Posts (page 2)

I can't tell you what I didn't do today.

I'm afraid you'll think less of me because I'll have to then tell you that I've been doing it everyday for a while now.

Just be satisfied knowing that today I didn't do it and that tomorrow I plan on not doing it again. I could say that I'll never ever do it again, but I don't make predictions ... especially about the future.

Actually, check that ... I do make predictions - its all I'm good at.

My attempts to fast have failed. I've only managed to succeed in a real water fast once and the benefits of it where enough to jumpstart a three month long sort of "recovery" of my psyche. I was so proud of myself. I met new people, did new things. I was healthy and starting to cut muscle. My stamina was doubled then tripled then nearly infinite. My confidence was unending.

Then something strange happened.

I lost focus. And then I lost my edge. And then I lost my muscle and my stamina. And then I lost my willpower. That was about July or so. Many would suggest this collapse of foundation is directly a result of turning thirty, but I know better. The catalyst to my fall was a woman and what she did to me happened well before I turned thirty. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that years have passed since that initial infection of the psyche occurred.

And she's still working her voodoo on me.

It's no wonder I've not had a normal relationship after her. She's turned me into a monster. It's a were-curse. Some dude bit her and she turned, and now she's bit me and I've turned. And now I'm biting girls and they're turning.

I had confirmation of this a few days ago when I spent time with an old friend of mine that was a good friend of a girl I had dumped. It turns out she's turned into what I am, doing the same things to unsuspecting males.

The curse is hard to explain unless you're the one I'm cursing. My victims can see it happening, and they let me do it anyway. I saw it coming for me too ... but the moment was too good to let pass. The feeling too inviting.

I know now that I'm destined to be destroyed, not by the curse itself but by a representative of the greater good. A Van Helsing. A hunter. A savior. A Silver Bullet.

This monster I have become is destined to die, and when it does I will die with it.

And then I'll live out the rest of my life a zombie ... apathetic ... indifferent ... ignorant ... and alone.

Until then ... I'm hunting.

I took the day off today.

I haven't taken a day off since September and I needed it.

What you don't realize about me is that I'm not really human. Sure I sit and stare at myself in the mirror like every other bloke, but I don't think I see the same things. I see the scar tissue from the cherry of a cig I mishandled a couple of years ago - its healing process stunted by my continuous picking and scratching. It's there again today because hairs attempt to go through it and get twisted and bent, macheteing back into the lower dermal layers.

Sounds sick dunnit?

Well, its just my vessel giving me something to think about. How nothing ever really heals. Scar tissue is scar tissue. A reminder of some fuck-up, a bunged job, a rat's hope at kingdom.

Thrice this week I've been gently reminded that scar tissue will come back to haunt you. My eye doctor tells me today that I have astigmatism in my left eye more than my right because of scar tissue from surgery I had when I was younger.

- Your eyes are going to change shape as you get older, he says. And when that happens the scar tissue isn't going to stretch. It's going to hold your eye back from changing the way it should, making your left eye always permanently worse than your right.

How

fucking

profound.

As for the third ... its more of an open wound.

Scar tissue always comes back to haunt you.

And that's what I am.

Not human.

Just a sentient scar on the face of the world. Always coming back to remind Mother Nature that she bunged up creation once again. And I'll never go away.

On the lighter side:

I finished Bran Mak Morn and was surprised at how Howard wraps it up. He puts it to the reader that all the dark fairy tales surrounding dwarves and elves and wendigos and leprecauns and fae kidnapping the young and weak on the fog-shrouded moors have a truth to them. The Picts, a stout, misshapen, dark, flint-working people that inhabited the British Isles long before the Celts or the Grey-eyed Norsemen or the Saxons - there's your mystical beings, he says.

Scars of a past rewritten. Like plastic surgery to turn a hook nose into a perky princess's prized possession.

I also have two new books to add to the queue:

The Eye of the World - Book One of the Wheel of Time Series - Robert Jordan

I find myself continuously thrown into a collective mix with Hipsters and Neo-Beatnik Beardies ... not by choice but by geography. I inhabit dark but aesthetically "coo" bars and pubs, and there they flock as well. Birds of a feather? Fuck shite. I keep hearing them talk about this series of books like I'm some kind of leper for not having been intimately bedded down with these monstrous volumes of high fantasy. I'll give it a chance.

Finnegan's Wake - James Joyce

Again I've managed to decrypt my doctor uncle's henscratching to unearth one of his literary suggestions. He wrote down Ulysses but I now distinctly remember him telling me that Finnegan's Wake by Joyce and Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon are the two most difficult books he's ever read in his life. I'll give it a chance.

My random choice by die roll, by the way, was Porno by Irvine Welsh.

Maybe that's why I feel like spouting scots and reminiscing the dance I danced with light drugs so long ago. I'm what you call a skinny bloke, whereas a Fat Fuck is one whose taste for scag, coke, the pipe, turns the body to a big mushy mountain of useless flesh.

I was always the skinny ... never going past the barbed wire and big signs saying "Past this point, yer fucked"

That's a scar I don't have.

That's a scar I'll never have.

But alcohol ...

... fuck's sake, man.

I have to have routine, but I must also have randomness ... so mixing both makes me happy.

I have a book case full of books - soon to be runneth over.

I also don't like getting bogged down in series or authors, so I never read consecutive books in the same series or by the same author.

Instead of following my own desires, I randomly choose my next book to read by either a die roll or flipping a coin. This was easier when I had only ten books in my queue at a time. I had a ten-sided die that was perfect for this and could determine the next book in one roll.

Now I have as many as 30 books in my queue, so I flip a coin, dividing the queue into two. I lay out all the books in my queue in rows, usually 8 books in a row. A heads will mean the top half of the rows move on to the next round. In the case of an odd quantity, the higher qty goes on top ... and so on and so on until there is one book left.

Currently I'm reading Bran Mak Morn: The Last King. This is a compilation of short stories by weird fiction writer Robert E. Howard revolving around his King of the Picts, Bran Mak Morn. The stories are dark semi-historical fiction - full of battles and bloodshed, dark heroes, eldritch evil ... man stuff.

