover’s tipped over and they’re trying to break—” there was a loud clonk, and the transmission ended, as if the comm had been dropped.

This is too much, Carver thought. Too much, too much. Who could have anticipated this? No one. No one, no one.

Voices in the Dark

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 04:36:13 GMT

Hey, hello. You hear me?

Anyone hear me?

Is everyone asleep?

Thump, crack!

Mmaa… what the hell was that?

Hey, sorry. I knocked something over, that’s all. Sorry.

Damnit, dude, go back to sleep.

I’m trying to, I’m sorry.

Creak, creak, creak.

Wait, did you hear that?

H-hello?

Yeah, someone’s moving around. Hello?

Dude, I thought no one else was awake.

Hey, who is it? Who are you?

We definitely heard creaking, right?

Yeah, I heard it, hang on. Hello? Who’s there?

- long silence -

This is getting really creepy, dude.

- long silence -

Dude, are you awake?

Shit.

Anyone out there?

I heard creaking, I know you’re out there, who are you?

Shit.

Why does it have to be so dark in here?

Thump, clatter clatter smash!

Ow, ow, fuck. Shit, I’m sorry guys, I hit something with my foot.

Sorry I woke you up.

Hey, guys?

Is anyone awake?

Is anyone besides me awake?

What the hell.

It’s the middle of the night and it’s really fucking dark and no one can hear me.

Anyone?

Creak.

Shit.

I know something’s awake.

What are you doing here, in the middle of the night? Are you hunting me?

Is that why no one is waking up? You?

I wish I could wake up from this.

It’s not even real; I’m staring into total darkness and speaking words that no one is awake to hear. Is this dreaming? Am I sitting inside my own head right now?

How the hell am I supposed to know?

Creak.

Oh, fuck you.

Far from Home

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 19:55:25 GMT

This is a really long, extremely rambly, and semi-insane piece. It's also sloppy and mostly unrevised. You probably don't want to read it. But click below if you insist...

FAR FROM HOME
a nasty and distorted sort of self-portrait.

a big, ugly, undeclared block of wood,

and the woodcarver.

he picks up his only tool,

the knife.

a bright, white, electric hospital room,

and the baby’s just been born.

it does the only thing it can –

it screams.

he chases little fragments off,

searching for the form within.

scraps and chips and forgotten bits

soon litter the woodcarver’s floor.

blood and shit and goo and spit

fall out and slap the floor.

the baby balls its fists, and screams –

a birthing is an ugly thing.

the carver’s mind is locked in a race

to beat the feverish knife,

to find that secret form within

before his blade cuts it all away.

the baby’s little eyes are open,

a soft and liquid blue,

and now he’s looking all around

but all he sees is angry white.

the carver’s knife falls still

as the destructive artist wonders

what it is he’s trying to wrest

from an empty heart of wood.

oh, then he remembers –

it’s chessmen.

it’s chessmen that he needs.

the baby’s clean and quiet now,

and crawling on the floor.

he chases brightly colored toys

and giggles at their joy.

a man with a pike springs from the wood!

“and you,” says He, “shall be a pawn.”

and brothers and brothers came streaming forth

as the feverish knife cut life from wood.

a bishop, with cloak, a knight, with steed,

a terrible Queen with an iron glare,

and towers and kings and shields and swords

spring up from the dissolving wood.

the baby has just learned two walk

as eight by two, and eight by two,

an army black and an army white

stand at arms on an empty ground.

the baby laughs, and slams it down –

and breaks his favorite toy in two.

laughing still, he finds a plate,

and relishes the noise it makes.

the carver wonders if he’s done

as he surveys his handsome set.

the horses’ nostrils flare just right,

and the pikes could prick his thumb.

he likes how the pieces seem alive,

how they seem to breathe, seem to move,

and, inspired by his handiwork,

he reaches for his knife.

this baby seems a demon-child,

as he destroys with selfish glee,

and the parents are a bit concerned –

“Did he get that from me?”

but no one knows what drives the child,

or what made him stop.

for now he is a peaceful thing

and fast learning to talk.

the pike-men thump their spear-butts down

and bishops cry out shrill –

shields and spikes are pulled aside

for the Black Queen now comes forth.

her color seeps into the ground,

and saturates the air.

her sword of spite, that thirsts for white,

is blacker than her raven hair.

her armor bends the light around,

and stabs the air with spikes and fins.

tendrils of black snake from her back

and float on the apprehensive air.

the carver has another block,

he’s chasing down some new untruth.

this time it’s a heart he seeks to find,

a heart that will teach him to live.

he’s trying to carve a heart from wood

before he loses his mind.

and he does not see that his army’s at war,

he does not sense his fatal lie,

and the baby’s learned a perfect word:

the endless, stubborn question “why?”

the knights on shining hooves fly forth

to meet the ebony queen,

the horses shake their brilliant manes

and riders raise their swords.

four Bishops, all in flowing robes,

two dark, two light, but all as one

tip back their heads, and raise their cry,

“go forth! go forth! you know no fear!”

and so the war begins in full –

the two white knights are first to die.

the parents sweat and wonder where

their precious baby’s gone,

for now they have a child who fights

and meets every small request with spite.

their child, they fear, is growing up,

and will leave the nest before too long.

but now he cuts his thumb, and sees

his half-carved heart is splashed with blood.

he sucks his thumb, and rests the knife,

and wonders wherein lies the life –

is it within the wood, or me?

but he resolves to finish the work,

to cut out his wooden heart,

and as his knife resumes its play

he does his best to ignore the blood.

and all the while, he does not see

the children of his mind at war,

for his wooden knights and wooden kings

have blood as well, which now they spill

upon the workroom floor.

“i’m leaving,” says the baby grown,

“and i hope i don’t come back.”

he finds his own place, an ugly flat,

and as the carver speeds his work,

to free his heart before the sun goes down,

the baby hopes this is the better way

for it’s hard to live without a home.

but then the carver, or the son, whichever one is you,

sees the game, and says “aha!”

“so this is how it’s done.”

he watches the little soldiers march

and spill each other’s blood,

he watches the pawns deploy their shields

to form a wall of friends.

a desperate charge puts Black in check,

but the king’s great sword

cuts the bishop in two.

“now this,” he says, “is a game for me!”

and two lost men sit down to play.

the carver with his block of wood,

his hopeful heart still trapped within,

sits down behind the white,

and the sad young man,

with nothing to carry and nothing to love,

sits down behind the black.

the pieces now stand still and straight,

no more than lacquered wood,

and in their patient rows they wait

for the hands of man to make them dance.

chess is not a game of chance

and the better man always wins.

the pieces give the mind a hand

to grapple with its twin.

the carver looks upon his men,

and smiles at the wood.

these are children of my mind –

he smiles at that thought.

i pulled them from the empty wood,

pulled them from my mind.

and now they wait for my command.

my mind will dance on a checkered board –

now that, he thinks, is a perfect thing.

but if that is all these chessmen are

then surely this—he feels his block—

is no heart for me at all.

he looks upon his bloody thumb,

and thanks it for the sign.

and now, he thinks, to prove this all,

i must win this simple game,

to prove i’m master of the wood.

to forever rid myself of doubt,

i must guide my mind’s hand true,

to prove the life within leads the life without.

the lost boy looks upon his men,

black and steely in their rows,

and feels the patterns stretching out –

patterns from which he has grown.

he looks across, and in the grinning rows of white,

he sees his father’s oafish smile.

a game of equal chance, he thinks,

now that is the human race.

we are all from the same pattern cut—

he looks from white, back to his black—

and all the pieces are the same,

but all that matters is how we move,

how we make this puzzle dance.

if father’s white, and the black is me,

then soon i hope that we shall see

that the better man is me.

i must win this simple game,

to prove the pattern is not all.

i must dance the better dance,

to prove that from my father’s tree

i have cut myself free.

“So,” they said as one, “let’s play.”

White-Horse, No. One

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 09:41:20 GMT

This piece will never make much sense to anyone but me. It's... kind of like creative writing, but mostly, it's just weird.

Snow ripped through the sparse trees. Driven by a cruel wind, it whipped the frozen ground and spun through the air in flashing, uncatchable currents. A form, a human form, was struggling through the drifts of snow, and the wind spun all about him, whipping about his jacket violently. On his back he carried a great collection of packages, and these flapped and rattled, though the sound was muted by the snow and ice that sheathed them. His scarf was no match for the wind, and blasts of snow would shoot down along his cheeks, or up from his chin, and cake his lips with ice. The wind ran straight under his scarf, and as it flew quickly away from him it carried captured bits of muttered words, stolen from his breath: “So tired… the bottle, the butterfly… this storm, if I believe… can’t ever, ever… how stupid, stupid, stupid… walking and… tired of this again, the well… butterflies don’t… the cold…”

The man was in an open field now. For all he could see, the field might have stretched out forever, in all directions. The blizzard had conquered all; the man was alone in the perfect emptiness of the cold white storm. He stopped here, as he had lost all sense of bearing, and he hesitated, for he knew that travel in any direction was equally futile. This storm that seemed to follow him had stripped the world bare, and the weary man was at a loss. And then a sound came: not the hollow, windy voice of the storm, but a strong, sharp sound, a resolute whack. Amazed, the man turned about, trying to determine the source of the sound, and then it came again: whack. The man felt his heart throb at this newfound hope. Whack. He turned about again, listening: whack. The sound came again, and again, another whack every few seconds, and the man began to follow the sound. It could not be coming from far off – not in a storm like this. Whack.

On trembling legs, the man took a few more, determined steps, and a blocky shape began to emerge from the white haze. With a few more steps, the man could see that it was a building: a squat, one-story building with white sides and ornate gray trim. There was a wooden door on the side facing the man, and next to the door, suspended by two chains, was a painted sign that swayed in the wind. Whack – it struck the side of the building, and made once more that solid, healthy sound. Whack – it struck again, and some of the snow clinging to its face fell away, so that the man could see the words written there: “The White-Horse Fool.”

Feeling as if he had reached the very last of his strength, the man lurched to the door and struck it with a fist. A trifling moment passed, and then the door opened, and golden light spilled out into the storm, silhouetting the dark figure that stood in the doorway. “Welcome to the White-Horse Fool Diner. Please, come in,” the figure said, stepping back and swinging the door open wide.

