The Lagolier

Not to be confused with a "langolier" which is a Stephen King creature that never really made any sense but likes to harass people in airports. Homeland Security should probably look into that.

I wonder why so many of us start blogs and let them slip by the wayside. I suppose it's one more thing in the day (or week) that has to get done, but I think maintaining them is almost meditative. I know for me, whether I'm creating some slapdash oddity -the only type I'm capable of- or actually talking about my latest feats of sloth, it becomes self-reflective and I often find that I feel differently about something than I had originally thought. Or at least I am often surprised at what comes out when I open the bloggity-box.

That said, meta-blogging is NOT very interesting- posts of "I should post more" or "why do we maintain these or fail to maintain them" are apologetic and unproductive. I know that in four years when I go back and read this as a bit of grinning nostalgia, there will be things that make me slap my knee and say "I remember that chapter of life; that was fun!" I also know that this will not be one of them.

In closing:

Down under the plates of the hull, the anaerobic newt looked out curiously. It had slunk its way onto the reflective plates of the shuttle to bask luxuriously on the heated surface in the sun, and then had crept under the plate for its growth phase, having absorbed all the light and heat it would need to finish the metamorphosis to adulthood. The dark, narrow crevice was perfect- millennia of evolution told it that no predators would be likely to find it here. The newt's body had begun secreting its self-cocooning sticky silk, and with bonds like titanium it had woven itself a bed, held fast to the hull and hibernating peacefully through the final checks and double checks, the blast of lift rockets and the rush of flight. Now, a million miles above the surface of its world, the newt awoke and crept out. In the joy of newly strengthened legs and cramped muscles, it did an exploratory leap.

Cake Batter Geese

Harold forked another mouthful of bean salad past his teeth, and chewed it halfheartedly. It was cold, sour, and vinegary. When he was three, he had told his mother he wanted to be a cook, but thirty-two years later he seemed cursed to permanent and extreme culinary tragedy. Even after buying several recipe books and stocking his kitchen with the best ingredients an air conditioner repairman's salary could afford, he still bungled hopelessly anything more complicated than basting a microwave hot dog with a half pint of mustard. Bean salad. How do you manage to muck up a bean salad, he asked aloud. Harold tipped the barely-touched plate into the garbage and reached for a delivery pizza coupon. He found that had used them all.


Python oil! This excellent keepsake now proven to repel ticks and vermin, draw in wild financial fortunes, and make sure no one's making a squinty face in the family portrait. Keeps change in your pockets and God in your heart, yours for the low low price of $45.79 and the last whoop of the eighth inning. Don't be caught out in the dark without it, friend. Immigrants and carnivore heliotropes may lurk these parks. At the end of days, the signs will crackle and letters fade. PER TO & S OP will spell out the nightmare name of him that comes, and all will be paper or plastic.


"Here's the deal," said the devil, "I'm gonna tear your arms off and leave you to die bleeding and vomiting, flexing bloody stumps to move limbs that are only an agonized memory. Why? Because I'm the god-damned devil, and you shoulda took off running the second you saw me." He smiled, and snarled, and reached.

llamaFace

When they were building the tree house, Tyler's dad always told him he used too many nails to hold each piece of wood in place, and that wood was a lot stronger than he gave it credit for. As the monsters outside his house howled in rage and slammed their bodies against his boarded-up windows, Tyler prayed that his dad had been right.

"Here's the deal" said the devil, "I'm going to give you this knife and this spear. Then I'm going to put you into a one room studio apartment plus kitchenette with a ravenous bear. For every ten seconds you stay alive, I'll give you 100 grams of gold (about $4000). Once the bear kills you, I'll bring you back to life and give you the money, but you and I will both treasure forever the memory of a bear mauling you to death. Of course, if you somehow manage to kill the bear instead, the gold keeps on coming, and you are set for life."

a speedboat peels away

Just underfoot, there were dozens and dozens of pancakes. As field day continued, the children gleefully romped through relays and races and water breaks and orange slices. The subterranean pancakes had minimal effect on the proceedings; maybe the displacement of dirt caused by one particular flapjack made Tommy Chumbles lose the three-legged race, or maybe it didn't. It was irrelevant. To Principal Hob, who had spent four dark and silent hours the night before digging up the field, sowing the unassuming breakfast cakes under the topsoil, and replanting the entire field of grass in time for the 7 am bus arrivals, it was the most life-affirming sight imaginable. Because Principal Hob was absolutely, terrifyingly insane.

