A body draped in drying skin, the bones pushing out and stretching the leathered hide of lust that once sat so loosely on them. Bloated it lay, thighs stretched open, the sweat of passion long gone and dirt remains, caked in crust and left to bake in the suns devilish grin. He the same, beside the woman, nude and open to the world. Their warm embrace a shadow in the outstretched arms between them, hands clenched in a hope that left with the smoke of a barrel. Their fingers intertwined, clasping dearly in their world of darkness so lifelessly enveloping the love they once shared. Her lips cracked, pulled taught with time against the aching row of teeth, once pearl in color now dawning a darker hue and gums in withdraw. The browning bloodless lines thin, mouth open in a grotesque yawning for breath that never came, and would never again. Dust had gathered on her brow, from windstorms past as dirt caressed the couple with grace and tenderness only natures gentle hand of death could give. He, a man of ageless decay now, lay to her side, one hand pulling her into his afterlife the other grasping motionless on his chest, at a bulbous patch of skin where a diseased heart once lay but was replaced by steel and heat in an act of courtesy by those who sought to send these lovers off together.

And there, if I pinpoint it, it glares, it bleeds in my vision. A solid notion of bleak fortitude, a rock that sinks and drags me further into a swamp of my own doing and darkness. Edges aren’t dirt but mush, decayed life left on the banks to rot and mix and stew seeping into the slowly poisoned water nearby. And here I am. Sinking. Sinking lower into this black morass of viscous liquid swirling around me only from my own descent, my limbs pushing away disgust while my feet plunge deeper into this putrid abyss. Above there is light, I think, a twinkle, sparkling from the surface through layers of grime and fifth drifting on the water’s skin. The piercing rays have become fewer but more intense, either in truth or in my mind. Perhaps their glare is from my own desire and hatred for their presence and soon to be absence. I hate them for being there but I wish they wouldn’t go. The chain is tied tight, tearing into my ankles and allowing the swamp water to mix with my blood, and my pain to flow out into the swamp itself, adding to the nightmarish sea around me without hope. If only I would open my eyes.

Papa Maw Molone,

Never felt too lonely,

Liven always only

In a mind without a care.

He’d work for now, 10 years or more,

Taking all he’d earned and worked for,

To share with mama maw the bear.

Papa Came home early,

Found her naked in a chair.

He looked her up and down,

And waited, with a stare,

Then noticed somethin’ missing,

she got no pubic hair.

She’d shaved it off for Jimmy,

the other neighbor bear.

But papa, had come early,

And Sally got a scare,

Cuz papa standin nearly

Lept the sofa with his glare,

Then jumped onto his mawma,

And gave her the prickly pear.

But little did he know,

She didn’t really care.

After sitting around after work I decided to start on a story that's been bouncing around in my head for a couple days now. It may evolve into something longer but for now I think it will be a short tale. Let's just hope I stay on task.

I.

Turning the stairs I came to the hallway. A light hung overhead, reaching down the corridor with decreasing intensity toward the end, where darkness shrouded a single exit, a door donning the sign “Emergency Only.” The wooden floor of the staircase was dressed carefully by carpet that may have been a crimson red when first laid, but had been beaten into a rusting brown. It was cut cleanly at the edges running along the walls, but the threads had worn thin near the entryway where many a careless soul had trodden. A coarse weave of plastic was beginning to show in the carpets decay, inviting me down a path that many before me seemed to take.

I pulled the slip of paper from my shirt pocket, damp with sweat from my chest: Room F, that was it, Room F

Doors were staggered down the hall, poking holes in walls through which the larger rats that resided here could scurry and rush off to their acts of sin. Room A, Room B, closer to the end of the hallway. The air was getting thicker and musky. It was a mix of incense, sweat and carpet cleaner, all coming together to mask the putrid smell of dried vomit that sat calmly behind its aromatic brethren. Room D, Room E, the air had become nearly a plume of incense, thicker not only in smell but in sight, the light dimming as moved farther from the hanging lamp behind.

Room F.

The air was heavy, making it difficult to breath. I could not tell if my head had begun spinning from the barrage of odors that seemed to escape from the seam of the doorway or from their effectiveness in pushing oxygen out of my lungs. It was a sea of cinnamon, sage, lavender, and what I could only experience as a feeling…lust.

My head was swirling, my knees weak and my stomach tight. The door was a battered wooden blockade to something I was still unsure of my desire to discover. In the center, just at eye level was the single bronze letter to reassure me of my place, F. It seemed to mock me, almost in a haze, and while my focus was drawn to it so seductively I did not notice as the letter moved backward, slipping slowly away from my eyes and mind at an angle as the door opened.

