Monday, March 13, 2017
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
The Nonplussed - chapter 1 (draft)
DISCLAIMER THING
If you're reading this, then know there is a story here that I'm willing to tell you, and it's a real humdinger if you're a human being. If you're some far future alien life form who happened to get hold of this by some clusterfuck of probability, then it probably won't make hardly any sense to you at all. You can go ahead and read it though, if you want. Maybe you'll like it, who knows... but I doubt it, so you might just wanna file it somewhere and get on with your totally alien and probably totally gross and disgusting alien business. Hey, no harm, no foul.
However... if you're human, then I'd advise that you continue reading, because this is YOUR story! It's all about people... stupid, smart, retarded, insane, evil, benevolent, funny looking, socially inept, miserable, deliriously happy, bright shiny and dusty people, just like you! Plus a few really exceptional ones thrown in here and there. Statistical anomalies.
So, I might ask myself... how do I know all of this, and why should you trust me to continue reading any of it? Because I'm the book, I'm the storyteller, and I'm telling you this. So, you can trust me to know what I'm going about! Ok?
Ok! On with it then.
Firstly. Let's see... um. Dang, there's so many to choose from. So many points of view! It's hard to decide which ones should take precedence. Ok, lemme back up. Let's see... um, um, um, um... Ok! Here we go, this guy looks interesting, and there's a lot of interesting folks around him, too. Huh... WHOA! Oh yeah, this guy is connected, he's a major focal point! Cool. We'll start with him. His name is... hang on... Dempsey Witt. From... Georgia, Podunk county, United States of America plus Baja California, the year 2060 AD.
Ok. We'll start with him.
.
.
.
Dempsey Witt - Dem to folks who knew him, Dim to his friends - was taking the scenic route to work today. It was a fine, almost spring morning in southern Georgia in January. The January dandelions were letting go, the January honeysuckle was in the air, and the smell of springtime in January was almost blowing in the wind, as fine as nostril wine, in the back country of southern Georgia.
'Almost is all you need,' Dim sang out loud to the tune of a hundred year old Beatles song that was squeaking out of the old dashboard sat-radio.
'Oh, and you know what else?' Dim continued out loud, 'Almost only counts in horseshoes, thermonuclear war, and 180 proof distilled spirits!' The proof - no pun intended - was the almost full load of almost 100% pure grain alcohol in the bed of the pickup. He was in a pretty good mood that morning, for a dilapidated old bootlegger, and he hardly even noticed any of the potholes as he bullied the old Ford pickup down the well neglected oil roads of southern Georgia, Podunk county, USA - well neglected in the upkeep, but well familiar in the driving of. That's the way that the oil roads of back country USA had been for the last hundred years, and Dem was sixty-six years old and could vouch personally for a bunch of those years. 'Oil roads were made for runnin' moonshine,' his dad used to say. They were the arteries and veins of it - and right now, Dim was the beating heart that was pumping the vital hooch to the vital organs. If Dim was the heart that pumped the hooch (or mule kick, as his dad used to to call it), then Sheriff Buckeye Buck was definitely the liver that did the processing. Sheriff Buck was the organ that filtered the 'lectric honey (as his mom used to call it) - that Dim delivered, so that it was provisioned fairly and according to the Law of the Land, according to Buckeye Buck that is, who was the hooch accountant, the county liver... Yeah, there ya go! That's the analogy he was looking for!
That's what Dempsey Witt was thinking that morning as he trundled over those ragged potholes. Work for Dempsey Witt was running moonshine, and the running of it was work for Dempsey Witt - Dim, as he was known to his friends, Dem to just folks - and he'd never known anything different for his whole life. Later on he'd maybe think about how strange all of that seemed in retrospect, once seen outside of his world of rural Georgia, right after the universe had exploded in his face, but whatever future that was gonna be, Dempsey Witt had no idea of it right then. He had hooch to deliver today, and not some time hence.
So it was a fine, spring-like January morning in Southern Georgia that Dempsey Witt - Dim to his friends, Dem to just folks; he always liked to make that clear - pulled his old hooch laden Ford 'lectric into the front yard of Madame Maybe's House of Well Repute and Oasis. It was 7:00 AM, and only just seven hours past the state mandated closing time of any and all reputed houses, be they ill or well. Dim (we'll just call him that from here on, ok?) cut the juice to the Ford and parked for a while, waiting. After a medium-sized while, the front door of Madame Maybe's cracked open by just a smidge, and an amplified caterwaul issued forth -
"BEELZEBUB IS A PRETTY GOOD GUY!"
Dim rolled down his window and hollered back -
"AS FAR AS DEMONS GO!"
And again, from the crack in the door -
"BUT HIS BROTHER BAAL..."
"LORD DON'T HE WAIL!" Dim yelled, close to cracking up. And again, from the crack in the door -
"AND BAPHOMET..."
And then both of them together, "IS JUST PLAIN PSYCHO!"
The front door to Madame Maybell's House of Well Repute and Oasis slammed open and half a dozen shotgun barrels poked out, pointing in all directions, like some kind of Looney Tunes ensemble.
"We gotcher dead to rights!" came the challenge.
Dim stepped out of the cab of the truck and walked around to the back. "Dead to rights?" he yelled, as he fiddled with the tailgate latch. "You don't even know what that means, you asshole!" Dim yanked the latch up and down furiously about a dozen times, but it wouldn't open. He slapped the tailgate in frustration and yelled to Sheriff Buck. "Gitcher fat ass down here and help me unload these kegs of moonshine!"
Sheriff Buckeye Buck of Podunk county, state of Georgia, USA, lumbered out onto the front porch of Madame Maybell's. "Shut up you dimwit," he hissed, his eyes shifting left and right as he leveraged his considerable bulk down the front porch steps. "What if I was posing as myself as an undercover cop? You don't know who might be hollerin' out the door, hiding in the nooks and crannies and alcoves! Great Godahmighty, son!"
Dim gave the latch of the tailgate one last, exasperated yank and decided to just skip the damn thing. He clambered up over it and into the bed of the pickup and shouted back, "First off, I'm old enough to be YOUR pappy, SON!" Heh, Dim chuckled and thought, I sure get a kick out of myself, don't I? "And nextly, concerning your cornfed paranoia, well... there wouldn't never be no problem of an undercover cop to begin with, would there, you thick country bumpkin! Because you'da justa been POSING as one!" Dim manhandled one of the big aluminum kegs toward the back of the truck. "Kinda like how you're constantly posing as the Sheriff of Podunk county," he added, "when you're really just the Hooch Man for every back-woods whore house and broken down saloon in all of southern Georgia!" Oh boy, Dim laughed down into his chin, he was sure hot today.
Suddenly six girls with shotguns, ranging from about ten to fourteen years of age, burst out of the open door of Madame Maybell's and went charging around where Sherrif Buckeye stood on the steps, like rapids around a boulder, and very nearly sending him tumbling. "You girls... you girls! Dammit, you girls!" blubbered the Sheriff.
Dim looked up from wrestling with the aluminum keg, just as one of the older girls - about thirteen years old, by the look of her - leapt up effortlessly into the bed of his pickup and offered him her shotgun. "Sir, would you mind keepin' a hold of this for me, just for a bit, til me and the girls is done here?" She said.
Dim stared wordlessly at the girl with his mouth hanging open. In all of his sixty-six years, this was probably the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. She was about 5' without an inch to spare, with dark brown hair that went down to her unusually broad shoulders. She was wearing a tank top, on the front of which was printed the image of a fur covered monster that was lifting up the fur fom it's midsection and pointing to a set of well chiseled abs. 'THE ABDOMINAL SNOWMAN' was printed underneath, in large letters. A long, brown summer skirt decorated with paisleys and flowers flowed down from her waist to her ankles, almost covering the pair of well worn sandals that she wore on her small feet. The girl was obviously in great shape, Dim could tell; simply by observing her arms and shoulders, which were smooth and well defined. She was simply the epitome of youthful exuberance.
"Sir, please? Time's a-runnin' out, and we gotta get this evidence to... to..." The girl looked around frantically for a second, as if she were trying to locate... " to where it's supposed to be!" she suddenly shouted. "And right quick! Please, zillions of lives are at stake!" She gave the outstretched shotgun an impatient shake, and Dim took it from her. Then the girl smiled a smile that could have gone down in history, if history had been paying attention. History was busy somewhere else though apparently, so only Dim saw that smile... that heart wrecking, ship breaking smile.
"Thank you sir!" she said, and then to the others waiting below...
"Girls! Let's get to it! You know what to do!" And with a tchika-tchika THUNK, one of em had jimmied the tailgate latch that Dim had been struggling with, and then it was down, and all six of the shotgun girls immediately began unloading the barrels of moonshine and rolling them up to the front porch of Madame Maybe's. "Were rollin' over and turnin' states evidence!" shouted one of the younger girls amidst the flurry of activity. Another, older girl shouted, "Shut UP! This is a black op, STUPID," to the younger one who had just blabbed about turning states evidence, whatever that meant.
Dim watched it all with his jaw hanging open. What the heck had just happened? he thought to himself. That smile, from that girl, the beautiful girl... It had poleaxed him! Suddenly Dim was overcome with a feeling of paternal love for her, whoever she was. He knew right then and there that he would die to save her, to protect her... What the heck is happening, Dim stuttered inside his own head. That girl had smiled the most perfectest smile in all of the history of the human race, and... she'd had no idea! How could she have? She was still existing inside of the perfect naivety of unspoilt innocence!
Dim was sure, more sure than he'd ever been in his life about anything, that this girl, who had just smiled that miraculous smile, had no idea that she was the most beautiful newborn woman who had ever just crossed over from childhood, through puberty, and into young adulthood. She just didn't know it. Amazing!
"Lookit em go," commented Buckeye Buck with a smile, as he finally made his way over to where Dim stood stupidly in the bed of the old electric Ford pickup, now empty of 7 and a half barrels of the bestest moonshine in all of southern Georgia. "They're something, ain't they?" Buckeye laughed. "A tad excitable though, but that's youth. Didja see how I almost broke my neck, with all of them tadpoles scurrying past me down the steps? Lordamercy! Dim? Dim, you awake in there?"
Dim came to with a start. "Uh... yeah." He dug around in his pocket for a second, as if he'd lost something, and then his hand just kind of settled there.
Sheriff Buck's eyes narrowed. "Now, Dim, you ain't been at the hooch this early on a Sunday morning, I know you ain't, cause you and me both know that I'd hafta... heh." He'd meant it as a joke, but after he'd said it, it didn't seem like one. Sheriff Buck glanced down furtively at his dusty boots, then up again at Dim, waiting to see how he'd take it.
Dim shook his head in annoyance, as if he were trying to rid it of an infestation of fleas. "What?" he barked, and then noticed Sheriff Buckeye standing right there, leaning against the side of the truck, and looking up at him with the most retarded look of questioning suspicion that Dim had ever seen. It was the look of an ignorant hick, stupid and glazed, Dim thought. For a couple of seconds as he looked down at the Sheriff, he was filled with disgust at the sight of him - 'What a stupid bottom feeder... how do I even know this backwoods inbred hillbilly?' - And then he'd snapped out of it, and saw his friend Bucky again. Sheriff Buckeye Buck. Dim called him Bucky. Young and dumb, yeah, but with a lot more smarts than anyone would ever know, unless they knew him as a friend. Dim felt ashamed for thinking those things about his friend. He'd been discombobulated by the girl's smile, that's all.
Dim recovered his composure and resumed his pocket digging, producing a pack of smokes and a lighter. He casually popped a cigarette out of the pack and put it between his lips, then cupped the lighter flame with both hands and inhaled deeply. "That's real funny," - cough, chuckle - "I guess Boss Hog just caught me red handed being human," Dim said as he exhaled a lungful of smoke.