Horris stands on the roof, looks down, and gives the hushed crowds below a smile. Across the street, a dozen unique and deadly vipers are loaded into the cannon and fired. Horris straps nine pounds of bleeding raw ham onto his bandolier and leaps roaring into the twelve-story high emptiness. Horris and the reptiles clash high above the city streets and begin their deadly dance. The ham, the snakes, and Horris's mismatched limbs and tube socks intertwine and begin choking one another. Blood is drawn and bodies are broken. They plummet through space, none of them able to breathe, and slam into the pavement. The ball of man and meat and serpent explodes, and Horris's gore-drenched cravat lands squarely at the stockbroker's feet.

"Here's the deal:" said the devil, "you tell me how many people you're going to kill. I'll give you two hours to do it, and at the end I'll give you ten thousand dollars for each person. Plus if you manage to kill as many as you said you would, I'll rewind time, set the whole thing to rights. Nobody's dead, nobody remembers you did anything wrong, and you keep the cash. But if you DON'T reach your quota, you don't get the money and you don't get the reset. Sound fair?"

I killed the first zombie.

I might have saved the world. Or I might have just killed a man. Either way I want to write this fast because something may be coming. I was driving to go pick up an air mattress for the trip this weekend and I swear I saw the first zombie. A man shambling toward the gas station with his neck at a broken angle, dragging one leg and foaming at the mouth. He was headed for the minivan parked at the far pump. I slowed the car down to see what was wrong with the guy, and he turned his head around and sniffed for a second. His eyes were black, with some kind of red skin irritation all around them. He was moving toward the van, and the van had kids in it.

I know zombies aren't real. But I know that if they were real, they'd look like this guy, and if he bit even one person it would be over. It would spread like it does in all the movies, and we would just have to find out whether this one has a happy ending where only 99% of the population dies, or if this is it. I can't say whether what I did was sane. I just know that I would rather risk my own insanity and incarceration than risk the lives of every person in the western hemisphere.

I killed him. I stopped my car in the middle of the lane and I grabbed a golf club from my bag in the trunk. I ran into the gas station lot and while the two other people standing by the pumps started to scream, I bashed the zombie's head in. I caved in his skull, and I scattered bits of zombie brain all over the club, the pavement, my face. I didn't get any in my eyes. I was careful.

The people were screaming, and I could see the guy in the gas station looking out at me and dialing something on his phone. I ran back to the car, covered the license plate with my shirt, closed the trunk on it, and drove home. I checked the news for any stories that sounded like a zombie infection, but nothing has come up. Whether it was a virus or black magic that made the first zombie, I think I stopped it.

I don't know what to do, and I don't know how long I have until the police find me and put me away for murder. Maybe they won't. I don't know how it works, or how many cameras or how many witnesses there were. Obviously putting this online might not be the best idea, but I want you all to know what happened if I disappear, and I want you all to be on the lookout in case the one I got wasn't the first, or wasn't the last.

I killed the first zombie. I might have saved us all. I might never sleep well again.

Overcast Orange with a whiff of sewage

Orson speared the last of the fish creatures. It gurgled a fluidy protest as it clutched the weapon sticking out of its gut, as if to argue that Orson's move had not been entirely fair, and if it had just been ready, the fight might have turned out more in the fish's favor. Orson emphatically kicked the shaft of the spear, sending it and the attached monster splashing unhappily into the slime of the bay. He swung his leg back over the seat of the bike and wiped a smear of fish blood off his leather sleeve- hopefully the smell wasn't permanent. Shaia gunned the engine and in the usual choking cloud of foul, particle-filled smoke, the two sped off down the dock in the fading, dusty light.

When they’d finished telling Dodd about the ordeal, back at the lounge, two hours and twelve beers had passed. Dodd gave a heavy sigh, leaning back on the cracking green fabric of the booth and peering across the bottle-strewn table. “Sixteen fish-men, and all of them carrying weapons. Spectacular. At this rate, next time they’ll probably have semi-automatics.”

