A Perfectly Lovely Ride

The sky got darker, but not like at sunset. The sun wasn't setting, it was shrinking, smaller and smaller but always still definitely the sun, until all at once there was night, Venus was out, the streetlights were lit, and only a wispy, hollowed out skeleton remained. It hanged there for about a minute, and people set off fireworks because people are obnoxious. Then a new sun grew out of the bones of the old one, and everything was possible again.

Remember the last time the FCC nearly killed net neutrality?

Tumblr had this nice big banner at the top of your dashboard alerting any active user about the problem. Guess what has changed since then? Verizon, one of the companies gunning for the death of net neutrality owns yahoo who in turn own Tumblr. Spread the word, tell everyone you can: battleforthenet.com tag posts you see about net neutrality with popular tags so the news spreads.

Workplace Anxiety

It was five minutes to eight on a Teusday morning, and he was up pacing nerveously around the bedroom, holding his stomach like he was about to vomit or have diarrhea. Typical behavior for him in the morning, at least on a work day. He really seemed to hate his job. I never learned what he did. There was a period of a few months during which he seemed much more relaxed, he slept better, he took care of himself, and during that time he never paced around the bedroom in the morning like that. He must’ve been out of work. Must’ve gone back to it when he went back to work.

He was doing especially bad on this particular morning. He always talked to himself, whenever he was alone, but always under his breath. On this morning he grew very agitated, talking to himself more and more loudly until he was almost yelling. Then he stopped, stopped pacing around and clutching his guts, and stopped talking to himself. He froze a moment, then hurried out of the bedroom. He must’ve gone to the kitchen, but I couldn’t see him. The kitchen was out of my field of view, and I was afraid that, if I turned the camera, he’d notice it. But he must’ve gone into the kitchen because he lived in this dinky little apartment where the kitchen and living room were on one side, and the bedroom and bathroom were on the other. He went through the doorway to the kitchen/living room area, and came back a few moments later with a pair of kitchen shears. He took them to the bathroom sink and stood there for a long while. I couldn’t see what he was doing; I could see him standing there at the sink, but he was in shadows and I couldn’t make out any details. It looked like he was cutting something— which, it turned out, he was.

He laughed to himself, a surprised little chuckle, and then came back into the bedroom. He’d cut off his left index finger and couldn’t have been happier about it. He tossed the scissors and his finger onto the bed, and called into work to tell his manager that he wouldn’t be able to come in, that there had been an accident in the kitchen and that he would be stuck at the emergency room all day. This seemed to go over fine. When he got off the phone he jumped onto the bed like a little kid and stared at the finger. It was moving, inching around his bed like an inchworm.

He cut off his left middle finger. He cut it off like he was snipping a corner off a piece of paper. He didn’t flinch, just, snip. There wasn’t any blood either. In quick succession, he cut off the other fingers of his left hand, snip, snip, snip. Five litle inchworms inched around his bed. He watched them all wriggling around there with a big grin on his face. He seemed satisfied… for a while. Then he took off his socks and snipped off his toes as matter-of-factly as if he were clipping his toenails: snip, snip, snip, snip, snip— snip, snip, snip, snip, snip.

Now he had fifteen little inchworms inching around his bed, and it looked like that would be all. He tried to cut his wrist, but it was too big a job for his kitchen shears. He couldn’t very well cut off the fingers of his right hand, because it was with his right hand that he cut. He pulled down his pants and seemed to contemplate cutting off his penis to make it sixteen little inchworms, but he pulled his pants back up without doing it. After that he seemed content to watch his new friends… for a while. Then he got the—frankly, brilliant, though also horrifying—idea to cut his face, opening his mouth wide and cutting off strips of cheekmeat and lips. These pieces added some variety to his menagerie: instead of inching around like inchworms, they stretched out long and pulled themselves forward, like earthworms.

