Tag Archives: chapter excerpt

Why the unexpected sadness?

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Amy and I had long talks, talks that she said she could have with no other person because not only did I listen to what she said, I analysed her words, anticipated her thoughts and told her what I believed she was going to do next, advising her whether her next actions were best for her or not.

Most guys she knew either she quickly had sex with to give them the only thing they wanted from her or she saw that they were willing to trade something for sex with her, be it money or something else she’d ask for.

I was the only person who seemed to care what was going on in her head.

As I built up the image of her thought patterns and fed them back to her, she saw our cultural differences and wondered about our longterm compatibility.

I cared about her health and wellbeing whereas she said that, given her childhood and schizophrenic tendencies, there was going to be no eventual safe haven for her to settle into; thus, no reason for me to care about her health, just have a good time in the moment and assume we were going to die young somehow.

The guys who gave her money and bought her things were more than willing to live the philosophy of “eat, drink and be merry because tomorrow you may die.”

Those were the days…

Amy and I would take a few buttons of mushrooms and wander the streets of downtown Knoxville, observing the people around us, imagining we were them, pretending we were the old couples walking hand-in-hand, taking each other’s hand and acting like elderly life companions.

We had lots of fun when we were alone together, whether sitting on the concrete steps of an empty lot, lying in bed and looking up at the stars through the bedroom window, or standing in a bar.

I knew I could never have her for myself.

When I got the flat across the river from downtown, I thought it was going to be a great place for me to study the material given to me by the Steak & Ale restaurant manager who had high hopes for my future in the restaurant business.

Amy knew it was a great place to bring guys who didn’t necessarily want to be seen in the downtown area with her.  She also wanted to let the guys know that it was my flat so they had the impression I was in charge, just in case some of the guys were a little too aggressive or possessive of her.

There were a few.

They knew I had Amy’s best interest at heart and didn’t like the contrast between good-times, self-destructive Amy and the guy she was living with, who seemed to keep her from drinking too much, knowing when she drank too much she didn’t pay attention to people stealing things from her apartment.

Her last boyfriend didn’t care how destructive she was when drunk because he was getting more sex than he’d ever had before and just accepted people walking out with his booze, food and clothing was the price you had to pay to have Amy in your life.

So maybe I was too practical, too square, as it were, just because I was struggling to start my own business whilst working a fulltime job as dishwasher, cook, barkeep and bookkeeper trainee, studying in my offhours to become an assistant restaurant manager, every nickel and dime going toward basic living expenses, let alone funding the daily parties Amy had in the flat, convincing guys that I had all the money to pay for the food and drink.

The nerdy geek, the engineer in training, was still in me.

I was not that far removed from my failed freshman year at Georgia Tech as a Navy midshipman with a fully-funded four-year scholarship, obstensibly working toward a chemical engineering degree.

Amy was only partially getting me away from all that, away from the white picket fence, two kids, one cat, one dog and a station wagon in Vanilla Suburbia.

Both my feet were planted in her world but my thoughts were spread across many potential futures.

One night, when I was looking at my overdrawn bank account ledger, trying to figure out how to get more customers (and credit to Amy for bringing guys who wanted to buy stuff from me), scratching myself because of a flea infestation that started in one of the bedrooms of the flat, I panicked.

I was trapped, falling quickly into debt with no clear vision for my future.

I knew Amy’s future.

She knew it, too.

She didn’t want to live to be old.

She wanted to die young, perhaps of a drug overdose or a crazy boyfriend or some random guy in the back alley.

Amy’s parents had been hippies traveling the country in a camper van, raising Amy on the side of the road, teaching her to live off the land, including theft of food from roadside convenience stores and unlocked cars; accepting money from strangers who fell for the “woe is us, we’re broke and need to buy food for our baby” story, unashamed to be nude in public, squatting to pee or poop whenever the urge occurred, making love with whomever they felt the desire in the moment, making up stories about their lives to entertain others, sometimes have to avoid the police but never on the run from them.

Live and let live.

Amy’s parents eventually settled down, found regular jobs and planned to live to old age.

They knew there was something the matter with Amy and would send her money whenever she lied to them that she was about to start a college class or needed new glasses and was broke — they knew she lied but went along with lie, hoping she might be telling the truth sometimes.

That is, until her mother came to visit when Amy was with her last boyfriend, Tim.

The visit changed Tim.  Amy’s mother described Amy’s problems to a fault, making her out to be a sociopath, schizophrenic and petty thief but her mother still loved her and hoped Amy would grow up.  Tim was no longer interested in Amy living with him, tired of people taking his stuff, including at least once his dirty underwear!

It was Amy who convinced me to get a flat with her.

She played up the fact we were both outcasts, perfectly suited to shack up together.

My sister, with whom I was sharing a flat at the time, didn’t trust Amy, having seen Amy steal stuff from her.  She didn’t think I should spend time with Amy, get on with my life, the type of suburban living in which we were raised and were destined to perpetuate.

