Organic Chemicals

Tonight I had an epiphany. I was at Kroger, just kind of hanging around inside with a shopping basket and waiting for 2:30 for my paycheck to hit, so that I could buy some food.

Finally 2:30 happened and I loaded up that basket, lemme tell you. Then, just before I went to the self-checkout, I followed a wild hair and logged onto Wells Fargo to check my balance, and fuck me blind, my balance was $9.00. I'd plum flat out forgotten that I'd missed a week of work.

That's when I had the epiphany. I'm a worthless sack of organic chemicals. Just one out of billions. Made out of common ingredients, and worthless. I can see it clearly, in math, surprisingly. The motion of my individual pattern, which calculates my existence on the fly, is an equation which never balances.

I'm like dark matter, and dark energy. A hungry gravity well that's never accounted for. I'm not even worthless... I'm negative worth. A warped piece of life that pulls anything of value into my infinitely dense singularity of shit... and say goodbye to it if you have time, because once I have it, it's crushed, and consumed, and thrown onto the negative side of the equation forever, and loudly.

Anybody who knows me knows that I post what I'm thinking when I'm thinking it. I think I mostly post the truth of the moment. I try not to lie. There's nothing anybody can say that would convince me otherwise of the truth of this epiphany. That is, assuming anybody wanted to. That's a great assumption.

Here it is. Behold, my sorry sorry drama, finally revealed, like chicken bones with all of the flesh boiled off and mechanically separated.

There is a bright side to this, you know. I'm way too chicken-shit to kill myself, plus I get way too big of a kick out of myself to cancel my favorite program. Plus I have a really shitty memory, and I'll probably forget that I even posted this. Seriously.

My sky, my moon.

I got off work at about 10:18, and all day since about 5:30 I'd been itching and scratching to get away from there so I could go walking and listen to Bette Davis Eyes properly, with my headphones.

Ever since I posted that long griping rant about vocal fry I've been thinking about that song, and today at work, at about 5:00, I had the presence of mind to download an mp3 of it from YouTube. Listening to it on my little teensy crappity phone speaker at work just wasn't an option, and I didn't want to put on my headphones because I didn't want to have to be at work when I finally listened to that song that I haven't heard properly for ten years, so I had to wait.

When I'd finally gotten home, my phone battery was at 35%, so I had to power it down and let it charge for half an hour so that I wouldn't have to worry about that when I finally cast off my moorings and released the rigging. Then I was out the door and on my way, and I got to listen to my song properly. Walking east, I had just gotten to the top of that hill where Scripture meets Bryan. The song was just about to end, and I was right smack dab in the middle of a deep feeling of satisfaction, when suddenly and with zero warning my right ankle (the not-injured one) went:

fa-SCHRITHP-FLUMP-lithck-KRUMP-pthhbbthbthbpt.

One second I was mid-step and ankle down and about as content as I ever get inside of a single moment, and the next I'd crumpled like a rag doll and was rolling off of the sidewalk and into the street. Like RoboCop, in that scene where he was running wild through the rice paddies and they had to switch him off from the control room. That's exactly what it was like. 

You know, it truly is a fairly remarkable experience when you all of a sudden just go ass-over-teakettle. It's a shocking transition. Imagine it like this - you're some poor redshirt on the Enterprise. You've finally finished your shift and you're relaxing in the sonic shower, when right in the middle of a wide open, contented yawn, suddenly - GENERAL QUARTERS RED ALERT KLAXONS FLASHING RED LIGHTS AND... BOOM CRRUUUMP FWOOM! A KLINGON TORPEDO HAS JUST RIPPED A HOLE IN THE STARBOARD BULKHEAD AND RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR CONTENTED YAWN AND STRETCH YOU'VE BEEN SUCKED STARK NAKED FROM YOUR SHOWER AND CAST TUMBLING LIMBS AKIMBO INTO THE VACUUM OF OUTER SPACE!

That's what it's like, every time. Just like that.

Right before I came to a rolling stop in the middle of the street, I caught a glimpse, straight down the road, of a pair of headlights coming toward me. Then I was flat on my back and ready to start cussing up a storm, for two reasons -

1. I'd just went ass-over-teakettle,

and

2. I was possibly just about to get runned over, again.

But I wound up on my back, like I said, and my vision naturally went straight up, and when it did, and before any utterance could escape from my throat, I saw the sky, spread out up there above me, the obscene presence of it, right there in my face, so unexpected, so unlooked for, like a hard slap, like an insult even, in that it was such a surprise to see it. Like a happy birthday surprise. That kind of an insult. The kind that scares you and pisses you off just for a second, until you realize what it is. And the moon was right there, just right there, dead center, and glowing its silly ass off, directly above me. It was like the punchline to that little tumble I'd just taken. The big white round shiny ass of the moon, mooning me as I lay there in the big ass middle of the street, with the headlights coming up.

I sorta kinda noticed the headlights shift over and inch by, and after a second or two they sped away and left me alone there, in the middle of the street, with my sky and my moon.

I twisted my umpteenth ankle.

It's 12:55 AM and I'm sitting here in the grass on the west side of Bonnie Brae, right there where it joins with Old Bonnie Brae, exactly at McKenna Park, where that big fat water tank sits on top of that hill.

I blame this on the lack of proper sidewalks in Denton. If there'd have been a proper sidewalk going around that corner, where Bonnie Brae curves at Oak St., then I wouldn't have had to walk in the field to the west to not get runned over by traffic coming around the blind curve.

Instead, I stepped into a mudhole at 12:45 AM and twisted the crap out of my ankle. The left one, this time. Now both of my ankles have been wrecked. GREAT. It's 1:02 AM now, and I'm just about to the point of thinking that maybe I can stand up.

DAMMIT, twisting an ankle SUCKS. And to top it off, I get to sit here, just almost near some brambly wildness, with sniffing and clawing at the turf sounds happening just over thataway a ways. GREAT. I'm an injured animal.

Ok I'ma try to get up now without screaming like a little girl.

WTF, MAN!!!

Geez! I mean, WTF! DAYUM, THAT WASN'T NICE AT ALL!

Ok.

Now that I'm calm, allow me elucidate.

On W. Windsor, right there at the rec center, near all of those baseball fields and frisbee golfs and that one model airplane field, I think all of it is collectively called Northlake, or North Lakes Park, or whatev, anyway, right there where the rec center is, you know, that gym for working out and learning karate, right there, the sidewalk on the south side of Windsor ends, and if you wanna keep on the sidewalk, you gotta cross over Windsor to the north side, where the sidewalk picks up again.

With me so far?

The thing is, I think that pretty much everywhere, as in at every intersection in every city, they've started making these crosswalk signals that talk. You know, the ones where you press the button and it shouts WAIT! WAIT! WAIT! and then it shoots a machine gun to tell you when it's safe to cross the street. I ain't kidding, for those of you who might not be familiar with current streetlight crosswalk etiquette. I'm not even trying to be funny, because that's what really happens. The crosswalk thingy shouts WAIT and then shoots a machine gun when it's safe to cross. Look it up on YouTube.

I'm assuming now that everybody knows about those militant crosswalk signals, and if you didn't, then now you do, so that's just some backstory to warm up the frontstory.

Onward.

Right there where I was talking about wallago there's a brand new talking crosswalk. It's not an intersection for traffic, it's just where the sidewalk moves from here to there, to designate the official place from which to move from here to there, like I already explained.

I didn't notice it at first, since I'm so used to walking this route, but as I passed by it, I heard this subtle blip sound that was louder then softer then louder then softer etc. No way could I just keep walking without investigating that thing, so I followed the louder blip and discovered it emanating from that brand new crosswalk thingy, and the softer blip was coming from the one on the other side of the street.

Well, of course, there's buttons on those things, and, of course, they want you to push those buttons. So, conditioned as I am, like a slobbering Pavlov thing, I pushed that button... and it was like that part in every movie you've ever seen where they trip the alarm! On both sides of the street, bright yellow lights - like ambulance lights, or emergency lights, or OH SHIT lights - suddenly lit up and started flashing, like the nukes were about to show up! And this loud machine voice began yelling at the top of its speakers...

YELLOW LIGHTS ARE FLASHING! YELLOW LIGHTS ARE FLASHING! YELLOW LIGHTS ARE FLASHING!

I tell you, it scared me shitless! I thought I was under arrest by the sidewalk police! Man, I just ran like a dumb blinded thingamajig for a few seconds!

After that I just kinda stood still for a minute, processing the event which had just happened. And... man, it started to piss me off! Who's idea was that anyway, to install the equivalent of a blinding flashing yellow strobe light shouting at 120 decibels on a pedestrian crosswalk? Who was it that thought this up as a good thing to implement? And who was it that reviewed this idea and decided, 'Yeah, this is a good idea, let's make it a real thing!' ???

I WANNA KNOW WHO THESE PEOPLE ARE BECAUSE I WANNA LOOK DAGGERS AT THEM! ALL OF THEM!

Or did any of that even occur at all, with the officially sanctioned insanity invented by the official professional civil engineer and presented as an officially good idea to the officials in charge and then officially built into a real, official thing? Because maybe the city council just gave this job to what's his face the civil engineers son, because they'd SO promised him that they totally, seriously loved retarded kids, and weren't prejudiced at all, and that retarded kids should be involved in city planning projects because it's politically correct? So maybe that's what actually happened?

WTF, MAN!!!

Brain format

I was thinking tonight about how there should be a C:\ format for your brain, but with an option to set aside a D:\ partition for YOU. You know, all of the little things that define your personality, so that you don't have to start over from scratch with a generic operating system.

Formatting drive C would be analogous to deleting all of the malware accumulated over a lifetime, like addictions and bad habits and prejudices, and the drive D partition would sequester everything about you that makes you an individual. Kinda like rebooting to three years old, but with all of your memories and natural developmental devices intact, such as language and coordination and basic social rules and the like.

Imagine waking up from a drive C format. You'd still be you, with all of your memories, but every single one of the neuron patterns that used to define complex habitual and learned behavior would be scraped away. Like cleaning the scuzz off of a years dirty car window, or painting over a bleached section of the wall that's only ever been exposed to the relentless assault of sunlight through that one window for the past several decades.