The import of the moment hadn't been lost on Sheriff Buckeye, though. He'd seen that look of contempt cross over his friend's features, just for a second. With all of the years that they'd known each other and run hooch together, he'd always known that Dim had looked down on him with a certain measure of contempt... an ashamed and we'll hidden contempt, but still there, nevertheless. It's why Buckeye Buck had maneuvered himself in the lofty position of Sheriff of Podunk county, after all. He'd done it for the good opinion of Dempsey Witt, because Dempsey and Buck's dear departed dad, Billy Buck, went way back... back to a time when the Sheriff's name was Witt, and when Buckeye was what you hollered at the scamp that always getting under his dad's heels...
"Was that a gaggle of gun toting girlies I just seen blow through here and carry off a truckload of South Georgia White Lightning, slicker'n goose shit?" Dim suddenly blurted, in an attempt to preempt the gathering mood.
Sheriff Buck relaxed visibly and laughed. "Heh! That's my secret service in training. Ain't they somethin'? A tad bit rambunctious, but that's just young'uns being young and playin' purtend, as young'uns ought ta."
Dim suddenly remembered the shotgun that he'd been holding the whole time, that the girl with the bedazzling smile had asked him to hang onto. He lifted it up for a closer examination. He tested the heft. He released the pump action and opened the chamber, revealing a bona fide12 gauge slug resting within. He turned it over and examined the stock, which had 'Mossberg' printed on one side, and 'SuperSuze', in very stylized, curlicue letters on the other.
"Say, what the hell..."
.
.
.
"Thanks for holding onto my gun, sir! Oh.. and, mission accomplished! I'm special agent Susanna 'SuperSuze' Hicks, by the way! Nice to meetcha, and thanks again for holding my Mossberg for me! Bye!" She saluted crisply, then leapt from the bed of the truck and was gone.
If you're reading this, then know there is a story here that I'm willing to tell you, and it's a real humdinger if you're a human being. If you're some far future alien life form who happened to get hold of this by some clusterfuck of probability, then it probably won't make hardly any sense to you at all. You can go ahead and read it though, if you want. Maybe you'll like it, who knows... but I doubt it, so you might just wanna file it somewhere and get on with your totally alien and probably totally gross and disgusting alien business. Hey, no harm, no foul.
However... if you're human, then I'd advise that you continue reading, because this is YOUR story! It's all about people... stupid, smart, retarded, insane, evil, benevolent, funny looking, socially inept, miserable, deliriously happy, bright shiny and dusty people, just like you! Plus a few really exceptional ones thrown in here and there. Statistical anomalies.
So, I might ask myself... how do I know all of this, and why should you trust me to continue reading any of it? Because I'm the book, I'm the storyteller, and I'm telling you this. So, you can trust me to know what I'm going about! Ok?
Ok! On with it then.
Firstly. Let's see... um. Dang, there's so many to choose from. So many points of view! It's hard to decide which ones should take precedence. Ok, lemme back up. Let's see... um, um, um, um... Ok! Here we go, this guy looks interesting, and there's a lot of interesting folks around him, too. Huh... WHOA! Oh yeah, this guy is connected, he's a major focal point! Cool. We'll start with him. His name is... hang on... Dempsey Witt. From... Georgia, Podunk county, United States of America plus Baja California, the year 2060 AD.
Ok. We'll start with him.
.
.
.
Dempsey Witt - Dem to folks who knew him, Dim to his friends - was taking the scenic route to work today. It was a fine, almost spring morning in southern Georgia in January. The January dandelions were letting go, the January honeysuckle was in the air, and the smell of springtime in January was almost blowing in the wind, as fine as nostril wine, in the back country of southern Georgia.
'Almost is all you need,' Dim sang out loud to the tune of a hundred year old Beatles song that was squeaking out of the old dashboard sat-radio.
'Oh, and you know what else?' Dim continued out loud, 'Almost only counts in horseshoes, thermonuclear war, and 180 proof distilled spirits!' The proof - no pun intended - was the almost full load of almost 100% pure grain alcohol in the bed of the pickup. He was in a pretty good mood that morning, for a dilapidated old bootlegger, and he hardly even noticed any of the potholes as he bullied the old Ford pickup down the well neglected oil roads of southern Georgia, Podunk county, USA - well neglected in the upkeep, but well familiar in the driving of. That's the way that the oil roads of back country USA had been for the last hundred years, and Dem was sixty-six years old and could vouch personally for a bunch of those years. 'Oil roads were made for runnin' moonshine,' his dad used to say. They were the arteries and veins of it - and right now, Dim was the beating heart that was pumping the vital hooch to the vital organs. If Dim was the heart that pumped the hooch (or mule kick, as his dad used to to call it), then Sheriff Buckeye Buck was definitely the liver that did the processing. Sheriff Buck was the organ that filtered the 'lectric honey (as his mom used to call it) - that Dim delivered, so that it was provisioned fairly and according to the Law of the Land, according to Buckeye Buck that is, who was the hooch accountant, the county liver... Yeah, there ya go! That's the analogy he was looking for!
That's what Dempsey Witt was thinking that morning as he trundled over those ragged potholes. Work for Dempsey Witt was running moonshine, and the running of it was work for Dempsey Witt - Dim, as he was known to his friends, Dem to just folks - and he'd never known anything different for his whole life. Later on he'd maybe think about how strange all of that seemed in retrospect, once seen outside of his world of rural Georgia, right after the universe had exploded in his face, but whatever future that was gonna be, Dempsey Witt had no idea of it right then. He had hooch to deliver today, and not some time hence.
So it was a fine, spring-like January morning in Southern Georgia that Dempsey Witt - Dim to his friends, Dem to just folks; he always liked to make that clear - pulled his old hooch laden Ford 'lectric into the front yard of Madame Maybe's House of Well Repute and Oasis. It was 7:00 AM, and only just seven hours past the state mandated closing time of any and all reputed houses, be they ill or well. Dim (we'll just call him that from here on, ok?) cut the juice to the Ford and parked for a while, waiting. After a medium-sized while, the front door of Madame Maybe's cracked open by just a smidge, and an amplified caterwaul issued forth -
"BEELZEBUB IS A PRETTY GOOD GUY!"
Dim rolled down his window and hollered back -
"AS FAR AS DEMONS GO!"
And again, from the crack in the door -
"BUT HIS BROTHER BAAL..."
"LORD DON'T HE WAIL!" Dim yelled, close to cracking up. And again, from the crack in the door -
"AND BAPHOMET..."
And then both of them together, "IS JUST PLAIN PSYCHO!"
The front door to Madame Maybell's House of Well Repute and Oasis slammed open and half a dozen shotgun barrels poked out, pointing in all directions, like some kind of Looney Tunes ensemble.
"We gotcher dead to rights!" came the challenge.
Dim stepped out of the cab of the truck and walked around to the back. "Dead to rights?" he yelled, as he fiddled with the tailgate latch. "You don't even know what that means, you asshole!" Dim yanked the latch up and down furiously about a dozen times, but it wouldn't open. He slapped the tailgate in frustration and yelled to Sheriff Buck. "Gitcher fat ass down here and help me unload these kegs of moonshine!"
Sheriff Buckeye Buck of Podunk county, state of Georgia, USA, lumbered out onto the front porch of Madame Maybell's. "Shut up you dimwit," he hissed, his eyes shifting left and right as he leveraged his considerable bulk down the front porch steps. "What if I was posing as myself as an undercover cop? You don't know who might be hollerin' out the door, hiding in the nooks and crannies and alcoves! Great Godahmighty, son!"
Dim gave the latch of the tailgate one last, exasperated yank and decided to just skip the damn thing. He clambered up over it and into the bed of the pickup and shouted back, "First off, I'm old enough to be YOUR pappy, SON!" Heh, Dim chuckled and thought, I sure get a kick out of myself, don't I? "And nextly, concerning your cornfed paranoia, well... there wouldn't never be no problem of an undercover cop to begin with, would there, you thick country bumpkin! Because you'da justa been POSING as one!" Dim manhandled one of the big aluminum kegs toward the back of the truck. "Kinda like how you're constantly posing as the Sheriff of Podunk county," he added, "when you're really just the Hooch Man for every back-woods whore house and broken down saloon in all of southern Georgia!" Oh boy, Dim laughed down into his chin, he was sure hot today.
Suddenly six girls with shotguns, ranging from about ten to fourteen years of age, burst out of the open door of Madame Maybell's and went charging around where Sherrif Buckeye stood on the steps, like rapids around a boulder, and very nearly sending him tumbling. "You girls... you girls! Dammit, you girls!" blubbered the Sheriff.
Dim looked up from wrestling with the aluminum keg, just as one of the older girls - about thirteen years old, by the look of her - leapt up effortlessly into the bed of his pickup and offered him her shotgun. "Sir, would you mind keepin' a hold of this for me, just for a bit, til me and the girls is done here?" She said.
Dim stared wordlessly at the girl with his mouth hanging open. In all of his sixty-six years, this was probably the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. She was about 5' without an inch to spare, with dark brown hair that went down to her unusually broad shoulders. She was wearing a tank top, on the front of which was printed the image of a fur covered monster that was lifting up the fur fom it's midsection and pointing to a set of well chiseled abs. 'THE ABDOMINAL SNOWMAN' was printed underneath, in large letters. A long, brown summer skirt decorated with paisleys and flowers flowed down from her waist to her ankles, almost covering the pair of well worn sandals that she wore on her small feet. The girl was obviously in great shape, Dim could tell; simply by observing her arms and shoulders, which were smooth and well defined. She was simply the epitome of youthful exuberance.
"Sir, please? Time's a-runnin' out, and we gotta get this evidence to... to..." The girl looked around frantically for a second, as if she were trying to locate... " to where it's supposed to be!" she suddenly shouted. "And right quick! Please, zillions of lives are at stake!" She gave the outstretched shotgun an impatient shake, and Dim took it from her. Then the girl smiled a smile that could have gone down in history, if history had been paying attention. History was busy somewhere else though apparently, so only Dim saw that smile... that heart wrecking, ship breaking smile.
"Thank you sir!" she said, and then to the others waiting below...
"Girls! Let's get to it! You know what to do!" And with a tchika-tchika THUNK, one of em had jimmied the tailgate latch that Dim had been struggling with, and then it was down, and all six of the shotgun girls immediately began unloading the barrels of moonshine and rolling them up to the front porch of Madame Maybe's. "Were rollin' over and turnin' states evidence!" shouted one of the younger girls amidst the flurry of activity. Another, older girl shouted, "Shut UP! This is a black op, STUPID," to the younger one who had just blabbed about turning states evidence, whatever that meant.
Dim watched it all with his jaw hanging open. What the heck had just happened? he thought to himself. That smile, from that girl, the beautiful girl... It had poleaxed him! Suddenly Dim was overcome with a feeling of paternal love for her, whoever she was. He knew right then and there that he would die to save her, to protect her... What the heck is happening, Dim stuttered inside his own head. That girl had smiled the most perfectest smile in all of the history of the human race, and... she'd had no idea! How could she have? She was still existing inside of the perfect naivety of unspoilt innocence!
Dim was sure, more sure than he'd ever been in his life about anything, that this girl, who had just smiled that miraculous smile, had no idea that she was the most beautiful newborn woman who had ever just crossed over from childhood, through puberty, and into young adulthood. She just didn't know it. Amazing!
"Lookit em go," commented Buckeye Buck with a smile, as he finally made his way over to where Dim stood stupidly in the bed of the old electric Ford pickup, now empty of 7 and a half barrels of the bestest moonshine in all of southern Georgia. "They're something, ain't they?" Buckeye laughed. "A tad excitable though, but that's youth. Didja see how I almost broke my neck, with all of them tadpoles scurrying past me down the steps? Lordamercy! Dim? Dim, you awake in there?"
Dim came to with a start. "Uh... yeah." He dug around in his pocket for a second, as if he'd lost something, and then his hand just kind of settled there.
