I’ve found myself taking for granted the professional massage techniques of Abigail who was able to work years of pentup stress out of chest muscles yesterday. Thank you, dear friend, for kneading the knots out which has opened my frame for better posture. Where have you been my whole life?
May your Minnie Mouse dream decor become a reality!
“I have, and Guin agrees she has too, created my own set of rules for my life…and stuck to them. But my boyfriend has no rules. He believes that it’s okay for him to be polyamorous but he wants all of his girlfriends to be monogamous only to him, there when he needs them.”
“You wondered why my boyfriend made a big throat-clearing sound when you mentioned the redhead? She used to be his girlfriend. It just didn’t work out. Didn’t stop her from coming to my birthday party. You remember how she sat upfront, trying to get attention the whole time. Well, Kirby was curious about how many people my boyfriend had slept with, pointing to one woman after another, Guin saying ‘Yes’ over and over. As the redhead walked behind Kirby, he said out loud, ‘Sounds to me like Bai’s boyfriend has fucked every girl in this room!’ That ended things completely for the redhead.”
“You know the woman who usually takes the money at the club? She has an emotional attachment, a ‘text relationship,’ with my boyfriend. When she found out he was going back to France, she took it personally, asking why he was leaving her. He leads her on without knowing it, or at least not acknowledging it. He keeps saying that he will have time for her later and doesn’t want to end their friendship before they become lovers.”
“Two months ago, I finally realised that I am truly polyamorous. My friends were shocked that I didn’t already know.”
“Why did I get divorced? I had an affair because I knew but didn’t know I was polyamorous and needed more than my husband’s love. He had an affair just to get back at me. He left me and then he came back. Did it twice. The second time I got pregnant and had a miscarriage. It pretty much ended our marriage.”
“George, my flat mate in a month, broke up with his girlfriend a few minutes ago. She went to get beer to try to make it up to him. She just saw me walk out of the flat and dropped the beer on the sidewalk. She started crying that she had no place to go. She’d have to get a hotel room because she didn’t want to move back in with her parents. She said she would come back for her things after she cleaned up the beer.”
“She was only living with him for three weeks and had already brought her Crock Pot to the flat. Now that’s love!”
“She spent 15 minutes writing that goodbye note. Can you believe it?”
“The girl was crazy. Sure, she worked in the media office on the military base, reporting straight to the highest-ranking female general in the Army. But I’m telling you, she was crazy. We’d been friends for two years and only become lovers a few weeks ago. She starting talking about marriage, kids…wanted to know where I was going all the time. I couldn’t take it. If I want to go next-door and sleep overnight at my friend’s place, that’s my business, you know?”
Today we were scheduled to give you an update on our Kickstarter campaign but our Creative Arts department had secretly accepted a contract to make propaganda posters for a government that goes without saying and said government pushed forward its publishing deadline due to changes in global politics.
We think the real excuse is the art department’s employees spending last night and today breaking down the subliminal messages hidden in the video, I Don’t Need a Reason, by Dizzee Rascal.
However, just because our ISP has documented logs that Dizzee’s video had been viewed and downloaded more often than Blurred Lines over the Labour Day weekend does not mean proof of cause is in the correlation pudding.
For you, the readers, the bottom line is this: an empty bottom line.
Time for this author to take apart an old computer for a future yard sculpture display — he may be bad at reading signs and signals between members of his species but he can always analyse electronic messages and hug his cats to meet his minimal companionship needs.
Salami, or as they say in Gaelic, c’est la vie!
Thanks to Danielle and fun friends at Marketplace Cafe.
Found in the study…circa 1982-83…
Bai jumped across the colony’s esplanade with Shadowgrass.
“Mom told me that you’re one of the main reasons I’m here.”
“She did?”
“Something about your grandfather and a war?”
“She remembered! That’s great. Yes, my grandfather was a soldier a long time, during the period many on Earth call World War II. He was a radio operator.”
“Dad told me about those. Specialists who were responsible for sending signals between groups of people because they didn’t have a love/hate relationship with the ISSA Net yet.”
“Hmm…hahaha. True. But my grandfather is famous back home in the Philippines. He was the man who first contacted General MacArthur, an American soldier in charge of many troops.”
Shadowgrass nodded, mentally scanning the information about World War II as they skipped and hopped. “So how does that account for me?”
“Oh, yeah, it doesn’t make sense, does it? Well, you see, my grandfather was a strict soldier which led to my father’s interest in discipline but for a totally different reason. You’ve probably never heard of ‘Star Trek,’ have you?” She watched his eyes flicker slightly. “Well, I guess you know about it now?”
“Yes, Bai.”
“My father fell in love with the TV show. It was like having his grandfather and all of his grandfather’s friends and uncles live the life of space soldiers. When I was old enough, he made me watch every episode of the original TV series, all the spinoffs such as ‘Next Generation,’ up to ‘Enterprise,’ and, of course, the films as they were released. Inside of you is a little bit of Data with a little bit of Wesley Crusher and Jake Sisko.”