Since you'd have all of your memories, you'd know beforehand what to avoid and what to embrace. You'd have a heads up on what things are good for you and what things will fuck you up. You'd be able to continue your life after the pause with your self awareness purged of all of the toxic information that you'd been forced to incorporate into the description of your previous self.

I mean, put very simply, your brain is just the wetware for processing the organic operating system of your personality. Like a hard drive with Windows. It's a cogent analogy, you know? It oughta be possible in theory, anyway... all that stuff I just went on about.

Honestly, I'm just bored and don't want to sleep yet, so I went and contrived this thing to write about because it takes my mind off of stuff. I can't think of anything else to do.

Marveling mood

A couple of years ago I was walking around after dark. I was in this marveling mood, just looking at everything like it was brand new and never seen before.

I'm telling this because I'm at the same place now that I was a couple of years ago, when I was in that marveling mood.

I came to an intersection in a residential neighborhood. Just stop signs, no street lights, so it was quiet and dark enough that I could indulge my urge to linger in the shadows.

It was an intersection, like I said, with four corners and four houses, with a yard in each corner. It was the northeast corner yard, a front yard, that captured my attention.

It was like a miniature landscape with all of the normal small things that you'd recognize, but being there and looking at all of it shifted my perspective so that everything became scaled up to an immensity, as if for a tiny awareness which dwelt there.

There was a tree, with gnarly roots that went in and out of the ground, and if you looked closely, it was like terrain. Like a jagged row of miniature cliffs were held up by those roots, with intricate structures within and without, forming a system of runnels and rivulets that followed the growth of the lesser root branches, and those branches were like river valleys that sloped up as hills onto fertile banks that gave way to fresh ground where a forest of grass and flowers and weeds grew amongst the tiny detritus of loamy, broken off, almost dried things that you'd find at the base of a well established, well aged tree. Broken acorn boulders and volumes of bark shards and immense sheltering canopies of mushrooms that grew as huddled masses against the root slopes, forming natural front porches for a community of root dwellers.

Once I'd realized all of that, I really began to sink into the unreality of it. I stared and stared at that complex of roots and the associated structures, and the grass and flower forests, and it felt like, it felt to me like I had shrunk down to the size of an ant, and that I was there, inside that miniature environment, which had become full size to me. So much detail that I'd never noticed before became real, real, real. Like the Antman movie, but this was years before that movie. It's a good comparison though.

While I was down there inside of it, immersed in the unreality of it, I felt this unspeakable longing. This unendurable melancholy. This comfortable grief which was the structure of this miniature universe, and all things here were built upon that grief and imbedded in it, just like the planet earth is imbedded in the spacetime of our universe, with all that we know being built up naturally from that. It was a tiny universe, and sadness was the fabric of reality. But it was oh so comfortable, and I longed to stay there, forever.

I can describe the experience, but I'll never know if my description is enough, because I'll never really be able to know if you've felt these same feelings. This weird, strange, alien feeling of longing inside of an infinite matrix of sadness, but oh so, oh so comfortable, and buried in it. Covered up with it, forever and ever.

This of course is part of the dream feeling, what I'm describing here, that I've gone on and on about, so many times before.

Glenna died.

Yeah.

When I heard that Glenna died, about two hours after that I told Chiy what happened and that I needed to go to Austin, even though that weren't true. I just wanted the rest of the night off and it was just easier to tell Chiy that I had to go to Austin, instead of having to explain to him that a man just wants a few hours to himself after something like this. He wouldn't have bought that.

Anyway. Just like anything else that comes out of the blue with no warning, I react at first by getting extremely pissed off, because I'm never ever prepared to deal with unexpected emotions. It's a selfish reaction.

I hate it that this happened. I hate it when shit turns bad. I hate hate hate it. A lot of that is selfish, because I hate having these emotions fucking me up, and part of the reason for that is because I don't have any control. I'll be fine one minute ago, and then suddenly this minute I can't keep it together, which especially sucks if I'm around other people, because it's an ugly thing when I break down.

Everything I've said so far is positively selfish, and I recognize that. What can I say? I have no excuse.

I can't stand the thought of dad being alone. I can't stand that thought at all, and I can't stand what it's like for dad. I don't even want to be typing any of this because it forces me to think about it. I keep saying to myself, 'grandma was ok after grandpa died'. Dad will be ok, too. I have to keep saying that over and over to myself.

Ok. That's all. I'm glad Matt and Leigh are there with Dad.

The Incomplete Alien

What I am about to recount is a vivid reconstruction of the entirely factual events which began onebegan that evening of November 9th, 2016.

some of switch are completely from memory, some that I managed to swipe type into my notepad app on my phone, and some supported by

November 9th, 2016.

Matt and I had been hanging out for days at this bar on the square, just stayinh completely hammered, and then - I have no idea why this was decided - but it was agreed amongst us that Matt would drive all of us home. On the way I was coughing and feeling a little sick, so after we'd arrived at Bree's place, I hurried up the stairs and forced my way inside, where I immediately stretched out onto her couch and got all comfy.

Bree shouted up to me from the bottom of the stairs, "You asshole, you broke my door jamb!"

"I called shotgun," I shouted back at her, as I closed my eyes and snuggled down into the couch pillows.

I began to wimpier loudly as she pounded up the stairs, and then I howled like a stricken thing when I sensed her shape blocking the light from the balcony outside.

"Oh... uh, hey. You ok?"

Huh? Oh. Bree had said that. I'd forgotten that she was there. "Yeah. Coughing a little," I croaked.

Bree knelt down, ever so gently and with utmost care, next to the same couch upon which I was stretched out upon. Then, ever so gently, she cupped the soft, ever so flawless substance of her palm, ever so carefully, against the ever so noggin of my forehead.

I coughed again and creaked, "I'm coming down with something." Then I coughed again and looked up at Bree and wheezed, "I'm coming down with something."

Bree thumped me on the forehead. "You just said that. Twice. What are you, coming down with retarded?"

Before I could hock up a witty riposte, my brother Matt stepped inside just then and shook himself like a dog, sending rain water all over the damn place and onto Bree and me and totally interrupting our moment. That's my brother, by the way... Matt. The spoiler of the moment. Thanks, brother. Geez.

After Matt had shook himself dry, he kind of just stood there, leaning against the door jamb with a lit cigarette and blowing the smoke out through the open door.

"It's starting to rain," Matt declared.

Bree, with one hand still on my forehead and the other wiping the rain spatters from her own forehead, quipped -

"Oh, you think? Thanks for the first hand weather report, Rain Man!"

SILENCIO...!

For several seconds, Matt was THIS CLOSE to being chagrined, but then he actually took notice of me, stretched out on the couch, and with Bree feeling my head. That shook him out of his moment of humility, right quick!

"What's this shit? You big faker!" Matt exclaimed. "You're just using sympathy to get her onto that couch with you!"

What? Huh? What? What what what??? Whatev... I said that by rolling my eyes. Then I tried not to smile, which made me try not to laugh, which made me try not to get all rolled up in a coughing fit.

"Ya got me," I managed to flubber. Bree slapped me on the forehead and then stood up abruptly. She glared down at me.

"Turd!" she cried.

Damned if that didn't do it and get me to laughing at full-volume, which quickly turned itself into a full-speed coughing spasm! Then it started to rain harder outside.

"Hey Matt, why don't you close the door," said Bree, looking at me with genuine concern. Matt hastily threw out his cigarette and turned to shut the door.

"Wait!" I wheezled. I was completely discombobulated. I looked up at Bree, and suddenly it felt to me as though a benevolent hand had just pushed gently into the center of my heart, as if to say... 'Hey, you. Don't go dying on me, k?' A single tear rolled down my cheek.

"I didn't know you cared!" I blubbered as I gazed up into Bree's eyes, which were like limpid pools. Then she backed several steps away from me.

"Look," she said. "Right now, millions and billions and trillions of your little endoplasmic reticulums or whatever those things of yours are called are being violently gang raped by billions and trillions and zillions of megaviruses, and I'd prefer it if your tired, poor, huddled and unwashed masses didn't yearn for freedom in my direction, ok?"

Another tear rolled down my other cheek. I felt like I'd just been poleaxed. Hearing Bree say those words to me hurt really really bad, right in the center of my chest where my fragile heart is contained. I heaved a shuddering breath, blew a snot onto the rug which landed right next to Bree's flip flopped foot, and said shakily...

"Never have I ever heard the poetry of Stubbins Ffirth recited more beautifully. Thank you, thank you thank you..." and I collapsed into a pile of whimpering shivers.

Bree looked at the snot on the floor, looked at me, looked back at the snot, looked at Matt, who just shrugged and made a whirling motion around his ear with his forefinger (if anybody knows the meaning of that ear-whirling gesture, hit me up on Facebook, please), looked back at me, looked at the snot again, looked at me again, then she slowly produced her smartphone, turned away from me, and began to type laboriously.

I peeked up from my shiverwhimpers. I could just make out the corner of Bree:s mouth, oh so slowly forming the sounds of the letters that she was trying so hard to locate on her little keyboard screen...

"S.......... T.......... U.......... B..........."

Etcetera, etcetera. It took about 15 minutes for her to misspell it and start over, and then another 30 minutes before she abruptly threw her phone into the kitchen sink, which was filled with dishwater. It was actually a pretty good shot, from the living room all the way to the kitchen.

"Thanks Ash, I think," Bree said to me after her brain had cooled down. Then, "I gotta do the damn dishes, dammit." She ran into the kitchen and started cussing and splashing dishwater all over the damn place.

I wheezed as I pushed myself up off of the couch and proclared, "I need a cigarette."

At that moment, as I was getting up, I saw something outside, in the sky... something that was visible through the open door for just a second, and then it disappeared from view. I scrambled up and hurried toward the open door and outside, into the rain. Matt followed me.

"Did you see that, Matt?" I shouted through the downpour. I sped around the corner of the balcony to get a better view, and there it was again. At first it looked like an airplane of some sort... a large, square shaped cargo plane, maybe... rectangular, and with rounded edges. I thought that it was possibly coming in for a landing, as it was pretty low in the sky.

