The Burrito Thing - A Comprehensive Analysis
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About thirty minutes ago I opened the door to my microwave oven to discover it lying there on the glass plate rotater, still wrapped in wax paper - the burrito thing.
Logic insists that I must have put it there, but I simply have no recollection of how long it's been languishing in my microwave, or how it even got there in the first place. I suppose for the sake of thoroughness, and to set a good example for the children, that I should also have no recollection of whether or not a burrito thing is safe to eat. It's probably a moot point, but isn't that what microwaves are for? Nuking the little critters that lurk inside of burrito things? It might not be safe to eat right this minute, per se, but I'm not unduly worried. Anyway, back to the mystery!
Here I am in the present tense. I'm hungry, I'm tired, there's a burrito thing here, and the clock is ticking. In order to solve this mystery I should start by looking for clues. I'll need to be scientific and methodical, like Sherlock Holmes. I'll begin by breaking the process into manageable chunks or steps, as they say in the scientific community.
Step 1. Find the facts!
Fact number 1: I know that the ridiculous size of my tolerance for alcohol precludes blackouts nowadays, and that's a fact.
Fact number 2: Hell, I can't even remember the last time I was drunk, and...
Fact number 3: I disappear into my liver two big ass bottles of 190 proof Tomahawk distilled spirits every week!
Now that I'm armed with the facts, I'm able to deduce that I absolutely do not remember putting the burrito thing in my microwave, because it's impossible for me to get drunk enough to black out. The scientific method is already producing quantifiable results! I'm pretty sure those are all the facts.
Step 2. Retrace your steps, Ash!
Ok, let's see... I was at the microwave, puzzling over the newly discovered burrito thing. Before that I was lying in bed watching Frozen for the eleventy-zillion-and-a-halfth time and possibly getting hungry. Before that I'd gotten home from work and fixed myself a great big drink with lots of that 190 proof Tomahawk stuff I was talking about a minute ago. Before that I was at work. Before that I was at home watching Frozen for the eleventy-zillionth time. Before that I was asleep. Before that I was scrounging for food after work. Before that I made a great big drink... and on and on, ad nauseam.
Ok, this is obviously the wrong approach. If every day is just a repeat of the previous day, then there's no way I'll be able to locate this mystery burrito by retracing my steps through thousands of repeats. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack! Wow... that's brutal. Basically what this means is that every day of my life is just a rerun of a pilot episode that was so shitty that it never even had the dubious distinction of getting canceled after the first season. Hell, it never even got canceled, it just got thrown in the trash. Oh my God, how depressing. I need a drink.
Since the scientific method of searching for clues didn't pan out, it's time to consider a less rigid, more right brained approach. I'll start by framing the problem of the burrito thing as the pilot episode of a reality show that's centered around my life, which I like to call:
EMPTY SHELF
The Search for Food
Catchy, huh? Kind of like STAR TREK 3 - The Search for Spock. I think it adds just the right amount of drama that's needed in order to give it a false sense of appeal. I'm not suggesting that a reality show centered around my life wouldn't be appealing; it's just that most people have to be lied to before they'll believe anything. It's a hook, you know? Lie to them, get them to watch so that they can see how much you've lied to them, and BAM! They're hooked whenever they discover the truth! Moving on.
Usually whenever I conduct a search for food I start by digging through the trash at work for write-offs... and whadda you know. Upon closer inspection, I see now that this burrito thing is definitely a write-off from work! NOW I'm getting some results! Now all I have to figure out is this... how did a burrito thing get all the way from the trash dumpster at my workplace to the inside of my microwave oven? That's the mystery, and I'm too tired to solve it right now, and I was too tired to solve it when I went ahead and ate it ten minutes ago. Sorry.
Please enjoy instead a comprehensive review of the burrito thing that's probably a write-off that I don't remember digging out of the dumpster where we chuck the expired food that's gone bad at the 7-Eleven where I work.
'The Burrito Thing Experience'
All I originally wanted to do was warm up my 4-Loko Tomahawk boilermaker in the microwave so that the carbonation didn't hurt my throat when I chugged it. That's when I discovered the burrito thing. After some quality ruminating, I decided that a minute and a half would be enough time to nuke the poison to death, so I nuked it for a minute and a half and ate it.
My conclusion is that it wasn't very good. It was all breakfasty, and not enough like dinner when you're in the mood for dinner. Plus the ever-present thought of the possibility of dying with every bite helped to make it less enjoyable.
All in all I'd rate the burrito thing as adequate emergency sustenance for Russian peasants in the event of a nuclear attack.
Thursday, November 30, 2017
Everything I Hate about My Favorite Movie, Frozen
You know that movie, Frozen, right? That goddamn animated Disney epic that came out a few years ago, based on some fairy tale that nobody outside of Russia has ever heard of? The one with the two most smokin' hot cartoon princesses ever made, hotter even than that little mermaid chick? Speaking of that mermaid chick... you totally get to see her bare naked ass, right after she grows legs and almost drowns as she's swimming up to the human world. It's kind of hard to see because you have to pause it JUST RIGHT, but man, it's frikin' awesome!
Anyway. You're probably gonna think I'm hating on that movie Frozen, but I'm really not. In fact, I'm pretty much hopelessly in love with Frozen. I've watched it exactly eleventy-seven-and-sixteen-fiftieths times, to help cure my aloneliness on my otherwise intolerable days off. Mostly I have it playing in the background while I'm on the pot. I really do love that movie, it's just that I have a bunch of nitpicks with it, the same as I do with everything I love.
Firstly, what's the story with that Christoph kid? I used to think that maybe he was an ice apprentice, but all he does is spend the entire day fucking up. Apparently he isn't learning anything about ice mining, so why is he even there? The ice miners sure don't give a crap about him... I mean, here's this little boy, scampering around among hardened ice miners who are constantly singing about what a dangerous job ice mining is, and nobody says anything about the little kid! Weird.
Speaking of little kids, way before Elsa grew up and became a neurotic bitch, she and her sister Anna used to have fun playing eternal winter inside the castle. Remember when Elsa was magickng those taller and taller piles of snow to catch Anna as she jumped from one to the other? You could just see it coming, that Elsa was only one or two catch me's away from screwing up royally (heh). So why didn't Elsa poof up some smaller snow mounds? Why did she keep making them BIGGER and BIGGER? That was just dumb, Elsa.
Then just as everything is going tits up, Elsa slips (on her own ice!) and hits Anna right between the eyes with an ice dart! King and queen anonymous freak out of course, and after thumbing through a book which shows an illustration of a positively evil looking troll waving it's claws over a royally garbed figure laid out on a stone slab like the Aztecs would put you on before ripping out your still beating heart, the King decides that these nightmare creatures are the only hope for his daughter, and he gathers up the entire fam and hauls ass to troll country.
What's the deal with those things anyway? They're definitely not carbon based life forms. Their organic chemistry is likely based on long chain silicon molecules, what with them basically being living rocks. Far out, huh? Well, if you've done as much research as I have into what makes those lovable little fuckers tick, then you'll know that silicon life would get along MUCH better in a permanent deep freeze. Wink wink, nudge nudge. Food for thought? Hey, I ain't pointing fingers!
Since it's pretty much established immediately that stone trolls are the 'good guys' for curing Anna, then why did that grampa troll go out of his way to scare the shit out of Elsa? Do you think he'd considered the possible consequences of showing a little girl a vision in the sky of her own blood red powers attacking from every direction and stabbing her into oblivion, pretty much guaranteeing that Elsa would be scared shitless of her own nature during her formative years? Why would grampa troll do that? Because he's an evil fucker? Kinda makes you wonder about those trolls, huh? Hey, just sayin'!
Ok, let's give those filthy trolls the benefit of the doubt for a second. Maybe that's how trolls raise their little troll kids, by scaring the shit out of them. Maybe rock trolls are just stupid, like a bag of rocks stupid, and they thought that Elsa was just another rock. But if rock trolls are just a pack of idiots with good intentions, then why did grampa troll throw in that memory wipe for Anna? The King seemed to agree that it was 'for the best', but what the hell does he know? To him, a satanic ritual is just as good as real live medicine!
The only thing that memory wipe accomplished was to confuse the hell out of a little girl, leaving her with no idea as to why her best buddy would suddenly just up and start hating her. The entire situation is completely fucked up! It's no wonder that one of those little girls grew up to be a paranoid, cast iron bitch, and the other one so desperate for love - any kind of love - that she'd understand it as simply a furtive glance in her direction. See what I'm saying about those dirty silicon based life forms?
Oh yeah. Don't forget about the troll woman who basically kidnaps Christoph when he's just a five year old kid. "I'm gonna keep you," says the troll woman to the little boy and his moose puppy as she wraps her cold, heavy arms of stone around their fragile little necks. What the fuck, man? I mean, discounting the horror of being embraced by a Golem, even if Christoph was an orphan, there's no way that troll woman could have known that. Creepy!
Ok, enough about the trolls. Here's a puzzlement. Why don't Elsa's gloves freeze when she's wearing them? Those manacles they clapped onto her hands when she was in prison sure froze though, didn't they? SO WHY DON'T HER GLOVES FREEZE? Could the reason be that the whole touchy-freezy thing is a neurotic condition, stemming from a traumatic childhood experience manipulated by those dirty, filthy silicon life forms? HUH? Ok, I'm done now with the trolls, really.
Let's move on to another thing that pisses me off, which is really the only completely unforgivable nitpick that I have. Why is it unforgivable? Because it's not a plot hole or a character flaw or anything like that... it's simply sloppy song writing that borders on the obscene.
Allow me to elucidate. Remember that part where Queen Elsa fucks off to the hills after her disastrous coming out party, and how she sings her way through magical puberty and finally embraces her womanhood by transforming from a stupid fraidy cat little girl into a sexy, sexy ice queen? And how she lyrically referred to a snowflake as a fractal? Remember how STUPID that was? Didn't you just want to slap the shit out of whoever it was who wrote those lyrics? I'm talking about the 'Let It Go' song.
You know...
'My power flurries through the air into the ground
My soul is spiraling in FROZEN FRACTALS all around'
...that part!
I'm terribly, grievously sorry, but there's just no possible way without invoking a couple of generations of math wizards into the storyline that Queen Elsa would have been even remotely aware of the fractal nature of a snowflake. Hell, the basic concept of a fractal would have melted her primitive, medieval brain! It's simply unforgivably sloppy on the part of the song writer who came up with those stupid, stupid lyrics. Shame on you, whoever you are, you stupid, lazy song writer who made that fractal snowflake crap into impossible song lyrics!
Some more nitpicks. Why do so many Disney animal sidekicks act like dogs? I'm armed to the teeth with examples. Here goes...
Lilo and Stitch. Stitch is an alien. To Stitch, dogs are aliens. Stitch acts like a dog.
Hercules. Pegasus is two pretty awesome animals smooshed together into one even awesomer animal with no sign of dog anywhere. Pegasus acts like a dog.
Tangled. Maximus is a genetically perfect horse with exemplary morals and intelligence on par with a human. Maximus could act like a firedrake if he chose to. Maximus acts like a dog.
The Fox and the Hound - Copper is a hound dog that's been mercilessly brainwashed to murder his childhood friend. Copper should, by all rights, act like a sociopath. Copper acts like a dog!
Frozen - SVEN IS A MOOSE FOR CRISSAKE, A FULL GROWN MOOSE THAT ACTS LIKE A DOG!
Why, these things??
Now back to those filthy, dirty trolls. No, I ain't done with them yet.
Those stone trolls sure sing a good story about true love while simultaneously trying their damndest to force two strangers into getting married, don't they? One of them is even engaged already! But do those stone hearted bastards give a shit? Hell naw, they have their own agenda, and it ain't about true love. I mean, how can anyone really think that those petrified horse apples are even capable of giving a single flip about true love, based on what we know about them now? It's obvious that they only want to marry Christoph to a princess as quickly as possible for political leverage. They're outright bastards, through and through, those rock trolls. I'm not pointing fingers though, I'm just sayin'. Those fucking rock trolls are nothing but a pack of bona-fide evil manipulative bastards. I hate 'em!
Just one more thing and I'm done, I promise...
Some may find the following negative critique of the Wandering Oakens Trading Post to be unwarranted - after all, when Princess Anna's horse bolted and left her to freeze to death just south of the North Mountain, I must admit that if it weren't for the Wandering Oakens Trading Post, princess Anna would have surely perished.
Still, can we please expect store proprietors as a general rule NOT to be greedy assholes? Or if not generally, then at least according to special circumstances, such as eternal winters? That's a special circumstance, right? The eternal winter thing? You know who I'm talking about... that big fat Swedish meatball who runs the Wandering Oaken. Screw that guy.
Oh, he comes off all nice at first, but then after trying unsuccessfully to rob Christoph he throws him out into the storm to die! And why? Because Christoph called him a crook? Which he is, by the way. What, you can't handle the truth, you big smiling lunkhead?
What he does next is just nauseating - he tries to sweeten up to Anna with a free jar of fish heads! Why? Because Anna had just witnessed an attempted murder? What kind of sleazeball tries to bribe a murder witness with a jar of fish heads? Could it be the kind that keeps his family locked inside a sweat locker during the hottest part of the year, barring eternal winters? How many murders do you think his family has had to witness, imprisoned in that broiling torture chamber that he generously calls a sauna? Are those people even his real family? What a psychopath!
Him and his big summer blow out. I mean, yeah, it's summer and everything, but there's a big frikin' snowstorm going on in July! If there's a big frikin' snowstorm going on in July, you don't say, "Hello, yoo hoo, big summer blowout!" to everybody who walks into the store, even if it's summer, because nobody is going to want to buy whatever you had for sale for your big summer blowout if there's an eternal winter going on! What an asshole.
And what the heck is a wandering oaken supposed to be, anyway? That makes zero sense for the name of a trading post that's permanently attached to the side of a mountain.
Anyway. I sure do love that movie, Frozen!
Anyway. You're probably gonna think I'm hating on that movie Frozen, but I'm really not. In fact, I'm pretty much hopelessly in love with Frozen. I've watched it exactly eleventy-seven-and-sixteen-fiftieths times, to help cure my aloneliness on my otherwise intolerable days off. Mostly I have it playing in the background while I'm on the pot. I really do love that movie, it's just that I have a bunch of nitpicks with it, the same as I do with everything I love.
Firstly, what's the story with that Christoph kid? I used to think that maybe he was an ice apprentice, but all he does is spend the entire day fucking up. Apparently he isn't learning anything about ice mining, so why is he even there? The ice miners sure don't give a crap about him... I mean, here's this little boy, scampering around among hardened ice miners who are constantly singing about what a dangerous job ice mining is, and nobody says anything about the little kid! Weird.
Speaking of little kids, way before Elsa grew up and became a neurotic bitch, she and her sister Anna used to have fun playing eternal winter inside the castle. Remember when Elsa was magickng those taller and taller piles of snow to catch Anna as she jumped from one to the other? You could just see it coming, that Elsa was only one or two catch me's away from screwing up royally (heh). So why didn't Elsa poof up some smaller snow mounds? Why did she keep making them BIGGER and BIGGER? That was just dumb, Elsa.
