Fundamental pieces

There are fundamental pieces of me.  Parts of an overall structure that form the foundations that hold up the bulky and malleable essence of my recognizable likeness. Those pieces are the identifier, hammered into the surface of the essence. 

A metaphor. Marble is the essence.  The shaped surface of the marble is the identifier. The individual blocks of marble are the pieces.  The circumstance is the shaping mechanism.

This identifier that I'm trying to explain is a single, simple thing.  Just a feeling associated with a memory.  It's not anything about myself that helped to form the essence of what it felt like for me to be a kid, this piece of me I want to describe.  It was the circumstance that I happened to be imbedded in, and everything that gave form to it was stuck right in there with me.  It was the soundtrack of the senses for those awful years.

I guess I'll go into it.  When I was a kid,  from about 6 to 12 years old, it was like... I always felt afraid.  I was grief stricken every day, because my parents were dead.  My mom and dad were dead.  I can't explain... of course, they were alive, but that's not how it felt to me.  To me it felt like they were dead, because I didn't feel safe.  I didn't feel stable.  I didn't feel protected. 

And every day I was filled up with guilt and fear.  Guilt, because I knew kids were supposed to have parents, but I couldn't see past myself to explain their absence... and fear.  The fear of not knowing if the next moment, or hour, or evening, or day, week, summer, year, or forever would be ok.  I think that's the main thing about being a kid, and growing up and developing, and becoming who I am that really poleaxed my development.  I never knew if it would be ok.  There was never a moment in my childhood that I could just take for granted that it would be ok. I was always scared.  Never secure.  Always afraid.

When I was a kid, it was never ever just ok or all right.  It just never, ever was, ever. I know those were important, formative years, because I remember how awful they were, and nothing else about them.

I was ten years old.  I remember my mom going to work, and when I try to examine those memories, I can't see my dad anywhere. I remember the feeling of being intolerably lonely, and lost, and horribly, irrevocably hopeless.  Lost inside loneliness and sadness, and guilt.  Guilt that I'd never be able to tell my mom I loved her ever again, because she'd always have to be gone, working swing shift, swing shift, swing shift, how I hated those words.  Swing.  Shift.  The alive part of the day.  Mom would be gone during the  part of the day that contained all of the life, but which for me instead contained all of the fear and grief. 

I felt like she was dead.  That my mom was dead when she worked swing shift.  I grieved every day when she left... the kind of grief of knowing I'd never see her again.  And I hated myself because I could never tell her how sorry I was that she had to be gone, and that I missed her so much... and that I was so sorry for missing her, and for being a hurt thing.

What I just described is the first time I've ever tried to put the essence of my childhood into words that someone else might understand.  It's because I heard a snippet of music that reminded me of then, and the memory of feelings has to be fleshed out, I guess.  It was a kind of spur-of-the-moment thing.

They're the memories which define my childhood.

At night

I got 'pulled over' by the cops again tonight. Some do-gooder called and reported me as a 'crazy person with long hair jumping around in the road'.  There's no walk signal for pedestrians at Carroll and University, so I suppose at 2:00 am, running across University at Carroll without getting killed, so I can shop at Kroger, could be easily mistaken as the antics of the criminally insane. 

Every time this happens, when some motherfucker (pardon my French) calls the cops on me for doing something at night that nobody would bat an eye at for doing if the sun was up, I feel like a shit heel for being me.

Pointy boots

When I was just a little kid, about three years old, I had these pointy cowboy boots that I really loved. I remember it. I remember wearing those boots, and in my little three year old mind, thinking that the pointy toes of those boots were devastating weapons. I could kick anything to death with those pointy boots.  Kick them to death, and make them bloody all over.

Those pointy boots have always been a fond memory for me... one of the few happy memories I have as a child, and the reason is because my grandmother used to remind me of them all the time.  She used to say, in this endearing voice, imitating me as an innocent three year old with grandiose visions of death dealing, "I'll Kick you with my pointy boots and make you bloody all over!"

On one hand, it's just the ignorant playtime thoughts of a three year old.  I remember those boots.  I remember wearing them, and saying that exact thing...

"I'll kick you with my pointy boots and make you bloody all over!"

I remember that, and it's only a fun memory to me.  But dang...

That's kind of fucked up, ain't it?

Poor kitty

Tonight after work I was walking home from my Wi-Fi spot.  That is, there's a secret place I know of, with a strong unsecured broadband Wi-Fi signal, where I bury my extra android tablet (just under a few pieces of tree bark and some pebbles) so that I can leech a couple of movies movies while I'm off somewhere else, doing something or another, so I don't have to sit there and wait.