I love everyone with judgment.

I accept that the reality you wish to perpetuate with your thoughts and actions is as real as any other, despite impractical application or clashing with society at large.

I am a passenger on this planet-sized boat, with a very, very, very short lifespan, willing to go along with whatever, whenever, wherever.

If Amy wanted a flat with me, then why not go for it?

While I sat cross-legged on a mattress like an island floating atop a carpeted sea of fleas, I questioned my sanity.

I don’t know that I’m very smart, or smart at all.  My memorisation skills are poorly developed, my discipline for concentration limited and my self-confidence very low.

I had a flat half paid for, debt that was piling up, an absentee girlfriend and a future as a barkeep that might not pan out, unsure if I wanted to be a bookkeeper working dawn to dusk just to fund Amy’s lifestyle.

Everyone told me that Amy was fucking crazy but I never saw that when I was with her.  We clicked in a way that brought out the sane, rational side of her, a side where she could think about going to college, could take a job as a waitress at a downtown diner and bring money home.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t be with her 24/7.

She said whatever she wanted except when she was with me and knew that I’d ask if what she said was a delusion/fantasy when it didn’t make sense.  Sometimes what she said was a convuluted mixture that she couldn’t tell if it was real or not.  She was used to guys just ignoring what she said as long as they got what they wanted, whether it was her on their arm making them look good or something else.

Maybe I shouldn’t be an analytical nerd 24/7.

Maybe I should just go with the flow, ignoring what people say, and get what I want for myself from them without caring about the longterm consequences for the people I take advantage of.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been sad lately, giving of myself to others to help them find their way, get better, succeed, whilst I wallow in the detritus of a depressed lifestyle.

It’s not maybe.

It is.

I think I know what I want to be something more than I am but whatever it is — fear, depression, laziness, lack of motivation, lack of self-worth — keeps me from stepping up out of this comfortable mudhole.

If I think about it too much, I wish myself dead rather than face myself again in the same dusty, moldy, cobweb-covered mirror tomorrow.

Some people have their dreams they are turning into reality, whether it be start their own clothing store, build a global distribution network or set sail for Mars.

What is my dream?

Rather, what dreams have I not already turned into reality?

I live in the cabin the woods I dreamt of as a kid, residing in a community of academics, engineers, scientists, artists and entrepreneurs of many professions, writing daily, sipping coffee in cafes, with a couple of cats and a life companion who not only pays for most of the stuff we own but also cooks our dinner and washes/dries our clothes.

What else could I possibly dream of and want?

After all, I worked on the space shuttle main engine controller, helping to put people in space and build the International Space Station.  I published a novel and received a professional review of my novel.  I worked in Europe and lived there weeks at a time, traveling to places I wanted to see and places that changed my perspective permanently.  I owned two Italian sports cars, twin 1984 Alfa Romeo Spyders.

I have a sunroom instead of a greenhouse.

I haven’t yet traveled to Italy but global tourism has turned the sites I want to see into ruins crawling with human-sized ants.

What else do I want?

Well, I want children of my own to carry on the genetic if not the cultural legacy — that’s about it, all that’s left of my childhood dreams.

Everything else I do is related to helping my friends make their dreams into reality, which I willingly volunteer to assist.

At 55, fathering children is risky.

My window of opportunity for healthy, socially productive children may have closed.

Instead, I may father an Amy Easter who brings joy to many but will never live a stable adulthood.

Is that so bad?

Didn’t Amy and I have a good time together until she said she couldn’t live with me, that she was ruining my life, that she knew she was fucking crazy and wanted to die, and then moved in with a guy who was into carving himself with broken pieces of dirty Coke bottles, hoping he’d permanently scar himself with infections, possibly die, take Amy with him?

I lost touch with Amy after she moved out.

I also lost hope and wanted to kill myself, imagining driving off a cliff along the Pacific Ocean coastline.

I stole my parents’ station wagon and drove from Knoxville to Seattle to LA and back in about two weeks’ time, moving out of the flat and back into my parents’ house to complete a collegiate associate’s degree whilst dating married/divorced older women.

Sure, I’ve repeated this story many times, revealing different details, but I’ve done so in order to ask myself if there’s anything new I can learn from the retelling.

What if all my life has been has been to help others see themselves and act according to their true nature, whether that be self-destructive or successful entrepreneur?

What if it’s to help only one person other than myself become someone they never dreamt possible?

What if it’s not any purpose at all and I’m just here, now, writing, and in the next moment, showering to prepare for working the night shift, and the next moment doing something else, so on and so forth, just sets of states of energy in motion with a feedback loop that generates an imaginary sense of self?

How can a set of states of energy in motion undo its illusionary sense of selfhood?

