Now what even the brightest high school student probably won't know unless they went into physics or philosophy in collage is that everything that we see in our world is defined by the vibrations of these subatomic strings. They define the color, shape and density of the building blocks that make up the matter that we are and live in. The only difference between the matter that makes up a building and the matter that makes up a super model whose face is plastered on the building is the vibration of these strings.
The Danelope, like the mathematical physicist Edward Witten whose one of the principal authors of the sting theory here in our universe, understood that some strings could leave the membrane of one universe and theoretically travel to a parallel universe on a parallel membrane. The open ended strings were trapped by the 4 dimensions that trapped Dan and Edward to their membranes. They were bound by time and the 3 directions; up-down, forward-backward, and side to side. Massless particles like gravitons could leave the 4 dimensions and Dan found a way to attach a message. The message was his very own spirit.
Dan knew that space was far more dynamic and changeable than even Albert Einstein thought. Dan found out that humans in our dimension were far more dynamic and changeable than even he thought thanks to advanced medicine. Unfortunately once Brono left the Navy and found a doctor that cared enough about him to listen, the number of medications he was on dropped considerably. He went from 38 of the best commercial pharmaceuticals that designer labs could offer to just two. The only two he really needed.
While this was great for Brono and his ability to function in the general populace without drawing too much unwanted attention upon himself it broke the conduit between the parallel universes. Dan was trapped in Brono's limb. Forever.
(continued . . .)
Feel free to make comments, suggestions, corrections, or good hearted heckling as this is just the first draft . . . Ezju can be reached at his writing site - http://www.prose.nosuchanimal.net or his fine art site http://www.nosuchanimal.net or even his design site http://www.phkaki.com
Monday, August 31, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Lament of the Damelope (short story page 3 of . . . )
Brono took another hit of Jim Beam. He didn't mind his hand looking at him seemingly sizing him up as a scientist would poor over the body of an alien body from Area 51. For some reason this seemed normal to him. What was most unnerving was the Danelope spoke only Russian and Brono had no idea what his hand was trying to tell him.
Brono now had a uncontrollably deep desire to learn Russian and began banging his head against the bulkhead of the ship. This did not help him understand his hand, the situation, or Russian any better but when an extremely angry EXE O burst into the room and asked without care regarding the blood on the bulkhead why he was disrupting the sonar test Brono could only reply. “Because.” In a gritty, raspy desperate voice, “it feels so good when I stop.” It wasn't long there after that Brono was let go from the Navy with a medical discharge.
This is the point where I met Brono, at Penn State Behrend where he was taking Russian 101 to learn to communicate with his hand, Dan. I was an undecided major claiming to be the only art student at Behrend as they didn’t have an art department. I thought I was so clever. Apparently there was a lot to learn by all.
I met Brono through mutual friends in a service fraternity called Alpha Phi Omega. Being the artist and against things like fraternity my friends made a kind of mascot or honorary member. Brono was a full blown member of this co-ed group from the land of misfit toys. For a group I didn’t want to be a part of I fit right in.
At parties the Danelope would make appearances. At first everyone thought it was just drug induced fun or maybe Brono had a few too many what ever he was drinking. Everyone started to have their own version of Dan. Drunk fools with hand puppets. Baked hippy fraternity brothers sat with resin on their shadow puppets cracking them-selves up to no end. Only a few saw the Danelope for what it truly was. Pure genius. We wanted one. Not an imaginary one but a real live disembodied trans-dimensional symbiotic alien parasite spirit to inhabit our limbs and speak to us in some language we would have to learn if we were to socialize with our new friend.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Lament of the Danelope (short story page 2 of . . . )
So now you have an idea of what a Danelope is and you have the basics of where this creature comes from but I'm sure you are wondering what the heck a Danelope looks like. In a nut shell, if you take your thumb and pull it in to meet your two middle fingers to form a muzzle of sorts and then allow your piny and index finger to remain erect like antlers you have the physical manifestation of a Danelope.
In the early days of Brono's relationship with Dan, his pet name for the parasitic alien living in his limb, Brono had no idea his arm and hand were possessed or what a Danelope was. Then again Brono didn't have a very clear view of what was going on in general much to Dan's advantage.
On more than one occasion aboard Brono's Navy vessel Dan had influence the unsuspecting Brono's actions. Little did everyone know, including Brono, That when his ship ran an exercise in repelling boarders and Brono sat in a lawn chair on the main deck with a bucket of highly charged capacitors it was the Danelope who was chucking these improvised depth charges at the unsuspecting Navy Seals. This behavior was later attributed to the massive amounts of medication Brono was on as was the existence of a disembodied trans-dimensional symbiotic alien parasite spirit.
On a side note, no one was killed during this exercise. Several of the Navy Seals had to be treated for minor nerve damage and burns but all ended well. I believe Brono should have been recognized for creative and innovative thinking. Regardless Brono still had no idea that his limb was slowly being taken over and he would soon come face to face with his own hand and one of the best friends he will ever have.
Full awareness of his situation came at 03:00 on a hot summer night in 1995, somewhere in the South Pacific. The entire ship was running silent for a sonar test. All unnecessary equipment and personnel were to shut down and make no noise. Brono was in the radio room with a bottle of Jim Beam he smuggled about earlier that week while to boat was at port. His hand was staring at him. The Danelope had taken full control and his antlers or more accurately feelers were slowly twitching as the hand tilted it's self in the way a cute puppy tilts his head when you say it's name.