Anyway.  I had just left that place and I was walking back to my compartment. I was thinking about the normal things that I think about whenever I'm alone at night and walking, like how beautiful everything is, and how I ain't never going to have a chance to see all of it, and how I can't decide whether or not I'm thankful or disappointed or relieved about that.  I was walking down the road, thinking those thoughts, and I look to my left, which happened to be East, where the three quarter moon just happened to be about 15 degrees above the horizon, and it just happened to have these clouds around it that formed sort of a frame, and all of that just happened to be snuggled into this narrow space between the side of this house and a tree that was in the yard over, which all together made another frame for the moon in the clouds thing, and when I noticed what I just described, that I was in the perfect spot that made the perfect point of view for connecting those two perfect places, my place place and the moon place, just for a few perfect minutes...

...well, when I noticed that, I guess I must have been in a really heightened sense of awareness situation, because otherwise I probably wouldn't have noticed that little kitty cat which wasn't making a sound at all, but which was following just behind me and for I dunno how long.  Just a scrawny shadow I happened to notice because it didn't seem quite like a rock or a bush to my peripheral vision.

It was just a scrawny cat, a skinny thing, and I thought it was a kitten at first but it wasn't.  It wasn't full grown yet, but it wasn't a kitten, but it was skin and bones, and hungry.

Taking all that into account, I can't believe I actually saw the dagum thing, 'cause it didn't make a sound at all.  It was just this shadow, kind of off to the left and behind.

When I totally became aware of it, I stopped and turned around and looked at it, and he plunked down on his haunches and just kind of sat there. He didn't sit there all tensed up and ready to spring; he sat there more like he was waiting for something. 

This kitty didn't seem like a fraidy cat at all. This one seemed like a friendly cat that had just been kicked around too much, and was really hungry, but wary too.  I know kitty body language, you know?  Does that sound retarded, that I claim to know kitty body language?  Well, I do, and this kitty really wanted to be friendly, but it was scared.  It wasn't a fraidy cat... it was a cautiously optimistic but ready to run like hell cat.  And no, that's not the definition of a fraidy cat!

This kitty never would let me pet it, and I didn't get aggravated at all. I just put some chips on the ground for it.  I really can't imagine any cat anywhere actually liking chips, but that's all the food I had at the time.  Poor kitty.

The crack in my heart

Wow, what an indecipherably  beautiful night. It's like the light of the full moon is punching a hole through the sky. The longer I stare at the bright moon, and notice the things that it lights up around it, the deeper I sink into the dream hole.

I never used to fall into this strange place, where the beauty of the world somehow threatens my sanity. I never used to make googly eyes at the clouds or notice impossible beauty in mundane places.  Not like this, not the way I do nowadays.  It ain't my normal mode, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

I never wondered about it until tonight. The thing is, I think I overdosed on beauty this spring. I got used to nature blowing me away every single day. I still loved it, you know, it ain't like I got tired of it, but my tolerance for it rose, I think. 

Now it's been several weeks or maybe a month and a half since the last awesome storm, and I've been going cold turkey.  Well, not really... I've just been looking down instead of up, I guess. But tonight...

Anyway. My original point, my original epiphany, the idea that came to me, was that when I really really got my heart broken wide open for the first time... not just thought I did, but really did... just a little over 5 years ago, it never healed up all the way. Because, you know, heartbreak never actually gets a hundred percent better.

What happened though, was that all of the beauty in the world that I never used to notice, or only took for granted, is constantly falling into that crack in my heart.  That's what's happening. That's the reason for all the crazy weirdliness that I can't understand, but which seems to exude continuously from the pores of the living world.

Goofy - an analysis

Although exactly what Goofy is has never really been established, it at least seems obvious what Goofy isn't - he definitely isn't just a normal dog.  He kind of looks like a dog, in that he has a dog-like head; but dogs aren't usually known for standing upright and walking on two legs.

After giving it not a lot of thought at all, I've arrived at the fairly obvious conclusion that Goofy is some sort of dog/human hybrid; possibly the result of experimental genetic tinkering.  He's able to do many things that people can do, such as walk and talk, wear clothes, and yes, even drive a car.  Pluto, however, can't do any of those things.  Why?  Is Pluto retarded or something?  Well, no... not really.  I mean, compared to a human, Pluto possesses roughly the same mental acuity as a retarded infant with severe brain damage and an extra helping of mongoloidism, and the cranial capacity of a deformed troglodyte with a microcephalic head and a rare case of double downs syndrome. Compared to another dog however, Pluto is just a regular dog.  Maybe even a doggie Einstein... but a regular dog, nonetheless.

