Cardinal Syndrome

What does an old bird do when his feathers are less lustrous than they were back in some aerial heyday?

He'd left the house he'd lived in after 37 years, hired a full-time nurse, and purchased a plot of land somewhere between Montana and Pennsylvania. Identifying it on the internet was the hard part. The easy part was watching anonymous workers dump his belongings into the giant dumpster placed right beneath his crusty bedroom.

But what was the deal with the nurse? She wasn't some husk crouching towards a cemetery plot...what motive did she have for taking this gig? Sure, he offered her a lot of money, but still. She was 23 and had less connection with the vague state they were relocating to than he did. This intrigued him and he hoped the mystery would twist in front of him, never truly revealing itself until the moment before they put the coins on his eyelids.

As he pictured it, she'd be gently mopping his brow and cooing him to sleep. He'd intuitively know that this was no sleep, this was the real deal, this was the primo-el-end-of to end all be-alls. He'd gaze piercingly up at her and respectfully beg her to tell him why, why had she left everything behind to care for him who she had never met before taking this absurd plunge.

She'd purse her lips, look off into the distance, lean down closer to him, lavender and lilac enveloping him like a dress slit up to a thigh, and unburden herself in toto.

"You see, when I first saw you..."

Absence Makes The Heart Grow

I feel a frown. This is a cue that I might have a chip on the ol' shoulder, that I might be feeling a bit jerked around, that my red has been reached, that Mt. St. Helen's is reincarnating in my belly. So I do a little inventory...why the not-so-warm-and-fuzzies? Why the upside down camper? What the hell?

If I could answer that question, I might not find myself in this position. And no, I'm not frowning because I am currently incarcerated. I frown not because I am in a stalemate with my cellmate. Those are easy reasons, easy peasy. Something else is going on and I only hope I figure it out in time. When I don't, my life gets worse exponentially.

See, when I am angry and I don't know why, simple tasks become difficult. Words fly from my tongue before I speak them, forks become complicated. You know how an old toy that runs on batteries will herk and jerk while trying to suck the last bit of juice out of those little cells? That is me in the throes of an unidentifiable temper tantrum.

So whenever I get that twitch, that highway wreck, that double murder down the street, that thing going on in my lil' ol' noggin, I pay attention.

Like I said, today I haven't figured it out yet. But it might be time for a new cellmate.

The Coin of the Realm

This was the part of the job he hated. All week he enjoyed the early rise, the long quiet bike ride with the heavy bag full of papers, the small signs of stirring, the late night stragglers struggling with house keys. But then the serenity of routine would shift come Sunday and people had to pay him for his services.

Yeah, he got paid, but all it meant to him was he had to deal with these people. They weren't asleep today, they had to pay up. You'd think he was coming to collect the vig from a late lowlife in a scummy Italian restaurant, instead of picking up a few extra bucks to be able to buy pizza after school got out.

To make matters worse, he had a new customer. He'd not met her yet, but she lived in an apartment building, house really, that was filled with angry septegenarians. As bad as making regular visits was, the first visit was always the worst for him. His normal bike-ride sweat would be layered over with a nervous sheen, an anti-social coat of perspiration. All of a sudden he'd be far more aware of what he was wearing, the sound of his voice, the way he walked, all of that shit.

The apartment complex was a big old Colonial house really, one he'd stood at the front door of many times. Someone would come trudging down the hall on a walker, or roll out in a scooter. He'd never had a customer on the second floor, which he'd not noted before this morning. He rang her buzzer. Just a second, she said, and buzzed him in.

Disoriented by the invitation, he hesitantly stepped through the door. Standing in the lobby he felt like an explorer. His bag of papers seemed to gain shape and weight, but somehow became more pleasant to carry. A door opened out of sight above him and heels clicked on hardwood. His blood picked up.

A brunette with wet hair and a purse over her shoulder approached the top of the steps. She asked him what she owed him but he didn't hear her. As she sat on the highest step and began to rummage through her purse, her bare knees clung together to repel his eyes. They almost totally succeeded.