In the early days of Brono's relationship with Dan, his pet name for the parasitic alien living in his limb, Brono had no idea his arm and hand were possessed or what a Danelope was. Then again Brono didn't have a very clear view of what was going on in general much to Dan's advantage.
On more than one occasion aboard Brono's Navy vessel Dan had influence the unsuspecting Brono's actions. Little did everyone know, including Brono, That when his ship ran an exercise in repelling boarders and Brono sat in a lawn chair on the main deck with a bucket of highly charged capacitors it was the Danelope who was chucking these improvised depth charges at the unsuspecting Navy Seals. This behavior was later attributed to the massive amounts of medication Brono was on as was the existence of a disembodied trans-dimensional symbiotic alien parasite spirit.
On a side note, no one was killed during this exercise. Several of the Navy Seals had to be treated for minor nerve damage and burns but all ended well. I believe Brono should have been recognized for creative and innovative thinking. Regardless Brono still had no idea that his limb was slowly being taken over and he would soon come face to face with his own hand and one of the best friends he will ever have.
Full awareness of his situation came at 03:00 on a hot summer night in 1995, somewhere in the South Pacific. The entire ship was running silent for a sonar test. All unnecessary equipment and personnel were to shut down and make no noise. Brono was in the radio room with a bottle of Jim Beam he smuggled about earlier that week while to boat was at port. His hand was staring at him. The Danelope had taken full control and his antlers or more accurately feelers were slowly twitching as the hand tilted it's self in the way a cute puppy tilts his head when you say it's name.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Lament of the Danelope (short story page 1 of . . . )
Before you can know what a Danelope laments I'm sure you are asking the same question everyone else is asking. What is a Danelope? Very good question. Let us start with the etymology of the word Danelope then. Danelope is an English word. American to be specific. It first appeared around 1988 in a small bureau in Pennsylvania called Erie. It is a clever bastardization of the Byzantine Greek word anthólops witch according to Wikipedia is first attested in Eustathius of Antioch (c.336), according to whom it was a fabulous animal "haunting the banks of the Euphrates, very savage, hard to catch and having long saw-like horns capable of cutting down trees."
Now that we know where the word Danelope comes from let us not get it confused with the animal that shares the same etymological background as the Danelope. While the antelope is beautiful big eyed African or Asian Bovidae the Danelope is not of this dimension let alone of this world. The Danelope is a disembodied trans-dimensional symbiotic alien parasite spirit which inhabits the limbs of unsuspecting and susceptible human hosts. In this case the poor bastard who had his appendage obsolesced with and I mean this in a very local way, Brono “the host,” never lost his limb to the Danelope but his mind was definitely in question.
How do I know all this? Well, quite frankly I was there. It was Fall of '87 and I was attending my first year of collage at Penn Sate Behrend just outside of Erie, Pennsylvania. I had cruised through high school without ever opening a book and graduated dead middle of my class of some 850 collage potentials. Before I could move on to State Collage, the main Penn State campus, I had to do my time at the state pen or Behrend as the alumni like to call it. On a completely unnecessary side note I never made it to Penn State main campus. At least never for scholastic reasons. It was there at Penn State Behrend that I met Brono.
Brono was an all American boy who served his country in the Navy where they made sure he was properly medicated to server his county all the way up until the day he requested freedom to speak freely. His Captain granted him permission and Brono spoke earning himself a section eight, mental discharge, right out of the armed service.
Maybe it was the 38 odd medications he was on to keep him even while on his tour of duty aboard an American military battle cruiser. Uppers. Downers. Blue pills. White pills. Ones to make him sleep. Ones to keep him awake. Anti-depressants, Bi-polar medication. Solutions for ADHD. Beta-blockers for anger. Others to pick him up.
Maybe my friend Brono was crazy. Regardless the Captain didn't take long to dispatch Brono after he described in extremely unpleasant graphic detail the sounds the Captain's skin and subsequently muscle sinew and bone would make rubbing against the main guns as he was fired out of them. When I say “extremely unpleasant” I'm talking about the kind of graphic detail that Clive Barker and Stephen King would cringe at while holding each other for comfort. Maybe it was the 38 odd medications Brono was on. Maybe not. Only the Danelope knows.
Now that we know where the word Danelope comes from let us not get it confused with the animal that shares the same etymological background as the Danelope. While the antelope is beautiful big eyed African or Asian Bovidae the Danelope is not of this dimension let alone of this world. The Danelope is a disembodied trans-dimensional symbiotic alien parasite spirit which inhabits the limbs of unsuspecting and susceptible human hosts. In this case the poor bastard who had his appendage obsolesced with and I mean this in a very local way, Brono “the host,” never lost his limb to the Danelope but his mind was definitely in question.
How do I know all this? Well, quite frankly I was there. It was Fall of '87 and I was attending my first year of collage at Penn Sate Behrend just outside of Erie, Pennsylvania. I had cruised through high school without ever opening a book and graduated dead middle of my class of some 850 collage potentials. Before I could move on to State Collage, the main Penn State campus, I had to do my time at the state pen or Behrend as the alumni like to call it. On a completely unnecessary side note I never made it to Penn State main campus. At least never for scholastic reasons. It was there at Penn State Behrend that I met Brono.
Brono was an all American boy who served his country in the Navy where they made sure he was properly medicated to server his county all the way up until the day he requested freedom to speak freely. His Captain granted him permission and Brono spoke earning himself a section eight, mental discharge, right out of the armed service.