However, for the sake of a non-biased exposition, it must be noted that Goofy is a fantastically stupid creature, despite his human-like characteristics.  He also displays an alarming lack of coordination which, considering his abominable nature, shouldn't really be that surprising; seeing how Goofy is basically the result of the tortured marriage of animal and human genetic material, haphazardly spliced together, then forced backwards through a French milking machine and thrown at the wall to see what sticks.

But I digress.

So, after ruminating not very deeply on the subject for not a very long time, I've concluded that Goofy's innate clumsiness is due to the basic incompatibility between a canine nervous system and a human musculature.  The resulting slapstick is that of a body which is constantly in the throes of raping itself.

In conclusion, the point of this long winded discourse is basically this:  The reason why Goofy can drive a car and Pluto can't is because Pluto is just a regular dog, while Goofy is a horrid abomination of nature, a walking blasphemy and a Testament for all that is unholy; a putrid and vile discharge from the womb of evil... the offspring of Satan, the Antichrist embodied in the cancerous flesh of a thriving tumor and wrapped in the mortal coil of a three headed serpent.

I suppose, however, that some transcription errors are to be expected in such an unwieldly attempt at genetic manipulation, so it would be wrong to place all of the blame solely on Goofy, just for naturally being evil.  It's obvious that the fault clearly lies with the Satanic, devil worshiping Disney artists and animators.

Something strangely disturbing I saw, whilst out walking during the small hours...

Ok. Okay, okay. Ok, I have to start this out with an OK or two.  Okay? Ok.  Okay...

Okay, here goes.  Just now, as I'm writing this, about two and a half minutes ago, as of right this second, I was walking down the street that I walk down all the time to get back to my apartment from Kroger.  It's almost 4 o'clock a.m., so it's dark, but that usually doesn't bother me because there are street lamps and other stuff that makes light, so I can see where I'm going without any problem. 

Because I've always got my head (which contains my eyes) angled downward at something or another, I rely on my peripheral vision alot, which ain't interesting at all, usually. Anyway, who cares. I'm getting off the subject.

I'm walking and reading or dictating or something, or making a blog entry. I was writing about... um... insomnia.  That's what I was doing. I was dictating a blog into my phone about insomnia, as I was walking, when I noticed a dark movement on top of the darker dark. Your peripheral vision is good at doing that, by the way... detecting slight variations of light intensity, that is.  It's because the light gathering cells in the peripheral part of your retina are comprised mainly of rods, as opposed to cones. Rods and cones. The differentiated, light gathering cells of your retina.  Rods are sensitive to light intensities, and cones perceive color.  So your peripheral vision is much better at perceiving different shades of dark and light. Damn. Anyway.

So there I was, doing what I just said I was doing, utilizing the amazing natural bio-features that just come with the whole package for free when you're born; that mind-flabbergasting nanotech that's built into my eyeballs, like 'twern't jist nothin' budda thang at all, and I saw this black kid.  That's what I saw, a black kid in the dark.  A black kid, in the dark, head down, eyes down, shuffling along, slowly, without a shirt, with a collar on his neck, and a rope emerging from some undetermined place out of the shadows and attached to the collar,  holding a garden hose, and watering a lawn. 

Recap - young black boy, shirtless, downcast, roped and collared, watering a lawn with a hose, slowly.

Now, you whoever might be reading this, tell me.  WTF was that all about??

Inspiration. Oh... and dirty prions

I get a lot of inspiration from my dreams.  No, I ain't taking about 'I have a dream' dreams, or 'Your achievements are only limited by your dreams' dreams, or 'Follow your dreams' dreams, or 'Don't just dream it, do it!' dreams, or 'The only thing separating your dreams from your future is YOU' dreams.  I ain't talking about those kinds of dreams.  Sure, I guess it's ok to have those kinds of dreams and to do the whole 'work toward it until you achieve it' thing, but that ain't what I'm talking about here at all.  Except where it applies, like when you dream about something and then you want to actually build what you dreamt about.  Like what I'm about to talk about here. But other than that, it doesn't apply at all to what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is the g'nite sleepyhead, the fuzzy dark no time passes part of it, then the waking down... and a real dream happens.  It can be in clear HD color, or it might be channel 4 in the boondocks and barely watchable.

