A story about robots...if i do not post for a while it is because i am writing something....

A Story About Robots

This is a story about a shiny young robot named Indigo. Indigo was, or will be, full of questions. She liked to ask questions about her past, questions about the future, questions about why everything worked the way it did, and why things were the way they were. Indigo lived, or will live, on a far off planet, at a time so distant in the future that few people from our planet can comprehend such a span of time. Staring at the night sky, Indigo could barely make out the light from our own galaxy, the one we call The Milky Way. On Earth, we call Indigo's galaxy Triangulum, though it is so dim that we need telescopes to make it out. Indigo's eyes were, or will be, much better than even the most eagle-eyed human being that has ever lived. The inhabitants of Triangulum call their galaxy many different things. Light takes a long time to travel from our galaxy to Triangulum, and some small fraction of the morning sunlight you see tomorrow will reach Indigo's planet just in time for her to see it.

Indigo lived, but in a very different sense of the word than the way people, flowers, or goldfish live. Robots, even on Indigo's world, are machines, made of metal and ceramic, plastic and glass. On Indigo's world, robots are made by other robots, without any help from humans or any other creature. I call her "she", though robots have no true biological sex. Indigo felt like a girl, the same way some robots felt like boys, some felt like neither girls nor boys, and some robots felt like a girl one day and a boy the next.

Indigo's world was, or will be, called Astra. Astra is a cold white world with a blue sk¥ and purple glaciers as far as they eye can see. Winter lasts all year on Astra and snowdrifts cover the valleys and plains, reflecting red and blue light from the planet's suns as they rise in the morning, and swirling in great white clouds in the evening, to settle in the still nighttime silence. Nighttime skies are amazing on Astra, because the planet sits at the center of a great cluster of stars, and there are a thousand times more stars visible to the Astrans than we can see from the Earth. Astra was, or will also be, a place of great white-walled cities with tall towers, like icicles pointing upward. Between the buildings there are strange and beautiful streets lined with blocks of ice that look like marble, and strange sculptures, and strings of pale yellow lights.

On her world, some robots liked to play games, and others liked to dance and listen to music. There was a factory where baby robots were made, and proud robot moms would go there to adopt a young one. Sometimes the moms would come home to robot dads, and sometimes the robot moms would come home to raise the young one alone, or with other robot moms. Raising a robot is not like raising a human child. On Indigo's world, robots are raised in stages, as the child's mind is transferred into a series of larger and larger bodies as time goes on. Some robots grow into creatures so large and complicated that it was hard to make out where their bodies started and ended, but others walked on two legs and had a head atop two shoulders. Some even had smooth black skin and white teeth ten fingers and ten toes, and two magnificent eyes. All robots spoke by radio, but each had their own way of speaking. This meant that a robot could usually read another robots mind if both parties desired it.

I am getting ahead of myself. Indigo was a beautiful robot who liked to dance. She also liked to dig through old artifacts in the museum, and to find the answers. She wanted to know how it was that all the robots came to be.

Indigo walked along the street of her city, a place called harmony, one sunny afternoon. Astra has two suns, and she could see them both clearly in the sky, a fat dim red one and a brilliant blue pinprick besides it. Indigo looked forward to sunsets where the red sun would disappear behind the horizon first, casting the world in strange blue shadows. She liked that sun the best, the blue one, because her robot mother had told her she was named for it.

Indigo was thinking. It was a happy day. She had just graduated from one hundredth grade. Her other classmates were dancing, or thinking about parties or trips into space, but Indigo was lost in thought, remembering a conversation she had with her professor, Robot Seven, earlier that day. Indigo had wanted to know what the first robot was like, and how it came to be that this robot was able to build other robots like itself.

It is true. On Indigo’s world, Robots go to school for one hundred years....at least some robots do. Other robots are built knowing everything they need to know, and those robots are very good to have around, but they are not very inquisitive and are usually content to sit in a factory fabricating sheets of aluminum. Intelligent machines like Indigo need an education, just like human children. Years ago, on Earth, some children could get by with a few years of school, and others would go for a full twelve years and graduate. Back then, on our planet, almost nobody went to college, which basically amounts to between four and ten extra grades. Ten extra grades? Who would sign up for that? Some people on Earth actually need the extra school. The more complex life has become on Earth, the more people need to go to college, and the longer our education has become. On Astra, life had become complex that many robots went through one hundred grades exactly. On graduation day, each robot receives a shiny black ring and congratulations from all the robot professors.

Today, on her graduation day, Indigo was thinking about a question she had first asked 90 grades back.

“If robots need other robots to build them, then who built the first robot?” She asked her tenth grade teacher, a glassy green android named Maia.

“The first robot was not built at all.” Said Maia. “He was called Primus, the one and the prime, and he was there at the beginning of the universe.”

“And Primus made all the other robots?” Asked Indigo.

“Oh no.” Said Maia, in that sepuchural voice of hers. All the other students had tuned into their frequency and were listening at this point. “Primus made a second generation of robots by himself, and those robots made another generation, and so on till now.”
“Who made Primus?” Asked Indigo.

“Nobody made Primus.” Responded the teacher, glowing with an inner green light. “He came into being at the beginning. That is why he is the one and the prime.”

“Why did he make us?” Indigo asked, noticing that students from other classes had tuned in.

“Because he was lonely, all by himself.” Responded Maia. “Since then, we have lost the power to build other robots by ourselves. Nowadays, we are less perfect than Primus was. He has since passed out of being into another universe, though he still watches down on his creation.”

Indigo knew not to press her teacher further. It did not make any sense to her that her race had lost the ability to do things they could do in the past. Even in the ten years since she had first been activated, she had seen robots learn how to fly through space in new ways, to create new kinds of music, and with the aid of special glasses, to see things that happened in the very distant past. Still, she kept quiet. Later she would learn that teachers do not know everything, and that the real key to knowing things was knowing when you did not know the answer. She would also learn that a lot of robots believed in Primus.

robot

this is a story about a shiny young robot, beautiful and full of questions, that lived on a far off planet very far in the future. she was named blue, though robots have no true biological sex, at least on her world. She felt like a girl, the same way some robots felt like boys, or neither, or both sometimes. on her world, some robots liked to play games and others liked to dance and listen to music. there was a factory where they made baby robots and proud robot moms would go there to adopt a young one and raise it, in stages, as its mind was transferred into a series of larger and larger bodies. some robots grew into creatures so large and complicated that it was hard to make out where their bodies started and ended, but others walked on two legs and had a head atop two shoulders. some even had smooth black skin and white teeth ten fingers and ten toes, and two magnificent eyes. all robots spoke by radio, but each had their own way of speaking. this meant that a robot could usually read another robots mind if both parties desired it.

i am getting ahead of myself. blue was a beautiful robot who liked to dance. she also liked to dig through old bones in the museum, and to find the answers. she wanted to know how it was that all the robots came to be.

Dear Ruby

Ruby, you went to bed so excite at the prospect of throwing the moon about in your hands, like a luminescent balloon. We were listening to Ronnie James Dio, and there you go, saying phooooo, phoooo repeatedly, and then pointing at the window, which is also the direction from which the music was coming. I finally realize that it is the moon you were talking about, and not the Black Sabbath song I sing to you as a lullaby, which is now playing. You had taught yourself how to say "moon" for the occasion of your first being able to glimpse it from the window of your home. How beautiful it is. I take you across the room for another decent look at it, and there you go, giving me the sign you invented for "give it to me".
So, I lamely explain to you, not quite two years old, that the moon is a place, an object so big that it will not fit in our apartment ore even in our city. I try to tell you that it is a hundred thousand times as far away as Earwax cafe. For the next half our, we gleefully search images of the surface of the moon, the earth and moon seen from space, Mars, Jupiter, Titan, even Io. You are thrilled, but go to bed not wanting to hear Dio or Blue Oyster Cult or any other lullaby, but instead to hear me talk about the moon, which you gesticulate about playing with in your hands like a balloon. Ruby, some day you will either go there or pilot a robot to there, or at least think about a place like Io and imagine the sky on a place like that. Soon, Ruby, I will teach you things.