I hurried down the stairs to ground level, so that I could get an unobstructed view of it from the parking lot.

"There! See it? Do you see it? Matt!"

Matt appeared next to me, and I pointed through the rain toward the strange, rectangularly shaped flying thing. Matt followed my finger outward with his eyes and in the direction that I was pointing.

After a long pause, Matt finally said, "Yeah... but what the heck is it?" A guy from the floor above offered his own observation.

"A blimp?"

"It could be a blimp," Matt agreed.

"Yeah, that's definitely a blimp," I said.

I said it, but I didn't believe it at all... I'd only said it because the guy on the balcony above us had said it, and then Matt said it, so I said it too, because... there's safety in numbers, right?

Then something lit up the sky behind us, casting long, dark shadows of the apartment buildings out onto the parking lot and into the field beyond. From there it looked like the surreal daylight that comes with a lightning flash, lasting for about three seconds and then fading back again to an overcast night.

Matt and I stood there, both of us shocked into a kind of motionless state like a couple of rabbits caught in the headlights. We watched the rectangular craft as it descended below the horizon, and a far away part of my mind recognized what we were seeing as an absurd impossibility - that for something so far away - what was it, about twenty miles to the low hills on the far horizon? For something so distant to disappear like that, why, that's the curvature of the Earth that the square aircraft thing had just disappeared behind. Just how big IS that thing? I thought... a mathematician would know. F'ing huge, maybe?

I was thinking those observations in a dislocated part of my consciousness, because... come on. I was in a state of shock you know, and so was Matt... as was, I'm pretty sure, the guy on the balcony one floor above us.

After about a minute of all that, a low rumbling susurration which proceeded from the direction of the distant flash behind us came rolling in, like the sound and feeling of the Earth politely clearing its throat in preparation for some godawful caterwaul that was to follow. And follow it did, right on the heels of that sound, and then the susurration increased to a tremble and then a rumble and then a genuine shaking off the Earth.

Then I saw with my peripheral vision the buildings of the apartment complex around us just kind of... lift and hover for a few heartbeats, and I felt myself going up too, and with that same faraway place at the back of my mind, I recognized the strangest contradiction -  that going up shouldn't make me feel heavier, until I realized that it wasn't just me that was going up... EVERYTHING was going up, as if the ground, beyond all reasoning, had become an impossible elevator platform. That's what was really happening. The ground of EVERYTHING, and we along with it, were going UP.

Then it all slammed back down again, followed immediately by an absolutely deafening thunderclap that just kept going and going for an interminably long time, which was followed immediately by an atmospheric shockwave, hot on the trail of the one that had just passed through the ground beneath us. My brother and I were thrown down and flattened, and I experienced the sensation of all the air inside of me just being PRESSED OUT, as if I were being squashed by an extremely heavy pile of nothing, which was quickly replaced with just a whole bunch of HURT being crammed, forcibly, into every collapsed part of me that used to contain life sustaining positive pressure.

I laid there for about another minute, flattened on the asphalt and sure that I was dead, before I finally realized that I had my breath back and that there was still a world around me. Finally I pushed myself up into a kind of crouch, and I could see my brother about twenty feet away, already standing up and looking around in a kind of insensate stupor. When he saw me trying to stand, he stumbled hurriedly over to me to help me up.

Neither one of us spoke as we surveyed the general condition of things, both of us trying to determine whether or not reality was still intact. I was slowly surprised to understand that the apartment buildings around us were still standing, but each one had been canted here and there, this way and that, into and away from the adjacent buildings at shallow angles. There were bricks and pieces of mortar strewn about, like the kind of debris that you'd see in old photographs of London and Dresden, hours after being bombed, and dust was thick in the air.

I suddenly remembered the guy on the balcony above us, and I turned around and looked up, but the balcony had apparently broken off. The shattered bits of it on the ground were obvious once I realized what I was seeing, and I recognized the arm of balcony guy sticking out from underneath a pile of third floor balcony, resting haphazardly on top of another pile of what used to be second floor balcony. All of it had become part of the ground floor.

What came next looked and sounded like the Shock and Awe footage from the second Gulf War. Streaks of light illuminated the clouds intermittently and then disappeared beyond the horizon, followed seconds later by low, rumbling staccato thuds, which gently shook the ground beneath us. This activity of streaking lights in the sky increased until it looked like the light of thousands of flashbulbs going of behind the clouds Most of the flashes brightened and then faded, but some of them punched through the distant cloud bottoms, suddenly becoming fiercely illuminated. All of those that punched through were followed by the whistling sounds of falling projectiles and the flash of each one as it found its target on the ground and each time, several seconds later, that distant series of low, rumbling thuds.

I suddenly realized that Matt was shaking my arm and shouting at me. I didn't understand why, because I wasn't asleep, obviously. I mean, who could sleep through such a racket? Matt knows that I'm a light sleeper, and that I don't need all of this shouting on top of all the rockets and bombs, just to put me awake. I mean, what the heck, man.

"...Ash. Ash! ASH, look at me! Hey! Fart head!"

I looked at my brother. "Huh? Shut up. Whut?" I'm pretty sure that Matt had just shooken me awake and out of a fairly authentic stupor. I mean, WTF and everything, but I was definitely fully aware and back to the surreality of the moment.

"Huh? What the...? Hey, leggo, asshole."

Then I woke up and realized that Matt still had hold of my arm from that time, billions of nanoseconds before, and that he was looking at me with crazy eyes, like Steve Zissou. When I finally focused on him and made mutual eye contact, his grip tightened on my arm, and he thrust his other arm out in an impatient gesture with his palm up, toward the light show on the horizon, as if to imply... Well? Are you gonna explain that, or what?

Yeah, ok... THAT, over there. The bizarre alien invasion or what-not that was going on. I could definitely explain that. Easy! Right? I mean, why else have I been reading all of the sci-fi crap that I've been reading for all of my entire life, if not to prepare me for a moment like this? Huh? I dunno? Maybe because it was all entertainment? Fun, and absolutely not scary or deadly or real in any way, shape, or form? A way to relieve stress, perhaps? A calming balming calming balming blam for clam?

I made up my mind and decided to play along.

"Well," I facted out loud, "I'm fairly certain that wasn't a blimp we just saw flying over the edge of the Earth."

I turned back toward the brightly flashing clouds. For a moment I almost skipped back into a protective, catatonic daze... but then I remembered that my brother was absolutely counting on me to provide an explanation for this shit, so I frantically thought about all of the ways that the human race had totally butt pounded so many alien invasions into fart dust, so many times already, throughout the history of science fiction. Hundreds of dozens of times! Countless examples of a sucker-punched humanity - rallying and kicking all kinds of alien ass -bubbled up to my frontal lobes from out of the despairing darkness of my Islands of Langerhans.

Thusly fortified, and with as much contempt as I could muster, I spoke the following words, loudly -

"I've read enough science fiction to recognize the last ditch efforts of a bunch of desperate trunk tentacled alien elephants with completely depleted resources just arriving here at Sol, Terra Firma, after a hundred light year journey and besought with bullshit alien elephant politics and and alien elephant mutiny, acting out of desperation and fueled by a remote hope - that the sudden presence of an alien starship full of skinny, starving, pathetic alien elephants into the Sol System, at Terra Firma by God - will be able to intimidate the entire Human Race with this bullshit paper tiger bombardment of a few million chunks of the asteroid belt, as if every four year old didn't already know that chucking 20 trillion dollars worth of nickel, iron, and carbonaceous chondrites at a blue-green planet which is right in the middle of going full swing into the information age and with a pretty cool planetwide internet already in place is just stupid, because it'd be FAR MORE beneficial to establish a profitable trade relationship with the Humans than to finance an exorbitantly expensive invasion with little hope of actually pulling it off, and an even lesser chance of recouping even a marginal percentage of the staggering losses that such an undertaking would surely inflict upon a bunch of withered, desperate elephant looking alien fag holes... so! Yeah."

I tried to fold my arms as a kind of gestural exclamation point, but Matt still had ahold of my left arm.

"Shit," Matt said. "We're fucked." Instead of delving into a proof of Occam's Razor, I found it easier just then to simply agree.

"Shit is right," I agreed. "Matt. Let go of my arm, will you?" I complained.

"Sorry." Matt let go of my arm. "That was a UFO, then. Wallago. Not a blimp," he stated matter of factly.

I folded my arms, since Matt didn't have hold of the one anymore, so I folded both of them. "Yup," I observed.

Matt went on. "Remember the one we saw from the pasture, behind dad's house in Commerce?"

"The one what?" I asked.

"The one UFO," Matt replied.

"Which one UFO?" I was genuinely puzzled, and not trying to be an asshole, at all. "I've seen a bunch of UFO's. Which UFO do you mean?"

Matt, incredulous - "The one that I just said, the one we both saw!"

I folded my two free arms. "Matt. Seriously... I can't remember who was and who wasn't with me when I saw this or that UFO. Can you be more specific?"

"WHAT??" Matt erupted. "You gotta be fucking kidding! The one that was shaped like a wheel, with spokes, and with lights where each spoke meet at the wheel... red lights... and one bright white one, exactly in the center, and the whole thing just happened to fly exactly in front of the MOON! And we saw the spoked, circular wheel-shaped silhouette of it, going right over the MOON! Remember? Both of us saw it, after we'd run out onto the back pasture behind dad's old house in Commerce, twenty-five years ago!"

It sounded like my brother was being genuinely sincere, but you know how brothers are... plus, how the heck can anyone expect anybody else to remember something from twenty-five years ago? I mean, as far as I know, I was only just born twenty-five years ago, and I'm pretty sure that I'm supposedly forty-five years old. Go figure...

Anyway, back to the dream.

"Could you be more specific?" I inquired of my brother.

I can't remember anything that happened or what anybody said next, right after that. The only thing I'm positively sure about is that something happened, and that I don't care what it was. Moving on.

"Yup," I repeated. "It didn't look like this one though..."