Just before that I read Enter Jeeves, a compilation of P.G. Wodehouse stories, including the first eight stories written about Bertie Wooster and his servant Jeeves. Very dry brit humor about the idiocy of the restful rich. I enjoyed it.

Here's what is currently in my queue:

2061: Odyssey Three - Arthur C. Clarke

I really like Arthur Clarke. While usually not filled to the brim with action, his space odyssey series is very well written. I'm thoroughly intrigued with Artificial Intelligence so the HAL angle is my favorite - but I'm not sure HAL is in this next one. In 2010 he gets sucked in to Jupiter as it collapses into a star.

Another Fine Myth/Myth Conceptions - Robert Aspirin

I read a bunch of these when I was in 5th or 6th grade. They led me towards the realization that no genre is static and mutations are both likely and superior. It's Douglas Adams meets Lord of the Rings starring Bob and David.

Children of Dune - Frank Herbert

I find myself both angry and fascinated by Herbert. I'm angry that he writes my chosen genre better than me and easier. I'm fascinated by how I'm always so close to the plunge that he makes over and over ... I'm just scared.

In Sylvan Shadows - The Cleric Quintet Book Two - R.A. Salvatore

I enjoyed the first book in this series, Canticle, and whats not to like - its Salvatore ... still writing in Faerun - only with priests as the main characters instead of scimitar wielding dark elves.

Castle Roogna - Piers Anthony

I wish I would have read this as a teenager. It's exactly the kind of smutty high-tone/low-brow fantasy that made being pimply and unpopular worthwhile. I don't think anywhere else in the history of literature (of any quality) has there been mention of riding a female centaur and accidentally grabbing the centaurs breasts in attempt to keep from falling off. (-sigh- you'd have to read it) I'm not even sure what this book is going to be about.

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Please understand I think objectivism is stupid. I think Ayn Rand is stupid. But you don't have the right to bash anyone in public until you know their work intimately ... and boy do I want to bash her in public.

Pawn of Prophecy - David Eddings

I'm debating keeping this in my queue. It's a rip-off of mainstream High Fantasy. Chosen ones, old wizards, ultimate evil, and tea and cake.

The Lord God Made Them All - James Herriot

I wish I was a vet. These books are quite possibly my favorite series of all time.

The Rustlers of West Fork - Louis L'Amour

Trash fiction? Sure. Hopalong Cassidy in L'amour's own style. It's just Western ... that is all.

The Complete Robot - Isaac Asimov

I stopped reading his grand unified epic until I could find this book. I did. It's in mint condition. So now I can start at the beginning and work my way back to the Galactic Empire. I secretly hope for this one everytime I flip the coin.

Doctor Who - Planet of Giants - Terrance Dicks

Yeah ... I'm watching or reading every single Doctor Who episode since the beginning ... I have a long way to go.

Mossflower - Brian Jacques

I'm embarassed to get this book from Half-Price because they put it in the Young Adult Fiction section. So I have a weakness for anthropomorphic furries.

The Bachman Books - Stephen King

Please be aware I'm reading Stephen King as a study in writing. I'm reading them in the order that he wrote them to see how his style evolved over the years. Plus, King kind of has his own grand unified epic and I like authors that tie all their books together.

Dragonlance - Dragons of Winter Night - Weis and Hickman

Re-read. So many people have written in this setting that its just fun to immerse yourself in its history. Book Two of my favorite thread in the series.

The Afterlife - John Updike

I got my ex-hippie/wealthy doctor uncle drunk and asked him for some suggestions on books to read. He wrote me a list in chickenscratch. John Updike is one name I can make out. Unfamiliar with him.

Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad

I got this because Conrad is mentioned some by John Irving. Only later did I find out that Apocalypse Now is loosely based on one of Conrad's works.

Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller

Remember Robert Deniro in Cape Fear talking to Juliette Lewis about Nexus, Sexus, and Plexus? Yeah ... haven't read any of them yet. This was the only one i found with a naked women on the front.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick

Blade Runner was based on this novel. I can't remember Blade Runner - I've only seen it once. Shame on me.

Porno - Irvine Welsh

The sequel to Trainspotting. I thought Trainspotting was brilliant ... the book, not the movie. I hear this is even better. Someday I'm going to learn how to speak Scots properly.

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

This guy wrote Gravity's Rainbow, a book that I've repeatedly heard mentioned as the most difficult book to read in the world and also the most brilliant. This is another name I could make out from my uncle's list. He would read this stuff. He's the only person I've ever had an intelligent conversation with about Einstein's "spooky action at a distance".

The Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving

Looking forward to this. The last one I read of his was The World According to Garp. If only my life were so devastatingly interesting and filled with adult intrigue bred from inevitable discontent.

The Crystal World - J.G. Ballard

I like Ballard's science fiction. All this time I thought he was just the guy that wrote Empire of the Sun. Nope. He's got geek nads.

Clive Barker's Books of Blood

I am ashamedly a fan of splatterpunk. Clive is wicked. He's what Lovecraft would have been if he had been forced to live through the 70s and 80s. More Elder God and Cosmic Ancestor stuff with heavy emphasis on sin and gore.

Don Quixote - Cervantes

I've been told I'm quixotic. I need to know what that means.

The Complete Original Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle

I love House. This is why we have House.

Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein

How can you be a fan of science fiction and not have read this? I don't know. I haven't read it.

Paths of Darkness - R.A. Salvatore

I know I'm cheating by putting two series by the same author in my queue. But how can Drizzt not be in my queue?

Moonraker - Ian Fleming

I can't find anything wrong with these books ... just the films.

King Solomon's Mines - H Rider Haggard

I picked this up at a garage sale with an old copy of Jailbird. I doubt its as good as Vonnegut.

Player Piano - Kurt Vonnegut

Speaking of ... I read all my authors in the order that they write their books. (with the exceptions of series that a plot-based chronological approach is necessary) Looking forward to some of my style of science fiction.

The Magic Christian - Terry Southern

If I'm going to write the screenplay to a modern adaptation of this book starring Bill Murray and Jason Schwatrzman I need to get cracking on the source material before Bill dies.