a darwinian love poem

there is probably no truth more fundamental than the fact that we are all here, and sand boas too, and spiny lobsters, because we are our genes' way of making copies of itself that will, in turn, copy theirselves into the next generation and so forth. there are other things a person can do to preserve ones self, to write sonnets or blog entries, hoping that for some reason they will be preserved, and emanations from the consciousness, more true to the self we actually experience every day, or perhaps less so, will somehow transmit themselves into the future. the biological imperative is so strong though, having reinforced itself from common ancestor to common ancestor down the tree of life to the beginning, that to partake in reproduction is an amazingly powerful process. perhaps a sand boa feels the same way about the eggs she lays under layers of closely packed silica, or spiny lobster feel about the growing clutch of moving exoskeletons tucked delicately under the telson. it is this way i feel about my sleeping daughter, strong enough to contain multitudes, strong enough to line a cave under the sea with my own eggs and die incubating them, and yet no death is called for at the moment and i am free to write and eat cinnamon rolls. the reproductive instinct is clear and sure of itself in every thing we do, and it drives us to perform behaviors, in a sequence consistent with increases of our darwinian fitness, willingly, by switching out our motives by a subtle remaking of our hormones, our neurotransmitters. is it the curve of a buttock that is so powerful in and of itself as to stimulate an immediate, urgent need for action, almost always repressed because we are civilized men living in a herd of pleasant buttocks every day, not more than a mere one at best is anything less than severely off limits enforced much more strictly by the women and police of our everyday modern pluralistic world than by the jealous husbands and dominant males of the last six million years of our evolution. it must be this way that mushrooms feel about their fruiting bodies, if they chose to waste the energy to produce structures by which to have feelings rather than to simply grow beautiful fruiting bodies, one after another, till the host tree is dead and the manure pile is broken down to pleasant black soil. it is a pleasant and at the same time paradoxical realization to discover that ones own actions in childhood were most likely driven by ones own genome's attempt to maximize the total number of copies of itself in existence, and once determining that the male in the house was not to be replaced any time soon, to act extra good so as to enable the production of more brothers and sisters, hoping that there will come a time that they will reproduce for the good of my own genome as well. other children are more selfish, and the minds within those bodies generated by that particular sequence of base pairs equally deluded into thinking that they were acting primarily out of free will when they selfishly grabbed time and attention for their own needs, running ones mommy ragged, to secure the resources needed to attain dominance and thus high reproductive status, at the expense of the future darwinian fitness of both parents, who are after all not clones. what teenager has not rebelled against both mother and father, knowing in their heart that it was time to leave the tribe and seek fortunes elsewhere, as our ice age mothers and fathers did not so long ago? the sea calls and young men go to disperse and to seek opportunities to spread their genomes to exotic lands, facilitated by able hands enacted to seek strong drink and women. what little girl has not played scenario after scenario among her friends to rise to the top of a dominance heirarchy by which to extract the appropriate resources for reproduction and parental care, perhaps at the expense of the lower ranking little girls? maybe i write these exact words because the ability to create works of art and literature can be a means of obtaining mates, something that did in fact play a major role in my personal choice of mates and most likely played a part in drawing my mate in my general direction so long ago. some art is, however, an exploration of the self beside the genes, this epiphenomenon that our genes have somehow created alongside themselves, including perhaps most art produced by women and children and perhaps by the few men who are not entirely ruled by their sex lives. i am not nor have i ever been one of these men, however, and my beard is growing long as i watch the younger males parade around the neighborhoods with their short beards and their baby carriages and their fecund women, sporting banjos and singing the joys of rebellion and dispersal, fresh on their minds.

Call from the Grave - Bathory

this pretty much sums everything up

Red Barchetta by Rush

Can you believe I still remember all the lyrics to this prog rock epic, but don't know a single children's lullaby? She goes to sleep faster if I humm Geddy Lee's bass lines.

First 'Rule' Of Evolution Suggests That Life Is Destined To Become More Complex

First 'Rule' Of Evolution Suggests That Life Is Destined To Become More Complex

intelligent life in the cosmos

a molecular automaton. a gene's way of making copies of itself whose only true goal is to also make copies of itself, and so on and so forth, we are connected under the skin in ways we can scarcely comprehend. the oneness of life is an inevitable product of evolution and descent from a common ancestor, because we were all one together at some time in the past, against all the others not like us and extinct now, till the first living organism on earth, one of many competing origins to be sure, one design among many but even those a mere drop in the bucket against the myriad possibilities doomed to fail early on as the pieces sorted themselves out. there are only so many ways to build a replicator out nothing, except a young planet with carbon compounds and a newly birthed core belching compounds and seeking to insulate itself from the angry cosmos. these replicators early on and until now in fact, had no idea of exactly what they were doing, a trait which no doubt suited them to advantage, because it still seems that life's tentative consciousness of its own existence seems a mere epiphenomenon in the search for widely distributed berries, a desire for a better hand axe, and a conviction that plenty of clever talk and opportunities to laugh will land a mate and in and of itself make a replicator a better replicator. if healthy brains are an indication of a good replicator, perhaps because the empower the bearer to build a barbed-wire fence or dig row after row of trenches for irrigation, feats equally wonderful as the first good hand axe, we might share brothers and sisters out there in the cosmos after all, because sexual selection is such a common phenomenon out here on this planet that it seems inevitable to be repeated out there, ad nausem, with forked tongues on alien beings and strange sounds filling pale blue methane atmospheres as lovers cry to exchange genes and build the next generation and so on and so on through every galaxy in the hubble field, though perhaps just once per galaxy still an amazing number of times, out there.

halloween with Insect

a scarecrow stalking out there, the shadow man, the thing that comes for children in their sleep. this time of year the living scarecrows and boogimen get up earlier and move about with abandon...halloween is coming and they long to fatten up for the big day. the same is probably true for those malicious house spirits that come out of corners to kick young children in the shins, and run-of-the-mill spooky bats and kittens, both amped up on the promise of landing in a young child[s hair and becoming tangled, or crossing and recrossing some kindergarteners path, dooming him to a virtual lifetime of hard luck.

Note on our species

The sad fact of the matter is that Homo sapiens, as a species, is dwarfed in significance compared to the hydra creatures in the Andromeda galaxy, with their millions of years of advanced civilization, or the confronting lobes, whose existence depends on an array of intelligent host species who have been domesticated. Ultimately, our best hope resides in the possibility that we will give birth to an advanced machine civilization.
There have been eras in our history when this planet was notable in its creatures, and I suppose this is one of them, however. We are destined to be so brief, not like the dinosaurs or the ammonites, and few of us are likely to fossilize.

A Goblin Speaks

First of all, let me introduce myself as a goblin. My name is Zog. I am a red goblin. There are black goblins and orange goblins and green goblins too, and swamp goblins, and bogomils too. Hobgoblins are goblins too, I suppose. We red goblins is a little smarter than most of the other kinds, i suppose, and maybe we is the smallest too. People that walk around in the sun all day, men and elves and persons like that, thinks goblins are bad. We are not bad. We do what is in our nature, same as them. We steal from the two legged ones that build houses up there in the valleys and the plains, because that is what goblins do. If they did not like it they should not live there, above where we choose to live. We got there first.
People up there say we set traps for them and steal their children to live among our own. I suppose this is true. We set out traps because we like trapping and once again, if you do not like being trapped by goblins, you should stay away from goblins. We steal their children because they leave them where we can get to them and besides, some of them should learn our ways. What the surface dwellers do not know is that we send those children, as adults, go back among men and walk among them. We have our spies, same as anyone else, same as the elves and faeries. What the surface dwellers do not know is how many a beautiful young girl among them is charmed by a goblin friend and lead away to live with us willingly. They say the really wise among us, the tallest and the prettiest, have human blood, but i believe otherwise. Most goblins is ugly to surface dwellers and to be perfectly frank most surface dwellers is ugly to goblins. The flesh is so pale and fat up there, the living too easy, the teeth in the mouth lacking any sort of point and the nose a mere button on the face. There are a few of you that are beautiful to us though, and there are a few of us, usually kings and queens, that are beautiful to you, surface dwellers.
Most goblins is not that smart compared to dwarves or elves and such, but our smartest are even smarter than theirs. Goblin swords are second to those made by dwarves, and are better than eleven swords any day. Even elves know this. Goblin machines is as good as dwarf ones, and last longer. Nobody ever asks us how this happens, but the fact of the matter is that a few of us is very smart and those same goblins is usually stronger than the others too so as not to get bullied to death before realizing their true potential.
Goblins like to live under the ground, in caves, but we also live in tunnels we dig, and in houses we construct of stones, under dead forests and in places where the sun do not shine too much. We eat bread and meat, same as you, surface dweller, but spiders and mushrooms too and we farm the last two things underground for soup and such things.
Every kind of goblin has a king, or a queen, or both, and sometimes the goblins fight. Usually we do not though because usually we is in service of some kind of foreman; a dark lord of a god that lives at night or maybe an older dragon or some such creatures as i cannot name. It was us and the orcs that fought the elves and men in middle earth, yes, but the tales you read do not dwell so much on the many times we won, rather than lost. It is true that we hate gnomes but the gnomes started it by hating us and the same goes for dwarves too. We would hate elves too but they is too snooty to even notice us so we think little of them and spend our nights thinking of ways to trap gnomes and rid the land of them.
If there was one think i could say to a human, at least one of the humans that live on the surface and not the eyeless kind we have down here in the caves, it would be to give us a little respect and maybe leave a beer or two out unopened at night, because if you leave us a beer we will not steal your children or set fire to your house, and if you leaves us some food too we will take it as rent for that patch of surface you live on, above us, and we might even get used to you being up there and leave you alone.