Orson leaned forward. “Making gunpowder under water…” he began. Shaia sighed loudly to cut him off.

“We stopped them before they made it into the city at all,” she said, “they still don’t know anything about us except that we kick their asses every time they decide to come up to the surface. What I don't get is, why do they keep coming back?"

“I don’t know,” said Dodd, “but they’ve attacked the docks five times so far, and there’s no reason to think they’ll stop. We just need to be prepared, and make sure they don’t steal any more supplies. They may not have our resources, but they’re inventive with what they get their hands on.”

“You sent out submarines last week after the first attack though.” Orson said, “did you see how many of them there are, or where they live?”

“The water’s still too polluted,” Shaia sighed, “I took a sub down there myself, and it’s nothing but sludge and radiation. I can’t see anything, and the sensors just get scrambled. I say the fishes don’t understand us, but we don’t understand them any better. I can’t imagine how they can even survive down there, let alone communicate and hunt. I don’t like how little we know about them.”

Dodd stood up. “Neither do I,” he said, “but our hands are tied. They can come into our world more easily than we go into theirs. We just have to wait for them to make their next move. I’m putting three volunteers on watch tonight, and installing a heavy gun down there first thing in the morning. You two should get some sleep. Make sure to get a patch for that cut, Shaia. Rations are tight, but we don’t want you getting infected with whatever bacteria the fishes might have to offer.”

"Another beer first," Orson suggested, "I'm not quite ready for the night to be over."

Dodd grudgingly agreed, and the conversation changed to lighter matters from there: the pulley rigging in ship house D and the mongrel dog that Haskell found hiding in his mail bag. By the time they each had drunk another two rounds, the worries of the skirmish on the docks was far from their minds.

Another nail in Walt Whitman's coffin.

I've noticed that the great majority of my literative spew has moved toward the dreamy and hallucinogenic, and usually ends with, or involves, someone's death. There will be no more of that. With that in mind, here is a poem about a jackhammer:

O jackhammer, my jackhammer! our fearful task is done.
here stands a mighty mega-mall, complete with Cinnabon.
the I-beams came to make a frame, the plexi-glass surrounded.
built on the very concrete that we pulverized and pounded.
But heart! heart! heart!
Though the digging has been dug
My jackhammer has died this day
For someone pulled the plug.

Dammit, still got the death in there. I suppose it can't be helped.

I ordered three umbrella hats this evening, with pointy tops to spin plates on. We shall put them on the heads of unsuspecting audience volunteers, and I think they'll have a grand time. I've always wanted one of my own. An umbrella hat, that is. I'm pretty well set when it comes to grand times.

A Different Spin has been invited to join the performer roster of Urban Circus, a Boston-based talent promotion company. We have a photo shoot with them on February 4th. The guy I talked to at the agency also said he was interested in bringing me on as a birthday entertainer and performer for their "pirate parties". Semi-regular gigs that I don't have to do any booking work for? Sounds pretty ideal to me. And of course ADS is going to the APCA conference in Atlanta in March, which is the big leagues. From what we've done so far in the show-writing and skill-development departments, we're actually ready for it. Our juggling and volunteer acts are legitimately hilarious. I'm proud of what we're doing here, and I hope it keeps going for a long time.

Olives make an excellent sausage substitute on pizzas. (edited post)

Preamble (does anything other than the US Constitution have a Preamble? That's definitely the only place I've ever heard the word used):

Off to your right, behind the capital building, you can see a lovely picture of a dolphin slumming around in the deeps. I am rather fond of this dolphin. Now, to your Slightly-Down-The-Page, you'll see several paragraphs of dreamy keyboard vomit documenting postmortem hallucination. I am also rather fond of these paragraphs. But unfortunately, I really don't like them together and next to each other. But nevertheless, here they are.

