Do we leave any part of the tower standing? Peel it away until it is just a twisted spiral cyclone of abandoned roller coaster track? Wouldn’t the energy just radiate in all directions without a form to focus it? Wouldn’t we just do as we wished when we wished? Wouldn’t we love at every opportunity, even if it had nothing to do with the conversation? Is this freedom or chaos?
Mighty Hunters
This morning I awoke to find that one or more of my cats had successfully stalked the elusive gold tassel often found clinging to new curtains hanging in bedroom windows. As I slept, the golden tassel was pulled from its safe perch and dragged out to the living room where it was properly mauled. The remains of the tassel were found stashed inside the hunter’s den, which had at one time been a table. Only piles of gold string testified to the existence of this rare beast. Good job, cats.
Maintenance
The Rodeo went into the shop yet again today, this time to replace the starter. People keep telling me to sell it and get a new vehicle. But I love my car. It was the first thing I purchased in my new life, a transport from one world to the next. I can’t just give up on it. Besides, after this year I will be done paying it off. Then I can use the extra money for maintenance and bringing it back up to top form. If it were a computer, I might think differently, but I think there is a value in getting the most use out of everything you own instead of always upgrading to the next best thing.
If only I could upgrade my insides. Tomorrow I will make an appointment with the doctor to perhaps confirm my greatest fear: My body is rejecting wheat gluten, an ingredient present in the bulk of the foods I eat. I’ve been reading up on it and the consequences of not dealing with this aren’t merely physical discomforts but serious health risks. I eat bread as a snack item and just about every meal I enjoy includes something gluten-based. And I already have lactose intolerance. It’s like the major food groups are slowly closing their doors to me. Years from now I will have to subsist on injections of genetically engineered nutrients. Anyhow, my next shopping trip will be gluten free, as an experiment. Wish me luck.
This is funny
Here’s how the play is being billed:
In The Wind, A New Supernatural Thriller by Eric Whitmore
In The Wind is a supernatural thriller set in the not-too-distant future. Most of humanity has been forced into bondage and slavery, and going outside after dark means certain death. Submerged in a tiny apartment, one family waits anxiously for the return of their son, as they plan their escape and revolt against the unspoken entities that have forced them into submission. As the wind shrieks louder and louder, terror creeps closer to their doorstep. With time running out, the family must risk death to prevail in a heart-stopping conclusion that celebrates the indomitable human spirit to live in freedom!
—–
I seem to have missed the whole celebration of the indomitable human spirit. Was that when the father was torturing their son’s friend from high school? Or perhaps they are referring to the mother strangling the son, a strained melee which seemed to last five minutes.
In the Wind
Last night I attended a performance of “In the Wind” at the Tricklock theatre. The play was written by my best friend’s ex-boyfriend whom I don’t care for at all. I was concerned that the play might actually be good and I would have to rise to the occasion and admit this fact. But this proved to be not the case.
“In the Wind” follows the meagre existence of a family living in the bomb shelter-like remains of their home. The world has been overrun by an alien dictatorship which has transformed society into the generic Orwellian dystopia that we all apparently fear. We never see the aliens or learn why they have modelled human society after the bleak apocalypses of “Brave New World” and “1984.” But we hear them from time to time, or at least we hear some kind of monsters prowling about in the wind whipped wastes outside of the hovel.
The husband and wife, along with their daughter-in-law, struggle to eke out an existence. They subsist on rationed food, maintain a bicycle-powered generator to provide light, and generally cower in the paranoid shadow of the new regime. They are bouyed by idealistic memories of their son who escaped and is now presumably a leader in the resistance. When they hear word of an upcoming push by the resistance, they plan their escape.
Other than a scene of torture via electroshock, there isn’t much else to the story. Just before their planned escape, who should show up at their door but their long lost son, now transformed into a kind of gestapo enforcer. He kills his father and then is strangled himself by his mother. Then the play ends.
What is to be made of all this? Is the message here to trust no one, not even your family? If the world should fall under the sway of alien invaders, is it best just to surrender your humanity and fall into step? I had no sense of what I was meant to learn from the story, if anything. By the end of the play, the marginally-sympathetic characters were either dead or reduced to near helplessness.
Only the acting prowess of the Tricklock company and the audio/video engineering made this play watchable. Even so, Joe Pesce, the actor playing the father, seemed almost too spirit-crushed and tired, as though he felt the play tedious. The actor playing the son (I forget the names now) was the only one who seemed to truly slip into his role.
The final line of the play, delivered by the mother standing over her strangled son, was “Let’s go!” I thought it good advice, so I went.
Forward
Today a friend complained that I don’t post often enough, so I’ll make more of an effort. 😉 Actually, it seems like when I am focusing on one certain activity in my life, I experience a kind of time distortion with everything else. If I get busy with work, I’ll look up and it will have been a week since I made a post in Frayed, the email interactive fiction project I’m running. Or I’ll spend what seems like a few hours on MySpace, and then suddenly the movies I rented are overdue. I lose track of what is going on in the books I’m reading because I’ve been more interested in working in the yard.
But it feels fantastic! I feel like there are so many possibilities for each day and I have so many interests I wish to pursue. I just kind of chuckle at myself when a deadline suddenly looms or it is Sunday again already and I need to set things up for the weekly Doctor Who showing.
I think what I’m saying is that I’m comfortable with the flow of time again. It doesn’t seem like sand spilling away into oblivion. Nothing grows in stasis. If time stood still and I could “hold this moment a little bit longer,” nothing would ever actually happen to me.
Beck
“Hammer my bones on the anvil of daylight” – I’m so glad Beck is back, filling my head with the lyrical wizardry of E-Pro.
Wedding Dream
This dream is mostly faded, despite its long epic nature. I remember having to smuggle the lower half of a woman (a doll or mannequin) backstage at a wedding. I accidentally walked in just as the crowd was singing “Here comes the bride, all dressed in white.” Only the bride wasn’t in white; she was a short, portly woman in a red wedding dress. Later, the lower half of the woman became a chimpanzee in a cage. I met up with my mentor in a high school and he was explaining the intrusion protocols to me. Apparently we were spies. We found some janitor’s outfits to change into. He was telling me things, but I wasn’t listening because I was so worried about the chimpanzee I had stashed backstage. It was carrying some kind of genetically engineered virus. I was supposed to have taken it to the customs office of the high school and let the chimp get processed along with all the other packages getting imported into the school. My mentor and I wove our way through the students. I saw a guy and a girl making out in the hallway and I thought “Man, I wish I went to this high school.”
Internet Time Machine
I came across this internet archive that stores web sites from years ago, letting you browse back in time. I could go back and look at my web sites as they were in 2001!
Check it out: www.archive.org
Journey Through a Needle
As I sat down to write this post, I realized that it could easily be misconstrued as a reference to intravenous drugs. Acupuncture is like the antithesis of that: using needles to heal, sending lines of energy through the body rather than heroin.
Points around my body lit up like nodes on an etheric power grid. Darkness. Then glimmering light at the periphery of my vision, sunlight on waves. The feeling of my whole being rippling in a heat haze. Scene of a woman putting up wallpaper in her living room, turns her head over her shoulder to speak to someone out of frame. Then down, down, down a tunnel. Everything behind a dark scrim. A cavern with a stone bridge, leading through arches. Everything is illuminated with inverted light, like a photo of microscopic organisms. I am flying along the path of the bridge, more of a raised highway running over a dark chasm. Doors of strange material sphincter open to reveal diamond-shaped openings that I fly through. Then it is revealed to me: I am under the Tower, coming in through a secret entrance. Of course, of course, of course… never thought about trying to get in from underneath.