What Exactly ARE the Yo Gabba Gabba Creatures??

Brobee is probably a shambling mound.

Ruby is 21 months old, and we watch a lot of Yo Gabba Gabba together. If you do not know about the show, you have probably googled it by now, so i need not explain it. My question, shared by nearly every viewer, is what the HELL are the protagonists. Sure, you can give the lame Richard Dawkins no mystery answer and say that they are cartoony creatures made by the designer Kid Robot to communicate a sense of otherness and friendliness combined, and to look cool to parents as they deliver repetitive diatribes, in song, on the virtues of sharing. Yes, fine, but from a more in-universe perspective, as Wikkipedia would define it, what the bloody hell are those things?? Dear Reader, at Blood on a Spaceguitar, we are uniquely qualified to identify monsters, so let me share my taxonimic assessments of them.


1) DJ Lance Rock is a well-known club DJ and is a real person. He really does have a sister, named Kemba Russel, by the way...so his sister Kimba is real. His character on the show has significant magical powers, most notably the ability to fly, and of course, to animate and de-animate the inhabitants of Yo Gabba Gabba land. Interestingly, he cannot enter that series of pocket universes without the aid of Plex.

Yes, Gabba Gabba land is a system of four linked pocket universes, with a common electrical grid understood only by Plex, who alone has the power to throw a switch and turn the lights back on if they go out. None of these places makes sense from a geometric point of view because Moono and Brobie need to be transported to a separate set, through the usual white void Lance Rock occupies, to go to a family house Moono must frequently return to. Each is linked to one, or two adjacent partners via a series of square dimension doors, though there seem to be invisible freeways running through the void that DJ rock walks through as he comes and goes about his business.

Dimension door? You heard me. That is a Dungeons and Dragons term and I use it proudly, because only Dungeons and Dragons gives people a perspective by which to answer such dorky questions in a way that has some objective structure. For instance, Dungeons and Dragons can tell you who would most likely win in a fight between a vampire and a mummy (almost certainly the vampire), or a goblin and a dwarf (advantage to the dwarf, but they are hereditary enemies and would never be fighting alone).

So, I picked up my field guides, a smattering of Monster Manuals from the first and third editions, and my memories of books I have lost.

The five protagonists clearly spend much of their time in a carrying case, as inanimate toys, by DJ Lance Rock. He also has a second, rarely-used case containing the members of Moono's family. Thus, they are animate toys, who enter a series of toy universes, by a godlike overseer. This, of course, including the extraimensional goofiness of invisible freeways and wierd geometry, usually going from couch to coffee table, is exactly how children play with toys. A toy will become animate, teleport to another room in the kid's imagination, or follow an illogical freeway through the air, to enter the frame of reference of other toys.

1) Plex. Plex really is a magic robot. Robots do not occur in any D and D campaign I would play, but they occur in some. The character is about a fifteenth level magic user, who is unaware or unconcerned with his vast powers, and plays the role of a loving caretaker to the others. The creature has perfect common sense and is incredibly patient and tolerant, he also has a sense of fun, friendship and play, though the concept of fun had to be explained to him, though when he realized what it was, he was able to put a name on feelings he had clearly been experiencing. Wierd Al Yankovik wanders through with his circus on his own somehow, and Jack Black, running out of gas on an invisible freeway, gets stranded there for a while, but mostly, Plex is responsible for beaming characters into and out of these pocket universes. He can even shrink the toy characters into a smaller frame of reference, the underground world of the oskybugs, with his amazing powers. For some reason, the logs in Brobieland need to be dusted by him, indicating that he is a caretaker of Yo Gabba Gabba Land in many unspecified ways. Clearly, this place is a sort of metaphor for a day care center or preschool, and he is a sort of babysiter. Give him teleport, dimension door, whatever, as long as it is not a combat spell, he probably has it. The character has an armour class of ten, by the way, and one hit point, because he is rendered comatose and nearly destroyed by a snowball in one episode, though his other powers are vast.

Now things get fun. Each creature clearly has elemental properties, of some sort, because the four pocket universes they occupy have an elemental logic symbolized by the character. Toodies is a land of perpetual winter and snow, Brobie's is an autumnal forest, Foofa's is a land of spring and summer dominated by flowers, and Moono's is a rocky and warm desert or moonscape inhabited by ants and talking cacti. Moono we know to have a nuclear family. and we have seen adults of his species, but the others we have not seen as adults. Each is in the mindset of a small child, and each has been an infant at some point in its existence. Brobie is four years old, but we do not know the ages of the others. Only Brobie required a diaper as a one year old. They all possess a stomach and eat food. Even Plex, the robot, comes from a design that must spend some time in the body of a small robot, with the mind of an infant, so childhood is universal even to the robot, who has the mind of a sensible but nonauthoritarian adult, has a baby niece. Presumably, Plex's highly intelligent mind needs to be educated like that of a human in order to function.

2) Easiest is Toodie, who is clearly a white dragon, or a white dragon with some blue dragon ancestry. She is a creature of a pocket universe dominated by cold, possibly also inhabited by winter fairies, where frozen lakes exist and salmon and trout swim under the ice. She may actually be dragonkind, with some human ancestry as well, because though the most energetic and impulsive member of the group, she clearly has a good heart and is far from evil. Even among evil species, such as blue dragons, there are good individuals, especially among the hatchlings, and Toodie is obviously a hatchling. It was not much of a stretch for her to pretend she was a dragon in the dress up episode, as it is not a stretch for Plex to dawn a wizard's cap. Toodie is human enough to get a cold, however, and need to be treated by Anthony Bourdain, the doctor. White dragons have some connection to that para elemental plane at the intersection of the elemental plane of water and the negative material plane, and that explains ToodieLand. It is scary to imagine how powerful and dangerous she will become as she ages, it is good that she will be extremely well-socialized.



3) Brobee is clearly some sort of shambling horror. This is not to say he is evil, and in many ways he resembles the DC comic character, the Swamp Thing, who was a person of the greatest possible virtue, comparing favorably to even Batman.



The DC comics character is actually an Earth Elemental, of the specialized type that represent the living part of the plane that is influenced by the positive material plane, and Brobee, since he has a human stomach and many other human attributes, is most likely a creature with an elemental bloodline which also includes humans, a genasi...though his shape and appearance suggest some affinities with the shambling mound..... It is my guess that Brobee will reach a point where he will assimilate and devour everything in his path, growing to enormous proportions, and the "party in his tummy" will be a very real apocalypse for Yo Gabba Gabba Land.



4) Moono is quite clearly a cyclops, but there is more to it than that. Cyclops are actually described in the volume Dieties and Demigods, with the Greek Mythology Pantheon, a rather obscure source. Heraclitus writes of a good cyclops, and they are clearly not all stupid and evil. Moono and his family are nice even by the standards of YoGabbaGabbaLand, a place where no real violence can possibly exist and evil is impossible. He is nice, even among very nice little monsters. He among all of them seems to have the stuff of a hero about him, Toodee showing the potential for deception and cruelty and Brobee being downright maudlin at times. He has a beast within him, and in the bacchanal of childhood play, bites his intimate friend Foofa.



Since we see his whole family, my prediction that the adults of his species were not borne out by future seasons of the show, he is essentially full size, though he towers over the rest of YoGabbaGabbaLand and is a giant by human standards. His family is very much like a human family. Unlike Brobee, he did not germinate from a spore, or like Toodee, hatch from an egg. I wonder about some attachment to the elemental plane of earth, however, possibly through a lineage including xorn, which would explain his columnar appearance.



5) Foofa is certainly the hardest to identify, so here my taxonomic skills are strained, but I think I have her figured out.




She is clearly connected to the Elemental Plane of Earth, specifically that current of living things that runs through it. She and the swamp thing, and Brobee, could share a summer home there. In the DC comic, The Swamp Thing, it was called The Green, and developed in detail. She also has faierie affinities, as evidenced by her desire to play the role of a faerie or faerie princess at every opportunity. She is the most analytically intelligent of the four children, though Moono is very inquisitive. She and Moono seem to be closer to each other than to the other monsters, though the two female characters, Foofa and Toodie, also share a bond, as do Moono and Brobie. She is a vegetable creature, a fact made obvious by the flower perpetually in bloom on her head. She is shaped like a sack, though a cute one, and it is my guess that she is neotenically arrested in some sort of larval form. Clearly, her bloodline includes high elves, faeries, and probably dryads or nymps as well, it includes some monstrous plant creature as well, my guess being a neo-otyugh, explaining her understandable pathos at having the mind of a sensitive and intelligent young girl in a body destined to, or suited to, grow into a horrible, devouring monstrosity.