And now on to the aforementioned hallucinogenic fiction. If verbose nonsense was mops and I was an elementary school janitor, man would I be set to clean up some vomit.
--

After he fell down the well, he barely remembered the suffocation of submersion at all. His frenzied panic plunged everything beyond the first burning breath of water out of his mind. Instead, the thing he remembered was the cat. The buzz in his drowning ears lowered in pitch as his waterlogged brain slowed, becoming a rumbling purr. He looked up and saw the cat, ethereal as any ever encountered by Alice, sitting on a pebble-strewn shore and watching him patiently. He stood up in the surf, dragged his heavy, watery clothes up with him onto the beach, and reached out for it. The well had gone, and there was no explanation offered or necessary. Here he was, and here was the cat.

It shook its head, ringing the bell on its collar. And then there were more. Out of the waves, out of the pebbles, climbed hundreds upon hundreds of lithe ghostly felines. They ringed him, walking head-to-tail in concentric circles, a sea of shifting ghostly fur and twinkling, tingling chimes. He tried to speak, but his senses gave in to the vertigo of their hypnotic pacing. And then the aural seascape of jingling collars shifted again, to the pattering of rain on the endless South Carolina hills he used to know.

He opened his eyes to gray skies and a warm summer wind, the rain soaking him and warming his spirit. The rustling rain through dogwood and magnolia found his ears, and the rich smell of the Southern soil drifted lazily up to him. He lifted his arms and stripped his shirt off, inhaling this perfect world. A flash of brown drew his eyes to the trees nearby, and he watched the flicker of a white tail bound away through the brush. He chased gladly after it, unsure of whether it was a deer or a cat leaping through the wilds of his afterlife, but joyful regardless. The water closed in one final time, and all was nothingness.

coolant toobs inclooded

My computer's dead, I'll get it back in a week. Probably won't update before then. They're replacing literally everything except the monitor. The most exciting part is this: because of the sinister machine's overheating, some of the silver paint on the part where my wrist sits had rubbed off. I didn't think that was a big deal. Turns out, there is no paint on that part of the laptop, and the heat actually caused the aluminum to oxidize into my skin. I don't think that will have any ill effects, except apparently an overenthusiastic use of italics.

Also, I've added something to the "Collaborative Fiction Project" Tim started a few weeks ago. The theory here is to use a line from a poem Karen wrote as the first line and jumping-off-point for a poem of your own. So here is my offering, double-posted because I am too lazy to write something else here today. I think the poem works better in the semi-ironic context of everything else up on the other blog so far... but it is what it is. Not like we're getting paid for this shite. Mayhap I shall illustrate when I have my tablet back.

I've sewed my butterfly chest all together
with straps made entirely of soup-stewed shoe leather
butterfly patches and butterfly stitches
the scars are still burning, the rotten flesh itches

To creak my neck forward sends head-spinning pain
through cold coils of copper I've hooked in my brain
I look down my body through eyes dried and wired
and electrically flex muscles long since expired

One leg's from a dead man; one leg is a wheel.
I've a cranial disc made of thrice-folded steel.
I've no nose to speak of, but that's just as well,
since I'm made of cadavers I've no wish to smell.

A mortal no longer, I've shed my old skin
passed through death and returned, transcending my sins
the police, when they killed me, my spirit unfettered
and thus I return, all the stronger and better.

I lurch down the stairs, my sucking chest heaving
to wish all the village a... memorable evening.

ten fifteens thrown to the halfwinds

The rocks were cold and wet; his feet slipped treacherously. Already there was a lightning-fork of blood running from just below his knee, and he knew his shins would be swollen soon, bruised by the uneven vertical stones. But he was higher than he had been a moment before, and though he couldn't see the top of the slope through the downpour, he knew it lay somewhere above, and on it, the lighthouse. To reach it was the only option now; to climb down these rocks would be even more difficult than the trip up had been. Somewhere below, the tide was rising, a slow and steady pursuer to his climb. The boy raised his bloody knuckles and reached for the next rain-slick rock.

Seventeen homeless men in seventeen cities reach simultaneously for seventeen stray dogs, offering their hands as if to say, "it's all right, we're both still here aren't we?" Fifteen of them are bitten.

There is a mote of gold in everything she says, if you can find it. Like the princesses who spoke in diamonds and frogs, she creates matter from words, and in parsing and panning we can become the tiniest bit richer.

