Glow balls. Balls that glow.

In a dark room, with low video quality, they look really neat. The music was... unintentional and atmospheric, just what iTunes shuffle had up at the time, but I left it in because
a) it actually works pretty well, and
b) I'm a lazy horse-stealin' sonuvabitch.

2:31 am counts as Christmas morning

I am really bad about giving presents. Really bad. I just don't think of it. Couple that with the fact that I don't have enough money to buy myself a pack of winterfresh gum, and I am in a bit of a holiday pickle. Fortunately I have excellent last-minute oh-shit abilities to pull something together that just barely fulfills the necessary requirements (see my Vassar transcript for details) and so on the evening of December 24th I managed to make things for my brother and sister that I'm actually pretty proud of.

For my sister, I made a goofy-looking comic-book cover of her musician self, Sticklips (who you can hear on MySpace, and is really quite good). For my brother, I made an expansion set to the board game Ashlyn and I made for him last year, in which you play an embattled team of elves trying to keep zombies out of Santa's workshop. I WOULD put up pictures, but I think that might cheapen it a bit since they were intended as gifts, not for me to show off.

Instead, you can have THIS little tidbit. I really can't imagine what these gentlemen could be talking about.

Christmas gift update: I got a box of chocolate liqueur cherries! Chocolate AND alcohol in tiny delicious packages. I am already delightfully allergically buzzed from just two. What a fantastic holiday.

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.

where do you get a green bowtie?

I have three plastic bottles on my desk: a life water I stole from a pizza place, a diet coke I received free from a job interview at "TOMB" a sort of live-action Legends of the Hidden Temple dungeoncrawl in Boston, and a seltzer bottle I bought on the drive up from Vassar on Tuesday to mix with the leftover gin we salvaged from Port Ewen. There's some kind of symbolic trinity there if I want to look for it. Fortunately for you, I don't.

I recently picked up an "Employment Guide" from a free newspaper machine somewhere out and about in Boston, and its contents really confuse me. There were almost no actual job listings within. Rather, it was filled with opportunities for me to go back to school or receive specialized training to become a medical assistant, trucker, or nuclear inspector. My favorite is a colorful panel with the heading "Attention Shooting Sports Enthusiasts! Motivated telemarketers needed to fill immediate openings!"

What?

A note on the walrus above: I owed one to Sasha, but I figured I'd just make it public property. But it's technically Sasha's walrus, so if it gets up to anything unsavory, you can direct complaints over to our lady in Amsterdam.

It is, more or less, ok.

There is, in evolutionary theory, an idea that within a society, some genotypes may be selected not because of their ability to survive and reproduce but because their behavior, while individually detrimental, benefits the entire population and thus is worth keeping around. I believe the millions of people who are dumb enough to leave unsecured wireless networks named "Linksys" lying around fall under this category, and I love them for it. Without them, this post would not be possible.

In fact, neither would any kind of internet access from our new Bostonian den, which is still mostly made of cardboard boxes and uncertain financial forecasting. Don't misunderstand, it's a very nice apartment. We just need to make the transition from "corrugated hairball hacked up by a U-Haul truck" to "legitimate residence".

For those who don't know or don't care, there is a new World of Warcraft expansion out. I haven't played much of it, but there's a very strong sense that if I want to keep playing WoW, I'll need to spend some very serious time with it very soon, since all our internet friends are already at level awesome and I'm still level... not. As Penny Arcade put it, "if I wait too long it'll be like going to high school with an older brother who refuses to recognize you in the hall." But maybe that's a good thing.

It is noon. It is now time to unpack the kitchen. Tally ho.

well hello again

So. I "dressed up" as the Corinthian for Halloween, a man with an excess of teeth. Ironically, I actually ended the night with fewer teeth than I'd set out with, thanks to a high-impact dental brawl with a candy apple whose shiny sugary coating would have challenged most bunker-buster warheads. But $250 and a pleasant half hour of drilling later, my tooth is back in business. Better yet it's artificial, which I've just realized qualifies me as a cyborg. You humans can go back to your smoking blue-soundstage hovels; I've got lasers to calibrate.