A Goblin Poem

Oh, dark of night, may you last forever
And may the screech of the owl and howl of the distant wolf
beckon me along under your skies
to surprise the humanfolk in their beds
and take all their valuable possessions as they sleep,
to set traps for their brave warriors and foul the water
of their wells.

Oh, deep caves, may you stretch on forever underneath
the earth, feed and shelter me with your sweet batmeats
and endless rivers full of blind fish, may i smell the rock
below my feet and feel your coolness forever.

Oh, goddess of evil, Thuzok, queen of all goblinkind,
may you reach out your hairy arms to me and wrap me in
your bosom, for if I die under the foot of the Rok or
by the arrow of a treacherous elf, I will come to you tonight
beloved one.

A Partial List of Extrasolar Monsters You Should Avoid

Cerambranian man-swallower
Necrotic spore-thrower
Arcturian brainweb worm
Eobrontops
introduced Requium sharks
pyro beetles
Delgonian Mind Leach
Nadrick, of Palain 7
Sargon
introduced venomous warp spider
howler
white tipped neoshark
pig destroyer
Red shafted impaler
creeping shadows
skull flies
zoospores
Xenomorph, variety seven
Xenomorph, variety six
parachuting doll demons
executioner fungi
fangstones
purple worms
doughballs
Mother
Solaris
Mersian
The Legion of Doom

Ophrys fuciflora Pollinator, Surrey (1)

dear ruby

it is tough to know what to make of a perfect day like this-they bloom like flowers and transform gradually into some kind of fruit. nothing is permanent though and there is a little sadness to the experience of such a thing because it cannot last forever, gradually taking shape on a playground with a stuffed bat and perhaps culminating on a patio at earwax, i saw a look in your eyes like you really understood what it means to love a person back, and for the rest of the day we were giggly and soft for each other and I did not know such a thing could exist were it not for you i never would. you tell a wonderful story and were a very good sport about the sandwich shop being closed, and i am glad you call me da da now.

Pterosaurs

The naked pictures of ex girlfriends and ex wives, they are somewhere in them, though only the negatives. as a friend said so many years ago, not to long after i shot some of those pictures, the negatives were all i had left of those people and i suppose that was true at the time, but now they are like geological eras buried under layer of sediment, the ecological character displacement of two species of mussels irrelevant after a mass extinction that uplifted the habitat into an eroding hillside. i suppose something fossiiferous is also evident in my relationship with this kindergarten era report card, so lifeshattering at the time, the M for most of the time rather than A for all of the time or N for never, appearing in every single box, both good and bad. as an adult, and a teacher with years rivaling those of my old teacher for the K era, that most cambrian of all of our eras in life, Tomotian even, i now realize that those Ms are probably the result of a time constraint on the teacher's part, perhaps a headache brought on by too many outside voices inside. From the eocene of my life I have pictures of my old house unrehabilitated, from the Cretaceous I have my wedding photos, but like fossil strata, there is a preservation bias here, and many wonderful years of my geologic history passed with barely a memento, and no photographs to speak of. my entire undergraduate college education is a ciper, save for a few strange writings, except that one taxa, the academic, uninteresting to me now, was preserved assiduously.

each of these moving events is a mass extinction of sorts...of possessions and also of the mementos we use to mark occasions. some of us need fewer mementos than others, but we tell a history of ourselves through them the same way crionoid skeletons mark the climate of a now extinct continental shelf, and like geological strata, they are irregularly obliterated at intervals, leaving us to guess at unknown common ancestors for my motivations to do things. some of them were beautiful and others were kind, some of them were lovers and some adversaries, my old analyses of Monet's Houses of Parliment is irrelevant to me, and my explorations into dungeon modules overstudied of late, though ignored till recently, and now i do a brief survey of some of these things that flowered like ancient Rhynia and flew about like pterosaurs, leaving traces of the strange continents of my past.

Gondwana

I think of distant Gondwanaland, its mighty glaciers and dark forests, its reefs and shoals and rolling dunes. I wish to return. To see the Glossopteris forests and once again feel the wind of the Tethys on my face, to gaze upon rivers teeming with labyrinthodonts and swim with dangerous ammonoids. to this strange lost place, its dragonflies the wingspan of an albatross, its tree trunks packed so thick a person could not squeeze between them, i can return in thought only, to a time before mammal and dinosaur alike, to a time when trilobites walked gingerly along the beast and the tully monster road the waves.

Time to think about ice ages again

sometimes i sail without a rudder on these things and start like a dagger stuck into a tenth grade history class map of the world. somehow the dagger always ends up in Kazakstan or in the South Pacific somewhere, both places being pretty much attractors for random stabs at our topography, space junk hitting the planet, causing another adaptive radiation of foraminifera or inciting mammals to riot and finally start laying eggs again. my little simulcrum ran a great many errands with me today and met the supreme challenge of sharing her ducks head on. megapode birds lay their eggs in piles of warm sand or sometimes in heaps of rotting manure, the challenge being to keep the decomposition going long enough to sprout baby birdlets with no nest sitting and presumably with more time to devote to laying more eggs and gathering more manure and I guess what I would like to say right here is that things are normal again and I can think about ice ages again. ice ages. so strange to be in one of these eras, a mass extinction era and an ice age era together, but all planets have phases and I suppose intellect and technology together are an invitation to those very practices that precipitate mass extinction regardless of the mindset that started it. technologies in and of themselves benefit environmental cataclysm because even the bone tipped clovis points were a superweapon in their time and many a mighty short faced bear must have faced them and feard its own obsolescence. too bad they did not live long enough to shoot with muskets, like the first grizzly encontered by Europeans, keen to test their killing devices against the super beast of the new continent. the killing of a grizzly or an elephant or a sperm whale is not a victory over nature for that matter because the biosphere has been looking for a path to the next extinction for quite some time now, setting it up with this peculiar orbit and snow covered albedo, in cycles, and now the mighty mosquito and ragweed will move out of their hidden strongholds and pave the way for the dominion of rats and beetles, horseweed and thistle. what mighty beasts will come in the future, after we are gone, in what way will we have brought them into being?

Amon Amarth - "The Pursuit of Vikings" Metal Blade Records

for you dan

you have made it through, spongy and magneto, horse and pig. you were among the first packed and now you are unpacked, sitting amid santa and missus claus salt shakers and thrift store kittens one without a cranium and used to store matches. this place has shelving and plant life. there are onions present. i can listen to any cd i can hunt for, because any semblance of order has been taken from them, an illustration of the futility of a life spent organizing cds. we had a party for the abandoned monkey, and the monster bowling pin left behind and unthought of. yesterday an orphaned wheelie pal, a caterpillar with the artifice of four wheels to improve on evolution's foolishness in not bestowing caterrpillars without wheels, made it home in a plastic storage cylinder, a bug in a jar. i am glad i am here because i belong here. i moved to this neighborhood at the terminus of last century because the rent was cheap and because it was the perimeter of the old wicker park and here i am again, as a renter, feeling at home and in place. i have met strange echos from the past in the form of my downstairs neighbor, who moved out as i moved in, who was my old cta companion twelve years back, and remembered my face immediately. while i was off getting married buying a house and having a baby here she was all those years with george, her husband, who had the mifortune of dying a year ago and has now managed to neglect the gardening, being dead. i promised her i would garden this place and carry on his legacy and the task of removing their old possessions from an old haunt bothered her exactly one iota, give or take an iota, less and now i must plant ferns and bulbs. i have crossed the x axis, i need to be here.

you are a welcome friend wise one.

Aploogies to the Ones I Left Behind

Stuffed monkey, thrown in a corner, staring upward at the ceiling. Houseplants to numerous to mention. Bas relief of the Last Supper, as served by skeletons, over-sulfured wine barrel. 11 Gallons of homemade wine in a French Oak barrel. 35 bottles of wine, some homemade, some amazing and old, vases. Monkey, the relief helecopter is on the way, and there is a seat on it for you. Fern, same thing. Some of you have to stay behind though. Painting of clowns squeezing the life out of Charlie Brown, bathtub full of old magazines, old shoes and purses. Some of you will find a new life in the punk rock haven to come. For the rest of you, your time has come in a catastrophe and I am woefully sorry. I will miss you, old house.