Somehow he made her laugh; maybe about the huge sum she owed him, maybe a self-deprecation about his timeliness or lack thereof. Either way, that sound was to be the last sound he heard as a child. By the time her laugh had tapered off, he was thinking like a man.

Sanctuary

There was nowhere to hide. If nothing changed and quick, they were more than toast. They were some coyote's bread and butter.

The hike had started early and was peppered with recreational drug use, junk food, and not enough water. By the time they hit the small expanse of grassland that tucked up against the towering facade they aimed to climb, they were dehydrated, stoned, hungry, sugar crashed, and exhausted.

That was before the strange electronic bubble enveloped their little camp. It was like something out of an early MTV video...mildly menacing and slightly sexy, fakely real and velveeta cheese-y.

Daphne was the first to panic and try to break through. Since there wasn't more than three feet of space between the entrance to their tent and the inner edge of the wacky dome, her charred remains wound up smoking and smelling mighty nasty.

Cricket, who had dated Daphne on and off ever since he started dealing pot a year and a half ago, was horrified at the carnage but some small flame of relief turned on and he realized that he'd never loved her. He wisely kept this from Sandi, Daphne's best friend and his best customer. She'd freak out even more if she found out that he wasn't really sorry to see Daph go.

So, none of this was very reassuring, but then things got worse. The pressure of the lava lamp invader quickly rendered them incapable of moving. They could feel impulses racing to their appendages, attempting to deliver the message, and feeling like many sad adolescent teenage boys used to feel before call-waiting changed the world.

They all writhed under the shifting lights that raced through the membrane that surrounded them. The sun went down and shortly after that, the kooky cage simply disappeared. But they still could not move.

Many miles away, a pack of desperate wolves picked up their scent. Normally they wouldn't have anything to do with man, but something told them this would be like an all you can eat buffet. And that, as they say, was that.

Discovery and Stupidity

The young god was very far from home. His mom was going to be upset with him later on and would probably only let him eat one or two solar systems before going to sleep for millenia. But that was for later, when he returned to Mt. Crackitybang where all the gods lived. He was supposed to be meeting his Uncle Prism who was going to show him all about forging stars and blowing them up, but he took a detour to earth before his lesson began.

He inched over the mountain, shining his giant mag-lite all around. He didn't see the structure that tripped him up, but before he knew it he was face first in the ocean, bleeding from his lip. He was really going to catch hell now, because his star-garment was creased and wet.

He ripped a giant swath of sod from the slope of the mountain and began to dab at the stain. Little beings dropped from it and they looked funny. The little noises they made stopped when he stomped on them. They didn't taste so good.

The impromptu dab only spread the seawater around. HE WAS GOING TO BE IN SO MUCH TROUBLE. He hated it when his mom yelled; watching galaxies get sucked into her screaming vortex made his tummy feel bad. This stress made him think he couldn't find his way home. Oh boy, did he begin to cry.

By the time he was done crying, the teeny bad-tasting things were shooting things at him and arguing over what he meant in the grand scheme of things. He just made it in time for the star tutorial with Uncle Prizm, who promised that he could keep a secret.

Precursors and Lectures

It had not been a good morning for Professor Simmons. His automatic coffee maker had shorted out sometime during the night so he had to wait bleary eyed and weary for each little damn brown drop to plop. European presses are too kitschy to wake up to and this offended his faux Proletariat facade.

When he was younger, the whole cravat/tweed pretense read more like eccentricity. Now, it was like a cursor beeping at the end of a list of errors in judgement. Deep in his heart he heard every muttered derision, every passing car transported a soul that saw him and scoffed. His every moment was suffused with acceptance of his failure; and yet, like a late evacuee in a flood, there his head bobbed, there he denied the swirling fate that enveloped him.

He didn't have a bad wig, but he might as well have.