Maybe it was the 38 odd medications he was on to keep him even while on his tour of duty aboard an American military battle cruiser. Uppers. Downers. Blue pills. White pills. Ones to make him sleep. Ones to keep him awake. Anti-depressants, Bi-polar medication. Solutions for ADHD. Beta-blockers for anger. Others to pick him up.
Maybe my friend Brono was crazy. Regardless the Captain didn't take long to dispatch Brono after he described in extremely unpleasant graphic detail the sounds the Captain's skin and subsequently muscle sinew and bone would make rubbing against the main guns as he was fired out of them. When I say “extremely unpleasant” I'm talking about the kind of graphic detail that Clive Barker and Stephen King would cringe at while holding each other for comfort. Maybe it was the 38 odd medications Brono was on. Maybe not. Only the Danelope knows.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Lightning Crashes (full short story)
An estranged friend once told me a fanciful if not tragically romantic tail about a race of presumably quantum beings who could only materialize and touch there soul mate once during the union of lightening. One reaching up from the ground and the other reaches down from the heavens to experience a lifetime of intimacy in a few spit seconds when the two energies meet. There is no more fanciful lightning. That would require an atmosphere.
Memory is like a dream, elusive. I’m not even sure what I have is a memory since my brain, its gray matter and synaptic neural impulses are all gone. What is left is an impression left behind with this energy that was me. A ghost. A spirit. A bodiless soul cursed to wonder the earth to and end that only God would know, if there is truly such a being. I'm not so sure.
I remember being hot all the sudden and then nothing. I remember the news being on. Watching images of holy wars raging on all continents. Jihadists yelling chants in too many different languages. Reports of starvation in America as big business abandons it's victims for willing new rich markets in Asia and the Middle East. I remember that! Americans not able to afford the products they manufactured. Barely able to afford food. We had been abandoned in every sense of the word. Then I was hot. Then nothing.
I had seen movies where everyone knew the end was coming. It was announced on the news. Television. The Internet. Newspapers. Even the guy on the street with the “End is Nigh” sandwich board knew the end was coming in the movies. People all huddled together like rabbits trapped in their warren waiting for the next announcement regarding their impending doom. People running rampant in the streets raiding, looting, fighting. Some movies were about asteroids some were about comets and others were about solar flairs reaching out across the distance and rendering the earth unsustainable for life.
There was no warning. No waiting and wondering about the after life. I felt warm for a split second. Then hot. Then nothing. I'm not even sure how long it was from the end until I for a lack of a better term woke as the specter I am now wondering the Barron lifeless Earth looking for a clue and waiting.
I've often wondered if being dead wasn't just a dream. I'd wake up and find I wasn't a ghost haunting a lifeless world. Then I'd remember the longest a dream had ever seemed to be is a few hours or a day at the utmost. I stopped wondering if it was a dream 2200 years ago. I'm dead. I'm a ghost. Now I just wonder if this is purgatory or some sort of existential hell or just is. Maybe there is no God, heaven, or any of that afterlife which religion promises. It's possible I'm just residual energy lingering like a stale echo. I may never know.
After a few hundred years my thoughts wandered back to that beautiful but deadly union. Polarized capacitors in the sky propagate ionized step ladders down towards mother earth and the hungry streamers reach up to the clouds in positive expectation. Plasma completes the path between the two allowing for a charge hotter than the surface of the sun to explode the air around it completing the brief bonding encounter of my old friend’s dimensional race. It must be a fulfilling and blissful moment between two beings culminating in a lifetime’s desire for these quantum beings Deadly to the human if struck. A beautiful and elusive phenomena.
I remember the 2K bug and how it was going to be the end of the world as several other doomsday dates in history. The Inca calendar said 2012 was going to be the end of civilization as we know it and they were not too far off base. It was 2012 when I died. I think it was mid-to-late December, getting ready for another lonely commercial Christmas. Not sure if it was the 21st or not. I was never very good with time or dates. None of that matters any more. I no longer count in days months or years. I count the number of times I see the comet Hale-Bopp. It take about 2,392 years for the Heaven’s Gate’s harbinger of death to orbit the sun. It will be here again in a decade or two. It will mark the 418,060th time I've seen it at perihelion like a firefly in the sky. I do so miss fireflies.
The sun was much whiter just after my death. The atmosphere which filtered out much of the harmful rays and scattered the blue no longer softened the brilliantly glaring giver of life. It still had some yellow to it but human eyes would have not been able to detect the subtly any longer. Being a ghost I’m not sure how I could see it but then there is plenty I didn’t understand while I was alive which I still do not comprehend. When the sun was out, the intensified contrast made it seem that there were only two colors, white and a brown black. Only at sunset could colors be discerned and even then they were different than I remember.
I never did discover what killed me. Nuclear war? Solar flairs? Meteor? The hand of God? I wondered the Earth searching for a clue to illuminate a mystery beyond my understanding. Being dead, a non-physical being, had its advantages while traveling. To my surprise I was bound the earth but not the physical laws I remembered. I couldn’t leave the surface unless by traditional means such as caves but I didn’t sink in water unless I forced the issue, not that there was much left on the surface anymore.
800,000 years ago I was at Old Faithful in Yosemite National Park or at least where the park used to be when the super volcano erupted underneath it. The dust and debris covered the sky for ages and only after a few centuries did I notice the accumulation of new gasses from this event and other volcanic activity around the Earth. She was not dead. Either that or she was the throws of her death rattle. It would be several hundred millenniums before I would know the truth.