Then just as everything is going tits up, Elsa slips (on her own ice!) and hits Anna right between the eyes with an ice dart! King and queen anonymous freak out of course, and after thumbing through a book which shows an illustration of a positively evil looking troll waving it's claws over a royally garbed figure laid out on a stone slab like the Aztecs would put you on before ripping out your still beating heart, the King decides that these nightmare creatures are the only hope for his daughter, and he gathers up the entire fam and hauls ass to troll country.
What's the deal with those things anyway? They're definitely not carbon based life forms. Their organic chemistry is likely based on long chain silicon molecules, what with them basically being living rocks. Far out, huh? Well, if you've done as much research as I have into what makes those lovable little fuckers tick, then you'll know that silicon life would get along MUCH better in a permanent deep freeze. Wink wink, nudge nudge. Food for thought? Hey, I ain't pointing fingers!
Since it's pretty much established immediately that stone trolls are the 'good guys' for curing Anna, then why did that grampa troll go out of his way to scare the shit out of Elsa? Do you think he'd considered the possible consequences of showing a little girl a vision in the sky of her own blood red powers attacking from every direction and stabbing her into oblivion, pretty much guaranteeing that Elsa would be scared shitless of her own nature during her formative years? Why would grampa troll do that? Because he's an evil fucker? Kinda makes you wonder about those trolls, huh? Hey, just sayin'!
Ok, let's give those filthy trolls the benefit of the doubt for a second. Maybe that's how trolls raise their little troll kids, by scaring the shit out of them. Maybe rock trolls are just stupid, like a bag of rocks stupid, and they thought that Elsa was just another rock. But if rock trolls are just a pack of idiots with good intentions, then why did grampa troll throw in that memory wipe for Anna? The King seemed to agree that it was 'for the best', but what the hell does he know? To him, a satanic ritual is just as good as real live medicine!
The only thing that memory wipe accomplished was to confuse the hell out of a little girl, leaving her with no idea as to why her best buddy would suddenly just up and start hating her. The entire situation is completely fucked up! It's no wonder that one of those little girls grew up to be a paranoid, cast iron bitch, and the other one so desperate for love - any kind of love - that she'd understand it as simply a furtive glance in her direction. See what I'm saying about those dirty silicon based life forms?
Oh yeah. Don't forget about the troll woman who basically kidnaps Christoph when he's just a five year old kid. "I'm gonna keep you," says the troll woman to the little boy and his moose puppy as she wraps her cold, heavy arms of stone around their fragile little necks. What the fuck, man? I mean, discounting the horror of being embraced by a Golem, even if Christoph was an orphan, there's no way that troll woman could have known that. Creepy!
Ok, enough about the trolls. Here's a puzzlement. Why don't Elsa's gloves freeze when she's wearing them? Those manacles they clapped onto her hands when she was in prison sure froze though, didn't they? SO WHY DON'T HER GLOVES FREEZE? Could the reason be that the whole touchy-freezy thing is a neurotic condition, stemming from a traumatic childhood experience manipulated by those dirty, filthy silicon life forms? HUH? Ok, I'm done now with the trolls, really.
Let's move on to another thing that pisses me off, which is really the only completely unforgivable nitpick that I have. Why is it unforgivable? Because it's not a plot hole or a character flaw or anything like that... it's simply sloppy song writing that borders on the obscene.
Allow me to elucidate. Remember that part where Queen Elsa fucks off to the hills after her disastrous coming out party, and how she sings her way through magical puberty and finally embraces her womanhood by transforming from a stupid fraidy cat little girl into a sexy, sexy ice queen? And how she lyrically referred to a snowflake as a fractal? Remember how STUPID that was? Didn't you just want to slap the shit out of whoever it was who wrote those lyrics? I'm talking about the 'Let It Go' song.
You know...
'My power flurries through the air into the ground
My soul is spiraling in FROZEN FRACTALS all around'
...that part!
I'm terribly, grievously sorry, but there's just no possible way without invoking a couple of generations of math wizards into the storyline that Queen Elsa would have been even remotely aware of the fractal nature of a snowflake. Hell, the basic concept of a fractal would have melted her primitive, medieval brain! It's simply unforgivably sloppy on the part of the song writer who came up with those stupid, stupid lyrics. Shame on you, whoever you are, you stupid, lazy song writer who made that fractal snowflake crap into impossible song lyrics!
Some more nitpicks. Why do so many Disney animal sidekicks act like dogs? I'm armed to the teeth with examples. Here goes...
Lilo and Stitch. Stitch is an alien. To Stitch, dogs are aliens. Stitch acts like a dog.
Hercules. Pegasus is two pretty awesome animals smooshed together into one even awesomer animal with no sign of dog anywhere. Pegasus acts like a dog.
Tangled. Maximus is a genetically perfect horse with exemplary morals and intelligence on par with a human. Maximus could act like a firedrake if he chose to. Maximus acts like a dog.
The Fox and the Hound - Copper is a hound dog that's been mercilessly brainwashed to murder his childhood friend. Copper should, by all rights, act like a sociopath. Copper acts like a dog!
Frozen - SVEN IS A MOOSE FOR CRISSAKE, A FULL GROWN MOOSE THAT ACTS LIKE A DOG!
Why, these things??
Now back to those filthy, dirty trolls. No, I ain't done with them yet.
Those stone trolls sure sing a good story about true love while simultaneously trying their damndest to force two strangers into getting married, don't they? One of them is even engaged already! But do those stone hearted bastards give a shit? Hell naw, they have their own agenda, and it ain't about true love. I mean, how can anyone really think that those petrified horse apples are even capable of giving a single flip about true love, based on what we know about them now? It's obvious that they only want to marry Christoph to a princess as quickly as possible for political leverage. They're outright bastards, through and through, those rock trolls. I'm not pointing fingers though, I'm just sayin'. Those fucking rock trolls are nothing but a pack of bona-fide evil manipulative bastards. I hate 'em!
Just one more thing and I'm done, I promise...
Some may find the following negative critique of the Wandering Oakens Trading Post to be unwarranted - after all, when Princess Anna's horse bolted and left her to freeze to death just south of the North Mountain, I must admit that if it weren't for the Wandering Oakens Trading Post, princess Anna would have surely perished.
Still, can we please expect store proprietors as a general rule NOT to be greedy assholes? Or if not generally, then at least according to special circumstances, such as eternal winters? That's a special circumstance, right? The eternal winter thing? You know who I'm talking about... that big fat Swedish meatball who runs the Wandering Oaken. Screw that guy.
Oh, he comes off all nice at first, but then after trying unsuccessfully to rob Christoph he throws him out into the storm to die! And why? Because Christoph called him a crook? Which he is, by the way. What, you can't handle the truth, you big smiling lunkhead?
What he does next is just nauseating - he tries to sweeten up to Anna with a free jar of fish heads! Why? Because Anna had just witnessed an attempted murder? What kind of sleazeball tries to bribe a murder witness with a jar of fish heads? Could it be the kind that keeps his family locked inside a sweat locker during the hottest part of the year, barring eternal winters? How many murders do you think his family has had to witness, imprisoned in that broiling torture chamber that he generously calls a sauna? Are those people even his real family? What a psychopath!
Him and his big summer blow out. I mean, yeah, it's summer and everything, but there's a big frikin' snowstorm going on in July! If there's a big frikin' snowstorm going on in July, you don't say, "Hello, yoo hoo, big summer blowout!" to everybody who walks into the store, even if it's summer, because nobody is going to want to buy whatever you had for sale for your big summer blowout if there's an eternal winter going on! What an asshole.
And what the heck is a wandering oaken supposed to be, anyway? That makes zero sense for the name of a trading post that's permanently attached to the side of a mountain.
Anyway. I sure do love that movie, Frozen!
Tuesday, November 28, 2017
A dream - running from the giant
A dream - running from the giant
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.
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I was underneath a rocky overhang, hiding from the giant. It was about as tall as a sodium vapor lamp, about sixty feet high. There was a young girl in my charge hiding with me. My best friend was nowhere to be found, and I'd lost my horse.
It was raining in torrents, and I couldn't tell the footsteps of the giant apart from the peals of thunder. I peeked out from beneath the overhang and saw the giant, about twenty meters away. It had a man in its hand, and I watched as the giant bit off the man's head and chewed it slowly, savoring the flavor, and then threw the rest of the man away.
After it finished chewing and had swallowed, the giant sniffed around, trying to locate me and the girl. It seemed to home in on us, although it couldn't see us. It began to cajole us, complimenting us with our success at eluding it, and promising not to bite off our heads if we revealed ourselves. Then it began to berate and belittle us with insults in an attempt to persuade us to emerge, resigned to our fate. Then it lost its mind in a rage and stamped about, furious and frustrated.
The girl whom I was protecting gasped out loud, and the giant made a step toward us. Frantically and silently, I tried to calm the girl, but she struggled and then let out a piercing whistle. I thought we were doomed, and then my horse came running underneath the legs of the giant and toward us. I picked up the girl and ran beside the horse and caught its bridle. I slung us both onto the horse's back and we rode away at full gallop.
The giant was enraged, and it roared deafeningly. I could feel its thunderous footsteps slamming into the earth as it chased us. I slapped my horse on the neck, urging it to run faster, faster, faster! I glanced down and saw the horse's hooves cycling in a blur, churning up the rain soaked mud like an overpowered machine for digging furrows. I glanced back once and was dismayed to see the giant about a hundred meters behind us, and gaining close to ten meters with each stride.
About a thousand meters ahead was a long ridge that spanned the horizon from South to North, and the setting sun was shining brightly underneath the trailing edge of the storm front. I leaned forward and buried my face in the horse's mane, urging it to please go faster, and I could feel the arms of the little girl in my charge squeezing tightly around my midsection. There was a secret redoubt on the other side of that ridge, with a hospital buried underground... but I knew that we weren't going to make it.
Then I heard a voice shouting from ahead of us, and I shielded my eyes with my hand and saw, atop the ridge, the gesticulating figure of a man. He started down the hill at an angle roughly perpendicular and to the right of my path, running wildly and yelling:
"I've gottim, I've gottim! Go thataway! I've gottim away from ya, go thataway! Thataway!"
It was my best friend. I'd thought he had deserted us, but there he was, running down the slope of the ridge, and drawing the giant torward himself and away from us. I clenched my teeth and squeezed shut my eyes to stop the tears, and yanked the reins to the left and away from my friend as he ran on a suicide mission to lure the giant away from me and the girl.
We made it to the top of the ridge, where I paused to get a look and to find my bearings. Down below on the other side I could see the exposed roofs of the redoubt stretching away to the left and to the right. I spotted a trail that would take us down to the nearest roof, and before descending I turned around to get a brief bead on the giant.
I cried out with a wordless sob when I saw that the giant had already finished with my friend and was sprinting all out, covering at least twenty meters with each stride, and was nearly to the base of the ridge. When it arrived it paused and raised its massive hand to its brow, then bellowed like Hells Bells as it spotted us at the top, silhouetted against the sun. The giant immediately began sprinting uphill.
I spurred my horse down the trail. Upon reaching the roofline, we followed it North until another path appeared, leading us to ground level. I dismounted quickly, the girl in my arms, and dashed to the nearest entrance and inside. With the girl perched upon my back, I raced down hallways and past many people, each of them with a growing expression of perplexity as we ran by.
I was searching hastily for a stairway to the underground hospital when I heard a mighty crash just a few tens of meters behind us. I stopped and turned to see a giant foot thrust through a jagged hole in the roof of the redoubt and planted in the middle of the hall, followed immediately by the thunderous cacophony of a giant fist as it made another hole in the roof, much closer to myself and the girl.
I ran with the girl on my back as sections of the ceiling cracked and fell around us. I passed a woman holding a broom in mid sweep, stuck to the spot, her face frozen in horror at a vision that I didn't turn around to see. There was a spiral stairway ahead that led down, and I leaped toward it with all of my strength and tumbled down to the next floor, just as the roof collapsed above us.
I picked up the girl and, holding her in my arms, I continued downward.
.
.
.
I was underneath a rocky overhang, hiding from the giant. It was about as tall as a sodium vapor lamp, about sixty feet high. There was a young girl in my charge hiding with me. My best friend was nowhere to be found, and I'd lost my horse.
It was raining in torrents, and I couldn't tell the footsteps of the giant apart from the peals of thunder. I peeked out from beneath the overhang and saw the giant, about twenty meters away. It had a man in its hand, and I watched as the giant bit off the man's head and chewed it slowly, savoring the flavor, and then threw the rest of the man away.
After it finished chewing and had swallowed, the giant sniffed around, trying to locate me and the girl. It seemed to home in on us, although it couldn't see us. It began to cajole us, complimenting us with our success at eluding it, and promising not to bite off our heads if we revealed ourselves. Then it began to berate and belittle us with insults in an attempt to persuade us to emerge, resigned to our fate. Then it lost its mind in a rage and stamped about, furious and frustrated.
The girl whom I was protecting gasped out loud, and the giant made a step toward us. Frantically and silently, I tried to calm the girl, but she struggled and then let out a piercing whistle. I thought we were doomed, and then my horse came running underneath the legs of the giant and toward us. I picked up the girl and ran beside the horse and caught its bridle. I slung us both onto the horse's back and we rode away at full gallop.
The giant was enraged, and it roared deafeningly. I could feel its thunderous footsteps slamming into the earth as it chased us. I slapped my horse on the neck, urging it to run faster, faster, faster! I glanced down and saw the horse's hooves cycling in a blur, churning up the rain soaked mud like an overpowered machine for digging furrows. I glanced back once and was dismayed to see the giant about a hundred meters behind us, and gaining close to ten meters with each stride.
About a thousand meters ahead was a long ridge that spanned the horizon from South to North, and the setting sun was shining brightly underneath the trailing edge of the storm front. I leaned forward and buried my face in the horse's mane, urging it to please go faster, and I could feel the arms of the little girl in my charge squeezing tightly around my midsection. There was a secret redoubt on the other side of that ridge, with a hospital buried underground... but I knew that we weren't going to make it.
Then I heard a voice shouting from ahead of us, and I shielded my eyes with my hand and saw, atop the ridge, the gesticulating figure of a man. He started down the hill at an angle roughly perpendicular and to the right of my path, running wildly and yelling:
"I've gottim, I've gottim! Go thataway! I've gottim away from ya, go thataway! Thataway!"
It was my best friend. I'd thought he had deserted us, but there he was, running down the slope of the ridge, and drawing the giant torward himself and away from us. I clenched my teeth and squeezed shut my eyes to stop the tears, and yanked the reins to the left and away from my friend as he ran on a suicide mission to lure the giant away from me and the girl.
We made it to the top of the ridge, where I paused to get a look and to find my bearings. Down below on the other side I could see the exposed roofs of the redoubt stretching away to the left and to the right. I spotted a trail that would take us down to the nearest roof, and before descending I turned around to get a brief bead on the giant.
I cried out with a wordless sob when I saw that the giant had already finished with my friend and was sprinting all out, covering at least twenty meters with each stride, and was nearly to the base of the ridge. When it arrived it paused and raised its massive hand to its brow, then bellowed like Hells Bells as it spotted us at the top, silhouetted against the sun. The giant immediately began sprinting uphill.