The man stumbled through the doorway, his head turned down and his eyes squinting against the warm light. He heard the door close firmly behind him, and then he felt a hand on his back, and after a few more stumbling steps a bench was being pushed under him, and he found himself seated at a table. He laid his weary arms on the firm surface, and took a shallow breath of the warm, glowing air. His head tipped forward as he thought of sleep, and with the gentle motion the packages on his back bumped and clonked quietly, but before the need for rest overtook him a voice touched him, a voice from nearby. It was the same voice that had welcomed him in to this strange, warm place, and this time it said: “Would you like anything, sir?” The man looked up from his defeated pose and blinked at the stranger. This time, though he could see a bit more, and he saw the stranger standing before him was surely a waiter. He had a grey buttoned vest and matching bow tie over a fine white shirt, and he stood waiting patiently as the snow-covered man blinked at him a few more times. The man did his best to put his fatigued brain, and his raspy, ill-used voice, into action. What did he – what did I want? What do I… “Mmaah, er,” he coughed, “Aahm…” What is this place? “Er, something to eat?”

The strange waiter bobbed his head, politely. “Of course, sir. And I will bring you some of our hot spiced wine, as well.” He smiled kindly. “I think you need it – this storm has been a bad one.”

--

Jared and Daniel sat at a large table, nursing cups of the White-Horse’s famous hot spiced wine. They were still waiting on the food.

“Do you ever wonder about this place?”

Daniel looked up from his wine. “What place? Oh, the valley?”

“No.” Jared stabbed with a forefinger at the table between them. “Here. The Fool.”

“Ah, the diner!” Daniel smiled, and took a quick sip of wine. “I have, actually. More than once.”

As popular as the little diner was, no one could get around the fact that the White-Horse Fool was a strange place. To begin with, no one had any idea what the name was supposed to mean, or where it had come from. All they knew was that “White-Horse Fool” was a bit of a mouthful, so most people simply said “White-Horse,” which sounded nice and rolled off the tongue easily. A few of the patrons, and particularly the ones who had been coming to the diner for the longest, called it the Fool, but no one knew why this was, and if you were to ask one of these faithful regulars, they probably wouldn’t know either.

“It’s the waiters that get me,” Jared said.

Daniel nodded. “Yeah, the outfits are…”

“Well, yeah, they’re strange. Out-of-place, I guess. But I mean it’s not just the outfits. It’s like… it’s like, they’re so trim and polite, and just, refined like, like they were serving at some New York bistro.”

Daniel smiled at that. “You’re right. But what I’ve noticed is, you know what, they’re really good: they’re quick, they don’t mess up, and I’ve never seen any of them get frazzled, or drop anything, or even forget anyone’s drink – yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of them make a single mistake.”

Jared agreed; the service was excellent. And the food was always good, too. He could already feel himself losing interest in his original topic. The Fool was a little bizarre, that was obvious, but it was really nice, too. For the food and the service, it was surprisingly cheap, and, Jared thought, looking across the room to a window through which he could see the blistering snowstorm outside, the location couldn’t be beat.

“Well,” he said, “who knows. Maybe the waiters just like working here or something. It is a funny place, though.”

“It is,” Daniel agreed soberly. He took another sip of wine. “Now, when the hell is our food going to get here?”

Modern-Day SUPERHEROES (Part I: Randall)

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 09:49:11 GMT

I hate the zoo. Hate it. I went once, at a very young age, and even then I recognized it as something to be despised. After that day I never went again. The filth and the mockery were too much for me. With all our modern shit we have no trouble taking big, powerful animals captive, no trouble at all subjugating them and keeping them trapped and humiliated in tiny cages. You can see the shackles in the animal’s eyes, if you watch them instead of reading some stupid brochure or display. You can see that the animal knows that something is terribly wrong, and every fiber of it is shouting “no, no, no!” but at the same time it has to know that there is no escape. No choice but to cling dimly to life in that tiny cage, under the constant leering of stupid parents and their stupid wide-eyed kids who want to see the “big, bad wild animals,” who look and look and dumbly get to feel more powerful than these great noble beasts just because we have stupid tricks like tranquilizer guns and muzzles and cages. People shouldn’t be allowed to see animals in that state. They shouldn’t have to belittle them before viewing – shouldn’t be afraid of witnessing them in their natural state, of seeing their real power and feral spirit. If people liked real animals they would go to Africa, or at least stay home and watch the Discovery Channel. They wouldn’t go to the zoo to see broken figures lying in useless, dirty, invalid lumps in the corner of a tiny cage.

What I hate more, though, is the freeway. Every time I have to drive the freeway I’m at the zoo again, except that now it’s cars instead of animals – beautiful, expensive, powerful cars that these people keep imprisoned under the hood because they’re too terrified of they power they might unleash if they dared to flex their leg against the gas petal and let those big engines gulp up some air and roar.

It’s worse when they drive at night. Night is the time for the wild beasts. The dogs and the devils come out at night, and the big cats and the hawks that hunt them. People are supposed to be asleep. They have to sleep because they have jobs in the morning, and if no one made it to their jobs the world economy would have to stop churning and that’s too much even for me. They have to sleep, so the hawks can protect them.

So I caused a major accident once. Big deal – once! It was a long while ago, too, way back near the beginning. I was in an expensive imported sedan, a BMW, and when I stroked the engine hard enough it purred like some kind of big murderous cat and I had to squeeze the wheel extra-tight because that beautiful engine wanted so badly to tear me in half with its torque. I was in a hurry that day. It had rained earlier, the first rain in a long time and I know that’s the worst because all the oils in the road wake up and rise to the surface, but I couldn’t let that slow me down so I had my BMW thundering. The red taillight eyes of traffic turn to streaks when you pass them fast enough, and in the darkness I could feel my eyes getting bloodshot from all the long red streaks tearing through them. Then suddenly the freeway was dividing.

A chevron of tall orange reflectors like the blade of a letter opener was marching up the lanes and splitting them apart, and I was on the wrong side. But even way back then I had already learned not to hesitate, ever. I pulled the wheel to the right just so, so that my big cat’s claws had just barely enough strength left to hold on to the road without slipping, and the tires had just begun to scream when I hit the first reflector. Slap! it disappeared under my bumper, bending like a neon-orange reed, and then it whipped right back up again against the car’s belly and pounded a strange rhythm, , on the undercarriage. And then I was plowing through a whole regiment of them, and to the beat of a drummer going slap! slap! slap! the neon reeds beneath me battatattatatta’d out a hailstorm. It was my beautiful soundtrack, full of desperation and suspense, but it ended too soon – I was already about to clear the reflectors.

There was a car blocking my entrance so I let off the gas only the tiniest bit, just in time so I would slide into the lane right behind him but then his brakelights tried to shout something at me and—why did you brake, idiot, you saw someone coming at you from behind and you slowed down, that’s stupid—I couldn’t do anything in time to save him. I hit him with my nose right behind his left rear wheel—it was perfect, it’s exactly the place where police interceptors try to hit a getaway car to send it into a spin, I hit him right there—and all I feel is this tiny jolt and his car is spinning, spinning right back into the reflectors. But if you watch videos of the cops doing their maneuver, it throws their cars off a little bit too, and now I was cutting across all six lanes and even though it was night and people are supposed to be asleep, there were cars everywhere, shooting like rockets across my windshield as my tires screamed and then my big BMW was starting to slide, almost completely sideways, when I get the huge crunch of a car burying its nose in my rear right fender and the jolt was much bigger this time and now I’m spinning too, spinning like a burning rubber banshee top and I whirl around just in time to see that car I sent into the reflectors crash up against an armored concrete wall and now the wall throws it up; it’s flipping in the air and I see sparkles of glass spraying out, and I think of a dolphin leaping up in the sun, but the world is spinning too fast and the dolphin is gone and now there’s only headlights, turning into big horizontal streaks like swords trying to cut through my windshield.

There were more collisions, more metal screaming and more explosions of glass, and then a final slam that threw me, hard, against the seatbelt, before my world was still again. The BMW was dead, its engine compartment crushed in from both sides, and we were jammed up against the barrier at the far right side of the freeway. I had made it across all six lanes. On the freeway cars were still crashing together and still spinning, their headlights and brakelights swimming together in a desperate swirl of red and white like the sirens on an ambulance. The scream of tires was fading now, and in their absence was rising the sound of human screams. It’s unfortunate that it happened this way. It’s never my intent to destroy, but in my line of work there’s really no room for apologies.

Leaving the scene of an accident isn’t hard. I kicked open the BMW’s door—the beast was dead, no point playing nice with it—and looked for a new vehicle. When people arrive at the scene of an accident they get this wonderful surge of humanitarian motivation and they all leap out of their cars, calling in emergency services on their cell phones, checking for injuries among the victims, doing their best to stabilize the scene. But their most significant contribution is the one they unknowingly make to me, by leaving their keys in their cars. I had no time to waste. I picked the best parked car that was still running—I can’t remember now what it was; it wasn’t anything powerful—and locked the doors once I got in. I passed more than half a dozen wrecks on my way out of the nightmare scene. Nightmare for them. Just a short but regrettable delay for me. I needed to be somewhere.

My name is Randall. Don’t let that story give you the wrong impression; it was a long time ago and I’ve never hurt that many people since. Really, I’ve done well. There’s a lot of driving involved in what I do, a lot of speed and urgency. I’ve gone through more cars than I can possibly remember. I have a friend who’s tried to persuade me to find a better way, to put an end to the destruction I cause. You can tell she hasn’t been on many freeways, hasn’t seen how many cars there are. I could break cars all day, for weeks, and the freeways would still be full. The river keeps flowing, and when that whole big river is at stake who can mourn the loss of a few drops?

Right now it’s 2 a.m. on a Saturday night and I’m on the freeway again, this time in a sweet little red Miata. Do you think I would even hesitate before annihilating it? The car may be pretty, but it’s only so much metal and glass. And our entire world is made of metal and glass. This car is a tiny and forgettable sliver against the incredible steel juggernaut of all the factories and supertankers and skyscrapers. So as much as I love cars, I am not going to preoccupy myself with coddling them. If this Miata ends up broken, well, there are always more to choose from.

