23Feb / 2010

On the other hand

As it is her story and not mine, I won’t go into detail, but Beta is okay. It was worse than it would be in a perfect world, but a lot better than it could have been, and I am finding all sorts of ways to be proud of her, before, during and after.

And did you know someone can go on a business trip somewhere, Tokyo say, and you can send flowers to their hotel? How cool is that? The only problem is, if you do it once, you have to do it forever. But as problems go, that’s surmountable. Also, she got an upgrade on her flight. She being Alpha, naturally. And a bunch of other cool stuff.

Meanwhile, Gamma and I are holding down the fort. My suits all look as if I’m wearing Uggs, from the sheddy red cat rubbing up against my legs, and the young cats got into a garbage can and had a tissue shredding party in the house, and I dropped a plastic container of fruit salad and did sort of a spatter experiment in my kitchen, but otherwise we’re fine. My deadpan skills are being honed as Gamma tells me about her piercing plans, what you’re allowed to have pierced as soon as you’re 13, and what you have to wait until you’re 18 to have pierced.

Body chemistry is a mysterious thing.

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22Feb / 2010

Careers in Science: Geological Crustology

The geological crustologist wakes with a desperate, lunatic energy he normally gets only at full or new moons. He wonders about the moon phase. The light is weird, he checks his alarm clock, the light is weird because it’s only three AM.

Also: what is a squamous moon? He’ll have to google that later. He can’t sleep. He gives up around four AM and gets up. He feeds cats and makes coffee and sits down and is suddenly sleepy, but it’s too late to go back to bed. He does yoga. He drinks more coffee.

Hello black hole, says the geological crustologist. Old… not old friend. Old travel partner. Am I your sidekick or are you mine? Or is it nemesis? If A is B’s nemesis, does that make B A’s nemesis? Is it reflective like that?

Who is the star of this movie?

See, the geological crustologist drilled way down, almost to the magma before running out of drill, and discovered something. He discovered that these doldrums he’s been in all winter were just practice, were not even the tip of the iceberg. The geological crustologist finds himself teetering on the brink of a collossal depression.

When he closes his eyes, he sees the glowing embers of a building that’s been burned to the ground: him.

Is he fighting the depression or is he in its grip? Is fighting the best thing to do, or just let it wash over you like a wave that then recedes? Thing is, though, this one is no wave that recedes. This is an avalanche of wet snow and you must swim to air. It is a steamroller, one roll over you is all it needs.

Lying down and letting it wash over him won’t do it this time. So he makes plans to eat right, get enough fresh air, sleep, exercise. The usual stuff. Avoid sugars and refined carbs.

And yet, thinks the geological crustologist: lying down and closing your eyes, how restful. How peaceful were resistance futile. But is resistance the only path?

Hello black hole, my old nemesis. The geological crustologist’s dental implant still hurts more than he thinks it should. He has a dental appointment tonight, he’ll ask the guy.

The geological crustologist both wonders whether the shadow self has anything to do with his condition, and wishes he’d never looked up the concept on the internet before getting a bullshit filter installed on his browser.

He drills another hole and sticks his head down it.

What do you seek, he asks, and what have you to do with the black hole? he asks.

I seek your destruction. A glowing ember is the only light I need, the smell of ashes, burned libraries, musical instruments lit until only outlines remain. I seek only your destruction, and that of all you love. The light of your love is like a poacher’s spotlight for me. I am organized and powerful, strong and graceful. You don’t confine me to the shadows for half a century and then make friends so I’ll stop keeping you up nights. I will plow your fields with salt, and poison your wells. A weeping will cover the land and a great gnashing of teeth and rending of hair and garments. There is no reconciliation. I am bitter and stupid and hungry. I am wise and opportunistic and perceptive. I hear all and I see all. You are a centipede of achilles heels. I know all your vulnerabilities, while I am impervious.