I spurred my horse down the trail. Upon reaching the roofline, we followed it North until another path appeared, leading us to ground level. I dismounted quickly, the girl in my arms, and dashed to the nearest entrance and inside. With the girl perched upon my back, I raced down hallways and past many people, each of them with a growing expression of perplexity as we ran by.
I was searching hastily for a stairway to the underground hospital when I heard a mighty crash just a few tens of meters behind us. I stopped and turned to see a giant foot thrust through a jagged hole in the roof of the redoubt and planted in the middle of the hall, followed immediately by the thunderous cacophony of a giant fist as it made another hole in the roof, much closer to myself and the girl.
I ran with the girl on my back as sections of the ceiling cracked and fell around us. I passed a woman holding a broom in mid sweep, stuck to the spot, her face frozen in horror at a vision that I didn't turn around to see. There was a spiral stairway ahead that led down, and I leaped toward it with all of my strength and tumbled down to the next floor, just as the roof collapsed above us.
I picked up the girl and, holding her in my arms, I continued downward.
Saturday, November 25, 2017
The umptiness.
The... 'poem'... that follows is the kind of stream of consciousness crap that's constantly barging through my brain, pretty much 24/7. I can't stop it, it does what it wants. I even have to utter this insanity out loud, half the time. Call it a phenomenon, an infliction, a permanent brain bunkle... I dunno, but it's constant and incessant, and it's always RIGHT THERE, INSIDE MY HEAD.
.
.
.
Booger brains and booger bears
Riding the flying jacuzzi hairs
Stomping on the beetlebots
Through half rotted slime
And kerbango snots.
Filching more unruly stares
From tarded and uncooly squares.
Hacking up a phleghmsly blud
Face down in a quagmire
Of squatswater mud.
Slapping slovenly the scabs
Of butt-encrusted corpse fed crabs...
A headless tooth under the bed
Scrunged up and alive,
With the maggoty dead!
The skumble-bumping innardslinks,
The uneschewed unblevined stinks,
Upon the choice of sliddled skin...
Peeled from the flesh,
Or churned within?
Fagnasticating murderbirds!
Craptaculating rancid curds!
The stunchered stumps of umptiness,
Make sweet the kiss
Of deaths caress!
YEE-HAW!!! There's no escape.
.
.
.
Booger brains and booger bears
Riding the flying jacuzzi hairs
Stomping on the beetlebots
Through half rotted slime
And kerbango snots.
Filching more unruly stares
From tarded and uncooly squares.
Hacking up a phleghmsly blud
Face down in a quagmire
Of squatswater mud.
Slapping slovenly the scabs
Of butt-encrusted corpse fed crabs...
A headless tooth under the bed
Scrunged up and alive,
With the maggoty dead!
The skumble-bumping innardslinks,
The uneschewed unblevined stinks,
Upon the choice of sliddled skin...
Peeled from the flesh,
Or churned within?
Fagnasticating murderbirds!
Craptaculating rancid curds!
The stunchered stumps of umptiness,
Make sweet the kiss
Of deaths caress!
YEE-HAW!!! There's no escape.
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Primate behavior
I just watched a fascinating display of nature in action.
I was on my way to the SchmelvenElven to do a little tidying up in the cooler, and as I was passing by Voertman's book store on Oak Street (the parking lot of which is commonly used by sprunciled duncelings as a vehicle repository during the small hours, since it's only about a hundred meters from the bars on Fry Street), about eight young troglodytes bouldered into view, fresh off the Night Train.
They were loud and boisterous, and I watched as two of them began to wrassle in a competitive manner, as sapient homos are wont to do when they're falling down drunk after a hard night of strutting around and without any females in hand to show for it.
As the two hominids wrassled, what began as a game escalated into a bona fide competition, which quickly became a tangle of arms and legs and shouts, all of which collapsed into that ditch area between the Christian campus center and Voertman's.
One of the spectating homos, yelling "Break it up, break it up!" jumped into the fray, and I watched as his mighty leap delivered the momentum of his outstretched fist right into the jaw of one of the wrasslers in the ditch. That's when all hell broke loose.
Suddenly it was an amalgam of pinwheeling arms and legs as the other five or six males joined the melee. Lots of tussling followed, the action of which quickly formed into two groups trying to pull away from each other. It reminded me of cellular mitosis, when chromosomes stretch and divide down the middle. As the two sides were about to come apart, a fist from one side connected with a nose from the other side, and chaos erupted once more.
Most of what followed consisted mainly of taunts, threats, insults, and lots of chest inflating and bowing up of one side to the other. It was then that I was reminded of a couple of packs of chimpanzees going at each other with a lot of bluster, but very little real bite, and I laughed out loud. As I was thusly occupied, a stranger strumming a guitar appeared and stopped next to me to witness the spectacle.
"What's happening over there?" he asked me.
"Primate behavior," I replied, after I'd caught my breath.
The guitar guy busted out with his own laughter and walked away strumming.
I was on my way to the SchmelvenElven to do a little tidying up in the cooler, and as I was passing by Voertman's book store on Oak Street (the parking lot of which is commonly used by sprunciled duncelings as a vehicle repository during the small hours, since it's only about a hundred meters from the bars on Fry Street), about eight young troglodytes bouldered into view, fresh off the Night Train.
They were loud and boisterous, and I watched as two of them began to wrassle in a competitive manner, as sapient homos are wont to do when they're falling down drunk after a hard night of strutting around and without any females in hand to show for it.
As the two hominids wrassled, what began as a game escalated into a bona fide competition, which quickly became a tangle of arms and legs and shouts, all of which collapsed into that ditch area between the Christian campus center and Voertman's.
One of the spectating homos, yelling "Break it up, break it up!" jumped into the fray, and I watched as his mighty leap delivered the momentum of his outstretched fist right into the jaw of one of the wrasslers in the ditch. That's when all hell broke loose.
Suddenly it was an amalgam of pinwheeling arms and legs as the other five or six males joined the melee. Lots of tussling followed, the action of which quickly formed into two groups trying to pull away from each other. It reminded me of cellular mitosis, when chromosomes stretch and divide down the middle. As the two sides were about to come apart, a fist from one side connected with a nose from the other side, and chaos erupted once more.
Most of what followed consisted mainly of taunts, threats, insults, and lots of chest inflating and bowing up of one side to the other. It was then that I was reminded of a couple of packs of chimpanzees going at each other with a lot of bluster, but very little real bite, and I laughed out loud. As I was thusly occupied, a stranger strumming a guitar appeared and stopped next to me to witness the spectacle.
"What's happening over there?" he asked me.
"Primate behavior," I replied, after I'd caught my breath.
The guitar guy busted out with his own laughter and walked away strumming.
Friday, November 17, 2017
Funeral face, again.
Today was another slow motion day.
Once every month or two, I wake up disconnected - slightly removed - two shakes shy of real life - plumbing the depths of the dark behind the daylight - ensconced within a roll of soaking wet cotton batting threaded with fibers of lead - according to no rhyme or reason.
Like the mortal agonies, waking up half dead and stuck inside the slow-flowing sap of apathy and despair is a seemingly random phenomenon. I'm clueless as to the unholy clockwork which motivates these inflictions.
On days like today, managing a facial expression feels like lifting weights. Speaking above a whisper feels like suffocating. Every action is accompanied by a desperate prayer located just below my awareness:
Guide me, protect me, as I'm forced through these motions.
Bad brain chemistry, triggered by unknown ingredients... that's the best explanation I can come up with for these little dips into hell that come every so often.
My boss got onto me today for having 'funeral face', as he puts it. Funeral face... that's a good name for it.
.
.
.
Why you have funeral face? You scare away customer! What wrong with you today?
Geez, I dunno, Chiy. Nothing is wrong, I just wake up like this sometimes.
Customer ask me what wrong with you, I try to protect you, I tell them, he have back pain, but customer leave and don't come back! It hurt sales!
I'm sorry, Chiy. I can't just force myself to pretend that I'm happy.
What wrong with you? Something bothering you? What happen?
Nothing's wrong, Chiy. I just wake up like this sometimes, there's no reason for it! I'm having a bad day. People have bad days. Customers have bad days, I have bad days.
You need help me out, I'm losing sales...
It's not my fault.
.
.
.
And I move through the entire day in slow motion, like a puppet submerged in syrup, scaring away customers and freaking out my boss because my brain chemistry is experimenting with recipes from a forgotten appendix of the Necronomicon.
Thank God these events only occur a few times a year.
Once every month or two, I wake up disconnected - slightly removed - two shakes shy of real life - plumbing the depths of the dark behind the daylight - ensconced within a roll of soaking wet cotton batting threaded with fibers of lead - according to no rhyme or reason.
Like the mortal agonies, waking up half dead and stuck inside the slow-flowing sap of apathy and despair is a seemingly random phenomenon. I'm clueless as to the unholy clockwork which motivates these inflictions.
On days like today, managing a facial expression feels like lifting weights. Speaking above a whisper feels like suffocating. Every action is accompanied by a desperate prayer located just below my awareness:
Guide me, protect me, as I'm forced through these motions.
Bad brain chemistry, triggered by unknown ingredients... that's the best explanation I can come up with for these little dips into hell that come every so often.
My boss got onto me today for having 'funeral face', as he puts it. Funeral face... that's a good name for it.
.
.
.
Why you have funeral face? You scare away customer! What wrong with you today?
Geez, I dunno, Chiy. Nothing is wrong, I just wake up like this sometimes.
Customer ask me what wrong with you, I try to protect you, I tell them, he have back pain, but customer leave and don't come back! It hurt sales!
I'm sorry, Chiy. I can't just force myself to pretend that I'm happy.
What wrong with you? Something bothering you? What happen?
Nothing's wrong, Chiy. I just wake up like this sometimes, there's no reason for it! I'm having a bad day. People have bad days. Customers have bad days, I have bad days.
You need help me out, I'm losing sales...
It's not my fault.
.
.
.
And I move through the entire day in slow motion, like a puppet submerged in syrup, scaring away customers and freaking out my boss because my brain chemistry is experimenting with recipes from a forgotten appendix of the Necronomicon.
Thank God these events only occur a few times a year.
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
The bestest idea that probably won't kill me.
Oh man, I just had the best idea that I've ever had in this world. I dunno what brought it on, it just hit me like a 59 lb bag of Angel feathers! Here it is:
Sometime soon, preferably on a cold night with low clouds and lots of ice on the ground, I'll gather up all of my necessary accoutrements, such as:
Music
Fully charged internet
Thing to write with
Flashlight
Camera drone
HotHands hand warmers
and...
Spare alcohol
and...
Coffee in a thermos
and...
A couple packs of smokes
and maybe...
A slim jim
And then I'll find a place to perch myself, as high up as I can, possibly at the top of a tree. I've got a couple of tree locations imbedded in my to-do memory banks that would work. I'll wanna get perched no later than 3:00AM, because I'm gonna need several hours of perching to get ready for the daylight. Anyway!
Then I'll wait for the dawn to roll over the horizon, in whatever shape it takes. After that, whatever happens, happens. Maybe I'm so overcome with emotion at the beauty that I lose my grip and fall and break my neck and die (tragic).
Maybe I'm so disappointed at the gray dawn that I slit my wrists and stain the white snow and ice with blood and then I die (that would be the most rad).
Maybe I fall asleep before the crucial moment and lose my grip and fall and break my neck and die (lame).
Maybe I stay awake the whole time waiting for the sunrise, and when it finally happens I forget to watch, and in my discombobulated state, I lose my grip and fall and break my neck and die (hilarious).
Maybe I get tired of waiting for the dawn and just say fuck it and decide to kill myself and then change my mind and just go home (probably).
What I'm counting on though, is a Dawnrise moment that will cure me of all the symptoms of death, kinda like the Grinch when his heart grew three sizes that day, except in real life and not a lame cartoon.
Damn, that's an awesome idea, Ash! This winter, that's what I'm gonna do.
Sometime soon, preferably on a cold night with low clouds and lots of ice on the ground, I'll gather up all of my necessary accoutrements, such as:
Music
Fully charged internet
Thing to write with
Flashlight
Camera drone
HotHands hand warmers
and...
Spare alcohol
and...
Coffee in a thermos
and...
A couple packs of smokes
and maybe...
A slim jim
And then I'll find a place to perch myself, as high up as I can, possibly at the top of a tree. I've got a couple of tree locations imbedded in my to-do memory banks that would work. I'll wanna get perched no later than 3:00AM, because I'm gonna need several hours of perching to get ready for the daylight. Anyway!
Then I'll wait for the dawn to roll over the horizon, in whatever shape it takes. After that, whatever happens, happens. Maybe I'm so overcome with emotion at the beauty that I lose my grip and fall and break my neck and die (tragic).
Maybe I'm so disappointed at the gray dawn that I slit my wrists and stain the white snow and ice with blood and then I die (that would be the most rad).
Maybe I fall asleep before the crucial moment and lose my grip and fall and break my neck and die (lame).
Maybe I stay awake the whole time waiting for the sunrise, and when it finally happens I forget to watch, and in my discombobulated state, I lose my grip and fall and break my neck and die (hilarious).
Maybe I get tired of waiting for the dawn and just say fuck it and decide to kill myself and then change my mind and just go home (probably).
What I'm counting on though, is a Dawnrise moment that will cure me of all the symptoms of death, kinda like the Grinch when his heart grew three sizes that day, except in real life and not a lame cartoon.
Damn, that's an awesome idea, Ash! This winter, that's what I'm gonna do.
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Stupid kids fucking with me
Saturday night after work I set up the telescope in the parking lot of the SchmelvenElven so that Sam and Josh and David could see the full moon through it. As I was taking a couple of ganders through it myself while I was waiting for them, a car load of kids pulled up. Before they even came to a stop, the driver was yelling out of his window:
"Hey, astronomer guy! Check out the scientific astronomer! Watcha lookin' at through that thing? Wave to the aliens!" Fuck those guys, I'm trying to get the moon into focus.
They all spilled out of the car, four of them, and headed into the store. One guy brushed against the scope, knocking it out of alignment. He apologized profusely. The guy sounded sincere."Hey, no prob," I said.
When they came out of the store the driver was back at it. "Yo, astronomer guy! What the hell are you looking at, bro?" Then to his companions, "Check out the scientist in the parking lot!" Uproarious laughter. Fuck those guys, I'm changing lenses.
Then, as they're backing out, this from the driver:
"Yo, astronomy guy with a telescope in a parking lot! Hey, scientist guy! Check out the scientist! Fuck you man!" Ok, I'd just about had it with this asshole.
"Shut the fuck up, you stupid, drunken moron," I said.
ERK! Went the car as it stopped backing up. "What the fuck did you say to me?" went the driver.
"I said shut the fuck up, you retarded, drunk idiot. Get the hell out of here and go finish being drunk somewhere else."
The guy was incensed. "What if I got out of this car and kicked your ass, huh?"
Ok. In this type of situation, it's always at least three against one. Shit talking only occurs when the shit talker has a minimum of two buddies with him. It's NEVER a one on one thing, EVER, and every time something like this happens - and it happens often - I know that there's a possibility of a physical confrontation. It's why I didn't say anything until the driver said 'fuck you, man'.