He found he could use the same technique with any hole. He did his nostrils, making little maggot looking pieces, and his eyelids. Then he did his belly button, which turned out the be the mother lode. New creatures came pouring out of him. He didn’t have to cut them out anymore either, they cut themselves out, or each other. When it was all over, there wasn’t anything left of him, and all the pieces had scurried away to hide under the floorboards, down the drains, in dark corners and other places where no one looks and my camera can’t see.

Smiles and Nods

It’s twelve fifteen and a woman is waiting in a busy coffee shop for a man she doesn’t know named Scot. He was supposed to meet her at the door but when she arrived she found no one, understandable considering the rain. She looked for Scot inside, but since she didn’t know him she was only looking for a man that seemed to be looking for a woman— that is to say a man who has an appointment to meet a woman for a job interview. This will be her third in-person interview for this position, a receptionist at a small software firm, and she was hoping it would be her last.

She’d never met Scot before but she did have his phone number. She tried it but it went straight to voicemail. She tried the woman in human resources also, since she was her contact at the company and since it was her that had arranged the hiring process up till this point, but that also went straight to voicemail. This wasn’t surprising. It’d been this way with everything, not just the interviews. Her applications had disappeared twice and following up on them had shown her right from the start that the people at this company were allergic to phones. She had to take her resume in and physically hand it over to the woman in HR to get anywhere, and then it was a phone interview that she was told was on Tuesday but which was supposed to be on Thursday, and another phone interview that just straight slipped the interviewer’s mind, an on-site interview with a man who had a thousand more important things on his mind, and another at eight o’clock in the evening. That last one took place in the parking lot— the man she was interviewing with only remembered the interview when he saw her in the parking lot as he was leaving for home. They chatted at length about many things beside his car, interminable small talk having nothing to do with her ability to be a receptionist at their company, and if he noticed her teeth chattering from the cold he didn’t mind. Some people wouldn’t have put up with it. People who don’t need a job, for instance.

After fifteen minutes of waiting, her phone rings, a text from Scot asking where she is. There’s a man standing outside, holding an umbrella and looking at his phone. She crosses the coffee shop to let him in.

“You must be Scot”, she says from inside the door she’s holding open for him.

“--— —.—--—— —--— —”, he replies, as if speaking, but instead of words, hissing and buzzing and popping like an arc of electricity rippling through the air. She looks at him uncomprehending.

“…What?”

“--—------, —?”

She smiles and nods like the hard of hearing do and tells the man she’s gotten them a table. The man smiles and follows. “Do you want to order anything before we get started?”, she asks as they pass the line for the register.

“— —”, the man replies, breaking off from her. “--—— —--—— —?—--—----— —.”

“…I’ll be over at that table, over there”, she tells him, pointing to the spot where she’d been waiting. She looks around the room, watches people in conversation, and she listens. There’s a lot of noise in the coffee shop, but she can pick out their words. Then it isn’t her hearing. But she looks at the man in line, watches him order his coffee. From across the room she can hear the buzzing and crackling coming from him, but the cashier rings him up without trouble. Then it isn’t his speach….

After ordering, he waits by the counter, and his order must’ve been simple as it’s handed to him quickly. He joins her at the table, setting down the coffee cup and his phone, which is running an audio recorder.

“--—------—--------——--—--,—----—--— —.”

Again she smiles and nods. She figures he must’ve said something about the recorder. Glancing at his coffee, she sees the lid has “Scott” written on it— two t’s, but close enough. At least she knows she’s talking to the right person. Or, something like talking.

“--—----—--—----—----— —,—------,—--—--— —--—--—--—--—--—----. —--,—--—--——--—------, (— —--—--),—--—------.—--— —--—— —…—--—--— —--—--?”

She smiles and nods once more, hoping that what he’d just said wasn’t a question she was expected to answer, but he keeps looking to her like he expects more of a response than a smile and a nod.

“I’m just looking for a fast-paced team that I can grow with”, she tosses out limply, figuring that whatever he may have asked, that’s a pretty all-right interviewey thing to say, but as the words topple out of her their stupidity rings in her ears and the sad humor of the situation—that here she is, a miracle of life, and this is how she spends her time, and these are the things she uses what may be the rarest phenomenon in the universe, language, to say—makes her chortle, but she catches herself and fakes a little cough to cover it.