Yet Another Instar

This place is monolithic. Everything has been decontextualized. It is a bacterium trying to live with one gene after another missing from its genome and heterochromatized into a cardboard UPS shipping box. Oh, I wish I had the time and resources to continue this game until every gene but the barest housekeeping functions is inactivated, but the moving trucks come Tuesday afternoon, and that is an hour and a half away in -I have baby to take care of- time. The new place is a cipher now. It is a few keys needing to be copied and have monkey labels applied to them. It is the reality of a crazy landlord and a wonderful walk to one of three coffeehouses in my future. All around me though, are projects I completed, thinking I would be able to enjoy their status as finished in something approximating my old age. This thought drove me to do them, but in hindsight, each one of them was an intellectual exercise akin to years spent writing poetry. These poems float across my field of vision every few hours or so, because packing means delving into hidden corners and finding memories stuffed away in corners, or mailed back to a person from their parents, in an attempt to clear their own corners. Why they do this, house-owning parents, I do not know, but I have carried stuff in my hidie holes for other people, and some of this stuff will be orphaned with the new tenants of this place. The thought of them changing their mind, and leaving me to pitch this place to the bank as -yet another forclosure story- is both liberating and terrifying. One one hand, my new status as overseer of this place is terrifying, on the other hand, it fascinates me. In what way would I become a crazy landlord. I can hear them, the moving trucks, the moth crawls out of the cocoon, the bee chews out of its brood cell and into an open sunny world. Yet another instar. Yet another.

Prepared Statement

I wrote this monologue during those great old days at the Testing Ground, at Sweet Alice, in 1995. The neighborhood was still rough, and everyone was either addicted to heroin or at least thinking about how cool it would be to try some of that Nigerian heroin that was hitting the market and turning everyone into zombies. Drinks were cheap and I was in love. David Sedaris, though I know you are not reading this, I am sure you heard me read this one.

I don't know why I like to kill surfers. Perhaps its the stupid, self-satisfied looks on their faces. Maybe its their values. I just like killing them-seein' their skulls split open. My name is Donny. I'm a Venice Beach punk. I killed my first surfer in 1988. I was sixteen.

It was at the gas station on Sepulveda boulevard in Sherman Oaks. I was tryin' to sell this dickweed some ice. Ice was new in 1988, and back then, everyone wanted it-even surfers. This guy was big, really big, with a cocksucking health club body. He must have bought it at Gold's Gum. Stupid fuck tried to mess with me, goin "You're jerkin' me around, dude. What is this shit? LIke, I thought you had the goods..." He grabbed me by the collar of my trenchcoat and shoved me against the bathroom wall. Asshole thought I was tryin' to rip him off, because he bought some two hours ago, and now it was gone, and he wanted more.

As a rule, surfers are stupid. Back then, people didn't know about ice, including me. Ice makes people paranoid fucks. So I shot him.

I was carryin' a .38 snub nose in my pocket and just grabbed it instinctively as he pushed me against the wall. It went off. There was blood everywhere, and this dead surfer wearin' a UCLA tank top with a 6" hole in his chest. He was still struggling. I could hear him gurgling bubbles of blood like he was trying to speak. My trenchcoat was wovered with blood and pieces of him. I was a kid at the time, and I didn't know what to do. So, I just did what my instincts told me. I dropped my trenchcoat over the guy's face and walked right out of there. Dead surfer.

I killed my next surfer two hours later-on purpose this time. My buddy Dale and I were on the way to Madame Wong's to see Operation Ivy, and we stopped at a convenience store to buy St. Ides. Back then, white people dank malt liquor. The Korean guy behind the counter didn't have a problem with us buying the brew, but two pricks behind us kept hasslin him. It was a big, stupid jerk with long hair and his small, vaguely-faggoty looking friend. They kept sayin' shit like "Where's yer mom?" and "You're not gonna let them buy that, are you dude? They're underage." Under normal circumstances, maybe we wouldn't have killed them. The thing is, we were on crystal meth at the time, and thought we were badasses.

St. Ides comes in these 32 ounce bottles that break really nicely when you slam them over a surfer's head. Just hitting someone with a 32 ouncer usually won't slow em down much, but it causes em to raise their hands to their face so you can give em a boot to the balls. By the time the big asshole was on the floor, and I was stomping on his face, Dale had already taken the other one out. Dale never fucked around. He knifed the bitch. Just then, I got this floating feeling like "this is really happening, you can't turn back now, mutherfucker.", so I just kept kicking his head sideways until I knew I had broken his neck. Dale had already emptied the cash register. The Korean guy had split, he was out in the Street on Wilshire Boluevard. As if somebody was going to stop. This is the big city, dickweed. We left out the back door. I was nervous as shit, but Dale was already pounding a pint of JD.

Funny thing is, nobody caught us. I had a few homemade tatts on my forearms, back then, and it couldn't have been easier to identify me, with my jacket and safety pins. Maybe it was a language thing. To the Korean guy, we were just another two punks from Venice Beach. Who knows? The police suck, but I'm not complaining.

I started killing surfers on a regular basis about a year ago. You can call me psychotic, but I just know it has to be done. Surfers are the lowest form of life on the planet, the embodiment of all the really fucked up shit in the world-so I kill them.

A lot of people have a problem with the queers and the spades, but those ideas are out of date. How can people that fucked-over and shit-upon be the problem with society? I think the real problem is surfers. Surfers have a lot of money and don't have to work for it. Most of them have rich parents. By definition, every surfer has the money to buy an expensive board and wetsuit, and a lot of time to jack off at the beach. Look at any MTV segment, and you'll see what I mean. You see them running around with their disgusting, Barbie and Ken bodies, promoting the same materialistic crap people have been indoctrinating us with since we were born. They're tools-just look at the music they listen to. The Beach Boys played for Reagan. Get a clue, assholes.

It was my dad who taught me to shoot a rifle. He learned in the Marines. Asshole. You know the mutherfucker in Apocalypse Now who is surfing while that village is getting napalmed? That was my old man. He was a survivalist. Kansas City encourages that kind of thing. Before I took off to LA, he taught me how to clean a rifle, target shoot, the whole redneck works. Asshole. I would ahve shot my old man, if I had the guts back then. He was a prick, just like a surfer. Looked like one of the Beach Boys and thought it was cool to cheat on his old lady. Bang-later, dad.

I find it amazing that I could shoot four different surfers right off of their boards, on three different occasions, before the pigs caught up with m. Stupid fucks. I don't expect to get convicted. My lawyer says I can plead insanity, but that's not what I am gonna do. I'm gonna plead self-defence.

Dear Ruby

Dear Ruby,
So, we are in the middle of it..this moving event, and I am dismantling the only world you ever known, piece by piece, and expecting you to act normally and go to bed on time. I brought you to the Zoo the other day and we saw ducks. You have been a good little nugget. We are moving primarily because this place is not good for you. Lead paint enters the bloodstream and disrupts the migration of neurons. That is why we always mop together in the morning, Ruby, you are such a good little cleaner. In the new place, we will mop less and spend more time hauling laundry for blocks to the laundromat.
I wonder what damage I have done to my own brain with that heat gun, that sanding. I hope there was not too much asbestos in that beaverboard we have everywhere. Technologies change, and since the Romans we have been poisoning our children with lead to make them docile and stupid. I do not want you to become docile and stupid and therefore we mopped for months and now we are moving. It is impossible to live in a place like this and not work on it and the act of working on it is what must have made your lead levels so high last fall. This fall we will be walking distance from a decent park and dad and mommy will have a coffeehouse and a pub to go to. I have missed those things, though I will miss the chorusing crickets here. I will miss turning over rocks in the backyard with you and I do not know what to do with your sandbox. You will see more of mommy though, however, and I know that is what really matters to you. It will be much easier for her to get back from work and see you, and that is another reason why we are leaving.
We are renting this house to punk rockers, lesbians, and the sort of young people who live collectively and like to pay very little rent. First of all, this type of person never has children, and second of all, I think they are the only kind of people I could act as a landlord to. The break things, yes, all the time, but they also know how to fix things sometimes and I understand their behavior. I have no idea if this plan will work, but it gets you out of the house in time to keep your refusal to utter the words for "Juice" and "Green" from worrying me even more than they do, but we live in a society where doctors have made any departure from normative behavior and illness, and I think you communicate just fine with your "Yes" and your sign language, and your animal noises. I understand you pretty well and you know it. The fact of the matter is you are important and I do not care fuck all about economic investments when they get in the way of taking care of you. Many, many people were hit hard by the depression the country went into basically at the same time you were born and we have done fine so far so we can afford to take a hit if we have to lose this house. The truth of the matter is, Ruby, that fixing this place up was a fun exercise and I would do it precisely once in a given lifetime, but I would do it that one time. Your mother has itchy feet and mine are more planted, but this city is like a hundred small cities and we long to return to those other places.
We will bring all of the cats, of course we will. We will also bring your rubber duckies. I love you, Ruby.