I mean, come on. That's a flip switcher, and I have no control when a situation escalates to that point. Am I supposed to just let an asshole be an asshole with impunity? Maybe, but I can't help it when my mouth shifts into automatic mode. I looked back into the eyepiece of the telescope and said:
"Dude. Get your dumb ass out of here if you don't wanna go to jail, because cops can smell drunk and stupid." Boy howdy, did that piss him off.
"FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING PUSSY, I'LL KICK YOUR ASS YOU FUCKING MOTHERFUCKER! FUCK YOU MAN, FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!"
All of this as I still have my eye to the scope, acting as though he's beyond my attention. I can see with my peripheral vision that he's slowly starting to back up again. Feeling relieved and pretty sure that he wasn't going to get out of the car, and while I was still peering through the scope, I couldn't help one more jab:
"Yeah, get out of here before you get arrested, you drunken infant." The guy hauled ass out of the parking lot.
See the kind of shit I have to put up with? And what for? Huh? Why?
Who else does this kind of crap happen to regularly? Is it just me?
"Hey, astronomer guy! Check out the scientific astronomer! Watcha lookin' at through that thing? Wave to the aliens!" Fuck those guys, I'm trying to get the moon into focus.
They all spilled out of the car, four of them, and headed into the store. One guy brushed against the scope, knocking it out of alignment. He apologized profusely. The guy sounded sincere."Hey, no prob," I said.
When they came out of the store the driver was back at it. "Yo, astronomer guy! What the hell are you looking at, bro?" Then to his companions, "Check out the scientist in the parking lot!" Uproarious laughter. Fuck those guys, I'm changing lenses.
Then, as they're backing out, this from the driver:
"Yo, astronomy guy with a telescope in a parking lot! Hey, scientist guy! Check out the scientist! Fuck you man!" Ok, I'd just about had it with this asshole.
"Shut the fuck up, you stupid, drunken moron," I said.
ERK! Went the car as it stopped backing up. "What the fuck did you say to me?" went the driver.
"I said shut the fuck up, you retarded, drunk idiot. Get the hell out of here and go finish being drunk somewhere else."
The guy was incensed. "What if I got out of this car and kicked your ass, huh?"
Ok. In this type of situation, it's always at least three against one. Shit talking only occurs when the shit talker has a minimum of two buddies with him. It's NEVER a one on one thing, EVER, and every time something like this happens - and it happens often - I know that there's a possibility of a physical confrontation. It's why I didn't say anything until the driver said 'fuck you, man'.
I mean, come on. That's a flip switcher, and I have no control when a situation escalates to that point. Am I supposed to just let an asshole be an asshole with impunity? Maybe, but I can't help it when my mouth shifts into automatic mode. I looked back into the eyepiece of the telescope and said:
"Dude. Get your dumb ass out of here if you don't wanna go to jail, because cops can smell drunk and stupid." Boy howdy, did that piss him off.
"FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING PUSSY, I'LL KICK YOUR ASS YOU FUCKING MOTHERFUCKER! FUCK YOU MAN, FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!"
All of this as I still have my eye to the scope, acting as though he's beyond my attention. I can see with my peripheral vision that he's slowly starting to back up again. Feeling relieved and pretty sure that he wasn't going to get out of the car, and while I was still peering through the scope, I couldn't help one more jab:
"Yeah, get out of here before you get arrested, you drunken infant." The guy hauled ass out of the parking lot.
See the kind of shit I have to put up with? And what for? Huh? Why?
Who else does this kind of crap happen to regularly? Is it just me?
Friday, November 3, 2017
Jelly Bean Apocalypse
At WinCo, standing in line. Two guys in front of me have a tub of jelly beans. Craploads of jelly beans in one clear plastic tub. Then, well, somebody must have lost a grip on the tub I guess, because next thing everybody knows...
SPLASHssshhhinklinkleinkydinkle!
That's the sound of fifty trillion jelly beans exploding as a tub of them hits the floor.
"Fuckin hell," I remarked.
"That about sums it up," said one of the guys.
I knelt down to help round up the critters, because it was definitely a three or more person job. As I'm catching escaped jelly beans and shoving them into a herd, I hear one of the guys, way far away where some other jelly beans were roaming free, say to his friend...
"So, exactly how germaphobic are you?"
SPLASHssshhhinklinkleinkydinkle!
That's the sound of fifty trillion jelly beans exploding as a tub of them hits the floor.
"Fuckin hell," I remarked.
"That about sums it up," said one of the guys.
I knelt down to help round up the critters, because it was definitely a three or more person job. As I'm catching escaped jelly beans and shoving them into a herd, I hear one of the guys, way far away where some other jelly beans were roaming free, say to his friend...
"So, exactly how germaphobic are you?"
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
I'm officially a published author now...
...kinda. Online. The point is, somebody I don't know read something I wrote and liked it enough to publish it for me.
Click that link, right there under these words. I wrote that article. Man, I sure crack myself up.
Everything I Hate About My Favorite Movie, Frozen
You went too far. Click the link above these words.
Click that link, right there under these words. I wrote that article. Man, I sure crack myself up.
Everything I Hate About My Favorite Movie, Frozen
You went too far. Click the link above these words.
Saturday, September 16, 2017
Mortal agony
Oh wow. Oh man... oh boy, did that ever SUCK. Tonight I suffered a mortal stomach agony for the very first time while I was up and motile, and not lying prone after having just awakened. Before tonight, they've always crept up on me early in the morning, waking me up with increasing nausea that finally transmogrifies into a mortal agony. I've always felt safe and shielded, knowing that mortal agonies only have power during one very narrow slice of my temporal physiology. Not anymore, I guess.
I was walking home from WinCo, listening to really, really loud music, when the nausea began to come on. That's not necessarily unusual, but it's definitely unpleasant and inconvenient. I was crossing the Baptist Church parking lot on Malone when it started. I stopped near the baseball field near the high school and tried to throw up, and that's when the pain began to creep up. I was still a quarter mile from home. I tried to throw up so that I'd get that little burst of feeling ok in order to brace me for the remainder of the walk home, but I couldn't make it happen. I stood up and hurried on my way.
Oh, it just got worse and worse, exactly like I was terrified that it would. I started to sweat. Nothing makes you sweat in rivulets like mortal agony, and nothing makes you pray out loud in desperation like some more mortal agony piled on top of mortal agony. As I staggered and lurched, I passed Friday night party goers here and there, and I wondered with a small, sequestered piece of my awareness what they must have thought of this man struggling along and doubled over, moaning 'Oh God it hurts so bad, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy', over and over.
I finally reached my compartment complex and somehow made it up the stairs. When I got inside, I collapsed onto my mattress. The pain immediately began to relent. Oh man, I just cried myself to sleep with tears of relief.
That was about three hours ago. When I woke up, the stench of stale sweat was ubiquitous. I was actually hungry, which was hard to believe. I nuked a TV dinner and here I am. I think it's time to sleep again, now. I hope I don't wake up again to mortal agony, part 2.
I was walking home from WinCo, listening to really, really loud music, when the nausea began to come on. That's not necessarily unusual, but it's definitely unpleasant and inconvenient. I was crossing the Baptist Church parking lot on Malone when it started. I stopped near the baseball field near the high school and tried to throw up, and that's when the pain began to creep up. I was still a quarter mile from home. I tried to throw up so that I'd get that little burst of feeling ok in order to brace me for the remainder of the walk home, but I couldn't make it happen. I stood up and hurried on my way.
Oh, it just got worse and worse, exactly like I was terrified that it would. I started to sweat. Nothing makes you sweat in rivulets like mortal agony, and nothing makes you pray out loud in desperation like some more mortal agony piled on top of mortal agony. As I staggered and lurched, I passed Friday night party goers here and there, and I wondered with a small, sequestered piece of my awareness what they must have thought of this man struggling along and doubled over, moaning 'Oh God it hurts so bad, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy', over and over.
I finally reached my compartment complex and somehow made it up the stairs. When I got inside, I collapsed onto my mattress. The pain immediately began to relent. Oh man, I just cried myself to sleep with tears of relief.
That was about three hours ago. When I woke up, the stench of stale sweat was ubiquitous. I was actually hungry, which was hard to believe. I nuked a TV dinner and here I am. I think it's time to sleep again, now. I hope I don't wake up again to mortal agony, part 2.
Saturday, September 2, 2017
Oh, it's just a... sad, pathetic tale of whoa.
Preface - lots of cussing coming up. I've cooled off a little since all this shit happened (whoops, pardon my Klingon) and I'm now a teensy bit more, less, emotional. Thus my presence of mind to include this warning. So. On with the shitshow.
.
.
.
Man am I pissed off... oh, so pissed off! Mighty pissed off! You'd be pissed off too, if you had to inhabit this creaky, rotten, son-of-a-bitchin wretched miserable corrupted and fucked up meat machine that I have wrapped around me 24/7!
Is that not clear enough? Is my meaning not seeping through in a satisfactory manner, like some kind of putrid osmosis? Well then, let me get more concise! I can do that, yeah!
Here's what happened. Just about 30 minutes ago, I was walking along and singing a song. Just the happiest bird in the world, tooling along down the avenue, not bothering anybody. Content for a rare couple of seconds. I almost felt like skipping! Isn't that fucking stupid? Yeah! I actually almost felt like skipping!
Ash... you retarded idiot! You teensy weensy, tiny whiney, pee-waddling little man! An instant of bliss is EXPENSIVE, DUMBASS!
Anyway.
Then you wanna know what happened next? Huh? Do you? Huh? Do ya do ya do ya? Are you hanging onto the edge of your seat, waiting for the other shoe to drop, right square on top of my gonads? Right there, in the middle of my testes? Are you ready for that great big merciless stomp that completely smashes my nuts? That's what you're waiting to hear, aren't you? I know, I know! That's all you wanna hear about! You just want to fast-forward to the part where my balls get demolished! You wanna fast forward to that part? To where my testicles get pulverized?
Who wants to get to the good part? I do! Let's go! Yee-Haw! Okay, let's fast forward to the part where I get sterilized by a jackboot!
Like I said awhile ago, I was just walking along, singing a song, thinking about nothing in particular. I probably had a stupid little grin plastered across my face, and my eyes were probably rolled up in this vague little gesture of contemplation about nothing in particular. Why, I might have been scratching my butt. Maybe I was smelling my finger. I could have been picking my nose. It's possible that a little drool could have been escaping my jaw. It was one of those almost perfect existential moments, you know? It was too good to be allowed to exist, because, fuck you, Ash! And that's when my right ankle decided to just up and say YAWN! ::: stretch::: g'nite, asshole, and then it just went BPPPHHTHHBBBTTHHHH!!!
I'm talking about my pristine, uninjured right ankle, not my recently recovered from a twist left ankle! That's my RIGHT ankle, just up and deciding to fuck off to the Blue Hills because it's funny! Tell me that's not premeditated.
Well, I shouldn't have to say that I of course went tumbling, ass over teakettle, and pain was involved. Pain, which quickly transmogrified into blinding white rage. Rage at the injustice. Rage at the scheming. Rage at the mutiny. Rage at the distrust of my body of the captainship of my own mind. Rage at the rage of the rage toward the rage at the rage from the rage of the rage. RAGE! Rage at the word rage because it sounds retarded!
Ok, I'm getting sidetracked by the pure, seething, retarded rage. Whatever, who cares. I survived the tumble and nothing expensive got broken! Fuck you, me! You hear you, me? Fuck me, you!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!?!!
And now everything is all okay again.
:)
.
.
.
Man am I pissed off... oh, so pissed off! Mighty pissed off! You'd be pissed off too, if you had to inhabit this creaky, rotten, son-of-a-bitchin wretched miserable corrupted and fucked up meat machine that I have wrapped around me 24/7!
Is that not clear enough? Is my meaning not seeping through in a satisfactory manner, like some kind of putrid osmosis? Well then, let me get more concise! I can do that, yeah!
Here's what happened. Just about 30 minutes ago, I was walking along and singing a song. Just the happiest bird in the world, tooling along down the avenue, not bothering anybody. Content for a rare couple of seconds. I almost felt like skipping! Isn't that fucking stupid? Yeah! I actually almost felt like skipping!
Ash... you retarded idiot! You teensy weensy, tiny whiney, pee-waddling little man! An instant of bliss is EXPENSIVE, DUMBASS!
Anyway.
Then you wanna know what happened next? Huh? Do you? Huh? Do ya do ya do ya? Are you hanging onto the edge of your seat, waiting for the other shoe to drop, right square on top of my gonads? Right there, in the middle of my testes? Are you ready for that great big merciless stomp that completely smashes my nuts? That's what you're waiting to hear, aren't you? I know, I know! That's all you wanna hear about! You just want to fast-forward to the part where my balls get demolished! You wanna fast forward to that part? To where my testicles get pulverized?
Who wants to get to the good part? I do! Let's go! Yee-Haw! Okay, let's fast forward to the part where I get sterilized by a jackboot!
Like I said awhile ago, I was just walking along, singing a song, thinking about nothing in particular. I probably had a stupid little grin plastered across my face, and my eyes were probably rolled up in this vague little gesture of contemplation about nothing in particular. Why, I might have been scratching my butt. Maybe I was smelling my finger. I could have been picking my nose. It's possible that a little drool could have been escaping my jaw. It was one of those almost perfect existential moments, you know? It was too good to be allowed to exist, because, fuck you, Ash! And that's when my right ankle decided to just up and say YAWN! ::: stretch::: g'nite, asshole, and then it just went BPPPHHTHHBBBTTHHHH!!!
I'm talking about my pristine, uninjured right ankle, not my recently recovered from a twist left ankle! That's my RIGHT ankle, just up and deciding to fuck off to the Blue Hills because it's funny! Tell me that's not premeditated.
Well, I shouldn't have to say that I of course went tumbling, ass over teakettle, and pain was involved. Pain, which quickly transmogrified into blinding white rage. Rage at the injustice. Rage at the scheming. Rage at the mutiny. Rage at the distrust of my body of the captainship of my own mind. Rage at the rage of the rage toward the rage at the rage from the rage of the rage. RAGE! Rage at the word rage because it sounds retarded!
Ok, I'm getting sidetracked by the pure, seething, retarded rage. Whatever, who cares. I survived the tumble and nothing expensive got broken! Fuck you, me! You hear you, me? Fuck me, you!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!?!!
And now everything is all okay again.
:)
Saturday, June 17, 2017
In search of the storm
Tonight there was a supercell lollygagging on the northern horizon, and it was moving south. Toward me. So, I decided to upset the status quo by going out in search of the storm...
But now... 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.
And I sure as hell found it. Good grief, did I ever get pounded. This happened on Hinkle Drive, just north of 380. 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 and to the north, 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. That sight alone made getting drenched totally worth it.
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 and to the north, 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. That sight alone made getting drenched totally worth it.
But now... 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.