He smiles at her pleasantly and says, “--.—— —. —----—----—— —— —--—------—--—--—--—--—--”, and extends his hand to her. She shakes it and smiles. “--—--—— —--—----.—--—--—------?—--….”

He had shaken her hand and stood up, so the interview must be done. Short, but that could be good or bad. Probably bad, she thinks. Either way she’s glad to be done with it.

“Thank you”, she says, but the cafe is crowded and noisy and he mishears her and thinks she said “No thank you.” It doesn’t make much difference. He smiles again, she smiles back. On the way out he gives her a little departing wave. She eyes a chocolate croissants in the pastry case but decides not to waste the money on it, what with her unemployment almost gone, (not that two dollars seventy-five cents is going to save her anyway). Later on that afternoon she’ll get an email from the woman in HR, and to her surprise, it’ll be a job offer. She’ll then return to the coffee shop and buy one of those chocolate croissants, to celebrate. At last! she got a job.

Language may be the rarest phenomenon in the universe, but the job market wants smiles and nods.

Clouds Don’t Evaporate

I caught a cloud that looked just like my son did when he was two years old. I took it home and fed it ice cream. Just like my son used to, it would cross its eyes in anticipation as I brought the spoon to its mouth. But it was just a cloud, and it evaporated.

Punk Spirit

Punk is an aesthetic, a form of music, a style of dress, but it’s also a spirit, a spirit in two parts. It isn’t concerned with how things are supposed to be done. It doesn’t ask for anything. It doesn’t owe anyone. It does things its own way. That’s the first thing. Consequences aren’t important. There’s nothing worth compromising yourself for. That’s the beginning of punk spirit.

Well the park bench, door, and sleeping in the rain / Little kids sitting in the shooting gallery / Set yourself up from innocence to misery / Well this is what you want, not the way of what they fucking say. —Tim Armstrong of Rancid in the song “1998”, from the album “Life Won’t Wait”

There are consequences. You’ll never be on anyone’s short list, or long list. You’ll never get a record contract. You’ll never have a big budget, or any budget. After you’re dead, no one will do a retrospective of your work, no one will make a documentary about your life, your name won’t be used as an adjective. You’ll always need a day job. You’ll die in obscurity, and you’ll stay there.

These things might not turn out to be true—nothing's certain about the future—but you have to believe they will. You can be happy about it, or unhappy about it, but you have to believe it, and you have to persist.

I had nothing, I had nothing to lose, and all that I was doing I was doing straight, always driven by the motto, “Either this way or no way.” —Blixa Bargeld in the 2008 TV show “Mein Leben”, viewable on youtube, translated by Google and corrected by me

Pig-headedness is only half of it. The other half is solidarity with the other punks, the other people taking their own way and taking it to the end.

Further, ever since ancient times, the skeptical Indra, Lord of Heaven, has come to test the intentions of practitioners, as has Mara the Tempter come to disturb and obstruct the practitioner’s training in the Way. All instances of this have occurred when someone has not let go of hopes for fame and gain. When great compassion is deep within you, and your wish to spiritually aid sentient beings everywhere is well seasoned, there are no such obstructions. —Eihei Dōgen in “Keisei Sanshoku” of his “Shōbōgenzō” as translated by Hubert Nearman

Breakfast with Grandma

I found my grandma standing in front of my open refrigerator door one morning, a gallon of milk tipped all the way back, guzzling it fast and not spilling a drop. It’s funny that that’s the thing that struck me most at the time, how she was just chugging this gallon of milk without losing any. My grandma had died going on ten years before, so you’d think seeing her there at all would be itself the big shocker that morning, but no, at least not at first.

