I’m giving myself seven days away from social media posting/reading, a staycation if you will, to conserve energy and work on a new project. Email and text as needed.
Tag Archives: humour
Morning Sunrise
Car parked in carpark overlooking morning traffic,
Hiking mates yet to arrive,
Brief meditation on the meaning of social connections
Atop our tiny planet
In this vast universe;
How can we find our way
Midst chaos and confusion
When social media redefines the hive mind,
When minds do not exist?
The dead cedar tree does not say,
Neither the crushed rocks
Nor the pigeon gliding across the road,
But they exist.
Traffic sings a song
When we take time to listen.
Dual use
As an inventor, I risk giving/selling my inventions to those who find unintended uses for my creative work.
Take, for instance, my machine for prechewing gum, softening squares into delicious gooey masses, retaining and releasing flavour for immediate enjoyment.
An undisclosed government bought that invention and bombarded rebel insurgents with masses of sticky substances, rendering the rebels and their weapons/transportation useless.
Or my latest invention, the shower that takes a 3D scan of your body and soaps/washes every part of your body precisely.
An Internet startup bought that invention and intends to blend it into their new clothes washer/dryer system whivh promises to revolutionise the home clothes cleaning industry.
Another Roadside Distraction
I don’t want to sit here right now telling you this.
In fact, I want to be me anywhere, anytime, before turning into myself, who I am now and cannot undo.
My uncle died.
A few years ago, when he was able to walk around his house without an oxygen tube dangling from his nose, he led me to the basement, his man cave.
“I know you are not blood kin but you’re the only male we can trust to carry on this secret.”
A few years ago?
No, it was 1992, 25 years ago.
What is time?
He leaned against a chest-high tool organiser, wheezing, catching his breath.
“I served in Berlin at the end of World War Two.”
I nodded, expecting Uncle Vadim to glaze over, lose focus and recite one of the few war stories he’d willingly shared with me, swearing me to secrecy about the atrocities and violence he had witnessed and participated in.
I knew he had served in Italy.
But not Berlin.
This was new.
He pointed to a shelf in a dark corner of the basement.
“See that wooden box? Bring it here.”
Uncle Vadim turned to woodworking as a relief for his mental troubles, carving crude duck decoys for a while, then antique clock replicas and finally, when his hands no longer let him carve intricate patterns, built interlocking curio boxes.
As I approached the shelf, I walked into a spider web.
I shudder now, remembering the touch of the web on my face and neck. It felt alive, like licking a 9-volt battery, tingling my skin with electricity.
My uncle laughed.
I brushed the web off me and grabbed the box.
A magnetic pull locked my fingers around the box.
My uncle laughed louder.
“Put it back on the shelf!”
I set the box back down and my fingers relaxed.
“Come here and sit down. We need to talk.”
My aunt yelled from the top of the stairwell. “Dinner’ll be ready in 15 minutes. You guys start cleaning up.”
“Okay, wife, we’ll be there soon.”
Uncle Vadim patted the seat of a stool.
I sat down and looked up at him.
His face, leathery and sunburned, was purple and bloated. I knew he was struggling to hold back raw WWII emotions.
“We were sent to find him and take him at all costs.”
His eyes almost glowed in the glare of overhead fluorescent bulbs.
“You know who I mean?”
I nodded.
“You understand why we had to find him?”
I shook my head.
“To break up the power. Our job was not going to be easy and we knew it. Many had died just by getting close to him, especially those who were incompatible. We had been tested, told we were compatible, but so had others…” He coughed up a large wad of phlegm and spit on the floor.
“So many had died trying to get close. None had been able to kill him.” He shuddered, lost his grip and fell against me.
His breath was hideous, like fetid swamp water. I helped him stand back up.
“Dinner’s ready!”
“Be there in a jiffy, missus!”
He leaned toward me and whispered. “We found him. We found him, we found him, we found him. By that which is unnatural, we found him. I’ll tell you the rest after dinner.”
I sat with my uncle and aunt, eating quietly, amxious to know this new secret, watching my uncle with new eyes, seeing that he pushed food around his plate but never really ate anything.
Had he always done that?
I normally went to the living room with them and joined their stare at the tellie which blared at full volume a series of unintelligible game shows.
Not that night.
Uncle Vadim motioned me back to the basement.
Have I told you I have the box beside me as I write this horrifying retelling for your eyes only?
Why did I have to follow my uncle’s instructions?
Am I dead or alive?