"Ok. Yeah," said Matt in an out of breath, exasperated tone of voice, and with what seemed like a really dry mouth, and also really sweaty and red. Don't ask me... I have no idea! Anyway. "Yeah, the one we saw didn't look like this one. Thank you!" continued Matt.

"The one what?" I said, utterly confused.

Just then, and I have no idea how I was able to detect his intent, coming so unexpectedly and right out of the blue like it was, but I did detect it... and I knew it, right then, that Matt was about to throttle me, and right in the middle of an alien invasion... I mean, come on!  It's a total mystery to me as I record these memories here, for posterity, but still, somehow I was sure of it! I think I might be psychic.

My thoughts shifted into lightning mode.

"Nope," I agreed.

That seemed to mollify my brother for the time being, and we were able to resume whatever it was that we'd been talking about about earlier.

"What are they dropping on us? Ash!" Matt was yelling at me again for no reason at all. "Ash? Ash! Snap out of it!"

"Huh?" I said, I mean slobbered. With a sizable effort, I wrenched my gaze away from the spectacle in the sky before us, and I fully regarded my brother.

"It's hypnotic, isn't it though?" I kinda sorta mumbled. "I can't hardly tear my eyes away from... whatever it is."

Matt fairly shouted this next part, right into my left ear...

"Fucking terrifying is what it is! What in the hell? What the fuck is this bullshit falling out of the sky? One of 'em just landed right behind us, about..."

Matt paused for a moment to think about something, then he continued.

"One mile for every second between the lightning and the thunder is about... ten seconds. About ten miles then, right? Ten miles behind us, so it's either about a 300 kiloton air burst, or at least a one megaton surface detonation... based on the overblast shockwave of about 4 psi, and out to about ten miles... FUCK! We're TOAST! I can't believe we're getting nuked by fucking UFO's!"

I couldn't believe that my brother had just spouted all of that technical data, so loudly, and in such a panicky manner. Was he actually right? All of that nuclear technical info had my brain in a whirl, and of that I'm absolutely certain.

Wait... wait, just sec, I thought to myself... what was I missing? OH YEAH!

"I have an app for that!" I exclaimed in triumph. I whipped out my Android phone and loaded the NukeBlast app, which is handy for calculating just this kind of thing, and for just this type of situation. I hurriedly entered all of the data that Matt had just spouted, and I was just about to exclaim, HURRAH! - when I realized that it was all bullshit. My phone was still working, so it couldn't have been a nuclear blast, because the EMP would have fried the electronics.

SHIT!

Uh. I'll type more of it later

The five stages of pulling a double

The five stages of having to work a double shift.

1. Denial
Dang, it's 10:30... where's 3rd shift? Surely he'll show up. Yeah, he just overslept is all. No way I'm gonna have to work a double shift... no way. That's crazy talk. He'll be here.

2. Anger
WTF! It's frikin' 12:30 and where the F is 3rd shift?! This is BULLSCHNITZ! Why the heck doesn't he leave his phone turned on when he goes do bed?? Wake up man, and get your ass up here so I can go HOME!! FUUUUUUUU-!!!

3. Bargaining
(hello?)
Hey man, 3rd shift never showed. Can you work for me so I don't have to pull a double? I'll work truck night for you -
(click)

4. Depression
This sucks!

5. Acceptance
Oh well. At least it's time and a half.

Bee

I think a bee is in love with me.
Oh can't you see, little bee, that we -
Thee, and me -
Can never be?
Flee, bee!
For you are she,
And I am he...
Yet of two different species
Are we.

Screams

Right after I finished composing that bunch of words about the Baptist Church, I was walking down Bryan St. and was just about ready to call it a night.

There's a hill there at the corner of Bryan and Egan that goes up to Scripture, and it's kinda steep. I usually perform the back and forth Z pattern when I go up it, like bulldozers do when they're going up and down the cliff sides of those strip mines. It takes longer, but it helps to not wear me out.

I had just crossed Egan and was doing my zigzag up Bryan toward Scripture when I heard this SHRIEK. Just this WAIL of despair from behind me, like an animal sound, but from a human throat. I stopped and turned around and saw somebody right down there, at the bottom of the hill on the corner of Egan and Bryan. Some young teenage girl who was apparently having a bad night. I could see her pretty clearly, from a distance of about 60 yards. Black skirt, black halter top, long black hair, black hose, black heels, and screaming.

I ignored the screaming event at first and just kept walking, which is always my go-to maneuver in situations like this. However, as I continued up Bryan and up that hill in my zigzag manner, the screaming of this girl just went on and on and on. What it seemed to me was...

Ok. This is 3:30 A.M. and there's nothing going on here, in the middle of the small hours. Nothing. It's just me and this screaming girl. We're the only two humans in the area who are Awake and Present, so it kind of makes for a public intimate situation, whether or not you ever wanted to be involved in one. It was just the two of us, and it absolutely felt to me like she was screaming to me, trying to get my attention... I mean, it was just us. It felt exactly like being in a room alone with this person, and watching her scream scream scream her head off. What would you have done? What? What?

I spent about 120 seconds at the top of the hill, looking back down at her at the corner of Bryan and Egan, debating with myself as to whether or not I should get involved with her screaming episode. As I stood there, feeling like an uncaring, selfish, shallow and emotionless ass for continuing to not do anything, these were my thoughts -

"I'm too tired for teenage drama."

"She's probably just pissed off at her step dad."

"Or her boyfriend/lab partner."

"Ash, you have zero business worrying about this anonymous, screaming stranger."

"Ash, you're more likely to make it worse, whatever her problem is."

"Ash, if you go down there to see what's wrong, she's gonna think you're a serial killer."

"Ash, don't even think about going down there to see what's wrong with this screaming girl. Just forget about it. It's teenage drama, and you're a 45 year old man. Don't be a fucking idiot."

"Ash, what if she's about to kill herself over some stupid bullshit?"

That's the thought that did it for me, so after just about two whole minutes of standing still at the top of the hill at Bryan and Scripture, fully illuminated by streetlights and looking down at the corner of Bryan and Egan to where this girl was having and incredibly vocal nervous breakdown, with both of us completely visible to each other the whole time, each of us waiting to see what the other one was going to do, I finally decided after the suicide thought to go down to her and find out just what the heck was wrong, and get all involved with the drama.

As soon as I started back down the hill - and I mean, IMMEDIATELY as I turned around and began to head back down the hill - that girl shut up and high-tailed it east on Egan. I hurried to catch up, and she made a chase of it for a while, hiding and popping up between cars... but by the time I'd gotten to Fulton, I couldn't see her anywhere. I shouted a couple of times, but she wasn't up for it anymore, I guess. Or maybe she wanted me to keep searching... I dunno. She was gone, and I was at a dead end and really really tired, and that's that.

So I just turned around and typed up all the happenings of it on the way home, and here you have it.

Prize gloves

What happened, was...

See, I live on the second floor of a complex of compartments. From that second floor height, high up from the ground can seem a lot higher than it actually is. If you're actually on the ground and judging the same height then you can get it, about how it's not really all that high.

With that said... what happened was, I was on my second floor balcony and looking down. What I saw was a pair of gloves that somebody had fastened to the branches of a tree, right there, and just under my position and out of reach.

Well, thought I, I'll take on this challenge! I'll just go down the stairs and underneath, and JUMP up and grab the prize gloves! It'll be excellent. It looked so easy, from way up above. Ain't that something though? Don't it always look easy from above?

So I clambered back down those stairs and was just ALL READY to jump as high as I could, from ground level, to claim those high-up gloves that I'd spotted from my second floor balcony compartment... and do you wanna know what happened then? Huh?

Those gloves were pinned to branches that came up to my shoulder at ground level. Those gloves weren't prize gloves... they were just somebody's gloves that were hung out to dry on a tree branch.

Memory

I'd like to try to explain something in detail. A personal experience.

There's this song that I listen to a lot, called 'proceed to memory'. When I first heard it, it imprinted upon my memory circuits as a nostalgia.

You know, you never can tell when those things will pop up and be permanent.

Well it did, and it had autumn as its reference. It's perfect, if you look at it as fall, being an ending, and proceeding into winter, as a memory...

Anyway.

Oh yeah. I almost lost track of what I was wanting to talk about. It's about this memory that I have, of when I was a little kid, in little kids school. Way back a hundred eons ago, in North Carolina, at Skerlock School. I have a lot of early imprints of that place, but not really that many actual memories. I think that the imprints show up in my dreams though, sometimes.

Anyway, again.

At night, when I walk up Ponder Street, up towards the high school, there's always a street light that casts shadows on the tall brick side of the school building. I've stopped there, just a whole bunch of times, looking at that brick wall with the shadows on it. They're simple shadows - just tree branches. Fuzzy, low resolution shadows, cast from a distance. But they sound... I mean, they look just like those lyrics. These lyrics.

"And soon all you'll have is a memory."
"And then you won't even have that memory."

It's very personal, this thing I'm talking about. Not that it's private... just, personal. You know? You probably won't get it. I'd like it if you got it, though.

In your FACE, turdknockers! YEAH.

Back in 2003, the ESA (European Space Agency - NASA's younger, dumber brother) gave the UKSA's (United Kingdom Space Agency - ESA's younger, dumberer step brother) Beagle 2 Mars lander a piggyback ride to Mars aboard the Mars Express mission.

Remember? Anybody else remember what happened to that mechanical clamburger looking thing, the Beagle 2 lander? And how it was supposed to pop open, like a... a waffle iron, and then flop out those two space waffles on each side, like a couple of space flavored Pop-Tarts? Remember how you don't remember it doing any of those things?

Yeah, it was a flop. Just the awfullest, colossalest, floppiest, sloppiest 40 million mile high dive belly flop onto another planet, EVER.

Y'all remember that now?

Well, that ESA kid on the other side of the lake just up and got too big for his britches in 2016, and decided to send it's very own 30 trazillion euro paperweight to Mars... and they named it the ExoMars mission.

Come on. I thought Europe was supposed to be trendy and ahead of the curve. Naming everything that's supposed to be awesome after the letter X didn't make the Mars Express any more X-Treme than it already wasn't, and that was at the tail end of the whole EXTREEEM!!! fad.