Over the course of our lives, the 1/3rd of it that we spend unconscious, and the 1/6th of that 1/3rd that we spend dreaming, add up to years and years of just being sound asleep and dreaming.  Years and years, for every one of us.  We are, none of us, different.  Each and every one of the seven billions of us spend up to a tenth of our lives dreaming.*  If you live to be 90, that could be nine years, just dreaming.  Nine years of your life that are stored in your memory as dreams, which are just as real to your neurons as the 66 years worth of memories that you actually experienced wide awake.

What I'm saying is, that's where I get my inspiration.  From the real dreams, not those... I don't know. The ones that don't happen because you're asleep.

I dream about flying a lot.  A lot.  I dream that I'm flying, and it's always so super super awesome cool and awesome.  I love it every time I dream it.  Then, I dream about skating on roller blades, really really fast.  Just skating so fast, and it being so effortless.  Those are my main frequent euphoric dreams... my flying and skating dreams.

So.  Finally!  The point of all this bullshirt.  The flying dreams are the reason why I want to build a hang glider, and the skating dreams are the reason why I want to build bionic boots.

Ok, that's all.

*Except for those of us with FSI; that is, Fatal Sporadic Insomnia.  Or even worse, the kind that gets passed down to your kids.  FFI, or Fatal Familial Insomnia.  It's all about spongifying your hypothalamus with bent proteins called prions. That sucks. And that's a horrible word... prion.  It just sounds evil in purpose.  Pry, like it's going to pry you open, and on, like it's going to just get it all on you, and you don't want it on you.

No grapes

Okay, so I'm at Albertsons after work, looking for those little personal watermelons, because I can actually walk one of those home without breaking my back.  Oh, and they didn't have any kind of watermelon at all the other day; not even the cut up pieces in the plastic tub thingies.  I had been fairly perturbed about that at the time, so I was glad to see all kinds of watermelon this time.

HOWEVER...

I'm also looking for some grapes, but I can't find any grape hides, grape hairs, or any traces of grape at all, high or low, beneath, betwixt or behind anything or anywhere.  And since I'm pretty much always carrying on a non stop conversation with myself, my opinion of the situation just tumbled out of my mouth hole, without any kind of real conscious thought or decision... like blinking, or breathing, or sucking back a snot.  You know.  What happens when the primitive part of your brain buried underneath the homo habilus australopithecus and crocodile parts kicks in.  Behold, ye troglodytes.  The R-complex or whatever.

What I said was something like this:

"What, no grapes?  What the fuck (pardon my french)?   The other day it's no watermelons, and today it's no grapes.  What kind of chickenshit (scuse my portuguese) outfit are these guys running?"

Then I found the grapes and...

...made away with me to the checkout counter.

...propelled myself toward the checkout counter.

...budged myself in the direction of the checkout counter.

...sauntered aggrandizingly over to the checkout counter.

...inflicted myself upon the checkout counter.

Any of those descriptions will do.

The guy is scanning my items and typing them in, shwoop, shwoop, beep beep beep, chika-chaka DONE, chingle changle ching-a-ling, there's my change, I'm through here, and then the checkout guy says:

"I gave you the 89 cents a pound price for those grapes" (they were white grapes, by the way) "because we're out of the red grapes.  Since you were looking for the red grapes.  So I just gave you the price for the red grapes."

? thought I. What the heck was he talking about?  My befuddlement was pretty much total, so I said, "Uhhhhhhh..." for a while.

THEN I UNDERSTOOD.  The checkout guy had HEARD me.  He'd heard my private discourse over by the uh... over in the... what the heck is that section called... the produce aisle!  He'd heard me bitching about the watermelons and grapes!  He'd heard me say the chickenshit outfit thing!  He thought that I'd decided to settle for the white grapes because they were out of red grapes!  What kind of random off the wall out of the blue corntastic craptacular cheese-o-matical hyperbole of serendipity had just squeezed itself into existence out of the infinite and ever collapsing cloud of fluctuating wave forms comprising the whatchamacallit of  quantum probability? 

I fully expected right then for the Earth to spontaneously transform into a quagma of strangelets and swallow itself up into a false vacuum of non existence.  Right now, at this very minute, I still can't quite believe that hasn't happened yet.

A dream - the Unmaker

A nightmare.