Saturday, June 10, 2017
Ow
Today was a singularly unique day and probably the most interesting day of my entire life, as far as brand new experiences go. It began pretty much the same way as any other day. Wake up sleep deprived and a couple of hours away from work with lots of cussing, then unpause last nights aloneliness distraction (Scent of a Woman, Al Pacino and Chris O'Donnel, 1992), then light a cigarette, walk to Kroger, the bank, blah blah blah, etc etc etc. I was happy to discover that I'd begun singing to myself almost exactly after I'd finished with the cussing, which was a good sign that my brain probably wasn't going to spend the day trying to choke the joy and hope out of me with its fresh, malignant tendrils of coiled and blackened hatred. So, yeah, today began on a promising note. I was only seven minutes late to work, and I felt like I was on a pretty good roll until 3:30 rolled around and then this started to happen:
The usual walnut sized knot of dull pain in the lower left portion of my back came awake,
yawned, stretched, and immediately began to twist and tighten into itself while at the same time growing its borders up to regulation baseball size, as if it were attempting to squeeze that part of my back into an infinitely dense singularity of pain. This process took place over the course of about thirty minutes, so by 4:00 a dark gray lump of unrelenting agony, about the size of a grapefruit, was nestled snugly, deep inside the natural bowl-shaped declivity of my pelvis and taking up so much new real estate that it actually felt closer to my guts than my back. What it was doing in there was pushing forward against the wall of my abdomen while twisting in all directions at once, especially inward, as if it were striving for a critical pain threshold which, if crossed, would cause the entirety of me to implode into that grapefruit-shaped region of my lower left abdomen, leaving a 155 pound bloody gobbet, approximately seven inches in diameter, twitching and pulsing behind register 1 in a rude and grotesque manner until it finally collapsed into an extremely dense oblate spheroid of bone, meat, blood, guts and brains, all pulped together into something with about the same consistency of vulcanized rubber.
By 4:30 the pain had become magnificent in its intensity. That's really the only word that comes close to describing those brand new heights of never before experienced agony - magnificent. Its quality was pure, its purpose unwavering, and its delivery was just... relentless, unbroken, and absolutely without mercy. It was an onslaught of mortal agony that just kept going and going and going and going and GOING. I couldn't even think because the experience of it completely devoured my attention, blurring my vision, and holding me in a kind of hellish thrall. For almost two hours I gripped the edge of the counter before me with white knuckles and shook uncontrollably, sweating like a lunatic, with absolutely every muscle in my body clenched up to maximum tension. I was lucky that during the entire happening of it business was extremely slow, and I only had to think above that unending wave of agony a mere handful of times, because doing that was simply... exhausting.
At about 5:45 it started to diminish, and by 6:00 it had become blissfully tolerable again. Still there, of course... but what a blessed relief it was, to experience regular old familiar pain. Good old just pain... never leave me again, please.
The usual walnut sized knot of dull pain in the lower left portion of my back came awake,
yawned, stretched, and immediately began to twist and tighten into itself while at the same time growing its borders up to regulation baseball size, as if it were attempting to squeeze that part of my back into an infinitely dense singularity of pain. This process took place over the course of about thirty minutes, so by 4:00 a dark gray lump of unrelenting agony, about the size of a grapefruit, was nestled snugly, deep inside the natural bowl-shaped declivity of my pelvis and taking up so much new real estate that it actually felt closer to my guts than my back. What it was doing in there was pushing forward against the wall of my abdomen while twisting in all directions at once, especially inward, as if it were striving for a critical pain threshold which, if crossed, would cause the entirety of me to implode into that grapefruit-shaped region of my lower left abdomen, leaving a 155 pound bloody gobbet, approximately seven inches in diameter, twitching and pulsing behind register 1 in a rude and grotesque manner until it finally collapsed into an extremely dense oblate spheroid of bone, meat, blood, guts and brains, all pulped together into something with about the same consistency of vulcanized rubber.
By 4:30 the pain had become magnificent in its intensity. That's really the only word that comes close to describing those brand new heights of never before experienced agony - magnificent. Its quality was pure, its purpose unwavering, and its delivery was just... relentless, unbroken, and absolutely without mercy. It was an onslaught of mortal agony that just kept going and going and going and going and GOING. I couldn't even think because the experience of it completely devoured my attention, blurring my vision, and holding me in a kind of hellish thrall. For almost two hours I gripped the edge of the counter before me with white knuckles and shook uncontrollably, sweating like a lunatic, with absolutely every muscle in my body clenched up to maximum tension. I was lucky that during the entire happening of it business was extremely slow, and I only had to think above that unending wave of agony a mere handful of times, because doing that was simply... exhausting.
At about 5:45 it started to diminish, and by 6:00 it had become blissfully tolerable again. Still there, of course... but what a blessed relief it was, to experience regular old familiar pain. Good old just pain... never leave me again, please.
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
Dearest David
Wednesday
May 24th, 2017
12:45 AM
.
.
.
Dearest David...
Wulp, I guess you've fucked off for good, and I'm not a bit sorry to see you go, you slimy two-faced bastard.
Here's a fun fact:
Every time anyone ever talked disparagingly about you in front of me, do you know what I would always say? Here's what I always said, and I quote myself:
"Yeah, I can see where you're coming from, but I like David." - Ash
That's what I always said, and it was true, because despite everything I really did like you. It was hard NOT to like you. Sharing your lottery wins with me, working a double shift when I was sleep deprived so that I wouldn't have to work ANOTHER one, giving me neurontins, counting my drawer and taking out the cardboard boxes and even offering to work the entire shift by yourself because I was in so much pain... you actually had me feeling genuine gratitude toward you on multiple occasions. To think that there was this evil side to you!
I never would have suspected that the real reason you wanted truck nights was simply because you didn't want to work with me. I mean, that never even would have crossed my mind! What a surprise it was, to learn that.
I was also completely flabbergasted to understand that you could actually think that I'm faking this back pain. You fucker, I hope you catch a good dose of sciatica one day so that you can personally experience how excruciating it is.
Oh, and this next one was a bona-fide sucker punch... that you would suggest something so underhanded, so despicable, so downright sinister as a group conspiracy in the form of anonymous, slanderous letters to corporate in order to have me fired. Insidious! Anonymous letters consisting of what, by the way? You mean how I always gave you the benefit of the doubt after enduring every one of your tantrums? How I continually strove, again and again, to expand my tolerance of your... uh, ways... into a genuine sense of likability? Oh, wait. Was it the nerve, the audacity, the unmitigated GALL I demonstrated that one time when I apologized to you - that you refused to accept - and after which you proceeded to throw that grand mal tantrum? Or was it the time that you threw that neck-vein popping tantrum because I wouldn't submit to your opinion regarding abortion? Or were you just planning to make up a bunch of lies? Or...
Oh. Yeah, of course.
It was that one, single time that I pulled rank on you by telling you not to sell tobacco to that dude after I'd already refused to sell it to him and then you threw that capillary-shattering tantrum, wasn't it? That was it, right? Yeah, that was it, I'm sure of it. That's exactly the kind of mortal offense that your ginormous ego would have no choice but to judge as Unforgivable - being forced to occupy a subordinate role to my position of seniority. I guess the only appropriate response to such an egregious offense (including whatever other infantile grudges you might be nursing) - according to your warped little mind - is revenge, pure and evil.
There are a lot of ways to describe a coward who presents a benign facade to someone, while at the same time contriving to plan a sneak attack from a safe distance:
Scum
Bottom feeder
Sleazy
Rotten
Lowlife
Reptilian
The bad guy
The villain...
In other words, one evil sonofabitch.
I wonder how well liked you'd be if everyone knew what a shit-talking, back-stabbing, petty-minded, conniving little snake you are.
Here's another thing... you weren't the second shift supervisor, by the way. Ever. Maybe you never understood what I'm about to tell you because I never lorded it over you, but I'm the second shift supervisor. Surprise! That's the title that Chiy gave me when he hired me seven years ago. Not that it really means all that much to anyone except you. So riddle me this - if you really were the second shift supervisor, and not just under that impression, then how could you have just up and fucked off from your job like you did after agreeing to see out the month? Huh? Riddle me that!
Here's a tidbit of wisdom for future reference... supervisors are expected to handle a difficult situation maturely and professionally, and not by throwing a tantrum like a little girl.
Now, with all of that having been said...
You've got a lot of good qualities, David. You're friendly, hard working, responsible, generous, and (mostly) reliable. However, at the same time you suck a big fat slimy green donkey dick, which pretty much takes a steaming Jolly Green Giant shit all over your good qualities and makes them worthless. I hope for your sake that someday you can get a handle on that, the giant green, donkey sucking, shit dicking thing, because if you ever did...
Well! Then you might actually qualify as a genuinely good person, instead of just coming off as one.
- Ash
.
.
.
p.s. If you care anything at all about NOT being a giant douche bag, then you should take everything I've just said to heart. All of it is nothing less than the truth.
p.p.s. Oh, and about me being lazy... if that's what you really believe, then fuck you.
p.p.p.s. Good luck.
May 24th, 2017
12:45 AM
.
.
.
Dearest David...
Wulp, I guess you've fucked off for good, and I'm not a bit sorry to see you go, you slimy two-faced bastard.
Here's a fun fact:
Every time anyone ever talked disparagingly about you in front of me, do you know what I would always say? Here's what I always said, and I quote myself:
"Yeah, I can see where you're coming from, but I like David." - Ash
That's what I always said, and it was true, because despite everything I really did like you. It was hard NOT to like you. Sharing your lottery wins with me, working a double shift when I was sleep deprived so that I wouldn't have to work ANOTHER one, giving me neurontins, counting my drawer and taking out the cardboard boxes and even offering to work the entire shift by yourself because I was in so much pain... you actually had me feeling genuine gratitude toward you on multiple occasions. To think that there was this evil side to you!
I never would have suspected that the real reason you wanted truck nights was simply because you didn't want to work with me. I mean, that never even would have crossed my mind! What a surprise it was, to learn that.
I was also completely flabbergasted to understand that you could actually think that I'm faking this back pain. You fucker, I hope you catch a good dose of sciatica one day so that you can personally experience how excruciating it is.
Oh, and this next one was a bona-fide sucker punch... that you would suggest something so underhanded, so despicable, so downright sinister as a group conspiracy in the form of anonymous, slanderous letters to corporate in order to have me fired. Insidious! Anonymous letters consisting of what, by the way? You mean how I always gave you the benefit of the doubt after enduring every one of your tantrums? How I continually strove, again and again, to expand my tolerance of your... uh, ways... into a genuine sense of likability? Oh, wait. Was it the nerve, the audacity, the unmitigated GALL I demonstrated that one time when I apologized to you - that you refused to accept - and after which you proceeded to throw that grand mal tantrum? Or was it the time that you threw that neck-vein popping tantrum because I wouldn't submit to your opinion regarding abortion? Or were you just planning to make up a bunch of lies? Or...
Oh. Yeah, of course.
It was that one, single time that I pulled rank on you by telling you not to sell tobacco to that dude after I'd already refused to sell it to him and then you threw that capillary-shattering tantrum, wasn't it? That was it, right? Yeah, that was it, I'm sure of it. That's exactly the kind of mortal offense that your ginormous ego would have no choice but to judge as Unforgivable - being forced to occupy a subordinate role to my position of seniority. I guess the only appropriate response to such an egregious offense (including whatever other infantile grudges you might be nursing) - according to your warped little mind - is revenge, pure and evil.
There are a lot of ways to describe a coward who presents a benign facade to someone, while at the same time contriving to plan a sneak attack from a safe distance:
Scum
Bottom feeder
Sleazy
Rotten
Lowlife
Reptilian
The bad guy
The villain...
In other words, one evil sonofabitch.
I wonder how well liked you'd be if everyone knew what a shit-talking, back-stabbing, petty-minded, conniving little snake you are.
Here's another thing... you weren't the second shift supervisor, by the way. Ever. Maybe you never understood what I'm about to tell you because I never lorded it over you, but I'm the second shift supervisor. Surprise! That's the title that Chiy gave me when he hired me seven years ago. Not that it really means all that much to anyone except you. So riddle me this - if you really were the second shift supervisor, and not just under that impression, then how could you have just up and fucked off from your job like you did after agreeing to see out the month? Huh? Riddle me that!
Here's a tidbit of wisdom for future reference... supervisors are expected to handle a difficult situation maturely and professionally, and not by throwing a tantrum like a little girl.
Now, with all of that having been said...
You've got a lot of good qualities, David. You're friendly, hard working, responsible, generous, and (mostly) reliable. However, at the same time you suck a big fat slimy green donkey dick, which pretty much takes a steaming Jolly Green Giant shit all over your good qualities and makes them worthless. I hope for your sake that someday you can get a handle on that, the giant green, donkey sucking, shit dicking thing, because if you ever did...
Well! Then you might actually qualify as a genuinely good person, instead of just coming off as one.
- Ash
.
.
.
p.s. If you care anything at all about NOT being a giant douche bag, then you should take everything I've just said to heart. All of it is nothing less than the truth.
p.p.s. Oh, and about me being lazy... if that's what you really believe, then fuck you.
p.p.p.s. Good luck.
Saturday, May 13, 2017
Meat machine
I'd forgotten how much I hate my ankle. My stupid, treacherous, Benedict Arnold ankle... ankles, actually. There's no telling which one of these treasonous little bastards is apt to pull a shenanigan. Just now it was the left one.
It's been about 3 months since one of these little turd knockers up and said, "Surprise! Did you miss me? Oh, and by the way, ef you, Ash! Enjoy some undeserved excruciation as I abandon my duties as a crucial load-bearing structure and just ef off to the Blue Hills, for absolutely no reason at all! HAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!!"
I'm pretty much powerless here. I can't punish my ankles, because then I'd just be doing their job for them. Same goes for my brain. I can't just put a bullet through it when it's torturing me with sleep deprivation, because my brain knows that it's the pimp and I'm the ho, and that the ho cannot survive without the pimp.
Oh. And now the back has decided to join leagues with the brain and the ankles. WTF, back? What did I ever do to you to deserve this betrayal?
And since the back pretty much has jurisdiction over the sciatic nerve, the sciatic nerve has no choice but to go along with the back, whether it wants to or not... and with the sciatic nerve comes the hip, the butt, the thigh, the knee - pretty much the entire drumstick.
It's like, more and more every day I'm coming to realize that I'm this alive awareness imbedded inside of this really fascinating universe, and I'm allowed to witness and think about and marvel at all of the astonishing things that surround me... but because of some cruel, twisted and powerful outside determination, I have to be slaved to this... meat machine... and forced to rely on it as a means for my continued existence here.
It's not even a quality meat machine. It's a bargain bin meat machine, a flea market meat machine, a meat machine of low quality and prone to failure.
This is all somebody's idea of a practical joke, I'm sure that it is... and it ain't right, man. It just ain't right.
It's been about 3 months since one of these little turd knockers up and said, "Surprise! Did you miss me? Oh, and by the way, ef you, Ash! Enjoy some undeserved excruciation as I abandon my duties as a crucial load-bearing structure and just ef off to the Blue Hills, for absolutely no reason at all! HAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!!"
I'm pretty much powerless here. I can't punish my ankles, because then I'd just be doing their job for them. Same goes for my brain. I can't just put a bullet through it when it's torturing me with sleep deprivation, because my brain knows that it's the pimp and I'm the ho, and that the ho cannot survive without the pimp.
Oh. And now the back has decided to join leagues with the brain and the ankles. WTF, back? What did I ever do to you to deserve this betrayal?
And since the back pretty much has jurisdiction over the sciatic nerve, the sciatic nerve has no choice but to go along with the back, whether it wants to or not... and with the sciatic nerve comes the hip, the butt, the thigh, the knee - pretty much the entire drumstick.