The truck can still find you.
Look the part and get the man.
Shopping carts are no safety.
Six pence for a tie.

Look the part and get the man.
Lurk the unders; man the drains.
Six pence for a tie.
But the filth can cling on the inside.

Lurk the unders; man the drains.
Hold your bag of seeds close, and save it.
But the filth can cling on the inside.
Breathe it out when the cities are ashes.

Hold your bag of seeds close, and save it.
Shopping carts are no safety
Breathe it out when the cities are ashes,
The truck can still find you.

*snark taco sauces, this is the end*

Thirty-five stories above, Howard clapped the top back onto the mayonnaise. He didn't see the shadowy thing grinning behind the refrigerator door. If he had, he would never have seen anything else.

Nothing to be done.

The Art Nouveau Philadelphia Society for Beckett in the Nude will have its first public exhibition this Saturday in the chapel at 7th and Hildebrandt. Formal dress is encouraged for audience members; Friends of the Society displaying badges will be admitted free of charge. Questions and concerns should be addressed to director Oliver McKittish, especially regarding the media coverage of the May 23rd shutdown of metro stations in the Glasgow area for tech night and dress rehearsals.

We hope to see you there!

I draw a thing, then I write a thing. Who knows.

When Captain Ferrier first invited us on the cruise I thought it would serve as nothing more than a lark, a flippant getaway to the skies aboard the most modern of airship luxuries. I was unaware at the time of the workings of such crafts, and thought them merely another item on the daunting list of things that would never be relevant to my own life, and therefore never worthy of serious research. Leave the baking to the bakers, the shoemaking to the cobblers, and the workings of highly inflammable airborne dirigibles to the obscenely rich, I thought.
However, when Melinda and I boarded the craft in person, I knew there was something here beyond mere goggle-sporting hobbery. There was a majesty to the swelling canvas balloon above; a regal air described even in the rudder fins on either side of the humming turbines on the rear of the ship, ready to carve the sky and cut wisping trails through the clouds. It was a commanding craft; I had never seen anything so grand.
But beneath the magnificent blimp there was an element that struck me as out-of-place. The entire "crew" of the ship seemed to consist of one squat, unpleasant mechanical man who, presumably due to his lack of a visible mouth, never said a word to myself, Melinda, or the captain during the entirety of our voyage. It clunked about on oversized mechanical feet, performing tasks which I, as an admitted aeronautical novice, can only assume were vital to the maintenance of our flight. At one point as we drifted above the Melbingian Sea, the automaton actually approached me, looking distressed, and would not leave until I gave it my pocket watch. The creature stared at the watch for no less than two full minutes before handing it back to me silently and clanking onward about its duties. I suspect I shall never know the meaning of this behavior, and it troubles me somewhat.
Perhaps when I have returned to the university I shall read up on these matters. Airships and mechanical men. I cannot name the curiosity this voyage has awoken in me, but somehow it feels truer than any previous pursuit I have undertaken.

again the text and picture are unrelated both to my life and to each other

He assumed he would need all fifteen of them eventually. There were social dinners, rain storms, and possible mining ventures in his predictable future, to name merely a few of the more probable scenarios in which a man might find himself wanting a very specific hat. One could never be too prepared. Plus, they were on sale.

...his initials are FAG... that really is too bad.

to clarify: every so often Mooch gets an email from someone with a name, request, and email address that is clearly nonsense and scammery. Every time such events transpire, there will be one of these posts. They will never be relevant. But reading the first one first will make more sense.



Hesitantly, but with infinite patience and the hope for a better tomorrow, Fernando Alvero Gomez picked up the phone. Ever since Kofi Mbambaa disappeared, Fernando had been assaulted by a neverending stream of desperate men trying to wire their questionable third-world finances through his telephone and email. But perhaps this would not be such a call, he thought. Perhaps it would be a friendly socialite, or a long-lost love.

It wasn't. All the bright hopes and uncertainties vanished with the first pathetic whine from the voice from the other end of the telephone.

"The account owner is late Fernando, I am heard you are the one to contact."

Fernando gritted his teeth. "Is this a solicitation call, my dear and grammaticaly destitute friend? Perhaps a need for some kind of money transfer?"

