“See what we did, Keith B.? I *told* you we couldn’t avoid Horns.”
Category Archives: **VIRTUAL OT
landmimes 03
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0034, 0515, Google Street View, Horns of Hatton+, Maebaleia/Satori, South Dakota
00340415
“Looks like a Dove. Highlighted by white, even. Shadow against light.”
“Could be could be,” he relented. Spider. They’d found him! Carrcassonnee was overjoyed.
“Can I… see him again now? Now again him see… I can?”
—–
“Well I’ll just wait upstairs while you finish speaking with each other,” said Jamie, walking away and highlighting Sign.
The footsteps on the stairs ended and the footsteps on the top floor began. Roberts was more free to talk about what Tessa needed to know. She’d already apologized about before. She said it was the town and the lag there, made her appear… less clever than she was. Roberts actually meant Tessa here but Tessa thought she meant herself (Roberts). There was just that difference between the two. Now at least the difference is clear, because we weren’t in Cable Isle any longer but back in Towerboro. Which office was the branch of the other didn’t really matter. That would be revealed soon enough. I would assume (the branch is) here without knowing more, but I’m about as clueless as Tessa in the moment. We better get to their dialog.
“I’m sorry about before, Tessa. It was the lag and the town.”
“Yes, you said that before.”
“I was just checking to see if you were listening. Sometimes people don’t when I speak, but maybe I’m just use to Cable Isle and its issues. Maybe here will be different.”
So just listening in, it appears that there is only one Roberts and Franklin investigating firm and it has moved from there to here. Back to the interaction.
“I’m listening,” said Tessa, trying to do this simple action. All I need, she thought, is to wake up, not sleepwalk all the time. That’s what Roberts desires.
“Let’s just enjoy the here and now for a moment, shall we?” Roberts kept silent. Tessa kept silent. Roberts reengaged eye contact. “*Now*.”
A blue Martian appeared. “Who’s that, Roberts?”
“Laura, please,” requested the psychic-detective. “And that, my friend, is an Observer.”
“Hmmm. What is she observing?”
“You,” came the quick reply. Silence again. Tessa was trying to think of a next step — what Roberts wanted from her again. She was trying to be mindful. Roberts — Laura — was patient, she knew. There was something here to be revealed, she picked up, and not just the Observer. There was another *thing* involved, a (she gleaned) thing that is not what it seems. An animal! She said this aloud.
“Good. What kind of animal?”
“She immediately thought, dog, but discarded it as too easy, not trusting her gut reaction. Her thoughts drifted to horse. She could just guess aloud. “Horse,” she said.
“Mmmm, not quite,” spoke Roberts, face remaining neutral.
Alligator? she thought. “Alligator.”
“Again: not quite.”
Spider came to mind but she broadened it as insect. “Insect.”
“Yes.”
Tessa was pleased, thinking that was the end of the game. But then Roberts continued. “And?”
“Something else besides an insect?” Tessa tried to clarify.
Roberts gave up the game, opened the door with her mind.
“A… dog?” It was the first thing that came to mind and then it was the last thing that came to mind. Funny how things work that way.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0034, 0415, Cable Isle, Google Street View, Jeogeot, Tennessee, Towerboro
row of red 02
“Okay Kenny, slow and easy. We know what animal we’re looking for now.”
“Dog,” Kenny said, repeating the last word of the old, confused man.
And then, just like that — so suddenly — there it was. “There!” Ken screamed almost as loudly as the killed lady in the house did before. Arthur squelched the desire to shoot him on the spot as well. Because he saw something too.
“Back up. I want to make sure.” Ken backed up one click.
“Okay, sloow and eassy — and no screaming this time.” He held one of his weapons to Ken’s head just to make sure. He could drive himself if push came to shove. And it might after this. One click later: still there.
“The bird is *attacking* the dog?” Ken said in as calm a voice as he could muster given the circumstances.
“One click more forward,” Arthur Kill demanded, not yet ready to answer any questions.
“Okay.” Click.
Arthur Kill looked at the spectacle that had moved more toward the back. The bird is far separate from the dog now.
“Indicating,” concluded Kill. “The bird was indicating the dog. We can go home now. But first…” *POP*
The dog replaced the man.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0034, 0414, Google Street View, Tennessee
row of red
“Hold on slow down,” commanded Arthur Kill from the passenger seat, loaded down with weapons of not so mass destruction and thus unable to drive. Instead Ken of Cable Isle’s Junk Yard and Mechanic Shop acted as his chauffeur, having been spared for a bit more to do this job after he successfully fixed the old ’57 Chevy just minutes before the 11 PM deadline, dead being the operative word here. Afterwards, however, we anticipate his story will end the same as his former partner Bobby’s: planted in the same paltry town cemetery as Arthur Kill rose from just day before yesterday’s tomorrow thanks to Wheeler Wilson and her wicked witchy ways. They may even just reuse the wooden coffin Harry or Harold the Gnome made specifically for Kill, which long Ken could fill out pretty nicely as well, they might determine. There’s also admittedly a racist angle to this possible reuse since both were black men. We need not go into the town’s sordid history here and the gnomes’ strong involvement with it. Arthur Kill’s corrupted morals have nothing to do with ethnicity. White Wheeler Wilson, for instance, is just as bad in many ways, perhaps even worse in some. And Ken is as innocent as the driven snow in all this.