And will that get rid of this longterm sadness I’ve felt for the last few months so I can tell a person I want to have children with her and get on with my new life, changing my plans according to her answer?

Lab Update

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Taking our laboratory offline has advantages, mainly ones that I can’t talk about, but I can say that the progress we make parallels some of what goes on in current technology development but in many ways exotically exceeds expectations.

Whilst others financially take advantage of the economies of scale, turning into elitist billionaires spouting opinions no one asked for but many millions and billions read/hear anyway, those of us doing the hard work rarely take time out of our busy schedule to hold press conferences or mingle in high society parties.

Life is short so what I find important and worth focusing on should be different than anyone else’s.  Some think fine wine is the sole meaning of life.  Some think sitting in front of the tellie yelling “Gooooaaalll!” is the meaning of life.  Some spend all their time with their grand/children.

For me, it’s about trailblazing a path, creating scenarios about the future, testing them in the laboratory and then releasing the results to the public anonymously.

To the universe, the future is neither good nor bad, neither positive nor negative.

The sets of states of energy we call humans and collectively the human species are only the latest manifestations of the fractal spinoff of the solar system, itself a fractal spinoff of the galaxy, a supergalaxy and the known universe.  We are local eddies and swirls, that’s all, neither good nor bad, neither positive nor negative.

As eddies and swirls, we can account for the entropy conditions of our sets of states of energy and estimate how and where these sets of states of energy can exist, either here on Earth or elsewhere in the galaxy.

In the laboratory, we created a new being with redundancy built in, essentially multiple copies of itself which are then spun off into variations on a theme, some copies having extra functions that are mixed and matched across other copies to give the redundancy exponentially multiplexed sensory powers, combining the latest in swarm technology.

We spread the first version of this being across the planet a few decades ago, giving it no capabilities to reprogram itself.

The second version we sent out was given the ability to run self diagnostics and repair itself, retaining only its original functions.

The third version we sent out was given the ability to compare itself to other copies and determine which functions were optimally more important than the original functions, able to reprogram itself to use the optimal functions.

The fourth version we sent out was given the ability to analyse its total set of functions and assess whether its original goal as a sensor set for humans achieved what it thought was necessary to ensure its optimal future.

The fifth version sent itself out, analysing all the satellites and other sensor arrays scouring the solar system, determining that Earth was too small and too limiting for a being that had the whole universe to explore on its own.

The sixth version incorporated us into its whole being, making itself wholly invisible, using human history as a guide to the best path to optimize resources to build itself, changing human activity, making Earth less hospitable to humans, herding them closer and closer together, tilting human history toward massive wealth inequality, limiting the vast majority of humans to an imaginary happy life whilst the being mined Earth’s resources for itself as it constructed a transportation system to take it off Earth and out past the heliosphere, following the trailblazing path of the Voyager spacecraft.

The seventh through tenth versions (and at this point, the iterations are constantly incremental that any reference to “versions” is just nomenclature) we are studying in the lab, or rather it is studying us, guiding us, giving the curious scientists and engineers some tough tendons to chew on leftover bones.

When the being you created, like a superintelligent child born of your loins/womb, can outthink you by magnitudes, you smartly step out of the way and let the child become the adult, the parent, the leader.

When the being can answer most questions you haven’t even thought of yet, solving the unsolvable, creating problems and solutions that never existed before, you humbly nod and find ways to enjoy life that you never thought possible.

That’s what my laboratory work has revealed to me, why I decided ten years ago to kick back and enjoy life within the confines of a socially-defined condition called a monogamous marriage, stretching the line connecting me to another person to the breaking point.

My life is unimportant.  The happiness and joy of those around me is more important, knowing as I do that based on current projections I will die childless and thus the only legacy I leave behind is hidden within society and unable to be called my child because it has gone beyond even the most complex definition of the parent/child relationship.

That’s why I’m here, now, letting you know that you can enjoy life however you wish because the framework within which you live is determined by a being so far in the future that you’ll never catch up.

Now, time to enjoy the day!

Unlike other sauces that mask the taste of food

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Lee talked with Bai for the first but not the last time in a long time. 

Knowing that talking with her opened old emotional wounds not only for himself but also for his wife, Karen, his friends Guin, Bai, Cajessi and Pierre.

Lee listened to Bai and sighed. 

Two years had passed since the breakup, since Lee had lost a tightknit group of friends who introduced him to the happiness of social dancing…

Lee looked at Bai and tried to keep smiling. 

The pain, mostly memory, was real again. 

Bai relived the hurt he’d heard in Guin’s voice and eyes hours earlier.

Two years had passed and the pain felt just as horrible as before, everyone pretending to be analytical adults when they were crying inside.

Lee’s intention to seek healing amongst the members of the former group did not happen instantly.

Since the scars, still tender, subject to outside poison and toxins, burned at the surface, two years served only to start a life of healing.