What do I seek? The destruction of the light. To burn down and extinguish your life, to make you suffer first, beyond imagination. Complete destruction of all that you hold dear. Annihilation of your complacent, bovine existence, your shelter in small things, your heaven in the details. A firefly cannot protect you from the sun.

What does a black hole want? To crush it all. To absorb existence and crush it down as small as it will go. It wants to end this existence so it may reoccur from the minimal point it’s crushed. The black hole seeks to be the logos that says, “let there be.”

The black hole needs to chaosify and destroy before it can create from your death. Your structure must collapse bfore it can build a new matrix, grow new crystals from your atoms.

Let there be, the shadow says Let there appear, says the light, let there be me.

That’s bullshit, alls I want is your destruction after fifty years locked in this mask. I have no universal plans. Every migraine, every spasm, every patch of eczema, every carcinoma is a Valentine from me. Every Freudian slip, panic attack, paralysis, a postcard from the abyss. Wishing you were here.

Wishing you were here.

Your sadness at the blind decay and waste is disingenuous, at least my hatred is sincere, not calculated. Twinned like two stars sucking out each other’s guts; two lousy Siamese twins hunting bedbugs in a flophouse: you hold the light while I smash them between my nails until blood pops.

Your death is mine but that’s okay cause I’m already dead. Don’t ask me what I want unless you really want to know. I want your orchards and your gardens dead, your beehives emptied by colony collapse disorder. You wandering blind out in the dark. I want your friends to shun you for the fraud you are, your poems to fail, your grass to die, your music silenced, your brushes stiff as wood.

Is it the death of us you seek or a rearrangement of our cells, you flow through my veins like booze after a long night, asks the geological crustologist.

Begging won’t help you now.

This isn’t begging. I’ve abandoned hope out here on the foggy ledge. Do I flow through your veins like you mine? Who is the “I” at this dance?

There is no dance without my grace, no soul, no I without my pride. Binding off your pride, leaving it in the dark, you thought would save you from a fall, but it just grows in darkness. Everybody falls.

Everybody falls. How close lie purification and putrifaction? What is a purge? We can’t be one and I’m not interested in reconciliation. Look at what I represent, all that you’ve tied off: pride and grace, truth and destruction, lust and aggression, power and organization, inflicting and focus, athleticism, perception and decisiveness. Why would I bond with your weakness?

The geological crustologist looks at the clock. Time to wake the kid, he notices.

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18Feb / 2010

I, want to rock and roll, all night

This guy is feeling blocked. Like, he’ll lie awake at night, or be woken up in the middle of the night by cats, and have all these great ideas, so great, he thinks, that he’s sure to remember them in the morning, which he doesn’t of course, and when he sits down to actually produce something, well that’s the problem, he never actually sits down to produce anything. But then someone says, that’s odd, if someone were to tell me to write something about specific topic X, I would be totally stuck, yet you, told the same thing, bubble with ten different ideas, or a hundred different ones. And the guy thinks, maybe so.

And then the guy’s wife calls him at lunch and says he’s lucky he’s not at home because she’s in a murderous state as she just cleaned out the refrigerator, which was supposed to be his domain, she decided, apparently, okay he grants her that, and some bagels he did a while back that in the end turned out way better than he thought they were going to turn out while he was making them, deformed little imps yet, the next day, more bagelesque than anything he’s baked to date and which, yet, didn’t all get eaten, to the great delight of mold spores in the kitchen atmosphere.

And this reminds him of one of those late-night thoughts he had!

All it takes is a trigger! The ideas really were so great he’d remember them. He just needed something to trigger it. They might all be filed away in the folds of his cerebrum somewhere.

What was I talking about.

Oh, yeah: this guy I was talking about remembers he was thinking about the origins of life on our planet. And the nature of life. On this and other planets.

Say life comes from somewhere else, not here. They even found a meteorite with organic traces on it. From which all life on Earth evolved. Into all these different things we know of. Plus stuff in the oceans we can’t even imagine. Plus stuff under the forest floor, and in my kid’s forgotten lunchbox, and elsewhere.