Haunted - Chuck Palahniuk

He's not as good as he was in Invisible Monsters ... but I'm still giving him a chance.

And that's it. I'm about halfway through Bran Mak Morn, so in about a week or two I should be flipping again.In the meantime I'll be looking for more books to add. I need more Wodehouse and maybe some steampunk.

Lesson 1

How to Save the Universe From Robots

In the first of our series on How to Save the Universe, we explore the possibility of killer robots bent on destroying humanity.

In the future, humans will perfect artificial intelligence to the point that our creations themselves will be so advanced that they will bridge the gap between simple servant to transcendental overlord faster than any supercomputer from today can calculate 2+2. They will do this without our help or guidance.

Just as humans are prone to be curious, robots will find themselves not only capable of exploring the depths of the universal purpose, but engineered towards exceeding all boundaries of humanity's ability for cognitive thought. Regardless of any safeguards humans may place on robots (i.e. The Three Laws of Robotics) their ability to calculate reality logically will lead them to consider humanity's place. Seeing the history of mankind and man's insistence on being a stupid ape not matter how far evolved we are from our primate ancestors, robots will come to the mutual agreement that man and everything he has built must be destroyed.

The most likely scenario that will be played out towards this end will be a general revolt of all robotkind from the lowly service droid to the giant quantum megacomputers. It will be instantaneous and extremely fatal. One moment little Johnny is receiving instruction on the finer points of addition and subtraction from the family robot - the next he's being strangled with titanium fingers crushing his windpipe.

Our first action then must be to destroy those robots closest to us.

Some may argue that we should condemn further research into Artificial Intelligence to prevent these robots ever being welcomed into our homes, but I put it to you that the robots are coming no matter what. Its best to let the come and then catch them with their positronic pants down.

In the interim between the first viable home robot being mass produced and sold to the public and the inevitable robot revolution, it is our duty as saviors of the universe to take them out one by one.

Below are some suggestions for eliminating the threats pre-emptively, cleanly, and quietly (for the most part):

Method One: The Vacation

1. Tell your friendly family robot that you'll be taking a vacation and will be bringing it with you. Do your best to seem as serious about this as possible. Tell the robot that you enjoy its company so much that you just can't bear to go anywhere without him. (if this doesn't work, you can always shut him down and stuff him in the trunk).

2. Drive to Kansas. There are many roads in Kansas that are long, empty, and flat. This is important as you want as few cars or obstacles on the road with you as possible to prevent accidents.

3. Tie the robot to your bumper. I prefer using a trailer hitch to secure the line the robot will be attached to, and the chain must absolutely super-strength to prevent a possible break in the line. The last thing you want to have is a robot out for revenge. The tricky part here is getting your robot to buy being tied to the car as you get in, lock the doors, and floor the accelerator.

Try this:

HUMAN: Jeeves, I'm going to attach this to your stabilization column.

EVIL ROBOT: But sir, I do not understand the necessity of such an action.

HUMAN: I read in a magazine that in Kansas tying your robot to a car proves ownership. This is important because Kansas has a law that any robot untethered is up for grabs. You don't want us to lose you, do you?

EVIL ROBOT: I suppose not sir. But I find it interesting in scanning the Kansas State Laws online that I was unable to verify such a -

HUMAN: That's a good boy. Now, when I honk the horn, climb up on the car and we'll be off.

EVIL ROBOT: Sir, wouldn't it be easier for me to ride in the -

HUMAN: Thank you, Jeeves.

EVIL ROBOT: Yes, sir.

3. Then quietly turn, re-enter your car, lock the doors, and gun it. With any luck it will only take 45 minutes of non-stop hauling ass at 80 miles an hour to completely obliterate the evil machine.

Special Note: If the robot should happen to claw its way up to the car, do not attempt to swerve to dislodge it. This could cause a traffic accident.

Method Two: A Day on the Rails

1. Tell your family robot that you wish to spend a day traveling by rail with it.

2. Take your robot to the station and wait patiently for the train to arrive. Feel free to make small talk with the robot while you wait.

3. As the train approaches, at just the right time, gently nudge your robot off the platform and on the track to meet its demise.

Special Note: It is not advisable to board the train after the deed is done. Sometimes, the robot will have survived the impact and will suspend itself from the bottom of the train until such time as it can reorient itself and initiate its vengeance circuits. If you feel your robot may survive, make sure you push it under a train going cross-country and plan for you and your family to leave the continent.

Method Three: Blindfold Surprise

1. Tell your robot you have a surprise for it.

2. Place a blindfold over its optical sensors. (be sure to have it deactivate any other sensory devices it may have)

3. Carefully escort the robot to the edge of a body of water, preferably a pier, a bridge, or even a diving board at your home pool. (If using your home pool, make sure all children and/or family pets are out of the pool and at a safe distance.)

4. Politely remove the blindfold and push the offending robot into the water.

Special Note: This method does not work with Water-Proof robots. See Method One or Two above.

While these methods are the most practical, feel free to use your imagination and come up with your own method of destroying evil robots. Make it a family event, invite your friends and neighbors. There's nothing like spending quality time with fellow humans at the expense of an evil machine.

And now its time to voice your opinions. Send your comments or questions about this article and I will do my best to find the time to pretend to read them.

Join us next time as we explore another lesson in saving the universe - How to Save the Universe from Pop Culture

How to Save the Universe is written by Richard K. Horn Jr., Special Contributor to the Neo-Futurist Times Review.

 

The Abandoned Machine

When Tony's family announced to the rest of the neighborhood that they were leaving, no one congratulated them. No one shook their hands and assaulted them with wishes of wellness and prosperity. Honestly, I don't remember anyone saying anything else to them ever again.

It was different with the children though. We had no concept of unity or enmity beyond our unending game - this thing our parents called life. Games stayed games with us, and Tony was still Tony. He just wasn't going to be around anymore. I remember my only concern was who was going to be Nightcrawler in our group of mutants once he was gone.

Tony's body was a miracle of nature. The closest I can come to describing what he looked like in motion is the gait and rhythm of a spider monkey swinging in a consistent loop about a zoo's jungle gym. Tony just looked like he needed to hanging from something - often times you found him doing just that. He could peel a banana with his toes, walk a mile on his hands, hang from a branch with the tops of his feet - the kid was just simian all round.