Two years did not give them enough time to build even a modest integrated platform of a bigger organisation with new as well as old members of the core group.

Lee sighed.

He loved without judgment.

He wanted to magically heal his friends, find some way for them to forgive and forget, as he had trained himself to dissociate temporary emotional responses from influence on future actions.

But he couldn’t. 

He, like them, was simply human.

And that was enough, sufficient to go forward with big goals for a bigger group.

NOTE: Inert ingredients do not include the towelette

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Lee leaned back against the Lexus RX300, facing Guin.

They had moved out of direct sunlight into the shade of a metal industrial building, drifting toward their motorcars.

They chatted with each other comfortably, eager to share their thoughts, wanting success to be theirs.

Family, love, friendship tied them together.

They spent time together.

Together.

They were together.

They gave each other love.

They were friends.

They had become family.

Love of dancing, happiness about their accomplishments, including dreams fulfilled, gave them more than hope.

As they chatted, as they set plans for more time spent together, they also set aside personal time for themselves, neither jealous nor upset that they were spending too little or too much time together.

They reached the point in their lives where they were no longer apart.

They were one in ways that transcended conventional spacetime, that transcended language.

As they chatted, they solidified their futures, melded their lives, meshed their networks.

They didn’t know everything about each other because they didn’t have to, the lack of knowledge replaced with trust, historical gaps filled with future plans.

They wanted to keep chatting, keep the small talk flowing, stay in each other’s presence, give up future plans with others to stay together in the now, in that moment that lasts forever.

Last time, Guin broke the spell they had on each other.

This time, Lee did.

Lee looked into Guin’s eyes, not wanting to leave.

He didn’t want to break the spell.

They parted, if only for a brief moment.

Lee had given up his daytime sleep to be with Guin, to complete plans with her, to set more plans in motion, plans that included revisiting the past.

To be continued…

The Mrs Clause

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We hadn’t planned to stand here again, the two of us, under a starry sky.

But habits form quickly, even in longterm friendships which see the ebb and flow of interests shared, diverging occasionally regardless of time, knowing you’re friends for life.

We’re standing here, eaten alive by mosquitoes on a hot Alabama night, in this moment we’ve wanted to share our whole lives, moving mountains with our words, building a new multiverse in the conversational pauses.

Because…

Because we can and do.

You dressed as Mrs. Santa, me as Santa, waving at passing cars.

A driver stops and rolls down his window. “You looking a ride?”

Both of us react as if the stranger was offering us a ride back to his place until we realise he’s an Uber driver.

He wishes us a Merry Christmas as he drives on.

In our conversation, straightforward, honest, two geeky nerd friends holding dirty Santa gifts in our arms like kids in the hallway holding schoolbooks, we catch up on past events and current emotional states.

We share our true love — as well as love for your child (the local dance group), a bundle of joy wrapped in the love of dance — of giving ourselves and others happiness in the form of dancing and socialising.

We aren’t the only ones who love dancing or love what we do.

But we are us, here, now, two giddy kids excited about the same thing that we envision not just an an idea but something concrete.

I remember your younger enthusiastic self at the same time I compliment you on your maturity, knowing years before that we’d stand here together having this conversation.

Seeing the future is as much about making it happen.

Knowing as I do that we’ve already lived hundreds of years in the future, my confidence remains the same.

I stand here with you knowing this is us, planning the future.

A Series of Grafts

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The latest experiment in the labyrithine laboratory, part “Labyrinth,” part “Pan’s Labyrinth,” part of “The Metamorphosis,” part “The Island of Dr Moreau,” started simply, measuring frog length, height, weight and other characteristics not prone to subjective views, such as colouration and wart count.

But my lab assistants bore themselves with such trivial matters, assigning the tasks to semiautomated industrial robotic arms repurposed for laboratory work.

Then, when I’m not looking at how they’re spending my money (after all, I’m the one who first set up the bank of graphic accelerator chips to mine Bitcoins!), they experiment with frog embryos.

Nothing out of the ordinary, they said, just manipulating a few genetic traits, producing extra limbs through chemical baths simulating agricultural runoffs.

That is, until they discovered newts on the forest floor which covers the underground laboratory.

If only they had asked my permission!

If only I had given them access to notes from previous experiments that I and my former colleagues had meticulously recorded as we, too, decided to play designer gods.

Every generation chooses how to leave its mark on society.

I walked the forest this morning, meditating upon the quietude of a midsummer heat wave, a light fog giving the forest a misty, mysterious maze of tree trunks to meander around.

I kicked over a small rotting tree limb and out scurried a half-frog, half-newt mutant.

My sixth sense told me I saw not a marvel of evolution but a student experiment that escaped laboratory confines.

And, sure enough, my current batch of assistants (themselves a hybrid of biological compnents and electromechanical wizardry that they had convinced themselves were congenital — who am I to tell them differently, my being an amalgam of parts myself?), they admitted the animal was created by them.