"My reaching for an American is underway, an unknown player who the account owner can claim as next of kin. J10million unclaimed is an amount no reasonable man could pass up, and if an American like you will just respond to my fabulous offer."

There was complete silence from Fernando's end of the line. The solicitor took it for consideration; it was not. It was the silence of unfathomable rage, drilled from depths of the human soul that no man previous had dared to glimpse, let alone attempt to harness. Fernando Alvero Gomez, in that moment, tapped such depths and found himself the stronger for it.

The solicitor, a shockingly Anglican-named man called Peter Henry, was still wet behind the ears when it came to dealing with dangerous men on the telephone; his preferred medium was e-mail. It would be his undoing, as well as, ultimately, the undoing of all life on earth. He had no inkling of the repercussions of his actions, and so drove on undeferred.

"J10 million unclaimed!" he announced again. "I am seeking for your cooperation and understanding to enable us claim the fund from the bank. Once the money is moved any lucrative business in your country. So as to enable me decides on what to do next."

Peter Henry heard a crunch through the telephone. He thought it sounded like cereal. A more informed person might have recognized it for what it was: the screeching peel of telephone handset plastic crushed in a fist of rage, splintered and shuddering through the telecommunicative wires it once protected.

Halfway across the world in a tiny apartment in Paraguay, the fire alarm went off. Fernando Alvero Gomez stood steaming, his very clothes cooked off of his flesh by the heat of his foolishly-wakened wrath, cackling in the insipid shower of the apartment's automatic sprinkler system.

Fernando's briefcase was not a heavy thing, easily lifted onto the bed and opened with three simple, practiced twists on three complex, intricate latches. Inside, the laptop sprung to life. "Good morning Mister Gomez," the cheery AI intoned through the pouring sprinkler system, "would you like to end it all?"

Fernando nodded, took a breath, and prepared himself for the void. He input the line of code, looked to the sky, and went to make a cup of lemonade while he waited for the missiles to fall. There would be no more telesolicitations. Not a god-damned one.

roosinetes

"It was a pleasant and breezy night, and the four horses each had a delicious bucket of bones. Mouthwash the Soporific, Malaise the Solipsistic, Moliere the Solecistic, and Harold the Bland gnawed gleefully and chilled the fuck out."

Fernando Alvero Gomez sighed and shut the laptop. Kofi Mbambaa, the lawyer, was at the door. His normally slick Colombia 'do was matted sloppily across his forehead, and there was evidence of some sort of rodent's recent habitation therein. Kofi took a bottle of pills from his suit coat, drank it in its entirety, and began his daily lament.

"Without our America backers, we will never to be able to transfer the money from the fifth princess Dubai, and the empire will be ruins! You must send out more of our desperate plea to the Americans if we are ever to regain our fortunes."

Fernando slumped in his chair. He thought about the handgun in his top desk drawer; how easy it would be to pull it out, kill Kofi Mbambaa where he stood, extricate his kidneys and profitable vitals, and continue his simple life undistubed for at least a few months more, courtesy of the black market transplant cartel. But he had promised the sweaty little man that he would finish the contract, and he had every intention of seeing it through. Even if it meant his novel would have to stay quietly seething on the back burner of his agenda. As a private problem solver, the customer had to come first.

"Kofi," he said patiently, "your princess is two provinces away. I can almost piss across the border. You have the money, the guns, and the total lack of moral scruples to get her out. Blasting in there with a tank and two hundred men would cost you what, two hundred thousand plus the assassins' contracts afterward?" (Killing the families of the dead was cheaper than paying widow and orphan benefits, by Fernando's math) "You lose more than that every day she stays in her father's castle. Kill the old fuck, steal his daughter, make your marriage happen, get your shitty little ducks in a row, and for god's sake work on your english."

Kofi's lower lip started to wobble. "But the Americans. Our email correspondence, we are making such progress and friendship..." His eyes began to tear.

Fernando saw it, and in one easy motion slid the drawer open. The silencer worked; with a tiny squeal Kofi crumpled backward and expired unhappily. Fernando walked across the room, closed the door, and went back to his computer.