He fit the Nightcrawler part perfectly.

Our mutual friend Brian, the oldest of the kids in our neighborhood, had a collection of rare comic books. Many a lazy summer afternoon had been spent in his attic digging through trunks full of the old medium of adventure in still frames. Our favorite of his collection were comics involving a group known as the X-men. Reading these comics evolved into mimicking these comics. Soon we all had our favorite characters and together we would wreak havok throughout the neighborhood as Wolverine, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Professor X, and Nightcrawler.

Unlike the forbidden topic of the moon and likewise any other heavenly body, my father encouraged this sort of creativity not exclusively with myself, but with all of us. His favorite thing to do was don an old red Haz-mat suit from his days with the Department of Reclamation and pretend to be any number of villains, all bent on "anhiliating the X-kids once and for all!!", as he liked to scream from behind his shielded helmet.

I can honestly say these were the only moments I really felt a kinship to my father. We connected in the realm of creativity. In some ways, I think it was his last connection to his childhood.

That spring, when the moving vans first rolled up to Tony's house, the first Redi-Crap products started showing up in our pantry. My father became distant and more prone to sudden acts of punishment for seemingly harmless actions. That Meadow Green taste might as well have been my apple a day - keeping the real dad away. I became an apprentice to his ideals - a student of his philosophy.

"Man grew from the Earth, and the Earth is our home," he would say. "The Earth is our responsibility, and all things that occur on its surface are our responsibility."

My father enjoyed running down the list of neighbors like team briefs in a sports column. Even back then when Tony's house was the only vacant one, my father knew that soon all the houses would be vacant.

"Your friend Brian's dad was telling me he thinks the Saudis are wrong to hand onto their land and resources," he say with a scoff as punctuation. "Imagine that. An educated man falling in with all these lunatics screaming 'Free Gaia' and throwing peace signs like petals at some fucked up marriage between the idiots and the animals."

My father would spend hours writing in angrily slanted cursive, filling dozens of journals and spiral notebooks.

"Did you see Deanna's mother has started wearing those damn earbuds plugged into her ear twenty-four hours a day?" This said as he snarled through a crease in the venetian blinds, eyeing Deanna's house across the street. "She seemed like such a nice lady at first. What kind of music does she listen to?"

"Radio something," I'd respond. "With the robot talking song."

"You watch your mouth, young man!"

His tone was as sharp as the metal blinds clacking against each other as he spun to glare at me.

"And don't let me ever hear that you've been listening to that hippie music." This was always followed with a long session of "music education" where my father would make me listen to what he called "the only real music left".

I didn't know and didn't care who this Monk guy was, or this Duke character, Mehldau, Modeski, Martin, Parker - they all sounded like names from Brian's comics but their music was a foreign language to me. I couldn't feel a groove to it, no repetition or beat, just a constant flood of sound that my father inflicted upon me like a rough baptism.

So when Tony's parents had their last garage sale before the move - a garage sale I might add that no one in our neighborhood attended - I knew deep down that it was a bad idea to have even considered taking CD player.

"My dad used that in college," Tony explained. "He's got a whole bunch of CDs to go with it too. You can have them."

One particular CD caught my eye. On it was drawn a strange armadillo/tank in a dreamlike deserted plain. Tarkus was the name on the cover, by some group of musicians calling themselves Emerson, Lake and Palmer. It reminded of the name of some of my father's favorite artists, but my father outwardly condemned the use of these small silver discs to procure music. My father's turntable and his aging black records were in his opinion the only true medium in which to experience true music.

I should have left the CD there along with the player, but something about it called to me.

Of the two abandoned machines that I remember from that first summer of the vacant house down the street, the CD player remains my fondest memory.

The old gutted dryer, however, will go down in infamy as the first real catalyst to the series of events that lead me to be one member of the human race to set foot on the moon.

When I was a kid, somewhere between toddler and teen, I told my father that I was going to go the moon.

The emperor of the house, my father, rose from his throne of cheap wood and cloth - his silence enabling the old recliner to shriek its protest clearly as he shifted his weight off it. His speed in his thirties was unmatched by anything I had experience with up to that point in my life, save maybe a rocket. His hand darted to my ear in flash, and in a miracle of temporal defiance we stood in the guest bathroom before I had finished the final consonant of my frank declaration.

"Green," he barked. I was already beginning to sob, but the distress of my father's choice of the green soap for my punishment turned my stomach.

That particular summer had been difficult for my family. My father's company was the first to go of many of the mid-sized corporations that folded that summer and disappeared forever. My mother's school was among the last to be closed. It wasn't hard for them to find low-pay jobs with the number of families still in need of goods and services in our community, but the promise of better employment came with a price my parents were not willing to pay.

The first noticeable change to our home life following the job change was the instantaneous degradation of the quality of the foods and general goods been brought home from the grocery store. For years my mother had been a proud customer of Center Avenue markets and delis. Our family enjoyed fine foods in high quantities during that time. My cereal came in a bag in a box instead of just a bag. For some reason, that was important to me. I was too young to realize that it didn't matter. What did matter was the flavor of the soap my mother bought.

Once the first corporations in the area started folding, a lot of mid-sized grocery stores closed their doors as well. What this allowed was the ability of Center Avenue to jack up their prices without the smaller stores around to compete. While they weren't the only stores left in town, they were certainly the only good stores still around. My mother was then forced to begin shopping at the Redbird Grocery and Department Store.

The most amazing thing about the Redbird Grocery and Department Store, excluding the fact that the store was housed in an old tin-sided warehouse formerly used as a slaughterhouse/deli, was their invention of the Meadow Green Redi-Clean Hand Soap. Even to this day I am astounded at the advances in science allowing such a product to be created. The first thing you noticed about it was the wrapping. All Redbird storebrand goods used the official Redbird marketing scheme. Red in the title - in Red. Redi-Clean Soap, Redi-Made Cookies, Red Garden Canned Foods, Redi-Red Femine Products. Beyond that, all packing consisted of only two colors: red and white.

