Saturday, May 13, 2017

Meat machine

I'd forgotten how much I hate my ankle. My stupid, treacherous, Benedict Arnold ankle... ankles, actually. There's no telling which one of these treasonous little bastards is apt to pull a shenanigan. Just now it was the left one.

It's been about 3 months since one of these little turd knockers up and said, "Surprise! Did you miss me? Oh, and by the way, ef you, Ash! Enjoy some undeserved excruciation as I abandon my duties as a crucial load-bearing structure and just ef off to the Blue Hills, for absolutely no reason at all! HAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!!"

I'm pretty much powerless here. I can't punish my ankles, because then I'd just be doing their job for them. Same goes for my brain. I can't just put a bullet through it when it's torturing me with sleep deprivation, because my brain knows that it's the pimp and I'm the ho, and that the ho cannot survive without the pimp.

Oh. And now the back has decided to join leagues with the brain and the ankles. WTF, back? What did I ever do to you to deserve this betrayal?

And since the back pretty much has jurisdiction over the sciatic nerve, the sciatic nerve has no choice but to go along with the back, whether it wants to or not... and with the sciatic nerve comes the hip, the butt, the thigh, the knee - pretty much the entire drumstick.

It's like, more and more every day I'm coming to realize that I'm this alive awareness imbedded inside of this really fascinating universe, and I'm allowed to witness and think about and marvel at all of the astonishing things that surround me... but because of some cruel, twisted and powerful outside determination, I have to be slaved to this... meat machine... and forced to rely on it as a means for my continued existence here.

It's not even a quality meat machine. It's a bargain bin meat machine, a flea market meat machine, a meat machine of low quality and prone to failure.

This is all somebody's idea of a practical joke, I'm sure that it is... and it ain't right, man. It just ain't right.

Thursday, May 11, 2017

The Burrito Thing - a comprehensive review

The Burrito Thing
A Comprehensive Review
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Almost exactly 30 minutes ago from  now, I opened the door to my microwave oven to discover it lying there on the glass plate rotater, still wrapped in wax paper - the burrito thing.

Logic insists that I must have put it there, but I simply do not remember anything about this burrito thing or where it came from. I know that my tolerance for alcohol precludes blackouts nowadays, so just how did this burrito thing emerge here, and now?

After examining the label on the wax paper, I understand that the burrito thing obviously comes from where I work, somehow... but how did it get here, all the way from the trash dumpster at my workplace, to the inside of my microwave oven?

That's the mystery! I'm too tired to solve it right now, and I was too tired to solve it when I ate it 10 minutes ago... so please enjoy this review of the mystery steak and egg wrapped in a flour tortilla burrito thing from the write-off pit where I work.

Firstly, I was somewhat trepidatious upon discovering this burrito thing sitting there inside my microwave oven, when all I wanted to do was warm up my 4-Loko so it didn't hurt my throat so much when I chugged it. It was a combination of frustrated bafflement at the stymieing of my objective, overlaid on top of the sudden remembrance of hunger which I'd forgotten about, about an hour ago, that frustrated me so.

Secondly, I was just a little bit deeply concerned that I had no memory of this burrito thing, or how it had gotten there on my microwave plate inside my microwave, because surely I had placed it there... unless... someone else had placed it there, for their own nefarious reasons. Whatev.

I quickly decided that a minute and 30 seconds would be enough time to nuke the poison to death, so I nuked it for a minute and 30 seconds and then I ate it.

My conclusion is that it wasn't very good. It was all breakfasty, and not enough like dinner when you're in the mood for dinner. Plus the ever-present thought of the possibility of dying with every bite helped to make it less enjoyable.

All in all I'd rate the burrito thing as adequate as emergency sustenance for Russians in the event of a nuclear attack.

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

A dream - the end

A dream - the end
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I peeked out my window, expecting to see a clear sky, but thunderheads roiled menacingly on the horizon. I hurried outside for a better look. The sky above was still clear, and directly above I saw four parallel contrails racing across the sky, far faster than jets... re-entry trails, like meteors but persistent. There was a series of four loud concussions - their sonic booms - as they disappeared behind the thunderheads, and then a flash erupted, disrupting the storm system and blowing it away. I watched as the flash faded over the course of about five seconds, and a mushroom cloud hurled into the sky. About thirty seconds later there was a deafening KA-POW that became a thunderous rumble, followed a few seconds later by a blast of hot air that knocked me to the ground. I got up in time to see three flashes in quick succession light up the horizon beyond the still rising form of the mushroom cloud.

Those were aimed at Dallas, I thought to myself. The first one missed.

I ran across the pasture to the nearby lake to check my water farm, a system of dozens of long organic tubers rooted to the lake bottom and held bouyant on the surface by air filled sacks. It was a system for drawing fresh water from underground reservoirs, and I would need it to survive. When I arrived I found the entire length of it, about twenty meters, coiled up and floating on the surface of the lake, dead. Someone had uprooted it, for what purpose, I had no idea. I drew it from the lake and held the large, round bulbous roots in my arms and cried. I pierced the air sacks and let it float to the bottom.

It was growing dark when the sky lit up with dozens of popcorn flashes, like rapid fireworks - some seemingly random, and some forming lines that spanned the horizons. Satellite killers, I thought. This is it, then.

To the northeast another flash engulfed the horizon, followed by another, more distant mushroom cloud.