Several times over the countless aeons would I wonder if that friend ever wrote the story? I wondered if anyone ever read it. Or am I just one half a lightening bolt that experienced the story and friendship for the few sweet seconds that it lasted? I had devoted many Hale-Bopp visits of thought to this story and my long lost friendship since awakening from death.
While watching the Earths crust thrust the throw like a ream of cloth during a massive movement know as plate tectonics my thoughts wondered to my state of being. I'm a ghost. Why haven't I seen other ghosts? I can't be the only one. Why have I been bound to this world for so many aeons? Maybe there are others, maybe a form of quantum sapience, not able to see another due to micro-dimensional displacement. It's possible that every living being on Earth who died during the apocalypse is walking around the world like I am wondering why they are alone. Maybe the Earth is still blue and green and the only thing scorched is me and my perception of it. I shake my head to clear these mental plagues that I may never know the answer to. Then my thoughts drift back to the spectacle at hand.
A new mountain chain has been formed and I became aware during my self-absorbed contemplation the entire planetary axis has shifted. I felt nothing. I notice a great deal of sediment in floating around the surface in swirling gasses while water seeped from a craves in the new valley forming a new ocean. Helium has been accumulating for several hundred thousand years now caused by radio active decay. It's not heavy enough to escape the Earths atmosphere like hydrogen is. I can see all of this but I can not see another soul.
Solar wind had been sweeping away any and all out-gassing by my hibernating planet for ages. Now there has been stabilization and I've come across water vapor, carbon dioxide, hydrogen-surfer and a few other trace gasses. Oxygen is now present and the creation of ozone has begun but there still exists the extremes temperatures between night and day. I spent the next 500,000 years watching and studying the formation of atmosphere.
Then the unexpected happens. I now feel warm all the sudden. I feel. How? I haven't felt anything in almost a billion years. Not cold. No pain. I'm dead. I couldn't feel tickles of solar winds or the texture of newly formed volcanic rock. I couldn't even feel the impacts of the annual Perseids meteors left by the comet Swift-Tuttle, which I used to lay awake as a child at night in July and August with my father to watch shooting stars streak across the sky. None. No feeling what so ever and now I'm warm. Déjà vu.
At this stage of Earths re-development the atmosphere is thin and is anything but the air I remember filling my lungs while alive. Now I feel the air around me heat up and then explode! I don't infuse air any longer but the heat is beyond suffocating. Dragon’s would think my breaths were hot in a way they could not fathom. It is not too unlike the feeling your lungs are going to burst underwater just as you break the surface only to gasp and inhale water by surprise. It's happening again.
The intensity of fully saturated light is blinding and the temperature is hotter then the surface of the sun. Then it happens. Colors burst in from the pure white and a world of life beams around me. Elegant sensations beyond description overwhelms my until now under utilized receptors until another’s touch pulls me into an uncommonly calm focus. Harmony. Only we exist to me at this time, this place, this moment. What is this?
Time stands still. Degrees of freedom are taken to the Nth dimension. Every moment of our life occurs at once. Euphoria, erotic bliss, satisfaction, precludes our children and life together. All our experiences, triumphs, and failures vibrate like strings across the universe, a virtuoso playing the sound track to our lives. Simultaneously all disappointments, ambitions, passions, challenges met and shunned, heart aches and emotional healing clap like thunder seaming together a fraction of a second. Another's breath like a breeze across my soul caresses my lips. Love, understanding, communication flash by as our clasped hands draw each other near for our final embrace. Our hands part. Time resumes. It is over.
Fin
Please feel free to comment, critique, suggest or otherwise heckle this story as you see fit. Just know I realize that there are many run-ons and I'll fix that in the next itteration . . . this is just the rough draft for input and criticism!
Memory is like a dream, elusive. I’m not even sure what I have is a memory since my brain, its gray matter and synaptic neural impulses are all gone. What is left is an impression left behind with this energy that was me. A ghost. A spirit. A bodiless soul cursed to wonder the earth to and end that only God would know, if there is truly such a being. I'm not so sure.
I remember being hot all the sudden and then nothing. I remember the news being on. Watching images of holy wars raging on all continents. Jihadists yelling chants in too many different languages. Reports of starvation in America as big business abandons it's victims for willing new rich markets in Asia and the Middle East. I remember that! Americans not able to afford the products they manufactured. Barely able to afford food. We had been abandoned in every sense of the word. Then I was hot. Then nothing.
I had seen movies where everyone knew the end was coming. It was announced on the news. Television. The Internet. Newspapers. Even the guy on the street with the “End is Nigh” sandwich board knew the end was coming in the movies. People all huddled together like rabbits trapped in their warren waiting for the next announcement regarding their impending doom. People running rampant in the streets raiding, looting, fighting. Some movies were about asteroids some were about comets and others were about solar flairs reaching out across the distance and rendering the earth unsustainable for life.
There was no warning. No waiting and wondering about the after life. I felt warm for a split second. Then hot. Then nothing. I'm not even sure how long it was from the end until I for a lack of a better term woke as the specter I am now wondering the Barron lifeless Earth looking for a clue and waiting.
I've often wondered if being dead wasn't just a dream. I'd wake up and find I wasn't a ghost haunting a lifeless world. Then I'd remember the longest a dream had ever seemed to be is a few hours or a day at the utmost. I stopped wondering if it was a dream 2200 years ago. I'm dead. I'm a ghost. Now I just wonder if this is purgatory or some sort of existential hell or just is. Maybe there is no God, heaven, or any of that afterlife which religion promises. It's possible I'm just residual energy lingering like a stale echo. I may never know.
