A dream - ancient treasure

I was at an outdoor flea market, and there were hundreds of square tin boxes for sale, with lids that would come off like those metal containers for Charles Chips. The boxes were arranged in categories, according to specific time periods in history. These were the categories:

Medieval
Romantic
World War I
World War II
Modern

Each of the tin boxes contained war relics according to its time period. I was perusing them and trying to decide which one that I would buy. I opened one from medieval Pakistan which contained a ridiculous military sweater. It was green and yellow, with a Muslim crescent, and the sleeves were too long and the midriff was too short. I purchased the British medieval tin box.

After that, I was with my dad, and we were driving to an apartment where a friend of his lived, which was located at the end of a long alley. I'd been there before, but when we arrived, the entire alley had been repainted in vivid colors. Dad went inside, but I just wanted to stay in the car, so I did. I wound up inside anyway, because the car became a bed in the apartment.

So there I was, in bed, in the living room of someone I didn't know, feeling very uncomfortable while my dad visited. I was naked under the covers, and I drew them up around me protectively. Then Dad said:

"I have to borrow that sheet, son."

So he took the sheet and left, and all I had was a pillow to cover myself with.

Later I was pissed off and in a pool hall. Somebody miscued and sent the cue ball flying off of the table and straight at me, and I snatched it out of the air, just inches from my face. I flung it away with a quick snap and and underhand backspin. I meant to land it on the pool table and have it spin to a quick stop, but it hit the opposite wall and shattered.

I was amazed that I had thrown it so hard. I quickly ran over to where the largest piece had landed and I picked it up. The cue ball was still whole, mostly; but about one fifth of it had been knocked away like a flint nodule, forming a wide, shallow and jagged crater-like declivity, at the bottom of which a handful of tiny diamonds lay nestled, sparkling.

When I moved the cue ball, there was a short delay before the cluster of diamonds followed suit. It was as if they were suspended in a thick liquid. Then they swirled and stirred, and tiny microscopic facets refracted the light in exquisite detail. It was almost as if a cloud of diamond dust, suspended in a slow-motion matrix, had settled there. I started at it, enthralled and motionless.

Then the cue ball began to crack, and as the cracks widened, brilliant light issued forth like the light of many lasers, illuminating the room and tracing intricate and shifting multicolored patterns onto every surface. Then the whole thing split wide open and fell to the floor, exposing a geode of concentric circles consisting of diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and every other type of gem of every possible color. There were two halves to it, and both were illuminated from within and were almost too bright to look at directly.

My sister, Cheyenne, was there with me. The brilliant beauty of what we saw was deafening, and I had to cover my eyes and shout to be heard over it:

"Look at what it became, Chey! Look, it split open into a geode! Look! Look, look! Look at it, it's a treasure, a treasure, a treasure..."

An encounter with ruffians

Last night at about 2:00 AM, as I was walking to Kroger, I had my awareness focused on two guys who had been walking behind me for the past few minutes. When they had almost caught up to me, I did an abrupt about face. They kept walking for a couple of steps, then they both turned around and kept following me. Then they separated and tried to come abreast, one on either side of me. Those two no-good rascals were trying to corner me!

I turned around and walked backwards and extended both arms straight out with palms forward, one for each of them. The unmistakeable and common gesture for Stop. Cease. Desist. Now. I was walking backwards like that, with my arms extended outward like I was propping up two columns. They didn't stop, so I said, loudly -

'No!'

'Gimme a cigarette,' said one. 'You got any spare change?' said the other. 'Whatchoo got?' said the first one. 'We ain't gonna hurtcha,' said the other one. And they both kept coming.

I stopped then and fumbled around quickly for my sheath and extracted my flashlight blade (I call it my flashblade) with one hand, and my laser pointer with the other. I opened the blade, hit the light, and pointed the laser, the blade, and the light at the ground between the two of them.

'I got these,' I said. 'Gawn now. Go.'

That finally got 'em to stop, and the three of us just stood there quietly for about ten seconds, regarding each other. Then I turned to the left and quickly walked away, keeping my eyes on them as I did. They didn't follow, but they sure did holler after me. Really nice, friendly stuff.

'M-f'er! Bitch! You little bitch! Mother-f'er, you better run, you little bitch-ass (vulgar word that used to commonly mean cat)! Run away, mother-f'er! Little bitch ass! Run, you little f'er!'

I didn't run. I just kept walking until I couldn't see or hear them anymore.

So, anyway. That just happened. And that's why I carry a flashlight knife and a laser pointer.

The world through a dirty glass.