Once again I have somewhere to be. Usually I wouldn’t be out this early - the best time to be driving is that space right before dawn, when the sky is turning from gray to an eerie blue but all the streetlights are still on and their sodium glow slashes orange on the road and the weird colors tint all the trees and houses and scenery so that sometimes you feel like you’re inside a kid’s coloring book or something. And at that time of morning, all the drivers are sleepy. They’re all either early-morning commuters, or the most dedicated of the late-nighters, and they’re respectively too freshly awoken or too sleep-deprived to be alert. They don’t even try to react as you shoot past them. But on a Saturday night like this, everyone on the road is nervous. Nervous because all they want is to get home quickly, but they’re stuck being half-afraid of getting hit by a drunk, and half-afraid of being mistaken for one by the countless lurking police cruisers. You can see it (well, I see it) in their driving: it gets cramped and jerky, and if you pass them too quickly they swerve as if you had been a milk truck headed right for them, and you have to laugh because if you had been a milk truck headed right for them they would have stood no chance at all because their reaction time is so bad that they often don’t swerve until you’re fifty feet past them and their headlights are just a frightened pair of dots in your rear-view mirror. This is a strange hour for me but I like it.

Call me an aesthete. I’m not too particular about my circumstances because I think everything has a beautiful side. Some things are hard to appreciate, like it took me a long time to see the beauty in the terror of a high-speed car wreck. But no matter what I feel, no matter what I see, there’s always a tinge of sweetness to it. The are some moments when I’m tearing down a deserted road in the dead of night, or spinning out of control and then crashing into light poles or barriers that whip my car around and spray glass everywhere, or when I’m just standing by my car on the top of some hill somewhere, listening to the engine cool and smelling the ache of the tires, that I can hear singing, like some beautiful opera is playing just inside my ear so that only I can hear it. It’s in those moments that I really cherish what I do, that I truly feel an appreciation for the world I am fighting to save.

Because I know that in the end, none of this is really about me. It’s not about me enjoying myself in the cars, savoring the dramatic moments and the thrills. It’s not even about what I believe in. It’s all about what other people believe in. They all have the right to believe, the need to believe, and I am here to protect that. I have to keep certain evils away from this city, away from this world, because if I didn’t, people would lose everything there is to believe in – lose every reason to live. Which is why I have somewhere to be tonight. Him.

But never mind. We’ll catch up with him in a bit. For now, it’s only the road and I, the road and the dark sky and the lights and the late-night traffic. This is the time of night when the contrast is sharpest – the contrast between the perfect black cast of the sky and the pulse of the sodium streetlights, the contrast between the red taillight eyes and the gold river of oncoming traffic, but really it’s the contrast between my car and theirs. It’s funny that all these drivers treasure their cars so much, take such good care of them and try so hard not to scratch or dirty them, and yet I’m the only one who appreciates their real value. I don’t pretend that cars are worth anything as objects of art or symbols of status, like something to be looked at and admired but not touched. No, cars cry out to be driven, to be seized by strong hands and thrown violently across the asphalt. There is so much latent power in cars, so much energy that most people are afraid to unleash. So I am the liberator. One at a time I confiscate these tiny slivers of the mechanical juggernaut from their mild-mannered owners and for the few moments before their destruction I let them roar, let them gulp down the gasoline and tear down the road with every shred of power the factory gave them. That’s the difference between my car and all the rest, the difference between a thousand terrified minnows and the screaming electric shark that scatters them all like leaves. And as much as I love having an open road to myself, late-night traffic like this lends a lot of atmosphere to my situation. There’s so much tension with all these cars, these red-eyed little cars that cringe and scatter as I power past them—and in that whipping moment you smile and wonder who are these people that buy these cars and are somehow still so afraid of driving them—and that adds to the urgent pulse of passing streetlights on my windshield and the chop of the air rushing through my open windows and the rumble of my engine running just below its redline and it’s as if I’m skating across the surface of a world that is only a pregnant moment away from falling to pieces and I’m the only one left who can stop it but only if I can get there in time; it’s all about getting to the right spot at the right time because if you don’t the world might end and it will all be happening because you weren’t fast enough…

Shit! What the hell is this, this was not supposed to – no! A low, sleek car, light blue like a frosted robin’s egg, is speeding up the onramp just ahead of me. Maybe it’s just a car like his but no, it’s him, it’s fucking him and he’s here – shit! I couldn’t have anticipated this, the plan had been to catch him later, and not here, here of all places was the worst to deal with him – had he planned this? Fuck! Does the bastard think he’s playing with me? Is that what he wants to try? Well, fine – it’s time to improvise. There’s always more than one way to come out on top…

His car is more powerful than mine, but I’m already at full speed and he’s still working up through his gears so I’m coming up quickly behind him. There’s still three lanes between us so I turn to the right, cutting off a semi and I bet the driver reached for his horn but before he can even touch it I’m already out of his lane and into the next, doing my best to pick out openings in the traffic and that fucker why is he here this is my road, he can’t think he can pop up like a baby-blue fucking turnip and expect me to let him get away, no, this is a mistake on his part, I might even be able to end it here because now I’m coming up just to the left of his car, it’s some expensive import and it’s so obnoxious with its immaculate angles and perfect powder-blue paint that I can’t wait to see it ruined, and as I slam my wheel to the right I can already see the beautiful destruction unfolding: the shining car is crushed in and spinning out of control, and now it’s slamming up against the guardrail, the metal screaming, and glass is spraying out like sweat exploding from a boxer’s face after he gets hit with the knockout punch.

My nothing-poem

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 05:16:42 GMT

A POEM THAT MEANS NOTHING

Hello,
This is my poem that I wrote,
and it doesn’t say anything.

How do you like that?
I don’t like it.
It screams in my face.
I always write deep, meaningful things.
Deep, profound lakes that you can never see to the bottom of
(mostly because clumsy language clouds it all)
and I’m always stubborn about making my lakes deep, deep, deep
because if it’s not as deep as the other lakes it might as well evaporate in the sun,
as useless and as quickly forgotten as drops of water on hot sand
that fell from the fingers of a swimmer as he left the beach.

So this is just a drop, then.
Effervescent and light,
gone before you know it.
You know, it’s great, because I could whisper anything in this transient little space – popcornpeanutbutterjellybeansyphilisandgrout – and you would never know because it’s too quickly fading, too quickly gone.

Here’s a poem that knows its own mortality.
Poems like to pretend that they last forever,
But it’s not true.
They die as soon as no one believes them anymore.
I’ve written of plenty of poems that were dead the instant they touched the paper.

Really it shouldn’t matter how long you live,
How deep your lake is,
How clever your phrasing is.
It’s all going by in the river, all sliding past, always at the same speed,
And everything because fades because
Water
(or Time, if my metaphor is boring you)
is a universal solvent.

But this is a submarine poem!
It doesn’t want to be on the surface of the stupid river.
It doesn’t want to compete for your attention.
It’s going to submerge, and play with bubbles instead.

Bubble bubble lublubble lubble lubble bubble
Lubble lubble bublubble bubble ubble bubble

A story is like a set of railroad tracks.
That’s what your life is – a set of railroad tracks. Long and straight and its got an end somewhere.
But the narrative is a tiny piece of string, that weaves every which way,
Crossing the tracks, crossing again, doubling back, skipping ahead.
You can play with the string.
Chase it like a cat.
Chew on it and laugh, a two-year old watching a locomotive charge straight at him and never knowing or caring…

Is the submarine poem trying to find something?
Trying to turn over a rock at the bottom and call it profound?
You don’t know, because you can’t ask anything of this poem;
it will just blow bubbles at you.

Oh, here, it’s found a heavy one –
What does it want?
Why is the submarine poem trying so hard to overturn that rock?
Does it care about something, after all?
No – it’s laughing at us.
It has left the rock behind.
It was only playing with us, to reveal our hunger for some silly profundity.

Bubbles. That’s all.
That’s all there is to eat so get used to it.
You have to subside on bubbles because there’s nothing beneath them,
nothing inside them, nothing.
Empty bubbles everywhere, and it’s kind of beautiful if you squint at them, and if beauty were enough for you you would not go unfed…

Above the river seeds are blowing by,
Drifting and leaping on the wind,
And sometimes they fall into the water, and die,
And those are the only seeds the submarine poem ever sees, the dead ones,
So the poem laughs and thinks of what silly tragedies
the seeds are, that can only die and make a mockery
of the promise of great life they carried within,
and the submarine poem laughs because it promises nothing.

I wanted to ask where the seeds were coming from,
And where the luckier ones landed,
But the submarine poem didn’t care.
In a field somewhere, of course, forget them!
The seeds will go take care of themselves.
Stop worrying about others because all that matters is

Well, nothing matters.
That’s why the poem just blows bubbles all the time.
It can’t think of anything else to do.

A poem going nowhere.
But it’s not –
The current is only stronger under the surface,
And the submarine poem, for all its defiance,
is still going downstream, still drifting,
perfectly at pace with everything else.
And it will fade in its proper time,
And everyone will forget that it ever blew bubbles,
Because it was just a silly bubble itself,
That thought it could escape by not caring,
But you can never do that,
The river won’t let you escape -
That’s the one thing it’s clear on.

Open Mic Night in my head

Tue, 09 May 2006 07:30:57 GMT

Bubbles!

I tend to blow big bubbles. Everything fits into one bubble or another. And then its bubble fits into a bigger bubble, inside a bigger one. And all the bubbles are within the master bubble named the Universe. My bubbles aren’t nearly as big as that one.

Most conversations consist of blowing little bubbles. You can blow bubbles that stick to your partner’s bubbles, or even meld with them; you can blow little bubbles that pop theirs and then hover, waiting for retribution; you can blow bubbles that just float up and away with the air and get ignored. When you get bored of blowing little bubbles, you can easily end the topic by blowing a bigger bubble around it, thus encapsulating all the little bubbles and making further discourse with them impossible.

You think in bubbles, too. The mind is like a giant field, covered in bubble machines of all makes and styles. Everyone has their favorite bubble machine – some with big, slow bubbles, some with quick streams of rainbowy little ones – and this machine is the one they most enjoy employing for conversation or thought. Some people’s soap mix isn’t so good, and their bubbles pop too quickly, making way for new bubbles, just as forgetful as the last. Some people’s ears aren’t so well sealed, and a distracting wind blows across their field, stealing away their bubbles before they’re quite done with them.

My left ear is like that – it leaks a little sometimes. When I’m half-asleep (which is a lot of the time, really) that sneaking wind will blow in and swirl about, throwing my neat arrays of bubbles into some crazed kaleidoscopery of hopelessly confused colors. I tried caffeine, to see if that would plug the leak, but it doesn’t blend well with my soap – makes my bubble machines ache and complain.

Anyway, yes. I consider myself a big bubble person. I like watching people blow little bubbles, and imaging the bigger bubbles that those belong inside of. I perceive the outer curve of things, the invisible “general idea” hinted at by the smaller, visible bubbles. Like in IHUM section, my ideas are always big. Not saying they’re good; I just like to play with the bigger bubbles. They’re much more inspiring, and carry too diverse a cargo to ever be boring.