So why are you still doing it sixteen years later, ESA? Huh? Are you trying to bring back the old black? Trying to be retro for the hipsters, or whatever those things are called over there? Is that it? Are you trying to appeal to a worthless demographic? Why would you do that? Is your, uh, board of ministers or whatever run by stuffy old farts who still think the mimeograph machine is mind blowing technology? Huh? What?

You don't have to answer any of those, because here's the answer.

NOPE.

Sorry boutcher hipster-fueled next generation Waffleman with X-Treme autoskip protection and the latest European army man parachutes that went SPLAT all over Mars yesterday, like a Mongoloid hijacked the short bus and sent it careening toward Mars, hell bent for space waffles.

Come on, Europe. How hard is it to put an armless, legless robot with a walkie talkie on Mars, for Pete's sake? Your older, smarter brother has had like, seven of those things up there for the past 40 years, now. Four of them are cars by the way, and two of those cars are still driving around. One of them for thirteen years, and still going.

BAM! In your face, Europe! And Russia, and China too, as a matter of fact!

In your FACE, turdknockers of the world!

JPL RULES!

Over now.

Tonight, I went out in search of the storm, I guess, because that's all I had. Never mind... it's true.

Well, I sure as hell found it. Boy, did I ever get pounded. I got tangled up in a barbed wire fence trying to make it into the sparse shelter of a loose copse of trees, just as all hell was breaking loose.

I finally got all huddled down with my umbrella, down in there amongst the wet things and the fertile things and the rich things. How I huddled, for about 30 minutes. It was almost like being indoors, under those trees. But man, wasn't it hell raging outside.

Finally it started to let up, and I crept out from my enclosure, into an adjacent field. It was like a meadow in moonlight, except it was cloudlight. You know. Lowlight. Lowglow. Light bouncing around from cloud to ground and back up and down again.

It lit up everything. I could see the trees, right over there, where I'd been crouching. And I could see lightning flashing beyond the trees, through and behind them, with the intricate limbs and leaves of the copse outlined as black shapes in silver-blue fire, for an instant. That sight alone made getting drenched totally worth it, ten times over.

But now. I can't help but wonder... who all, if anyone, has ever seen a grassy field come back to life after a violent storm? I never have, or had, until tonight. What I'm talking about is the slow but increasing movement of a few bugs. One or two.  Then shake it up a little. Just shake it up, until it gets back to normal. The storm is over.

It was one of the most amazing things I've ever stopped purposefully to witness the happening of.

Me, at first, and then nature.

So. This is what my life looks like.

Firstly, I feel rotten for feeling rotten. I wanna just get that out of the way right quick, because it's like the bad taste of a shitty malt liquor. There's no buzz without the crappy taste, just like there's no self indulgent whining without the self loathing. We square? Coo.

What happened was, I got excited and jumped the gun just then and spoiled the Big Reveal about feeling rotten. And also - because I'm passing by the place and thinking of it right now, and so it has to be said - I totally, completely resent you, whoever you are, and what you did, by installing 24 hour lights in my underground secret stairway, where I read 'On The Beach' and bawled my stupid head off four years ago. Thanks for the dark stairway to begin with, I guess... but 'THANKS' (wink wink, nudge nudge) for ensuring that I'll never, ever be able to seek solace there, inside of the intolerable small hours, ever EVER again. EVER. So...

THANKS FOR THAT.

Ok, enough about them, and back to me. Me me me, and my one point perspective. That's a joke. It's ironic, because one point perspective is a description of a static picture. You learn that in drawing 101. But, consciousness isn't static, so it's actually a perspective consisting of infinite points, receding outward in all directions... but the joke is the comparison of a physical perspective to a mental one.

Whatev. It ain't funny anymore because I've over explained it. You shouldn't have to explain a joke... I mean, I shouldn't have to explain a joke. You know what I mean. Hell, it wasn't funny anyway, so it must not have even been a joke to begin with.

So... what was believed to be a joke wasn't a joke, and... thusly, it becomes a joke on the joker! Isn't that funny?

Anyway. I almost cured my bad mood with that anti-anti-joke. I almost don't feel like bitching and moaning anymore. Plus, there's the ever-encroaching lightning on the horizon, and that's giving me a buzz.

No, it's not the alcohol, or the nicotine, or the Substance D...

Nature gives me a buzz. Pissed off nature, just woke up with a hangover nature, nature in a murderous rage, nature on its wedding day, so beautiful that it hurts my eyes to look at it, nature that forces the incomprehensible math of Itself into my tiny awareness, so that I become a flubbering imbecile, drooling and pointing at the Hyper-Calculus of it, and muttering, 'so pretty, so pretty...'

Where was I? For a minute there, I lost myself.

2(10^11) galaxies.

How many galaxies are in the universe?

There are about 2*10^11 galaxies in the universe, as the smart apples like to say.

That is, a 2 followed by eleven zeros, or 200 followed by 9 zeros, which is another way of putting it.

Or you could just write it out as 200,000,000,000, which is tedious, but probably a more familiar way of expressing it.

If you wanted to forego a strictly numeric expression, you could describe the number of galaxies in the universe as two hundred thousand million... but the simplest, most familiar way would be to just say or write two hundred billion. Two hundred billion galaxies. That's how many galaxies there are floating around out there in space.

Two hundred billion galaxies, yup. That's how many galaxies...
.
.
NOT!
.
.
.
Throw all of that crap right out the window, because that's what we used to think. Because NOW we've discovered,  very recently, like in the last couple of days, that there are many many many MANY more galaxies bouncing around out there than we ever, ever, ever EVER would have imagined... as in, somewhere around 2*10^12 galaxies, as the smart apples like to put it, hanging out in all of the vasty deeps.

2*10^12 galaxies. That is, a 2 followed by12 zeros. 2,000,000,000,000. You know. Two thousand billion, or two trillion.

We live in a universe which contains TWO TRILLION galaxies.
.
.
.
NOW!
.
.
.
Your average galaxy contains about two hundred billion, or two hundred thousand million, or 200,000,000,000, or 2*10^11 stars.

Oh... and I just realized that I probably should've explained wallago about how scientific notation works and how to read it. It's about powers of ten, you know? Remember that from junior high?

Just in case you don't, it's like this:

10 to the first power is written 10^1
The ^ symbol signifies 1 as an exponent.
10 to the first power is 10^1
10 to the first power equals 10
10^1 = 10

10^2 is 10 to the second power
10^2 is the same as 10 squared.
10^2 means10 multiplied by 10
10*10 = 100
10^2 =100

10^3 is 10 to the third power
10^3 is 10 cubed
10^3 = 10*10*10
10*10 = 100
100*10 = 1000
10^3 = 1000

And so on. Get it? So in order to write numbers in scientific notation that aren't limited to the strict powers of ten, you just multiply the power of ten by another number. So, if you wanted to write, say... 4000 in scientific notation, you'd write it like this:

4*10^3

In other words, the exponent of the power of ten is the number of zeros following the first integer.

Otay?

Our own galaxy, The Milky Way, is a fairly average sized, barred spiral galaxy which contains around 200 billion stars. Since the Milky Way is pretty run-of-the-mill as far as galaxies go, then we can safely assume that the average galaxy in the universe probably contains about two hundred billion stars, more or less.

Now, multiply 2*10^11, or 200 billion, by 2*10^12, or 2 trillion. To do that, you just multiply the integers and add the exponents.

2(10^11) * 2(10^12)
equals
4*10^23
or
4 with 23 zeros
or
400000000000000000000000
which is

400 sextillion.

So, just FYI. There are approximately two trillion galaxies in the universe, and four hundred sextillion stars. Approximately.

Galaxies = 2,000,000,000,000
Stars = 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Just sayin'.

Duh Lekshun

There's this thing that I've noticed a lot more of lately, because of duh lekshun for the new Principal of America... about how people who spend a lot of time farting around on Facebook tend to react when experiencing a head-on collision with such instigationalizing items as news, information, observations, opinions, inane drivel, incessant ramblings, cat memes, caca, poo poo, bullshit, and the antics of the apparatchik chicks... who, admittedly, are just super cute and impossible to look away from. GO APPARATCHIK CHICKS! YOU GUYS RULE!

Anyway, back to the thing that I've noticed a lot more of lately. Para ejemplo (just a couple):

1. Mainly, it's all of this crap about the upcoming showdown for the new Principal of America that's got everybody's panties in a wad, and it's just unfathomable to me. I mean...

Ok. I think I can safely presume that just about everybody has had his or her panties in a wad before, for one reason or another. I know I have, and I can say with utmost vehemence that having my panties in a wad pretty much sucks thoroughly, and sideways. Having to dig in there and rescue my underwear from the cracks of doom is NOT an experience that I've found particularly palatable, and I feel as though I'm speaking for pretty much everyone here. Right? Am I right?

Ok. Now that we've established the unpleasantness of having to rescue your underwear from the Challenger Deeps, it becomes necessary to examine the reason why your underwear ever needed any rescuing to begin with. Why? Why would anyone knowingly ever put their underwear in such peril?

I'll tell you why. It's because politics makes you stupid and oblivious and causes your butt cheeks to clinch up incessantly, creating the perfect underwear trap. There. I feel that I've just spelt it out clearly enough so that any moron can understand. I mean, they teach this to us in kindergarten. Even the tardlies who take the short bus to school know better than to get their panties in a wad about... about... POLITICS!

IT'S ALL JUST A WIDELY BROADCASTED PSYCHOTIC JOKE, ALL OF IT! HOW CAN ANYBODY TAKE ONE LOOK AT IT AND THEN DECIDE, WITH AN UNPSYCHOTIC MIND, TO ACTUALLY INVEST ENOUGH CARE IN IT TO ACTUALLY PARTICIPATE, AS IF IT WAS SOMETHING THAT WASN'T JUST THE BIGGEST UPCHUCKED HAIRBALL OF LIES THAT'S EVER BEEN SERIOUSLY PASSED OFF AS A THING THAT ISN'T A BIG, FAT, HAIRY, STINKY, HILARIOUS JOKE, ESPECIALLY SINCE YOU'RE THE PUNCHLINE FOR BELIEVING ANY OF IT?