After a few hundred years my thoughts wandered back to that beautiful but deadly union. Polarized capacitors in the sky propagate ionized step ladders down towards mother earth and the hungry streamers reach up to the clouds in positive expectation. Plasma completes the path between the two allowing for a charge hotter than the surface of the sun to explode the air around it completing the brief bonding encounter of my old friend’s dimensional race. It must be a fulfilling and blissful moment between two beings culminating in a lifetime’s desire for these quantum beings Deadly to the human if struck. A beautiful and elusive phenomena.
I remember the 2K bug and how it was going to be the end of the world as several other doomsday dates in history. The Inca calendar said 2012 was going to be the end of civilization as we know it and they were not too far off base. It was 2012 when I died. I think it was mid-to-late December, getting ready for another lonely commercial Christmas. Not sure if it was the 21st or not. I was never very good with time or dates. None of that matters any more. I no longer count in days months or years. I count the number of times I see the comet Hale-Bopp. It take about 2,392 years for the Heaven’s Gate’s harbinger of death to orbit the sun. It will be here again in a decade or two. It will mark the 418,060th time I've seen it at perihelion like a firefly in the sky. I do so miss fireflies.
The sun was much whiter just after my death. The atmosphere which filtered out much of the harmful rays and scattered the blue no longer softened the brilliantly glaring giver of life. It still had some yellow to it but human eyes would have not been able to detect the subtly any longer. Being a ghost I’m not sure how I could see it but then there is plenty I didn’t understand while I was alive which I still do not comprehend. When the sun was out, the intensified contrast made it seem that there were only two colors, white and a brown black. Only at sunset could colors be discerned and even then they were different than I remember.
I never did discover what killed me. Nuclear war? Solar flairs? Meteor? The hand of God? I wondered the Earth searching for a clue to illuminate a mystery beyond my understanding. Being dead, a non-physical being, had its advantages while traveling. To my surprise I was bound the earth but not the physical laws I remembered. I couldn’t leave the surface unless by traditional means such as caves but I didn’t sink in water unless I forced the issue, not that there was much left on the surface anymore.
800,000 years ago I was at Old Faithful in Yosemite National Park or at least where the park used to be when the super volcano erupted underneath it. The dust and debris covered the sky for ages and only after a few centuries did I notice the accumulation of new gasses from this event and other volcanic activity around the Earth. She was not dead. Either that or she was the throws of her death rattle. It would be several hundred millenniums before I would know the truth.
Several times over the countless aeons would I wonder if that friend ever wrote the story? I wondered if anyone ever read it. Or am I just one half a lightening bolt that experienced the story and friendship for the few sweet seconds that it lasted? I had devoted many Hale-Bopp visits of thought to this story and my long lost friendship since awakening from death.
While watching the Earths crust thrust the throw like a ream of cloth during a massive movement know as plate tectonics my thoughts wondered to my state of being. I'm a ghost. Why haven't I seen other ghosts? I can't be the only one. Why have I been bound to this world for so many aeons? Maybe there are others, maybe a form of quantum sapience, not able to see another due to micro-dimensional displacement. It's possible that every living being on Earth who died during the apocalypse is walking around the world like I am wondering why they are alone. Maybe the Earth is still blue and green and the only thing scorched is me and my perception of it. I shake my head to clear these mental plagues that I may never know the answer to. Then my thoughts drift back to the spectacle at hand.
A new mountain chain has been formed and I became aware during my self-absorbed contemplation the entire planetary axis has shifted. I felt nothing. I notice a great deal of sediment in floating around the surface in swirling gasses while water seeped from a craves in the new valley forming a new ocean. Helium has been accumulating for several hundred thousand years now caused by radio active decay. It's not heavy enough to escape the Earths atmosphere like hydrogen is. I can see all of this but I can not see another soul.
Solar wind had been sweeping away any and all out-gassing by my hibernating planet for ages. Now there has been stabilization and I've come across water vapor, carbon dioxide, hydrogen-surfer and a few other trace gasses. Oxygen is now present and the creation of ozone has begun but there still exists the extremes temperatures between night and day. I spent the next 500,000 years watching and studying the formation of atmosphere.
Then the unexpected happens. I now feel warm all the sudden. I feel. How? I haven't felt anything in almost a billion years. Not cold. No pain. I'm dead. I couldn't feel tickles of solar winds or the texture of newly formed volcanic rock. I couldn't even feel the impacts of the annual Perseids meteors left by the comet Swift-Tuttle, which I used to lay awake as a child at night in July and August with my father to watch shooting stars streak across the sky. None. No feeling what so ever and now I'm warm. Déjà vu.
At this stage of Earths re-development the atmosphere is thin and is anything but the air I remember filling my lungs while alive. Now I feel the air around me heat up and then explode! I don't infuse air any longer but the heat is beyond suffocating. Dragon’s would think my breaths were hot in a way they could not fathom. It is not too unlike the feeling your lungs are going to burst underwater just as you break the surface only to gasp and inhale water by surprise. It's happening again.
The intensity of fully saturated light is blinding and the temperature is hotter then the surface of the sun. Then it happens. Colors burst in from the pure white and a world of life beams around me. Elegant sensations beyond description overwhelms my until now under utilized receptors until another’s touch pulls me into an uncommonly calm focus. Harmony. Only we exist to me at this time, this place, this moment. What is this?