Sheriff Buck's eyes narrowed. "Now, Dim, you ain't been at the hooch this early on a Sunday morning, I know you ain't, cause you and me both know that I'd hafta... heh." He'd meant it as a joke, but after he'd said it, it didn't seem like one. Sheriff Buck glanced down furtively at his dusty boots, then up again at Dim, waiting to see how he'd take it.
Dim shook his head in annoyance, as if he were trying to rid it of an infestation of fleas. "What?" he barked, and then noticed Sheriff Buckeye standing right there, leaning against the side of the truck, and looking up at him with the most retarded look of questioning suspicion that Dim had ever seen. It was the look of an ignorant hick, stupid and glazed, Dim thought. For a couple of seconds as he looked down at the Sheriff, he was filled with disgust at the sight of him - 'What a stupid bottom feeder... how do I even know this backwoods inbred hillbilly?' - And then he'd snapped out of it, and saw his friend Bucky again. Sheriff Buckeye Buck. Dim called him Bucky. Young and dumb, yeah, but with a lot more smarts than anyone would ever know, unless they knew him as a friend. Dim felt ashamed for thinking those things about his friend. He'd been discombobulated by the girl's smile, that's all.
Dim recovered his composure and resumed his pocket digging, producing a pack of smokes and a lighter. He casually popped a cigarette out of the pack and put it between his lips, then cupped the lighter flame with both hands and inhaled deeply. "That's real funny," - cough, chuckle - "I guess Boss Hog just caught me red handed being human," Dim said as he exhaled a lungful of smoke.
The import of the moment hadn't been lost on Sheriff Buckeye, though. He'd seen that look of contempt cross over his friend's features, just for a second. With all of the years that they'd known each other and run hooch together, he'd always known that Dim had looked down on him with a certain measure of contempt... an ashamed and we'll hidden contempt, but still there, nevertheless. It's why Buckeye Buck had maneuvered himself in the lofty position of Sheriff of Podunk county, after all. He'd done it for the good opinion of Dempsey Witt, because Dempsey and Buck's dear departed dad, Billy Buck, went way back... back to a time when the Sheriff's name was Witt, and when Buckeye was what you hollered at the scamp that always getting under his dad's heels...
"Was that a gaggle of gun toting girlies I just seen blow through here and carry off a truckload of South Georgia White Lightning, slicker'n goose shit?" Dim suddenly blurted, in an attempt to preempt the gathering mood.
Sheriff Buck relaxed visibly and laughed. "Heh! That's my secret service in training. Ain't they somethin'? A tad bit rambunctious, but that's just young'uns being young and playin' purtend, as young'uns ought ta."
Dim suddenly remembered the shotgun that he'd been holding the whole time, that the girl with the bedazzling smile had asked him to hang onto. He lifted it up for a closer examination. He tested the heft. He released the pump action and opened the chamber, revealing a bona fide12 gauge slug resting within. He turned it over and examined the stock, which had 'Mossberg' printed on one side, and 'SuperSuze', in very stylized, curlicue letters on the other.
"Say, what the hell..."
.
.
.
"Thanks for holding onto my gun, sir! Oh.. and, mission accomplished! I'm special agent Susanna 'SuperSuze' Hicks, by the way! Nice to meetcha, and thanks again for holding my Mossberg for me! Bye!" She saluted crisply, then leapt from the bed of the truck and was gone.
Friday, February 17, 2017
A dream - flying the hang glider
I had my hang glider. I'd finally built it. I had it disassembled and packed into a duffel bag, and I was taking the bus out to the edge of town to look for a good place to launch from. Someone on the bus asked what I had in the duffel bag. "A bamboo hang glider that I built," I replied. "I'm gonna test it today. "
The guy smiled, shook his head, and said, "If you're trying to kill yourself, you sure as hell don't need to take a rickety, homemade hang glider with you when you take the plunge." I'd definitely heard that before, and I had my stock answer ready.
"I ain't trying to off myself. What I've built is based on a glider design called a Rogallo wing, and this one specifically is referred to as a bamboo butterfly. And I didn't just throw this thing together together willy nilly, you know. I've built five different test models, and I tested each one until it was trashed. The final one was a 1/5th scale model with a wingspan of a little more than four feet, so I've done a lot of testing. The only thing left to test now is the real thing, so here I am." The guy raised his eyebrows and made a little 'pff' sound, and just shook his head a little.
"I've read about people doing this and pulling it off with no experience whatsoever," I said. "If they can do it, then so can I." The guy just shook his head some more. Finally he spoke.
"I know what a Rogallo wing is, and I know all about your bamboo butterfly. I'm a hang glider pilot, and speaking from years of experience, what you're doing is a damn fool stunt and you're liable to break your neck."
I looked at the guy. "It may be a damn fool thing to do, but I sure as hell am gonna do it anyway. I mean, anybody can do this. Anybody! The bamboo is free, it grows everywhere. You might wind up spending fifty dollars for materials, such as nuts, bolts, screws, duct tape, a propane torch for curing the bamboo, a saw for cutting it, and plastic sheeting for the sails. Do you understand what that means? It means that any Joe Schmoe with fifty dollars and a little determination can FLY, man. How can somebody have that knowledge in their head and then not do it?"
The guy looked at me for about five seconds, then he slapped his knee and busted out laughing. "Well, I guess even a damn fool can make a good point. If you live through it, let me know how it went." I said that I would, although I didn't even know the guys name, or how to get hold of him after.
My stop came and I hefted my duffel bag and got off the bus. I walked around, looking for a good spot to launch, and I found one. It was a wide street with thick stands of trees running along each side that went downhill for about an eighth of a mile, then leveled off and continued in a straight line until I couldn't see it anymore for the trees. There was a decent wind blowing from the direction of the road, so I unpacked my hang glider and assembled it, hefted the pilots cage over my shoulders, gripped the support struts with both arms, ran as hard as I could toward the slope of that road and jumped with everything I had. The sail billowed as it caught the air, and suddenly my feet were off the ground. I looked down and watched as the road surface slipped away beneath me. I looked to the sides and saw that I was almost level with the treetops. I was a good thirty feet in the air, and flying. No, not just flying... I was sailing. Sailing straight and true, cupped inside that little valley of trees, and following the path of the road below.
Then the leading edges at the far ends of both wings snapped. The wings didn't outright collapse, but I'd lost about twenty percent of my glide ratio. I shifted my body back as far as I could to lift the nose so that more of the surface area of the wings would be able to catch the air. That helped a little, but then the nose came up too far, and I stalled. I started to drop fast, so I pushed myself forward, straining to get the nose down again. Finally the wings billowed as they caught the air, and I dropped hard onto the road surface, like a paratrooper. It was like jumping from a ten foot height and landing on your feet. It felt like an inside out uppercut - like a pressure wave traveling through every square inch of my body, starting with my feet and landing full force, right inside my noggin. I thought my skull was gonna come apart. And, MAN, did the soles of my feet STING! I was alive though and no worse for wear, and my neck wasn't broke. I'd done went and did it.
I inspected the broken leading edges and saw the weak spot. It was where I'd had to fasten two bamboo poles together to increase the total length of the edge, and it didn't hold, plain and simple. I'd have to make it stronger, is all. I trudged back up the hill with the broken hang glider resting on my shoulders, and when I got to the top, the bus just happened to be right there as it was making its rounds. The guy I'd spoken to before saw me and waved, then made a gesture with his hands like he was snapping a twig, followed by a shrug as if to ask, 'what happened'? I made the twig breaking gesture, followed by a twisting screwdriver, and a motion like I was rolling tape around something. Then I made as though I were trying very hard to break a stout branch without success. After that I made a muscle with my arm and gave the guy a thumbs up. I could see the guy laughing and giving me a thumbs up as the bus disappeared down the road.
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
lives
Here in Denton there's a cemetery right close to the UNT campus. An old one, surrounded by high fences, but there's always a gate open whenever I go by there, no matter what time of day, night, morning, gloaming, or whenever. I'm always over there at night, though.
Olden graves are something of a comfort to me because my dad used to take us kids to olden cemetery plots in East Texas... just to be there, you know. To imprint the experience on a young brain. I remember those cemetery visits from 30-40 years ago, so nowadays I approach cemeteries as a place where I'd like to be. With a young, dreamy feeling.
I go into that cemetery here in Denton sometimes, like tonight, when I'm wandering around, restless and with nothing to do, but not ready to hit the end of it yet. I go into there and look at lots and lots of graves. It's easy to lose myself in the looking at all of those names, all of those lives. Lives like mine, that meant something once, to someone, and I'm only catching the thin, foamy froth of the ocean of that life, by seeing that headstone, with the name and date, and sometimes a personal inscription.
If I dwell on this stark reality of never knowing the texture of all the lives around me, alive and visible, alive and behind closed doors, dead and cold and buried and forever unknowable, I'll begin to despair with profound grief. If I let that feeling grow, it'll start to hurt so bad that it passes beyond my comprehension, the feeling of it, and I'll reboot back to just being confused and a little depressed. I can account for the process of it now, because it's happened so many times before.
Olden graves are something of a comfort to me because my dad used to take us kids to olden cemetery plots in East Texas... just to be there, you know. To imprint the experience on a young brain. I remember those cemetery visits from 30-40 years ago, so nowadays I approach cemeteries as a place where I'd like to be. With a young, dreamy feeling.
I go into that cemetery here in Denton sometimes, like tonight, when I'm wandering around, restless and with nothing to do, but not ready to hit the end of it yet. I go into there and look at lots and lots of graves. It's easy to lose myself in the looking at all of those names, all of those lives. Lives like mine, that meant something once, to someone, and I'm only catching the thin, foamy froth of the ocean of that life, by seeing that headstone, with the name and date, and sometimes a personal inscription.
If I dwell on this stark reality of never knowing the texture of all the lives around me, alive and visible, alive and behind closed doors, dead and cold and buried and forever unknowable, I'll begin to despair with profound grief. If I let that feeling grow, it'll start to hurt so bad that it passes beyond my comprehension, the feeling of it, and I'll reboot back to just being confused and a little depressed. I can account for the process of it now, because it's happened so many times before.
Thursday, February 9, 2017
The car chase
I was in a car chase once.
A bona-fide, side-swiping, corner screeching, rearview mirror looking, heart pounding, trying to get away, seat of my pants car chase. I just now remembered it. I can't believe I forgot about it... I must have repressed it. It was when I was out of my mind on morphine every day, back in 2005.
What triggered the memory was that movie Ted, about the teddy bear that comes to life. The one with Marky Mark, and that 70's chick who played his girlfriend, and that scene where the suit and tie guy from Avatar stole Ted and then the car chase ensued. I was watching that movie tonight. I dunno why it was that particular car chase that triggered the memory of my very own car chase. Maybe because that whole movie is on drugs? Anyway. Here's what happened:
Firstly, it's important to note that although I was a genuine opiate addict, never ever did I ever obtain opiates from a drug dealer. Oh, no... I was a special kind of drug seeker. I explored and researched legal ways to obtain my substances, because my addiction was private. The only people who might have even suspected it were the checkout clerks at the grocery stores and hobby supply shops that stocked what I needed. I'm talking about bulk poppy seeds at grocery stores, and dried decorative poppy pods at the arts and crafts stores. Oh. And eBay.
The thing was though, I would frequently buy out all of the available stock from every local store within a 25 mile radius, so I was always riding the ragged edge of disaster because withdrawals were always, ALWAYS just right around the corner if I couldn't get my legal opiate fix. Like I said before, seeking out a drug dealer was just out of the question, because I wasn't that kind of junkie... I was still a junkie though, to be sure. So, with withdrawals always lurking around the corner, I was constantly searching for another store that was relatively close by where I could score my poppy seeds or my poppy pods. My main drug dealers at that time were Central Market, World Market, Fiesta, Joanne's Arts and Crafts, and Michael's. And occasionally eBay, but eBay involved a long wait for delivery, and junkies are seriously not about long waits when withdrawals are knocking on your door like Jehovah's Witnesses.