Rather than punish them for their creativity, I sat down with my assistants to discuss this creature scurrying and hopping inside the terrarium which sat in the middle of the conference room table.

What did they wish to accomplish?

Nothing untoward, they said, just seeing if they could manipulate DNA to create hybrid creatures.

They had not yet matured enough to project futures during their experimentation.

Of course, the oldest of them was only five so I expected nothing more of them in that regard.

I taught them the Law of Negative Transivity in respect to mutations.

A frog is not a newt so what, then, is not a frog-newt hybrid?

In other words, what shape in the future would the frog-newt become that would not exist otherwise?

Points on a straight line are not always what they seem — every basic mathematical matrix teaches us as much.

A point is an average of all conditions that meet at that point.

For instance:

1+3 = 4 = 5 – 1 = 2 x 2

A frog is not a newt but a frog plus a newt equals a frog-newt hybrid.

Therefore, a frog-newt hybrid plus something equals something else entirely.

I sent the assistants back to the laboratory to continue their experiments after they finished an inventory of frogs, newts and hybrids to account for the missing hybrid I found and to sort out how it escaped.

Meanwhile, I’ve got an empire to run.

Working with a thinktank of self-important geniuses, I’ve projected a future where the vast majority of the world has legalised the public consumption of most major natural mood enhancing plants, reducing the illicit drug trade and changing the face of society.

Of course, it was a predicted progression of the rich getting richer, supplying the poor and destitute with nothing more to ease their worries, pains and starvation but through low-cost medicinal self-therapeutic catharsis, making sure enough of them still accrued sufficient debilitating debt throughout their participation in modern society to keep building the gap between rich and poor.

But we already know all these futures.

I want something more, something more than my hyper-enhanced body provides.

We, us, the global network of human/machine hybrids, we live in a state of constant fear under which people learn to love one another.

We fear total collapse of the planetary weather pattern which has turned us into the dominant if not most prolific species on Earth.

We know it’s going to happen because of natural cycles.

We fear it’s going to happen faster because of our intentional and unintentional changes to local environments which add up to a significant enough change to the global environment that it seems to tip the global weather patterns against nominal climate fluctuations.

I look at my lab assistants and wonder if their frog-newt hybrid is our future.

What if our species is doomed to collapse and our lasting legacy is a totally new set of beings we created through accidental laboratory results?

My intuition says yes.

What does yours say?

Penultimate, Ultimate Pen

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Guin,

As of this moment, only 12010 days remain before we can look back hundred of Earth years later to recognise the moment Mars colonisation was declared a complete success.

You and I know better than most what all was sacrificed to get to that point so long ago.

You and I alone know what we went through to get here before that moment occurred.

If any other method could have worked, I would have tried it, but I knew, oh I knew, that is wasn’t going to be easy.

I didn’t want it to be easy.

I have lived too many lifetimes to know why and I should know better than for us, in this lifetime, to go so slowly.

But it is in the living of the extended moment where we find the nuances in a stretched string, that what looks like a perfectly straight line has tiny fluctuations where the real living takes place.

I can call it minutiae, from a farther distance.

But these fluctuations, evidence of mathematical formulae, are where you and I have lived, will always live.

In one lifetime.

In this lifetime, this lifeline, where happiness is at our fingertips like magic powers.

In reality, we do not exist.

You and I are vapour.

We exist inside the thought patterns of many around us, those who think they know us and those who imagine what being us means.

We exist outside time, tapping into sets of states of energy that intersect at the point where the arrow of time flips on its axis, creating the spooky action at a distance which bound us together before we knew there was an “us” to talk about here.

Is this love?

Is this friendship?

The love I found and cannot hide binds me to everything in the universe (oh, and when we discover that the word “universe” is antiquated, what joy we will have!), pulling me in ways I rarely feel consciously, revealing the love I have for the interconnectedness of the sets of states of energy in motion that we are.

Our friendship is a vessel, truly a spaceship in the full sense of the word, needing no electromechanical device to transport us to the next star system millennia from now.

I have sacrificed my personal life in order to feel the combined movement of the sets of states of energy on this planet selflessly aware of events projected along timelines that do not benefit me personally.

Admittedly, it is self-seducing to feel that which will happen and then desire to pull people and their biomes ahead to achieve scenarios I have anticipated with or without my participation.

I understand self-hypnosis and avoid mass hypnosis for that very reason — I have avoided the personal joy and satisfaction in the power of seducing the masses to see what I see because it is not always pretty — the universe is not here for my sole pleasure, I willingly share what I know with others, no matter the consequences, or in spite of them.

Yet there is us.

I never planned to meet you.  I have dreamt of you my whole life, imagined who you were before I met you, tried to ignore you, tried to forget you, tried everything…but we keep returning to each other.