Time stands still. Degrees of freedom are taken to the Nth dimension. Every moment of our life occurs at once. Euphoria, erotic bliss, satisfaction, precludes our children and life together. All our experiences, triumphs, and failures vibrate like strings across the universe, a virtuoso playing the sound track to our lives. Simultaneously all disappointments, ambitions, passions, challenges met and shunned, heart aches and emotional healing clap like thunder seaming together a fraction of a second. Another's breath like a breeze across my soul caresses my lips. Love, understanding, communication flash by as our clasped hands draw each other near for our final embrace. Our hands part. Time resumes. It is over.
Fin
Please feel free to comment, critique, suggest or otherwise heckle this story as you see fit. Just know I realize that there are many run-ons and I'll fix that in the next itteration . . . this is just the rough draft for input and criticism!
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Lightning Crashes (short story page 5 of 5)
At this stage of Earths re-development the atmosphere is thin and is anything but the air I remember filling my lungs while alive. Now I feel the air around me heat up and then explode! I don't infuse air any longer but the heat is beyond suffocating. Dragon’s would think my breaths were hot in a way they could not fathom. It is not too unlike the feeling your lungs are going to burst underwater just as you break the surface only to gasp and inhale water by surprise. It's happening again.
The intensity of fully saturated light is blinding and the temperature is hotter then the surface of the sun. Then it happens. Colors burst in from the pure white and a world of life beams around me. Elegant sensations beyond description overwhelms my until now under utilized receptors until another’s touch pulls me into an uncommonly calm focus. Harmony. Only we exist to me at this time, this place, this moment. What is this?
Time stands still. Degrees of freedom are taken to the Nth dimension. Every moment of our life occurs at once. Euphoria, erotic bliss, satisfaction, precludes our children and life together. All our experiences, triumphs, and failures vibrate like strings across the universe, a virtuoso playing the sound track to our lives. Simultaneously all disappointments, ambitions, passions, challenges met and shunned, heart aches and emotional healing clap like thunder seaming together a fraction of a second. Another's breath like a breeze across my soul caresses my lips. Love, understanding, communication flash by as our clasped hands draw each other near for our final embrace. Our hands part. Time resumes. It is over.
Fin
The intensity of fully saturated light is blinding and the temperature is hotter then the surface of the sun. Then it happens. Colors burst in from the pure white and a world of life beams around me. Elegant sensations beyond description overwhelms my until now under utilized receptors until another’s touch pulls me into an uncommonly calm focus. Harmony. Only we exist to me at this time, this place, this moment. What is this?
Time stands still. Degrees of freedom are taken to the Nth dimension. Every moment of our life occurs at once. Euphoria, erotic bliss, satisfaction, precludes our children and life together. All our experiences, triumphs, and failures vibrate like strings across the universe, a virtuoso playing the sound track to our lives. Simultaneously all disappointments, ambitions, passions, challenges met and shunned, heart aches and emotional healing clap like thunder seaming together a fraction of a second. Another's breath like a breeze across my soul caresses my lips. Love, understanding, communication flash by as our clasped hands draw each other near for our final embrace. Our hands part. Time resumes. It is over.
Fin
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Lighning Crashes (short story page 4 of 5)
While watching the Earths crust thrust the throw like a ream of cloth during a massive movement know as plate tectonics my thoughts wondered to my state of being. I'm a ghost. Why haven't I seen other ghosts? I can't be the only one. Why have I been bound to this world for so many aeons? Maybe there are others, maybe a form of quantum sapience, not able to see another due to micro-dimensional displacement. It's possible that every living being on Earth who died during the apocalypse is walking around the world like I am wondering why they are alone. Maybe the Earth is still blue and green and the only thing scorched is me and my perception of it. I shake my head to clear these mental plagues that I may never know the answer to. Then my thoughts drift back to the spectacle at hand.
A new mountain chain has been formed and I became aware during my self-absorbed contemplation the entire planetary axis has shifted. I felt nothing. I notice a great deal of sediment in floating around the surface in swirling gasses while water seeped from a craves in the new valley forming a new ocean. Helium has been accumulating for several hundred thousand years now caused by radio active decay. It's not heavy enough to escape the Earths atmosphere like hydrogen is. I can see all of this but I can not see another soul.
Solar wind had been sweeping away any and all out-gassing by my hibernating planet for ages. Now there has been stabilization and I've come across water vapor, carbon dioxide, hydrogen-surfer and a few other trace gasses. Oxygen is now present and the creation of ozone has begun but there still exists the extremes temperatures between night and day. I spent the next 500,000 years watching and studying the formation of atmosphere.
Then the unexpected happens. I now feel warm all the sudden. I feel. How? I haven't felt anything in almost a billion years. Not cold. No pain. I'm dead. I couldn't feel tickles of solar winds or the texture of newly formed volcanic rock. I couldn't even feel the impacts of the annual Perseids meteors left by the comet Swift-Tuttle, which I used to lay awake as a child at night in July and August with my father to watch shooting stars streak across the sky. None. No feeling what so ever and now I'm warm. Déjà vu.
Comments, suggestions, corrections, input, and heckling highly encourage and greatly appreciated! Thank you! This is a rough draft and will be revised before print.
Ezju paints fine art with coffee as an artistic medium at http:\\www.nosuchanimal.net and operates a design studio at http://www.phkaki.com
A new mountain chain has been formed and I became aware during my self-absorbed contemplation the entire planetary axis has shifted. I felt nothing. I notice a great deal of sediment in floating around the surface in swirling gasses while water seeped from a craves in the new valley forming a new ocean. Helium has been accumulating for several hundred thousand years now caused by radio active decay. It's not heavy enough to escape the Earths atmosphere like hydrogen is. I can see all of this but I can not see another soul.