So, about the car chase... that's what all of this is really about, you know.
What happened with the car chase is, one morning I woke up from what I knew was my last binge of poppy seeds. I'd been all over DFW to every one of my usual places the day before, and nobody had anything in stock. I was getting very, extremely desperate, so I got online and expanded my radius of range by another twenty miles and discovered an untapped Fiesta Mart just 40 miles away, in Mesquite. Fiestas always stocked the two pound bags of poppy seeds (unless I'd completely liquidated their inventory), and I'd never been to this particular Fiesta before... so it stood to reason that if I hauled ass over to Mesquite and to that as yet unplundered Fiesta Mart, that I'd be able to score the poppy seeds which would stave off my imminent withdrawals. I calculated that I had just enough gas to get there and back again, so with withdrawals just nip nip nipping at my nose and ready to take a big bite, I got into my car that morning and tore ass to Mesquite.
Now the thing is, during this miniature road trip, I was just about almost exactly on the edge of some full blown opiate withdrawals... and unless you've ever had to experience it, you'll never understand the fear of anticipation. Calling opiate withdrawals flu-like with diarrhea is like calling radiation poisoning flu-like with diarrhea. Can I just say it's awfuller than anything you're likely to have ever experienced before, unless you've had your own bones crushed before your eyes? It was the fear of imminent withdrawals that was driving me to Mesquite like a lunatic, to get to my drug dealer/grocery store so that I could purchase the magic cure for dope-sickness. Oh yeah... I think it's important to note that I'd long since gone way beyond drug seeking for the simple purpose of getting high. Now it was simply a cure seeking ritual. Catch here a glimpse of the living, repeating hell of the life of an addict.
Ok ok, to the car chase, already!
I was almost there, and sitting at a stop light. There were two lanes for turning left, and I was in the right one, waiting for the left arrow to turn green. It was taking forever, as stoplights are wont to do, and when it finally turned green, the car directly ahead of me was just sitting there, doing Jack and blocking my left turn. Finally the light turned yellow, and the car blocking my turn hadn't turned yet, so I gunned it and sideswiped that car and hauled ass to the left, just making the light, but tearing the hell out of the front of that car as I forced my way past it. I saw in my mirror that the front bumper of that car had been wrenched loose and was hanging down by about six inches, and that the front right quarter panel was just scraped all to shit. Well, that sure as hell woke 'em up from whatever passed for Tweeting in '05, and they ran that red light like a bat out of hell and came hauling ass after me.
After that, it was like all rules of traffic dissolved and just didn't matter anymore. I didn't stop at red lights, I didn't stop at stop signs, I didn't signal, and I didn't slow down unless I was screeching into a turn. It was exactly like a car chase in a movie. Every few seconds I'd check my rearview and catch a glimpse of my pursuer, and then I'd either gun the hell out of it, or I'd brake like a maniac in order to go tearing around the next corner. This happened repeatedly - this checking of the rearview, glimpsing the pursuit, and reacting accordingly, like a lunatic straight out of the Dukes of Hazard - until finally, after an interminable period of cat and mouse with cars, I realized I'd lost them. I was the winner. I'd won the chase, and I'd gotten away with it.
I was lost by then, so I carefully found my way back to whatever road I'd been on and continued to the Fiesta Mart. When I got there, they had about twenty feet of shelf space filled with those 2 pound bags of poppy seeds. It was an overdose of relief, if there is such a thing, and that flood of relief suddenly evaporated all of the adrenaline from the car chase that'd been holding me up until that moment, and I just started to boo-boo. Very quietly and discreetly, mind you, but genuine sobs, nonetheless. I couldn't believe that any of what had just happened had really happened. I couldn't reconcile my own identity with the person that had just done all of... that.
I still can't.
A bona-fide, side-swiping, corner screeching, rearview mirror looking, heart pounding, trying to get away, seat of my pants car chase. I just now remembered it. I can't believe I forgot about it... I must have repressed it. It was when I was out of my mind on morphine every day, back in 2005.
What triggered the memory was that movie Ted, about the teddy bear that comes to life. The one with Marky Mark, and that 70's chick who played his girlfriend, and that scene where the suit and tie guy from Avatar stole Ted and then the car chase ensued. I was watching that movie tonight. I dunno why it was that particular car chase that triggered the memory of my very own car chase. Maybe because that whole movie is on drugs? Anyway. Here's what happened:
Firstly, it's important to note that although I was a genuine opiate addict, never ever did I ever obtain opiates from a drug dealer. Oh, no... I was a special kind of drug seeker. I explored and researched legal ways to obtain my substances, because my addiction was private. The only people who might have even suspected it were the checkout clerks at the grocery stores and hobby supply shops that stocked what I needed. I'm talking about bulk poppy seeds at grocery stores, and dried decorative poppy pods at the arts and crafts stores. Oh. And eBay.
The thing was though, I would frequently buy out all of the available stock from every local store within a 25 mile radius, so I was always riding the ragged edge of disaster because withdrawals were always, ALWAYS just right around the corner if I couldn't get my legal opiate fix. Like I said before, seeking out a drug dealer was just out of the question, because I wasn't that kind of junkie... I was still a junkie though, to be sure. So, with withdrawals always lurking around the corner, I was constantly searching for another store that was relatively close by where I could score my poppy seeds or my poppy pods. My main drug dealers at that time were Central Market, World Market, Fiesta, Joanne's Arts and Crafts, and Michael's. And occasionally eBay, but eBay involved a long wait for delivery, and junkies are seriously not about long waits when withdrawals are knocking on your door like Jehovah's Witnesses.
So, about the car chase... that's what all of this is really about, you know.
What happened with the car chase is, one morning I woke up from what I knew was my last binge of poppy seeds. I'd been all over DFW to every one of my usual places the day before, and nobody had anything in stock. I was getting very, extremely desperate, so I got online and expanded my radius of range by another twenty miles and discovered an untapped Fiesta Mart just 40 miles away, in Mesquite. Fiestas always stocked the two pound bags of poppy seeds (unless I'd completely liquidated their inventory), and I'd never been to this particular Fiesta before... so it stood to reason that if I hauled ass over to Mesquite and to that as yet unplundered Fiesta Mart, that I'd be able to score the poppy seeds which would stave off my imminent withdrawals. I calculated that I had just enough gas to get there and back again, so with withdrawals just nip nip nipping at my nose and ready to take a big bite, I got into my car that morning and tore ass to Mesquite.
Now the thing is, during this miniature road trip, I was just about almost exactly on the edge of some full blown opiate withdrawals... and unless you've ever had to experience it, you'll never understand the fear of anticipation. Calling opiate withdrawals flu-like with diarrhea is like calling radiation poisoning flu-like with diarrhea. Can I just say it's awfuller than anything you're likely to have ever experienced before, unless you've had your own bones crushed before your eyes? It was the fear of imminent withdrawals that was driving me to Mesquite like a lunatic, to get to my drug dealer/grocery store so that I could purchase the magic cure for dope-sickness. Oh yeah... I think it's important to note that I'd long since gone way beyond drug seeking for the simple purpose of getting high. Now it was simply a cure seeking ritual. Catch here a glimpse of the living, repeating hell of the life of an addict.
Ok ok, to the car chase, already!
I was almost there, and sitting at a stop light. There were two lanes for turning left, and I was in the right one, waiting for the left arrow to turn green. It was taking forever, as stoplights are wont to do, and when it finally turned green, the car directly ahead of me was just sitting there, doing Jack and blocking my left turn. Finally the light turned yellow, and the car blocking my turn hadn't turned yet, so I gunned it and sideswiped that car and hauled ass to the left, just making the light, but tearing the hell out of the front of that car as I forced my way past it. I saw in my mirror that the front bumper of that car had been wrenched loose and was hanging down by about six inches, and that the front right quarter panel was just scraped all to shit. Well, that sure as hell woke 'em up from whatever passed for Tweeting in '05, and they ran that red light like a bat out of hell and came hauling ass after me.
After that, it was like all rules of traffic dissolved and just didn't matter anymore. I didn't stop at red lights, I didn't stop at stop signs, I didn't signal, and I didn't slow down unless I was screeching into a turn. It was exactly like a car chase in a movie. Every few seconds I'd check my rearview and catch a glimpse of my pursuer, and then I'd either gun the hell out of it, or I'd brake like a maniac in order to go tearing around the next corner. This happened repeatedly - this checking of the rearview, glimpsing the pursuit, and reacting accordingly, like a lunatic straight out of the Dukes of Hazard - until finally, after an interminable period of cat and mouse with cars, I realized I'd lost them. I was the winner. I'd won the chase, and I'd gotten away with it.
I was lost by then, so I carefully found my way back to whatever road I'd been on and continued to the Fiesta Mart. When I got there, they had about twenty feet of shelf space filled with those 2 pound bags of poppy seeds. It was an overdose of relief, if there is such a thing, and that flood of relief suddenly evaporated all of the adrenaline from the car chase that'd been holding me up until that moment, and I just started to boo-boo. Very quietly and discreetly, mind you, but genuine sobs, nonetheless. I couldn't believe that any of what had just happened had really happened. I couldn't reconcile my own identity with the person that had just done all of... that.
I still can't.
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
The constant doing of it.
WARNING
TERRIBLE THINGS YOU MIGHT NOT WANNA READ BEFORE BED COMING UP
.
.
.
How do I feel? My girl is gone. I'll never ever see her again. It hurts, is how I feel. It's been hurting for nearly seven years. That's just one of my feels though. She's totally ok, right? The logic of that tells me to be happy. She's only an immediate emotion though.
I see myself sometimes. Occasionally I'll catch a glimpse of myself and I look like a curled up ball of person when I see myself. Isn't that ugly? How does that work? How can I see that, and be it at the same time? How can I be so ugly to myself? How? I mean why?
I don't know how anything happened. I can't remember how I ever did anything. My history is a mystery to me.
I have a few comforts though. One of them is mortality. My own mortality. I think it's because of books. Books have endings, and so do I. I love to read, and because of that I understand endings. I'm gonna have one too, sometime. An ending.
I don't understand anything about my story though, and that's frustrating. I love it at the same time though, that I don't understand shit. Wouldn't you be almost bored to death if you understood everything? There'd be no surprise. No joy. I don't know what anything means, or what to measure anything by, our how to figure out what's valuable and what's worthless. I have no clue about those things. It's despair and joy at the same time, the knowledge of being self-stupid.
About a couple of months ago I saw a recorded livestream of a 12 year old girl hanging herself, and crying and apologizing as she did it. Why did I watch it? Because she recorded it, as her last act before death, and she wanted it to be seen. How could I not watch it, knowing that. Watching it was like having an electric current running through my brain at full voltage during the whole process. I couldn't react. I was paralyzed, and my tears were rolling out of dead, motionless eyeballs that couldn't blink. I felt like I was being killed as I saw the past tense suicide of a 12 year old girl transpire. I was almost dead too, as she was swinging and choking. That almost killed me, it did. It almost killed me right then and I'll never, ever recover. It's a permanent condition.
At the same time I recognize a necessary survival element inside of myself, and I think I'm lucky to have it. It's like this buoyancy that I don't understand, that always stops me from sinking, exactly when I'm completely perforated by the dead bullets. It makes a funny out of a horrifying. It turns an offense into a fuck you. This mechanism inside of me always, always makes me laugh, right when the bulkheads are about to give.
I guess that's good, but... it's just a remedy. It ain't a solution, you know? I know all of this sounds totally emo. It's just a piece of my insides that nobody else ever, ever wanted to see, but that I'm always always trying to make into something that's not batshit crazy. It's kind of exhausting, the constant doing of it.
TERRIBLE THINGS YOU MIGHT NOT WANNA READ BEFORE BED COMING UP
.