When she was done with the milk she tossed the empty jug over her shoulder and started in on the eggs. It was Sunday morning; I go grocery shopping on Saturdays. She picked a good time to stop by if she was hungry. She ate each of the dozen eggs in one bite, shell and all, and tossed the carton over her shoulder. It landed next to the milk jug, in a little pile she was making, along with an emptied styrofoam tray of ground beef, an emptied jar of jam, and a wrapper for a brick of medium cheddar cheese. I have to imagine it took her some time to chew through all the cheese, it was a new one.

I didn’t say anything to her, and she didn’t notice me. I went back to my bedroom and paced around, forgetting for the moment that I’d long since kicked the nail biting habit. I didn’t believe it was really my grandma. My eyes told me it was my grandma, she had my grandma’s skin, my grandma’s hair, she wore my grandma’s clothes, her shoes, her pearls, her perfume. But some other sense, one I can’t name, was screaming at me with at least as much certainty that this was not my grandma, that my grandma was dead and even if she wasn’t, the thing in my kitchen wasn’t her. I’d gotten up that morning to find a spider in my kitchen the size of my dead grandmother, far too big to put outside without touching it, far too big to smash. When it was done with my fridge and my pantry, what would it eat next?

My phone was charging on my nightstand. My wallet was there with it, which was lucky since I normally keep it in a dish on the counter in the kitchen. I took them both and cut a hole in my bedroom window screen with the nail file end of a pair of clippers from my headboard. I jumped out the window. I guess this isn’t my house anymore, I thought. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel much of any way about leaving my house behind with nothing but the clothes on my back, my phone, and my wallet. I was a little irked about the groceries, since I’d just gone to the trouble of getting them. My car though… there was no way to get to the keys without going through the kitchen. I left it behind. It hurt, it really hurt to leave the car behind like that, like I was leaving a friend behind, or no, not a friend, a pet. Someone who needed me. And after a few days of walking everywhere, it hurt a lot more.

My Shoes

My shoes have holes in them, one in each, where the calluses on the balls of my feet wear on my soles. They still look pretty nice though, and they’re comfortable, as long as it isn’t wet outside. I plan on keeping them. I hate shopping for shoes. I hate that someone can pry money out of me just because I have feet. It’s like my feet don’t belong to me, like I’m just renting them from Vans. And it takes forever to pick a pair, and they never feel as good as my old pair, and they always look too crisp—not till after a few weeks do new shoes start to look normal—and the whole time I’m picking them, I’m thinking, “What’s wrong with the ones I’ve got on now?”, and it’s a good question.

So I’ve decided not to buy shoes anymore. I’m going to wear these ones out. I’m going to beat the ever-loving shit out of them. I’ll patch the holes in their soles, and the next ones, and the ones after those. If they rip, or if they pop a seam, I’ll mend them. By the time I’m through with my shoes, there won’t be a single original stitch of canvas or scrap of rubber left in them, all that’ll have been turned over forty, fifty times. I’m going to put a half billion steps on these shoes. They’ll be nothing when I’m done with them, unrecognizable. I’m going to exhaust my shoes completely. I have to. They’re the only shoes I’m ever going to have.

The Thousand Year Echo

Meryl was weeding in her garden when she heard the first voice. It spoke clearly, like it was the neighbor calling over the fence to her, but she didn’t understand the words. She looked around after the voice, but saw no one.

“Hello?”, she said, rising hesitantly to her feet. The voice was still speaking— had been speaking, uninterrupted since she first heard it. Meryl peeked over the fence. Maybe the neighbor had turned on the TV, or a radio. But when she got up on her tiptoes to see over the fence, she noticed the voice was gone. She made a sour face, then brushed it off and went back to weeding. No sooner had she knelt down to take up her trowel again than did the voice come back, along with several others, laughing.

“Who’s there?”, she demanded, stamping her foot as she stood up again and holding the trowel like a knife. No answer, just more of the same talking she couldn’t understand. She checked the other fence, and the other other, both with the same result. She returned to the spot she was weeding and listened. What language was that? Russian? Chinese? No, not quite. Was it just a bunch of babble? Was she having a stroke, or a seizure, and this was a symptom? She took out her phone and looked up “symptoms of a stroke”, and “symptoms of a seizure.” Neither seemed likely. Just making the search and reading the results was a strong indication, in and of itself, that she wasn’t having a stroke or a seizure. Then what was she hearing?

