Saturday, June 20, 2015

some of the worst characters from you are starting to emerge

But they cannot come out without a little context.

Well--it's not that they cannot. It's just that they would rather not.

"Rather knot?" asks one of the sailors.

I draw a precipice. I draw a Sherlock Holmes' footprint upon it. I stand proudly at the precipice.

"Move forward!" I command.

Of course, this is a whole ecosystem, this massive ship. There are a lot of badly rounded little slips of people walking around. They lack definition and need me to start to give hints about them. If it's not some drama about the state of statistical disadvantage, it's usually another 'epic' yarn.

One of them asks me "Why are you freaking out? Just relax. It's a Saturday. Enjoy the Saturday."

"It's warm outside," I tell them. "The sun is quite epic right now, eh?"

"It's making me sweat as I stand here," explains a woman. "I'm here to visit my son, but he's away at work, so I'm sort of just ambling around. Checking out the world he lives in. But it's so hot, and I thought it would be cold, so I had put on a jacket."

"And then it turned out that it was hot."

"How can one predict these things?" she said, relegating the problem to chance.

"I don't know, must be insane to do that," I said coolly, and my cool suit visor slowly lowered and snapped into 'cool' mode. I set it to about 65 degrees, since that is the only way that ice can begin to form in the subconscious. I walked away from the hot person, because I had no interest in tempting the lore of spontaneous combustion. I even put a sign up as I moved away, "(You are too hot)". That's the last she would ever see of me, for being that warm and so on.

I entered a life where the universe was coordinated. Funny things still happened, but they were just really tight. There was no dilly-dallying. There was no BS. When a person made a joke, everyone noticed that it was a joke, and not serious. But when someone was serious about their serious thing, everyone else also took it seriously. "I don't find this hilarious at all," I said to a stone pad, which allowed me entrance into the grave.

A goblin shat on my shoulder, but I was very serious at this point. I looked up at him as though he was a King of Goblins. "Why shit you in this fashion?" I asked with greatest courtesy.

"Make me yours," challenged the fiend.

I took the gun and shot it into my mouth.

"Do you know about any jokes?" asked the funny face.

"Why shat you upon my shoulder?" insisted my serious form.

"Cos I could."

I began my conversation with it. At all points this being would slither, and twist. And turn. At every possibility it would just shrug away at my comments. "Why are you so uneasy?" I asked, finally.

"You discomfort me," it replied. "You make me all twisty, turny."

I felt that we were making some progress. "How can I make your tormented soul sit easier?"

"First of all, don't portray me as a tormented soul."

"Why not? You are tormented. You have been twisted by the err of the world. Nay. The err of the whole Universe."

"I'm sorry that your whole Universe errs," replied the monster. "Mine is pretty good. Until you."

"Until me?"

"Until you aggravate me. Coming over with your broken Universe and trying to overlay your errors upon my perfection," said the goblin.

I wanted to slaughter it, but by that time, I had already changed. "I have changed," I declared. "I seek no job as correction-maker."

"Will you begin to learn about why I am the way I am?"

"I will learn, and thereupon be thy friend and cordial advisor," I told it.

"Your face is hilarious, but I'll trust you on this," said the creature, cautiously.

I nodded to indicate positive vibes, and held my arm at length--a gesture of comraderie. "This is how my peoples greet strangers," I told it. "It is not an representation of bathroom services."

"You know I'm a monster," it told me. "There is no way this will be 'civilized', as you often seem to put it."

I sat down and pulled out my provisions. "There are always ways," I said.

Friday, June 5, 2015

In Vino Veritas

"In Vino Veritas," she said, as though it may be a spell from her Harry Potter books or something.

I waited a second simply to see whether magical stuff would begin to happen--you know, lights and special effects. Then, as I realized there was nothing in her words, I just burst into this horrible laughter. Laughing, directly in her face. "I'm sorry," I managed, between slivers of cheer (sometimes patting my chest just to remind my heart that it would need to beat faster in order to keep the pulmonary system chugging at point), "I'm just. I'm just Dumber, I guess?"

"You're what? Dumb?"

"No, Dumber," I smiled. I gave her a trinket from Chinatown that had made me think of her on an off minute.

"It means that when you drink, you speak the truth," she said coldly to me.

The sun then died and all the pyramids of the world became cones of peanut butter ice-cream. "Who the fuck is Vino. Are you cheating on me?"

"You said you are sick of me!" she cried. "You drank, and then you said you are sick of me!"

"Yeah, that must be the real truth!" I accused her, instead. "You know what--in my Vino, it's YOUR veritas. When I drink, I suddenly find out who the fuck YOU really are!"

"Yeah, you know what, that's the Veritas in Vino Veritas."

I switched off the tape and started a new one. This one was called "She's Your Je Ne Sais Quois".

As time poured down the funnel of my mortal existence my mind slowly evaporated with that thought. My imagination became as vapor, thinning itself to the very world that surrounded me. I became my imagination, and it sat in my stead.