I wish I could really communicate the dream feeling. I'll try to describe the view of it from my minds' eye. The view accompanies the feeling; that's the only way I can even begin to approach the actual sending of the feeling from my cloud of thoughts to yours.

Ok. This is naturally somewhat abstract, but there are recognizable elements familiar to everyone - the elements are like words that form the grammar of the sentence which describes it. The dream feeling. The derealization phenomenon. Here goes:

Firstly, imagine that everything I'm about to describe is taking place behind a window, or a screen. A glass screen... like a TV screen. It's the language of it, I suppose. The phonetics are in color; a palette that tends toward yellow-beige-gray, with reddish-purple hints where there are shadows, or things of a darker shade. The glass screen is smeared and dirty, and everything visible beyond that glass has a smeared and dirty accent. A profoundly decrepit and unconcerned ignorance.

It's like looking outside through the large front window of a small town laundromat, or a gas station. I mean a real gas station, not a convenience store. Think thirty or forty years ago, if you have memories that go back that far.

So, if you're able to get a picture of that in your mind, and you can speak a description of it to yourself using that visual grammar, then all you have to do is stain it with a couple of coats of apathy, coat it with a layer of old dust, put it inside of a dry, still late summer afternoon, and then name it 'Eternal Evening, 7:30 PM, and Old'.

Ok, that's the predicate. Now let's form the subject - and here's where I'm pretty sure the communication falters, because what you see through that window has to be very personal.

Everything I've described so far is the womb, but it's the movement inside that makes it a thing impossible to express, but which I can't ignore. Because it's MY feeling, a singular feeling that comes from a deepness inside of me that nurtures a painful but comforting kind of discord, surrounded by a melody consisting solely of minor diminishments that are just slightly out of tune, and only barely audible.

I'll give you mine.

When I look through that window, there's no motion. Not even a slight breeze to stir up the dust and dirt; and there is a dirtiness everywhere, and on everything. There's life out there, but it's a still life. People are out there. Sitting still, mostly.

Sometimes that window provides a view out onto a porch; hot and splintered and dead. Sometimes it's the laundromat window, looking out onto a few yards of cracked concrete desolation, with weeds stuck in the cracks.

Looking outside, through the backseat window, I can feel sticky bare thighs on a hot vinyl surface.

There's a horizontal view of the world through that dirty glass, tipped vertically and with an earful of dirt, and a darkness underneath a flat and protesting deadness of wood that's nailed to itself and sharing its splinters, punctuated by cinder blocks and clods of dry earth which sprouts gray weeds; all dead.

Underneath and permeating it all, there's a living satisfaction, imbedded inside of and agreeing with the view of the world, and the dry, dessicated smell of it. The essence of it is captured like a still frame that was left out and overdeveloped, in mid-rot.

The sum total is extremely unsettling, but it's what the experience of living inside of the world feels like to me, sometimes.

The Prestigious Starfleet Academy

I figured I should pass along some sage advice about what I learned so far, and how I got it learned, because it's bad karma to hog it all for myself. Here goes.

The prestigious Starfleet Academy is a real school that I actually think I went to. It offers all kinds of things. They have classes for lots of stuff, which is their main draw.

Here are some of the valuable classes I signed up for:

Counting Recycled Calories 101
Fucking with Feng Shui 101
Algebra for Assholes 101
Killing and Cooking and Killing 101
(this was an elective for Klingons only, but I never showed up for class and nobody ever even knew that I'm not a Klingon)
Quantum Theory for Preschool Retards 101
Drawing on the Right Side of Somebody Else's Brain 101
Thirteen Dimensional Alternative American History 101

And one other elective:

Bickering with Barriers - Sound, Light, Time, and Concrete 101

They give you a dot matrix printout of your degree when you're done, which is a nice perk. I'd recommend Starfleet Academy to anybody who just don't give a crap about nothin'.

Off dead center

I'm a point, a location in space-time, with about a 90 degree lateral view in one direction, which I'll call forward, and a  perpendicular view of about 30 degrees.

The point of me is frequently in motion, relative to a much larger thing called planet, and you can keep on scaling up until you reach the boundary of what is possible to perceive over the vastiest distances of space and time. Beyond that... I give it a big fat raspberry, because it'll never hear it anyway.

The me point, at its absolute highest resolution, is zero-dimensional. You'd  think that would mean nothing, at first. I mean... zero, right? Zero dimensional. No bigness, or wideness, or heaviness, or stinkiness, or anything. No information at all, except for location, what? And hey, give that zero dimensional point a few seconds within which to exist, and then fart forward a couple of meters, and BANG! Your zero dimensional point becomes a one dimensional line, expressed through the fourth dimension of time.