Solar wind had been sweeping away any and all out-gassing by my hibernating planet for ages. Now there has been stabilization and I've come across water vapor, carbon dioxide, hydrogen-surfer and a few other trace gasses. Oxygen is now present and the creation of ozone has begun but there still exists the extremes temperatures between night and day. I spent the next 500,000 years watching and studying the formation of atmosphere.
Then the unexpected happens. I now feel warm all the sudden. I feel. How? I haven't felt anything in almost a billion years. Not cold. No pain. I'm dead. I couldn't feel tickles of solar winds or the texture of newly formed volcanic rock. I couldn't even feel the impacts of the annual Perseids meteors left by the comet Swift-Tuttle, which I used to lay awake as a child at night in July and August with my father to watch shooting stars streak across the sky. None. No feeling what so ever and now I'm warm. Déjà vu.
Comments, suggestions, corrections, input, and heckling highly encourage and greatly appreciated! Thank you! This is a rough draft and will be revised before print.
Ezju paints fine art with coffee as an artistic medium at http:\\www.nosuchanimal.net and operates a design studio at http://www.phkaki.com
Monday, August 17, 2009
Lightning Crashes (short story page 3 of 5)
The sun was much more white just after my death. The atmosphere which filtered out much of the harmful rays and scattered the blue no longer softened the brilliantly glaring giver of life. It still had some yellow to it but human eyes would have not been able to detect the subtly any longer. Being a ghost I’m not sure how I could see it but then there is plenty I didn’t understand while I was alive which I still do not comprehend. When the sun was out, the intensified contrast made it seem that there were only two colors, white and a brown black. Only at sunset could colors be discerned and even then they were different than I remember.
I never did discover what killed me. Nuclear war? Solar flairs? Meteor? The hand of God? I wondered the Earth searching for a clue to illuminate a mystery beyond my understanding. Being dead, a non-physical being, had its advantages while traveling. To my surprise I was bound the earth but not the physical laws I remembered. I couldn’t leave the surface unless by traditional means such as caves but I didn’t sink in water unless I forced the issue, not that there was much left on the surface anymore.
800,00 years ago I was at Old Faithful in Yosemite National Park or at least where the park used to be when the super volcano erupted underneath it. The dust and debris covered the sky for ages and only after a few centuries did I notice the accumulation of new gasses from this event and other volcanic activity around the Earth. She was not dead. Either that or she was the throws of her death rattle. It would be several hundred millennium before I would know the truth.
Several times over the countless aeons would I wonder if that friend ever wrote the story? I wondered if anyone ever read it? Or am I just one half a lightening bolt that experienced the story and friendship for the few sweet seconds that it lasted? I had devoted many Hale-Bopp visits of thought to this story and my long lost friendship since awakening from death.
(continued)
The writings on this page are intended for audience participation. I highly encourage and greatly appreciate all forms of constructive criticism, comments, suggestions, corrections, input and even good hearted heckling. The stories I publish here are all rough drafts and will evolve before actual publication in book form. This is considered a community effort and credit will be given to those who participate. Maybe your input will mean the difference between a best seller and mediocrity!
Ezju posts these stories in full at his Website http://www.prose.nosuchanimal.net
His fine art can be viewed at http://www.nosuchanimal.net and his design work can be viewed at http://www.phkaki.com
I never did discover what killed me. Nuclear war? Solar flairs? Meteor? The hand of God? I wondered the Earth searching for a clue to illuminate a mystery beyond my understanding. Being dead, a non-physical being, had its advantages while traveling. To my surprise I was bound the earth but not the physical laws I remembered. I couldn’t leave the surface unless by traditional means such as caves but I didn’t sink in water unless I forced the issue, not that there was much left on the surface anymore.
800,00 years ago I was at Old Faithful in Yosemite National Park or at least where the park used to be when the super volcano erupted underneath it. The dust and debris covered the sky for ages and only after a few centuries did I notice the accumulation of new gasses from this event and other volcanic activity around the Earth. She was not dead. Either that or she was the throws of her death rattle. It would be several hundred millennium before I would know the truth.
Several times over the countless aeons would I wonder if that friend ever wrote the story? I wondered if anyone ever read it? Or am I just one half a lightening bolt that experienced the story and friendship for the few sweet seconds that it lasted? I had devoted many Hale-Bopp visits of thought to this story and my long lost friendship since awakening from death.
(continued)
The writings on this page are intended for audience participation. I highly encourage and greatly appreciate all forms of constructive criticism, comments, suggestions, corrections, input and even good hearted heckling. The stories I publish here are all rough drafts and will evolve before actual publication in book form. This is considered a community effort and credit will be given to those who participate. Maybe your input will mean the difference between a best seller and mediocrity!
Ezju posts these stories in full at his Website http://www.prose.nosuchanimal.net
His fine art can be viewed at http://www.nosuchanimal.net and his design work can be viewed at http://www.phkaki.com
Friday, August 14, 2009
Lightning Crashes (short story page 2)
I've often wondered if being dead wasn't just a dream. I'd wake up and find I wasn't a ghost haunting a lifeless world. Then I'd remember the longest a dream had ever seemed to be is a few hours or a day at the utmost. I stopped wondering if it was a dream 2200 years ago. I'm dead. I'm a ghost. Now I just wonder if this is purgatory or some sort of existential hell or just is. Maybe there is no God, heaven, or any of that afterlife religion promises. It's possible I'm just residual energy lingering like a stale echo. I may never know.