“Wait here,” he further ordered to Ken, and got out of the car to inspect shoes laid out on the stairs of the small house, flip flops more specifically, 8 in number, a suspicious number indeed given what he was looking for.
I’ll go in and try to get information from these stick hicks one by one, he thinks, killing them as I count them off. Could be 4 regular human beings, but, dare he dream it, could be *one* thing. “Keep the engine going,” he barked at Ken, not caring if the people inside (if they were people) heard him or not.
Turns out it was 4 humans to his disappointment. He popped them off 1 2 3 4. The 2nd and 3rd were too scared even to talk. The 1st just screamed — Kill put an end to that quickly. The 4th was interesting. “Dog gonnit, I know that name,” he said in a weary old voice to Arthur’s question, his mind obviously too gone to realize what was happening, and that 3 of his relatives or whatever (Kill assumed everyone was related to everyone else in this stick hick house) had perished and that he was in all likelihood next. “Dog…” he said, pausing before finishing with “gonnit.” “Dog,” he said again, and let it stand alone this time. “Dog!” he said, remembering. *POP*
“Thanks,” Arthur said, blowing smoke from the barrel of the just fired pistol as was his custom. Dog it is.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0034, 0413, Cable Isle, Google Street View, Tennessee
grrocery/only coke is real
“The portal was too strong,” guessed Kolya later on, standing before it with a can instead of a bottle. “Collapse of the kingdom SIIIPP.”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0033, 0404, Google Street View, Iowa
Hy-Vee
The wind blows hard as we enter the village.
Well pump replaces rocket ship on the next encountered welcoming sign. The pump is a rocket?
Ah ha. Well pump standing by itself in an otherwise vacant lot more on the edge of the tiny hamlet. Launching pad?
And then another one in the exact center, blue instead of white.
Visiting Roger Pine Ridge (as it turns out) waits on a bench at the store he saw pictured on that rock, the one that absorbed Marty. Maybe Marty is here, he reasons. Might make sense. He’ll give it a couple more minutes or hours or days at least. Years.
The flapping continues. Roger is unable to light one of his personally rolled white sticks because of it. Sparks too dangerous in a spot so wooden and full of history.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0033, 0311, Google Street View, Iowa
00330310
We live in the North now, me and my collection of avatars. Centered around Route 12. Below us are Upper Austra, Lower Austra, Wild West, and Yd Island. Between them are border areas such as Alien Island, Frog Isles, and Lands End. Surrounding it all are the Rim Islands and also Southwestern, where that big rock which obviously doubles as the oracle Carrcassonnee is located. The rock also links Nautilus to the Real World through Iowa. Most likely. Marty disappeared inside it; became one with it. He and Roger Pine Ridge drove all the way to the central square in that old, beat up Chevy that apparently didn’t go into the levy. Marty: how can interior and exterior be the same?
Maybe the answers lie here, a bit outside the defined hypercube.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0033, 0310, Frog Isles, Google Street View, Iowa, Lands End, Lower Austra, Nautilus, NORTH, Rim Isles, Rooster's Peninsula, Southwestern, Upper Austra, Wild West, Yd Island
00330309
The Bogota series, The Arab ponders here, studying the collage section of the blog. Half series, half not, the complexity of the photo-novels weighing in again. Since Boos, collages have depended on its now enormous (ponderous?) storyline. That was 2015. This is 2022. A long time for collages to serve another master and not themselves as completed, self contained art works, or at least self contained art series. Bogota changed all that. Bogota never had its own gallery, although I tried to make a unified sense of the whole. Didn’t work, except, a bit, for inclusive series Bogota Proper, as I call it, and, more recently — in the last year and a 1/2 or so — Picturetown, another Canadian based series like Boos before it, notably enough. But even Picturetown was different: separate it from the attached photo-novel, 24 in a series of, presently, 32, and the meaning is severely diluted, maybe irreparably damaged. Yet I still do create individual collages here and there in the continuing process. This, I assume, will continue…
Looking back on it, audio-visual synchronicities, another kind of collage, go hand in hand with the 2d, more “regular” ones. What one might call the first true movie collage of the bunch, “Billfork” back in 2004, was created in the same year as the 1st 2d collage series in Greenup. Then, on the other side, Boos was created about the same time as the last audio-visual collages I made in 2015-2016.
Just moving down the blog headers to Reality — Reality, pheh, what a concept! — I’ve hiked almost every day since I retired March 1. I’ve included some RL photos in the blog recently, but I want to do more of that. It’s all going to a place where I concoct one of those woodsy art happenings again, like with Bigfoot-Chesterton also from 2015-2016, another of those seeming last-of-its-kind phenomenon. Truth is, I think that audio-visual synching will return, albeit in a very different and unexpected form. Collage series will continue, perhaps separating out from virtual reality again and relying more on themselves alone for meaning. Writing is very important, but art also will go on.
And I’ll probably try my hand at an actual novel sometime, sans pictures. The setting may very well be Oz.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0033, 0309, BIGFOOT, Blue Mountain, Bogota, Carrcass+08, carrcasses, City Park, collages 2d, Country Park, County Park, Nautilus, NORTH, Oz, Rooster's Peninsula
West Hel
I spotted the cacti I spotted the cops.
Then all became blinded.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0032, 0508, Arkansas, Google Street View
Sunklands 