Uncle Vadim leaned against the workbench, showing me a map he had pulled out of a secret compartment in the leg of the bench.
“We knew where his main bunker was but had information that he had moved to what was supposed to be an unknown chamber. If we found him in the chamber…”
He coughed up more phlegm.
“Sorry, but just by telling you about him, I’m…” He heaved, shuddered and stopped breathing.
He looked at me like a corpse, his eyes unfocused.
“All of us, every…single…one, died. We weren’t compatible!”
He let out a low growling laugh. “But that’s the most merciful thing that could have happened to us after we found him!”
He started breathing again, the purple tone leaving his face, the bloating subsiding.
“There. I have told you. I’ve held that in me for almost 50 years.”
Uncle Vadim looked a decade younger.
He touched my hand. “You have it now. Can you tell?”
Ever since I had walked through the spider web and held the box, the tingling sensation stayed with me.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry but I had to give it to someone before I died.”
I’m looking at the box, wondering why me.
I followed his instructions. He told me that after he was buried I was to act uninterested in his tools, pretty much ignoring his man cave.
Only after my aunt died was I to ensure that someone else enter the basement, remove the tools and woodwork of my uncle, bring them to me.
I asked a childhood friend to empty the man cave.
She gladly complied, happy for an excuse to visit me.
As we unloaded her car, I did my best to act nonchalant, pretending that the stuff was only important because it belonged to my uncle.
She got a kick out of the Italian girly pocket calendar from 1943, full of colourised images of reclining nudes. She looked at the coins, including Belgian, Italian, Swiss, French and German.
We shared a box of pizza and stayed up late reminiscing about our youth.
She left a couple of hours ago.
Uncle Vadim insisted I be alone when I opened the box.
He gave me verbal steps that I memorised and repeated back to him, steps I had to follow exactly or trigger hidden booby traps.
I opened the box after 15 steps.
There it sat, the thing that Uncle Vadim had kept in his house, the thing that ate away at him and has already started eating away at me for 25 years.
For you see, like Uncle Vadim, I have been dead longer than I’ve been alive.
It was a price I paid without being asked.
It’s the price I paid for this moment.
The thing is there, wrapped in faded silk, shriveled beyond recognition.
Uncle Vadim’s military unit had found their target, following their orders to the letter, cutting up the body, dividing the pieces between them and going their separate ways, never to make contact with each other again.
Uncle Vadim was entrusted with the most vital piece, the one section of the body that enthralled millions, killed on sight at close range and held a magnetism of its own.
I died to have this knowledge before I knew what it was.
I waited until just before I started writing you to find this, in the box…
The Fuhrer’s severed hand; rather, the tentacle of a creature so alien it belies description.
For you see, when Hitler died, he returned to his natural shape.
I had to share this with you because I plan to destroy this relic and when I do, I will disappear with it.
Uncle Vadim wanted to destroy it himself but had been warned it would set off a chain reaction much worse than had Hitler lived.
I can’t live with this secret.
Haha, did I just say That?
What I meant was I can’t remain undead with this secret any longer.
Know that you and you alone are the one I loved the most.
I wanted to have children with you, grow old with you but Uncle Vadim took that away from me before we got the chance to meet.
I have been undead for too long.
I love you.
Please forgive me if the world falls apart after I do what should have been done over 70 years ago.
I do it for us.
I’ve found the others.
One of them located the alien spaceship.
We’re going to put the pieces on the ship and set it for a destructive collision course with the Sun.
Disciplined Success
When what I want in the moment, like socialising with friends, is delayed due to unforeseen vocational interruptions, I’ve learned to take a breath, let go of the urgent feeling to be with people I know, and discipline myself to focus on completing short-term tasks to successfully complete long-term goals.
This planet, Earth
On the middle part of the North American continent, with noncontiguous parts involved, a 24-hour period of time set aside to remember dead humans who swore to protect and defend a social group, an organised cultural entity called a government named the United States of America.
On this day, many celebrate family ties.
Some, like me, spend time with family but also spend hours in a work shift collecting blood from donors to save lives of civilians and government military workers as needed.
Our species is built to compete against and cooperate with members of its kind for planetary resources, resorting to organised violent attacks sometimes.
Remembering the sets of states of energy no longer actively participating in our daily lives helps us relearn what they learned but also to live and learn more.
The apparent opposite poles of war and peace are illusions.
We flesh eaters burn a lot of energy, that is all.