And then there's -

2. - the real badassery that gets circulated on social media now and then, but that nobody gives a flying horses patoot about. Stuff like, how the universe has a hundred times more galaxies than anybody ever thought it had, before... two trillion galaxies, that is! Preposterously awesome.

And other cool shit, like that star that keeps getting dimmer and dimmer with no plausible explanation for it, except that maybe there's a Dyson sphere under construction there? And that's what's blocking the light? An alien megastructure, in other words?

Or how about the Juno probe which just arrived at Jupiter?

Or the six inch wide, single celled amoebas at the bottom of the Mariana Trench?

Or the two supermassive black holes that collided and shook the universe so hard that reality crumpled and exploded like a rebounding trampoline for just a split second, and during that split second, every single cell in your body accelerated to Warp Factor 1? No shit?

Huh? What about all of that amazing stuff? What about all of that? Why do people instead love jacking their brains to a cartoon race to the top of a gold plated garbage heap? Why why why?

Why? Am I the mutant?

I just flat out do not get it.

ATALL.

Oh. And here's the REAL butt clincher...
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Naw, just kidding about the butt clincher. I'm done.

Sidewalk

I'm the kind of person that's... well. I'm not a bad person, per se. I don't think that I am, anyway. I hope I'm not. However... I am a pretty blatant street name dropper. I know this about myself, and I recognize it as a flaw. Can I continue with forgiveness already assumed? Cool.

So. I'm walking north on Bonnie Brae, and I've just passed by the fire station on Windsor. There's actually a sidewalk there that goes north too, after that. It's exactly like the last place that you'd ever expect a sidewalk to be. Going north and into oblivion, from the corner of Windsor and Bonnie Brae.

It's a real sidewalk, and I'm on it right now. I've been on it lots of times, but for a couple of years I was totally and completely afraid to go onto that sidewalk. It really is the kind of sidewalk that you'd think would lead into an overgrown, choked up, black and gray darkness... like what you'd dream about. It's really like that. It's the kind of thing you've known about and have been familiar with for a long time, but are afraid of.

A couple of years ago though, I went ahead and walked down that sidewalk. It was just way too much like a dream to keep ignoring just because I was afraid of it... so I went down it, and I went and went and went. It's strange to remember that first time that I dared the sidewalk, you know. What with me being on it right now, and all.

It goes north for a little while, for about a quarter mile, and all along its way, it gets more and more choked and choked and overgrown and neglected until it gets to a bona fide country road. I've had dreams about this sidewalk, and the road that it comes to... it's a strange path. It's one of those feeling/meanings that's hard to convey as an awake-time concept. It tries to slip into the dream feeling the more I think about it and try to grasp it, you know...

It's the physical reality and presence of this thing that I'm trying to describe. This spooky, dreamy path that goes north. It's a real, physical thing that's already a  happened thing, and has been a real thing way before the presence of me. I've only discovered it recently, but it was already here long before me, soaking up its own mystery, for an unfathomable amount of time. Do you get it? Understand what I'm going on about?

I'm transcribing the experience of reality every time I write something down, just so you know. No matter how crazy it seems, what I'm recording are things that I'm describing, according to my ever present memory, as a transcription. It's just me taking notes on what is happening to me. Trying to put the experience into a form that I can communicate.

I understand now why I was afraid of that sidewalk to begin with. There weren't monsters down there, or dangerous evil things. Nothing like that. It's more like... being afraid of the kind of dangerous risk that happens inside of a dream. Not a nightmare... just a dangerous dream, that you remember for years and years after, and that you can never really stop thinking about. Until the dream finally bleeds itself away from a memory, and into a terrified, relaxed kind of feeling.

Does any of that make sense?

Face plant

A person can't live like this, with the no-sleep thing going on 75% of the time. I ain't kidding. That's an average of two hours of sleep a night when you add up about a years worth of this crap that's been happening to me. I don't think a person can live like this, anyway... am I a person? I can't live like this is what I mean, I guess. I can only do this for so long... definitely NOT until my natural expiration date, if this method is supposed to keep up until then. This awful, awful method.

I've read everything I could find about it. There's no cure for it except for drugs, drugs, drugs, and those will only dilute the suffering so that it's able to stretch out into a bona fide insanity. Some people have had to endure decades of unrelenting insomnia! I've only been dealing with it for almost two years, so how the heck do these insomnia veterans decide every day NOT to eat a face plant off of an overpass onto the interstate?

There's no cure, there's no help, and there's no hope. I'm stuck inside of the flawed, unwanted and rejected hardware of myself, which is incompatible with the responsibility for my own continuance. My life is a tightly coiled spring, all the time, and I have to move in precise ways and do precise things, all the time, in order to keep the spring from coming all the way unlatched and just blowing everything to hell.

I can't simply take the first steps. I can't take a step back and get a good look at things. I can't just take advantage of what's available. I can't just check myself into a clinic. I can't just find a doctor. I can't just materialize resources. I can't just cast a spell, or dream an epiphany, or visualize a solution, or pray for a miracle, or just figure it out. I can't just decide that I'll do whatever those things might be that will make me ok. I CAN'T DO THAT.

Why? I'm physically capable of DOING, right? So, why? Because there's a severely broken gear in my noggin, is why. Broken, and only held together with the captains spit, like the Millennium Falcon. Isn't that funny?

Have you ever felt immobilized? Just unable to do anything? Anything outside of those blunt force requirements, like going to work, and... I dunno, eating and crapping? That's me. I'm immobilized. Why? Because that's what a true painting of me looks like right now. There's no explaining the reasons for it in vivid detail. There's no nothing about it, at all, ever. There's just the painting as it exists right now.

I'm broken. I can't do anything except go to work, and work like a broken function at work. After work is the only treasure in my life because it's the only time I can feel anything. It's like, being let go, released, and so for a couple of hours after work, and only after work, I'm almost free, a little bit. And the hilarious thing about it is, the insomnia is a symptom of the brokenness. So even if I were somehow miraculously cured of the insomnia, I'D STILL BE BROKEN.

I have a good sense of humor though. A cancerous, puss filled, self-deprecating sense of humor, to be sure... but I've also got an awesome immune system that totally deals with it, so my sense of humor is always healthy. I've also got a full grown appreciation of irony floating around in there, too.

Plus, I'm just a swell guy. And there are people who like me, who really, really like me... and dammit, if I weren't such a swell guy, I'd have eaten that face plant years ago already. But hell... how selfish and not swell would that have been?

This isn't me just being low, and it's not just a mood I'm in. This is baseline for me. Humor and joy and love and hopeful feelings are all... what do you call the jumps and spikes on a graph? Aberrations. Good, calm, peaceful, satisfied, hopeful, ok feelings are all just aberrations. Spikes on a flatline.

I often think about why people decide to off themselves. Sometimes I feel repelled by the thought. That's the normal way to feel about it. I think everybody can understand that feeling, right?

Other times though, I can understand the contemplation of it. I can completely understand why somebody would do it. I mean, I'm right there, at the apex of their logic. I get it, totally.

It's like... understanding that cauliflower is good for for you, but since you don't like cauliflower, you don't eat it. That's what the face plant looks like to me. The face plant is cauliflower, and it's good for me, but it still tastes bad so I'm not gonna take a bite of it. Yuck. Face plant. Sounds way worse than egg plant.

What scares me though is how it's common to just say F it after we've grown up, and then we'll just eat the damn egg plant already. That's totally what people do all the time... they grow up and decide to eat the food they hated when they were a kid. I know, because I can actually stomach some mushroom or some squash now that I'm all growed up, as long as it's dressed up inside of some other flavors. It just has to seem appealing enough to overcome my initial feeling of revulsion, is all.

See what I'm afraid of? See the analogy? Do you see how it feels like an inevitability to me, that I just need to grow a little bit more into the feeling, and then I'll be able to develop enough of a taste for face plant that I'll actually take a bite of it some day, as long as its dressed up inside of a few palatable seasons? I mean reasons?

Maybe I'm just in a crappy mood right now. I don't know. Everything is a circle of crap that eats crap and digests crap and craps crap and sows crap and grows crap and harvests crap and prepares crap and serves crap and eats crap.

Oh well. Maybe I'm just in a crappy mood right now.

A dream - The Scourge

Whoa. I just slept for four and a half hours and had the craziest dream.

Something had gone disastrously wrong with the Earth in the far future. The core of the planet had been poisoned, and the entire planet was slowly rotting from the inside out. When the rot reached the surface, the Earth would become uninhabitable and every living thing would die.

It was decided that the cause of whatever was happening to the Earth was rooted in deep time, and would have to be dealt with at its source. The scientists of the future scoured two million years of human history, searching for a group of people with the physical toughness, mental stamina and moral fiber to travel three billion years back in time to the dawn of life on Earth, where they would systematically move forward through those three billion years in an attempt to locate the source of 'The Scourge', which is what they'd taken to calling the Earth's sickness.

Only four 'perfect' people were found to have ever existed throughout the entire history of humanity, and all four of them were American World War 2 soldiers; two men and two women. Once contact had been made with them by the far future humans via a wormhole communication link, the four Perfects were made aware of the dire condition of the Earth in the far future, and of the mission through time to locate and destroy The Scourge. They were told that the four of them had been chosen specifically, out of every human being who had ever lived, to take on the mission to save the future Earth.

The four Perfects agreed, and the future humans hurled them three billion years into the past to begin their search through time for the source of The Scourge. What they discovered, almost immediately, was that soon after the first single celled life had naturally appeared, the Earth had been invaded by a vast swarm of alien spores... which, upon falling into the oceans, had given rise to a planet-wide infection of alien viruses. As the alien infection propagated, a semi-sentient viral network began to emerge, similar to a neural network but on an unimaginably vast scale. It wasn't long before the nucleus of every single living cell on planet Earth had been virally injected with alien RNA, forcing an unnatural, misshapen purpose upon the natural evolution of life on Earth. This was a plan 3,000,000,000 years in the making, and the alien viruses had a lot of patience.