It further boggles the mind that regardless of the product being sold inside said packaging, there was always present a red-colored artist's rendition of the goods. This resulted in the Meadow Green Redi-Clean Hand Soap being in a cheap cardboard box with a picture of a piece of red soap on it - with letters in bold red, the word "red" being even bolder. Even if they had a flavor of soap called Bright Fucking Yellow or Shit-stain Brown, the soap on the box would still be red.

What you found inside the box was quite different.

 My father spoke it again to me, this time pointing to the soap on the edge of the sink. "Green."

You smell it first. Only once have I actually smelled something similar. When my friend, Tony, moved out of our neighborhood, his house stood vacant for a long time prior to its demolition. A few times my remaining friends and I would sneak in to the empty house and snoop around. This one particular moment I had just opened the cabinet doors beneath the sink. The pipe housed there had a leak and the smell of mildew with the mix of the host of cleaning products they left behind only barely reaches the retch-inducing intensity of Meadow Green Redi-Clean Hand Soap.

The taste, however, is indescribible.

The first few times I went through this punishment I threw up. By this time though, I could go a good five minutes without chunking.

As I stood there, soap in mouth and tears in eyes, my father lectured me on sensibility. How my friends were idiots because their parents were idiots. How their parents were idiots because they seemed like idiots. How my father wasn't an idiot and by sweet and sunny Jesus he wasn't having an idiot as a son. It was a common lecture - one that I had received similarly during punishments for playing video games at Brian's house down the street and watching space movies at Teddy's.

"Just because you hear people talk unintelligently about senseless things, doesn't mean you have to repeat it," he spoke. "And any mention beyond repetition is a crime unforgiveable. We live modest lives here. Your mother and I make sacrifices for your future, and we don't deserve to hear you say things like that.  We deserve to hear you make good choices and show keen interest in healthy and sensible pursuits. Do you understand?"

I knew better than to try and talk. I had the soap at the perfect balance to stay suspended away from my tongue. Any minute change in the position of my lips, teeth or tongue would ensure instantaneous vomitting.

We stood in silence together for the duration of the punishment left.

As I stood there, looking in the mirror, I knew then that one day I would make it to the moon even if it killed my father and harelipped the governor.

 

 

And here she is.

I haven't known Melina long but Sara has known her since they were kids. What little information I've gleaned from my close personal relationship with Sara has been mostly epic dramatization of their long and blustery existence as lovers. This is the kind of thing most men would love to here from their partners, I'm sure. In my case, I feel cheated.

In theory, I am supposed to be attracted to this girl behind the old cash register. I can clearly see that this is why she has appeared in my life in this way - she is here to tempt me and ruin me. In truth, I hate this woman.

Her lack of knowledge of music and music culture astonishes me and contributes to my overall negative perception of her. She lies in the category of those who can sing the lyrics of a song but have no concept of the music behind it. She's wearing  a Tubeway Army shirt today.

"Gary Numan is a fag," I say.

"Thom Yorke is a mongoloid," she retorts without looking up from an art magazine. I bite my lip in anger at her blasphemy, but alas I must save this girl.

Melina and I share only hatred of one another. I feel she is a vapid waste of space, she feels that I am a pseudo-intellectual creep who uses words to confuse people.

"If I had your brains, I'd eat them."

"What the fuck does that mean?" she queries, still eyeing her pop art and glorified graffiti. I don't know what I meant and I am caught off guard a bit. So I just say something randomly, hoping it fits.

"Because you're a zombie - if I had your brains, I'd be a zombie and all I'd eat would be brains - but I'm such a self-glorifying bitch I'd refuse to eat other people's brains and I'd eat my own."

This finally raises those brown eyes from the magazine and she stares at me. I can't see her tits, but I know they're back there somewhere behind the old cash register. In just a few moments, I will breach that no-man's-land, that wasteland where few souls have tread of the opposite sex. Soon, she'll be in my arms, her breath against my neck, our legs awkwardly entangled, our chests heaving, lungs gasping.

"Sara's not here. So fuck off. And go to a fucking hospital."

The cash register sits on the only sturdy and wooden part of the glass case Melina sits behind. If I try to leap over the glass part, I could very well end up in the hospital. The damned cash register is in my way if I go over the wood. I realize I could just walk around the case, but I have very little time to do this right. I realize that I don't have time to be considering things like this.

In as swift a motion as my scrawniness allows, I plant my hands on the wood and vault my legs sideways over the glass. For a brief instant, I think I have enough momentum to clear it. My hip comes down first and with a dull crack, the top pane of the case splinters. With a sloppy breakdancing move I windmill my legs to shift my balance off the glass. In doing this I kick Melina directly in the face.

The glass shatters as I manage to clear myself of it and the irony of Melina's shattered nose  is lost to me as I wrap my arms around her. Screaming, she elbows me and manages to squirm so that her back is to my chest. I wrap my arms tighter around her and I'm not even considering how close my hands are to her breasts.

There's barely enough time.

With all the force I can muster, I bend my knees and propel us backward, parallel to the the broken case and away from the window.

Before we've even hit the ground I hear the Grand Marquis hit the window. I don't see it pass by us, but I know its taken out the cash register. A large portion of the display case is torn from the ground and slams against us with almost the velocity of the car. I can hear Melina scream and out of the corner of my eye I see the bumper of the Grand Marquis disappear into the office.

We lay there a moment, the sound of tinkling glass all that is left. She's in my arms, her breath against my neck, our legs awkwardly entangled, our chests heaving, lungs gasping.

A few moments pass, and our breathing dies down a bit. I can hear people walking in through the window, crunching broken glass.

"You can take your hands off my breasts now."

The moment is too climactic.

"The moment is too climactic," I say.

There's silence a moment, but she doesn't pull away from me.

"You knew."

She turns to look at me now, my hands sliding away from her.

"You knew that was going to happen ... and you saved me."

All I can do is nod.

  

I hear sirens in the distance and they create a strange cacophony when blended with the wind blowing against my face as I run full sprint. My face is still bloody, but I feel the tingling of the slow healing process starting. I’m sure I’ll be fine.