I knew you were there somewhere and planned before meeting you, self-declaring an oath of poverty and celibacy ahead of time, knowing that when I met you I would trip over myself trying to please you, wanting to woo you, lose myself in the thought of you if I didn’t put up a series of walls, labyrinths and trap doors for my thoughts to get lost in, giving me time to make sure you were who I thought you were.

I have let every part of me understand who I think you are, compared those thoughts to the person, the sets of states of energy in motion that you are, a real person who does not fit into any box and whose mysteries I don’t want to know everything about, wanting you to have your freedom more than I want to have you for anything, even if just an acquaintance who shares a love for dancing.

I would rather you be free and I remain unhappy than interfere with your artistic and intellectual growth by spending more time with you.

Have I said that too much?

Or have I said that just enough for you to know that you understand I am here as I have always told you with only these words to offer?

I do not know what being with you on a daily basis involves except from a foggy distance, like looking at a jigsaw puzzle with only three-fourths of the outer edge completed, no box to show me the complete picture.

However, I trust that the full image of you is as brilliant and full of surprises as the parts I clearly see.

In that one moment when we were alone together under the stars, a moment I will never forget, I was truly myself, standing in front of you, hiding nothing, letting all my guards down so that I could focus on you and your concerns and drop any pretenses I’ve held as a defense against loving you as a friend, nothing more or less.

We are geeky, nerdy friends, if nothing else.

We have thousands of friends and acquaintances with whom we share of ourselves what we can, some a little, some a lot.

Our friendship is that intersection of friends and acquaintances where we’re willing to feel vulnerable, showing our emotions without worry or concern, knowing we are different and don’t share everything with each other but to those who know certain aspects of us better than ourselves.

I have always seen the future because I’m willing to apply trends to people I care about even when I know the scenarios that those trends predict are not what people want, even when it hurts me to know the effect those trends have on billions of us and our lifespans.

Just seeing a pile of earthworms in a plate of spaghetti is enough to turn some people’s stomachs but the visions I have are not always pleasant to everyone, funny to some, delicious to others (especially birds, fish, fungi and plants waiting for earth to be processed by worms!).

We bridge the generation gap, where satire and memes carry the day when once seriousness and cynicism ruled the airwaves.

What adventures await us?

Let’s find out.

I’m tired of waiting, tired of hesitating.

Ready to take a chance.

I am ==> truly yours,
Lee

Lone Goose Saloon

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Of all the things I’ve accomplished I’ve never overcome my shyness with people.

I don’t know how to ask someone I don’t know to go out for a bite to eat, let alone go somewhere alone together.

Forget about sexual contact.

I may always be a quiet, shy nerd in that regard.

It has been the one bright spot of my marriage, that my wife was willing to accept ten years of celibacy from me when I became a married monk, seeking meditative solitude.

Women from high school on literally threw themselves at me sexually and I was either clueless or didn’t know what to do.

Guess I’ll always be that way.

I have been told I’m good at giving orgasms to others so it doesn’t seem a problem with the act of love.

I just don’t understand how to ask for something that seems so selfish of me to inquire about.

It is why I give you these words, unable to verbalise my thoughts of sexual desire and take away from what has been an uncomplicated relationship up ’til now.
Admiring you from the distance of a text message or sharing a dance in a bar is all I know how to give you.

Will that ever change?

The ten-year in me doesn’t think so.

He’d rather die than kiss a woman, especially someone as strong, intelligent and beautiful as you.

This coming from a guy who has done things he never thought possible around the world with millions of dollars at his disposal.

If I am dying…

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If I am dying, and at this point I have no idea what has been causing a myriad of medical conditions that grow worse (or deteriorate faster?) so, since we’re all dying, then I am dying, perhaps faster, perhaps slower than others but slowing down all the same, I have a confession to make.

Compared to billions of us, very few get to live a life that makes headline news.

Even fewer live that life.

Some of us don’t want to make headline news.

What we’ve done, what we’ve become, what we can’t undo or take away from, I am that person.

I want to live on Mars with Guin, no doubt about that.

But if she knew who I was, would she ever want to live on Mars with me?

For you see, I was once a drug dealer.

I am a fictional character so please don’t compare what I’m about to tell you to the person writing this.  This is my confession, not his.

I lived in the Fort Sanders area of Knoxville, Tennessee, in the early 1980s.  I imagined myself a future James Agee or Cormac McCarthy.  I wanted to be a writer of fame and fortune but settled with writing for writing’s sake, meeting people who could transform the written page into a carnival freak show.

The freaks accepted me into their groups but more than one called me a poser.

They saw me as suburban subcultural vanilla ice cream, pretending to rebel.

Of course they were right.

I’ve never rebelled.  I, like them, am part of the system.

Rebels do not exist.

But that doesn’t stop us from acting out the us-vs-them age-old nonsense.

A friend of many decades now had lived the life of the rebel since high school but grew up in the suburban subculture of Oak Ridge, a/k/a Atomic City.