It's like, more and more every day I'm coming to realize that I'm this alive awareness imbedded inside of this really fascinating universe, and I'm allowed to witness and think about and marvel at all of the astonishing things that surround me... but because of some cruel, twisted and powerful outside determination, I have to be slaved to this... meat machine... and forced to rely on it as a means for my continued existence here.
It's not even a quality meat machine. It's a bargain bin meat machine, a flea market meat machine, a meat machine of low quality and prone to failure.
This is all somebody's idea of a practical joke, I'm sure that it is... and it ain't right, man. It just ain't right.
Thursday, May 11, 2017
The Burrito Thing - a comprehensive review
The Burrito Thing
A Comprehensive Review
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.
.
Almost exactly 30 minutes ago from now, I opened the door to my microwave oven to discover it lying there on the glass plate rotater, still wrapped in wax paper - the burrito thing.
Logic insists that I must have put it there, but I simply do not remember anything about this burrito thing or where it came from. I know that my tolerance for alcohol precludes blackouts nowadays, so just how did this burrito thing emerge here, and now?
After examining the label on the wax paper, I understand that the burrito thing obviously comes from where I work, somehow... but how did it get here, all the way from the trash dumpster at my workplace, to the inside of my microwave oven?
That's the mystery! I'm too tired to solve it right now, and I was too tired to solve it when I ate it 10 minutes ago... so please enjoy this review of the mystery steak and egg wrapped in a flour tortilla burrito thing from the write-off pit where I work.
Firstly, I was somewhat trepidatious upon discovering this burrito thing sitting there inside my microwave oven, when all I wanted to do was warm up my 4-Loko so it didn't hurt my throat so much when I chugged it. It was a combination of frustrated bafflement at the stymieing of my objective, overlaid on top of the sudden remembrance of hunger which I'd forgotten about, about an hour ago, that frustrated me so.
Secondly, I was just a little bit deeply concerned that I had no memory of this burrito thing, or how it had gotten there on my microwave plate inside my microwave, because surely I had placed it there... unless... someone else had placed it there, for their own nefarious reasons. Whatev.
I quickly decided that a minute and 30 seconds would be enough time to nuke the poison to death, so I nuked it for a minute and 30 seconds and then I ate it.
My conclusion is that it wasn't very good. It was all breakfasty, and not enough like dinner when you're in the mood for dinner. Plus the ever-present thought of the possibility of dying with every bite helped to make it less enjoyable.
All in all I'd rate the burrito thing as adequate as emergency sustenance for Russians in the event of a nuclear attack.
A Comprehensive Review
.
.
.
Almost exactly 30 minutes ago from now, I opened the door to my microwave oven to discover it lying there on the glass plate rotater, still wrapped in wax paper - the burrito thing.
Logic insists that I must have put it there, but I simply do not remember anything about this burrito thing or where it came from. I know that my tolerance for alcohol precludes blackouts nowadays, so just how did this burrito thing emerge here, and now?
After examining the label on the wax paper, I understand that the burrito thing obviously comes from where I work, somehow... but how did it get here, all the way from the trash dumpster at my workplace, to the inside of my microwave oven?
That's the mystery! I'm too tired to solve it right now, and I was too tired to solve it when I ate it 10 minutes ago... so please enjoy this review of the mystery steak and egg wrapped in a flour tortilla burrito thing from the write-off pit where I work.
Firstly, I was somewhat trepidatious upon discovering this burrito thing sitting there inside my microwave oven, when all I wanted to do was warm up my 4-Loko so it didn't hurt my throat so much when I chugged it. It was a combination of frustrated bafflement at the stymieing of my objective, overlaid on top of the sudden remembrance of hunger which I'd forgotten about, about an hour ago, that frustrated me so.
Secondly, I was just a little bit deeply concerned that I had no memory of this burrito thing, or how it had gotten there on my microwave plate inside my microwave, because surely I had placed it there... unless... someone else had placed it there, for their own nefarious reasons. Whatev.
I quickly decided that a minute and 30 seconds would be enough time to nuke the poison to death, so I nuked it for a minute and 30 seconds and then I ate it.
My conclusion is that it wasn't very good. It was all breakfasty, and not enough like dinner when you're in the mood for dinner. Plus the ever-present thought of the possibility of dying with every bite helped to make it less enjoyable.
All in all I'd rate the burrito thing as adequate as emergency sustenance for Russians in the event of a nuclear attack.
Tuesday, May 9, 2017
A dream - the end
A dream - the end
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.
.
I peeked out my window, expecting to see a clear sky, but thunderheads roiled menacingly on the horizon. I hurried outside for a better look. The sky above was still clear, and directly above I saw four parallel contrails racing across the sky, far faster than jets... re-entry trails, like meteors but persistent. There was a series of four loud concussions - their sonic booms - as they disappeared behind the thunderheads, and then a flash erupted, disrupting the storm system and blowing it away. I watched as the flash faded over the course of about five seconds, and a mushroom cloud hurled into the sky. About thirty seconds later there was a deafening KA-POW that became a thunderous rumble, followed a few seconds later by a blast of hot air that knocked me to the ground. I got up in time to see three flashes in quick succession light up the horizon beyond the still rising form of the mushroom cloud.
Those were aimed at Dallas, I thought to myself. The first one missed.
I ran across the pasture to the nearby lake to check my water farm, a system of dozens of long organic tubers rooted to the lake bottom and held bouyant on the surface by air filled sacks. It was a system for drawing fresh water from underground reservoirs, and I would need it to survive. When I arrived I found the entire length of it, about twenty meters, coiled up and floating on the surface of the lake, dead. Someone had uprooted it, for what purpose, I had no idea. I drew it from the lake and held the large, round bulbous roots in my arms and cried. I pierced the air sacks and let it float to the bottom.
It was growing dark when the sky lit up with dozens of popcorn flashes, like rapid fireworks - some seemingly random, and some forming lines that spanned the horizons. Satellite killers, I thought. This is it, then.
To the northeast another flash engulfed the horizon, followed by another, more distant mushroom cloud.
That's the Red River army depot...
.
.
.
I peeked out my window, expecting to see a clear sky, but thunderheads roiled menacingly on the horizon. I hurried outside for a better look. The sky above was still clear, and directly above I saw four parallel contrails racing across the sky, far faster than jets... re-entry trails, like meteors but persistent. There was a series of four loud concussions - their sonic booms - as they disappeared behind the thunderheads, and then a flash erupted, disrupting the storm system and blowing it away. I watched as the flash faded over the course of about five seconds, and a mushroom cloud hurled into the sky. About thirty seconds later there was a deafening KA-POW that became a thunderous rumble, followed a few seconds later by a blast of hot air that knocked me to the ground. I got up in time to see three flashes in quick succession light up the horizon beyond the still rising form of the mushroom cloud.
Those were aimed at Dallas, I thought to myself. The first one missed.
I ran across the pasture to the nearby lake to check my water farm, a system of dozens of long organic tubers rooted to the lake bottom and held bouyant on the surface by air filled sacks. It was a system for drawing fresh water from underground reservoirs, and I would need it to survive. When I arrived I found the entire length of it, about twenty meters, coiled up and floating on the surface of the lake, dead. Someone had uprooted it, for what purpose, I had no idea. I drew it from the lake and held the large, round bulbous roots in my arms and cried. I pierced the air sacks and let it float to the bottom.
It was growing dark when the sky lit up with dozens of popcorn flashes, like rapid fireworks - some seemingly random, and some forming lines that spanned the horizons. Satellite killers, I thought. This is it, then.
To the northeast another flash engulfed the horizon, followed by another, more distant mushroom cloud.
That's the Red River army depot...
Monday, May 8, 2017
Dempsey Witt
70 years old. The sheriff of Podunk county, Georgia. Suicidal.
Dempsey Witt, the only child of Vera and Hank Witt, was born on December 31st, 1971 in the small town of Fireworks, Georgia. His parents divorced in 1987 when he was 15, and his mother remarried in 1988 to Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade of the United States Army.
His father Hank was a bootlegger and moonshine runner, known for his specific brand of moonshine, Smokin' Hank's Double Rectified. As a boy, Dempsey spent summers with his father, who taught him everything about distilling spirits, as he expected the boy to take over 'the family business' when he turned 16.
Dempsey graduated from Paul Pewitt High School in June, 1989 and attended Southeast Georgia Community College in nearby Mt. Tolerance, Georgia and studied basic curriculum until 1992. He then went to work at the local fireworks factory, which employed about half of the residents of Fireworks. It was there that he developed a fascination for explosives and, with the enthusiastic help of his stepfather, became quite adept at creating his own explosive devices, from small scale firecrackers to full blown hand grenades.
In1993 Frank Slade, Dempsey's stepfather, was demonstrating an exercise in hand-eye coordination to a group of new recruits by juggling six live hand grenades and taking shots of Smokin' Hank's Double Rectified for each grenade that he dropped (Frank was a long time customer of Hank Witt). Unbeknownst to Frank at the time, one of the six grenades he was juggling had lost its pin, and it exploded when it was at the height of its arc, about fifteen feet above his head. Luckily for Frank, most of the shrapnel exploded outward and not downward, but as he had been looking up when it happened, the shock liquefied his eyeballs, blinding him instantly. Frank had believed that teaching hand-eye coordination to new recruits was an invaluable lesson, and that his drunken grenade juggling method of instruction was superior - the reason being that if you could learn to juggle hand grenades while drunk, just think how good you'd be if you were sober.
When Dempsey learned of his stepfathers drunk grenade juggling accident, he thought it was the funniest and most bad-ass thing he'd ever heard, especially after Frank had wiggled out of a court martial and was honorably discharged. Dempsey began to consider joining the army as a result of his admiration for his stepfather, and a growing feeling of obligation as a stepson.
It was due to an encounter with recruiters at a McDonalds in Atlanta, where Dempsey was recognized by the two recruiters as being the stepson of Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade and belittled with questions and assumptions of whether or not he planned on continuing the step-family tradition of drunkerds juggling explosives, that made up his mind. He gave both recruiters the double bird and headed to the nearest recruiting office and joined, right then and there.
He scored in the top tenth of a percent on his ASVAB and was fast-tracked through college for his bachelor's degree and placed in officer training school.
Blah blah blah something else happens.
Geez I gotta do this shit for another dozen characters.
Dempsey Witt, the only child of Vera and Hank Witt, was born on December 31st, 1971 in the small town of Fireworks, Georgia. His parents divorced in 1987 when he was 15, and his mother remarried in 1988 to Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade of the United States Army.
His father Hank was a bootlegger and moonshine runner, known for his specific brand of moonshine, Smokin' Hank's Double Rectified. As a boy, Dempsey spent summers with his father, who taught him everything about distilling spirits, as he expected the boy to take over 'the family business' when he turned 16.
Dempsey graduated from Paul Pewitt High School in June, 1989 and attended Southeast Georgia Community College in nearby Mt. Tolerance, Georgia and studied basic curriculum until 1992. He then went to work at the local fireworks factory, which employed about half of the residents of Fireworks. It was there that he developed a fascination for explosives and, with the enthusiastic help of his stepfather, became quite adept at creating his own explosive devices, from small scale firecrackers to full blown hand grenades.
In1993 Frank Slade, Dempsey's stepfather, was demonstrating an exercise in hand-eye coordination to a group of new recruits by juggling six live hand grenades and taking shots of Smokin' Hank's Double Rectified for each grenade that he dropped (Frank was a long time customer of Hank Witt). Unbeknownst to Frank at the time, one of the six grenades he was juggling had lost its pin, and it exploded when it was at the height of its arc, about fifteen feet above his head. Luckily for Frank, most of the shrapnel exploded outward and not downward, but as he had been looking up when it happened, the shock liquefied his eyeballs, blinding him instantly. Frank had believed that teaching hand-eye coordination to new recruits was an invaluable lesson, and that his drunken grenade juggling method of instruction was superior - the reason being that if you could learn to juggle hand grenades while drunk, just think how good you'd be if you were sober.
When Dempsey learned of his stepfathers drunk grenade juggling accident, he thought it was the funniest and most bad-ass thing he'd ever heard, especially after Frank had wiggled out of a court martial and was honorably discharged. Dempsey began to consider joining the army as a result of his admiration for his stepfather, and a growing feeling of obligation as a stepson.
It was due to an encounter with recruiters at a McDonalds in Atlanta, where Dempsey was recognized by the two recruiters as being the stepson of Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade and belittled with questions and assumptions of whether or not he planned on continuing the step-family tradition of drunkerds juggling explosives, that made up his mind. He gave both recruiters the double bird and headed to the nearest recruiting office and joined, right then and there.
He scored in the top tenth of a percent on his ASVAB and was fast-tracked through college for his bachelor's degree and placed in officer training school.
Blah blah blah something else happens.
Geez I gotta do this shit for another dozen characters.
Dickjackson Jones
Dickjackson Jones -
This is the essence of his character, or the nucleus.
* He's a socially high-functioning autistic
* He's a genius with an IQ of 200
* His focus, his passion, his obsession, is everything to do with air and space flight
* He's had no formal schooling beyond the 5th grade
* He's a self-taught aerospace engineer
* He's a self-taught freelance test pilot
* He's the commander of the Flying Turtle
* He began to have recurring dreams about Mars in 1996 when Pathfinder landed on Mars and, he believed, immediately began beaming signals directly into his brain
* He has since suffered with frequent cycles of cluster headaches
* He has a recurring dream of Olympus Mons, a volcano on Mars, erupting and blowing gentle smoke signals of peace into space from its dormant caldera
* He's certain that his dreams of Mars are somehow related to what he believes to be the signal from Pathfinder but he doesn't know why or how
* When he dreams of Olympus Mons it triggers a new cycle of cluster headaches
* After each cluster cycle his dream of Olympus Mons becomes more frequent and vivid
* Each time he dreams, he is on the cusp of discovering the meaning of his dream, and a new and even more intense cluster cycle is triggered, which shatters his burgeoning understanding
* The repeating cycles of almost comprehension followed by agonized confusion is surely driving him insane
* During his brief periods of lucidity between dream/cluster cycles he feels a growing certainty that his dream is telling him that he has to travel to Mars to find an answer for... something, and that his headaches are inflicted upon him by... something, in order to prevent him from taking action against... something
* He understands and takes seriously the possibility that his entire life is merely an insane hallucination resulting from the mental breakdown of a self-stranger with whom he feels no connection or identity whatsoever
* He is capable of displaying absolutely no outward signs of pain when experiencing the Mortal Agony of a cluster headache, which effectively hides his condition from everyone
WHAT HE WANTS
* Dickjackson Jones wants relief from his cluster headaches, so that...
* He can be rid of the pain, so that...
* He'll be able to think clearly, so that...
* He can finally understand what his recurring dream of Olympus Mons is trying to tell him, so that...
* He can FLY.
WHY HE WANTS IT
* He's terrified of an infinite universe that exists without a meaning or purpose
* He's desperate to discover a meaning, a purpose, or simply a reason for why anything even exists at all
* He's fundamentally afraid that his joy of flying and everything to do with flight, which he believes comprises the sole reason for his existence, might be as meaningless as a dung beetle pushing a ball of shit
* He wants to be comforted with the knowledge of something larger than himself
HOW HE'S GETTING IT
* He steals the Flying Turtle mid-mission and sets course to Mars, to follow his dream.
