pocket full of compound w

this one is about a super hero who breaks out in warts, a side-effect of the mutation. i'll either set it in a time when noone had heard of "super heroes" as a genre or in the present, where the character can't deal with the ugly nubbins on his body. either way, it drives him mad and his health deteriorates. put that in your marvel pipe and d.c. smoking jacket, punks!

a good book

people love to consume media. what if it were the other way around?

a book that devours readers, growing it's internal story. the short story would follow the book from place to place as new readers are brought into it. and at the end of course, the reader would feel like he/she was similarly taken.

the day the celebrity company was born

so, the store opened after a final 60-to-0 countdown. cheers resounded throughout the city streets, and cameras were held aloft as people recorded the scene. people were taking their last photos with their non-iPhones. they were well on their way to coolness. you would think there was a foreign dignitary in town, or at least a popular celebrity. but no, but was for a portable technology offering from a popular company.

it takes technology to mobilize a re-evolution. and a post-acquisition franchise coffee.

sad rhombus

one there was a sad rhombus who upset the squares. he was all hunched over and had spots. the other parallelograms picked on him, especially the elitist squares. even the quadrilaterals got in on the act, then the class of rectangles at large.

this rhombus had to sit at the back of the bus.

the unknown

there is comfort in the unknown, knowing that you do not know what fate lies around the corner, what the coroner will mutter under his breath over your recently deceased corpse. and what your mother will think then they pry open your hard drive. always wear clean underware!

cobol programmer

he was a cobol programmer. now he drives a porsche w/licence plate: y2k 911. he's a-okay, makin' that mo'nay. takin' a to'nay, but he's so lone'lay. 'cause now the job's gone 'way.

the twilight zone

having watched about 30 episodes of rod serling's masterpiece series at the intersection of horror, theatre, and science fiction (which many of us like to call speculative fiction) over the past month or so (thanks dvr technology), i've come to the conclusion that serling was one of the greatest genius writers of his time.

it's high time someone started making television like this again, and i don't mean rehashing the series as was done in the 80s. the original 60s series is the only one that's right.

there needs to be a new serling, a new voice pondering what ifs into the night, somewhere at the intersection of sleep and dream, at the intersection of reality and fantasy, at the intersection of day and night ... the twilight zone.

byt called something else and with modern pacing, but not obnoxious like so much modern tv rubbish!

future memories

deja tu is so much friendlier than deja vu. both refer to a sort of futurized memory that is triggered when the scene is relived.

until i met her, i could've sworn i hadn't ever seen her before this day. but something about her hair floating in the breeze, undisturbed by her body, as they shot along their own trajectories, the sound of the bus' brakes ringing through the streets, the smell of warm pads soon to follow, seemed so familiar to me.

i felt horrible for not addressing her as she passed by, letting her walk out into the oncoming cars without greeting, without warning. i thought she knew the lights were out. i had turned just in time to witness the impact.

as her head rolled past, the pale blue eyes staring up at me, i realized that this has not yet happened... it is but a deja tu waiting for a formalism. i fear the day that it does.

the speed of life

i'm traveling through time at exactly 1 sec/sec.

sometimes i lose track of the meter, and it seems i'm moving faster of slower than that. i haven't yet learned to master steady timeflow. this will take more meditation.

don't clone it alone

Despite humanity's success at cloning the physical structures comprising their own biology, the ability to clone souls has remained ever-elusive.

It seemed that DNA itself was nothing more than a skeletal blueprint with no meaning until it's interpreted. And the human virtual machine could only be ported by sexual reproduction. It turns out, souls themselves are the platform upon which humanity runs -- without the underlying bios and bias, the structured codes of DNA are worthless. So the companies moved over to trying to produce souls. As you can guess, this has been a failure.

But, as with all things inspired by science fiction, the research continues.

astray on the loose

in bondage, hit up with 30cc's of deceitful toxins, my id was sewn in under my skin, a passive transmitter that could not be removed without risking the sensitive organ tissue around my hippocampus.

i had been tagged like a stray dog running rampant in the back alleys of the solar system. they would always know where and with whom I was.

but they would still never know what I thought.

the mines of mars

When luputonium was discovered on Mars, all hell broke loose. Though they had bought and sold all the land on earth, the rapid commodification of another planet was a new experience for the human race.

But we're fast learners. Heluva fast when there's money to be made.

Then, as quickly as it was discovered, the source ran dry. Luputonium is fickle and responds to subtle changes in the environment. As more people moved in, the traces became ever more faint.

Now all that was left were the abandoned drills and husks of long tubing that once provided life support for the men who worked the mines. It wasn't long before the entire colony was inhabited by squatters.

The government of Earth considered storming the planet, but decided it wasn't worth the money.

because she wanted to see the stars

She could not let the opinions of her family keep her from her mission, having every need to soar through the heavens out beyond the atmosphere. And this career finally gave her that chance, even if she is put down by some of her colleagues. It still beats the hell of being trapped planetside where you're from, rather than elevating yourself to where you're going.

These were her final thoughts as the wandering asteroid slammed into her vessel, pulverizing it into a million tiny little pieces.

shifting gravities

The lumpy world ebbs and flows with gravitational flows. From this telescoping precipice with oscillating scopes the smoldering iron of shiting sands melts away our feet. Alone, we are incomplete, a single sand in a desert of dunes.