By this point we've all voted. Bully for us. Mother suggested this morning that it might be worth it to save Obama paraphernalia so we can later dig it out of our musty horrible old man attics and wave it at our uncaring grandchildren as they sit in their virtu-pods- so we can tell them We Were There. It's a neat idea to think that this might be a major historic event, but I think I'm too cynical to believe that the kind of change people predict will really happen. The issue to me is that Americans are still slothful, ignorant, religious wump-bugglers who don't know what they want, and the political system is designed to make change slow and gradual. I will not tirade here though: I am not well-enough informed to make my particular brand of wump-buggling stand out as anything special, so there's no reason to inflict it on my (future) self or anyone else. That said... I'm just as fingers-crossed hoping-with-bated-breath anxious about this election as everyone else. God dammit I hope he wins.

Tomorrow I will make a pretty picture. Today I will not. In its place, I give you permission to picture an alto sax wrestling Al Pacino on the inside of a tube sock.

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.

cranberries

Devastation and flooding rocked the delta today.

The ten-day intensive circus training time is gone, taking with it any hope that any of us will be genuinely productive for more than a few hours a day. While it was running, we kept a schedule of what we were supposed to do, hour by hour. Over the past few days I've tried to keep a similar solo schedule for myself, but realistically it might as well read

11 am- eat a soup, check webcomics
12 pm- watch the daily show
1 pm- think about cats

Ashlyn and I have recently burned through all 26 episodes of The Vision of Escaflowne, a disgusting blend of starry-eyed-romance girl anime and giant-robot-smashing boy anime, whose soundtrack primarily consists of a chorus of Japanese men singing the title over and over in Gregorian baritone. That, combined with the usual bullshit Japanese philosophy, reminds me why I hate anime. The theme song, seen here... reminds me why I love it.



Wow, it's almost 1 pm... I should probably get started on cat-thinking. I'm really glad the world isn't covered five feet deep in them. Really, really glad.

my car punched itself in the face

Still here. The A Different Spin training time is becoming less super-intense as we get better at what we're doing, but I suspect the dropoff also has something to do with the fact that we've been at it for 5 days now. It starts at 10 am, give or take cooking time of a bagel, and ends at 10 pm, give or take when we run out of lamp oil and muscular integrity. But it's jolly good fun, and we're all getting a lot better at everything we do. I have every faith that both the shows we're working on will end up ravishingly fabulous. The fire show is great; the daytime show will be great as soon as we can write some decent patter instead of shouting profanity at Tim and gibbering on about cranberries.

make your hadron last for hours with natural male enhancement

The Large Hadron Collider is not going to destroy the world; unfortunately that's about all anyone seems to know about it. To remedy this, the scientists behind it (who all appear to be attractive, intelligent, 20-something-year-old women) have released a rap video to help explain the purpose and workings of their rather arcane ten billion dollar project.

Science... is awesome. The fact that we're exploring our world and figuring out how the whole game works is great, and it makes me sort of abstractly sad that my life isn't on any kind of track to contribute to that great work.

edit/addendum: yes, of course anyone working on the LHC is intelligent, and it doesn't take a video to show me that... my particular combination of adjectives was just born from the fact that smart girls who rap about their giant underground particle accelerators are automatically members of the hottest branch of femininity: brilliant women with a sense of humor. Yes, the video is too pixelated for me to see how attractive they are. The point is, it's irrelevant.

Whatever, it's my birthday, I'm drunk. I'm excused.

Ricky tells me that those girls probably weren't really the scientists involved. I am unwilling to accept this hypothesis. Leave me my dreams.

Good morning, me.