"So now you're a fucking noun," she said. "Imagination. The noun."

"Is this the warning about showing versus telling?" I asked, smiling.


She nodded.

"You see, in Vino," I explained carefully, choosing each movement of tongue, "for me, it is not Veritas. It is merely the layout of a playground."

"More lies, huh?" she sulked. She was wearing something. A 'hoodie', I believe they call them. It was pink and clearly a comfort garment.

"You look cute in your hoodie," I told her.

"You're grossing me out right now, just shut up," she said.

I knew there was no way I could possibly shut up, given the expanse of ruminations at the time, so I veered off to a different direction. I began to think about space. I contemplated the way it seems that space grows infinitely. I thought about the human journey, from the beginning of speech and storytelling to the gradual objectification of perception. I imagined I was blind for a lifetime, just walking around the Earth without the amenity of sight. Just touching things, smelling things as I walked around the Earth. Hearing. They made a tv show on Netflix based on comics that some of the instructors would read me on my travels. Daredevil. And then I began to lose the sense of taste. That came as a shocker, because I really loved to eat food up to that point. I laughed and figured, "What better time to switch to protein drinks?"

I was reminded of the story of the poor man who would simply smell the rich man's food and be happy eating gruel. That was a real kicker of a story right there. Began to live on $2/day in New York City just ordering pints of rice from any Chinese takeouts I could find as I walked around. Even if I was strolling through Mars, it would still be these $2/day pints of rice from New York City Chinese takeouts. At least I could smell everything around me, and imagine that I was experiencing a feast. At least, for a little longer. But then, even the smells stopped.

"What next, my sense of touch?" I rolled my eyes...and started noticing I couldn't tell whether or not I was rolling my eyes. "SURELY THIS IS A JOKE" I typed in caps all over the 'Internets' (by that time, I was probably just making light impressions on tissues or walls, or whatever else was around out there--I couldn't tell, you see--t that's kind of the point).

I began to feel really paranoid. Because I could not see, hear or taste or smell or touch.

"You ever sit down at a sort of outdoor establishment, get a coffee, you know? And smoke a cigarette?" Enjoying the environment around you, contrived as it is?

I didn't think, and just said out loud, "You mean, like, it's a fairly warm day. The sun is out. It's kind of hitting your dark skin. You have the option of sitting either at an umbrella table or one without an umbrella?"

"Yeah, you know? You just had a fight with your girlfriend and she's going to leave you soon, and you know it. But you're sitting there having a coffee and smoking your cigarette. In the sun."

I smiled. "I've been there," I said. I took a drag off the Dunhill. "Though, I'd like to think that I've kind of advanced a little, you know?"

"What do you mean more advanced?" asked the young man.

"Like, I'm at the point where I'm in a relationship where she knows I can be really impossible sometimes, so everything is cool. It's much better than when you're younger, and everything is a fucking drama, you know? Sure, we fight, but everything's fine, you know? It's not like she's a three year old. What's the big deal?"

"So the fights mean nothing?"

I smiled. "Sure, you know, you hear about all these hotheads out there trying to fight for something. It's like someone told them there was a game that they need to fight over, and now, over time, they're just fighting over this...really pointless shit, to be honest."

"And it doesn't really matter because you can always go back to your girl?" said the young man.

"Yeah."

There was an idea of sunlight and the thought of dragonflies, and a small stream.

"Which girl again?" except this time I realized it wasn't the young man saying it. In fact I could no longer perceive him.

"Young man?" I asked out. "Young man, what do you mean by that?"

Nothing.

Where had this started? Which girl again? Why? "Vino?" I emanated. "That's your name, young man, Vino?

Vino, please!"


.

To be continued.

Moving from Anti-Gravity Vehicle Simulations to Close Chats with You

"I'm flying over for a close chat," said the voice, which sounded a little bit like a mix between Tom Selleck and the KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand) voicebox.

"You're calling me a voicebox? Now? I was a fully interactiv--"

KITT was turned off.

Only Tom Selleck remained. "I don't like that you have switched off your companion," said Tom. "In real life, you can't just switch people off just like that."

"Just don't fly so close to my vehicle," I said, tersely over the radio. "It's enough that I'm contemplating various geometry as I hurtle through space and time, I don't need your moustache to pose issues."

"There, we have finally connected," said Tom. "This might be a first, man. This might be the first time a person actually shifted from one cockpit and began knocking on the next."

"And what are you knocking with, the bones of your knuckles?"

"What?"

"There's no way your skin will even survive these speeds. Let alone your oxygen helmet."

"I guess I'll just camp out here then, on your wing."

I looked at my controls and there weren't any more buttons to make it happen faster. There was only this slider that indicated the gradual increase of speed, and it was set at Maximum.

"Just make sure you do it according to safety regulations of making a fire on the wing. Don't want your lazy arse flinging me to oblivion," I told the guy.

Things began happening faster.