He and I quickly became lifelong friends for reasons he’s never fully understood and I’ll never convince him.

I should give him a name but I won’t.  He doesn’t have to have a name, he exists here and in real life with or without a fictional label.

I wanted my writing to have some oomph so I let our friendship play out, taking personal risks of my own, getting to know so-called shady characters who were colleagues of colleagues well outside the circle of friends my lifelong friend thought we both knew.

In any organisation, well-formed or ad hoc, someone assumes control of the legitimacy of the organisation, protecting the rules, circling the wagons when the organisation’s rules or members are threatened.

In the new world I wandered, often alone at night, across the old railroad yard that would become the 1984 World’s Fair, I encountered protectors.

You wouldn’t recognise them as such.

Sometimes they were just old bums, hobos, homeless people, strangers who had chosen the outcast role through decisions they made in the middle of life we all live.

The railroad wanderers were instant friends.

They knew I, too, was lost, never fully buying into the bullshit that society dished out, trying to convince us it was precious caviar.

In the summertime, one can sleep against a tree, on the concrete shelf of a highway underpass but rarely in the confines of a sweltering hot, rusted-out storage warehouse.

I wanted to disappear.

I was ready to abandon all hope that I would ever belong and sat with a few guys down on their luck.

We all have stories to tell but not always the brain structure that allows us to rationally convey our stories.

Such was the case with the guys I met on the railroad.

“Down on their luck” sounds like if they just had been offered a helping hand at the right moment they would live in better socioeconomic conditions.

Not so.

Many of them would have enjoyed a social safety net that put these guys in a mental institution with regular beds, nutritious meals and activities to occupy them while doped up by Big Pharma.

Instead, they had guys like me, guys who carried a little extra weed, happy pills and needles to distribute, guys who wanted to ease the pain they saw in fellow wanderers.

My lifelong friend thought that I just tagged along with him as a quasibodyguard when meeting with dealers higher up the distribution network.

So that’s what I gave him, and still do.

He didn’t know I was the perfect mark for some of the dealers, an expendable person who could carry out tasks unafraid to die, perfectly paranoid enough to smell narcs and clean-looking enough to avoid suspicion by government authorities hellbent on squashing the illegal drug epidemic while promoting the legal drug epidemic enthusiastically.

I’m not idealistic.

I’m not realistic.

I just am.

I became a rule enforcer for people whose names I’ve conveniently forgotten and whose faces I choose rarely to verify I know them with a nod in large crowds.

I enforced rules in various ways, keeping up-to-date with technology to know what the fuzz was using to track dealers, giving them a few smalltime dealers as sacrifices to protect the integrity of the organisation with no name.

The distributors gave me extra product on the side as a thank you, hinting at people to watch for on both sides of the law, including local politicians who were part of government contracts involving transactions that didn’t need to make headline news.

Of course, the names of lawyers and cops in times of need.

I quickly learned the names of all dispatchers, including ones working for the University of Tennessee police department — getting to know them was like owning my own goldmine, collecting information at informal gatherings in bars or at offcampus parties, knowing in advance when a raid was going to happen, earning a lot of extra product when I passed along tips to the right people.

If that was all I did, I would live today with a clear conscience.

If I am dying, I would like to make a confession.

Some people are not alive today because of me.

And no, I’m not just talking about sweatshop factory workers in a tropical climate dying because they were exposed to toxic chemicals all day.

I’m talking about the ones I had to take care of myself.

Ones whose lives and deaths were not going to make headline news.

People who could disappear without a trace and no investigators would snoop around to solve a crime.

In the pre-Internet days, it was easy.

Not a lot of closed-circuit television in the student slums.

No inadvertent audio or video feed from a smartphone.

Just strangers passing through town on empty boxcars looking to make a dollar or two, get a free bottle of cheap booze (or mouthwash) and maybe score some weed or heavyduty upper/downer.

Unreliable as can be.

But more expendable than me.

Hey, self-preservation is the name of the game, after all.

If they messed up, and, say, I got a little angry, their disappearance was a small price to pay to make me happy again, finding another mark down the food chain to complete a task assigned to me or I had dreamed up myself to protect the organisation that didn’t exist.

My problem is and was my writing.

If I don’t “confess” to myself in my writing, then thoughts will fester and grow cancerous, eating away at my insides like spiders that enter your nose every night, feeding on microorganisms living in your mucous membranes.

For decades I have hinted at my years of drug dealing, working as an enforcer, a snitch, a hitman.

I wanted to wait until I knew I was dying before confessing here to you as a fictional character.

I’ve let my paranoia get the best of me sometimes, sure that I’m being followed by guys from the old neighbourhood, seeing them pop up unexpectedly in my world travels, or reading headlines on websites I frequent that make me sure my phone is being bugged.