It's my birthday. And so, at midnight, I put on the gas mask, fishnets, and dance belt (for Tim and Ricky's sakes) and lay in the tub for several minutes with the shower running cold, drinking a teacup of rum and cackling gleefully. I then went out to the living room, turned off all the lights, and juggled glow clubs while wearing an eye patch just to see if I could do it. When there are no parties to be had, one must resort to madness.

And now it's bedtime; tomorrow begins the great odyssey of A Different Spin.

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.

turkey goes bad surprisingly quickly

Someday I actually need to learn Photoshop. But not tonight.

At least I'm not reading webcomics.

New things

First off... I added Stuff to the top of the page, and to the borders as well. Please tell me if they aren't working or if it all looks horrible, so I can change it to be more browser-compatible. Obviously I only see the internet through a wide-screen Firefox lens.

Secondly, I edited together a new A Different Spin promo. It looks like this:

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.

it was his only friend

I've been waking up most mornings and writing. It feels nice to have a creative flow going, a forced, set time for world creation. Like D&D, but without having to have friends around.

The vaguelyamazing.com domain is expiring, and we don't especially want to re-up it. So we won't. Which means all my image hosting will go down the tube, and I'll need to go back and fix all the links that will break on the old bloggums. The Flash token you see above is hosted on FileDen, which is an ulcerous skank of a website, with popups, advertisements, click-through promotions, and other horrors of the plebeian web. They're the only file dump I found that allows direct linking though, and it's free. I guess beggars can't be choosers, and I'm glad there are services like that.

World of Warcraft. It still has me. I still love spending hours cuddled up with it, projecting consciousness into the little glowy screen as my sweaty wrists erode the paint around the keyboard and the cookies in my stomach bolster their fortifications of gut tubbery. An elegant mess indeed.

SAVORY CHEESES!

friends are for censoring

There are wasps, sometimes, that climb into my room on some grand mission of insect exploration. The screen on my window doesn't quite cover the whole area, and apparently there's a wasp nest somewhere outside on the wall of the apartment.

None of said wasps have expressed any kind of hostility yet; mostly they've just died quietly behind one of the other window panes or in the long-ago-forgotten and slightly-less-long-ago-encrusted soup bowl on the back of my desk. I think it will take at least five more of these intrepid little fools before I call any kind of maintenance people to Deal With It.

There is an online dating site catering specifically to World of Warcraft players. I, being both a World of Warcraft player and an internet sex fiend, decided to investigate. What I found was more of a networking site, a facebook kind of thing with its own friend networks and message boards and the like, where people leave almost-suave messages on the walls of everything with a vagina within 200 miles of their den. But that's typical internet. The thing that strikes me is that this is an online community dedicated to people who live in an online community. Recursive nerddom. But it goes even further. There is a guild in World of Warcraft (on Lightninghoof, a word whose uttering awakens an Ancient Wrath in Tim Ellis) dedicated to people who network on the site. So. A true supplicant in the church of e-poon spends time on World of Warcraft, sets aside time within his WoW time to go play specifically on the realm of the dating site, and spends time on the dating site discussing the time spent on the realm dedicated to the dating site. Goddamn I hope these people are having amazing WoW sex for all their efforts.

The site is called Datecraft if you want to see it for yourself.

And now, the end-of-post semi-creativity, courtesy of Sally Slade's endless patience in putting up with me: This worked a lot better when I was frantically stream of consciousness typing and with the unexpected google image search at the end. Reading it in this form sort of has the punchline spoiled.

But I trust you all to use your imaginations.

The rain in spain is spiky like cocaine

Being wet is nice.

There are lakes and pools and rainstorms and all of them instantly make me feel elevated and loosely immortal. They're also a great way to get exercise without sweating all over yourself...

Dungeons and Dragons is still the greatest possible use of time in the world: Cooperative storytelling and going into a world with your friends that you are creating together is the definition of "team-building exercise". Maybe I could take that show on the road... "Dear Corporate Overlords: bring your cubicled minion bonnies out for a few hours of escapism and shared hallucination. You don't need True Strike to know it'll be a guaranteed hit!" If only I could turn the storytelling skills of D&D into actual, publishable trash.