.
.
How do I feel? My girl is gone. I'll never ever see her again. It hurts, is how I feel. It's been hurting for nearly seven years. That's just one of my feels though. She's totally ok, right? The logic of that tells me to be happy. She's only an immediate emotion though.
I see myself sometimes. Occasionally I'll catch a glimpse of myself and I look like a curled up ball of person when I see myself. Isn't that ugly? How does that work? How can I see that, and be it at the same time? How can I be so ugly to myself? How? I mean why?
I don't know how anything happened. I can't remember how I ever did anything. My history is a mystery to me.
I have a few comforts though. One of them is mortality. My own mortality. I think it's because of books. Books have endings, and so do I. I love to read, and because of that I understand endings. I'm gonna have one too, sometime. An ending.
I don't understand anything about my story though, and that's frustrating. I love it at the same time though, that I don't understand shit. Wouldn't you be almost bored to death if you understood everything? There'd be no surprise. No joy. I don't know what anything means, or what to measure anything by, our how to figure out what's valuable and what's worthless. I have no clue about those things. It's despair and joy at the same time, the knowledge of being self-stupid.
About a couple of months ago I saw a recorded livestream of a 12 year old girl hanging herself, and crying and apologizing as she did it. Why did I watch it? Because she recorded it, as her last act before death, and she wanted it to be seen. How could I not watch it, knowing that. Watching it was like having an electric current running through my brain at full voltage during the whole process. I couldn't react. I was paralyzed, and my tears were rolling out of dead, motionless eyeballs that couldn't blink. I felt like I was being killed as I saw the past tense suicide of a 12 year old girl transpire. I was almost dead too, as she was swinging and choking. That almost killed me, it did. It almost killed me right then and I'll never, ever recover. It's a permanent condition.
At the same time I recognize a necessary survival element inside of myself, and I think I'm lucky to have it. It's like this buoyancy that I don't understand, that always stops me from sinking, exactly when I'm completely perforated by the dead bullets. It makes a funny out of a horrifying. It turns an offense into a fuck you. This mechanism inside of me always, always makes me laugh, right when the bulkheads are about to give.
I guess that's good, but... it's just a remedy. It ain't a solution, you know? I know all of this sounds totally emo. It's just a piece of my insides that nobody else ever, ever wanted to see, but that I'm always always trying to make into something that's not batshit crazy. It's kind of exhausting, the constant doing of it.
Monday, January 30, 2017
B is for beshitted.
A befuddled Beelzebub boldly imbibed a barrel of briny beer behind the barn before belatedly barging blindly by Baal's barmitzvah then barfed beside a burgeoning bevy of embittered bugblatter beasts and blamed the booze for being a bastard.
Thursday, January 26, 2017
torture
I read an article online today. One of those 'personal experience' stories, much like something I would write. This person was talking about what it was like to be bipolar. She was talking about it. About the medication and the side effects, and how she would have to take more medication just to counter the side effects of the medication she was already taking, and how each medication that was added on top of the previous medication was like a Jenga tower. You hope it stays upright and doesn't fall, but each new medication was like pulling a link from the tower. If you're lucky, it holds. Eventually though, the whole thing will collapse. It's just inevitable.
That was her life. A constant, never-ending experiment with finding the right medication to keep the Jenga tower upright, that would bracket in her bipolar, allowing her to function. Kind of. On top of a rickety tower.
Sometimes she would achieve a sort of stability, but with side effects that refused to be countered... such as random body part paralysis, constant dry mouth, having her sensation of taste ironed into a single nasty, metallic flavor, and uncontrollable weight gain followed by uncontrollable weight loss, just to name a few. Sometimes, despite the meds, the Jenga tower would collapse, and she'd be buried, trapped underneath debilitating depression and unable to move, literally. Sometimes she would abandon the tower because the side effects would become untenable, and she would lapse back into the unmedicated cycle of highs and lows.
She described all of her experiences in great detail, and I truly can't imagine having to live like she has to. My heart uselessly and ineffectively goes out to her. What can I do but feel a limited amount of empathy for her? I can't do anything except for that, and my anonymous empathy does her no good at all.
There's one part of her experience that I can imagine, though. The debilitating, unable to move part. I feel like that pretty often when I'm waking up and confronted with the thought of the imminent day... the unavoidable awake period that must occur when sleep has absolutely been exhausted. I get that a couple of times a week, mostly on my days off. I'll find myself waking from an uncomfortable dream with my kidneys screaming in pain, forcing into me the total discomfort which forbids me from continuing to lie prone. I have to get up, absolutely... but the thought of getting up, and the action of moving myself into an upright position, elicits just the awfullest mental anguish. It's a hellish limbo, that period of time between 'becoming conscious' and 'completely uponabandoning the the sleepish un-time of being stretched out on that torturous, dreaming rack'. It's torture, both ways, but I'd rather experience that torture in dream-land.
So then, what's my condition? Something is wrong. This isn't normal, I'm pretty sure, the way I experience life from day to day. It's hell, a continuous hell. It's a conscious hell too. It's a self-aware hell. It's a hell that I can expect to some degree, every day. What is this condition? What is this hell-sick that I'm afflicted with? Is it curable? What the F is this kidney pain that I have which, apart from insomnia, and on top of it, prevents me from experiencing more than six hours of lying prone and at rest at a time? Why is this torture visited upon me? It's a torture of every day normality, meaning that every day is normally torturous. This every-day-ness of torture makes me think incessantly of suicide. I'm not suicidal by nature, you know. I want to live. But this thing... this knowledge, of the inevitable future of hell, of the knowing that every day is going to, maybe be horrible, to a certain degree, just makes me think about putting a permanent stop to this bullshit.
I like finding funny though. I like expressing funny. I like seeing funny and communicating funny. I like everything that's funny. I like morbid funny. I like offensive funny. I like cute funny. I like innocent funny. I like funny, in all its incarnations. What I've read though, here and there, is that an incessant amount of funny is a signal of extreme unhappiness. Extreme despair. That too much funny in your spirit can be fatal.
I don't wanna die. I get a big kick out of things that come with being alive... not just the funny. Lots of things. Beautiful things. Amazing things. Unknowable things. I don't wanna miss those. I'm not suicidal, I'm really not... but I have this cute little monster that showed up on my doorstep when I was born, and now it's a pet that just needs feeding, all the time, and it's eating me alive, and man, it hurts, getting eaten alive. Hurts. Unbelievable hurts... hurts like, you'd do anything to stop the hurt.
That's all. I feel really sorry for the girl with the bipolar.
That was her life. A constant, never-ending experiment with finding the right medication to keep the Jenga tower upright, that would bracket in her bipolar, allowing her to function. Kind of. On top of a rickety tower.
Sometimes she would achieve a sort of stability, but with side effects that refused to be countered... such as random body part paralysis, constant dry mouth, having her sensation of taste ironed into a single nasty, metallic flavor, and uncontrollable weight gain followed by uncontrollable weight loss, just to name a few. Sometimes, despite the meds, the Jenga tower would collapse, and she'd be buried, trapped underneath debilitating depression and unable to move, literally. Sometimes she would abandon the tower because the side effects would become untenable, and she would lapse back into the unmedicated cycle of highs and lows.
She described all of her experiences in great detail, and I truly can't imagine having to live like she has to. My heart uselessly and ineffectively goes out to her. What can I do but feel a limited amount of empathy for her? I can't do anything except for that, and my anonymous empathy does her no good at all.
There's one part of her experience that I can imagine, though. The debilitating, unable to move part. I feel like that pretty often when I'm waking up and confronted with the thought of the imminent day... the unavoidable awake period that must occur when sleep has absolutely been exhausted. I get that a couple of times a week, mostly on my days off. I'll find myself waking from an uncomfortable dream with my kidneys screaming in pain, forcing into me the total discomfort which forbids me from continuing to lie prone. I have to get up, absolutely... but the thought of getting up, and the action of moving myself into an upright position, elicits just the awfullest mental anguish. It's a hellish limbo, that period of time between 'becoming conscious' and 'completely uponabandoning the the sleepish un-time of being stretched out on that torturous, dreaming rack'. It's torture, both ways, but I'd rather experience that torture in dream-land.
So then, what's my condition? Something is wrong. This isn't normal, I'm pretty sure, the way I experience life from day to day. It's hell, a continuous hell. It's a conscious hell too. It's a self-aware hell. It's a hell that I can expect to some degree, every day. What is this condition? What is this hell-sick that I'm afflicted with? Is it curable? What the F is this kidney pain that I have which, apart from insomnia, and on top of it, prevents me from experiencing more than six hours of lying prone and at rest at a time? Why is this torture visited upon me? It's a torture of every day normality, meaning that every day is normally torturous. This every-day-ness of torture makes me think incessantly of suicide. I'm not suicidal by nature, you know. I want to live. But this thing... this knowledge, of the inevitable future of hell, of the knowing that every day is going to, maybe be horrible, to a certain degree, just makes me think about putting a permanent stop to this bullshit.
I like finding funny though. I like expressing funny. I like seeing funny and communicating funny. I like everything that's funny. I like morbid funny. I like offensive funny. I like cute funny. I like innocent funny. I like funny, in all its incarnations. What I've read though, here and there, is that an incessant amount of funny is a signal of extreme unhappiness. Extreme despair. That too much funny in your spirit can be fatal.
I don't wanna die. I get a big kick out of things that come with being alive... not just the funny. Lots of things. Beautiful things. Amazing things. Unknowable things. I don't wanna miss those. I'm not suicidal, I'm really not... but I have this cute little monster that showed up on my doorstep when I was born, and now it's a pet that just needs feeding, all the time, and it's eating me alive, and man, it hurts, getting eaten alive. Hurts. Unbelievable hurts... hurts like, you'd do anything to stop the hurt.
That's all. I feel really sorry for the girl with the bipolar.
Sunday, January 22, 2017
president Trump prime time cartoon stupid ass bullshit America will be retarded great again words like pundit and inauguration and politics and pundit geez isn't that a stupid sounding word pundit hashtag what are we fuckin stupid
What's with all the 'used to be, once was, will be again - great' bullshit that I keep seeing everybody posting about America? Is everybody stupid? Are we in past tense mourning for a possible future present tense? What the hell, y'all? Am I the only one who sees down to the retarded bones of this CRAP? What kind of hysterical mob mentality is this? Yeesh! It makes me wanna slap something.
Can everybody just stop for a sec and rescue your underwear? Just because America is tarded and immature and insane on a regular basis don't mean it ever stopped being great. Come on, y'all! So the president is a real live cartoon, syndicated, and guaranteed for four seasons. That doesn't mean that the whole country just automatically goes down with the captain of the ship! There's literally SHITLOADS of things that have zero to do with stupid ass politics that make America great. I ain't gonna list them, because you should already know, for Pete's sake.
Everybody gets all caught up in stupid ass politics, like politics is something you should use for setting a bona-fide standard by. Doesn't anybody else get it, that a great big fat greasy pile of politics is simply ugly, ugly entertainment for your R-complex? Politics is an insidious device with one purpose - hitting the Mob Button that's buried deep down in your primitive consciousness, where it's easy to manipulate.
What's my proof for this, somebody might ask? My proof is all this bullshit that people keep saying about making America 'great again', as if America was a beloved baseball player who got caught shooting up steroids. As if using steroids totally and completely defines the ultimate worth of that baseball player named America. It's stupid media crap, designed to manipulate and warp your insides, and you all should know better.
Everybody needs to tear yourselves away from that stupid ass President Trump cartoon already. Sure, it's funny... but come on. There's WAY better cartoons that you can watch on YouTube. Like Ren & Stimpy.