That's what I am. A zero dimensional point with this cone of perception extending forward and away from the point of me and into three dimensions, preceding me along a line through the fourth dimension of duration; and in the process, leaving behind just a complete mess of a one dimensional timeline.

I dunno how that thing is ever gonna get untangled and straightened out. I think, maybe...

Maybe, if somebody way back when would have had litten the far beginning of it, and if it would have had burned and sizzled and zipped forward like a fuse and all up that tangled timeline in a forward manner, that then maybe I will have had seen it coming some day. I'll'd have seen that sizzling spark, in reverse, blasting forward and into the future at tachyon speed, and maybe I'd have been able to be seeing it coming after me, barreling through time, somehow.

I'd have to have had remembered it to see it, but maybe I would... uh, keep remembering something. Remembering it brighter and sizzlier every time, just before I remembered it, until I am and was sure, that it was and would have been only a minute ago that the world will explode around me.

I'm sure I remembered it that way...

Just a second ago.

Rich enough

Wouldn't it be awesome to be rich enough to have an apartment in every single apartment complex in Denton? So if you're out walking, and suddenly you need to take a dump, or you need a band-aid, or you're hungry and need a sandwich, or your phone needs a charge, or you're just fed up and want to lock yourself inside four walls, a ceiling and a floor, and a door... there, you'd have it. All of those things. Just a hop, skip, and a jump away from almost any phenomenon.

Wouldn't that be cool? And you could have houses where there ain't any apartments, so you're covered.

Cool, right? All you need is money. Bunches. Money in bunches, that is. Not so difficult.

Ok, that's what I'm gonna do.

Transistor

Ok, there's this song by 311 called Transistor, and the awesomest part goes like this (lyricwise):

You're a transistor
A lightning resistor
Conductor to the mother star
That's what you are

So I was listening to that, because Transistor kicks a certain amount of boo-hiney - which, as it just so happens to be - is exactly the maximum amount of boo-hiney that can be kicked before shitzkies start flying into the fan.

So, that was happening, and for one of those rare, elusivial moments, time stopped and I was genuinely happy and at peace.

THEN A SHOOTING STAR SHOT RIGHT PAST WHERE I WAS LOOKING, EXACTLY AT 'CONDUCTOR TO THE MOUTHER STAR, THAT'S WHAT YOU ARE'!

Man. It was awesome.

And to top it off, another just went whizzing by. An even awesomer one, just 47 seconds ago.

It was pretty cool, man.

Blue and orange

Blue and orange. If you let the sky roll over, and you hang around for it, that's what happens, slowly. Blue and orange.  They're complimentary colors, by the way.

It's best if you're not careful at all, so that you can be taken by surprise, because...  which is better, anticipating a beautiful thing, or having it knock you over the head while you're daydreaming?

This is what baffles me. It just rips away my ego. It tears a hole in my necessaries and shreds my gives a craps.  And it's just a couple of colors thrown onto the world, is all it is. It scares the shit out of me that one day I'll die, and that I'll miss so much beauty.

Surprise!

You know, things can be really terrible for Joe Schmoe. A regular person can suffer quietly for years, and nobody'd ever notice.

However...

What's still great about everything is the element of surprise.

4:48 am

It's 4:48 AM (I wish it was earlier; more time for this) and there is a lightening storm on the eastern horizon. It's blazing away like a crazy thing... an experience which, by its mere description and wonderable purpose, provides a beyondness separate from the fromthing of your before... you know. The thatnesses. The THATNESS of an object or phenomenon which demands your constant attention. THAT essential item required for the maintenance of your own sanity. THAT thing... the thing that you must do, so that THAT person doesn't have to suffer an undue amount of his own THATNESS, because you let your THATS became THOSE, escaped from your self control. By kind of selfishly removing yourself from them, you know.

THAT, the one I mentioned earlier, happens once you become separated and cast away from the things that you value as having worth (funny how hatred and misery become a tradable commodity) such as rent and bills and money and all of the built in common denominators of life that I am forced to use to calculate the color of the final reduction. God help you if your fractions aren't ready, for the world of decimals and long division awaits. As if...

Why does injury invariably require insult? It's as if Ms.Pate was just waiting... as if it were her sole purpose, after terrorizing two generations of families, to infiltrate every funeral of every family she contaminated and injured, as if she had the right - the gall to assume that living in the same small town and teaching horror, not long division, to the kids of her previous experiments, made her ok. And that it gave her any kind of right to insinuate her shitstink into the memory of my grandpa's funeral.

Do I seem bitter about this? I just realized, that maybe I do...

Nah.