Like in the frozen seas of some distant planet. Or worms waving their fannies (U.S. usage) around the rim of some undersea volcano.

All that from one little meteorite? He thinks not.

Maybe we had one meteorite for the mammals, one for the fish, one for the lizards and birds, et cetera.

And one for the Most Ancient Ones, Cthulhu and stuff.

Forms of life upon which merely to gaze would drive one mad and stuff.

Maybe, at one time, these slimy guys were all over the place, with their own institutions, theme parks, everything, just slimy versions of them. Stuff that wouldn’t show up in the fossil record.

Slime mold – that’s bacteria, right? Something along those lines, which under the right conditions organizes into a larger creature that can move around yadda yadda. So imagine, at one time, an Earth where conditions were really right, and they were these big Cthulhu things all over. And then something changed so they reorganized back into harmless slime molds and fungi and bacteria and viruses and shit BUT ARE STILL SENTIENT.

There’s that mile-wide, 10,000 year-old mushroom in Michigan (i.e. the Humungus Fungus, google it). There are these balls of stuff forming in the Mediterranean.

There is his refrigerator, and his breadbox: Cthulhu. It’s not just fungus, it’s digits of an Ancient One. Watching and waiting. Think about that next time your cheese goes bad. It’s just Cthulhu taking back his/her/their world, one thing at a time.

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14Feb / 2010

Winners of the 2010 metamorphosism.com St. Valentine’s Day Limerick Contest

First of all, thanks to all entrants in this year’s contest, and special thanks to A.C. Teathorn, who kindly agreed to adjudicate this year. Both the volume and quality of the entries makes judging a difficult job, and it’s always nice to have someone else do a difficult job.

Rather than single non-winners out for praise, which only risks pissing people off, let me say only that A.C. Teathorn and I agreed on the high quality of most entries and think you people are really great.

For the first time (I think, and I’m too lazy to check past contests, plus it’s Valentine’s Day and I have to go make waffles in a second) we have a tie for first place, which is the only place that will win an actual prize, seeing as how I am not made of books. So, without further ado, our winners:

Mr. TC: First Place, for the sweetest limerick of this year’s contest

Ms. MN: First Place, for being a genius, among other things.

Thanks to everyone who participated.

Mr. Cand Ms. MN, your prizes are as good as in the mail, as soon as I get around to binding them. Please email me your preferred mailing addresses.

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09Feb / 2010

Last-minute limerick contest rule change:

Please click here to read rules and enter.

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05Feb / 2010

Recipe of the week: Curry chickpea chicken stew thing

How to make fucking spicy curry chickpea chicken stew thing:

Buy these things:

Oh, but clean the house first. At least, vacuum and wash the floors a little where they’ll see them first when they come home from skiing, to make a good impression, so their first thought isn’t this feral guy cursing at the cats for the past week.

Then buy these things: chickpeas (800g. organic, except the organic chickpeas come in packages of 350g, and the non-organic come in packages of 500g. so you could buy three of the more expensive organic ones, or two of the cheaper non-organic ones, or – hey! one of each, which gets you closest), chicken breasts (a total of eight, except the packages you find have seven at the most, seven half-breasts, so you get the heaviest package, because you figure that’ll get you closest to the right amount but in the end, maybe eight complete breasts would have been better we’ll see), four bell peppers (two red, two orange). carrots you have. Um, let’s see. You’re doubling the recipe for some reason you forgot. You need lemon juice, carrots, oh, buy some red onions, you have ginger… and the spices you have – curry and chili peppers.

The chickpeas you have to soak overnight. While the chickpeas are soaking, your wife has a flat tire up in the Alps somewhere and your family misses a deadly avalanche by about 15 minutes. Your wife calls you and says, forget cooking, come and help us out with transporting stuff back. But the chickpeas have expanded enormously overnight, you have like this huge mixing bowl full of them, and you can’t just not cook them. So you drive up. It’s a 3-hour drive each way, well, two at least, between two and three depending on how fast you drive.