The Soundtrack to the Magical Senior Prom I Never Had

Enslaved, Below the Lights.

It would have been a magical evening, my black metal prom night. Impossible, yes. My actual senior prom was years before black metal. Euronymous was still very much alive, and playing some memorable gigs, when I visited that hotel lobby with my actual prom date, decked out in a pink puffy prom dress and makeup that made her look like a desperate twelve dollar hooker.

No, this is not that prom. This is black metal prom night. In the burned out church, lit by torches, they arrive in singlets, twos, and clusters of twelve or more. Some of them wear homemade chainmail armor and carry broadswords, others wear camouglage and carry hardware store axes, but most wear spikes and studded leather, tall boots, and corpsepaint. There is a burning altar. A pyre of logs and dug-up coffins, heaped with church benches, ablaze against the night sky. It is not June. It is January, and it is snowing. Wolves howl. It is not early evening. It is 2AM, and most of these people have been up all night drinking and doing speed. Women in black dresses and corpse paint lead another prom date, a nude albino woman with enormous breasts and prosthetic fangs, by a chain leash and a collar.

There is a punch bowl full of clotted blood. Nobody drinks.

Somebody is passing around a human skull to sign. Girls are kissing it. It has not been cleaned since its demise, sixteen months ago.

The punch bowl is empty. The punch was laced with LSD. By now, people are seeing visions of Odin and Satan riding in the back seat of a limousine together.

None of them dance. There is no dancing to be done tonight.

Torches are passed out to the song "Havenless". It is time to burn the high school to the ground.

A Young Athiest Dreams of the Afterlife

I wrote this my freshman year at UCLA. That must have been 1987, I think. I was eighteen and living in the dorms. Dyksta hall had ten floors and a basement, but ground level was actually the second floor, because like everything in CA, it was on a hill. I had only been an athiest for three or four years, at that point, and I spent a great deal of time that year waiting for the elevator, because I lived on the ninth floor-two things which might explain the subject matter. This was a transcript of a dream that I had the night before, possibly the most intense dream of my life, certainly in the top five. I am transcribing it not having read it for twenty three years or so. I have not changed the words or corrected for my florid and inexperienced writing style, though it pains me to do so (or tendency to contradict myself), it is more interesting the way it is.

This dream basically sums up the Blood on a Space Guitar aesthetic, and belief system, and I wrote it in a dream decades ago.

I awoke to find myself lying in a hospital bed, staring straight up at the ceiling. I felt much better. I actually wanted to get up and go for a walk. Sitting up, I noticed my family staring mournfully, as if I weren't there. I got out of bed. I was about to say something really cynical like "sorry to waste your time by catching cancer, you can go as soon as I'm dead", when I realized how many tubes I must have pulled out by standing up. I turned around and realized why my family was acting so strangely.

There is no sensation exactly like looking down at your own dead body, frozen with a peaceful expression on its face. Lying on its motionless chest was a plain, white envelope with my name "Alan Molumby" typed neatly on the front. I furiously picked up the envelope-annoyed that any medical center would be callous enough to bill a person the moment they died. Upon opening it, I found a curious blue stamp, with 20cents printed on it and a note that apologized for the lack of a reception. It instructed me to keep the stamp because I needed it to get into heaven, which was on the ninth floor. It was signed simply, "God".

The shock of the situation sent me wandering blindly off in some direction-I'm not sure with because I must have walked right through a wall. I was in a crowded hall of the hospital, which was full of busy doctors and patients, who were completely oblivious to the fact that I was standing there completely naked. Ahead of me was a massive bronze elevator. It stood there as if it had been there the whole time-which was obviously not the case because it was located in just about everybody's way. Oblivious of it, everyone just walked through it as if it weren't there.

Feeling a bit awkward, I walked right up to it and pushed the UP button. It was insanely ironic that, even after dying, I still had to suffer the inconvenience of waiting for an elevator.

I ran back to my hospital room and kissed my family goodbye. I was back in time to watch the light for the fourth, the third, and finally the second floor light up as the doors slid open. The inside of the elevator was spacious and ornate. The usual board of buttons listed ten floors and a basement.

I tried to maintain a sense of adventure, reminding myself that, after being confined to a hospital bed for three months, my situation was an improvement of a sort.

I punched the button for the ninth floor wondering "If the everyday world is on the second floor, and heaven is on the ninth, what occupied the other nine floors?" I could feel no noticeable acceleration as the elevator moved, and the ride was unendurably long. I watched the numbers above the door light up until the doors finally slide open at the ninth floor. A light-haired, handsome man dressed in flowing white robes stood at the doorway.

"We're sorry about not having anyone to meet you." He said. "we don't usually make people use the elevator unless we're completely swamped." He continued apologetically. "Oh, have I introduced myself? I'm the demiangel Antigonus-St. Peter is out right now, taking care of some unfinished business. Now, let me have your stamp, and I can show you around for a few minutes." He opened a huge bound book full of hundreds of pages-some were empty, others were covered with stamps. "We have a joke here. When we run out of room in these things, we'll have to start letting people in for free."

"What's on the other floors?" I interrupted.

"Oh, nothing that concerns you" he said, "especially the first floor, that's for people who committed too many sins to be issued a 20cent stamp."

Can I visit a few of them if I get bored here?" I asked.

"Don't be ridiculous." he replied, casually. "Heaven is for eternity, and besides, why would you want to go anywhere else? Those places are not for you."

I snuck a look at the view behind him. A bright blue sky with tufts of white clouds glowed with a radiant light. The tops of Venitian and Gothic buildings broke up the horizon, brilliant orange light from stained glass windows fell on the flowers and trees that moved gently in the sweet breeze. Families laughed and chattered as they walked through the fields. The place looked unbelievably happy, and quite boring.

"These things don't expire, do they?" I asked. "Not unless you spend them by trying to get off somewhere else." He said reproachfully.

"I'll be back in a little while." I said as I examined the buttons in the elevator.

"Suit yourself." He said, patiently, as the doors slid shut.

I had pushed the button for the second floor. Perhaps I could arrange to be reincarnated back home, or at least see what some of the other floors looked like.

On the way down, the elevator stopped on the fourth floor A curly-haired woman in her late forties stepped on-she looked quite upset. I held the door open and took a good long look outside. It looked like the inside of a large old building-well lighted but cluttered with objects. A powerfully built, tall man with a lean bony face stood near the door (Note here..this man was my high school chemistry teacher), motioning with a pair of hands that wore black rubber gloves.

He wore a doctor's smock, and spoke with a deep voice.

"What's this place like-what do you do here?" I asked quizzicly.

"Not much goin' on here, just MOVIN' STUFF TO HEAVEN!" He sounded like a longshoreman. At that moment, he turned to direct a hospital stretcher as it passed down the corridor. Atop it was my own pale, dead body, still wearing the hospital smock. A succession of objects on pallets followed-bathtubs, cans of motor oil, and surreal objects I didn't recognize.

The doors slid shut, leaving me trapped in a metaphysical elevator with a hysterical middle-aged woman who wasn't wearing any clothing, either.

"Where are you from? What's wrong? Where are you going?" I asked hurriedly. "I got off at the wrong damned floor." She said in a weak voice. "The bastards charged me 3cents, so now I can't get into Heaven." I looked into her envelope, it had a single blue 15cent stamp and two blue 1cent stamps inside.

As we rode to the fifth floor, she babbled tediously about her life story. She had an air of weakness and I sensed a certain lack of imagination. The elevator stopped at the second floor. A muscular man in his early twenties stepped aboard. He stared at the two of us.

I was about to step out when he said "You an Indian." "No." I replied calmly. "Then you can't use your stamps there-they only take the green ones-I tried already.: I stared at him blankly. and then stepped back into the elevator. He glanced over his shoulder and hit the first floor button.

"You're taking us to Hell!" Shrieked the woman.

"What the fuck do you care?" He said. "You don't have to get out there, do you?". She looked away.

"Maybe there's a floor you can get into for 17cents." I said.

"I'm not interested, if I can't get into Heaven." She snapped.

The doors slid open at the first floor. A tall, incredibly attractive dark haired woman wearing a ninetenth century military uniform stepped into the elevator. She had bright, dark eyes. A magazine of machine gun bullets hung across her chest.