----

Welcome to my ship. I am its captain and master, and I speak for all its material and crew. But you see, I can’t really justify calling it my ship. It has such a large crew; and they do all the work, really. I have a first mate to keep the ranks in line, I have a helmsman who keeps us straight and a navigator who reads the stars and tells us the way to go, I have a clerk who maintains all the records and papers so I don’t have to worry about them myself.

So what do I do? Oh, I have my moments. Set sail, draw sail, call the watch, break for dinner, prepare for landfall, ready guns, fire guns, raise flag, raise parlay, drop anchor, raise anchor, carry on men, step it up now double time, these commands and all their like. I watch over my ship, and she carries me well, and all the crew gets along just fine.

But I worry. What do I really do? The first mate, I think, is cleverer than I would like to believe, and somehow it seems that all my ideas have their roots in him.

What does the captain do? He watches, he nods, he fiddles with the rigging.

What does the captain do? Nothing that the crew needs. They know their tasks by heart; they could perform fine without his eyes or words over them.

What does the captain do? He sits in his cabin and frets about his ship’s course. But it’s the navigator that sets it.

What does the captain do? He sits in his cabin, and worries if he is anything that the first mate is not. Worries that he is only a shadow, a useless shell wrapped around a fully autonomous machine.

What does the captain do?

What does the captain do?

----

The waves crash
waves crash
crash on your feet in the sand,
your hands ready
your strong hands, there in the wave
ready to catch the crash

beach sand with the drift and the ticks
and the limp seaweed and the gulls
scattered before the wave and the waves
and the crashing wave
that toys them all
and they spin in the wave, stream
and crash as the wave, with the crashing wave
that makes our beach
and crashes evermore

The hands in the water your hands
with fingers in the stream of foam, cut it
into littler streams between your fingers
streamers of the wave little streams
in the tide, crashing up devouring the beach
as you face the tide
with your strong hands

hands in the wave
still yours
hands in the wave
make it your wave between your hands
the strong hands holding the wave

my hands are frozen.
caught in a shape, a frame
my hands are the open doorway opening
frozen by the tide, the cold of the crashing
crashing waves too much perhaps overcoming
my hands now frozen forming an open door
to me

the waves are crashing
crash on the beach the shore tear the sand
throw about the drift and the ticks and roar
crashing past you around you, defiant one
and carrying the beach the waves crash through my door
and fill me with seaweed and salt and the crush of the water
an empty room filled with the rush
and drained by the recess

I am what the wave will bring me,
what the wave will take
you can stand in the crash and cut the wave
but it cuts
right through me

(ridiculous)

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 23:59:38 GMT

Quick! Create more space!

Yay! A green field, on a hill, with yellow flowers!

Oh, but that’s not interesting.

Please hold. Your request will be transferred.

*beep* *click*

Yes, this is Subconscious.

No, we’re all out of those.

Oh… in that case, maybe we can fix something up.

What can we arrange for you?

“Whatever comes to mind will do fine.”

Popsicles!

…

At this point a dubious self-consciousness splits itself into two voices, mostly so it can express its self-dubiousness more conversationally.

“I refuse to believe that we have to write a story about popsicles.”
“Yeah, I can’t see that working out very well.”
“Should we cast in for another lead?”
“That can be… well, unpredictable.”
“We’re doing it.”

Shoelaces!

- pause -

“That completely sucks.”
“Haha, I know. You want to try?”
“Alright. Is it anything like fishing?”
“Kind of, except the fish are a lot weirder.”
“Ok, here I go…”

Snowmen made of sand!

“Hey, actually I like that one a little better.”
“Well, yeah. You know I caught a fish once that was thiiiiiiii—”
“Do it again.”

An ice princess in a cloud, with a little star-wand, and a crown of thorns!

“Oh..”
“I don’t like that one at all.”
“Go fish.”

A star explodes in a huge purply supernova, stretching the fabric of space-time like spandex!

“Pfffff.”
“Yeah. Who’s coming up with this stuff, really?”
“It’s probably better not to look beneath the surface. Just keep casting.”

A hurricane! Whoosh!

“Nope.”
“Second. Motion carries.”

A pool of water, dripping upwards!

“Well?”
“What?”
“Is that one good?”
“Uh – is there something we’re supposed to be looking for?”
“I think we forgot that part.”
“So… um.”
“Just keep fishing.”

A pipe running through a dark tunnel. A window on the pipe reveals it is full of… soupy people parts?

“Ew. No. Do it again, quick.”

A stack of papers, of assorted Day-Glo colors. Out in the sun. Each sheet, as it is lifted from the stack by a gentle wind, folds itself neatly into a little airplane, and sweeps off towards somewhere far above.

“Hey, I like it.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of cute.”
“If only we knew what we’re supposed to do with it.”
“Wait – remember who we are?”
“Oh, right – we’re the conversational extensions of a dubious self-consciousness.”
“Yes, and I think he’s about done with us…”

*shloomp*

- silence -

Thank you for holding. Your space has been created. To hear your space described again, press 1. To request a change, press 2. To enter your space now, press 3. To exit this menu, press 4. For other requests, or to speak directly with the Subconscious, press 0 now, or just stay on the line.

*3*

Feral

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 01:09:22 GMT

Do you remember when we found you?
Fear had driven you far--
We followed the broken branches and the blood,
Brushing the rain from our eyes, trying not to think
Of what we might find.

I remember how dirty you were,
How defeated,
When we found you at the base of an old tree
With mud on its roots.

I was terrified by your eyes -
Your strange eyes!
What was burning in them, when we found you
With dirt and sap on your skin
And blood drying on your wings?

You looked up at us, and my breath caught –
So alien! So afraid, so angry, so wild your eyes!
I pitied your eyes, that held such pain;
I wish I had known how to help you -

And I wish you had not run.

Have you lost the use of your wings?
Did we take even that from you?
And have we confined you to this dying forest,
To flash away in fear from every reach of Man?

And are you the only angel I will ever see,
With grey wings so worried and worn,
And blue eyes so enflamed?

I saw the furious pride in your step when you ran,
And the frustration, the hopelessness,
The burning indignance
In the flip of your wings.

And I saw in your eyes
Your refusal
To acknowledge me.

The strong of spirit so remain
For as long as they can live. And surely
Strength itself, Spirit itself cannot die,
But…

The little leaves were pooled with your blood.
I let it wash over my fingers, and
Draw streaks across my palm.
I made a fist, and felt
The blood—the blame—soak in.

Reader, do not make me write this alone.
Take my hand.
The blood is yours too.

Very philosophical

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 00:27:59 GMT

I was taking a walk a couple weeks back. Just me, walking. Me and my clothes and my shoes, padding along the asphalt.

I felt easy, I felt simple. Just walking along, all alone, with nothing to worry about.

Oh, but I wasn't alone. I had stuff in my pockets! What did I have, what did I have? Oh, you know. A wallet, a cell phone, my keys, an mp3 player. The usual.

But wait! What are these things!

These things, these things. Things. Pause a moment and let's look at them.

1. A cell phone: COMMUNICATION. I can talk with anyone; call numbers anywhere in the world. The whole plugged-into-the-vast-information-network deal.

2. Keys: ACCESS. Four keys on my keyring: one to my dorm and room, where gathers nearly everyone I know here; one to my PO box, in which appears packages, notes, or letters from any place you like; one to my bicycle, on which I get to rocket around campus at leisure; and one to my big lock, behind which I may preserve all the dark corners and intricacies of my identity. These keys are my admission tickets, my personal way in to all the places I belong to. Two other little things on my little keyring: a watch, that sets a meter to the arcing of the stars, and a little flashlight, that feeds my eyes when our own star will not. Take that, nature - I am MAN!

3. An mp3 player: SELF-INDULGEMENT. You don't know what I'm listening to under these headphones. Well, you do know this: I'm listening to exactly what I want to listen to. Me, me, me. I get to pump myself full of whatever sounds I like best, without you knowing any of it. I'm defining myself through my choice of music. Or, you know, molding myself by absorbing someone else's packaged self-importance. But what I mean is I'm doing with myself exactly what I want to. No one else has a vote. My headphones put me on an island, where no one can touch me and no one can correct me. If you pass me while I've got my headphones on, you aren't a person. You're just another item in the grand visualization of my current song. The visual world becomes wholly mine, just like the auditory one.

4. A wallet: INTEGRATION. Dump out your wallet onto a table, and look for something that isn't a link to a system. Money? Credit cards? A plastic ID card? Your voter registration card? Safeway club card? A list of phone numbers, or appointments? They work only as keys, as connections to the greater body. Your ID - the string that ties you to a legal identity. Money as an exchange note asserting that you contributed by X amount to society, and deserve a reward of X value. Your SUID: the wordless-transaction facilitator.
(You show cashier item of value Y, give them your SUID)
(Swipe. They see you are Person A, of value X)
(Scan. Value Y will be subtracted from value X)
(Item presented to you. Your card, with new value X, is returned)
(Society now owes you Y less.)

You know how I feel, with all these things in my pockets? I feel like I've got strings running out of me in every direction. Strings running to the bank, to my dorm room, to my room at home in Washington, through my phone and out to every person I know, to Washington D.C. where I exist as an SSN and a vote, to a university server where I exist as a tuition bill and a bulleted list of graduation requirements waiting to be checked off.

When I was in Europe, I could feel an umbilical cord, that reached out from me all the way back to America. Because I wasn't a person there, not to them. I was a little piece of America, standing in their country but still firmly anchored in mine. This is the only reason I felt safe. I had this big cord running back to my America. I knew and they knew that if anything happened to me, anything malicious, America would find out, and America would be angry, because ours is a country that is fierce about looking after its own. So they tolerated me, the little piece of America playing about in their country, stretching his cord out to see how it feels.

Well, the story is I lost my wallet this week. I feel like a stripped gear. I can't buy things, can't identify myself, can't drive, can't travel. My pocket is eerily empty and I feel incredibly ineffectual. Physically weaker, almost. I guess that's how dependent I am on the big gears.

So now I'm getting a new everything. A shiny new SUID, a shiny new driver's license. A new bank account with a new debit card, a new credit card, a new FLiCKS pass. It's refreshing. I get to go to my bank and re-enact the opening of my account. I get to pretend I'm getting my driver's license for the first time. Think of how powerful I'll feel when my new check card comes.