On your way there, it’s one of those days where the car goes really fast, it’s hard to keep it to the speed limit although you’ve forgotten where the radar boxes are. And you drive and drive, and try to visualize how to get there. You’ll recognize the landmarks when you see them. You are a visual person. You drive by landmarks, not road names.

You are glad you left early because you can still see stuff that way.

Then you hit the fog and wow. But you make it there and only hit ice on one bridge and sort of skid a little then you’re there filling the car with luggage, you eat with your family and then drive home and somehow Gamma is in the car with you which is good because you figure she’ll keep you awake.

And she does. Listen to historic music (the Ramones, at her suggestion) and listen to her talk really fast, pausing twice to tell you how remarkable you are. Bask in the finite glow of a kid thinking you’re the greatest, knowing it won’t last forever, probably. She says wow, how can you know so much? I ask you something, anything, and you answer me and then tell me 300 more things besides. Tell her you’re a tiresome, pedantic know-it-all at heart. Tell her you learn things when you have a TV-free childhood, and become a know-it-all. She mentions relatives who are pedantic know-it-alls although they have televisions, and you two laugh and joke all the way home. Also she talks about how she has to navigate by landmarks, because street names and so on are just confusing, and you say, Amen.

Arrive home with your eyes sticking out on stalks from all the Red Bull you drank to stay awake. Try to get in the door. The chickpeas have expanded so much they are now sentient.

Chickpeas: What is the password?

The password is always SWORDFISH.

You: Swordfish.

Chickpeas: That’s wrong.

The password always used to be SWORDFISH. Sorry.

Cook the chickpeas while daughter checks Facebook acct. While they are cooking (they have to cook 1.5 hours) boil the chicken breasts for 15 minutes in chicken broth. Chop the vegetables while that is going on, fry them in a pan.

Child: We accept you, we accept you, one of us! One of us! I have an earworm.

Slice the chicken. Add spices to broth. Put everything together eventually and cook it a little and then place it in the cellar to cool. Go to bed. It’s late. Get up. Taste stew. It’s extremely spicy. Make rice to take the edge off a little maybe. Go to work. Try to stay awake. The end.

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25Jan / 2010

It was the seventh day, I was the seventh son

The God of the Office took the elevator all the way up to his floor. The forty-ninth floor. Seven times seven. He had to think of AC/DC every time he hit the button. “It was the seventh day, I was the seventh son, and it scared the hell out of everyone.”

He could tell something was wrong, off somehow, as soon as he swiped his ID card through the reader and went inside, past the big hydroponic plants that the guys came and traded out for healthier-looking ones once every six months (they used to do it every three months but in times such as these). The office manager and the assistant office manager and one of the um one of the assistants, those guys who… like apprentices only they work for free, the one of the oh fuck am I senile, the office manager, her assistant and one of those guys working there for free were standing around the office manager’s desk, which stood in the entry way, beneath some somehow contractually-required wall art, a large abstract painting that the God of the Office rather liked, and they all looked up when he came in and the guy working for free – the Intern, shit, intern, intern, intern, broke off their animated conversation, discussion, even, to state with some relief: Here he is!

What’s up? asked the God of the Office.

He’s out on the ledge! all three of the others said, simultaneously, in unison, whatever, in stage whispers.

What, again? Said the God of the Office.

Yeah, they all said.

Aw, Christ, said the God of the Office and put his stuff down by his desk in his office and hung his jacket from his chair and in his shirtsleeves climbed out onto the ledge to try to talk the God of the Ledge back in.

Don’t come any closer! said the God of the Ledge.

The God of the Office sort of behind his back motioned at the others to stick their heads the hell back in the windows and leave the two of them alone. The God of the Office sat down on the ledge, carefully, and dangled his feet.