"Mouthwash the Soporific, Malaise the Solipsistic, Moliere the Solecistic, and Harold the Bland gnawed gleefully and chilled the fuck out. Their riders would be home soon, and then there would be housecleaning to do."

expensive whiskey doesn't taste any different.

There once was a baker from Boston
who found kids in his shop quite exhausting
so he baked up with glee
a pink cake that said "FREE!"
and had cyanide baked in the frosting.

Stacey and I made a dollar store board game about frogs. They need to enlist the aid of Community Helpers like firemen, nurses, and telephone repairmen (from a Community Helper hearts deck) to overcome challenges like Ravening Hobos, Travis Craw, and Grandpa's War Stories and win gold coins. These challenges are hidden deep within five thematic zones on the board: the City, the Sea, Space, the Volcano, and Inside a Third Grader. It's a spectacular drinking game of absolute nonsense. I just wish I had a constant posse of people to help play, make, and test games. Board games, RPGs, Flash games... I want to try the Alternate Reality Game thing, fishing around in the web and across cities to find clues and race other players to uncover something that doesn't actually exist. Except that it does.

Forgive my nonsense; I haven't had a vegetable today.

pots and pants and blowsifh

In space, as it turns out, popsicles don't taste as good.

The boy was afraid to leave his house. Without clean socks, it couldn't be done. He wasn't about to put on the dirty, crusty ones, and walking barefoot was out of the question. And so he starved.

Kangaroo pouches are not warm and fuzzy. They are external incarnations of the womb. They are sticky and amniotic. You'll never look at Kanga the same.

If confronted with all the cardboard we have consumed in our lives, we could produce extremely functional shelters, sprawling and leaning in a corrugated shanty town. If confronted with all the plastic we have consumed, we could waterproof it.

If confronted with all the dogs we have ever seen, we would be buried in dogs.

What did chickens look like before we domesticated them? Were they bigger? Are they a species new to the world and created by humanity, like Dachshunds and Furby™s?

When she made him the scarf, she had been afraid he wouldn't like it. Or that he would say his proper thank yous and give her a hug, then leave it in an unceremonious heap in the back of the closet. She wasn't sure if men wore scarves, or at least, if he did. She still knitted it though, and every hour she worked she held him in her mind. The scarf she gave him was warm and wooly, and full of life.

A single toaster strudel, left unattended, is capable of burning down your entire block.

I have cans of soup but no bowls.

Fishcoat was a mustachio'd gentleman of the upper class who was never seen out and about without nine flavors of monocle, all of which were bitter and horrid. He liked to lick at least one around 4 pm, as an afternoon tide-me-over sort of snack between luncheon and supper. He never wore the same suit of clothes twice, and had never once been late for an appointment. Such was the world of Fishcoat. I am going to tell you how he died.

It happened the day the lollipop girl appeared on the doorstep. Fishcoat, who was enjoying his daily operatic in the bathtub, was most perturbed at the interrupting chime of the doorbell, which cut short his warbling rendition of the Barber of Seville. Fishcoat stood, his sudsy fat rolls bouncing soapily out of the tub and into a towel. He made his way down the stairs and opened the door.

A tiny waif confronted him, wielding a bushel of crystallized sugar-pops on a bushel of wrapped paper sticks. "BUY A LOLLIPOP!" she enthused. Fishcoat gasped. He did not know how one deals with children, especially when one is clad in a towel. He slammed the door in abject terror, and ran back to his suite. He opened the window, and peered down below. The tot was still present, still waiting patiently at the door. He withdrew his bulbous head, and assured himself that the lollipopper would inevitably disappear.

Five minutes passed. Fishcoat had clothed himself in a new suit, regained his composure, and poured himself a flagon of tequila. Such was life. But as he steeled himself for the impending floodtide of alcohol, he was snatched up in the hooks of a sudden and irresistable urge to go have a gander once again out the window. He looked. The lollipop girl was gone. No sweet candy vendor stood on his doorstep. Fishcoat smiled, closed the window, and blissfully quaffed his pint of pick-me-up, which immediately knocked him into unconsciousness.