I lost some cash too... but cash is hardly anything anyways. It was just a little potential that won't be realized. Which really is nothing new, in my life. You could say there's an awful lot that's wasted. Well, maybe this cathartic process of restringing myself will teach me a little about the value of things. Or, you know, maybe not. I've escaped unchanged from worse.

Black Sand, White Sand

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 02:27:20 GMT

hooray, I finally wrote something! I hope it doesn't sound too self-important... it's meant to be a wandering more than an attempt at any definitions. If I still like it a week from now, I might come back and work on it some more... who knows. And I know it looks really long -- but it's easy to read.

Smoke drifting from a tarnished incense-bowl…

Soft reddish light from a ring of paper lanterns…

Rough wood beams overhead and all around, to hold up this humble old temple…

A heavy, deep-blue rain battering the muddy paths outside…

The smell is strange…

An old man sitting before you.

Bald, wrinkled. He wears a soft orange robe.

His eyes are closed. You can see him breathing.

To his left, a wide, shallow bowl of pure white sand.

Before him, and before you, a square recess in the floor.

The recess is filled with more of the same white sand, carefully combed.

To his right, a very small bowl of black sand.

You must go to this place, they said.

He will show you what you want to see.

He will show you what you need to see.

Go to him. Go.

The sound of the rain is fading.

You watch the old man breathing,

Wondering if he is asleep.

The smell of the incense gets stronger…

You begin to think of sleep…

Your head nods forward, ever so slightly…

The old man opens his eyes, and a hand emerges from his robe.

“Let’s play a game,” he says…

It occurs to you that it should seem extremely strange to hear this man speak perfect English. Yet it does not… the fact seems perfectly natural, like everything else about this place. This is a place where everything is believable. You find it comforting, to be unable to doubt. It takes away your obligation to evaluate everything you hear. Here, you can simply lean your mind back and soak it all in… a wonderful warm hot tub for the soul.

The old man—“No;” he interjects, “call me Sensei.”—the Sensei draws his fingers lightly over the smooth sand before him. “Watch,” he says. With flicks of his forefinger, he draws a series of V’s in the sand. “What do you think this sand means?”

“Mountains?” you ask, hopefully.

He shrugs and wipes away the shapes with his palm. With sand from the wide bowl beside him, he makes three little cones of white sand. “Mountains,” he says. Then he knocks them aside with his hand, and smoothes the sand back, and forth, until every trace of them is gone. He looks up at you. “What do you see in this sand?”

“Nothing…”

The Sensei nods. Letting sand trickle from between his fingers, he draws a pattern of small humps, and then a ring around them. “A city,” he says. “Nothing.” He wipes the shapes away. Now he runs his fingers through the sand, quickly, drawing out the shape of an animal’s head. He looks up at you; you raise your eyes to meet his.

“Tiger,” he says.

“Nothing,” you say.

He nods. You look back down, and the tiger-shape has vanished. The sand is smooth again. With his hand he gestures at you, palm up. “You draw something.”

You draw your fingers through the sand: it is soft, and cool. It shifts lightly at your touch, as if eager to be moved. It flows, almost mercurially, into the tracks left by your fingers, until no trace of their path remains.

The Sensei nods. “Draw.”

You do your best to draw a tree. When you finish, it looks something like a tree, although hazier and somewhat lopsided. You look up at the Sensei.

He nods. “Nothing,” he says.

“Nothing,” you agree. You look down in time to see the tree-shape melting into the sand. In an instant, the sand is once again perfectly smooth.

“Now watch,” says the Sensei. He lays both hands flat on the sand before him. “I will draw with my mind.” You watch the sand, and soon, you see it move. At the center of the square, a thin tendril of sand rises up, almost dancing as it curls higher and higher. It begins to thicken, and then the top of it splits into many branches. Then the branches are splitting, and then tiny leaves are sprouting from them—and by this time, the trunk has become thick and solid, and you can see the tops of roots curling over the sand—and then the leaves hide the branches, until the top of the tree is a mass of tiny white petals. The shape is perfectly still. You look up at the Sensei. His eyes are closed.

“Tree?” you say.

He opens his eyes to you, and shakes his head. “Nothing.”

As if an ice sculpture in the sun, the tree melts away. Sand pours down from its branches, and the trunk sags. Soon the branches are bare, and the trunk is weak, and the tree-shape folds like wax. As the last elements of the shape sink into it, the smooth white sand ripples.

“Nothing,” says the Sensei. He pulls a handful of sand from the wide bowl, and holds it to his forehead. “Nothing!”

You nod sympathetically, pretending to understand. “So this is nothing,” you say, pointing at the square of white sand, “and what is this?” You point at the untouched bowl to the Sensei’s right, the bowl full of black sand.

The Sensei nods, knowingly. Slowly, he picks up the bowl, and holds it between his crossed knees. He looks down into the bowl. “The black sand holds the power of the human mind.” He looks up at you, and holds the bowl out. “Here. Draw.”

You take the bowl, and with a handful of the black sand, begin to draw. You draw a circle, and then within the circle, a square. You try to remember what Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man looked like – surely that would be fitting—

“No!” The Sensei splashes white sand over your drawing, erasing the black lines. “You must draw something of beauty. Abandon your silly geometries!”

You pause. Mathematics is the purest expression of human ability; it is the human giving name to that which spawned it, surely, that is beautiful? But it’s not what the old man wants… you should at least humor him.

You draw a sunrise. It probably wouldn’t look like a sunrise to anyone else, but the old man seems to understand. You hope it was the thought that counts.

“No!” The Sensei strikes away your drawing again. The white sand seems to devour the black. “Closer, yes, but still wrong. You must draw what is most beautiful to humans. What they hold most dear, what makes them laugh and cry, what makes them dream! Draw that!”

Hmm. Springtime? Babies? Love? Rain? Religion? Food? Opera? Poetry? Baseball? No… probably not baseball.

The Sensei is impatient. He leans forward, his eyes piercing yours. Forcefully, he whispers: “What do humans treasure most?”

Oh…

“Is it life?”

“Of course it’s life!” The Sensei eases back, and he softens his gaze slightly. “Now draw it.”

“You want me to draw… life?”

He sits, watching you. You watch him breathe for a few moments. He is waiting.

You sigh, and for the third time reach your fingers into the bowl of black sand. It is coarser than the white, and heavier. You can feel the grains, feel their jagged edges and uneven shapes. You take a handful, and, not knowing what else to do, hold it out over the drawing square.

Draw life… draw life. Life – just about everything has life. It’s a living world out there. Trees have life, tigers have life, and even unalive things, like the ground or a river or the air, even those are full of life. Draw life… how do you draw life? Life is an abstraction, a quality assigned by an observer…? What must the observer see, then?

How do you draw life? You can’t… well, what then? What you do you? Well…

You draw a curving line, like a shallow S. You look up at the Sensei – he is watching the drawing square intently. Hmm. Well… You add two cross-hatches to the S, one at the one-third point and one at two-thirds. Hmm… with your empty hand you reach down and pinch in the sand at one end of the line, so that it tapers to a point. Then you add a bit more sand to the other end, so that it is wider than the rest.

You empty the rest of the sand back into its small bowl, and rest your hands in your lap. Then you look up at the Sensei, expectantly. He is watching you.

“What have you drawn?”

“It’s a salamander.”

He smiles—which is surprising, because he looks the type who can’t—and says, “Why that?”

You shrug. “I happen to like salamanders.”

His smile widens as he nods. “Good!”

At this point, all you know is that you hope he understands you better than you understand him. You also can’t think of why you just drew a salamander. Well…

“Now see what you have done. Watch.”

You look down at your crude drawing. It hasn’t changed.

“You know what a salamander looks like? You know how they move?” the Sensei asks.

“Yes…”

He gestures. “Use your mind, as I did. Draw it completely.”

You lay your hands flat on the white sand, and think all you can about salamanders. As you watch, the drawing changes. The stick-legs become articulated, and then toes become visible; the head becomes spade-shaped and eyes emerge; its belly widens and a pattern of stripes and blotches swirls across its back; its tail becomes fat and finely textured.

You look up at the Sensei. “It’s just like your tree…”

“No. This is with the black sand. You will see: remove your hands.”

You do so. For a moment, everything is perfectly still. Both you and the Sensei are frozen, watching the salamander. Then it moves -- its tail flicks as if in surprise, and its little legs spring into motion. The black shape scurries halfway across the drawing square, then quite suddenly it dives, burrowing into the white sand as if it were mud on a riverbank. Its tail flicks one last time before disappearing; and then the white sand is still again.

For what seems like a long time, you sit and watch the sand. Then a question comes to mind, and you ask, “Why did you say the black sand holds the power of the human mind? It has life, but where is the human element?”

The Sensei lays a long finger alongside his nose. He smiles in such a way that you know this is his favorite part. “Because,” he says, “It was your mind that made it move. You, and not the sand.”

“I gave it life?”

“Yes. You, the human, are the only one that could have.”

“But… human life comes from the same source that every other life does, and there was certainly life before humans—”

“Before humans it was not life.”

Hmm. “You asked for the most beautiful thing…”

“Yes, and you know that beauty is a creation of humans.”

“So you imply that the concept of life is—”

“Is human. Yes. So every life is also human.”

“And the things that moved before there were humans… what do you call those?”

“They were particles in motion. Patterns and accidents and coincidences.”

“And now that there are humans to witness these patterns they become…”

“Poetry.”

“Life is poetry?”

“The most beautiful poem of all.”

“And… you claim this poem has a human author?”

“It becomes ours because we are the first who can see it. Humans have the inner eye… they can see the substance and the beauty of thing, beyond the simple thingness of it.”

“So the white sand is…”

“Everything that already was.”

“And the black sand is… everything that we have seen, and now believe in.”

“Yes.”

“What if humans disappear, then? Does the poem die?”

The Sensei draws his fingers through the white sand, and you watch as the tracks fill in almost instantly. “It certainly will.”

“What am I to do, then? Am I to make something of this?”

“Only believe.”

“That is it?”

“Believe, and love the poem. It is your inheritance and your legacy.”

“This is all very strange…”

The Sensei’s voice was suddenly very soft. “That doesn’t matter…”

And he was gone.

You stay for a while, making animals out of the black sand and watching them scurry away. You wonder where they are all going. But, you suppose… that’s probably not what’s important.

next...

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 01:27:25 GMT

Here is a world that sparkles. All the people live high up in the sky, so that from the ground it looks almost as if they move among the stars. Glassy catwalks, with silver threads for handrails, connect a great array of platforms. Some of these are flat, and serve as markets or parks or meeting-places, and others are great curving ivory towers that reach higher and higher towards heaven.

