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.