Can everybody just stop for a sec and rescue your underwear? Just because America is tarded and immature and insane on a regular basis don't mean it ever stopped being great. Come on, y'all! So the president is a real live cartoon, syndicated, and guaranteed for four seasons. That doesn't mean that the whole country just automatically goes down with the captain of the ship! There's literally SHITLOADS of things that have zero to do with stupid ass politics that make America great. I ain't gonna list them, because you should already know, for Pete's sake.
Everybody gets all caught up in stupid ass politics, like politics is something you should use for setting a bona-fide standard by. Doesn't anybody else get it, that a great big fat greasy pile of politics is simply ugly, ugly entertainment for your R-complex? Politics is an insidious device with one purpose - hitting the Mob Button that's buried deep down in your primitive consciousness, where it's easy to manipulate.
What's my proof for this, somebody might ask? My proof is all this bullshit that people keep saying about making America 'great again', as if America was a beloved baseball player who got caught shooting up steroids. As if using steroids totally and completely defines the ultimate worth of that baseball player named America. It's stupid media crap, designed to manipulate and warp your insides, and you all should know better.
Everybody needs to tear yourselves away from that stupid ass President Trump cartoon already. Sure, it's funny... but come on. There's WAY better cartoons that you can watch on YouTube. Like Ren & Stimpy.
Saturday, January 21, 2017
Whatev.
Wulp, I suppose that clenches it, then. I learned today that the girl I've been cockadoody-poopoo-tarded in love with since January 2009 is now a full blown, bona-fide nun.
I guess that means I can finally put the boots to to that dime-sized knot of twisted space-time that just barged in and made itself at home, right there underneath my sternum. You know, the one that feels like a chunk of degenerate matter that got lodged in mid swallow, which I've been choking on for almost seven years now. That'll be a relief, to finally hack that thing up and spit it out, like a petrified loogie.
So. Basically good news, then. I guess.
Meh. It ain't like I didn't know it would happen eventually. I haven't seen or spoken to her since October 2011. Right now it's just a sucker punch and not a full on ass-beating. I'll be right as rain in half the time. Three years, max.
I guess that means I can finally put the boots to to that dime-sized knot of twisted space-time that just barged in and made itself at home, right there underneath my sternum. You know, the one that feels like a chunk of degenerate matter that got lodged in mid swallow, which I've been choking on for almost seven years now. That'll be a relief, to finally hack that thing up and spit it out, like a petrified loogie.
So. Basically good news, then. I guess.
Meh. It ain't like I didn't know it would happen eventually. I haven't seen or spoken to her since October 2011. Right now it's just a sucker punch and not a full on ass-beating. I'll be right as rain in half the time. Three years, max.
Friday, January 20, 2017
glide ratio
Super coolness has just occurred, only a few minutes ago.
I just finished building a 1/5th scale model of a Rogallo wing, the biggest I've made yet. The wingspan is 52" - a little more than four feet. Full scale is a 22' wingspan. 22 feet, that is. The one I made is 52 inches. This is the fifth model of a Rogallo wing that I've made. You know... for the hang glider.
The first one was just WRONG. It was built out of bamboo shiskabob sticks and a tall kitchen trash bag. This is the one that, when launched, performed the unashamed, instant stall with a loop-duh-loop. It had about a 3 foot wingspan.
The second one, I rebuilt from the ashes of the first one. It was completely destroyed when it plummeted straight into the ground from about a hundred feet in the air, at about 30 mph I'm guessing, when I was flying it like a kite at Northlakes Park a couple of months ago. 3 foot wingspan.
The third one I built out of wire clothes hangers instead of wooden utensils. This one was like the first one, but smaller, and on acid. When I launched it, 45% of the time it would nose straight down and 45% of the time it'd do a psychotic loop-duh-loop after a dramatic stall. 10% of the time it would do just the most amazingly perfect glide. 2 foot wingspan.
The fourth one I built just like the third one, but using shishkabob sticks again. My reasoning was that maybe the metal clothes hangers were too heavy. I never got to test fly this one, because I stepped on it when it was buried under a mound of dirty clothes, and it just broke, all over. 2 foot wingspan.
The fifth one I just completed a couple of hours ago. I was way more carefuller with the measurements on this one than I was on any of the others, because this one is a big one, and errors tend to magnify on a logarithmic scale by orders of magnitude. Who knows. So I had to nail a great big, unfolded lawn and garden hefty bag onto the wall, and I used one of those roll-up sewing rulers and a sharpie marker and a regular short 12 inch ruler for a straight edge to draw the shape of the borders of the most precise Rogallo wing ever, ever, onto that hefty bag nailed to my wall. When it was finished, I very carefully cut it out with one of my many thrillions of knives that I keep on hand, ready for deployment at an instants notice.
The final shape of the flat, unmounted wing was that of a right triangle with an outwardly curved hypotenuse, with the point of the right angle serving as the exact center of a circular border defined by the curve of the hypotenuse, which covered about 30 degrees of arc. I mounted it onto these long wooden dowels that I found in the crafts and hobbies department at WalMart, and all of a sudden it was a wing, for flying.
I just took it out for its maiden voyage, and man. How the wings billowed and took shape as they slipped easily, like a form-fitting garment, onto the wind. Just a trash bag taped to wooden dowels... but oh how it sailed. It was so pretty. And stable. No sudden nose dives, or psychotic stalls with a backwards loop-duh-loop right into the ground. This one just flew straight, with a glide ratio of about 4:1. That is, for every four increments of flight, it lost one increment of altitude. That's a pretty crappy glide ratio actually, but the important thing is, it was a glide ratio, and not a nose dive or a psychotic stall, ending in a loop-duh-loop. Every time I launched this one, it glided. It glided, like something that's built for gliding is suppose to do.
So, now it's just a matter of scaling it up 5 times.
I just finished building a 1/5th scale model of a Rogallo wing, the biggest I've made yet. The wingspan is 52" - a little more than four feet. Full scale is a 22' wingspan. 22 feet, that is. The one I made is 52 inches. This is the fifth model of a Rogallo wing that I've made. You know... for the hang glider.
The first one was just WRONG. It was built out of bamboo shiskabob sticks and a tall kitchen trash bag. This is the one that, when launched, performed the unashamed, instant stall with a loop-duh-loop. It had about a 3 foot wingspan.
The second one, I rebuilt from the ashes of the first one. It was completely destroyed when it plummeted straight into the ground from about a hundred feet in the air, at about 30 mph I'm guessing, when I was flying it like a kite at Northlakes Park a couple of months ago. 3 foot wingspan.
The third one I built out of wire clothes hangers instead of wooden utensils. This one was like the first one, but smaller, and on acid. When I launched it, 45% of the time it would nose straight down and 45% of the time it'd do a psychotic loop-duh-loop after a dramatic stall. 10% of the time it would do just the most amazingly perfect glide. 2 foot wingspan.
The fourth one I built just like the third one, but using shishkabob sticks again. My reasoning was that maybe the metal clothes hangers were too heavy. I never got to test fly this one, because I stepped on it when it was buried under a mound of dirty clothes, and it just broke, all over. 2 foot wingspan.
The fifth one I just completed a couple of hours ago. I was way more carefuller with the measurements on this one than I was on any of the others, because this one is a big one, and errors tend to magnify on a logarithmic scale by orders of magnitude. Who knows. So I had to nail a great big, unfolded lawn and garden hefty bag onto the wall, and I used one of those roll-up sewing rulers and a sharpie marker and a regular short 12 inch ruler for a straight edge to draw the shape of the borders of the most precise Rogallo wing ever, ever, onto that hefty bag nailed to my wall. When it was finished, I very carefully cut it out with one of my many thrillions of knives that I keep on hand, ready for deployment at an instants notice.
The final shape of the flat, unmounted wing was that of a right triangle with an outwardly curved hypotenuse, with the point of the right angle serving as the exact center of a circular border defined by the curve of the hypotenuse, which covered about 30 degrees of arc. I mounted it onto these long wooden dowels that I found in the crafts and hobbies department at WalMart, and all of a sudden it was a wing, for flying.
I just took it out for its maiden voyage, and man. How the wings billowed and took shape as they slipped easily, like a form-fitting garment, onto the wind. Just a trash bag taped to wooden dowels... but oh how it sailed. It was so pretty. And stable. No sudden nose dives, or psychotic stalls with a backwards loop-duh-loop right into the ground. This one just flew straight, with a glide ratio of about 4:1. That is, for every four increments of flight, it lost one increment of altitude. That's a pretty crappy glide ratio actually, but the important thing is, it was a glide ratio, and not a nose dive or a psychotic stall, ending in a loop-duh-loop. Every time I launched this one, it glided. It glided, like something that's built for gliding is suppose to do.
So, now it's just a matter of scaling it up 5 times.
Ye Olden Fart
Say, here's something to ponder, the next time you're carving the petrified cheese clumps out from underneath your toenail cuticles...
I think we can all agree, that uness you get murdered, or suicide yourself, or get tragically and pointlessly scrubbed along the way for some dumb reason, you're eventually gonna transmogrify into an old fart, and then die. I mean, we. Am I right?
So. You got three possibilities. I mean we. Murdered, scrubbed, or blown away and forgotten on the wind of an old, dusty fart. The Three Great Destinies According To The Human Condition. One will be yours! Just think... no. Never mind. It's better if you don't just think. About the horror, the horror...
Hang on though, I've got an idea. Say, what if... for instance.
If you in general are one of the lucky few with completely neutral luck, and you happen to survive your entire life without suiciding yourself or getting tragically scrubbed by a random death encounter, then you're probably thinking that the only thing left for you is a one way trip to Old Fartsville. Right? You were thinking that.
Allow me to suggest an alternative...
Just because you've survived all of life's horrors, only to wind up as a broken, windy fart for all of your effort, doesn't mean you HAVE to be an old fart. Instead, try being an Olden Fart.
An 'Olden Fart'.
When the time comes, that is. Just think about it... 'Olden Fart' sounds way more dignified than 'old fart'. Am I right? Say what?
You're welcome.
I think we can all agree, that uness you get murdered, or suicide yourself, or get tragically and pointlessly scrubbed along the way for some dumb reason, you're eventually gonna transmogrify into an old fart, and then die. I mean, we. Am I right?
So. You got three possibilities. I mean we. Murdered, scrubbed, or blown away and forgotten on the wind of an old, dusty fart. The Three Great Destinies According To The Human Condition. One will be yours! Just think... no. Never mind. It's better if you don't just think. About the horror, the horror...
Hang on though, I've got an idea. Say, what if... for instance.
If you in general are one of the lucky few with completely neutral luck, and you happen to survive your entire life without suiciding yourself or getting tragically scrubbed by a random death encounter, then you're probably thinking that the only thing left for you is a one way trip to Old Fartsville. Right? You were thinking that.
Allow me to suggest an alternative...
Just because you've survived all of life's horrors, only to wind up as a broken, windy fart for all of your effort, doesn't mean you HAVE to be an old fart. Instead, try being an Olden Fart.
An 'Olden Fart'.
When the time comes, that is. Just think about it... 'Olden Fart' sounds way more dignified than 'old fart'. Am I right? Say what?
You're welcome.
Thursday, January 19, 2017
Planet Dirt
You know what? 'Planet Earth' - that most majesterial sounding title that we proudly give to and proclaim as to be our homeworld - to some alien would translate literally to 'Planet Dirt'.
'Where do you come from?' those aliens would ask.
'What do you call your homeworld?' they'd say.
'You call it Earth? What does it mean, this word, Earth? Please, enlighten us with your rich cultural history! We are extremely advanced aliens, and we respect all humble origins! What? Huh? Say again? No. Really? You're joking!
We, as advanced and enlightened aliens, of course, appreciate humor... huh? You're not joking? Wait, just hold on.
Earth means... that is, translated literally, it means... dirt? Like, the stuff that makes you dirty? The stuff that retarded kids eat, and that Enlightened Beings continually strive to remain cleansed of and from? That's the name of your world? Planet Dirt?'
Uncomfortable silence.