After a few hundred years my thoughts wandered back to that beautiful but deadly union. Polarized capacitors in the sky propagate ionized step ladders down towards mother earth and the hungry streamers reach up to the clouds in positive expectation. Plasma completes the path between the two allowing for a charge hotter than the surface of the sun to explode the air around it completing the brief bonding encounter of my old friend’s dimensional race. It must be a fulfilling and blissful moment between two beings culminating in a lifetime’s desire for these quantum beings Deadly to the human if struck. A beautiful and elusive phenomena.
I remember the 2K bug and how it was going to be the end of the world as several other doomsday dates in history. The Inca calendar said 2012 was going to be the end of civilization as we know it and they were not too far off base. It was 2012 when I died. I think it was mid-to-late December, getting ready for another lonely commercial Christmas. Not sure if it was the 21st or not. I was never very good with time or dates. None of that matters any more. I no longer count in days months or years. I count the number of times I see the comet Hale-Bopp. It take about 2,392 years for the Heaven’s Gate’s harbinger of death to orbit the sun. It will be here in a decade or two. It will make the 8th time I've seen it at perihelion like a firefly in the sky. I miss fireflies.
After a few hundred years my thoughts wandered back to that beautiful but deadly union. Polarized capacitors in the sky propagate ionized step ladders down towards mother earth and the hungry streamers reach up to the clouds in positive expectation. Plasma completes the path between the two allowing for a charge hotter than the surface of the sun to explode the air around it completing the brief bonding encounter of my old friend’s dimensional race. It must be a fulfilling and blissful moment between two beings culminating in a lifetime’s desire for these quantum beings Deadly to the human if struck. A beautiful and elusive phenomena.
I remember the 2K bug and how it was going to be the end of the world as several other doomsday dates in history. The Inca calendar said 2012 was going to be the end of civilization as we know it and they were not too far off base. It was 2012 when I died. I think it was mid-to-late December, getting ready for another lonely commercial Christmas. Not sure if it was the 21st or not. I was never very good with time or dates. None of that matters any more. I no longer count in days months or years. I count the number of times I see the comet Hale-Bopp. It take about 2,392 years for the Heaven’s Gate’s harbinger of death to orbit the sun. It will be here in a decade or two. It will make the 8th time I've seen it at perihelion like a firefly in the sky. I miss fireflies.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Lightning Crashes (short story page 1)
An estranged friend once told me a fanciful if not tragically romantic tail about a race of presumably quantum beings who could only materialize and touch there soul mate once during the union of lightening. One reaching up from the ground and the other reaches down from the heavens to experience a lifetime of intimacy in a few spit seconds when the two energies meet. There is no more fanciful lightning. That would require an atmosphere.
Memory is like a dream, elusive. I’m not even sure what I have is a memory since my brain, its gray matter and synaptic neural impulses are all gone. What is left is an impression left behind with this energy that was me. A ghost. A spirit. A bodiless soul cursed to wonder the earth to and end that only God would know, if there is truly such a being. I'm not so sure.
I remember being hot all the sudden and then nothing. I remember the news being on. Watching images of holy wars raging on all continents. Jihadists yelling chants in too many different languages. Reports of starvation in America as big business abandons it's victims for willing new rich markets in Asia and the Middle East. I remember that! Americans not able to afford the products they manufactured. Barely able to afford food. We had been abandoned in every sense of the word. Then I was hot. Then nothing.
I had seen movies where everyone knew the end was coming. It was announced on the news. Television. The Internet. Newspapers. Even the guy on the street with the “End is Nigh” sandwich board knew the end was coming in the movies. People all huddled together like rabbits trapped in their warren waiting for the next announcement regarding their impending doom. People running rampant in the streets raiding, looting, fighting. Some movies were about asteroids some were about comets and others were about solar flairs reaching out across the distance and rendering the earth unsustainable for life.
There was no warning. No waiting and wondering about the after life. I felt warm for a split second. Then hot. Then nothing. I'm not even sure how long it was from the end until I for a lack of a better term woke as the specter I am now wondering the Barron lifeless Earth looking for a clue and waiting.
Memory is like a dream, elusive. I’m not even sure what I have is a memory since my brain, its gray matter and synaptic neural impulses are all gone. What is left is an impression left behind with this energy that was me. A ghost. A spirit. A bodiless soul cursed to wonder the earth to and end that only God would know, if there is truly such a being. I'm not so sure.
I remember being hot all the sudden and then nothing. I remember the news being on. Watching images of holy wars raging on all continents. Jihadists yelling chants in too many different languages. Reports of starvation in America as big business abandons it's victims for willing new rich markets in Asia and the Middle East. I remember that! Americans not able to afford the products they manufactured. Barely able to afford food. We had been abandoned in every sense of the word. Then I was hot. Then nothing.
I had seen movies where everyone knew the end was coming. It was announced on the news. Television. The Internet. Newspapers. Even the guy on the street with the “End is Nigh” sandwich board knew the end was coming in the movies. People all huddled together like rabbits trapped in their warren waiting for the next announcement regarding their impending doom. People running rampant in the streets raiding, looting, fighting. Some movies were about asteroids some were about comets and others were about solar flairs reaching out across the distance and rendering the earth unsustainable for life.
There was no warning. No waiting and wondering about the after life. I felt warm for a split second. Then hot. Then nothing. I'm not even sure how long it was from the end until I for a lack of a better term woke as the specter I am now wondering the Barron lifeless Earth looking for a clue and waiting.
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