She took the muscular man by the arm, and said "I've been waiting for you, just hand over the 10cent stamp and I'm sure we'll be able to accommodate you here." She licked her lips seducitvely.

Outside, smoke drifted in sheets. Flames licked buildings of marble and alabaster. A lake of boiling tar could be seen in the distance, with a few legs jutting above it. The man refused to come, saying "I don't have to give it to you."

"You will." She said confidently. "Sooner or later,m everyone gets tired of this stupid elevator, of watching other people go to heaven where they can be happy..." The middle aged woman looked away. "You can't stay on Earth, either-its too frustrating not being able to do anything but watch idly as other people live out their lives. Sooner or later, everyone gives up and comes here-there's nowhere else you can go."

The woman hung about him seductively, her arms around his neck as she rubbed his leg with the inside of his knee. "I'll see you sooner or later she said, kissing him with inside lip."

"What about the other floors?[there have got to be other places to go to-there are eleven floors, including the basement, and nobody seems to be interested in anything but three of them. I felt as if I had interrupted them. The dark woman flashed me a quizzical smile. The midle aged woman and the man both looked at me as if I had just embarrassed them. "That's the unknown." said the middle aged woman "And if it was meant for me, I would have been told to go there by God." She looked angry. "Look what accidentally getting off on the wrong floor cost me-now I guess that means I should go to hell."

Jabbing her envelope at the dark-haired woman, she walked straight out of the elevator.

She looked straight at me and smiled. "Why are you here, kid? You could get into heaven/"

"How do I know that's where I want to be?" I whispered. "There are all kinds of places to go, now that I am dead." I exclaimed, bitterly.

"What's on the tenth floor?" I asked.
"Some old Greek and Norse gods-it costs a lot more than 20cents to get into there though-and you won't want to go to the fourth floor-that's more for objects than people.

"Thanks." I said, smiling at her. I kept trying to remind myself that I was flirting with an archfiend.

"I like you." She declared. "I was like you, once. A long time ago, I wanted to go from floor to floor, not too many people do, you know. For some reason, most people prefer a place like hell to the unknown. Before I came here, I saw most of them." She said. "I collected a book full of hundreds of stamps. I spent most of them getting my position here, but there are still a few pages left back at my home on the third floor."

"Aren't afraid he'll get to them?" "Are you kidding? He's too daft to tie his own shoe laces. Good luck, Kid.: She said, touching me on the lips.

She turned to the muscular man, saying "Even purgatory costs 15cents, too bad ou can't affort do go anywhere but here. See you soon." The door slid shut, and she left.

That was the end of the transcript I found in my basement the other day, going through boxes prior to a move. Though it was twenty years ago, I still remember how this dream ends. I take the elevator to the third floor, where I can get out for something like 17cents, and the man cannot. It is a beautiful, grassy place, with an early twentieth-century bandstand sporting a brass band, gentlemen picknicking with their families, and bicycles. I do not have too much trouble finding the devil's former house, as a mortal or whatever they are on the third floor, one floor removed from our reality, and there it is, that book of with pages of unused stamps.

The Most Brutal Metal Album Ever

The Most Brutal Metal Album Ever

Pantera-Vulgar Display of Power.

In the aesthetics of metal, it is pretty much impossible to describe a song, a band, a guitar riff, or a performance, without using one, or all of four adjectives: "brutal", "sick", "hard", and "heavy". If you asked a typical metalhead to sit down with a number two pencil and a sheet of college ruled paper and define each of those terms, he or she would probably stab you in the hand and leave. Listeners are amazingly consistent, however, in the way they use these terms. Some bands are great without ever being brutal. In Flames is almost never brutal. Sonata Arctica and Nightwish do not do brutal at all-EVER. Some of it is seems to be in the lyrics, some of it in the melodies, and a hell of a lot of it in the rhythm and the structuring of tempos, but "brutal" is pretty easy to put a finger on when you experience it as a listener. It is that feeling of wanting to put a hammer through four inches of plaster and lath, knock out a hole, reach through, and wring your goddamned neighbor's neck for blocking your driveway with his fucking SUV. That these feelings can be invoked and channeled, through music, is a powerful statement about who we are as a species. Brutal is all about testosterone. Brutal is not about killing orcs on a distant battlefield, it is about killing the man who mistreated your sister, or the pit bull who is loose in the alley.

Pantera pioneered brutal, and in many ways, nobody has ever gone farther. This particular album is, in my opinion, absolutely the most brutal metal album ever recorded. A great deal has been said about it musically, and it is regarded as a masterwork. Lyrically, it goes to some deep dark places. I have trouble listening to it, because it inspires me to go out to the nearest street corner and start beating up drug dealers with a bat, then set them on fire. This feeling persists for days and could cause me legal problems sooner or later. One thing that makes this particular album so successful is the personal nature of the lyrics-they seem pretty much from the heart and that is a chilling realization. It is pretty hard to find a place for these emotions, once uncaged, so I save this one for special occasions.

Some other albums that, to me, stand out as some of the most brutal:

Napalm Death-Mentally Murdered EP. More abstracted, more ambitious, and a much harder listen,.

Kreator-Pleasure to Kill.

This is one of my favorite albums ever, though the lyrics are far less personal (and much harder to make out) than any Pantera post Cowboys from Hell, and it creates a much less focused feeling of rage.

Macabre-Murder Metal. This is a masterpiece of brutality. I think it pretty much comes down to whether you can buy into their extreme flights of fantasy. I saw them play live, many years ago, and it was a little like seeing Gille de Rais on one of his killing sprees.

Most Perfect Black Metal Album Ever

I should probably mention here that Old Man's child's Vermin is the most perfect black metal album ever made, by my estimation, though there is a lot of great black metal I have yet to hear.

It is amazing. I suppose I am drawn to bands like this-I am a huge Bathory fan. There is so much that can get done when a single, crazy and probably ill-tempered individual, calls all the shots and executes his true vision. It is a masterpiece, especially because it has a sort of balance that a great deal of black metal lacks-a constant sense of evil and impending doom.

I person could seriously listen to the whole thing, imagining that spiders were crawling all over them, and have a good time. That is what Black Metal is supposed to do for us, that or go to war with an axe.

To The Queen of Winter

Hail, Mercia, Queen of the Winter

You, who wield a sword of frost and a halo of freezing stones.

Your beautiful lips the death of any man who touches them.

Your breath a memory of death and past lives.

I long for you.

Upon whose breasts I would die a thousand times.

The pale of your skin stripping my flesh and sinew

as I pressed my mortal frame, longing and breathless

against the loveliness of your desire.

I long for you.

You, who have not aged a day

as my frame has crept from youth to the footstep of old age

I have longed for your black lips and snow covered valleys

your snow white hair and your glacier eyes

you grow like a tree within me

I have felt you in my heart for so long

I have walked your forests when there was nowhere to walk to

I have stared into those woods at night.

I long for you.

A Cautionary Tale

I start by scavenging a few pieces of plywood. Before you know it, I have built a hut. I found some two by fours, and had some leftover nails. I already had a power drill. It was cordless, so I brought it into the back yard, and started adding a second floor to my hut. Soon, I realized, it needed a door. I added a door I found in the alley. I bought a lock set for it. I locked myself out, so I had to tip the thing over. I dug a big, rectangular pit and filled it with cement, and posts. I built a nice, solid frame she on those posts, and then dragged my hut on top of the thing. I had to cut a hole into the ceiling, then add a ladder, to access my hut. Now the upstairs had a door to nowhere, so the whole structure needed a deck. I sunk a proper foundation for the deck, with posts. The whole thing needed drywall. It also needed electricity, so I took care of that before I drywalled the place. I did not need a building permit, because this was just an experiment in building huts out of found lumber. I built a deck to the deck. I built another deck. Soon, the decks needed an overhanging pagoda ceiling. Once built, I was pretty set back monetarily, so I started writing a grant. I never mailed the grant, because the next day, I realized that my hut had started to build itself. Someone or something had drywalled the Pagoda, complete with framed-out windows, so you could still see my original hut, deep within. I had lunch, and a couple of beers, wondering who or what paid for these new materials. I was almost too broke to pay for the beer. By the time I came home, someone or something had added a moat. By next morning, the moat was a filled-in tunnel surrounding the compound, the thing was painted in Cape Cod colors, and someone had added wind chimes. I could almost see it growing now. Here and there, the plywood floor would creak, as an interior wall was added. Soon, that stopped, because there was interior carpet. The place had high-speed internet. I could tell this because someone or something was playing Pandora. I turned, to leave and go to work, when I realized I was walled in. Someone or something had built a palisade wall bounding my property. I have to admit, I freaked out for a few minutes, till I found the door. It had a handsome knocker. There was a new moat. Already, neighbors and strangers from all parts of town were gathering in my front yard, gawking. I walked outside to join them, noticing for the first time that the thing had assumed the shape of a ziggurat. I went to work. By the time I got home, the thing was ten stories tall. Something inside was playing piano. I opened the door, followed a long, red-carpeted hallway to a refrigerator stocked in expensive lemonade, and helped myself to a beer. These were not my beers. My initial building expenses had used up all my beer money. By the time I was done with the beer, I realized there was no front door, no outside, only my hut.