His first seminar of the day was in a bland hall tucked away behind the Biology monstrosity. The desks in the drably lit room were so like elementary school that he half expected Jimmy Travis to jump on him and pull his pants down in front of that girl he liked. His students shambled in like the suckers they use to fill out police lineups, innocent but just barely.

Without greeting them formally, Simmons began. Coffee lids, powdered pastry in plastic wrap, zippers on backpacks, earplugs coming out, all these sounds fought him until he was just far enough into the lecture so that he couldn't start over. The collective lack of interest in the room was enough to put pre WWII Germany to shame.

Suddenly, without provocation, to the surprise of all present, most of all himself, Professor Alton Simmons began to laugh at it all. And once he did this, something even more surprising happened. His hair began to grow at an alarming rate. By the middle of the seminar he almost tripped over it while staggering into the corner in a fit of giggling. Surprisingly, none of the students called 911...

Ooga Ooga and Such

A caveman sat among his cavemen brethren. Being a leader of men, a precursor to the great figures of human history, he exhorted his fellow strivers to attain new heights of knowledge and action heretofore un reached by man.

His hairy hand scratched his stinky ass, whereupon he raised it to his nose. "Ooga ooga," quoth he. "Oooga ooga ooga ooga, ooga! Oooga oo."

Hearing such eloquence, many of the men burst into tears, or perhaps the snot that was already dried on their face simply fell off all at once. Either way, they had been forever changed by this burning light of existence. Moving as one, they followed him out of the cave. A vast valley opened before them, teeming with God's spawn in all shapes and sizes. One of God's spawn jumped out from behind a tree and bit the arm off the third dude in line. The rest of them moved a bit further along the path and just let that shit happen.

After two fights and a few short stops so someone could take a crap, they emerged off of the rise and onto the plain. Then they got distracted by a few babes who were hanging out by the stream picking bugs off of each other and eating them. The cavemen sat drooling mightily and not one of the babes was afraid of being exploited by pornography. One of these fair maidens crapped too, so free she felt of pression.

"Ooga!!!"

The valiant voice of the chosen one was like a cold splash of water on a sleeping woolly mammoth. The day hung in the balance; a long brutal hunt which could result in little more than sweat, or a day of luxury with some hotties.

What followed was long retold ooga by ooga; tears of ooga ooga oo lifting the memory into more than myth. The sun went down and the cavemen and women rushed our race towards this blog.

The Prophet of Dreams

There once was a man who found his system suddenly inverted...his daily life was filled with strange imagery, impossible feats, apocalyptic pleasures, and erotic tragedy. Once night fell and his eyes dropped shut, probability defined events instead of imagination, and calm settled over him even though he craved the rush of his waking life.

Soon his ability to maneuver through his day was impeded and he was forced to allow the full force of his reality to sweep him away. Whirling without limit he would find himself atop a mountain on the other side of the world with a strange arctic insect buzzing about his ears waiting for a tiny bit of skin to be exposed to a deadly bite. His fatigue would overtake him and he would find himself sipping coffee at his kitchen table reading the sports page. The relief was indescribable.

The dream would pass without incident and he would hold his eyes shut as long as he could. Flipping the lids up he would see a vast tract of pine covered grassland. Untouched by humanity prior to his arrival, he would nonetheless come across a carpet laid out perfectly between two identical firs. The swirling reds and browns and blacks of the rug against God's canvas created a hallucinatory effect and his bare feet hovered over it, feeling the man-made moss and marveling at the elephant next to his big toe.

The rug jerked beneath him and he fell into an Indian sit. Haltingly it raised to the first level of branches of the tree, which lightly brushed his arm. In a shot he was above the trees and the landscape spread out beneath him like a fan in front of a beautiful queen.

This time, the arrival of his nightly routine dream was not a relief...

Welcome One and All

This is a whim of the highest order, inspired by my wonderful older sister Sheila. As I have leapt before I looked, the full style and look of this little corner of the web will be as fluid as needs be. As the big boys always remind us, everything is subject to change.

The first push-pin has been put onto the cork board.