So, has anyone pissed on Ms. Pates' grave yet?  20 years ago, when the old witch finally croaked, I swore to. I haven't yet. That witch terrorized two generations of Davis's. Now that so much time has passed, I dunno if I will... I don't think it would be right. But that... Creature... was a cruel sadistic monster who garnered enjoyment, mostly through inflicting terrorizing humiliation upon the fourth grade children entrusted to her charge. I was one, my sister was one, my brother was one, heck, even my dad was one. We all suffered under that evil bitch.

I got sucked into a digression of my own device for a minute or two hours there. I was originally talking about a lightening storm. What happened? I know, but I'm not telling. But, I have it all recorded for posterity to combustabulate about.

Anyway. I'm at the Baptist Church on Bryan and Crescent, and I'm gonna look for someplace higher to watch the lightening storm. That's really all I wanted to say. And that was two hours ago.

Ice cream.

CRITICAL UPDATE - THIS INFORMATION MAY SAVE YOUR LIFE

Consider for a moment, if you will... the common banana. It's the fruit - a berry, actually - of a large, herbaceous flowering plant. One of the millions of species of living things with which we share this beautiful blue orb, floating serenely through the cosmos. Small. Yellow. Unobtrusive. Conveniently packaged. Tasty. Friendly. On your side. In your corner, and rooting for you. Benign. Harmless... Oh. And it wants to kill you.

Consider for another moment... potassium-40. A radioactive isotope of potassium, with a half life of ONE BILLION, TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY ONE MILLION YEARS. It's the only known isotope that undergoes all three types of beta decay, emitting electrons, neutrinos, anti-neutrinos, positrons, and gamma rays. You know... little tiny teensy weensy things that will kill you dead, dead, DEAD.

So. You know all that potassium that bananas are jam-packed with, that you've always been told is 'good for you'? Well, surprise! That potassium just happens to be potassium-40!

If you eat 10,000,000 bananas all at once, you will CERTAINLY DIE from RADIATION POISONING!

And...

If you eat 274 bananas a day for seven years, you will experience CHRONIC SYMPTOMS of RADIATION SICKNESS!

And...

If you blend 10,000,000 bananas together for one 12 oz smoothie, the potassium-40 will reach CRITICAL MASS and undergo FUSION, initiating a chain reaction and unleashing 100 megatons of NUCLEAR HELL!

Bananas. Who knew?

Raccoons are stupid.

Uh... ok, that's not something you see everyday.  Allow me to elucidate.

So, what happened was, I had just walked back to the Shmelvin Elvin  after work to retrieve my reading glasses, and while I was there, Mr. Chin bought me a beer (remember, I wrote a little thing about that wallago), and then I headed back to my compartment.

As I was walking past the swimming pool, I heard a ruckus of rustling leaves behind me. I figured it was either the wind or some other pedestrian, kicking his/her way through autumn's golden gown, so I didn't give it another thought.

Then it happened again, but closer and quite a bit more ruckus'd up than before. So, what I did was I turned around to see what was ruckusing up the leaves, and what the heck did I see barreling down the breezeway, heading straight toward me, hell bent for hash browns, were two big fat raccoons - so big and fat, I thought that they were dogs at first.

Well, those Supercoons didn't look like they were in agreeance with the idea of changing direction, and according to Newton's first law of motion, which states -

'Every big giant fat raccoon or pair of great big giant fat raccoons, in a state of uniform motion, tends to or will tend to remain in that state of motion, unless an external force is applied to it or them.'

- I decided right then and there that I did not want to be that external force, so I stepped out of the  breezeway... and I'm glad I did, because otherwise I would have been like... POW!... you know, like... KAPOW!... like when Charlie Brown gets nailed by a line drive that knocks him ass-over-tea kettle and right out of his clothes.

As that was happening, I was fairly shouting, "Look, look at those two raccoons, look at those two big ass giant raccoons, look, look at that, oh... look at 'em, they just went 'round the corner, look at those coons, damn ain't they big, look at 'em go!" to nobody in particular, as there wasn't anybody around anyway.

After about five seconds of quiet, I heard this 'ACK ACK AAAACK... ARP! ARP! YIP -  AAAAAAAK!' sound, like a dog getting put through a machine, so I did the only thing I could do. I tore off after those two raccoons and around the corner!

And guess what I saw. Just take a wild guess. What I saw around the corner. Go ahead, I'll wait.

.......
.......
.......

Yup, you guessed it. Two big fat raccoons humping like there was no tomorrow.

Oops that was a typo

It's early late weirdness. 6:35 in the AM.

