Category: Life form

Found this in the gutter down the street. Somewhere, medical a VW – a new one, illness by the make of the silkscreened aluminum – is driving around without an identity.

Is the badge the seat of a car’s soul?
Edward was bored with Ur-space.

He had been living there for the past nine months during most of his leech time (the 5 hours a day allotted to every citizen in his creche), cialis 40mg and he was fucking bored.

The organic ship designs – so edgy just six months ago – now all looked like the vole intestines from which they were modeled. The avatars were cliche’d, look the tele-sex pedestrian and thuddingly dull.

When it first launched last year, Ur-space was IT for multi-user existence: You stuck your head into the womb-helmet and galaxies bloomed around you. Realtime haptic sensors let you feel. Odor organs fed you smells. The jacks that lit up your corneal implants were of the finest rhodium-plated platinum. The em-sensors playing the mood-track were custom-tuneable to compensate for any variations in your EKG pattern or pharmacological appetites, and by god, when you plugged yourself in, you were THERE.

But like any wirehead habit that fired the same four chemical compounds through the same set of dendrites over and over and over again, Ur-space had a tendency to be too wonderful, too fast, too soon.

Before long, it tasted like last season’s model. Before long, you found yourself stabbing the same phantom triggers repeatedly to wring the last few endorphins out of the space before you had to submit to the gruesome act of unplugging and the hideous way realworld had of sucking you back down to a level of inanity you never thought possible.

And before long, you were piling up at random bus stops like driftwood in the surf, seesawing between the chemical deficit of neurotonins and the emotional deficit of your sick junkie days.

Before long, you were 13, with nothing left to care about, save the nagging notion that you could have spent the money on a moped and tried escaping for real.

He tongued the switch in his upper right second bicuspid for shutdown and winced as Ur-space folded away. The silk brocaded cushions faded to a cigarette-burned bus bench. The females went up in wisps of light. The warmth in his head, his balls and his hands dulled to a numb ache.

Then the bus hissed rigth past at high speed – the driver having rightly marked him for a pathetic nodder – flinging an acrid fan of rainwater, coolant and trash across his waking face.

His split-second impression read it as a skipped hippocampus shutdown routine – at least something should have damped the sharp endorphin falloff. But then a flurry of trashed popcaps caught in the spray peppered his face and clenched eyelids like finger-tip-sized plastic buckshot, and he flinched awake to Shitworld, as he liked to call it.

Shitworld was now the only place he could imagine – scraping the greasy rainsplash and half-dissolved popcaps out of his hair – worse than Ur-space.

It wasn’t so much the comedown that sucked. It was the knowledge that this was a reality he could never modify, the world into which he never asked to be born, and the one he had spent much of his copious leisure time between waking, podmeals, learnfeeds and sleep – escaping by wire.

Sighing, he pulled the fleshlids from his fatique-jacket pocket, stuffed his skulljacks closed (making a mental note to swab them out with antibiotics once he got home) and glared at the bus’ receding taillights.

Be fucked, and not in a shy way, he muttered after it, coiling the skullnode wires around the now-cooling HeadCase and stuffing the whole nasty affair into his bag.

He looked at his watch – gametime was permanently toggled to OFF when he was inside – and gasped. 12:45 a.m. That had been the last bus. Ffffuck. Better get inside or get boxed hard for a curfew violation.
Edward was bored with Ur-space.

He had been living there for the past nine months during most of his leech time (the 5 hours a day allotted to every citizen in his creche), order and he was fucking bored.

The organic ship designs – so edgy just six months ago – now all looked like the vole intestines from which they were modeled. The avatars were cliche’d, the tele-sex pedestrian and thuddingly dull.

When it first launched last year, Ur-space was IT for multi-user existence: You stuck your head into the womb-helmet and galaxies bloomed around you. Realtime haptic sensors let you feel. Odor organs fed you smells. The jacks that lit up your corneal implants were of the finest rhodium-plated platinum. The em-sensors playing the mood-track were custom-tuneable to compensate for any variations in your EKG pattern or pharmacological appetites, and by god, when you plugged yourself in, you were THERE.

But like any wirehead habit that fired the same four chemical compounds through the same set of dendrites over and over and over again, Ur-space had a tendency to be too wonderful, too fast, too soon.

Before long, it tasted like last season’s model. Before long, you found yourself stabbing the same phantom triggers repeatedly to wring the last few endorphins out of the space before you had to submit to the gruesome act of unplugging and the hideous way realworld had of sucking you back down to a level of inanity you never thought possible.

And before long, you were piling up at random bus stops like driftwood in the surf, seesawing between the chemical deficit of neurotonins and the emotional deficit of your sick junkie days.

Before long, you were 13, with nothing left to care about, save the nagging notion that you could have spent the money on a moped and tried escaping for real.

He tongued the switch in his upper right second bicuspid for shutdown and winced as Ur-space folded away. The silk brocaded cushions faded to a cigarette-burned bus bench. The females went up in wisps of light. The warmth in his head, his balls and his hands dulled to a numb ache.

Then the bus hissed rigth past at high speed – the driver having rightly marked him for a pathetic nodder – flinging an acrid fan of rainwater, coolant and trash across his waking face.

His split-second impression read it as a skipped hippocampus shutdown routine – at least something should have damped the sharp endorphin falloff. But then a flurry of trashed popcaps caught in the spray peppered his face and clenched eyelids like finger-tip-sized plastic buckshot, and he flinched awake to Shitworld, as he liked to call it.

Shitworld was now the only place he could imagine – scraping the greasy rainsplash and half-dissolved popcaps out of his hair – worse than Ur-space.

It wasn’t so much the comedown that sucked. It was the knowledge that this was a reality he could never modify, the world into which he never asked to be born, and the one he had spent much of his copious leisure time between waking, podmeals, learnfeeds and sleep – escaping by wire.

Sighing, he pulled the fleshlids from his fatique-jacket pocket, stuffed his skulljacks closed (making a mental note to swab them out with antibiotics once he got home) and glared at the bus’ receding taillights.

Be fucked, and not in a shy way, he muttered after it, coiling the skullnode wires around the now-cooling HeadCase and stuffing the whole nasty affair into his bag.

He looked at his watch – gametime was permanently toggled to OFF when he was inside – and gasped. 12:45 a.m. That had been the last bus. Ffffuck. Better get inside or get boxed hard for a curfew violation. He saw the sweepbeams already cascading down the street towards him, and bolted, scrabbling hard at a peeled security get to get inside fast.

Glass crunched beneath, and the metal fencing tore at the toggles on his jacket, the straps on his bag, needing him to stay on the street and go to jail because apparently it amused them.

A sweepbeam osciillated towards him, draping its sharp violet viewpath over slumbering cars and lurking street furniture.

He panicked, hauled out a pocket knife and hacked at the bag straps. Fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK!

Like an old cartoon, it relented just as the beam passed and he tumbled backward onto the hard mosaic floor, cracking his head.
I delight in finding the delight my children find in simple acts of creation.

Paper is an adventure. Fold it and make a city, buy a castle, viagra buy a world.

A couple of these things have been floating around the house this week.

I have no idea what they are. All I know is that my son – or my daughter – made them.
Or at least that’s what this blog points to.

Wild cucumber tastes and looks nothing like its namesake. It is a 4-inch-long, order egg-shaped handful of misery, approved with cactusy spines that puncture your skin if you grip it too tightly.

A taste of the juice inside (for they prove to be very juicy when dissected with a serrated knife and a thick dishcloth to pad your hands) confirms that it’s a nastily bitter fruit with little interest in nourishing other creatures.

The kids brought home a couple of these from a hike up Runyon Canyon.