I was part of mission control which was directing a time ship with five passengers into the far future.  We had video screens showing the crew, and we were in verbal communication with them.  I gave the order to accelerate and one of the crew pushed a lever forward, and we could see the stars change positions as they flew millions of years into the future.  As they were moving through the eons, they would pass these regions of discontinuity which would appear as a swirling blackness that quickly disappeared into the past.  This happened several times, and the crew began to report these phenomenon with some anxiety, as they were becoming more frequent and harder to avoid.  Finally they passed straight into one.  This is where the dream becomes a nightmare.

It only affected one member of the crew, but I could see through his eyes what was happening to him.  There was a head of a demon before him that he could see in his mind.  Everything else around him was black.  I can picture what the demon head looked like, but warped is the closest I can come to actually describing it.  Warped and ungood.  It was called the Unmaker.  As it infected his mind with it's essence, I could see what was happening to him.  He was at his station, looking catatonic, and then his eyes went wonky.  One rolled up so that about half of the iris was hidden, and the other jerked slightly away from center, so that it was looking outward.  He went into a slight convulsion all over his body, and started to cry silently.  Then he began to utter the strangest gibberish.  I could hear it so clearly in my dream, but I can't remember any of it now.  It was something like this...

"Then oncely the defaculation is compressioned we can inslide for with an excratiational blackdock with it out fromover, the it of thens when, full of your selfly crob crob, crobs forever."

That's extremely close in essence, if not in the actual words.  He went on like this for some time, and eventually he got up from his seat and approached a female crew member.  She panicked and tried to run away, but she couldn't stand all the way up.  She just kind of froze and had to wait for the gibbering one to reach her and infect her with the insane sickness as well.  When he reached her, he planted his mouth full onto hers and blew the poison into her.  She began to convulse too.

We were watching from mission control and somebody finally had the presence of mind to slam the controls into reverse and bring the ship out of the discontinuity and back home to the present.  When the ship appeared, I went inside to investigate.  Everybody was either dead or unconscious, except for the infected girl, who was severely pregnant.  She was just sitting at her station whimpering quietly, with her head hanging forward limply and her arms wrapped tightly around her stomach, as though she were enduring severe agony.  Tears were streaming from the corners of her eyes, which were tightly shut.  Then she began to cough, a horrible wracking cough with slimy sounds all through it.  She stood up and doubled over, chocking on the cough, and finally she vomited this slimy gray infant onto the floor.  It was covered with putrid afterbirth, and where the cord should have been, there was this black, lumpy growth about the size of it's head.  It looked like rotten black broccoli, and the grotesque baby-thing started to gnaw on it hungrily.  I picked up the... unbaby, and looked around frantically for a way to dispose of it.  All I could think to do was to stuff it into a trash receptacle that was built into the wall.  It opened like an ashtray, and I stuffed the vile baby-thing into it.  Stuffed it down, hard, pushing and pushing, until it was a pulp, then I shut receptacle door.

a stack of rocks

I was walking the back way behind things tonight, and I came upon a fence that looked like the ground around it wasn't too overgrown. I stopped and turned on my camera light toward it and saw a concrete area on the other side of the fence with this mound of rocks. I followed the fence for about a hundred yards until I found an opening, and I went through until I came back to that concrete area. Somebody had stacked a pile of rocks there.

See, this is the kind of personal, anonymous thing unlike Fox News that makes me understand that there are other people in the universe besides myself.

landmarks

It was almost clear to me for a second there. I was thinking about how lost I am... there's this song called 'Lost Souls' by this band, and I was listening and sitting very still, staring at the moon, and just being quietly blown away that I was looking at a real thing, like I'd look at your face. Really there. I guess what makes it surreal is that the moon is so steeped in legend, so even though it's right there, just right up there, it still seems inaccessible. But there it is.

I was, just a few minutes ago, sitting on a curb.. about a block west of the square. On Hickory. Right across from that... hang on... just a little past that shoe repair shop. Across directly from Hypnotic Donuts. And biscuits. Who's heard of that place? Wow, I gotta check that place out.

Anyway, what was it. Oh... ok, I just severely flipped somebody off. One of those flip offs that lasts for a good long time, as you're following them with the finger while they escape the situation. The visualization of it only works when you're a pedestrian flipping off a moving vehicle.

I flipped the guy off because he almost ran me over at an intersection where I had the walk guy on the sign lit up. That really pisses me off, that fucker. What if somebody else not as wide-eyed and readily provoked as me was crossing at that time, and that drunk bastard (I'm assuming he was drunk... maybe he was just really young and really dumb, to go screaming through a left turn at a pedestrian crosswalk like that) ran right over that other possible person? Huh?