This is the essence of his character, or the nucleus.
* He's a socially high-functioning autistic
* He's a genius with an IQ of 200
* His focus, his passion, his obsession, is everything to do with air and space flight
* He's had no formal schooling beyond the 5th grade
* He's a self-taught aerospace engineer
* He's a self-taught freelance test pilot
* He's the commander of the Flying Turtle
* He began to have recurring dreams about Mars in 1996 when Pathfinder landed on Mars and, he believed, immediately began beaming signals directly into his brain
* He has since suffered with frequent cycles of cluster headaches
* He has a recurring dream of Olympus Mons, a volcano on Mars, erupting and blowing gentle smoke signals of peace into space from its dormant caldera
* He's certain that his dreams of Mars are somehow related to what he believes to be the signal from Pathfinder but he doesn't know why or how
* When he dreams of Olympus Mons it triggers a new cycle of cluster headaches
* After each cluster cycle his dream of Olympus Mons becomes more frequent and vivid
* Each time he dreams, he is on the cusp of discovering the meaning of his dream, and a new and even more intense cluster cycle is triggered, which shatters his burgeoning understanding
* The repeating cycles of almost comprehension followed by agonized confusion is surely driving him insane
* During his brief periods of lucidity between dream/cluster cycles he feels a growing certainty that his dream is telling him that he has to travel to Mars to find an answer for... something, and that his headaches are inflicted upon him by... something, in order to prevent him from taking action against... something
* He understands and takes seriously the possibility that his entire life is merely an insane hallucination resulting from the mental breakdown of a self-stranger with whom he feels no connection or identity whatsoever
* He is capable of displaying absolutely no outward signs of pain when experiencing the Mortal Agony of a cluster headache, which effectively hides his condition from everyone
WHAT HE WANTS
* Dickjackson Jones wants relief from his cluster headaches, so that...
* He can be rid of the pain, so that...
* He'll be able to think clearly, so that...
* He can finally understand what his recurring dream of Olympus Mons is trying to tell him, so that...
* He can FLY.
WHY HE WANTS IT
* He's terrified of an infinite universe that exists without a meaning or purpose
* He's desperate to discover a meaning, a purpose, or simply a reason for why anything even exists at all
* He's fundamentally afraid that his joy of flying and everything to do with flight, which he believes comprises the sole reason for his existence, might be as meaningless as a dung beetle pushing a ball of shit
* He wants to be comforted with the knowledge of something larger than himself
HOW HE'S GETTING IT
* He steals the Flying Turtle mid-mission and sets course to Mars, to follow his dream.
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
dramatis personae non grata
Dramatis Personae Non Grata
* denotes point of view character
.
.
.
* DickJackson Jones - First half Aborigine/half Irish Inuit astronaut, commander of The Flying Turtle, an advanced SSTO spaceplane prototype based on the X-33 VentureStar, equipped with the first practical EM drive
Roger Dodger - Kiss ass white boy and pilot of The Flying Turtle, first white boy left on Mars
Ramona Tostada - First female Mexican astronaut (later remanded to zeroth) and mission specialist aboard The Flying Turtle, Two Dog Night Light operator
Charles 'Charlie' Caoutchouc-Jambes - French Vietnamese rubber tycoon and astronaut tourist aboard The Flying Turtle
Pinot Noir - Chinese peasant and homebrew inventor of the Long March Bottlerocket
* Skyler Montgomery - American physicist and inventor of the Two Dog Night Light, aka moonbeam, brrr-beam, lunar laser, looneybeam, crazylaser, ice box beam, a lasing heat sink aka freeze ray
Mung Bean - British physicist and winner of the Nobel Food Prize for splitting the ham-burger
Thaddeus Thomas - Amish inventor of the Pulverizorator, the ultimate farming implement
Sabathius Malachi - Amish usurper of the Pulverizorator, repurposed as the Ultimate Death Dealer for the SCSG
* Bobbie Kay Rudolph - American theoretical physicist at CERN, responsible for creating the dimensional rift into the Infinite Realm of The Far Flung Hunger by colliding anti-martinis molecules at light speed with the Great Big Giant Hadron Collider while shitfaced
Sir Ferlin Goolsby - President of the United States of America and Baja, California
Terri Peterson - Secretary of Defense
Terd Burgleson - White House press secretary
John 'Rocketman' Elton - NASA administrator
Sargent Schneider Schnitzkies - drill sargeant, US Army
* Captain Killian Gore - Captain of the USS Donald Trump aircraft carrier carrier, US Navy
Little Big Junior - American AM radio talk show personality, founder of the Little Big Brother Tea Party party
Walks Carefully On Eggshells Like A Bear - Russian double agent adopted by Navajos at birth
Pyotor the Awesome - Tsar of the Soviet Confederate State of Georgia, aka Ivan the Awful
* Generalissimus Nathanial Warbottom - reluctant Lord Marshal of the SCSG armed forces
Olivier Bustier - Engagé Volontaire in the French Foreign Legion and sole survivor of the Gay Bomb
* Dempsey 'Dim' Witt - moonshine bootlegger and Commissar General of the SCSG Coordinated Information Apparatus
* Svetlana 'SuperSvet' Hicks - special agent of the Apparatchik Chicks
Apparatchik Chicks - elite all-female SCSG battalion of the Coordinated Information Apparatus
Stardog - lead singer for Stardog Champion, a Seattle based band from American annexed Baja, California
* Dreyfus Marlowe - convenience store clerk and heroin addict with a heart of gold from Austin, Texas
Todd Trilby - Pothead psychonaut, Dreyfus's best friend, aka Toddmonsah, Monstah Boy, Monstobulous
Ignatius - demon from hell and Dreyfus Marlowe's heroin dealer and tormentor
Bad Friday - shipwrecked Rapa Nui serial killer
* Purl Ashblaque - gunslinging grunge wizard, summoned via DMT by Toddmonsah to battle Ignatius
Charnala - former gunslinger turned witch and Purl Asheblaque's sworn enemy
Mrs. Bojangles - Canadian high school algebra teacher and cast iron bitch
Ricardo 'Dick' Cabeza de Queso - Mexican cheese smuggler and Ramona Tostada's older brother
* Twit and Twat - two highly intelligent African Grey Parrots constantly bumbling into Deus ex Machinas
Phuc Sum Yun Gy - South Korean internet troll, grammar Nazi and Best Paladin WOW gamer
Emperor Cannibalus the Starvling - Dark Lord and Emperor of the Infinite Realm of the Far Flung Hunger
* Ash - Praetor to Cannibalus the Starvling
Xdfhitef - 'The Stupidest Genius', an alien demigod exiled from the 13th dimension, aka the devil, Lucifer, Satan
God - God the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible, aka Yaweh, Jehovah, Yeshua, Joshua, Jesus, The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit, The Holy Ghost, The Holy Trinity
Ball - just the cutest kitten, ever.
* denotes point of view character
.
.
.
* DickJackson Jones - First half Aborigine/half Irish Inuit astronaut, commander of The Flying Turtle, an advanced SSTO spaceplane prototype based on the X-33 VentureStar, equipped with the first practical EM drive
Roger Dodger - Kiss ass white boy and pilot of The Flying Turtle, first white boy left on Mars
Ramona Tostada - First female Mexican astronaut (later remanded to zeroth) and mission specialist aboard The Flying Turtle, Two Dog Night Light operator
Charles 'Charlie' Caoutchouc-Jambes - French Vietnamese rubber tycoon and astronaut tourist aboard The Flying Turtle
Pinot Noir - Chinese peasant and homebrew inventor of the Long March Bottlerocket
* Skyler Montgomery - American physicist and inventor of the Two Dog Night Light, aka moonbeam, brrr-beam, lunar laser, looneybeam, crazylaser, ice box beam, a lasing heat sink aka freeze ray
Mung Bean - British physicist and winner of the Nobel Food Prize for splitting the ham-burger
Thaddeus Thomas - Amish inventor of the Pulverizorator, the ultimate farming implement
Sabathius Malachi - Amish usurper of the Pulverizorator, repurposed as the Ultimate Death Dealer for the SCSG
* Bobbie Kay Rudolph - American theoretical physicist at CERN, responsible for creating the dimensional rift into the Infinite Realm of The Far Flung Hunger by colliding anti-martinis molecules at light speed with the Great Big Giant Hadron Collider while shitfaced
Sir Ferlin Goolsby - President of the United States of America and Baja, California
Terri Peterson - Secretary of Defense
Terd Burgleson - White House press secretary
John 'Rocketman' Elton - NASA administrator
Sargent Schneider Schnitzkies - drill sargeant, US Army
* Captain Killian Gore - Captain of the USS Donald Trump aircraft carrier carrier, US Navy
Little Big Junior - American AM radio talk show personality, founder of the Little Big Brother Tea Party party
Walks Carefully On Eggshells Like A Bear - Russian double agent adopted by Navajos at birth
Pyotor the Awesome - Tsar of the Soviet Confederate State of Georgia, aka Ivan the Awful
* Generalissimus Nathanial Warbottom - reluctant Lord Marshal of the SCSG armed forces
Olivier Bustier - Engagé Volontaire in the French Foreign Legion and sole survivor of the Gay Bomb
* Dempsey 'Dim' Witt - moonshine bootlegger and Commissar General of the SCSG Coordinated Information Apparatus
* Svetlana 'SuperSvet' Hicks - special agent of the Apparatchik Chicks
Apparatchik Chicks - elite all-female SCSG battalion of the Coordinated Information Apparatus
Stardog - lead singer for Stardog Champion, a Seattle based band from American annexed Baja, California
* Dreyfus Marlowe - convenience store clerk and heroin addict with a heart of gold from Austin, Texas
Todd Trilby - Pothead psychonaut, Dreyfus's best friend, aka Toddmonsah, Monstah Boy, Monstobulous
Ignatius - demon from hell and Dreyfus Marlowe's heroin dealer and tormentor
Bad Friday - shipwrecked Rapa Nui serial killer
* Purl Ashblaque - gunslinging grunge wizard, summoned via DMT by Toddmonsah to battle Ignatius
Charnala - former gunslinger turned witch and Purl Asheblaque's sworn enemy
Mrs. Bojangles - Canadian high school algebra teacher and cast iron bitch
Ricardo 'Dick' Cabeza de Queso - Mexican cheese smuggler and Ramona Tostada's older brother
* Twit and Twat - two highly intelligent African Grey Parrots constantly bumbling into Deus ex Machinas
Phuc Sum Yun Gy - South Korean internet troll, grammar Nazi and Best Paladin WOW gamer
Emperor Cannibalus the Starvling - Dark Lord and Emperor of the Infinite Realm of the Far Flung Hunger
* Ash - Praetor to Cannibalus the Starvling
Xdfhitef - 'The Stupidest Genius', an alien demigod exiled from the 13th dimension, aka the devil, Lucifer, Satan
God - God the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible, aka Yaweh, Jehovah, Yeshua, Joshua, Jesus, The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit, The Holy Ghost, The Holy Trinity
Ball - just the cutest kitten, ever.
screaming eyeballs
Dreyfus patted himself down and located his cigarettes in his right front hip pocket, then did it again to locate his lighter. He stopped walking and pulled a smoke from the pack and cupped it up to his face with both hands to shield it from the wind. After a couple of faulty flicks, he turned around, away from the wind, so that he was facing the direction from which he'd just been walking. * flick, flick * Then there was a sudden flame, well shielded from the wind by the brunt of his back and by his little two-handed cave. The lighter flame was brilliant to Dreyfus's dark adjusted eyes and left a stark, orange afterimage imprinted upon his retinas. It took about half a minute for the afterimage to fade, and when it finally did, Dreyfus was just about to spin aroud and resume his walk when he thought he saw a shadow of something just barely beyond the floating blue gauze left behind by the brilliant orange. Something... unfriendly, was the only word he could think to describe it. Something that was moving toward him.
Suddenly Dreyfus was flat out terrified, and the thought of looking up to see what was moving toward him rendered him completely paralyzed and unable to move. Instead, he just stared at the bright cherry of his cigarette and tried to take a small measure of comfort from the light of it. As he stared, it seemed as through the cherry was shrinking, becoming smaller and smaller, but also brighter and brighter. As it shrunk, the surrounding blackness collapsed into it, making it ever smaller but ever brighter, until all he could see was one excruciatingly brilliant pinpoint of orange, surrounded by a thick, suffocating darkness that pulsated, like a reverse ripple effect, moving inward and collapsing in shrinking waves toward him at the center.
This is what it feels like to play hide and seek with the devil, Dreyfus thought to himself. Or was it tag? Playing tag with the devil? Was that the game he was playing? Had been playing, for the last fifteen years? With the devil? Was that really what he'd been doing? He could hardly credit the thought...
Suddenly it felt to Dreyfus as though he'd been torpedoed, right in the gut and just below the belly button. It was like a dense, liquid compression wave that expanded, but instead of moving outward, it went DOWN. Not down as in toward his feet or the ground, but into another direction of down that went deep inside of him. Down through a dimension where local gravity is expressed in units of pain, and altitude is measured in painful increments. Down down down went the compression wave, compressing and liquifying and squeezing his guts ever downward toward some hard, flat surface of smooth, limitless agony that lay waiting below. Dreyfus felt it all in exquisite detail as it happened, and it even seemed to him as though he could hear it... a rumbling deepness that vibrated like a subwoofer, going lower and louder until it passed beyond hearing and crossed over entirely into pain. Dreyfus's world had suddenly collapsed into a singularity of simple feeling. No need for fancy grammar, parts of speech, sentence structure, or complex rules of rhetoric. The language of this place consisted of just one word-like concept... suffering.
Terrible. It just terrible. The awfulest... jst the worst, the very worst, ever. Just acknowledging the reality of the vague shape that he'd actually seen which precipitated this dip into tangible agony made his eyeballs want to scream forever. Yet despite the reality of actually being inside of such an impossible horror, the thought of his eyeballs screaming for eternity - two eternally pissed off eyeballs inside of his sleep deprived head, constantly bitching inward at his shriveled, unslept brain, for eternity - made Dreyfus chuckle under the ocean of pain, just a little. Suddenly it was the funniest thing he'd ever known, and simply because it was all wrapped inside the absurdity of this evil, insidious, unrelenting suffering. Dreyfus laughed out loud! Why? Because it was hilarious to him, and just the funniest thing, ever.
That's when Ignatius realized that things were starting to go not exactly the way he had expected. So it was that the demon made his first fully fledged, fully physical, fully stereotypically demonic appearance, in the flesh, fully real and fully there, and pulled forcibly into physical reality by the insipid yet undeniable laughter of the object of his torture.
Suddenly Dreyfus was flat out terrified, and the thought of looking up to see what was moving toward him rendered him completely paralyzed and unable to move. Instead, he just stared at the bright cherry of his cigarette and tried to take a small measure of comfort from the light of it. As he stared, it seemed as through the cherry was shrinking, becoming smaller and smaller, but also brighter and brighter. As it shrunk, the surrounding blackness collapsed into it, making it ever smaller but ever brighter, until all he could see was one excruciatingly brilliant pinpoint of orange, surrounded by a thick, suffocating darkness that pulsated, like a reverse ripple effect, moving inward and collapsing in shrinking waves toward him at the center.