The four Perfects understood immediately. It was them, just the four of them - two men and two women, discovered inside the midst of one of the most morally conflicting and physically reprehensible periods of war known to human history, fighting the good and pure fight - who were all that was left of the Earth's original intent for Life. The alien virus didn't get everything, because these four had evolved along a hidden, impervious line - independent and pure and immune to alien hijinks - and guided by an inbuilt 'unconscious awareness', originally meant to be a common characteristic of alive things.

There was one more troubling thing that the four Perfects noticed before setting off into the future with their source report however, and it was this - a small and unobtrusive yet purposefully planted vegetation, growing out of a particularly significant place on the surface of the Earth in the soil, and megayears before any kind of intelligence had been purported to have evolved. It could have only been put there for some purpose by the viral network.

The reason why it was such an issue to the Perfects was this... the spot where the tiny vegetation was growing happened to be the exact spot where the World Tree would be growing, just a few thousand million years later.

What's the World Tree? In my dream that I'm telling you about right now, the World Tree is the route of all evil. 'Root' being the key word here. The thing about the World Tree is, in the far future, the World Tree is the sacredest thing to those of them living there. It's basically respected, if not actually worshipped, like a god by all of those far future humans.

As The Four were traveling back up the line of time to report to the future humans, they were able to witness the evolution and growth of the World Tree as it occurred. They watched as the alien infection slowly evolved the seeds of the World Tree, and how the root of the World Tree insinuated itself further and further down over the eons, until it had finally reached the core of the Earth, far in their own futures. They were able to see how that route had not only spread down toward the core, but also far and wide so that it encompassed practically every square meter of arable soil in the world, therefore influencing and molding all life into a state of infected knowing, from birth, that the World Tree was the source of all life energy, even though that was a lie constructed purposefully over the eons to appear true.

After the Perfects arrived in the far future of the sick Earth, they gave the future humans the bad news about everything that they had just learned regarding the alien virus and the hijacking of natural evolution. Then, after that, the Four gave the future humans the really bad news... that the history of the universe was, is and will be, ever, unfolding according to plan and that their own very existences were, are and will be, ever, born from an innate wrongness of which they'd been unaware but nevertheless had been inflicted upon them at the beginning of the world, and even before then... and that since they were an offshoot of the wrongness, they were naturally flawed and had to go.

Well, I can tell you, and the four Perfects can also tell you, that the future humans didn't really take to the simple acceptance of this doomsday notion with open arms, and so it was that an epic war began between the future humans and the four Perfects.

At this point in the dream, the view zooms out, encompassing the entire surface of the Earth engaged in all out, far future War. The future day World Tree has grown into a continent of forests which have all merged together to form one mighty trunk, several hundred miles wide, which grows up solidly and merges into an immense canopy of leaves and branches that extend all the way up to geosynchronous orbit, 26,000 miles above the surface of the Earth, and shading a quarter of the planets surface. The roots which hold this colossal vegetable to its planet-sized prize extend all the down to the core, by the way.

After the World Tree is almost destroyed,the full horror of realization finally dawns upon the far future humans, and they recognize the truth... that the source of The Scourge has all along been themselves, and that the four Perfects had performed their mission far more effectively than the future humans had ever dreamed in their most perfect nightmares.

Hi, how are you?

This is in no way a bitch or a moan, just saying - but insomnia has me by the short and curlies again! I've only slept 5 hours since Sunday, and I'm ready to puke coat hangers!

WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY!

Oh, my brain hates me so much. My brain is just laughing, laughing laughing, and laughing at me.

'Look at the oh poor baby who can't sleep! Har har, hardy HAR HAR! You little sniveling baby, how do you like THIS... (twists my hypothalamus)... or, THIS... (pushes my heartbeat volume up to eleven) ... or... THIS!

There wasn't any kind of new 'THIS'. It was just my brain being an asshole because it thought I was funny, all suffering and stuff. Well, F you, brain. Just F you. You won't be laughing when my ass goes right through you at terminal velocity after I jump off of the top of the TWU Twin Towers, and land, brain first on the concrete!

You won't be laughing then, you... you... you F'ing BRAINIAC! I HATE YOU!

Walk.

Walk.

Walk walk walk, walk walk walk, walk!

I wish I wasn't so drunk... but I have to walk, of course. I'm normally not this drunk whenever I have to do it though... I mean, a certain amount of buzz is required, but sometimes a little bit is just a little too much.

The thing is, I'm trying to switch from a high calorie, low alcohol diet to a low calorie, high alcohol diet, and it's gonna take some getting used to. I'm doing that because it's cheaper, and also, fewer calories make you tougher. Sensical, no?

Have you ever been writing something, and was perfectly satisfied with your paragraph, but then looked up and saw that the paragraph which you'd just finished and thought was perfect looked too small? And even if what you said in the paragraph was perfect, you had to go back and either add more to the paragraph, or make that paragraph part of another paragraph, or split it in half, just so that it would look better on the page as a block of words and sentences?

It takes a lot of practice to be this articulate when you're as drunk as I am right now. I've always said that drunk driving takes lots of practice, and I'm pretty sure it's the same for drunk walking and typing. For example, even though right now I'm WAY drunker than I would usually ever want to be, I'm still in control of my major factories. I mean faculties.

I'm totally in control of everything that makes my body go, and do, and swipe-type. In fact, I'd be just fine if I could just think straight, and walk without spinning. You'd never be able to tell that those were problems just by looking at me though, because I'm an expert. Just don't get me mixed in with some other person or someones or some somebodies, because that's where it would all fall to pieces... if I had to actually do a one on one communication thing, in real life, right now, with something. Otherwise, I'm perfectly alright.

Still though... I normally don't like to be this drunk, but it was an accident, so whatev. I can still walk a straight line until I run out of calories and as long as the line I'm following is straight, and the roads here in Denton are usually pretty dadgum straight, even at night. I'll say that right now, dadgumit... Denton has a fine road construction. But the sidewalks kinda suck.

As a matter of fact, as a Dentonite - is that even a thing? A Dentonite? Sounds like it might explode - anyway, as a Dentonite, I hereby request more and better sidewalks.

SEE WHAT I MEAN ABOUT THE UNDERSIZED PARAGRAPHS?

Anywho. Tonight is a fine night to walk, if you have to walk. The clouds are low, it's a cool temperature, and light is bouncing everywhere and off of everything, making shadowy things stand out in an orange kind of way. There should be a word for that kind of light... that late night, cloud lit light.

Nightlight? No... cloudlight? Nightclight? Longlight? Lowglow? Longlow? Lowlonglow? Maybe one of those.

The thing is, I don't think a lot of people know about that kind of light, so that's why there's no casual way to refer to it. I mean, there's words like twilight and gloaming and midnight and high noon and stark white and pitch black and magic hour, but nothing for the low glow. Maybe they have it in another language? Probably... in the mean time, I guess I get to enjoy it all by myself for now.

People I've known

Have you ever been walking home and were almost just about within sight of your doorway, but it was taking you way too long to get there by just walking? And then you said to yourself:

'F walking speed, this sucks!'

And so you went into full sprint mode to get there sooner? Anybody else ever done that?

It's kinda like when you're downloading an app, or just trying to read an article on Cracked.com, but it's taking forever just to get the dadgum part of the page with the actual words on it to load because of all the extraneous bullshit and the slow, walking speed connect.

So you gotta deal with shit like absurdly large PNG format illustrations, and sidebars camouflaged with sneaky HTML tags that match the background color of the page  hidden link to spam, and also the big loud virtual java tumors with no volume controls that indiscriminately spring their cancerous wares upon the unsuspecting surfer, with all of it relegated to a kind of 'side of the road garbage', and all of it just a part of the unstoppable collection of crap which eventually fossilizes into the gooey black stuff which comprises the surface of the internet oil road.

What was I talking about again? I totally forgot.

Who cares.

Oh wait, I remember. So eventually you just get fed up with the whole busload of bullshit and shell out the money for the fast connection. They win.

Isn't it weird how people do that? How we will shell out money just to get a slight Improvement to an online product -  an improvement which equals speed of access, and speed of data flow? Are all of those things really important? Truthfully, and in all honesty, those things are extremely important to me. It's just a sign, a symptom, of something inherently wrong with me. With my priorities.

What do I do about this street?  This memory lane... I mean, when I was a kid, I used to hear my dad play songs on piano with these chord progressions which were just haunting to my adolescent mind. I've even figured out where some of them came from. There are songs that I know my dad loves, and I grew up with them because my dad played them, and I can hear pieces of those songs in the songs that he plays. The ones that he's written are like battles. The aftermath of battles, the violent continuity rips that haunt me. Like the memories of those dead people.

I often wonder how I will be whenever I'm in my sixties and seventies, if I don't keel over in a couple of years. Will I still be tortured by the deaths of those people -  those deaths in which I had a direct participating hand?

Oh my God... there was a roommate I had in Austin back in April of 94. He was Clint's cousin. At that time, Clint myself Cheyenne and Scott were letting everybody and anybody live in our apartment with us. There was Willie, Trish, Trish's two sisters, and Clint's cousin. I can't remember his name. I do remember that he was extremely friendly and likeable, and I felt comfortable around him pretty much immediately. I liked hanging out with him.

Then one day, out of the blue, we'd heard secondhand that he and Trish had been out all night doing cocaine. This wouldn't have normally been any kind of big deal to us, because we were all young and really really stupid. However, a lot of our things were missing after that night. In particular, my Jim Morrison boots, and some of Cheyennes clothes. That was the only thing I was really pissed off about though... my Jim Morrison boots. Oh, and my poet shirt that Mom gave me for my birthday whenever I turned 25. Trish also went missing, as did her sisters, and Willie, and Clint's cousin. Everybody disappeared.

Well, we never heard from Trish or Willie or Trish's two sisters ever again. And we never heard from Clint's cousin again either.  Later we came upon the knowledge that his cousin had hung himself, just about 60 miles north of  Austin, in Temple. In a barn, in Temple. There was a 12-pack of beer on the ground next to where he was hanging, from a rafter in a barn. There was also a note, but I don't know what it said, because he wasn't my family. I wasn't privy to it, and I didn't want to intrude to ask about it. It was bad enough just knowing the circumstances.