In the terrifyingly pristine corridors of his upper-class mind, Fishcoat drifted. Behind his senses he heard a rumbling with a backbone of mariachi cornet. His mind flopped tequilishly around to confront this intruder. Juaxtango, he cactus loa of the wastes, loomed into his vision, his ectoplasmic tango shutting down all possibility of resistance. Fishcoat's will jellied. Juaxtango bellowed a psionic roar of maraca that carried one simple demand: BUY A FUCKING LOLLIPOP!

Fishcoat awoke with a wide-eyed howl, his pristine mustachios curled perplexingly upward. He leapt to his feet, grabbed his overstuffed wallet, and bowled down the stairs, flutting money unceremoniously in his path. The door, painted and bevelled in the most urbane style, was shattered by the barreling corpulent missile of Fishcoat's bulk. Unimpeded, the fat man ran on.

He ran as only a man recently confronted by a sombrero'd mexican tequila spirit can run, careening forth in search of the tiny fundraising lollipop vendor. Three blocks down the road, after trampling a bulldog and traumatizing its aged master forever, he found the wee tyke. Foaming and wild-eyed, he demanded a candy.

"one dollar and fifty cents!" she exclaimed, holding up one of the tasties to Fishcoat's flaring, fur-lined nose. The heaving rotundus snatched the offered sweet, and dug through its wallet for a bill of such small denomination. Having found none, he threw a hundred at the girl and bowed graciously before sticking the lollipop in his mouth and descending in a torrent of bottom-first fat rolls onto the curb.

The sweetness was overwhelming. Fishcoat closed his eyes and Juaxtango appeared behind them, cackling and backed up by a quartet of sombrero'd mexican towel boys sporting mustachios every bit as impressive as Fishcoat's. They handed the drunk and sugared fat man a mouth harp, and faded blissfully into the tequila-lollipop sunset of Mariachi Voodoo Hell.

There are no visual words in this.

Sheldon DeLoach had never played basketball before. Nevertheless, he stepped onto the court prepared to do his best, and confident that he could succeed at anything he put his mind to and eager to defend his honor in the heartless arena of before-school one-on-one.

Martel Guapo had also never played basketball before. But he had a name that meant "the Handsome Hammer," which is really difficult to top. The bets were taken, the court arranged.

The ball went up. It should have come down and been snatched by the grubby, unskilled fingers of one of the two boys, launching a riveting game of fumbling, rolling basketball in the 7 am mists. The other kids should have cheered as the hopeless lads bungled shot after painfully easy shot. All this and more would have unfolded that day, if only Martel Guapo had closed the garden gate.

Alas, Martel Guapo had not closed the garden gate, and so had been followed all the way down to the school by the enormous lizard who had taken up residence beside his mother's parsley. Thus, as the ball came down it was snatched not by Sheldon and not by Martel, but rather by a joyful airborne predatory reptile. The beast sailed across the court, hit the ground, and savaged the rubbery sphere in ways that would almost certainly have traumatized the surrounding middle-schoolers had the ball possessed innards, guts, or other such gore-covered tasties. The carnivore lizard, who had been expecting no less, was quite put out.

Children screamed. The lizard panicked. These events, as they continued, formed what a Thinking Person might call a positive feedback loop. Sheldon DeLoach did so in his head -he was an intelligent lad- as he watched children and lizard whip one another into an elaborate frenzy of shrieking and flailing adolescent/reptilian abandon. It shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone that the panicking lizard dropped the ball and ran.

What did come as a surprise, particularly to a certain Marian Brubbles, who held the second clarinet seat in the middle school band, was that the lizard dropped the ball and ran toward her. It hit her at the knee-caps, and sent her face-first into the asphalt before vanishing into the woods. She chipped a tooth, and after the full story came out later that day, vowed never to speak to Martel Guapo again. Had there been no lizard incident that day, things might have turned out differently between them. In fact I can say with the greatest assurance that they would have lived happily ever after, somewhere in the Netherlands. But they will never know.

And that is why basketball has been banned from the county of Hamshap since 1987.

dreams

Last night's dreams were clear and narrative enough that I thought them sharing-worthy. However, they're also a rather long read, so in the interest of space I'll just link to them.