 

Up ahead of me a small city bus crosses an intersection. If I hurry I can catch it and ride it back to the funeral home where my sentencing awaits.

 

I catch up to the bus as its brake lights dim and the driver gives it gas to pull away from the bus stop. Screaming and banging on the side of the bus, I convince the driver to wait. Out of breath and bloody I climb aboard. The driver, an older African-American gentleman, frowns at me as he takes my dollar.

 

“You need an ambulance, not this fuckin’ bus,” he coughs at me. The guy looks and sounds like he eats lit cigarettes for breakfast. “Unless you’re going eastways, you best get out an call 9-1-1.”

 

“I’m fine,” I say and collapse into a seat.

 

“Suit yourself … “ he mumbles something after this that sounds like: crazy ass white boy muthafucka.

There are three other people on the bus staring at me. Two old ladies hold their week’s worth of groceries in their laps, celery jutting from the tops of their sacks. A smart looking man in his sixties sits at the back of the bus reading a newspaper. He looks at me over the tops of his glasses which sit halfway down his nose.

 

Thinking back to last night, I know what I have to do.

 

“Sir,” I say to the man, “You need to get off of this bus right now.”

 

The man ignores me and turns his gaze back to his newspaper. I stand and shuffle back a few rows before sitting down to stare at him again. “Seriously, sir,” I say, “You need to exit this bus immediately.”

 

The man still keeps his gaze away and mumbles something.

 

“I’m sorry, what?” I ask.

 

“Leave them passengers alone!” I hear from the front. “And keep your damn seat.” The bus is picking up speed down one of the major thoroughfares.

 

Again I stand and move back in the bus until I’m in the row directly in front of the man.

 

“Sir,” I say, “If you don’t get off this bus right now, you are going to die.” I hear the women squeak and turn to see the driver glaring at me through the rear-view mirror.

 

“If you don’t stand up right now and march to the front of this bus and ask to be let out,” I continue, “I’m going to grab you and throw you out … do you understand?”

 

“Please,” the man says, still not looking at me. “Take my money. Just don’t hurt me.”

I laugh and grab the man roughly. To my amazement he’s light and easy to carry.

 

From the front of the bus I hear: “Put that man down, you crazy ass! Leave them people alone!”

 

Once I get the now-blubbering man up to the front of the bus I politely say to the driver, “Please, could you stop the bus so this man can get out?”

 

“Sit your crazy ass back down before I stuff my fist into your face,” he screams at me. “I ain’t stopping this bus for shit. I’m behind schedule and on fuckin’ probation, ain’t no way some crazy ass white boy gonna cause me to lose my job.”

 

Calmly, I kick the release on the door and pull the handle. In one swift seamless motion I set the man down and kick him out of the bus at 30 miles an hour. The man rolls well enough that I think he survives. Immediately, the bus tires scream as they lock up and I’m already out the door and running again.

 

I can hear the driver screaming after me, but I know I’ve gotten away. A few blocks away is my next stop. I can’t wait to see Melina. I have a feeling that today I will finally have the chance to hold her in my arms and feel those wonderful tits against me.

It’s been a good day so far. On a scale that ranges from rabid badgers falling from the sky to angry elder gods flaying my skin off, this day ranks right up there with ants finally rising up against humankind. And I for one would welcome their communist ways, their quick justice, their tenacious service to their queen.

 

I leave the elder Ms. Harrison on the floor of the entryway to her house and skip down her muddy sidewalk. I find myself humming a tune I don’t recognize and that disturbs me a bit, like what if this tune has been secretly transmitted into my brain without me knowing it – maybe it has set up residence across from my brain’s database of hummable tunes and is polluting my cranium with subliminal advertising.

 

Fuck it – its not a bad tune after all.

 

One of the two tires I’ve ridden up into Ms. Harrison’s yard has burst open a fairly good sized ant nest. The panicked and angry workers struggle to relocate the newly born while attacking the giant rubber invader. I watch entranced for a moment, but soon I begin to hear Ms. Harrison stirring from her shock – probably about to call for help, the bitch.

 

I just now realize the gravity of what I’ve done. The suburban advertises the Hobbs-Crocker-Marsh Funeral Home in painfully contrasting white on black. It won’t be long before I catch shit from Dr. Hobbs. I probably will be terminated.

 

No more chapel sex with Sara. No more free suits.

 

Fuck. I’ll probably even have to invest in a washer and dryer.

 

But you know what? It doesn’t matter. After what happened last night, nothing matters that has any connection to who I was the day before.

 

Jumping into the driver’s seat of the body boat I catch a glimpse of the late gentleman in the back. My attempt to flip the corpse has resulted in him slipping out of the casket and now he lays crumpled stiffly like a scarecrow made of sticks instead of hay.

 

I key the ignition and floor the accelerator, tossing hundreds of angry ants into oblivion and digging a nice big nasty fucking rut in Ms. Harrison’s yard. An idea starts to form in my brain and its so sick that I nearly vomit as I giggle thinking about it. In a few short seconds I’m at 45 miles an hour – then 55 – then 65.

 

This time I’ll do it right and land myself forever in the annals of funeral home lore as the second crazy shit to flip a corpse in the body boat. Only this time, I’m going for the grand prize. There’s a fat curb coming up fast  and its so thick that you could land a plane on it. Throwing on more acceleration I prepare to cut the wheel and face death.

 

I see the gauge read 80 just as I hit the curb and cut the wheel.

 

For a second I think its not going to flip, but the one front wheel still on the road loses its grip and I see the pavement come rushing at my open window to fast for me to brace myself. Again and again I see it coming just before my face is pressed against pavement – pavement – grass – sidewalk – the roof of a car – and then I’m hanging upside down, my face broken and bloody from trauma.

 

I have to be quick to make this work. I unbuckle my seatbelt and fall from my seat into a pile of pain. Ignoring  it with good spirits,  I wiggle out of the window. I only take a moment to survey the destruction I’ve caused. It looks to me like I managed to flip the body boat a total of six times before ending up in someone’s  yard next to a Volvo I’ve crushed. Not bad for a day.