It was always night here, and the night was always clear. The moon was always half-full, so that it cast pale ghosts in the eyes of the tall, silent people who drifted along the catwalks. These people, in their dark robes, never seemed to cease their motion, but moved so slowly from place to place that perhaps they never moved at all.

There was one other life on the catwalks: a single white cat would sometimes come, and play with the reflections of stars trapped in the glass. Whenever one of the tall shapes swept past, the cat would croon and rub its head against their calves, but never did any of them respond to the touch.

For all its somber sadness, this world was beautiful. Light behaved differently here; it fell like rain from the stars, and the tiny drops hung on the white cat’s fur so that the animal sparkled. The people never stopped for the rain; but kept up the same pace, moving restlessly along the glassy walks. Their robes drank in the falling light, becoming luminous, until a hundred ghosts walked with the moon through every dark eye.

Flight of Fantasy

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 06:09:30 GMT

A fun exercise for me:
"Flight of Fantasy."
We start somewhere, fearlessly.
Perhaps we say a few words; perhaps nothing.
Then we fly to the next place, the next encounter.
To the next, to the next, to the next.
Fearlessly. Effortlessly. Just flutter.

Two travelers. Wearing colored robes. Standing just inside a pristine Greek temple, which floats in an endless sea of whiteness. The air shimmers.

Turn! Something grabs their heels, knocking them off their feet, and now they are spinning through nothingness, blackness.

Land in a forest, in the thick wet moss. They taste the dirt on their lips as they stand up. One of these travelers is slightly less than masculine, and the other shows some hint of the feminine, but these differences are subtle. They might as well be twins, actually. Both are tall, dark-haired and dark-eyed, elegant. They are graceful, and when they look about themselves, studying the deep green forest, they look with eyes full of patience and depth. When a twig breaks in the depths behind them, they turn in perfect unison, eyes wide and searching. But they see only the silence of the trees.

Turn! The moss turns orange and curls away like dissolving embers, and the travelers plummet into black space. They fall just for a moment, and as they tumble they see tiny dim stars watching them from a distance. When they land, it is on worn marble stones.

They are in the courtyard of a giant temple: all around them, statues of stern men and mythical beasts soar up into the night sky. Columns in endless rows march up and down the courtyard’s edges, and on one side, a grand staircase cuts up the side of a towering dark pyramid. Far above, barely visible to the travelers, a tiny oil lamp burns in the windowed room at the pyramid’s top.

Turn! The oil lamp flares up, growing brighter and brighter until it washes out the pyramid and the columns and the statues, and the travelers stand in empty whiteness.

Turn! The whiteness dissolves and they fall, fall fall—into a bottomless sea. Bubbles stream from the folds of their robes as they sink, slowly, past aquamarine and royal blue, into midnight, and into blackness.

Turn! They erupt from the sands of a desert dune. Wind carries the disturbed sand away eagerly, and the travelers stand dry and cold atop the desolate landscape. In every direction, folds of sand flow out like water. Again, it is silent. Not even the wind speaks. The smaller traveler, the fairer one, thought to speak—but then could not. Not here.

Turn! A whirl of sand springs up around them, and as it grows into a mighty storm it carries the travelers upwards, spinning them, fanning out their robes like sails as they are thrown high, high into the sky.

They saw a white city, in the clouds. The one city, that has always been home to the dreams of fairies and angels and gods and heroes: that was the city they saw, with all its thin parapets and their rainbows of flapping pennants, it was all there, but the travelers passed it by in an instant. It was gone, and the two were now swallowed by a dark and heavy storm-cloud.

The travelers twirl through mists of raindrops not yet heavy enough to fall, and they see tendrils of lightning arc and whip ominously through the heavy gray. Thunder rattles them, makes water spray from their hair and their robes, makes them spin like tops again. The thunder was a voice; it rumbles out this single word: “Turn!”

The travelers spin, spin, until they are barely visible, and when the next arc of lightning rips past, it runs right through them, devours them, incinerates them. They become furious light, and join the stream that tears down at the earth. The bolt finds a tree, and with a crash of thunder, shatters it. As the broken trunk falls away, and the splinters and the leaves float down in a daze, the two travelers get up from the blackened ground. Their robes are frayed all along the edges.

Turn! The lightning reverses out of the ground, and the tree snaps back to where it had been, and as the sections of trunk clamp back together around the travelers, the two begin to dissolve. A wind arrives, and as the two become dust they are lifted by the urgent breeze. A cloud of golden particles, swirling, rises from the forest and joins the high, strong currents that run under the storm-cloud.

The wind gives out over a tropical island that hangs in a vast blue sea. The golden dust wafts down, merging with the soft sand on the beaches. A soft wind stirs the sand, folding the golden particles into the body of the beach, until the last disappears. A moment later, the curl of a cresting wave solidifies, takes shape, and one of the travelers washes up onto shore. The next wave does the same, hardening at the moment before its collapse into foam, and the second traveler is reformed. They lie in the surf, the fingers of each wave brushing the threads along the fringed edges of their robes. Up the beach, a coconut drops from its tree and lands softly in the sand.

Turn! The coconut leaps up from its bowl in the sand, and as it hurtles at the travelers it splits open on one side and begins to grow, swelling up until it dwarfs the two, and it scoops them up in its open maw and then snaps shut. It continues to grow, and now flies up into the heavens. It lengthens, becoming sleek and metallic, and by the time it has grown to the size of a small city, it is a mighty star-ship.

The travelers stand on the bridge. They are dry, and their robes are new and bright again. They watch, through giant windows, as the ship glides past planets and stars unending.

Captain on the bridge! He comes striding in with tall boots flashing, his uniform sparkling, a look of daring adventure on his face! He calls out, and suddenly there are crew members everywhere, swarming under his orders, dancing their hands across glowing displays, murmuring quickly into hidden microphones. The Captain comes to stand at the head of his ship, watching infinity approach and infinity pass, and as the scurrying of his crew plays out in the reflections on his boots, he smiles at the yawning space before him.

Turn!

shfifty-fivers

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 06:35:58 GMT

So they're not true 55-word stories. They're 55-word fragments of a story I'm too lazy to sketch conventionally. And, incidentally, one of them is actually 50 words, and one is 60. Which was mostly due to certain incongruities in my handling of some embarrassingly simple equations. But let's pretend it was artistic discretion.

Sleek new helicopters stretched out in a long line, their fresh coats of ice-blue metallic paint grinning in the sunlight. On the flank of each was emblazoned the bold insignia of the Helios Corporation.
“Where are these headed?”
“Australia. New distribution center there.”
“Is there anywhere that Helios isn’t?”
“No. That’s the whole idea.”

“What did we do to deserve these?”
“Nothing. The Helios Corporation believes in the importance of charity.”
“That’s not the real reason.”
“For now, that doesn’t matter. You do appreciate what Helios does for your town?”
“Well, of course—how could we not…”
Cargo trucks with ice-blue cabs streamed past. They carried building supplies.

“Have you seen this?”
“Let me look. Um… no.”
“No one has. It’s new today.”
“And… what’s it do?”
“That part is still secure information.”
“I somehow foresaw that. Is there anything you can tell me?”
“This will be big. Real big.”
“Helios redefining the world again, eh?”
“You bet.”

“So you’re telling me…”
“That Helios can give you triple the interest rates of any major bank.”
“I feel I shouldn’t believe this.”
“Sir, I work for a very dynamic company. We use our resources aggressively, and we run a consistent profit.”
“It just seems so strange that Helios remains privately owned...”
“No: that’s exactly why we are so successful.”

At 3:14 a.m., under heavy rain, the bored pilot of an Israeli JSF-H jet on long-range patrol made a small error in navigation. Four degrees off course, the plane drifted sleepily from its planned route.
Helios, three years earlier, had won in international court the right to defend its own airspace.
The plane disappeared.

omg; poetry!

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 01:52:15 GMT

Aqui estan some poems. Most are from a few weeks back. And I only did a little editing, so they're somewhat rough.

And, because it's fun to name things, this collection henceforth shall officially be known as "Little Wordy Bits."

            Firefly

I think that somewhere
is a tiny little string that, if I pulled it,
would unravel all the world.
All the little wordy bits would mush and melt together,
And the great reaches of the sky’s color would strain into hard little points,
beady pindrops of ebony falling like armored hail.
And all the trees would puff*, dissolving featherdown, and the shattered particles would
         shine and sparkle.
Ink would flow backwards from the top of my pen,
     wafting and billowing as if underwater.
These funny lines and arches would spring up from their paper,
     leaves hopping up, breathless, from the thud of a giant’s fall.
They would float, curious, tasting the air, spinning a bit.
And then the little wordy bits crumble into black dust,
and every mite of dust becomes a tiny winged bat,
its screech too high to hear as it wheels and flaps within the swarm of its brethren.
And as the midnight criers spread, little wings beating eagerly, tirelessly,
     they grow larger.
They drift upward on their undead wings,
     untouched by the streaming hail,
     red eyes tearing holes in the smothering night.
Now the bats are falcons, now hawks, now herons, now condors.
And as the air spins and dreams into the open vacuum,
     and the buildings evolve into mushrooming fountains of sound-color,
         and the ground turns, a key in a lock, and settles into its black-lake grave,
             and all the sounds and shimmers and lights freeze in place, and bleed away,
                 the sentinel birds on endless wings ascend to the corners of a dying sky,
                     and whisper a curtain across the ended page of time.

            Aeon

His hands are calloused
     and strong.
He is the size of eternity.
From the satchel on his back he draws glowing orbs
     rolls them on his fingers, until they pulse with warmth.
He gathers several in his palm,
     lets them slide and clack together,
         and they flash with bursting energy.
He holds on up, to his ancient eye,
     knowing it, whispering to it, breathing with it.
Holding it in a fist, he throws out his arm, releases,
     and the newborn orb rolls off his longest finger and departs,
     burrowing silently into the depth of the void.
Reaching behind himself, the great one
     tears off the tiniest bit of his back,
     just a few grains of his essence.
Each grain he holds before him, seeds,
     and to each he whispers a story.
And the great one’s arteries carry his dreams out to his gentle fingertips
     and every dream finds the story it will live,
     and so every grain finds a feeble heartbeat.
Curling his hand again into a fist, the great one again throws out his arm,
     again releases his children to the void.
And the humming seeds ride a trail of light left gleaming by the golden orb
     until they find it at its resting-place, smiling, awaiting them,
         and on soft threads tethered, each seed spins round and round,
         each to its own drumming beat, each warm from within, shining in the singing light.
And the great one rattles his gemstone orbs, for the thousandth time once more.