II.

 In my state I could barely collect my thoughts to skim over the memories of what I’d been told. Their voices were being pressed away in the back of my skull by the intensity of the smells and the hum of the ceiling fan in the dimly lit room before me. Something about a woman, a temptress, a keeper of hearts, one who would dig deep and bore her way into the cartilage between your bones. I could not recall a tale of happenings, only half-conscious mutterings drunken fools, pouring out their feelings in explanation, each story told as if the teller were speaking into a mirror blindfolded by fog, seeking out some semblance of their own reflection and definite self. I could feel that steam, that fog on my own, entering my nostrils and embracing my skin in the warmth that radiated from the room. It was a natural heat though, and perhaps came from myself as well. My pulse was stepping slower but I could feel my blood warming.

Its rhythm was magnetic. Each of ceiling fan’s blades pushed their way through the air, forcing the odors to circulate and drawing them into new spaces that had remained untainted. It was an apartment, the doorway peaking into a living room where the hallway's once clean red carpet seemed quite unwilling to sit. The wood was a deep brown, the lacquer dulled by time and thick in its film, catching only dirt now rather than glances of admiration.

The walls were peppered with charcoal etchings and spackle, some of the drawings covering up the remaining cracks that laziness would not allow joint compound to conceal. My blood continued to pulse in beat with the fan, while my head spun round with each revolution. I could feel control slipping, fading into an acquiescence of fate and invitation of decadence.

Mycrowfoan

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Post 1.mp3 (4.43 MB)

Here is the first recorded post. Something I would like to note is all posts are unedited excluding noise removal of my microphone and mild voice modification for my entertainment. Everything said is free flowing and unscripted. This also applies to the writings.

And so began the way of clicking and passivity rather than patience and reading.
In the cookie monster recording it sounds like Yoda...

Note: the Beautifully.mp3 is not a normal recording sped up. None of the voice recordings have been altered by program effects...except perhaps the one where I'm a robot.

Cookyoda Mama

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Cookyoda Mama.mp3 (362 KB)

I Will Find Them

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Stitch Family Lost.mp3 (289 KB)

Overlord

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Audacious.mp3 (551 KB)

After messing around this afternoon with Audacity, I'm considering continuing my writing but through recordings. It's easier for me to tell stories while coming up with the material off the cuff rather than typing them up, as that hampers creativity and takes more time. I've attached a sample of what can only be my real voice in the name of fun.

Now II just need to settling on a storyline or something to start off the project. Perhaps an adventure between a clock and a past lover (the drapes)? Though, that sounds kind of like Disney. No matter.

Additionally, the market has been quite kind recently and it's dangerously inviting to try and throw more money at a growing beast that seems "harmless."

     How to choose between things? It’s possible that one outcome may be better than the other, but perhaps the two paths may converge in something unexpected. If I say no one offer but affirm another, I may end up in Texas. If I agree to the former offer and reject the latter, perhaps I’ll find myself owning a new CD player. But, maybe if I say yes to both, I end up trading the CD player to a homeless man in Texas for a pair of beaten up alligator skin boots that happen to catch the eye of a woman who sees me on my way back to the airport. She catches up to me rather quickly and may inquire as to where I obtained such fashionable footwear. Who would I be not to inform her of the entire event and then see where things go?

     It seems I may be too easily influenced or engaged by my surroundings. This can have polarizing effects, though thus far it has yielded “positive” things. Positive then is of necessary consideration, as I’m proposing agreement not necessary feeling on the matter. If I agree to any offer then I can’t feel anything toward until it ends. This applies though to any circumstance then, you can’t really judge the entire event until it’s over. So, let’s say I go to a concert and we get stuck in traffic on the way there. I can’t say it is “not fun” yet. Perhaps I can fragment the evening, but that would be unhelpful. We arrive at the concert and I purchase a drink, turn around, and get knocked into by someone, spilling the drink onto both of us. They apologize and disappear into the crowd, me left damp and wondering whether or not it’s fair to say, “I’m not having fun” yet. To skip limitless scenarios that I could concoct, it seems I would only be able to declare the event “not fun” come the next morning once I have digested the previous evening’s events. However, if I follow my earlier advice about fragmentation, then setting the concert as a “single occurrence” would be contradictory to my endeavor. I must then incorporate all daily activities and happenings into one continuous occurrence that cannot be judged conclusively until the end. At this point, sewing together all these different moments that should be inscrutable lends me to title such a thing as “life.” The scarf of life: constantly being knitted further but always around your neck as you roll around.