I liked this guy. I didn't know anything was wrong in his life. He never gave any outward indications of any problems. He seemed happy and we'll adjusted. It was just another violent dickpunch in my life, regarding someone I'd known personally, who had intentionally ended his own life. I don't know why he did it. I'll never know why.

It happens over and over in my life. I get suicides put in front of me, left and right, of people I've known or had some hope of knowing, and giving a little bit to, from my private hoard of what's real inside of me. And so many times in my life, someone whom I've decided to trust with my real self have killed themselves.

There are more of these, but I don't wanna do it right now.

Sleep walking

I went walking tonight. I've had several drinks, plus a couple of sleeping pills. I knew that it might turn out that I would wind up in a weird place. And sure enough, it did. I wound up in a weird place.

Although I remember being totally in control the whole time, I don't remember anything about that time that I was in control. As I'm walking home now, I'm trying to remember just what the heck happened. I wanted to go somewhere secluded so that I could listen to my music out of my speaker, because I don't have headphones, and so I wouldn't bother anybody,

I remember walking toward Walmart, and then it just becomes a blank. I don't know what happened after that. It was the sleeping pills, and the drink.

What I remember next to clearly is being on Bonnie Brae and walking South past Albertsons. Did I ever make it to Walmart in the interim? What happened? Did I get close by and just decide to turn around? Did I see a cop that freaked me out? Did I realize that I'm jack shit broke and I have nothing to spend at Walmart, even if I got there? I vaguely remember some pan handlers, but they could be a figment of my imagination....

See, everything is so beautiful that I positively can't ignore it. So what happens, is I find myself distracted for long long periods of time. Man, am I ever a stumbling drunkard. I just want to get home now so I can stumble drunkrrdly into my bed.

Short, repeated contractions of the diaphragm, accompanied by vocalizations.

And now, for the funniest word since kumquat.

Absquatulate - to leave abruptly.

Behold, the absquatulate in its natural habitat:

"The fuddy-duddy absquatulated with the kumquats."

Christmas list

Hey everybody!

Here's my Christmas list for this year.

I realize that one or two of these items may be difficult to procure with just five and a half months notice, so I've also listed some acceptable alternatives. On with the list!
.
.
1 Continuum Transfunctioner
or
1 Rubik's Cube
.
.
1 Mr Fusion
or
1.21 gigawatts
.
.
1 Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator
or
1 kilogram of Illudium
.
.
42 Infinite Improbability Drives
or
1 sperm whale/petunia bowl combo
or
6 pints of bitter
.
.
1 Flux Capacitor
or
1 original, 61 year old conceptual sketch of a Flux Capacitor
.
.
A couple of Psycho-frakulators
or
1 Psycho-frakulator
.
.
and
.
.
1 kilogram of magic faerie dust
.
.
or
.
.
1 magic faerie corpse grinder
or
1 Cole & Mason Acrylic Pepper Mill
and
1000 live magic faeries
or
1000 dead magic faeries
.
.
Thanks!

The Bionic Dork

Ash Davis. 45 year old Slurpee Slinger. A man barely alive (obviously).

Gentlemen, we can rebuild... oh never mind. We can't do higgledy piggledy jackity jack crappity crap squatalot on the pot for this moron. We can watch him vicariously, though.

We have the technology. I mean, he has the technology (seems like any dumbass can get hold of it nowadays) because he consistently posts the details of his pathetic existence on public forums, as if  he were trying to... Aw, shitznat. Hey man! That ain't the way you do confession, stupid!

Anyway. We have the capability to watch this idiot (you know, Ash) in his attempt to build some moronic... I mean, bionic boots and become the world's first Bionic Dork, because he's constantly yammering and bragging about it online.

Ash Davis will be that dork. Pretty much dorklier than he ever was before.

Stupider. Dumblier. Weaklier. Slowlier.

Gentleman. The 6 dollars man with a couple of pennies left over that he had to bum from somebody. The Bionic Dork.

Don't worry. Self deprecating humor just means that everything's still limping along just fine at the speed of lump.

Who dat suicidin' up the place?

Yeah, I'm suicidal. I think about how I might be able to kill myself every day. I put myself to sleep at night imaging a gun going off in my mouth, like a lullaby.  I spend about 10-20% of my awake time thinking about death. I'm totally, definitely suicidal. I guess I'm lucky though, because I'm way to afraid to ever, you know. Off myself. The closest I ever came was writing a suicide note that I never delivered, back in 2007. I read it back to myself and realized I was cracking jokes, like... 'I shot myself in the heart so I'd leave a beautiful corpse for an open casket funeral.' I laughed myself out of delivering it, that time.

I don't think I'd ever be able to ix-nay myself if anybody was still around to bear the grief. How selfish could I be? Not that selfish, I hope.

I'm absent from church for a long while now. I think, church never made me happy or solved my problems. I'm miserable at church, and I'm miserable away from church. I know... but I have very little strength of will to ensure those things which aren't imposed on me forcefully, out of immediate necessity. I haven't chosen to live a life which = suffering + church. I know what's right and I know what's wrong, I just don't have the will or the stamina or the strength or the love for myself that is necessary for my to save myself. I want God to grab me in His Fist and squeeeeeze me, forcibly, into the right shape. I've been praying for that for almost ten years, and I don't think it's gonna happen.

I don't know what to do, because any action I take right now will be wrong, because I'll resent the action eventually, because I'm broken and can't act in a right, necessary manner and then understand my actions, if actually were to act.

Yeah, I'm suicidal... but I've always believed that I'd never kill myself simply because I want to. That hasn't changed. I don't think it'll change, I hope not. Nah, I'd never actually do it, not while people still know me and would cry if I were gone. How could I do that... not to me, but to them? I couldn't.

French cat

Hey Leah.

I saw your French cat poster on somebody's shirt today.

-Ash

The sleep feeling.

You live with insomnia for long enough, you start to get a knack for it. You become familiar with what that feels like, when you kind of just know that you're either gonna, or not gonna be allowed to sleep.

You usually start to understand the situation just about right when you would normally start to become sleepy. That is, if you were a normal person and not cursed. Still, you used to be a normal person, and you used to be used to getting sleepy, so there's a feeling there that comes before 'sleep time', whether or not you recognized it. A ghost of a feeling, anyway.

The way you realize that you can't have any sleep tonight is when you first start to imagine that you might like to go to sleep. This realization may occur due to a few different reasons... maybe you've been awake since the technical beginning of the day, for a dozen or so hours. Maybe you're conditioned to go to bed at a certain time. Maybe you're just plumb wore out because you worked really hard that day. Maybe you're just plumb wore out because you ain't slept in a week.

It's probably a combination of two or more of those reasons. Whatever the reason why the idea of sleep floated across your list of imminent possibilities... the thing is, right after you've thunk the sleep possibility, you'll get another feeling, and THAT's the feeling what decides that you get to sleep. Everybody gets that feeling, but nobody ever notices it unless they've ever felt the opposite of it, or the lack of it.

It's a little bit like stepping back from yourself for a second and looking at your sleep temperature, but instead of actually looking, it's a feeling. Still, the comparison works. So you step back from yourself and you can't help but see your sleep temperature, if you've gone without sleep for a while. It's not something you'd ever notice unless there was something wrong with it, or unless you were used to something being wrong with it. Otherwise, it's just as natural as your body temperature. You never notice it.

If your sleep temperature is red, you don't get to sleep. If it's blue... blessed, blessed blue... then you're one of the few people who have ever been able to know to an absolute certainty that the future is good, and kind. If it's blue, you know you'll be able to sleep, and the feeling you get is like how you felt when you first realized that you were sure, 100% without a doubt, that there is a God. It's like, this euphoric joy, the elation of just being flat-out positive of something good, that you know is real. There's no proof for it, but you don't need proof because you can feel it. It's like... being unburdened.

That's the feeling you get when you know you're going to be able to sleep, after weeks of insomnia.

The reason why I went and wrote all of this is because my sleep temperature is red today. I saw it about thirty minutes ago. And since I ain't sleeping, the idea came to me to write about what it's like. So, that's what it's like.

Nightmare - sad violence

I was standing on a hill just outside of town, looking down at it. Something like a silvery green hot air balloon had fallen nearby. It seemed totally alien and unfamiliar, and I was afraid to go near it. I didn't know where any of my family was, and I was waiting on top of that hill for Fr. Justin and Dax and some other parishioners to walk with me into town.

My lost family showed up instead, but they seemed different. I didn't recognize them, although I knew who they were. I asked what had happened to them, and one of them said that there was a little bit of it left for me.

We turned around and walked back up the hill to where the balloon was resting. I was told to crawl inside of it and wait, but I was terrified. They all told me that it would make me stronger, and that I would be able to manage incredible feats of strength and endurance afterward. I asked if it would also protect me, and they said no.

I crawled inside the deflated balloon and waited. It became hot and windy inside, and then I felt a force pushing upward against both of my armpits. It was a soft pressure, and it tickled and hurt at the same time. Then it pushed inside of me and filled my whole body.

I crawled out of the balloon and my family said, there, that wasn't so bad was it? Then there were dozens of us, and we were all identical, silvery man-shaped figures. Then we all came together to form one single giant silver man, composed of the dozens of smaller individual silver men. I was balanced precariously at the top, and I was terrified as the long, silver strides of the man-thing carried me down the hill and into town.

When we arrived, I was taken off of the top and put back inside the balloon. This time while I was in there, I heard this ghost voice... a quiet, yet howling whisper of a voice. It was saying:

Asad, revenge, asad violence. It said that many times.

I cried out, What does it mean?

Asad, you are, it replied.

Asad means 'you are'?

You are a sad violence, you are a sad revenge, replied the ghost voice.

Then it repeated, making 'a sad' into one word again:

Asad revenge, asad violence
Asad revenge, asad violence
Asad revenge, asad violence
Asad revenge, asad violence
Asad revenge, asad violence
Asad revenge, asad violence,

in that howling ghost whisper.