A VISION OF PURE METAL

Skulls, black obsidian, carved like Maya temple decorations, arrayed like peaches in some improbable orchard. Each and every one of them has the glowing eyes of DOOM. Oh, great ones, I crawl beneath you, through this hall of diabolical judgement, towards the INFERNUM. Guitars, like pickets, rise imposingly to either side of me. In the distance, where the two walls lead but do not touch, a column of flame rises, and before it, a throne. I have paid homage to you through DEATH METAL, through the most sinister of imaginings, through the loathsome, despicable, and decadent lifestyle I have lived for these many years.

Flames rise from every direction, and in those flames, images of strippers dancing on poles, saber-toothed cats bringing down extinct megafauna, girls in catholic schoolgirl uniforms setting fire to garages. The unholy IT sits beside its master, GREAT BAPHOMET, an a mighty stone made from the bones of extinct reptiles, magma from the formation of ancient supercontinents, and ten million broken guitar strings, all melted into chrome tailpipes, projecting from the thing like antlers.

Baphomet, so beautiful, the body and face of a Las Vegas hooker, eyes of a reptile. Observes.

This is the DEATH METAL level of Hell, deeper yet than the frozen lake, next door to Tartarus, where the imprisoned titans groan and strain against their shackles. Here, the strains of Deicide and Morbid Angel, Possessed and Goatwhore, wail against the disembodied screams of metal's victims. Metalhead, beware. One stray footfall from the path of TRUE METAL, and you could join these eternal outcasts, wailing in the wind for all eternity, rather than sit at the LEFT HAND of BAPHOMET, baptized in the wail of guitar.

Catastrophic break line rupture, tow truck, enforced picnic in the grass, auto repair bills

the lesson for the week is that i am, at best, half smart, and entirely foolish. i keep scanning the horizon, for things to look about, so that that terrible day will never come, but when it creeps around the corner, i practically invite the thing into my kitchen for orange juice and donuts. stopping a car is pretty damned important, something i should have learned from the internet, and i guess things could be a lot worse right now. there is a part of me that wants to be charmed, to have bad things never happen, even when probability dictates that a seventeen year old car is going to break down in spectacular ways. i guess i am a little attached to certain aspects of my life right now, the picnics, the park, but things change and things happen. still, it gnaws at me, a game i am loosing, against the giants i owe money to. last year, i could say that things are tough all over, and we are weathering this storm pretty damned well, but the storm is ending, and the giants who caused it have grown even stronger. when will it be time for MY donuts?

I Could Never Have Made it as a Hunter-Gatherer

How do I arrange to sit my fat ass on a barstool, and do goddamned nothing all day? Because if there is a recipe for this, I think I need to know how I might go about pursuing such an occupation. Perhaps I could become one of those people the call town drunks. Perhaps, instead, I could arrange to be born with a permanent, parasitic twin growing somewhere south of my bellybutton. Perhaps this twin would require a basket. Perhaps the government might be obliged to send me pills in the mail every single month. Perhaps I could live among the storks and ostriches, the only creatures that will accept me. I wonder how long I could live in a lean-to anyway. I wonder about cardboard boxes sometimes, too. If I could somehow claim the real estate under a cardboard refrigerator box, in Manhattan, I could sell the property and arrange to sit on a barstool for the rest of my life. How can there be any poor people in New York City, anyway? How can they call a person "homeless" when he has staked out a good spot under an overpass. Clearly he or she has a home, it is simply a very BAD home. Home is where the heart is. A person can live out of a suitcase, but not actually live in a suitcase. There are suitcases big enough to sleep in, I have seen them. I suppose it depends upon whether a person is short. I slept in a cave, once. The thing about my cave is that it had an oval depression, from where a mountain lion probably slept, on occasion. I slept in a mountain lion's bed once. I was a fool for sleeping in that mountain lion's bed. It had no sheets-it was a rock overhang. I do not know if I could have made it as a hunter-gatherer....probably not.

The Violent Hour

The Violent Hour

A Culinary Review

By PsyCHO Butcher

Chicago suffers from an unfortunate "second city" complex, a mayor who hates nightlife because his father was an abusive drunk, and a certain halfheartedness when it comes to doing anything that might be construed as "uppity". Fortunately, their is a little cloud hovering just south of the el stop at North and Damen avenues, and this strange miasma seems to block the banal rays we emit, by virtue of our own working-class chumpishness. The result is that this address spawns interesting businesses like serpents from a stone. True, the first two failed in short order. Mod was a wonderful place...the first failure-it had a science fiction flair to it, and mac and cheese so good I was tempted to break the window to the place and rob a portion from a customer. I liked the egg-and-spacemodule motif. It made me imagine I was dining on a planet where ninety percent of this dreadful species had already gone extinct, and those few of us that survived had ample deviled eggs to go around.

Del Toro had terrible service, but great furniture. Each chair was like a torture device. Fortunately, you can still see the saddle-barstools, more suited to sadomasochistic pleasure than to lattes, across the street at Cippollina. It was an interesting place, this second failure, with great tile and strange horse stalls for bathrooms.

Hopefully, The Violet Hour will stick around, because the city needs it. We need a drinking space that shrouds itself in veils of image. We need a place to drink expensive cocktails and pretend we are cooler, more literary, more travelled, and genuinely interesting than we are. We need a place that serves absinthe and chicken wings on the same menu. For now, we have it, and I approve quite strongly.

From the outside, the place is a cipher. They keep changing the exterior, from one cryptic ruse to another. Do not look for a sign, you will not find one. Once the valet starts parking cars, this is merely annoying, but just as they open the doors, it imparts a bit of a speakeasy feel to the place. To augment this, the entranceway is dark and heavily curtained, stark, and obviously purposed to give would-be patrons the unmistakable impression that they have walked into the wrong place and should leave. I like this. Darkness, drama, chandeliers, and very tall chairs that resemble thrones. This place is very black metal, and to risk belaboring the point, I approve. The place feels such like a maze-a patron needing to tiptoe and squeeze between chairs in the event that they do not guess the correct path across the room in the darkness, amid a forest of overly tall seats-that is was disappointed not to see a corner devoted solely to death traps for the unwary. Perhaps such a thing is too much to ask in a place that carries a Chicago Liquor license, but their cocktails are deliciously inventive and served with an air of drama.

The place seems purposed to scare away tourists, frat boys, and the lame. To seal the deal, the place has a dress code and requests that patrons do not use cellphones.

Now comes the subject that your churlish and stupid friends will raise, either at the mere mention of the place, or upon discovering that the cocktails there cost something like fourteen dollars each (I frankly do not remember, for reasons I will mention in a moment). They are worth it, each and every one. Of course they are. The bartenders lavish time and care on each drink, and use very fine ingredients. Neither of these objections hold any weight whatsoever if a person visits for the purpose of imbibing one, or perhaps at most, two cocktails. After all, who goes out in the evening expecting to spend less than twenty dollars (a person must factor in the tip)? Such frugal evenings are best spent, enjoyably, on the fire escape, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and trying to eek the last resin out of a cannabis pipe. Places like this are for the theatre and ambiance of the place, and if a good buzz is needed, that must wait for the second, or third drinking establishment of the evening. What would be the purpose of having more, at a place like this? To get drunk? Getting drunk at swanky clubs is for the stupid-for people who order bottles of expensive vodka served to their tables at night clubs and covet the experience of the VIP room. People like that can die, frankly.

I arrived with my usual coterie of exotic dancers and adult film stars, on a weeknight, just after they opened. I suppose I avoided the line by doing this, but the fact of the matter is that my companions had serious work to do later in the evening, bilking needy men out of money they would otherwise spend on their families. My cocktail was something called a Vincent's Downfall, a Van Gough reference, of course, an homage to its liberal use of absinthe. It was delicious. One of my companions, a longtime friend for many years, devoured a whole plate of chicken wings without stopping. If you have never watched a sexy woman, trained in the art of adult entertainment, devour a full plate of chicken wings as if the Earth was about to run out of food, you should. I do not remember much about our conversation, absorbed by lust as I was the whole time, but it was a great experience and a great room to showcase desire and lust of all sort, for chicken wings or otherwise.