            The Eternal Blue Silence

Mountains are the best of all secret-keepers.
     At night, when their shoulders are cold, they murmur,
     wordlessly, but so all that are near can hear:
         secrets…
The mountains never abandon their watch.
     Balanced high among them, in a stern little valley,
         The blue jewel knows not sound, nor life, nor time.
         Its surface clear, its surface still,
             it lies like glass,
             a perfect tinted pane
             splitting the jagged ranks of bursting peaks.
         The lake is deep.
There are no birds, for there are no fish,
     no motion at all,
     no resistance to the crystal calm.
The lake is cold.
     Its icy stillness crucifies the air, until no wind can stir the bone-white dust
         along the knife-edge shore.
The lake is Keeper of the Story.
     Its black depths, a hundred fathoms down, suffocated,
         are constant witness to the period-mark at the Story’s end.
     Firmly at the bottom, planted at the deepest point,
         A steel-bound vault.
Behind the curving steel bands, within the heavy metal hull,
     The remnants of a Story abbreviated are folded, apologetic.
     All the strands gathered to one and coiled,
     All the whispered dreams carefully retrieved, reduced, and bottled,
         every potential reversed, and frozen,
     Every word ever spoken, every life lived, every memory, from the first to the very last,
     Retraced, undone, forgotten, erased, siphoned into the mournful vault,
     Sealed, in the heart of the blue jewel,
     with this:
         “We Know Only That We Have Failed.”

            (no title)

The spaceport was defined by arches,
     Cavernous half-domes cocooning the terminal.
Along every wall, bright fluid lights charged through thin glass channels,
     “Orange—economy travel—this way;
     “Green—freight shipping—this way”;
     “Red-white-red—Security and Military—this way”;
     “Light blue—rest facilities and accommodations—this way.”
She was standing by the benches
     at the eye of the whorl of faces and hurried feet,
     drowning slightly in the vast echo chamber of the kinetic jigsaw.
She knew that every face she saw was quickly transient,
     every present will tightly wrapped around a distant destination.
     Tomorrow they would all be gone, reshuffled, replanted.
     And she knew tomorrow, their perfect replacements would be sutured in,
         whole legions of them, with the same purposeful step, the same iron intent.
She heard the deep-throated voice of the intercom
     calling out gates, departures, destination,
     the invisible conductor of this switchboard orchestra.
She stood by one of the curving plastic window-panes,
     watching the spaceships.
     Sleek, black-hulled behemoths, easing to or fro on invisible threads,
     beady navigation lights dot-tracing their curvatures
         as they slipped in and out of the yawning port-docks.
She felt their weight, their tug on the fabric of space
     as deep red engine-glows clicked on, with another after another departure,
         each one a stamp and sealing lock on another thousand lives.
She found a catwalk, and peered down into a shipping-freight bay,
     and watched the endless stenciled crates,
         all clones in battered metal hulls,
         playthings of the somber spidery cranes
             which shuffled them, from the belly of one beast
             to the belly of another.
She watched the crates,
     each foretold, each assigned,
     birthplace, endplace, timeframe all neatly stenciled on,
     and she wondered if she would like to be such a box.
She stood again in the concourse,
     watched again the maelstrom of faces,
     and saw the stenciled fate between each pair of hard-set eyes.
She looked up,
     to the top of the highest dome,
         to where hung a glass ring
         from which all the color-streamers sprang.
         Its hundred glassy legs each shimmered
             with the pulse of another familiar destination,
             a monochrome flag for every considerable future.
At the center of the swirl of drops,
     the drops that fill the haunted crates,
     She stood and hated the ring,
         wanting its lazy, gauzy promise
             of every color, unresolved,
         wanting it to take her hand,
         cursing the cruel threads that ran so stiffly, so eerily constant through the tubes,
             cursing the threads that pulled the great dark shapes through space,
                 wishing one—any!—would break and hurl her crazily, uncontrollably
                 across the lacing web of human threads, out of its folds,
                 wishing a nameless star would catch her on her flip-spin path,
                     wishing it would welcome her, replenish her,
                     and tell her she was not blind.

            Red Thayodorus

I call myself Thayodorus Mansantana.
You may call me the same.
I like the words, I like the way they sound,
and that is enough, for a name.

I come from the boundless spectral plane,
The realm for dreams no god can tame,
The land where the bodies of heroes are lain.

Thayodorus Mansantana! The one and truest son,
I am the wind that whistles through the gears of Time,
I am the eye within the Eye within the sacred Rhyme,
I am the thread which persists while all else is undone.

Perhaps you have felt the touch of my hand,
Perhaps heard the rings of my boots,
Perhaps seen the slash of my crimson cape,
and in that moment a thousand years were spanned.

But if you did not catch me, do not miss me,
For in time, in Time, I come always, again.

I am Thayodorus Mansantana!
I am waiting behind every mirror,
Burning in every lightning-bolt,
Watching from every clock-face,
Thayodorus, Thayodorus,
until I fly again!

Ghost story

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 02:48:59 GMT

“Do you believe in ghosts?”
After a pause, I responded: “No...”
“Well, you should.”
I laughed. “Are you going to try and convince me to?”
“Look.” The small man across the table from me pulled something small out of his pocket, and laid it before me. It appeared to be a silver marble.
I wonder what he expected me to say. Looking at the marble, I don’t see how he could have expected much.
Within a few seconds he grew tired of my silence. “I was out on the street, standing on a corner. I was waiting for the light to change. I was looking upstreet, watching the cars come by, and then I turned back to face the crosswalk--and this struck me directly in the forehead.”
He picked up the marble and held it out to me. “Here, hold it.”
I held out my hand gamely. “Surely you realize how ridiculous this sounds?”
“No, just hold it. You have to understand.”
“It’s just a ball bearing; it could have popped out of a nearby piece of machinery. Or maybe it was in the street, and got thrown up by the wheel of a passing car.”
He laid the small orb in my hand, and I gasped: if it had been made from solid lead, it wouldn’t be half this heavy. The marble must have weighed over five pounds.
“This is impossible...”
He nodded emphatically. “I completely agree. But watch, it gets much stranger.” He reached out and took the marble back. Cupping it in his hands, he shook it vigorously. I could hear little thuds as the heavy mass rattled between his hands, but as I listened, the thuds grew softer, and then were inaudible. The man’s arms had relaxed, as if he was shaking empty air. He stretched his hands out towards me.
“Here,” he said. “Feel it now.” He opened his hands. The marble didn’t look any different... I wrapped my fingers around it, expecting to need my shoulder muscles to lift it. But it was no longer heavy. It rolled easily about, as if a feather in the wind, and I lifted it easily between two fingers.
“I don’t believe it.” I really didn’t.
“Then I challenge you to explain it. When it first struck me, it weighed not an ounce. But I caught it, and slipped it into my pocket, and within a minute I felt in growing heavier. Whenever I shake it, it seems to return to its original state of lightness.
“What can I say? I didn’t choose these things to happen to me. I am every bit as objective and level-headed as you are, and for that reason, I cannot deny these facts, but nor can I understand them.”
I tossed the still-weightless marble into the air. It hovered there, like a balloon, before wafting gently down. It almost gave me vertigo, watching a little metal ball defy gravity. It made me feel like we were hanging in outer space.
Then suddenly, the ball regained a bit of its weight, and fell heavily to the floor. I picked it up, and held it up in the light, turning it this way and that.
I felt apologetic. “I don’t know what to say,” I told the man. “This could mean anything. Anything that you want it to, really. But I’m still not convinced...” I peered closely at the little sphere, looking for a crack or seam. Perhaps some strange new type of gyroscope... I pinched it between the nails of my thumb and forefinger - and the marble dissolved.
My thumb and forefinger snapped together, in the middle of a tiny cloud of silver smoke. The marble was simply gone. And, as my companion and I watched, the smoke shimmered in the light for a moment, and then it faded away to nothing. We were left with empty air.
There was a long, unhappy silence.
“Well...”
“No one but us saw it.”
“I haven’t even decided that I really did see anything.”
“No... you don’t get to decide that part. You saw it, same as I did.”
“What do we know, then?”
“I don’t know. Less than we did before.”
“Luther... what did we see?”
He paused. “We have seen a glimmer of something we have always assumed to be nonexistant. Perhaps, a force totally outside our understanding of the universe. Something our awareness touches only when it wants to be touched. ”
It was a terrifying thought. But somehow, I felt I had always been waiting for this moment. I had been waiting, for years, for an event that would topple all of my assumptions. I had seen it coming, almost. Along the way, I had always known I was shutting out too many possibilities, foreclosing too many dark passageways.
I looked at Luther. “Am I supposed to start believing, now?”
He looked right back at me, and said nothing.
The silence lengthened.

Creating some space

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 11:18:11 GMT

I’m Dill. I’m six years old. To you, my world is the distant future. I have a story to tell you about my world, although it’s really about your world. I can’t tell it right now. I’m not ready to lay it down. But remember me: I’m Dill. I’ll tell you my story soon.

I’m Samuel. I’m a hitman. You could say I do it for the money. You would be correct to say so. But I believe I do it for the poetry. For the perfect red that springs from a bullet-hole to the heart. I do it for the wind that ruffles my hair when I stop outside the building, after a job, to straighten my suit jacket. I kill, because someone has to be the steely hand of Death around the necks of these criminals, and in all truth I’d like to see that role filled properly. I do good work, and my clients respect me. It’s all an enormous game. That’s what allows me to sleep. None of it is real.

Leona is in her forties, and a widow. She owns a little flower-shop in a decent part of town. To the enormous frustration of the younger philosophers, she is entirely content.

Wyatt works in a clothing-mill. He’s been watching the managers watching him. He can’t figure out what they have that he doesn’t. (Besides money--that comes after the fact.)

Bridget hates her parents. Her life is one shaped by incredible passions, and she reacts to everything. She’s touchy, unpredictable, impatient, and unnerving to be near. You get the feeling she’s about to explode from an overload of inexpressible self-righteousness.

Tom is in the Army. The Army is what defends our country. Tom guards our Freedom, our Democracy, and our Rights as Individuals.
Tom thinks Freedom is pretty swell.

Cynthia is always out of breath, because she’s so constantly bowled over by the beauty of the world she forgets to draw in air. She’s an example of a bad system: she can’t adapt to her environment. Evolution disfavors that. She can’t raise her midline, can’t make the beauty ordinary. A good human has to learn to see everything as ‘so-so,’ or else they'll end up asphyxiating, like Cynthia did. Everyone saw that coming. Her funeral was so-so.