'Ta ta, dirtlings!'
Aaaaand... they've shunted into hyperspace.
'Where do you come from?' those aliens would ask.
'What do you call your homeworld?' they'd say.
'You call it Earth? What does it mean, this word, Earth? Please, enlighten us with your rich cultural history! We are extremely advanced aliens, and we respect all humble origins! What? Huh? Say again? No. Really? You're joking!
We, as advanced and enlightened aliens, of course, appreciate humor... huh? You're not joking? Wait, just hold on.
Earth means... that is, translated literally, it means... dirt? Like, the stuff that makes you dirty? The stuff that retarded kids eat, and that Enlightened Beings continually strive to remain cleansed of and from? That's the name of your world? Planet Dirt?'
Uncomfortable silence.
'Ta ta, dirtlings!'
Aaaaand... they've shunted into hyperspace.
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
emergency bullshit
BRRRRRIIIIINGALINNNG
Hello, Grand Central Station...
Oh, hey, sup y'all. Huh? Me? Oh nuthin'. Just out haunting the neighborhood, up to no good. Drunk and high on amphetamines, hanging around between parked cars, with my head full of stars.
Oh, sorry... Huh?
Yeesh! That sounds exactly like the pedicure from hell, straight out of the lawyer book. Hell yeah, file a claim! That's an act of God. It's legal! Bad pedicures are always Acts Of God. Look it up in the lawyer book!
What? Say again? You woke up and your toenails were on fire? Oh. You just shake that off, that's called wake&bake&shake. Huh? Oh, what? They're literally on fire, with flames and smoke? Oh! Dang. Sorry bout that.
:::click::::
BRRRRRIIIIINGALINNNG!
Hello, Grand Central Station Drug Emporium, can I help you? Huh? Oh, I see. Cold or clammy? Both? Which hand? Both hands? Ok, hold please...
BRRRRRIIIIINGALINNNG!
Grand Central Station Drug Emporium Smack-O-Matic, what's your emergency? Huh? Oh. Oh, I see. Are you sure? Ok then... firstly, and according to the instructions here... hang on. Ok. Firstly, did you do the tail flick test? No? Oh... yeah. No, yeah. You need to do that for the death certificate. Red tape... anyway.
:::click:::
BRRRRRIIIIINGALINNNG
Hello, Grand Central Station Boulevard... Oh! You still there? Great! What you need are 10,000 mg of Imodium. Do you have it? I mean them? Whatever... Oh... huh? What? Oh, you have it? REALLY? NO SHIT? Great! Now just administer it... carefully... watch for it... into the subdural vein of the transvertical hematoma, of the corresponding brain partholomew... watch for the weak ipsilaterral component... got it? Great!
Now. What I need you to do is to STAB the rat, carefully, right up it's butthole. Yes. Up the butthole. What? Oh, whatever... FINE! The anus. Can we continue? Thank you!
Carefully STAB the rat, right up it's ass, with a carefully contrived stabbing tool... why you little... hey, let go of that! SECURITY!!
:::click:::
BRRRRRIIIIINGALINNNG
Hello, Grand Central Station Mind Fuck Delivery Service and Quantum Algebra, please hold...
::: seventy two gazillion years later:::
BRRRRRIIIIINGALINNNG
Hello, Grand Central Station Mind Fuck Delivery Service and Quantum Algebra II, please hold...
Hello, Grand Central Station...
Oh, hey, sup y'all. Huh? Me? Oh nuthin'. Just out haunting the neighborhood, up to no good. Drunk and high on amphetamines, hanging around between parked cars, with my head full of stars.
Oh, sorry... Huh?
Yeesh! That sounds exactly like the pedicure from hell, straight out of the lawyer book. Hell yeah, file a claim! That's an act of God. It's legal! Bad pedicures are always Acts Of God. Look it up in the lawyer book!
What? Say again? You woke up and your toenails were on fire? Oh. You just shake that off, that's called wake&bake&shake. Huh? Oh, what? They're literally on fire, with flames and smoke? Oh! Dang. Sorry bout that.
:::click::::
BRRRRRIIIIINGALINNNG!
Hello, Grand Central Station Drug Emporium, can I help you? Huh? Oh, I see. Cold or clammy? Both? Which hand? Both hands? Ok, hold please...
BRRRRRIIIIINGALINNNG!
Grand Central Station Drug Emporium Smack-O-Matic, what's your emergency? Huh? Oh. Oh, I see. Are you sure? Ok then... firstly, and according to the instructions here... hang on. Ok. Firstly, did you do the tail flick test? No? Oh... yeah. No, yeah. You need to do that for the death certificate. Red tape... anyway.
:::click:::
BRRRRRIIIIINGALINNNG
Hello, Grand Central Station Boulevard... Oh! You still there? Great! What you need are 10,000 mg of Imodium. Do you have it? I mean them? Whatever... Oh... huh? What? Oh, you have it? REALLY? NO SHIT? Great! Now just administer it... carefully... watch for it... into the subdural vein of the transvertical hematoma, of the corresponding brain partholomew... watch for the weak ipsilaterral component... got it? Great!
Now. What I need you to do is to STAB the rat, carefully, right up it's butthole. Yes. Up the butthole. What? Oh, whatever... FINE! The anus. Can we continue? Thank you!
Carefully STAB the rat, right up it's ass, with a carefully contrived stabbing tool... why you little... hey, let go of that! SECURITY!!
:::click:::
BRRRRRIIIIINGALINNNG
Hello, Grand Central Station Mind Fuck Delivery Service and Quantum Algebra, please hold...
::: seventy two gazillion years later:::
BRRRRRIIIIINGALINNNG
Hello, Grand Central Station Mind Fuck Delivery Service and Quantum Algebra II, please hold...
Friday, January 13, 2017
Bitching about that movie, Frozen.
WARNING!
LOTS AND LOTS OF BITCHING ABOUT THAT MOVIE, FROZEN.
You know that movie, Frozen? I have several problems with that movie... that is, besides that big fat Swedish meatball who runs the Wandering Oaken trading post being such a greedy, two faced prick (I've already gone on and on at arms length about that). And what the heck is a wandering oaken, anyway? That just makes zero sense for the name of a trading post that's permanently attached to the side of a mountain.
Don't get me wrong. It may seem like I'm hating on Frozen, but I'm not, really. In fact, I'm pretty much hopelessly in love with that movie. I've watched it exactly thirteen-and-a-half-dozen-and-a-half times, not counting the eleventy-seven-and-sixteen-fifteenths times that I've left it playing in the background on my days off to keep me company so that I don't die of chronic aloneness. I just have a bunch of nitpicks with it, that's all. Like I do with everything I love.
Ok, onward with the nitpicking!
Firstly, what's the story with that Christoph kid? Is he an apprentice ice miner? Does he have parents? Is he an orphan? Is he homeless? Is he just a nosy brat who follows you around, always asking questions and irritating the heck out of everybody? The ice miners sure don't seem to give a crap about him. I mean, here's this little boy, scampering around among hardened ice miners who are constantly singing about what a dangerous job ice mining is, and nobody says anything about the little kid. Weird!
Speaking of little kids... way back when, before Elsa grew up and became a neurotic bitch, she and Anna used to have fun playing with her snow powers inside the castle. Remember when they were playing, and Elsa was magickng those piles of snow, each one taller than the previous one, to catch Anna as she jumped from one to the other while screaming "Catch me!"? You could just see it coming, the fact that Elsa was only a couple of catch me's away from screwing up royally (no pun intended). My question is, why didn't Elsa just start poofing up some smaller snow mounds for Anna to jump onto? Why did she keep making them BIGGER and BIGGER? That was just dumb, Elsa.
So then Elsa slips on HER OWN ICE (come on, really?) and hits Anna right in the forehead with an ice dart! If she'd just started making smaller snow mounds, that never would have happened... anyway. King and queen anonymous freak out, and after thumbing through a book which shows an illustration of a positively evil looking troll waving it's hands and magicking over a royally garbed figure laid out prone and helpless on a stone slab like the Aztecs would put you on before ripping out your still beating heart, the king decides that these nightmare creatures are the only hope for his daughter. So, he gathers up the entire fam and makes for Troll Country, post haste.
What's the real deal with those things, really? Those rock trolls? They're definitely not carbon based life forms. Their organic chemistry is most likely based on long chain silicon molecules, what with them being basically a coven of walking, talking rocks. I won't go into the details as to why, but you can trust me when I tell you that silicon based life forms would have a much tougher time trying to stick it in an earth-like environment than carbon based life forms. In fact, silicon life would get along MUCH better in a far colder environment. Wink wink, nudge nudge. Hey, I ain't pointing fingers, I'm just sayin'. Food for thought.
Pretty much right off the bat it's established that these stone trolls are the 'good guys', for curing Anna. That elder troll sure went out of his way to scare the shit out of Elsa though, didn't he? Do you think the elder troll considered the possible consequences of showing little girl Elsa that vision in the sky of her own blood red powers attacking from every direction and stabbing her into oblivion? Didn't scaring the crap out of her like that just wind up making things worse, in the long run? It pretty much guaranteed that Elsa would constantly be scared shitless of her own nature all the time during her formative years. That's a recipe for an evil ice queen if I ever saw one. Kinda makes you wonder about those trolls, huh? Hey, just sayin'!
Ok, let's give the trolls the benefit of the doubt for a second. Maybe that's how trolls raise their little troll kids, by scaring the shit out of them, and it's perfectly normal for them. Maybe it was a well intended but tragic blunder between two alien life forms attempting to communicate with each other. Maybe rock trolls are just stupid... like, a bag of rocks stupid, and they thought that Elsa was just another rock to be yelled at. Maybe. Right? But if rock trolls are just a pack of idiots with good intentions, then why exactly did the troll elder throw in that memory wipe for Anna? Huh? Riddle me that. The king seemed to think it was 'for the best', but all it did was confuse the hell out of a little girl, leaving her with no idea as to why her big sister, who used to be 'her best buddy', suddenly just up and started hating her. Think about it. The entire situation is just completely ef'd up. It's no wonder that one of those little girls grew up to be a paranoid, cast iron bitch, and the other one so desperate for love, any kind of love, that she'd understand the meaning of true love to be simply a furtive glance in her direction. See what I'm saying about those dirty silicon based life forms? That's some seriously devious future planning of the unstupid variety, you know. Those stone trolls are pretty damn shady, if you ask me.
Oh, no wait! Don't forget about that one troll who basically kidnaps Christoph when he's just a five year old kid. "I'm gonna keep you," says the troll woman to the little boy and his moose puppy. WTF, man? Even if Christoph was an orphan, that troll couldn't have known that. Creepy! Am I right?
Ok, enough with the trolls for now.
Here's a perplexing conundrum. Why don't Elsa's hands freeze her gloves when she's wearing them? Everything else she touches freezes pretty much instantly, so why don't her gloves freeze too? Those manacles they clapped onto her hands sure froze though, didn't they? SO WHY DON'T HER GLOVES FREEZE? Could the reason be that the whole touchy-freezy thing is all in her head? A neurotic condition, stemming from a traumatic childhood experience? Manipulated by those dirty, filthy trolls, that is?
Oh boy. This next nitpick is a doozy. It really is the only completely unforgivable nitpick that I have. Why is it unforgivable? Because it's not a plot hole, or a character flaw, or anything like that. NO! This is simply sloppy song writing. Stupid sloppy song writing. Stupid sloppy song writing that borders on obscene ignorance, which borders on obscene arrogance. Allow me to elucidate.