Our heads are in the stars, dust of which settles heavy in the moors of astronomical speculation. We are but one nation on our shared rock, with much consternation we ply constellations, cut statues of bone. But gravity's what keeps us together!

echo, reverberate, homeless

it seemed everything she typed in came back to haunt her. from the feeling about her sister's wedding, to the fact that she liked that band, every thought, opinion, and review provided a new trajectory for stalkers and strangers and disagreements with family and friends. pondering this information age late one afternoon while she sat upon the cardboard mantle made her sick. it always comes back at you harder than you expect.

between sleep and life

imagine with me that merchants in the future will sell genetic material, pimping personal self-improvements.

the bright sky burned his eyes and into his brain from the cornea to the cortex. this reminded him of his childhood in majorca. he never learned the language, but understood the people. but he never understood himself. there was always another thought that remained ever-elusive in the still of the night. he never knew his mother.

as he sat awake at night, he considered what the lives of merchants from antiquity must have neen like. they were likely full of strife like his own.

he thought about the rush of selling his first. the promise of a repaired liver. what could be better for an alcoholic client. and from this he recalled the first child's genetic material -- a 13-yr-old saved from lukemia. what could be better. not only did he sell life, he set the price of life.

but he was never more scared. he would not live forever, no matter what deals he could swing, no matter what insider trading he could arrange. and he was alone. the high stress of the job of selling life meant he never had the time for a wife. and now he lie awake in the never still night.

coffee, his morning pill, what kept him going. but it never tasted right. nothing ever did. that made him wonder if he was once his own customer. the first rule of selling -- never sell what you'd rather keep yourself. he went from a luxury high-rise apartment downtown to a rural trailer, where he lived out his days under cover of darkness, unable to ever look the sun in the eyes. heh. that sounds like his father. ah, his father must've arranged his genes. realizing this, he took his life.

headhunters, inc.

stephen awoke from a dream. in it, he was hired by a company of talented technologists, who maintained a very academic, yet customer-focused approach to their work ethic. he was very happy for six months. but then, on an extended business trip to slovenia, they left him in the water, his clothes in the locker, his passport gone.

he tried to pass through the outgoing turnstiles, but realized that his companions had reported him to the authorities and were on their way out of the nation, back from their working vacation. now he would be on his own to plead his innocence. but the men of the station wielded automatic weapons, old kolashnikov's from bygone days. regardless, he's have to flee on foot, over the wall, a robe over his dripping body in the january snowdrifts.

he took refuge in the no-man's land that ran 500 feet along the border, first in the trunk of a car that he smashed his hand opening, then behind a makeshift wall of discarded suitcases from previous refugees, who would no longer need their items in the afterlife. but he knew that soon was approaching the hour when he would be discovered -- though he could blend in with his newfound clothing scavenged from one of the suitcases, he didn't speak the language and
the authorities were very much actively hunting him down.

i wonder what ever happened to that guy. yeah, let's go to lunch, comrade.

fetch, boy!

We're all dangling perilously on the edge of a frisbee thrown by {God|!God} across the stellarsphere. Discuss.

soundtrack to specfict

whatever happened to the notion of scifi soundtracks reaching into your soul and showing you what you've been missing about yourself? 2001: A Space Odyssey's makes me sterile just thinking of the entire climax scene. forget the films the narrator is forced to watch in A Clockwork Orange, my droogs, and focus on that scene. there, you have two options. the first is to repent and resume a life of touched, anxiety-drug-induced normalcy. the other is to never sleep. to lie awake under the stars, dreaming of another place that's out there. and not too far away, in terms of the entire multiverse.

especially when you consider how much unoccupied space there is at the subatomic level. if only we could code a message to commune with our organs. but alas, we must rely upon the diagnoses of earthlings for survival.

makes me want to take a hammer to all the ikea furniture in the world.

zappa's peaches en regalia opens the film, a dark sky populated with spinning stars as we see a first-person view of space travelers in their vessel headed off to some distant place. and it doesn't move slow, despite what 2001 tells you. you know you're moving in space because of your inability to stop.

maybe someone else should pilot the craft for awhile. and let erwin do the math.

math rock. lots of math rock. to rococo rot, couch, and tortoise round numebers to their core.

the day the earth sat stale

after 10,000 years of supposed civilization, the selfish bipedals that roamed the earth like a metastacized tumor had funally met their match. there was nothing left to do. all the science had been done. art had been rendered meaningless in light of this fact, and civic responsibilities mere tourism. and people were all out of cameras. one hadn't been bought or sold in hundreds of years. there was simply nothing left to see, no new way of filtering light, no means to an end all right. the lights never went out, the night was passed out in a dark alley.

think of all the starry nights that we missed. think of the girls we could've kissed. philip glass would be proud of us. ira glass, not so much.

there is no 13th floor in space

the line had to be taut. the whole time. if one end cut loose, the other would flap in the distant space, awaiting a reconnection that would never come. these connections are so like humans. so fragile. the need to be taught. to love.

the craft had made a narrow escape from the atmosphere, the rusty aft thrusters trustworthy on this day. and she was free. free from the friction that ran through the fiction of earth. no longer. she would pursue a life among the stars.

the day would come when she would, like all things, pass into the night sky, a glittery reminder of what once was. like the stars in the sky, how many years already dead unknown, the distances between friends measured astronomically.