My name is Lucas. I am completely lost. Your world terrifies me, and I have no recollection of where I have come from. I walked through one of your cities, and stared up at your buildings. How many people live inside one of them? How many lives do my eyes glide over with that one glancing look? How can you bear it? Do you tell yourself all those people don’t exist? I wish I could do so; the strange blank faces of your city inundate me, collapsing my thoughts. There are simply too many people in this world. Don’t you feel like you are suffocating? Don’t you feel like all our souls are crammed too close together, and they’re starting to blur into one? Can’t you feel your edges dissolving? Can’t you feel the dread of losing yourself, of disappearing in this tide of blank faces?

grAh.

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 10:28:24 GMT

You know, these journal things are dangerous. They give you all sorts of ideas. Suddenly, you’re burning to express thoughts that, a few days ago, you weren’t even aware you had. Suddenly you’ve got a hundred different things to say to the world. I think it makes you a little reckless.
Because if I went off on a rant like I’ve been wanting to, I know I would just sound ridiculous. So I’m not going to say anything. Mum. Mum as a clam.
I’ll keep this place clean. No heart-outpourings. No vehemence. Placidity.

Hmph.

And still more sketches...

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 08:16:03 GMT

I watched the coffee, swirling around in my cup. I scowled at it. Little black spots were floating in it. I think they were mocking me.
The music in this place: too loud. Obstructed my thinking. I watched the bouncer. He was scowling at people, like I had scowled at the little black grains ruining my coffee. The place was almost empty; it was the wrong night of the week.
It was raining. You could only tell by watching the street through one of the small windows. Every minute or two, a car would glide by, and I could see the raindrops spattering on its windshield. I wondered where the cars were all going.
I had a car once. Then there was an accident--not my fault, if that changes anything--and now I have nothing. Took a sip of the sour coffee. I could feel the grains in my throat.
What a miserable night.

Johnny was a builder. Before he could even walk, he was piling and stacking blocks into ambitious towers. He was always looking upwards, admiring the tall trees around the house, and when his parents drove with him through the city, he stared and crooned at the silver skyscrapers. As a small child he was always in the woods, gathering sticks and weaving them together, erecting little palaces by bracing the sticks in the ground and leaning them against each other. Each project was more complex and delicate than the last, until his creations looked quite believably like the homes and temples of tiny people.
Johnny’s parents were naturally very proud of their son’s hobby, and they congratulated themselves on his genius, and they read some Ayn Rand and talked about Johnny’s future, and congratulated themselves some more.
On his fifteenth birthday, Johnny’s parents gave him a beautiful hardbound edition of The Fountainhead. He read it in two days. On the third day, he sat in the woods, next to his latest and favorite structure. The whole day, he did not say a word; he simply sat, looking down at the cover of Ayn Rand’s book.
That night, he did not eat with his parents; he went to sleep without saying a word.
Early the next morning, he got up and carried The Fountainhead back out to his place in the woods, where his beautiful structures stood all around. In his pocket he carried a cheap plastic cigarette lighter.
Johnny sat and opened the book, and started tearing the pages out, one at a time. All morning, he tore the pages out, and all afternoon, he folded and shaped the pages and built from them his most perfect structure. He used every page, and the binding served as the paper tower’s foundation. He finished the tower when the sun was just beginning to set. He stood up.
“Dominique,” he said, gesturing at the paper tower, “Here is your palace.”
He burned it down.
“Roark,” he said, “I have nothing to give you. And even if I did, I don’t think you would be listening.”
He burned all his wooden models. Nothing but ash was left. And then he disappeared.
No one knows where Johnny went. His parents never heard a word from him again; neither did his friends.
And I certainly don’t know, either. I wonder what he knew, what he was so sure about. I wonder if we are supposed to be that sure, ever.
But I still admire Johnny.

It’s become a recent hobby of mine to find a topic of conversation, complete with a clever opening line, that will interest any stranger, and thus allow me to strike up a conversation with anyone on the street. It’s remarkably difficult.
First of all, people these days are busy. They don’t have time to stop and pretend to be interested. Often they don’t even have time for a single word; I think they would just shoot me an offended look and keep walking.
So the first order of business becomes catching people when they aren’t obsessed with getting somewhere. Again, very difficult. Even on a subway, when people are just sitting there, they are intent on their destination. As if the subway train would stop moving if they were to stop concentrating on the purposefulness of its motion.
Sometimes, you get someone on a subway who isn’t impatient, who isn’t on a cell phone, and who isn’t staring intently into a newspaper.
Then, you have to struggle with yourself over going to this total stranger and saying something very unusual to them. It’s even harder than that, because your confidence has to be perfect. You have to sound as if you’re only casually interested; you’re just looking to pass the time with a little pleasant conversation.
But then all that was easy. What, now, do you say? What topic would compel a stranger to stop a while and chat? Surely there is something that people want to talk about, but don’t. I’m still looking for it.

Some more sketches

Mon, 27 Feb 2006 10:41:57 GMT

“Good morning...”
Ahhh... I could smell bacon. And the white curtains looked angelic in the golden light. Robe, slippers, head scratch, yawn, downstairs. Hardwood floors, warm. Smile, look at the white ceramic of the cereal bowls against the pearled granite, against the glow of a fresh orange.
Was it sunny outside? Oh yes. Was it summer, with green trees and pretty brooks and skies and light pastel clothing? No... Was it winter, with fresh snow piling over the boughs of Dr. Seuss pines, snow with perfect rabbit-prints leading up to the woodshed, and icicles shining from the eaves of Tudor mansions? No, it wasn’t winter either. There was no season outside. I can’t tell you how that’s possible, or what exactly the world looked like at that moment, but it is safe to say that this world has no temporal index. There were simply no reference points; no one knew how to measure the passing of time, or even felt the need to. The past was not a linear continuum. All events that happened in the past were equally in the past, so that the story of one’s life did not stretch out like a long river, but was piled up all together as if everything that had ever happened had happened in perfect simultaneity.
So when I ate my bacon, I was also joining about two hundred of my past selves, and we all ate bacon together, and we looked out the window, and we were all very glad we didn’t live in one of those worlds where people stretch themselves out into long, silly lines because they think about time the wrong way.

Let’s take two people, throw them into togas (and maybe give one of them an olive-leaf crown), and slap them down in a very nice Greek temple, beautifully proportioned, that floats in the middle of a field of overexposed whiteness. You know, the technical definition of the middle of nowhere. Like an enormous modeling stage, except without any hidden edges; this place has no edges at all.
So, these two guys. I made them both male. I hope you’re not offended, but they came to me as males and, unless you want to throw them into a terrible identity crisis, I think we should let them stay that way. The second guy, the one with the leafy tiara, we can call Olive. The first one, whose toga has a very sharp orange slash across it, we can call Orange. And now Olive and Orange can have a very profound and compelling discussion, or at least attempt to.
Orange starts it: “There is no meaning in this world! All is transient, chaotic, absurd! We are no more permanent, no more divine than a breath of wind!
Olive receives the kickoff, and makes a dashing return! Or would have, had the Greeks played football. Perhaps I should settle on a more appropriate analogy. But certainly you agree that Greek philosophers attempting American football (in their togas, of course) would be at least a little bit cute. But, then, we must address Olive’s reply: “No,” he says, “you make a fool of yourself with such uncontrolled wailing. You must look closer...”
Reader, I apologize, but you must understand that Olive can be, and generally is, a tremendous bore. If he gets in his head that someone needs something explained, well, he’ll certainly explain it, but he is so abominably methodical (and thus predictable) that his explanations, even of something simple like “why do people think potatoes are watching them?”, can take several hours to complete. But I digress. Importantly to you, reader, his response to Orange was insufferably long, and I certainly will not make you bear it. I will do my duty as a scribe, and summarize for you the few and far-between salient bits of Olive’s response.
In short he said that of course the world seems lacking in meaning, because ‘meaning’ is something that Man carried with him when he first arrived here. Since then, he has certainly made things with meaning, like a car, which goes places (or occasionally flies out of control and mashes itself into a terrible mess), or a word, which works as a little box for ideas that everyone can understand, but in the end it remains true that many things in the world are without meaning. Olive granted to Orange that a particularly sour and soulless individual could see animals as very complexly coded survival scripts, which have built up over time but are still just as ridiculously useless as the first few conglomerate molecules from which all life descended.
Orange grew very bored at this point (well, really it’s me that got bored, but let’s not abandon the novel illusion) and told Olive, in no kind terms, that “every word of this is rubbish.”
Olive caught the hint, and to general surprise, responded cleverly and quickly. “Well, then, congratulations. You have destroyed for yourself any hope of loving this world. Keep your empty glass, sir, I want no part of it.”
Now this is interesting, because these two Greeks have gone and switched their roles. Orange was the fiery one, critical of the world but still intrigued by its great questions, and glowing with a passion for discovery. Olive was the cold and reasoned one, who saw all things clearly. But now it seems that Orange has become Occam, and Olive has become a Romantic. And the best part is, I can still wheel them around however I choose! Maybe I’ll have them switch around again, and again! But no; these characters are not interesting any more.
So I blow them both up. But their togas remain intact, and they explode into simple smoke instead of making a big bloody mess all over the pristine white temple. I didn’t want to sully the place.

“Let the arm that struck the blow, come forward!”
A big man steps out of the crowd. Now he stands near the fire, with the pack of eighty-odd others standing behind him in their loose tribal clothing.
The tribe needs a Voice. The five men closest to the fire step forward, and form a half-circle facing the Arm that Struck the Blow.
The five speak so that all could hear. They speak as one.
“This arm is evil, and dead. It has moved against the Way. Let evil be purged, and the tribe be strong.”
The man who stood alone, the Arm that Struck the Blow, now bows, and kneels before the tribe.
“May the tribe be strong,” says the Voice.
The tribe needs a Hand. There was a mallet: the man closest to it picks it up. He swings it around with the strength of the entire tribe. The tribe was strong, and the weak limbs must fall away. This limb was sick, and dead.
The evil limb was cut away, and the tribe was strong again.
A woman came forward, and stood near the Voice. She holds a new child in her hands, born just minutes ago.
The Tribe says, “The Tribe grows stronger still.”
Every mind in the tribe has the same thought: "The tribe will soon be strong enough. This tribe will soon tear apart the enemy behind the hills. Soon. The tribe grows strong. Strong."