That's the Red River army depot...

Monday, May 8, 2017

Dempsey Witt

70 years old. The sheriff of Podunk county, Georgia. Suicidal.

Dempsey Witt, the only child of Vera and Hank Witt, was born on December 31st, 1971 in the small town of Fireworks, Georgia. His parents divorced in 1987 when he was 15, and his mother remarried in 1988 to Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade of the United States Army.

His father Hank was a bootlegger and moonshine runner, known for his specific brand of moonshine, Smokin' Hank's Double Rectified. As a boy, Dempsey spent summers with his father, who taught him everything about distilling spirits, as he expected the boy to take over 'the family business' when he turned 16.

Dempsey graduated from Paul Pewitt High School in June, 1989 and attended Southeast Georgia Community College in nearby Mt. Tolerance, Georgia and studied basic curriculum until 1992. He then went to work at the local fireworks factory, which employed about half of the residents of Fireworks. It was there that he developed a fascination for explosives and, with the enthusiastic help of his stepfather, became quite adept at creating his own explosive devices, from small scale firecrackers to full blown hand grenades.

In1993 Frank Slade, Dempsey's stepfather, was demonstrating an exercise in hand-eye coordination to a group of new recruits by juggling six live hand grenades and taking shots of Smokin' Hank's Double Rectified for each grenade that he dropped (Frank was a long time customer of Hank Witt).  Unbeknownst to Frank at the time, one of the six grenades he was juggling had lost its pin, and it exploded when it was at the height of its arc, about fifteen feet above his head. Luckily for Frank, most of the shrapnel exploded outward and not downward, but as he had been looking up when it happened, the shock liquefied his eyeballs, blinding him instantly. Frank had believed that teaching hand-eye coordination to new recruits was an invaluable lesson, and that his drunken grenade juggling method of instruction was superior - the reason being that if you could learn to juggle hand grenades while drunk, just think how good you'd be if you were sober.

When Dempsey learned of his stepfathers drunk grenade juggling accident, he thought it was the funniest and most bad-ass thing he'd ever heard, especially after Frank had wiggled out of a court martial and was honorably discharged. Dempsey began to consider joining the army as a result of his admiration for his stepfather, and a growing feeling of obligation as a stepson.

It was due to an encounter with recruiters at a McDonalds in Atlanta, where Dempsey was recognized by the two recruiters as being the stepson of Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade and belittled with questions and assumptions of whether or not he planned on continuing the step-family tradition of drunkerds juggling explosives, that made up his mind. He gave both recruiters the double bird and headed to the nearest recruiting office and joined, right then and there.

He scored in the top tenth of a percent on his ASVAB and was fast-tracked through college for his bachelor's degree and placed in officer training school.

Blah blah blah something else happens.

Geez I gotta do this shit for another dozen characters.

Dickjackson Jones

Dickjackson Jones -

This is the essence of his character, or the nucleus.

* He's a socially high-functioning autistic
* He's a genius with an IQ of 200
* His focus, his passion, his obsession, is everything to do with air and space flight
* He's had no formal schooling beyond the 5th grade
* He's a self-taught aerospace engineer
* He's a self-taught freelance test pilot
* He's the commander of the Flying Turtle
* He began to have recurring dreams about Mars in 1996 when Pathfinder landed on Mars and, he believed, immediately began beaming signals directly into his brain
* He has since suffered with frequent cycles of cluster headaches
* He has a recurring dream of Olympus Mons, a volcano on Mars, erupting and blowing gentle smoke signals of peace into space from its dormant caldera
* He's certain that his dreams of Mars are somehow related to what he believes to be the signal from Pathfinder but he doesn't know why or how
* When he dreams of Olympus Mons it triggers a new cycle of cluster headaches
* After each cluster cycle his dream of Olympus Mons becomes more frequent and vivid
* Each time he dreams, he is on the cusp of discovering the meaning of his dream, and a new and even more intense cluster cycle is triggered, which shatters his burgeoning understanding
* The repeating cycles of almost comprehension followed by agonized confusion is surely driving him insane
* During his brief periods of lucidity between dream/cluster cycles he feels a growing certainty that his dream is telling him that he has to travel to Mars to find an answer for... something, and that his headaches are inflicted upon him by... something, in order to prevent him from taking action against... something
* He understands and takes seriously the possibility that his entire life is merely an insane hallucination resulting from the mental breakdown of a self-stranger with whom he feels no connection or identity whatsoever
* He is capable of displaying absolutely no outward signs of pain when experiencing the Mortal Agony of a cluster headache, which effectively hides his condition from everyone

WHAT HE WANTS

* Dickjackson Jones wants relief from his cluster headaches, so that...
* He can be rid of the pain, so that...
* He'll be able to think clearly, so that...
* He can finally understand what his recurring dream of Olympus Mons is trying to tell him, so that...
* He can FLY.

WHY HE WANTS IT

* He's terrified of an infinite universe that exists without a meaning or purpose
* He's desperate to discover a meaning, a purpose, or simply a reason for why anything even exists at all
* He's fundamentally afraid that his joy of flying and everything to do with flight, which he believes comprises the sole reason for his existence, might be as meaningless as a dung beetle pushing a ball of shit
* He wants to be comforted with the knowledge of something larger than himself

HOW HE'S GETTING IT

* He steals the Flying Turtle mid-mission and sets course to Mars, to follow his dream.