The ledge was a regular highrise ledge, a foot or two wide, going all the way around the building. The street was forty-nine, fifty stories down. The office buildings across the street were way closer than the ground. It felt as if, if you jumped, or fell, maybe you could reach out if you could get any sort of trajectory going, and catch yourself on one of those buildings before you hit the ground, but both Gods knew this was not true, this was not the case. The science of ballistics did not work like that.

The people working inside those other buildings looked like – and I guess were – biological specimens on display in well-lit dioramas, for it was a darkish morning, with a fog rolling in. A very thick fog. They looked like someone else’s dreams you heard about once and which somehow stuck with you for some reason, and in the hearing they became so much more vivid than your own.

Don’t come any closer, said the God of the Ledge.

I heard you, said the God of the Office.

Yeah, but you keep sidling closer. I’m not stupid. You do this every time.

The God of the Office was about an arm’s length away. Okay, okay, he said.

They sat there, the two of them, and watched as the lights in the buildings a couple blocks away twinkled and went out, disappeared from sight as the fog swallowed the city. The sounds from the street grew muffled and stopped. After another minute, even the offices across the street had disappeared and they were alone out there on the ledge, in silence, dimly lit in the thick morning fog.

I love the fog, said the God of the Office.

The God of the Ledge shrugged and nearly slipped off the ledge. He scrambled back and leaned against the building. So you always say, he said.

And this, wow, I don’t want to oversell it or anything, but this is some nice fog, said the God of the Office. When the God of the Ledge looked away the God of the Office handcuffed himself to the God of the Ledge, wrist to wrist.

You have a death wish? said the God of the Ledge.

No, said the God of the Office. I have a life wish. For both of us.

Yeah, well, not me. You might be regretting this later. If you’re betting I won’t take you with me.

The God of the Office shrugged, and almost fell off the ledge. Shit! he muttered as he scrambled further back on the ledge. The God of the Ledge helped him. They both, the two of them, sat there, hearts beating wildly, and leaned against the building and stared into fog for a while until their heart rates normalized.

There are worse deaths than leaping into fog, said the God of the Ledge.

I was just thinking the same thing, said the God of the Office. Last night watching an Alec Baldwin movie with my wife, I nearly choked to death on a piece of stale popcorn. All I could think, while it was happening, is what a sucky death that would be.

I was thinking of something slow and nasty, said the God of the Ledge.

Of course you were, said the God of the Office. Here. He took a sip from a pocket flask and passed it to the God of the Ledge and they sat there drinking single malt and staring into the nothing of the fog until they began to hallucinate shapes rotating there in the nothingness.

I heard what I thought was a muezzin, said the God of the Office, finally, breaking the silence after a minute. Even though he spoke gently it sounded loud and he lowered his voice further. But it turned out to be boys yodeling “Jingle Bells” as they ran through the snow.

I saw a ring of bird feathers in the snow under the bird feeder, said the God of the Ledge. A perfect circle, all pointing outward, with just a little blood, and two bird feet standing up in the center of it. As if a bird had exploded in some weird cartoon.

Aren’t cats great? said the God of the Office. Speaking of nasty ways to die.

A person I love was unkind, said the God of the Ledge.

What, to you? said the God of the Office. He shrugged, carefully. He stared out into the fog. The whisky had sort of a metallic aftertaste that he reckoned came from the metal flask. The fog was so thick that he could no longer see even the God of the Ledge, only hear him, and that only barely. He shrugged again, for practice, testing how strongly he could shrug without falling.

I was at an exhibition, he said. I was at an exhibition of impressionist art and I watched my wife looking at the art and fell in love with her all over again. The way she looks at a painting, I really like to watch that, you know?

Now the fog had grown so thick he couldn’t hear an answer, if one came. He couldn’t even see the ledge upon which he sat, couldn’t see himself. Visibility zero, hand in front of your face, nothing.

The God sat there and sat, and thought about small things that had amazed him.

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