I twisted my umpteenth ankle.

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

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

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

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

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

WTF, MAN!!!

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

Ok.

Now that I'm calm, allow me elucidate.

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

With me so far?

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

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

Onward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WTF, MAN!!!

Brain format

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marveling mood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glenna died.

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Incomplete Alien

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

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

November 9th, 2016.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SILENCIO...!

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

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

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

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

"Turd!" she cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A blimp?"

"It could be a blimp," Matt agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I made up my mind and decided to play along.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The one what?" I asked.

"The one UFO," Matt replied.

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, back to the dream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My thoughts shifted into lightning mode.

"Nope," I agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHIT!

Uh. I'll type more of it later

The five stages of pulling a double

The five stages of having to work a double shift.

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

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

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

4. Depression
This sucks!

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

Bee

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

Screams

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm too tired for teenage drama."

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

"Or her boyfriend/lab partner."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prize gloves

What happened, was...

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

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

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

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

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

Memory

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

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

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

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

Anyway.

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

Anyway, again.

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

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

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

In your FACE, turdknockers! YEAH.

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

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

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

Y'all remember that now?

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

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

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

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

NOPE.

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

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

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

In your FACE, turdknockers of the world!

JPL RULES!

Over now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me, at first, and then nature.

So. This is what my life looks like.

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

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

THANKS FOR THAT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2(10^11) galaxies.

How many galaxies are in the universe?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4*10^3

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

Otay?

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

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

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

400 sextillion.

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

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

Just sayin'.