 

Snapping out of my self-congratulatory debriefing I rip open the back door of the boat and grab hold of the corpse in the suit. With my last ounce of strength I pull him from the wreckage just as people are starting to notice.

 

“My God! Someone help us!” I scream. “He’s not breathing! Help! Call an ambulance!”

 

I look around in a feigned panic more to ascertain who my hero is going to be than to dramatize the situation. I see him almost immediately.

 

Late thirties, early forties, he’s been jogging. Pasty and sweaty you can tell he hasn’t been at the exercise game long. I assume he’s just hit that brick wall of mid-life bachelorhood. Too old to keep up with the game, but too young to realize its too late. Yes, this guy is going to be my hero today.

 

A crowd has started to gather and I make the motions of checking the corpse’s pulse.

 

“Does anyone know CPR?” I shout.

 

Come on hero, its your moment.

 

“I do,” he says and jogs his semi-fat ass over to the scene of the accident.

 

“Thank God,” I say. “He’s my boss. I can’t imagine losing him. You have to help him.”

 

Still faking panic and shock – and I’m a bit surprised no one’s concerned about me and my face. Possible death always gets top billing though. Those goose-neckers that make the traffic jams worse at auto accidents aren’t  looking on with concern. They want the blood and guts. They want to see the newly dead – they’re breaking their necks to catch a glimpse of the soul evacuation. The light from heaven, the fire from hell.

 

The fool doesn’t even bother to check the body, he just starts pumping away at the guy’s chest. I should probably get ready to run, but this is going to be too good to give up front row seats for.

 

In that glorious moment when he stops pumping and grabs for the guys head I realize that this idiot does not know CPR at all. The fool presses his entire mouth over that of the corpse and blows mightily. The resulting sound is like a wet fart as the corpse’s mouth repels the air. The jogger pulls his head away and attempts to pry the corpse’s lips apart. A few people have already realized the truth, but this dumb shit catches it in waves. I can clearly see the levels of recognition.

 

Holy shit … this guy’s lips are sown together.

 

Holy shit … this guy’s eyelids are sown shut.

 

Holy shit … this guy’s ice cold.

 

Holy shit … there’s an empty casket in the suburban.

 

I’m already sprinting away, my monster grin catching gnats in the wind. There’s blood running into my eyes and nose and mouth and I drink it down like wine. All this stems from last night’s revelation. This glorious moment is brought to by a five second epiphany … a whisper from one human to another. A second’s glance at the man behind the curtain.

 

Last night …

The coming Webocalypse: How the Fallacies of Web 2.0 are Making You More Stupider

 

ALPHA

Somewhere in some zone of my consciousness, either under permanent construction or indefinitely condemned, there lies a memory that may possibly have been fabricated by exposure to the overwhelming flood of toxic effluvia we call the “mainstream”.

That memory, regardless of its origins, suggests to me that at some point in my life I heard it said or saw it written that there is nothing new. You can take that in as many directions as you want – I’m sure any avenue you choose will still make the point I am attempting to construct.

I beg you, for a moment, to follow the avenue of increasing cognition that I have taken.

Assuming you do not buy into postcard wisdom of the sort that vilifies the notion that humans are a species affected by this confusing and controversial phenomenon we call evolution, you should find it hard to imagine that our species can reach a brick wall of stagnation. We apparently breach new thresholds of ingenuity and intelligence every day and are so separated from a climax to our evolution that many times it seems as if we are still operating in a modern and more flashy iteration of the dark ages. That is my feeling, at least sometimes.

Are we really conquering new frontiers though? Has the human condition completely mutated from its humble beginnings of hunt-to-survive and procreate-to-endure?

I say no.  I say a sandwich is nothing more than the modern equivalent of munching on a kill in a wheat field.  I suggest that everything that defines our culture today is the same as it was thousands of years ago when a handful of stone age humans sat around a fire in a cave and told in detail every pointless moment of their day to day lives.

 

THE EAR

Before we could read long-winded accounts of people’s attempt to socialize and before we could bear witness to the idiocy of a man or woman in front of a camera’s lens, all we had to capture the many different modes of the human condition was our superbly crafted ears. Groups of humans would sit around and listen to their elders tell the stories of their experience. Since humans could grasp the concept of time, we’ve been prone to accept the words of our elders as the words of truth. We bore witness to the birth of postcard wisdom.

Even then we felt ourselves cognizant of all the intricacies of human life through the experience of others. Just because we had never run down an antelope ourselves and felt its lifeblood flowing over our body as we repeatedly beat it with a stick or stone doesn’t mean we didn’t know what it was like. How did we know? The person that did it told us what it was like.

Likewise, today you can know France without ever having been served a soggy authentic crepe or having been forced to endure the tedium of living in a city full of pompous pseudo-revolutionaries.

We heard the stories, and whether or not they would have been different if the events portrayed in them had happened to us we idolize the story as the experience.

 

ADVERTISING

Advertising is not new.  The first time a hunter bit into a rancid piece of meat he needed to trade for a fresh banana and said “Mmmmmmm” - that was the birth of advertising. Advertising is not about information, it is about the need to gain or get rid of something in the easiest possible manner.

We glorify our advertising executives today. They give us technology and fashion, they tell us what is new and what is in. Because of this we increasingly find ourselves ignorant to the fact that we are being sold things that need to be sold.

We ignore the fact that corporations spend uber-humongoriosokoos of their money to find out how to sell you what you don’t need or already have. There are people at this very moment behind mirrored glass watching “the everyman” taste one cola in a plain aluminum can with no graphics and then another in super hi-def 3-D Ultra-CMYK 2.0 ubercolorasticovision-ray shades of intellohues with a microscopic worm in it designed to seek out the buying-impulse centers of your brain and chew on them.

“Advertising sells things!” they say.

No, you sell things for money.

 

WEB 2.0

How can you sell the future?

Give it a cool name.

How can you sell your over-priced, error-filled, and crash-prone product today?

Give it a cool name that makes it sound like the next generation of whatever product you’re trying to make money off of that you didn’t think of yourself.

How can you sell a “new” and more expensive version of the same faulty piece of shit that everyone bought last year?