I have no sympathy. Young, dumb, drunk, retarded, whatever. I flipped 'um off for a long time, and then felt pretty terrible after, during the entire time I've been writing this description of what happened. It only just happened, you know.

Dammit, now I lost the frikin' thread of whatever it was I wanted to say, way back when.. GOLL! ! I ruined it by flipping the guy off. I could have ignored it and went on with whatever it was that was inspiring me. Whatever. it's too late now.

(two weeks later)

I remember what it was, that train of thought. I was looking at the moon and forging this rude comparison of the distant beauty of it to this image I have in my mind; the only moment in my life that meant enough for me to to burn it permanently into a cluster of neurons as a detailed memory. It's like a photograph in my mind now, as if it were only six years ago... smiling eyes before me, inches from my face.

Landmarks for the terminally lost. That's what I'd forgotten.

seriously, bionic boots

I have a new project which I've decided to start up in addition to and alongside the hang glider project (which I've estimated will cost - the hang glider, not the new project - around $150.00, that is, $60.00 for the plastic sheeting, a 10' x 100' roll, $60.00 for 8 bundles of 1" wide x 8' long bamboo poles, 25 poles to a bundle, making 200 feet total ((unless I can find some wild bamboo just growing someplace in town which is suitable, and I've already got one guy who has given me permission to go all up on his land which is situated on Oak St., just a hundred yards or so past the church and on the right, in that recessed area where there's a big house kind of tucked back in there, and chop down as much bamboo as I want because he says there's a lot growing there and because he digs the hang glider idea, plus my sister Cheyenne said that she knows where to find some bamboo, although I hope she's not talking about that spot across the street and a couple of houses down from her house going toward Bell, because all of that got cleared out recently. Which would bring the cost down by about $60.00)) plus about $30.00 for duct tape, screws, nuts, bolts, wing nuts and washers).

This new project is almost as kick-ass as building a hang glider, because the next best thing to flying, I figure, is running very fast and jumping, because I frequently have dreams of doing that, and it's always awesome. I also dream about flying pretty regularly, which is even more awesome. Anywho, I'm talking about building some bionic boots.

Yup, that's right. bionic boots. Just like Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man (if you're old enough to remember that TV show from the mid-seventies, which I am and do... heck, I even had a Six Million Dollar Man action figure that you could open the access panel on his arm and see all the electronic and mechanical greeblies inside), except that you don't have to be a man barely alive as a result of crashing a space shuttle with no choice but to have your mangled body parts chopped off and replaced with bionic ones just to get a pair of super cool robot boots.

This time I'll need an assortment of springs, to start with. I'm thinking maybe about 6 or 8 of those springs made for trampolines... 3 or 4 for each boot. I'll also need some smaller springs. I'm trying to imagine where I've seen some suitable springs like the ones I'll need, and I'm thinking of the kind they use in air rifles - heck, I dunno. I'll have to do some research - two for each ankle. Then it's just some long, flat and narrow steel supports, the kind with holes all in them to make them light, for the structure. I've seen 'em used for homemade shelves. And a bunch of screws, bolts, nuts, machine oil, and an assortment of cylindrical, one axis pivot joints. Similar to a door hinge, but way stronger and more awesome. And some kind of tough, possibly plastic boot sort of structure to strap onto the top of each one of those spring-loaded person flingers, for the purpose of connecting the person to the flingers.

So, with a hang glider strapped to my back, and bionic robot boots strapped to my feet, I'll be pretty much unstoppable.

Urethra.

How many times have I taken a leak in my entire life?  All living sentient beings must at some point in their existence confront this question.  Finally this question has come to me.  It is time.  This question must now be answered.  How many times?  Have I taken a leak?  In my life?

I have calculated that it is close to 50,000 times.  My urethra rules.  Thank you, urethra.  Water erosion ain't got shit on you.  Urethra!  URETHRA FOREVER!!!!!

Now, about those telomeres...

sunshower

Earlier this afternoon at about 3 o'clock the sun was shining, those big fluffy cumulonimbus clouds were all over the place, and it was sweaty damn hot outside. Then, quite suddenly and out of the clear blue sky, it started to rain. I looked up and there was one solitary cloud almost directly above, not quite blocking the sun, and rain was falling out of it. Just that one cloud. I pointed my camera directly up and took a few pictures. This is what rain looks like when it's falling out of a single cloud in an otherwise relatively clear sky.