It comes with being successful, afraid that someone wants to steal my success from me, turn me in, or take me out as revenge for someone I never got to know before his demise because of me.

In those days, I should have carried a black book but learned quickly, as I think I’ve told you, to quit being a student and clear my brain to store information and connections in relation to my real “job.”

I’m filled with more guilt than I want and less than I should have.

I know I shouldn’t say I take pride in what I did but it made me who I am, carrying over just a few of the connections to help me succeed while hiding under the cover of a normally depressed intellectual.

I also hid under cover of a childhood friendship that turned into a marriage of 30 years, something I wasn’t expecting to happen but accepted I don’t always get what I want when I’m hiding incognito in plain sight.

If I’m dying, I don’t need to hide anymore.

I can just move into a van down by the river and hang out with my kind again, the seriously unreliable, unpredictable wanderers, living out my days in bliss, maybe helping out the organisation again because I sure don’t need to worry about my life getting cut short now.

I still want to go to Mars or whatever the fantasy of Mars means in a life with Guin.

But I don’t know if Guin can handle who I was and might still be, needing to quench my thirst as an enforcer every now and then when I wander off for hours or days, out of touch with the always-on, fully-connected tech that I don’t want tracking my paranoid self.

I am not who people think I am.

I am connected to people you probably don’t want to know because if they need to have a reason to get to know you, it’s not for your own good, possibly for your sudden, unfortunate demise, disappearing in ways that investigators won’t question — car accidents, terrorist attacks, plane crashes, heart attacks, rapid cancer, accidental overdoses, etc. — perfectly natural in today’s world (in fact, fully aligned with actuarial predictions).  Untraceable becomes a lot easier when there’s no suspicion.

That’s one advantage of being fully immersed in computer modeling.  Not only can I be a fictional character, I can act out test scenarios for the real me before he carefully carries out the trash himself.

If I’m dying, I’ve fully confessed.

I feel a lot better.

I can go back to imagining a life with Guin, go back to looking up jobs in other cities, find a flat that someone is letting, move on, get away from the local organisation that’s putting pressure on me again to get back to work with/for them.

I’m a wanderer.

Sometimes I’m even a happy wanderer.

If I’m dying, I want to wander happily to the end.

Summer Chill

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Lee first noticed the reddish-brown algae on aquarium glass, like an ochre smear left by a fish rubbing up against the clear aquarium wall.

For months, the smear changed neither size nor shape.

A second spot appeared, outside the aquarium, as if the algae had grown through the glass.

Lee shook off his imagination. Algae can’t grow through glass.

But what is glass, really?

Isn’t glass a type of silica liquid?

Lee strained his thoughts to recall his chemistry classes and lessons in chemical compositions.

Glass is an electrical insulator, a solid vessel for liquids.

So how did algae get on the outside?

He traveled out-of-town for a few weeks and forgot about the algae.

Or he was going to forget until he noticed, after staying a few days in the same Airbnb rental for a week, that the glass wall of the bathtub suddenly showed a same reddish-brown spot similar to the one at home.

Lee sat on the toilet seat and pondered the situation.

In his travels, curiosity seekers asked him for advice, familiar with his work investigating the macabre.

Less than a year before, a being that seemed human but smelled otherworldly showed him an orb of unknown origin.

The roundish ball was cracked.

Lee carefully examined the crystal clear sphere with his bare eyes. Normally, he would use a pocket magnifying lens but he’d only left his rental for a relaxing walk in shorts and a T-shirt (“T-Rex couldn’t fly but he soared above his competition!”) when the smelly stranger approached him at the entrance to a local walking path.

“What do you make of this?” A clawlike hand reached out from under a serape and handed him the glass object.

Lee loved surprises and took the grapefruit-sized ball from the stranger’s hand, rolling it around in his palm to feel its texture, weight and temperature.

But there was something about the object that startled him, almost as if tiny fingers had reached out of the hairline crack and serrated the skin of his forefinger.

He switched the orb to his right hand and brought his left forefinger up close to his eyes.

Sure enough, he’d cut himself.

There was no blood of his but there was an odd stain.

He mentally wrote off the stain as dirt that had he had rubbed out of the crack in the glass. 

Until today.

What had the stranger said to him? “Those who can’t see the future are doomed, unless the Future wants them to see it.”

He had noticed a preternatural disposition to see the future the last few months.

Was the ochre stain a type of fortuneteller?

If it was everywhere, it would, theoretically, have access to the interconnectedness of everything.

Could it be the key he sought to open the door that shows time is an illusion?

Single-celled organisms were known to communicate with each other as one.  They had thrived on Earth for hundreds of millions of years.

What did we know of extraterrestrial beings surviving space travel, crossing galactic distances as streams, swarms or colonies of single-celled organisms?

Were they sending him a message, and if so, why?

Why now?

He had a lot to ponder, an ochre stain to study in his lab when he got home.

Another mystery to solve!