the rainy day and the piano

the universe is fragmented into these layers, some of them we would call "real" and others distinctly not part of this reality. we all know this. this is how we can pour milk into our rice crispies and not be driven insane by the distinct possibility that it was another version of ourselves, a distinctly different person that existed merely seconds ago, that poured the crispies into the bowl to begin with. or is it Krispies? The man who spelled them incorrectly or at least in avoidance of the brand namature is a distinctly different person than the one who is refusing to push his cat away from the keyboard so that he can continue to write this. We are different, he and i. He has made his decisions and i have done my time in his shoes. Is that why we go through so much trouble to make these things that ultimately become memories? graduations and awards ceremonies, and days at the beach and at the zoo. soon they are gone, but in the participation of making the, we open up universes in which those people are, at least in theory, experiencing them in the present. this is good because i am an engine for the creation of these parallel universes and so are all the people that read this. this means that one index of the present is the future possibilities it is creating just by sitting there and the past, empty now, moments it believes it is connected with. every now and again i am sure we cross a reality that just happens to be the present in another timestream, and we cross over without knowing it. how could we?

a lament for the cephalopods

it is probably true to say that every squid dies for love, or some approximation of it. a pity then, that the cephalopod minds do not have the neurons to fully grasp the scope of what they are doing. that is the fundamental game of evolution-to survive and reproduce, but the game of survival is set against the game of reproduction, and sooner or later, a person, eight legged or two, finds themselves displaying color after color, pattern after pattern, brass knuckles and electric guitars, shotguns and poems, until all the ink has run dry and there is nothing left to live for save the chance at a single more mating attempt. i salute you, my eight legged brothers under the skin, for going about it the way you do. there are no half-measures when it truly comes down to it. to live to court another day is just that, another day to die in the act of seeking love or whatever comes closest to it. for us mammals, the fields of play are expanded sideways, and i suppose i will never know if Cretaceous ammonoids looked after their babies the way i hope they did. like the giant octopus, in its darkened boudoir, breathing oxygenated air over its babies till the life drains out of it.......either way, the eggs we incubate grow up to become replicators in their own right, bent of feeding and breeding the selfsame way we did. cephalopod brothers, and sisters

for you, baphomet

i long to touch your crowned head, your thorns. you are not a beast to be reckoned with lightly, yet you are there, Baphomet, and either you have sought me out or somehow i have had led you to myself by scent traces. perhaps it was all the scribbling, and perhaps it is the way i posture. nevertheless, here you are and you represent a genuine conundrum. you have rotated everything precisely forty five degrees, and now i am viewing everything, all of it, from the side. i could not see these facets before, and yet i long to have my old perspective restored. what do all these old plans mean now, after all this, these games i have played over the ages, the scores now turned upside down and inverted, like crosses yes, like the hanging man, or worse still, the hanging man restored to standing. we speak separate languages, and that is why i cannot trick you into sitting down at the table for a game of checkers. this is chess, i see, your game, and i am sitting down to play.

more....

Onward they walked, till at last Blue stood in the vault of the PowerMind. It was brightly lit, and crowded. More than a thousand robots of all shapes and sizes stood, watching her entrance with serious expressions.

A great blue eye appeared in the space above her, and the PowerMind uttered a single word.

“Speak!” it said.
At that particular moment, Blue felt smaller than she had been before. She was tiny before the magnificent PowerMind, and she felt it. She wanted to curl up in a ball and go away, never to come back. Something was very wrong here and she did not have the courage to face it. Still, she stood proudly, trying to summon the words. Finally, from somewhere deep within her, some place her Robot Mother put there through hours of loving attention, something lesson after lesson with Robot Six taught her, a conviction that the truth must be spoken somehow propelled words from her mind.

“Your excellency.” she began. “I have found unequivocal evidence that robot civilization began on planet Vulcan, and that robot life was preceded by at least one earlier form of living thing.”

The blue eye glared down upon her, beaming a harsh and steady malediction.

“In addition, your excellency.” Blue continued, feeling that it was too late to stop now. “Our solar system has been visited by an intelligent species that arose hundreds of million years ago on Vulcan, and is most likely, ancestral to our own.”

The blue light intensified.

“Its....impossible.” it blurted, clumsily. This was a PowerMind taken aback, surprised, even terrified.

“Let me present my findings, starting with the fossils.” continued Blue, and the robot spoke for three hours.

rough draft

The two walked, together past hexagonal bulkheads and down strange tunnels. Zero gravity makes a large place seem very much larger, because there is so little sense of where a person has just been. They walked over, or through, a vault with thousands of hexagonal tanks, all holding tiny creatures Blue could make no sense of. They were fleshy and green, not steely and grey. They had soft, feathery gills projecting from them, and tiny openings. With an admixture of awe and surprise, Blue realized that each of them had a mouth. Such a strange thing to have, and she was now seeing them in the flesh. Blue peered into a small hexagon, barely larger than her hand, and stared at the minute passenger.

“It is my duty to take care of my brothers and sisters.” said her new friend, as if that notion made any sense to Blue at all.

“Do they need to eat?” asked Blue,

“Yes, sometimes.” her friend answered. “Just like me.”

All of this was shocking to Blue, but she tried not to act too surprised. Her new friend was one of these things, whatever they were. Strange though, because despite the strangeness of her engineering, she was a machine, at least on the outside. Blue began to wonder many things about this strange new friend. Whomever she was, she had a name, though Blue could make no sense of it for the time being. She continued talking, but But blue lost her train of thought. Blue gathered from the things her friend was saying that each of these passengers had a name as well.

“What is it like?” asked Blue.

“What?” the visitor answered.

“To eat.” asked Blue.

“Wonderful.” said the visitor.

Sad

You keep waiting and waiting for a good time to talk, to share things, and that time keeps being pushed back. Finally, it does not happen at all, because things have changed and now there will never be that time. I do not want another one, I want this one, but i cannot have it now and nobody will listen anyway. I will miss you. I wish you did not have to move away and I wish you did not wait to tell me things in person because I am the last to know and it is not clear when we will ever see each other in person again.

invertebrate

a faint murmur of something otherworldly, rain on a tin roof, the smell of night flowers.