She stood there in her garden, completely baffled, listening to the voice carry on. Could somebody be playing a trick on her? How? Could the metal plate in her head be receiving radio signals? (She had no metal plate in her head, as far as she was aware.) Maybe it was time for a cup of tea, Meryl thought. She dropped her trowel where she stood, took off her work gloves and left them with the trowel, and walked to the back deck. When she stepped up to the deck, the voice cut out, like a radio losing reception. She stepped back down. The voice came back. She flossed the step, up and down: Up, no voice; down, voice.

Meryl skipped the tea. She went to the hardware store and bought a hundred orange marker flags. She systematically combed over each square foot of her back yard, row by row, like she was mowing the lawn. She’d take a step, listen for the voices, and, if she heard them, mark the spot with a flag. When she had covered the whole of her back yard there now appeared a swirl of markers, a spiral galaxy of orange flags with Meryl’s gloves situated in the center.

Over the next two weeks Meryl made a few more trips to the hardware store. She dug up her garden, digging along the contours she’d mapped out with the flags, then filled the area in with poured concrete, making herself a nice, if not oddly shaped and bizzarely placed, new patio. She put a wrought iron bench in the middle of it, and on either side of that, a flower box. It became her habit to spend much of her free time out on that bench, listening to the voices.

It had been a man’s voice the first time, but it wasn’t always. She’d hear, now a gang of children at play, now a young man and woman talking, and a baby crying. A whispering woman—and she could’ve been whispering right in Meryl’s ear—frantically muttering what sounded like a prayer was a recurring one. Always the voices came in that uninteligible, unplaceable language— apart from the baby’s.

Meryl looked for that language, scouring the internet for samples of any she’d never heard before. None of them were right. The more she listened to the voices on the patio, the more unlike anything else their language seemed. It was heavy, and solid like blocks of carved, polished stone. Every other language she could find was a twittering of birds by comparison.

One afternoon Meryl had friends over for dinner. She took the table from the back deck and set it up on her new patio, where they all dined that night. She was nearly as shocked as her friends were when they heard the voices. She’d been operating under the assumption this whole time that she’d gone discreetly and pleasantly insane, or something like it.

Jason—she’d had the biggest crush on him in high school, which no one ever knew about, and when he ended up marrying her sort-of friend, Dawn, Meryl drew closer to her out of some masochistic impulse—was particularly excited by the phenomenon and, after a few beers, announced to the dinner party that he was resolved to solve the riddle. Everyone laughed at this, except Jason. Conversation moved on. No one thought much of the announcement.

Meryl herself wasn’t very curious about the voices. Or, she was, just in the way that she wanted to listen to them, rather than in the way that she needed to have an explanation for them. It was troubling enough to know other people could even hear them. Finding out what the were, where they came from, what cuased them— to Meryl that would just be making matters worse. Jason started emailing her frequently, asking questions about the voices. She answered his questions. He was no trouble to her.

Until one day he showed up with a small crew of—were they scientists?—all duded up in hazmat suits like she had E.T. stowed away in her back yard. He promised her that it would only be two hours, tops, and then it’d be like they were never even there. They just needed to collect some data, he told her, that’s all. He pleaded with her, and flirted, like he always used to do in high school. He was old and ugly now, and the display was farsical, but in fairness she was old and ugly too, and anyway it worked. Meryl relented.

They were in and out in two hours, and they had left no trace, just like Jason said. Then, years passed, and Meryl never heard what came of it. Dawn and Jason had divorced not long after, (but unrelated to), the data collection episode, and their divorce had let the air out of her friendship with either of them. She fell out of contact with a lot of people, as it happened, and drew closer to the voices. She had, over the years, developed an understanding of their language, but she couldn’t articulate their meaning. To listen to a language for years, but never speak it… you get a sense of it, in your guts, like a dog must have for the way its human relatives speak. But a dog doesn’t have the equipment to talk back, and neither did Meryl.

