2022-01-04

homepage/blah/index.html

@@ -16,6 +16,161 @@ ideas' witlessness;
 ideas' witnesses;
 ideas-
 
+2023-01-04
+
+	Karl and Will watched Captain James Cook sit in his recliner, seeming
+to deliberate. An intravenous line was slung over the armrest from the back of
+the chair into Cook's arm and he sat, catatonic, drool dripping past his bottom
+lip, eyes wide open. Both of them knew he neither cared about what they said
+nor was physically able to hear them. Behind them a small porthole window let
+them see into the depths of outer space.
+	Will finished his thought and verbalized it. "So, like, what's he
+thinking about?"
+	Karl: "What?"
+	"He's on tranqs or something. Is he thinking about the ship?"
+	Karl turned to Will. "Are you new here or something?"
+	"What! I'm just asking a question."
+	"Did you go to school?"
+	"Yeah."
+	"Did you graduate?"
+	"Well... no."
+	"Yeah." Karl gestured to the thin tube. "That's a drug cocktail of both
+stimulants and paralytics. The chair measures his vitals and keeps him alive
+while he can use all of his brain to think about what moves to make next."
+	Will reexamined the chair from where he stood. "Why can't he just think
+normally?"
+	"I just said. He can but this lets him use more of his noggin. The dude
+is basically doing six dimensional chess up in there. A good captain will
+figure out the next thousand years' moves in advance, I've heard."
+	"I don't envy him."
+
+	Captain James Cook stood on a featureless white plane under a black
+starless sky, using a rod of wax to mark the ground in red. Taking into account
+all of the nearby cosmic entities - the rocks and dust and occasional dwarf -
+he charted out the next hundred years' plan, then the hundred after that, then
+the hundred after that. The landscape around him turned pink as he marked the
+hours to make up the days to make up the months to make up the years.
+
+	An alarm sounded. Karl and Will ran to their respective stations. The
+chair began to rouse the Captain for the emergency.
+
+	James had finished year 963 when he started sliding down the smooth
+surface. His naked body smeared the red wax on the floor as the floor smeared
+it on him and after rolling for a couple seconds he was finally kicked off the
+ground into the ether. Floating in space, he assumed the posture of sitting in
+a chair so that his carriage back into physicality would be less violent. Then
+like a dog pushed off a cliff he was back in his seat, chin wet, looking
+through the porthole towards his previous home; outsideness.
+
+2022-09-16
+
+Bookworm
+	I looked for a moment at a painting above the stairs and their bronze
+railing. It had an elaborate painting of a symbol that resembled a Cyrillic "Щ".
+	"Alright, let's go." I gestured to the stairs.
+	"What? Why?" Aaron walked through one of the dozen or so aisles of
+shelves, each packed with books up to the height of his shoulder. The room we
+were in encompassed the full third floor of the cylindrical tomb to which we
+were tourists, lit brightly by incandescent lamps and only incandescent lamps.
+There were no windows nor would there be anything of interest past the glass if
+there were.
+	"You said there would be one or two people here to meet us." Aaron
+raised a hand on which he was raising his index finger but I interrupted him.
+"If there's nobody to meet us for what's essentially a distress call, from this
+'living vault' which I'd call a crypt, what got to them first? Whatever it was,
+I don't wanna meet it."
+	"Everything here is visible. There are no places to hide, or hide a
+body." At that, I scanned the ceiling but it was just uniform brick. "I don't
+know where they went, but we've looked around, and there's nothing here. I
+don't see why you'd be so unnerved." I wasn't unnerved – at least I didn't
+think I was visibly so. On the other side of the room, which wasn't terribly
+big, though it was of a reasonable size for a small library, a hardwood board
+under the tightly woven carpet let out a muffled squeak. A cheap bell rattled.
+Judging by the look on Aaron's face, I had given him a death glare, but after
+he looked down his aisle he relaxed. "It's a cat."
+	I slowly stepped over to his aisle of books and there, on the other end
+of the row, was a black and white cat with a red collar. I said the first thing
+that came to my mind. "Its head is too big."
+	Aaron looked at me but I kept looking at the cat. "'Its head is too
+big'?" The cat's head kept extending and growing. Whatever reaction I had
+caused Aaron to turn back to the cat. "Oh, fuck."
+	The cat's fur grew sparse as its skin stretched wide and its head
+turned a slow spiral into an upside-down position before its forehead grew
+fangs and its former lips fused together. Its eyes widened and became
+humanlike. The creature must have been three meters long with a serpentine head
+but cat-sized body at the end, away from us. Its fangs were what peeked of a
+mouth and that mouth opened its wide jaw and began to speak in a deep rumble of
+a voice. "I."
+	I slowly reached for and silently unbuttoned the clasp on my knife
+while maintaining my stare at the creature. Aaron, probably close enough to the
+thing to smell it if it had a smell, trembled slightly but enough that I
+noticed. I wished I hadn't gone into this damn grave without my lighter but it
+was confiscated by Aaron's parents (also the governing body of this archive –
+built to withstand a nuclear blast, so humanity had a "damn fine base from