“Mom said you were able to infuse my genetic material with the propensity for personality traits of fictional characters. How did you do it?”
Bai ran her gloved hand across her faceplate, intending to but unable to rub her eyes. “Did Guin tell you I used to date Brannon Braga?”
“Huh-uh.”
“Yes. He was the one who inspired me. I hope I inspired him some, too. His place in Melrose, not far from the film studios, was amazing. I remember one party he had, it was a food bar from front to back. You walked from his kitchen to the backyard, which opened onto an English garden, and then the pool…the pool…” She stopped and looked up at the Martian sky.
“What is it, Bai?”
“He said he put me in one of his scripts. I never asked him which one.”
Shadowgrass flipped a few times in the air, bounced up and down like a kangaroo and landed in a three-legged stance. “Did he write about me?”
“No. You are my creation. I mean, it was me who gave your parents the idea to call you their son.”
Shadowgrass flipped up in the air and landed in a standard bipedal configuration. “That’s what Mom said. But I thought you might know something else.”
Bai heard a note of disappointment in Shadowgrass’ intonation of curiosity.
“Shadowgrass, you are a part of everyone’s life, don’t you know? You are the culmination of our species’ achievements. Do you know how many kids on Earth dream of being you, able to change out body parts on a whim, with superstrength and superspeed?”
“Yeah, but…”
Bai nodded. She knew where Shadowgrass was taking his thoughts. His mother, Guin, had been a competitive boxer from an early age, trained by her father, a former member of the U.S. Marines, with assistance from his military and boxing buddies. Growing up on a farm, she had been kicked and stomped on by calves and cows, raising her pain tolerance above normal levels. She had later become a ballerina before switching to a career in rocket science.
Shadowgrass wished he had his mother’s natural abilities, and didn’t have his enhanced abilities that made him so much more capable than his parents.
At age two, he had completed his space exploration vehicle. When his parents were two, they were barely walking and talking.
That’s why Bai had asked to spend the afternoon with him. He needed encouragement to take Martian society to places he couldn’t believe possible when he’ll look back in a few marsyears.
She couldn’t believe she was with him herself, remembering the nights decades earlier, alone with her thoughts when she was at her lowest, torn between her French lover and being near her children on the North American continent.
She wanted to teach Shadowgrass to embrace his emotional side and use the energy he generated to plant seeds in his thoughts that would sprout into giant oaks in no time.
She had done that for so many other people. She knew she could get Shadowgrass to, too.
To address the concept of freedom, one asks oneself what is the attitude one adopts to question “the concept of freedom.”
Tonight, the one who addresses the question is the one who writes the words, thinking in broader scopes outside of one’s inner circle yet operating within one’s circle of influence.
One is.
Yet, one is not.
There is no “one” that exists outside of space and time, separate from the universe.
One chooses, therefore, to write upon subjects of personal interest to answer the question, “Who am I in this moment that constitutes who I was and who I was not a moment before?”
What are decisions I make or made that move me out of one swimming lane and into another?
What are the masks, the walls, the false identities that divide the bigger concept of me seen by myself in a mirror and seen by those sets of states of energy that clearly are not me within the timeframe of seconds/months/decades?
To be sure, a breath from another person can be inhaled by me — to whom do the molecules “belong”?
Why would someone be nice to me for no other reason than to share a moment when two male whitetail deer should be walking closeby, eating apples under a line of apple trees near the creek the same as any other dusk in the past few weeks?
I am not a complex person. I do not compose symphonies or design planetary socioeconomic systems from scratch.
I am a person who loves the person who has been a constant part of his life for 40 years but who loves a lot of other people, too.
I test social situations, then report what I observe.
I am what some people call devious.
I am helpful, courteous, kind, cheerful, thrifty and friendly but not always obedient, trustworthy, loyal, brave, clean and reverent.
I listen in order to learn.
If people don’t mind me being devious, then I don’t mind using our connections and our friendships for good stories.
There are many new characters to introduce to our main story and I have the better part of this week to get them written down, their lives painted on this canvas for posterity, giving them a place in our Martian colony, our Moon base and our Earth support network.
Some of them coincide with the lives of people I’ve met, some people more like acquaintances I’ve bumped into and other people I’ve gotten to know better than I know myself.
I remind myself in this blog entry that writing about people I know, putting their words and actions into my thoughts so I can imagine what they’ll do in imaginary situations is not the same as my living their lives, although it might be.
I have to see how much I can stretch my imagination and how much I choose to look at the limits I’ve placed on my thoughts and actions, deciding which limits were set arbitrarily at one point in my life and no longer apply.
Is it “art” above all else, including my subcultural expectations?
What am I doing here in this blog?
As a person fully aware of his surroundings, what am I willing to say is background noise and ignore? What of the background noise is worth my attention? What is in my face that is masking something more important? What needs to be in my face that isn’t?
These questions set my thought patterns in motion for this week’s stories.
The answers may or may not involve me, but they will certainly involve the characters who appear in future blog entries.
Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we blast off toward new horizons!
Our resident Frenchman has us over for dinner, where the surprises never end!
treetrunkdings 