In the same time, she had also developed lung cancer, which she fought and “won.” The sad truth is that one does not win against cancer. Meryl was down half a lung. Her life would be shorter than it otherwise would have been, because of that. And still, not a day would go by, from the first day she was diagnosed until her last, that wouldn’t be in the shadow of her cancer, or its returning. She didn’t think of herself as having won a battle.

Oh, and money. Not much of that was left, meaning the voices that had kept her company for so long now would be repossessed by the bank, along with everything else. This would happen, she was certain, save for a miracle. Then, a miracle.

Jason called her, out of the blue, to tell her that they’d found what the voices were. They were an echo. An echo from a long, long time ago. Using a lot of sciencey words that meant nothing to Meryl and that, truth be told, meant nothing to him either, Jason explained to her that any sound waves propagating through the space enclosing that little patch in what used to be her garden would be repropagated exactly, through that same space, some one thousand years later, by a process distinct from the one which causes familiar echos, but roughly analogous. Jason was very excited about all this. Meryl wasn’t. But along with this news, Jason had also called with a proposal: To make that special little patch of hers a destination. People would pay good money just to sit on her bench and listen to the idle chitchat of our distant ancestors, and even better—he said even better, but to Meryl it seemed even worse—they could leave a message of their own, to be heard by who knows who in a thousand years’ time. “Can you imagine it?”, he asked breathlessly.

Meryl hated the idea, but she did believe it would pay. Again, she relented to Jason. She kept the house, and raked in money besides. She even got to hear the voices still, on Sunday’s, when the house—not her house anymore, the house—was closed to the public.

She thought it was kind of sad, watching all these people come to leave their own personal messages for the next millennium. She understood, like she understood the voices, in her gut, not her head, that there simply wouldn’t be anyone to recieve them.

Five More Mastodon Droppings

Five more very short stories from my Mastodon, which, incidentally, I now know how to link directly to.

Utopia

In the future there will be no need for money. The production of everything will be either automated or done by a person considering the work to be play, and in either case the produce will be freely given away. There will be no pollution, the whole world made from a drop of sunlight, and not a bit gone to waste. Vast tracts of land will return to wilderness and we’ll steward it like we always should have. There will be only one class owning everything in common, because everyone else and their children will have starved long ago.

Chafing

Your existence chafes me. The fact that you dare to meet my gaze is galling. That you don’t grovel before me is an insult. You think you have a right to what’s yours? I disagree; you ought to have only what I allow you to have. If I had the power, (when I have the power), I’ll snuff you out as vengeance for ever having the arrogance to stand on two feet.

But, come on, don’t be so one-sided. Don’t be unreasonable. I’m willing to compromise. Let’s meet in the middle.

My Dad Says Goodbye

I saw my dad last night, on my front porch. He had stuffed himself into a corner, back pressed into the ceiling, holding himself up by his hands and feet, like Spider-Man. He tried to pretend he was a dummy, but I saw the glint of light when his eye twitched. Last time I’d seen him we were both passing through the train station in Seattle. At the time I wondered how long it takes for the family to learn when a homeless person is found dead. I suppose it’s forever in some cases.

After snapping a photo as proof, I went to unlock my front door. The sound of the key must’ve spooked him. I heard a flutter, looked to his corner, and he was gone.

Totality

The moon passed before the sun, and under its shadow crowds cheered, and a few people cried. One minute, two minutes, the cheering continued. Five minutes, ten minutes, a worried murmuring. After an hour, everyone was crying.

Equanimity

Joann became god while riding her bike after school one day. As god, she ignored her curfew. It was dark when she got home; her house was in flames. Her dad was at work, her baby brother was upstairs in his crib, and her mom was on the lawn screaming for help between long, wheezing gasps. She had rushed into the house, over and over, only to be repelled by the smoke and the flames. Joann could see that her mom had a strong preference that her son not be burned, but, as god, she couldn’t see why.