+which to regrow their knowledge" – Aaron's mother's words, not mine). It wasn't
+something I didn't understand – I too long for a first edition Origin of
+Species sometimes after one or two glasses of wine at night, and have to page
+through Sotheby's catalog in order to talk myself out of bidding the next time
+one's stolen out of East Germany, but if there was truly some new Dracula or
+Frankenstein – aside from the books, that is – hidden in these rows, I'd be
+willing to burn down a lot more than some paper or even myself to make sure it
+never saw the light of day.
+	Aaron finally spoke. "Hello?"
+	The creature tore a tentacle underneath the cat's chest and swung it up
+above its head, morphing it into a fleshy wreath-like structure, almost like a
+set of antlers. Its head and tentacle, I noticed, bent backward as they
+stretched up, to keep its center of gravity below its paws. I realized what it
+was doing, forming a fractal construct of flesh and the gaps between around its
+head, as a second tentacle tore through the fur on the cat's back. "Aaron. Back
+away towards me."
+	The creature's eyes, bigger now, blue, turned towards me. It rumbled
+and finally spoke, something: "Apart from the one fundamental nastiness-" it
+made a gargling noise "-nineteenth century suffering from toothache." It thrust
+its tentacle towards Aaron and he turned and ran for the stairs, to which I
+also started running. The creature began to scream in a cacophony of fifty
+voices. Aaron and I got to the end of the stairway and ran across the second
+floor (fiction) to its descending stairs. I didn't take the time to look behind
+myself.
+	When we got to the bottom-most level of the vault Aaron ran to the
+telephone next to the stone arch exit, currently leading to a brick wall, and
+rang the operator as I turned to face his six and saw the monster, with the
+body of a cat, the face of a (for lack of better description) werewolf, and the
+two tentacles of a void, approaching, by morphing its appendages into some sort
+of shape that could grip onto the stone bricks of the ceiling. By the time it
+had climbed its way to the center of the room the vault started violently
+twisting and the centrifugal force threw me and Aaron against the wall. The
+beast staggered but hunkered down, moving its body towards the ceiling. The
+black oily tentacles spread out into the bricks like they were Play-Doh shoved
+into a fine mesh.
+	The door next to us opened up and we made our way across the wall to
+which we were pinned and fell through. We yelled to the engineers to keep it
+twisting and the portal slid shut behind us.
+	Aaron's father, Robert Arsenault, in his signature suit and green tie,
+jogged down the freshly painted hall to meet us and the operator of his billion
+dollar vault. Aaron and I were smoking, to Robert's chagrin, and against the
+advice of Jamie Simon, who was almost as well known as Robert but in different
+fields. In fact, the design of the library was officially called the Simon
+Machine, and used novel mechanisms to rotate an entire cylindrical building on
+its base as an extremely overkill locking mechanism so no unauthorized entities
+could get in. I wasn't briefed on the details, or, well, I was, but I didn't
+have the three PhDs necessary to understand any of it.
+	A vent softly pumped air from the surface. Technically our location
+wasn't supposed to be made known to the lackeys but Aaron said it was somewhere
+in Peru.
+	"What the hell was that?"
+	Aaron tapped his cigarette on the previously empty ashtray next to
+Jamie's keyboard. "I dunno."
+	Robert thrust a pointed finger into Aaron's face. "You don't know? An
+animal got into my library and neither of you can even tell what the fuck it
+was? Do you even know how many legs it had?"
+	Aaron seemed to have the same idea I had; Robert could figure out what
+the thing was without our help. He wouldn't believe us if we told him what we
+saw.
+
+	Unfinished! A shame, too. I think that one could have been pretty good.
+Maybe sometime I'll write a middle and ending.
+
+
 2023-01-03
 
 2022-12-07
@@ -526,7 +681,7 @@ the dogs is automatic, and that I don't need significant input nor pay) in
 servitude to these dogs – it's not that I mind, of course; I do love these dogs
 even if they may not love me (are dogs capable of sentient love?). And this
 concept is interesting. They essentially live in their paradise; they go
-outside every 2-3 hours (whenever they move around usually it’s because they'd
+outside every 2-3 hours (whenever they move around usually it's because they'd
 like to move around outside) and exercise their bodily functions out there when
 need be, they play with each other and at least seem to have intellectual
 stimulation out in the back yard, and they all get as much water as they want
@@ -797,7 +952,7 @@ her meet me after she had already taken the job at the wristwatch company.
 alive. I think of this as I order us two of her favorite potion, cold brewed
 coffee with a pinch of cinnamon. She hasn't had this in months, she tells me for
 the fourth time. I apologize for my detachment. I've seen my world crumble again
-and again. I'm too far gone, and I’m sorry, and I have to move on. She's talking
+and again. I'm too far gone, and I'm sorry, and I have to move on. She's talking
 to me for the first time for the fourth time and the last time and I'm not
 listening. I'm sipping the cold brew and trying to taste the cinnamon, for the
 last time.