At about 4:50 cops were all over Fulton by the high school, and I got 'stopped' for the umpeezillipnth time in my life. They asked if I was as teacher at DISD. I said no, and they asked politely if they could, before they did it, take my wallet and get my ID out of it, and run it through the angry system, which they did. Thank you, come again, sir, probably very soon, you know, because and stuff.

Now the suns about to come up, and I should de-conscious myself soonly.

Sometimes though, at times like this... the small hours, you know... early, with a pearly great light over the ebbing everything, is when I almost lose that sunshiny

Oops, that was a typo.

A flawed fundament

Ok. You may have noticed, as I have, that we have electrons, neutrons, and protrons. You know, that make stuff.

I mean... protons.

What? Protons? Well heck, why not protrons? I mean, we've got  electrons and neutrons...

Well, some smart apples a hundred years ago figured out that there is a such a thing as these things, so they started naming them according to their descriptions. Electrons are electric, neutrons are neutered, and protons are proteins. You know, common sense stuff.

Well, what happened after that was, some other smart apple came along and started taking well enough and throwing it into a crowd, and suddenly we have textbooks that say electrons are inherently negative, because getting electrocuted is bad, and that's negative, I guess. They just had to go and get personal with an electron.

And we can't say neutrons are neutered anymore, because that's politically incorrect, because dogs and cats are people too... whatever. So now we have to say that neutrons are neutral. I mean, it's the same difference, ain't it?  Neuter, neutral... whatever, it comes out in the wash meaning the same dadgum thing.

And don't all proteins, every last ever loving one of them, have protons as one of their essential ingredients? Huh? Tell me I'm not right! Show me a protein that doesn't have a proton in it, and I'll show you a pork pie hat made out of pork pot pie and baked into the shape of a fedora and worn by a porgy and applauded by a bess, just like tweren't nuthin but a thang about it at all (and they should be called protReins, because Tron is the root word of awesome, by the way).

So what do they do to the proton? Not only do they forcibly rip away the Tron...

Oh boy.  Ok, gimme a sec to take a couple of deep breaths so I don't go splitting atoms here.

Alright. Firstly, before I shed light on this atrocity... they say that the reason its called a proton is because it has a positive charge. I mean, it's not just an arbitrary name, is it? Proton? There has to be some correlation between the name of the thing and the property of the thing, right? Like pro means positive, I guess? Right? Haven't I just demonstrated that concept with the electron and the neutron? Yeah, whatever, about them screwing up the names... they were still following a recognizable system, however flawed. Like pro for positive. Like an analogy that a third grade teacher in a one horse town would come up with... it's clumsy and ignorant, but at least it balances.

But the proton... and the electron too, as a matter of fact, now that I think about it... damn it, I'll just come right out and say it. The proton should be called a positron, and the electron should be called a negatron!

... no, not a Megatron, you stupid stupid machine! Negatron! No, not negate on... negatron! A negatively charged Tron!

Yeesh...

If you weren't just an idiotic integrated circuit, then maybe you would understand how bringing up the name of an evil transformer has absolutely nothing to do with what these words are all about... with what they MEAN, man! You can't just go making suggestions for spelling corrections all willy nilly... you've got to consider the CONTEXT surrounding the word that you're trying to auto-spell!

Anyway, dammit...

Right? Right?? Who's with me? I mean, why does an anti-electron get to be called a positron, instead of an anti-negatron? Which was discovered first? Or, more importantly... which are there more of in the universe, PERIOD?

There are so obviously more electrons (negatrons) than positrons (anti-negatrons). So why does the opposite of an electron get to be called a positron???

It ain't fair, dammit!

Meaningless beauty

I feel compelled... that is, I have to say something about it. I must attempt to communicate the experience. I don't yearn to share it... the essence of it yearns to be shared. And the yearning of it compels me to try.

It's like this... it's like something a newborn baby would dream, the first time it slept, and the first dream it dreamt. That's what it looks like, the thing that's got me worked up.

It's... but looking at it makes me feel old, like just the seeing of it forces the roots of it right into me, and the receiving of it is like... knowing the end of something. Something vast. But that's all I can see... the end of it. And it makes me feel so old...

And if beauty can be found in anything, then I use that justification to support the description and the feeling of what I'm seeing, which is meaningless beauty. Being poleaxed by the majesty of the ending of an ancient thing, without knowing or understanding the substance of it, or the history of it, or the life of it or the essence of it, or the meaning of it.

Just the end of it, and it's hammering my awareness like the gamma rays that a hydrogen bomb slams rudely and forcefully and absurdly into violent existence. But it's still there, the thing I'm all worked up about.

I look at it now and then again, and it's always an oldness. What it does to me, is it conveys to me a feeling of never having to breathe again, and being ok with that, and just accepting it without panic.