You know that part where Queen Elsa just fucks right off to the hills after her disastrous coming out party? Remember how she finally embraces her womanhood and transforms from a stupid fraidy cat little girl into this sexy, sexy ice queen? And how she conjured this totally awesome palace made out of ice onto the most coldest top part of the North Mountain? And how she lyrically referred to a snowflake as a fractal? Remember that? Remember how STUPID that was? Didn't you just wanna reach out into the ether and slap the shit out of whoever it was who wrote that part of the lyrics? I'm talking about the 'Let It Go' song. You know -
'Frozen fractals all around'
- that part. I'm terribly, grievously sorry, but there's just no possible way, without invoking a couple of generations of math wizards into the storyline, that Queen Elsa would have been even remotely aware of the fractal nature of a snowflakes structure. Hell, the basic concept of a fractal would have been completely lost to her primitive, medieval brain! It's simply unforgivably sloppy on the part of the writer who came up with that stupid, stupid lyric. Shame on you, whoever you are, you lazy lazy song writer who made that fractal crap into impossible song lyrics!
Some more nitpicks.
Why does Christophs animal powered sled explode when it crashes, and why does Sven the Moose act like a retarded dog all the time? And why does Elsa, who is supposedly all about protecting Anna, magick an evil snow monster into existence that totally wants to kill her? Oh yeah, and Elsa does this monster magick immediately after shooting a poison ice dart directly into Anna's heart. WHY? I've tried to justify Elsa's constant, seemingly unintentional abuse of her sister, and I can only think of one reason that really works. Elsa is just a stupid, stupid girl. Not a bad girl... just stupid.
Now back to those filthy, dirty trolls. No, I ain't done with them yet.
Those stone trolls sure sing a good story about love, while simultaneously trying their damndest to force Christoph and Anna into getting married. Hell, they try even harder after learning that Anna is already engaged to someone else! Plus, there's that little troll kid who says, "and by the way, I don't see no ring." That kid is just obnoxious! Who taught that little shit that it's ok to steal another man's woman, just because she's not wearing an engagement ring? Huh? Maybe she took it off to do the dishes! Maybe she wears it on a chain like a necklace! Maybe she lost it, and desperately hopes to find it again! Maybe he just hasn't given it to her yet! Oh, man, that pisses me off when somebody actively tries to steal another guy's girl away from him, and uses that lack of a visible ring thing as justification. That makes me wanna be violent!
Anyway, what was I talking about... Oh yeah, those little troll bastards. So, do you really think that any of those petrified horse apples really gives one flip about true love, based on what we know about them now? I don't think so. They just want to marry off Christoph to a princess as quickly as possible, in order to gain some political power. See? They're bastards. I'm not pointing fingers! I'm just sayin'. Those trolls are a pack of genuine, bona-fide bastards.
Ok, just a couple more...
So, if all Anna needs is an act of true love to thaw her frozen heart, then she should have been cured the moment Olaf began to melt after building a fire for her, and then refusing to leave her side. Because if that ain't true love, then I don't know what is. Plus, Olaf flat out tells Anna that he loves her when they all first arrive at the troll clearing.
ALSO... It's clearly spelled Weselton, but everybody calls it weasel town anyway. No wonder the ambassador of Weselton is such a bitter old man.
Whew! I'm glad all that's off my chest.
LOTS AND LOTS OF BITCHING ABOUT THAT MOVIE, FROZEN.
You know that movie, Frozen? I have several problems with that movie... that is, besides that big fat Swedish meatball who runs the Wandering Oaken trading post being such a greedy, two faced prick (I've already gone on and on at arms length about that). And what the heck is a wandering oaken, anyway? That just makes zero sense for the name of a trading post that's permanently attached to the side of a mountain.
Don't get me wrong. It may seem like I'm hating on Frozen, but I'm not, really. In fact, I'm pretty much hopelessly in love with that movie. I've watched it exactly thirteen-and-a-half-dozen-and-a-half times, not counting the eleventy-seven-and-sixteen-fifteenths times that I've left it playing in the background on my days off to keep me company so that I don't die of chronic aloneness. I just have a bunch of nitpicks with it, that's all. Like I do with everything I love.
Ok, onward with the nitpicking!
Firstly, what's the story with that Christoph kid? Is he an apprentice ice miner? Does he have parents? Is he an orphan? Is he homeless? Is he just a nosy brat who follows you around, always asking questions and irritating the heck out of everybody? The ice miners sure don't seem to give a crap about him. I mean, here's this little boy, scampering around among hardened ice miners who are constantly singing about what a dangerous job ice mining is, and nobody says anything about the little kid. Weird!
Speaking of little kids... way back when, before Elsa grew up and became a neurotic bitch, she and Anna used to have fun playing with her snow powers inside the castle. Remember when they were playing, and Elsa was magickng those piles of snow, each one taller than the previous one, to catch Anna as she jumped from one to the other while screaming "Catch me!"? You could just see it coming, the fact that Elsa was only a couple of catch me's away from screwing up royally (no pun intended). My question is, why didn't Elsa just start poofing up some smaller snow mounds for Anna to jump onto? Why did she keep making them BIGGER and BIGGER? That was just dumb, Elsa.
So then Elsa slips on HER OWN ICE (come on, really?) and hits Anna right in the forehead with an ice dart! If she'd just started making smaller snow mounds, that never would have happened... anyway. King and queen anonymous freak out, and after thumbing through a book which shows an illustration of a positively evil looking troll waving it's hands and magicking over a royally garbed figure laid out prone and helpless on a stone slab like the Aztecs would put you on before ripping out your still beating heart, the king decides that these nightmare creatures are the only hope for his daughter. So, he gathers up the entire fam and makes for Troll Country, post haste.
What's the real deal with those things, really? Those rock trolls? They're definitely not carbon based life forms. Their organic chemistry is most likely based on long chain silicon molecules, what with them being basically a coven of walking, talking rocks. I won't go into the details as to why, but you can trust me when I tell you that silicon based life forms would have a much tougher time trying to stick it in an earth-like environment than carbon based life forms. In fact, silicon life would get along MUCH better in a far colder environment. Wink wink, nudge nudge. Hey, I ain't pointing fingers, I'm just sayin'. Food for thought.
Pretty much right off the bat it's established that these stone trolls are the 'good guys', for curing Anna. That elder troll sure went out of his way to scare the shit out of Elsa though, didn't he? Do you think the elder troll considered the possible consequences of showing little girl Elsa that vision in the sky of her own blood red powers attacking from every direction and stabbing her into oblivion? Didn't scaring the crap out of her like that just wind up making things worse, in the long run? It pretty much guaranteed that Elsa would constantly be scared shitless of her own nature all the time during her formative years. That's a recipe for an evil ice queen if I ever saw one. Kinda makes you wonder about those trolls, huh? Hey, just sayin'!
Ok, let's give the trolls the benefit of the doubt for a second. Maybe that's how trolls raise their little troll kids, by scaring the shit out of them, and it's perfectly normal for them. Maybe it was a well intended but tragic blunder between two alien life forms attempting to communicate with each other. Maybe rock trolls are just stupid... like, a bag of rocks stupid, and they thought that Elsa was just another rock to be yelled at. Maybe. Right? But if rock trolls are just a pack of idiots with good intentions, then why exactly did the troll elder throw in that memory wipe for Anna? Huh? Riddle me that. The king seemed to think it was 'for the best', but all it did was confuse the hell out of a little girl, leaving her with no idea as to why her big sister, who used to be 'her best buddy', suddenly just up and started hating her. Think about it. The entire situation is just completely ef'd up. It's no wonder that one of those little girls grew up to be a paranoid, cast iron bitch, and the other one so desperate for love, any kind of love, that she'd understand the meaning of true love to be simply a furtive glance in her direction. See what I'm saying about those dirty silicon based life forms? That's some seriously devious future planning of the unstupid variety, you know. Those stone trolls are pretty damn shady, if you ask me.
Oh, no wait! Don't forget about that one troll who basically kidnaps Christoph when he's just a five year old kid. "I'm gonna keep you," says the troll woman to the little boy and his moose puppy. WTF, man? Even if Christoph was an orphan, that troll couldn't have known that. Creepy! Am I right?
Ok, enough with the trolls for now.
Here's a perplexing conundrum. Why don't Elsa's hands freeze her gloves when she's wearing them? Everything else she touches freezes pretty much instantly, so why don't her gloves freeze too? Those manacles they clapped onto her hands sure froze though, didn't they? SO WHY DON'T HER GLOVES FREEZE? Could the reason be that the whole touchy-freezy thing is all in her head? A neurotic condition, stemming from a traumatic childhood experience? Manipulated by those dirty, filthy trolls, that is?
Oh boy. This next nitpick is a doozy. It really is the only completely unforgivable nitpick that I have. Why is it unforgivable? Because it's not a plot hole, or a character flaw, or anything like that. NO! This is simply sloppy song writing. Stupid sloppy song writing. Stupid sloppy song writing that borders on obscene ignorance, which borders on obscene arrogance. Allow me to elucidate.
You know that part where Queen Elsa just fucks right off to the hills after her disastrous coming out party? Remember how she finally embraces her womanhood and transforms from a stupid fraidy cat little girl into this sexy, sexy ice queen? And how she conjured this totally awesome palace made out of ice onto the most coldest top part of the North Mountain? And how she lyrically referred to a snowflake as a fractal? Remember that? Remember how STUPID that was? Didn't you just wanna reach out into the ether and slap the shit out of whoever it was who wrote that part of the lyrics? I'm talking about the 'Let It Go' song. You know -
'Frozen fractals all around'
- that part. I'm terribly, grievously sorry, but there's just no possible way, without invoking a couple of generations of math wizards into the storyline, that Queen Elsa would have been even remotely aware of the fractal nature of a snowflakes structure. Hell, the basic concept of a fractal would have been completely lost to her primitive, medieval brain! It's simply unforgivably sloppy on the part of the writer who came up with that stupid, stupid lyric. Shame on you, whoever you are, you lazy lazy song writer who made that fractal crap into impossible song lyrics!
Some more nitpicks.
Why does Christophs animal powered sled explode when it crashes, and why does Sven the Moose act like a retarded dog all the time? And why does Elsa, who is supposedly all about protecting Anna, magick an evil snow monster into existence that totally wants to kill her? Oh yeah, and Elsa does this monster magick immediately after shooting a poison ice dart directly into Anna's heart. WHY? I've tried to justify Elsa's constant, seemingly unintentional abuse of her sister, and I can only think of one reason that really works. Elsa is just a stupid, stupid girl. Not a bad girl... just stupid.
Now back to those filthy, dirty trolls. No, I ain't done with them yet.
Those stone trolls sure sing a good story about love, while simultaneously trying their damndest to force Christoph and Anna into getting married. Hell, they try even harder after learning that Anna is already engaged to someone else! Plus, there's that little troll kid who says, "and by the way, I don't see no ring." That kid is just obnoxious! Who taught that little shit that it's ok to steal another man's woman, just because she's not wearing an engagement ring? Huh? Maybe she took it off to do the dishes! Maybe she wears it on a chain like a necklace! Maybe she lost it, and desperately hopes to find it again! Maybe he just hasn't given it to her yet! Oh, man, that pisses me off when somebody actively tries to steal another guy's girl away from him, and uses that lack of a visible ring thing as justification. That makes me wanna be violent!
Anyway, what was I talking about... Oh yeah, those little troll bastards. So, do you really think that any of those petrified horse apples really gives one flip about true love, based on what we know about them now? I don't think so. They just want to marry off Christoph to a princess as quickly as possible, in order to gain some political power. See? They're bastards. I'm not pointing fingers! I'm just sayin'. Those trolls are a pack of genuine, bona-fide bastards.
Ok, just a couple more...
So, if all Anna needs is an act of true love to thaw her frozen heart, then she should have been cured the moment Olaf began to melt after building a fire for her, and then refusing to leave her side. Because if that ain't true love, then I don't know what is. Plus, Olaf flat out tells Anna that he loves her when they all first arrive at the troll clearing.
ALSO... It's clearly spelled Weselton, but everybody calls it weasel town anyway. No wonder the ambassador of Weselton is such a bitter old man.
Whew! I'm glad all that's off my chest.
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