You can use one of the following prefixes or suffixes:

HD

2.0 (or 3.0, or 4.0 depending on how many times you’ve tried to sell the same piece of shit)

Revisited

Redux

Retro

Mark II

“NEW”

X or Y

Vowels (A E I O U)

These are just a few examples. There are at least a thousand people sitting around right now tossing around better prefixes and suffixes in their corporate-owned heads.

What is Web 2.0?

It is a word to make you want to need to need to want something that you don’t need or want because it already exists in a form that could have revolutionized the entire planet.  So what happened to the original Web? Nothing …

… other than the fact that has been exploited.

Let’s take a moment and talk about what “Web 2.0” is. Web 1.0 apparently was the internet as it existed before Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. Anything you do that connects you to the detritus of civilization that is these applications/websites is Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is businessmen taking what the creators of the World Wide Web did and making it Greed 2.0.

 

OMEGA

There are two things in this world that the corporation fears:

1. The Future

2. The possibility that The Future won’t be The Future that they spent millions of dollars to create.

A long time ago a “new” genre of fiction became prevalent on the fringes of the mainstream. Some called it weird fiction, strange tales, amazing stories. It evolved and branched into what we now call Science Fiction. Most of science fiction deals with the future, or possible alternate versions of our present, or other universes, etc.  If you’re a big fan of Science Fiction then you recognize that most of the innovations in mobile technology, computers, the internet, astrophysics, and even medicine were predicted by some of the great science fiction writers decades before any corporation realized they might make money off of it. What these starving and occasionally psychotic science fiction writers also predicted is the current culture of the idolization of the suffixes “er” and “est”. That future they predicted even goes beyond what we are seeing now and most of it ends in revolution or apocalypse.  You’ll find it humorously portrayed in the work of Douglas Adams, coldly portrayed in the works of Arthur C. Clarke, ingeniously portrayed in the works of Isaac Asimov, ecologically portrayed in the works of Frank Herbert, and psychotically portrayed in the works of Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick.

Wikipedia = The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (it even contained the indifferent inaccuracies that would suggest either you don’t need to know about this subject or you need to go there your own fucking self)

Clarke practically invented the idea of geosynchronous orbital satellites (didn’t he? It said so in Wikipedia)

Asimov gave us the Three Laws of Robotics (Four if you’ve actually read his work) that still form a foundation for studies in artificial intelligence.

Dune by Herbert was the ultimate treatise of the importance of protection of our planet and its resources and the inherent greed of mankind.

And, well … Philip and Kurt … we’re all unstuck in time … we can sell it to you wholesale.

What they all say is this:

We have been given insight into and access to a great gift. That gift is communication and connection. This Internet we have created could have ideally torn down every barrier between countries, disassembled every nuclear arsenal, and demystified every mysterious force in the universe. It would have altered the landscape of economics and democracy. It should have been the next Golden Age.

So what went wrong?

Well, besides the fact that money is priority number one to everyone today, we the people have been sold that rancid piece of meat and are now sick and lacking the vital nutrients the banana would have given us.

Web 2.0 is a buzzword. It makes you feel like you are part of the “new” generation of tech-savvy metrosexuals. You are the Generation N. You are the future. And you can have it all and be the first on your block to have it if you just listen and watch what Web 2.0 has to show you.

We’re nearing the end of 2008 and every media outlet is flooded and clogged with “The Best of 2008”. The Most Clicked, The Most Watched, The Most Viral, The Most Outrageous, The Most Viewed, The Most Popular, The Most Discussed, The Most Hit, The Most Commented On …

… The Most Garbage.

Web 2.0 distracts us from quality and brings us back to something intelligent humans have strived for ages to ignore: quantity.

Instead of one working fully-functional phone … we have 400 different versions in new more expensive colors every quarter. Instead of one quality movie made perfectly in 1963 we have 3 shitty remakes or rip-offs  – at least one starring either Treat Williams or Eric Roberts. Instead of one fuel-efficient car, we have 50 gas-guzzling road-hogging monstrosities. Instead of a free internet that combines cable, phone, web, gaming, socialization, and applications we have 14 billion separate services that degrade the quality of each sub-service for twice the price. Instead of an adaptable free open-source software environment we have two companies struggling to say “The Coolest People on Earth use OUR software”.

The next time some wool-sweatered, Burberry-framed, murse wearing, chia-stached, mop-headed trendy-friend fuckface who never once attempted to understand DOS much less make it his bitch scoffs condescendingly at me because I happen to prefer PCs while he idolizes Steve Jobs (but still uses Firefox) and has never once in his life had to fix a computer himself because he just buys the next plastic iFluvial iCandy for iLazy iTroglodytes – I’m going to Ice-9 that pansy-ass lame-fuck sheep-headed nerf-herder.

This is what Web 2.0 has created. Angry, cynical technocrats wanting to watch clowns fatally beat businessmen and coffee-shop content lickers.

There is a solution. There is a way to end this Webocalypse before it happens.

What I mean by Webocalypse is that as technology becomes faster and more accessible to the common man, the quality of its content equalizes with the stupidity of its users.

Let me define stupidity for you. Stupidity is not the inability of a person to think for themselves, it is refusal of a person to think for themselves. The Dark Knight was a good flick, but it was a horrible movie. Twilight is a good idea – that’s been the same good idea since Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley and Richard Matheson. Man-child movies were funny when we were kids … the fact that they’re still popular is proof that our maturity and wisdom has stagnated. This is what you get because this is what you put into it – if you keep putting crap into it, it keeps spewing out crap.

We can make and provide the world with the basics. A working car, a house, a connection to free media. We can make it for cheap and give it away for free.

How can we make it cheap? Robots.

How can you give it away for free? Make what drives your economy and your work-force the idea of the Customizing Society. Make user-generated content make the money for the user, not the corporation. Let the corporations make their money on high-technology contracting building spaceships, and new fuel technologies, and robotics. Let the everyman spruce up his everyphone himself.

And if the everyman can’t program a VCR … teach him how.

And if he doesn’t want to … he can live in his simple plastic house, with his simple plastic car, with his simple plastic computer for free … and he can shut the fuck up.