     This doesn’t invite infinite acceptance, but rather encourages a withholding of judgment until you forget what you were judging in the first place. It’s impossible to blame a faulty memory for not getting mad, yes? Looking forward to what comes next can be much healthier than dwelling, brooding, screaming, crawling and pounding your skull over what has already happened. Yea, yea yea, yea yea yea yea, ad infinitum. Everyone deals in the motto of “forget the past, live in the now.” Few people actually do it though. I don’t, I guarantee that. I spend a lot of time analyzing not only the past, but also the future. This, though, is where the discrepancy lies and where I feel it is possible to apply the adage.

     One who uses the past to gauge the present is wise, but those who use the present to interpret the future are fools. If we use what has occurred before to interpret our surroundings, then by golly I think we’re living up to the standards of our overdeveloped prefrontal cortex. However, trying to make claims about what should come, or attempting to anticipate an event, should be avoided. We should forget the past when looking into the future, and live in the now while considering what we’ve done. The idea becomes rolling with it while learning from your mistakes, not blindly forgetting what has happened. You can reflect on the wrong done by stealing someone’s jacket from a bar while drunk and then not do it again. If you didn’t consider the negativity, you might end up with a closet full of stolen clothing that means nothing to you except the potential for a moth colony. If I were to try and conclude this thought process tonight, it may keep me up for too long, though I do enjoy it.

Today formvar coating of electron microscopy grids has failed 4 times. 5th time is a charm and hopefully we can get the experiment going. Go go Shewanella oneidensis!

I can't decide on a title, but let's start with what will be the book's introduction.

In years past, a version of ourselves from which we have spawned once walked the same ground. Their technology was no different, functionally, than our own. It served a purpose of communication, a means of recording ideas and conveying new ones. It even permitted innovation, building upon the creations of the past, as we do ourselves. This was a time of equal if not greater accomplishments in controlling the earth, in directing its day to day activities. These creatures were autonomous and capable, in fact, far superior to ourselves given their inventions. For these creatures then, whom we can begin by calling the Esperns, or Gigglicks, or Pinizaps or any name that comes to mind, as it is wholly unimportant, their means of containing information was far different from our own.

Think, if you will, on modern forms of communication. The medium through which you read this, for example, is such a technology. It is a device meant to store an idea that can then be taken in by other eyes and minds, processed, possibly modified, and perhaps regurgitated. Thousands, if not millions of years from now, how likely would it be for the earth's residents to be capable of picking up the remnants of a compact disk and be able to interpret it. For that matter, would they even know it was meant to store information? Given that they could figure this out, would they be capable of deriving some contraption that could read the compact disk. Again though, think about trying decipher the drivel that may be contained. Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas Special means much more to us than it may to them.

That’s scary though. If they could read the music, would they begin to believe that a culture, many years before them, was defined by high pitched singing creatures that were obsessed with something called “Christmas,” ideas of “cheer” and speaking in set slots of 3-4 minutes with a “beat” in the background? What a tragedy that would be indeed. However, just as we assume ourselves to be capable of accurately and competently studying contraptions from the past, let us hope that those to come after us will be equally capable and not mistake our most revered practices to be singing in sets of three.

Perhaps though, they could be too far removed from the technology we have produced. Maybe they wouldn’t even interpret it as some constructed item at all. In fact, they may pass over a CD as commonplace. Few individuals are aware of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a modern marvel located in the North Pacific Gyre between the West Coast of North America and the East Coast of Asia. It consists of suspended plastics that have collected into a veritable Trash Vortex about twice the size of Texas. Now, it is possible that over the years this mound of plastic will condense, collect salt, minerals, dust, water, pollen, and whatever useful items may travel from one place to another, and become a viable living space. Millions of years from now, it may not even be considered “plastic,” but rather, “land” as it has been there so long that the future sentient organisms would be incapable of seeing it as otherwise.

Here lies the beginning implication of this tale. The creatures from so long were quite competent, to a degree that can only be compared to our own accomplishments in function but not in material or integrity, as their schematics and mechanisms were different. However, as the omnipotent mediator, it is the responsibility of this text to relay the story coherently, so all concepts and facts concerning the Esperns have been translated into conceivable notions for the layman of today, or at least the mildly educated individual capable of reading and following a plot.