This is what it feels like to play hide and seek with the devil, Dreyfus thought to himself. Or was it tag? Playing tag with the devil? Was that the game he was playing? Had been playing, for the last fifteen years? With the devil? Was that really what he'd been doing? He could hardly credit the thought...
Suddenly it felt to Dreyfus as though he'd been torpedoed, right in the gut and just below the belly button. It was like a dense, liquid compression wave that expanded, but instead of moving outward, it went DOWN. Not down as in toward his feet or the ground, but into another direction of down that went deep inside of him. Down through a dimension where local gravity is expressed in units of pain, and altitude is measured in painful increments. Down down down went the compression wave, compressing and liquifying and squeezing his guts ever downward toward some hard, flat surface of smooth, limitless agony that lay waiting below. Dreyfus felt it all in exquisite detail as it happened, and it even seemed to him as though he could hear it... a rumbling deepness that vibrated like a subwoofer, going lower and louder until it passed beyond hearing and crossed over entirely into pain. Dreyfus's world had suddenly collapsed into a singularity of simple feeling. No need for fancy grammar, parts of speech, sentence structure, or complex rules of rhetoric. The language of this place consisted of just one word-like concept... suffering.
Terrible. It just terrible. The awfulest... jst the worst, the very worst, ever. Just acknowledging the reality of the vague shape that he'd actually seen which precipitated this dip into tangible agony made his eyeballs want to scream forever. Yet despite the reality of actually being inside of such an impossible horror, the thought of his eyeballs screaming for eternity - two eternally pissed off eyeballs inside of his sleep deprived head, constantly bitching inward at his shriveled, unslept brain, for eternity - made Dreyfus chuckle under the ocean of pain, just a little. Suddenly it was the funniest thing he'd ever known, and simply because it was all wrapped inside the absurdity of this evil, insidious, unrelenting suffering. Dreyfus laughed out loud! Why? Because it was hilarious to him, and just the funniest thing, ever.
That's when Ignatius realized that things were starting to go not exactly the way he had expected. So it was that the demon made his first fully fledged, fully physical, fully stereotypically demonic appearance, in the flesh, fully real and fully there, and pulled forcibly into physical reality by the insipid yet undeniable laughter of the object of his torture.
early outline
Scenes, in order, and appearances of characters
1.
Dim Witt and Buckeye. Somewhere in south Georgia. Dempsey 'Dim' Witt is dropping off a barrel of hooch for Sheriff Buckeye Buck at the local whorehouse/saloon. Lots of smalltalk. Maybe some largetalk. There's an old fashioned CRT behind the bar, with a news guy talking about President Goolsby's weapons of war program for the war on global warming, and the upcoming launches of the unprecedentedly expensive 250 billion dollar cooling laser aboard the absurdly expensive 750 billion dollar Flying Turtle, a prototype launch vehicle equipped with the first practical EM drive, and in other news the brand new retarded expensive 1 trillion dollar aircraft carrier carrier, a floating city ten miles from fore to aft, five miles from starboard to port, with a mile high superstructure, a carrier for carrying aircraft carriers, makes its maiden voyage. As an afterthought, the reporter mentions how Georgia once again graciously volunteered to foot the 2 trillion dollar bill, reminiscent of their generosity by volunteering to foot the bill for the New Clear Nuclear Deterrent program of the previous generation. Dim and Buckeye, upon hearing the news, lose their shit (later on when things have developed beyond the point of no return they present a single, very fancily printed 2 trillion dollar bill to President Goolsby, absolving Georgia from all debt and backed up by the Space Bank. Eventually... when Space Banks become a real thing, that is, so just hold onto that 2 trillion dollar bill until then, President Goolsby, because it's... it's like a railroad bond. It'll be worth quintillions someday when there's a such a thing as Space Banks. And then the unanimous middle fingers go up and Georgia officially secedes)
2.
Walks Carefully On Eggshells Like A Bear. A Navajo Indian who flunked out of secret agent school. He is drunk in the corner of the saloon and lifts his head when Dim and Buckeye start yelling about the news on the CRTV. He thinks about a lot of stuff in his drunken stupor (dunno what yet. His back story probably). He makes a decision, gets up, staggers over to the bar, and is the first to suggest the secession of Georgia from the US, and proposes a new Navajo Confederacy. He's smart, but the more he talks, the more his upbringing influences his drunken speech, until the Navajo lifestyle he's describing sounds like a communist state. He's laughed off and thrown roughly out of the saloon.
3.
Peter. Another drunk in another corner of the saloon has been paying attention with half an ear ever since Dim and Buckeye came in. This is Peter, and he's a secret true communist. An autistic outcast, extremely intelligent, but almost a psychopath in his inability to read and understand the emotions of others. He's not without empathy though, he just doesn't perceive what other people are feeling. His thoughts reflect this. He has been treated cruelty his entire life because southern country hicks can be cruel assholes. Therefore, and because he's autistic, he has a black and white idea of wrong and right, and he gets an idea... just a pipe dream, really... for the perfect utopia, with him as the new Tsar. Better than Marx's. A true equality, in black and white. Pure. Nobody has ever listened to him before about anything because he's an asshole. He doesn't know this about himself. But the time is ripe for a revolution in Georgia, and folks are just about ready to listen to anyone and consider anything. Peter gets up and discretely follows Walks On Eggshells etc. out of the saloon.
4.
Susanna 'SuperSuze' Hicks. Adopted as a baby, her origins are unclear. Fourteen years old and completely naive and with no idea at all that she's just grown into the hottest woman who has ever lived, EVER. She's just started high school in podunk south Georgia. Through elementary and junior high she's gathered a reputation as a tattle tale, only because she has a knack for finding things out. What to do with the info? Tell, tell, tell! She's got the genes of a secret agent, because unbeknownst to her, her REAL mom was/is? one (a Russian one), like Beatrice Kiddo in Kill Bill. There's a story there... Susanna is following a couple of kids in her class who wanna get it on. Susanna doesn't realize this, she takes all clues and cues out of context. She's innocent. She's playing spy, she's SuperSuze. She's gonna report to headquarters on these naughty kiddos. Then she sees them just about to have sex. She doesn't understand, but she knows that the game just got serious! She blackmails the couple into giving her information pertaining to her mission. Flustered and discombobulated by this, the guy shouts out this thing (dunno what yet) that he saw, and that's the secret info, please don't tell on us, and SuperSuze leaves them alone, satisfied with a mission well completed. (The info she has seems innocuous, but it's something important. Dunno what yet. When she tattles it though, that's what gets her noticed. Her path to the Apparatchik. She eventually gets baptized and becomes Svetlana, the SuperSvet. The Awesomest of All Apparatchik Chicks. Lots more about her, she's a main character.
5.
Something going on in the fucking White House, with President Goolsby and the press secretary and the secretary of defense. Some preliminary shit about pissed off Georgia. A small item,Mr President, about one Thaddeus Thomas, an Amish inventor, and a14 year old girl from South Georgia named Susanna Hicks, possibly something of import, but most likely just blown out of proportion. Oh yeah, there's also this issue of pissed off Georgia, speaking of Georgia. They're talking about seceding? Heh. Appease them with a fortieth mortgage on the air they breathe, that'll shut em up. A press conference about the launch of the Flying Turtle, stopping global warming by freezing the moon with the cooling laser, the insane genius of it, because sunlit surface of the moon is 200 degrees F, and all reflecting down onto the Earth. Terd Burgleson, the press secretary, handles it. Terri Peterson, secretary of defense, realized something possibly maybe important concerning the Amish guys and the Georgian girl... Nah.
6.
Dickjackson Jones, astronaut and Commander of the Flying Turtle. He suffers with the awfullest cluster headaches. He's Big, he's Black, and he's Tough, so he's able to hide it when he's suffering with suicide headaches. It's actually a superhuman ability, but he doesn't know that about himself, that his ability to mask agony that would have absolutely everybody else writhing on the floor and screaming like an animal isn't normal. He copes because he has hope, hope that comes from a recurring dream about Mars. About Olympus Mons, an inactive volcano for billions of years, erupting very gently and blowing 'smoke signals of peace' out into space from the caldera. Walks On Eggshells has similar dreams, later on. For now though, the Flying Turtle is on the launch pad, counting down, and Dickjackson is in command cool as a cucumber, and right in the middle of the worst headache of his life, ever. It's the mildest of a new category of headaches to come, though. This poor guy... he's gonna be the most tortured character in the entire story... but he's Dickjackson Jones, and he's one cool negro. Aborigine, actually. Half Aborigine actually, and half Inuit/Black Irish/pure blood Aryan. There's a lot going on here, with Roger and Ramona and Charles that I'll figure out later. For now It's the widely publicized launch of the Two Dog Night Light. A lot more shit about this...
7.
Dreyfus Marlowe.
1.
Dim Witt and Buckeye. Somewhere in south Georgia. Dempsey 'Dim' Witt is dropping off a barrel of hooch for Sheriff Buckeye Buck at the local whorehouse/saloon. Lots of smalltalk. Maybe some largetalk. There's an old fashioned CRT behind the bar, with a news guy talking about President Goolsby's weapons of war program for the war on global warming, and the upcoming launches of the unprecedentedly expensive 250 billion dollar cooling laser aboard the absurdly expensive 750 billion dollar Flying Turtle, a prototype launch vehicle equipped with the first practical EM drive, and in other news the brand new retarded expensive 1 trillion dollar aircraft carrier carrier, a floating city ten miles from fore to aft, five miles from starboard to port, with a mile high superstructure, a carrier for carrying aircraft carriers, makes its maiden voyage. As an afterthought, the reporter mentions how Georgia once again graciously volunteered to foot the 2 trillion dollar bill, reminiscent of their generosity by volunteering to foot the bill for the New Clear Nuclear Deterrent program of the previous generation. Dim and Buckeye, upon hearing the news, lose their shit (later on when things have developed beyond the point of no return they present a single, very fancily printed 2 trillion dollar bill to President Goolsby, absolving Georgia from all debt and backed up by the Space Bank. Eventually... when Space Banks become a real thing, that is, so just hold onto that 2 trillion dollar bill until then, President Goolsby, because it's... it's like a railroad bond. It'll be worth quintillions someday when there's a such a thing as Space Banks. And then the unanimous middle fingers go up and Georgia officially secedes)
2.
Walks Carefully On Eggshells Like A Bear. A Navajo Indian who flunked out of secret agent school. He is drunk in the corner of the saloon and lifts his head when Dim and Buckeye start yelling about the news on the CRTV. He thinks about a lot of stuff in his drunken stupor (dunno what yet. His back story probably). He makes a decision, gets up, staggers over to the bar, and is the first to suggest the secession of Georgia from the US, and proposes a new Navajo Confederacy. He's smart, but the more he talks, the more his upbringing influences his drunken speech, until the Navajo lifestyle he's describing sounds like a communist state. He's laughed off and thrown roughly out of the saloon.
3.
Peter. Another drunk in another corner of the saloon has been paying attention with half an ear ever since Dim and Buckeye came in. This is Peter, and he's a secret true communist. An autistic outcast, extremely intelligent, but almost a psychopath in his inability to read and understand the emotions of others. He's not without empathy though, he just doesn't perceive what other people are feeling. His thoughts reflect this. He has been treated cruelty his entire life because southern country hicks can be cruel assholes. Therefore, and because he's autistic, he has a black and white idea of wrong and right, and he gets an idea... just a pipe dream, really... for the perfect utopia, with him as the new Tsar. Better than Marx's. A true equality, in black and white. Pure. Nobody has ever listened to him before about anything because he's an asshole. He doesn't know this about himself. But the time is ripe for a revolution in Georgia, and folks are just about ready to listen to anyone and consider anything. Peter gets up and discretely follows Walks On Eggshells etc. out of the saloon.
4.
Susanna 'SuperSuze' Hicks. Adopted as a baby, her origins are unclear. Fourteen years old and completely naive and with no idea at all that she's just grown into the hottest woman who has ever lived, EVER. She's just started high school in podunk south Georgia. Through elementary and junior high she's gathered a reputation as a tattle tale, only because she has a knack for finding things out. What to do with the info? Tell, tell, tell! She's got the genes of a secret agent, because unbeknownst to her, her REAL mom was/is? one (a Russian one), like Beatrice Kiddo in Kill Bill. There's a story there... Susanna is following a couple of kids in her class who wanna get it on. Susanna doesn't realize this, she takes all clues and cues out of context. She's innocent. She's playing spy, she's SuperSuze. She's gonna report to headquarters on these naughty kiddos. Then she sees them just about to have sex. She doesn't understand, but she knows that the game just got serious! She blackmails the couple into giving her information pertaining to her mission. Flustered and discombobulated by this, the guy shouts out this thing (dunno what yet) that he saw, and that's the secret info, please don't tell on us, and SuperSuze leaves them alone, satisfied with a mission well completed. (The info she has seems innocuous, but it's something important. Dunno what yet. When she tattles it though, that's what gets her noticed. Her path to the Apparatchik. She eventually gets baptized and becomes Svetlana, the SuperSvet. The Awesomest of All Apparatchik Chicks. Lots more about her, she's a main character.
5.
Something going on in the fucking White House, with President Goolsby and the press secretary and the secretary of defense. Some preliminary shit about pissed off Georgia. A small item,Mr President, about one Thaddeus Thomas, an Amish inventor, and a14 year old girl from South Georgia named Susanna Hicks, possibly something of import, but most likely just blown out of proportion. Oh yeah, there's also this issue of pissed off Georgia, speaking of Georgia. They're talking about seceding? Heh. Appease them with a fortieth mortgage on the air they breathe, that'll shut em up. A press conference about the launch of the Flying Turtle, stopping global warming by freezing the moon with the cooling laser, the insane genius of it, because sunlit surface of the moon is 200 degrees F, and all reflecting down onto the Earth. Terd Burgleson, the press secretary, handles it. Terri Peterson, secretary of defense, realized something possibly maybe important concerning the Amish guys and the Georgian girl... Nah.
6.
Dickjackson Jones, astronaut and Commander of the Flying Turtle. He suffers with the awfullest cluster headaches. He's Big, he's Black, and he's Tough, so he's able to hide it when he's suffering with suicide headaches. It's actually a superhuman ability, but he doesn't know that about himself, that his ability to mask agony that would have absolutely everybody else writhing on the floor and screaming like an animal isn't normal. He copes because he has hope, hope that comes from a recurring dream about Mars. About Olympus Mons, an inactive volcano for billions of years, erupting very gently and blowing 'smoke signals of peace' out into space from the caldera. Walks On Eggshells has similar dreams, later on. For now though, the Flying Turtle is on the launch pad, counting down, and Dickjackson is in command cool as a cucumber, and right in the middle of the worst headache of his life, ever. It's the mildest of a new category of headaches to come, though. This poor guy... he's gonna be the most tortured character in the entire story... but he's Dickjackson Jones, and he's one cool negro. Aborigine, actually. Half Aborigine actually, and half Inuit/Black Irish/pure blood Aryan. There's a lot going on here, with Roger and Ramona and Charles that I'll figure out later. For now It's the widely publicized launch of the Two Dog Night Light. A lot more shit about this...
7.
Dreyfus Marlowe.
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