How we burn energy in the future is the debate of which I’m most interested today.
The dead and fallen give us the right and permission for such a debate any day, of course.
Let’s start now…
Poetry slammed
In a few words,
Lives shattered shared in prose,
Drunken texts spilled across microphones,
Dragon’s love for unicorns cut by short tails,
Suicides dissected like insect entrails,
Urban decay echoing in dark alleyways.
Claw marks
Last night, stopped at a local pet store to buy food, stopped at another to buy a rescue kitty from Forgotten Felines.
Today, a hike in the north Alabama hills (or mountains as they call them on this part of the planet).
Observe scratches and spots of blood on my arm from playing with Papier, the cat who adopted me over two years ago.
A day for action, less thinking, more hiking and socialising, extending my mental relaxation period through the end of this week, focusing on my art and not on my mesh network of thoughts.
A good weekend, in other words.
Do birds fart?
As I swept debris from the front deck this afternoon, a squirrel dropped 50 feet from a broken tree limb onto the forest floor nearby. Plop! It quickly scurried back up the bark of a large oak tree. Somewhere between here and there, the shared space in which we exist, I mentally prepare my next performance piece.
Last time, the performance was spread across this blog and Facebook/Messenger posts, drawing in people I intended to entertain and those who were drawn in by the mesmerising word patterns of writing, speech and their own imaginations. My closest friends knew I was performing. Those on the periphery drew their own conclusions and I didn’t stop them from doing so. I mentally called it, “An Ode to Fake News,” learning more about myself and my longterm goals in the process.
This time, I draw on the past, remembering my fondness for the Quay Brothers, Eastern European satire, David Lynch, Edward Gorey, Ada Lovelace, Mary Shelley and E.A. Poe, building props for a comic music video, knowing I will not compete with Adult Swim (barely familiar with its comic tropes) but able to create something I want from my own imagination, for my entertainment as always.
My props will include a domestic dance partner, with computing interface of some sort, probably the Arduino stuff I have but perhaps, based on my budget, an Adafruit device.
I also have a Raspberry Pi setup with a 7-inch display that would perfectly fit the “face” of the domestic dance partner.
Of course, I give a nod to my friends who appear as characters in my stories, “Guin” and “Shelmi,” as well as the many dance partners who gladly give up all pretenses and personal space to share two-minute slices of paradise with me on the dance floor. Inevitably, Erin Kennedy’s robotic work influences me in ways I never expect until I look back and go, “Wow!”
I’ve thought about incorporating music from friends, such as my first dance instructors, Jason and Danielle Knight, who are part of a group called the Harlequin Jazz Band.
This blog has run out of image space so I won’t post images here. I may move over to Google+ and post updates there. The final video will appear on Facebook.
I anticipate this will take a couple of weeks to set everything up but it can easily turn into months depending on my energy level, my attention span, and all the other projects I leave lying around unfinished that I may pick up on a whim.
Thanks to everyone, you know, family and friends, the cat, safe drivers on the road, spiders in the bathtub and tea harvesters. Even the graveyard of empty birdfeeders in the backyard puts a smile on my face when I need it most!
And now, time to drive to that place where I put my life on the line to transport blood products from donors and to hospitals, helping to save the lives of unknown others!
UPDATE!
One idea for combining Raspberry Pi 3 and Arduino?: https://blog.adafruit.com/2017/05/26/portable-raspberry-pi-zero-arduino-programmer/
Freedom of thought, freedom of action
In this blog space and elsewhere in social media, I ensure my satire parallels the nonelectronic physical world as much as possible, giving readers the illusion it is all one.
In fact, I am just one person who doesn’t understand what is going on except by modeling the various possibilities, the variety of ways, this set of states of energy can interact with the rest of the universe, turning it all — happiness, sadness, anger, fear — into subtle satirical images.
Now, I am at a resting place in my thoughts.
I am free of the urge to act, feeling no compulsion, no obligation to move in any one direction.
Not numb but no pain, either.
Not perplexed or troubled.
Not even curious what’s next.
Surely, I will find or create a new storyline.
And if I don’t?
Well, being alive and relatively healthy ain’t so bad.
I define me.
I complete me.
Summer is here, my spring fever ebbs, no seasonal affective disorder, the dog days of summer kept at bay by a wave of cool weather.
I am not happy.
I am not sad.
I am not anything except me, pulled back in to my personal space for now.
I am.
I am not Groot! 😉
treetrunkdings 