This is the protagonist of a fine little bit of nonsense Mike, Ricky, and I wrote this morning while making crepes.

...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.

smarmy nightlings

It’s been a bad night. The kind of night when the howling psychopathy is calling, when the calling blacklingness wants me. Giggling and tapping at the windows, it is asking me to come play with it. It tells me things will always be different out on the mad road; that we can have everything we need from everyone who doesn’t need it as much. Kill and take, it says: slash the walls, burn the bills, and sow the kind of terrorific seeds that chill through the minds of everyone who hears. Never look back, never face consequences; if you have no pattern or motive you cannot be beaten, and if you're going to be alone in the world anyway, why bother? In a world of cooperative people, the individual willing to be the unspeakable cheat comes out on top.

Emo emo emo. Yeesh. No... I’m still good, I still don’t want that. But it’s there, and every so often when life gets tiresome, it comes out to say its leering, tongue-waggling hello. I suppose it’s better than its predecessor, horrific depression. Maybe. Why would I post this? Jesus I need something to do. I'm chewing a dollar bill. That could probably give a man unpleasant diseases. I should be working on any number of things; tomorrow I will be more productive and call more colleges and offices and such. I only got one confirmed show today, and it's a small daytime gig up in the midst of nowhereland, Maine. Things need to pick up. But I truly believe that they will. I just need to find some more money in the meantime. And more importantly, I need to make games, run through the woods, make music and art, and generally remember all the reasons that life is worth celebrating.

It's just been one of those nights.

It has not been 21 days

or anywhere near that. I suspect it has actually been closer to... three. Days are easier to keep track of when the numbers are smaller. But it is good to be keeping this monstrosity alive again. I think it has to do with unemployment.

Stacey wants to play Final Fantasy VII. I am not sure that I want to play Final Fantasy VII again, but I would like to have the recent experience in my mind. 60 hours seems a bit much to devote to such an endeavor, but it WOULD be nice to have fresh memories of subquests, airships, horrific chocobo inbreeding experiments, and a certain attractive jailbait materia ninja fresh in my mind once again. The last time I saw such things was middle school. These are dire straits, and should be navigated.

...maybe I'll just be productive while she plays, and juggle unobtrusively while she gets wtfpwned by the secret boss you have to kill to unlock Vincent. No, Stacey, I'm not telling you how to beat him.

There is a bear, sometimes. There is bad drawing, sometimes. Sometimes, these times overlap at the same time.

off-topical cream

I don't think I have Lyme Disease. I had a bizarre rash on the back of my leg which could -with a little imagination and squinting- be described as bullseye. Fortunately the rash itches from time to time, which the internet assures me is a good indicator that what I have is not Lyme disease, but is rather some kind of random flora- or fauna-inflicted skin condition that it would really be better if I kept to myself. And so, of course, I'm telling you all about it. Rational thought wins again.

Anyway, I think I dodged the lyme disease bullet (I just noticed that every time I've written that, I've capitalized it less than the time before). But it got me thinking: it's very possible that I could develop some horrible debilitating neurological condition, and with no money or insurance, there's not a hell of a lot I could do about it. My immediate reaction is sort of worrisome... I think if something like that were to happen, it would just mean it's time to go off and live la vida loca with the little time I had left, rather than try to scrape money together or beg friends and family, despite the fact that I know they'd be willing to help. I'm way too passive in terms of just playing the cards I'm dealt. I would do something about that... but to do so would be paradoxical.

A Different Spin: East Coast Edition slowly sloughs forward, and other opportunities are presenting themselves. Nothing worth writing about... I think that's why I've stopped writing; nothing noteworthy is going on.

But enough whining and personal business and actual blogging. Here is a picture of a man and an octopus high-fiving in a peach orchard. And isn't that what life is all about, really?

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."