He watches from afar, noting that she may have Winona Ryder eye. Didn’t she just visit a local hair stylist several days before? He knows she did, although not with the results she wanted. The results *they* wanted? It was a question he had to be asking at this juncture in our story.
—–
Back up to “normalcy”.
—–
“Where you been?”
“Oh just riding around the sand.”
“Hmm.”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0037, 0307, HANA LEI, Sand Springs
It was always risky going back to the Omega continent, but I thought this hot dog perched atop a Wendy’s hamburger joint meant something. Wendy’s hadn’t sold the questionable commodity since the mid 80’s, yet here it is. In the present tense of Our Second Lyfe, Oriental style; thinly squirted with mustard.
—–
Barry X. Vampire felt he drove his dinner guests away with his impatience. He was anxious to start the next chapter of his book, his life in general. He stares past a nearby house of one of the guests, a nice enough guy named Stan Gunderson who he met at the market a couple of weeks back, toward the Dead Sea and what he’d always heard called Dead Dog Isle. He wanted to know why it was named that. Was it one of those false memories that seemed to be more common these days? He had to find out.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0037, 0302, Omega, Southern
“I’ve been betrayed? By a *triangle*??”
“I can explain.”
—–
He often thought of that day he found Elvira with a shape. Three corners and the truth, he knew after that. So far did he run to square and the extra corner that he didn’t have time to stop. Until today. Decision. The portal would be open again to New Mexico: 7:15 this morning. He could take his bike and just ride ride ride, never looking back. Stupid second world, he thought and almost spat on the ground, at least imagined it. The powers that be had a plan. He would blend in with a pack of choppers heading south from Los Lunas, become part of the pack itself. “Do whatever you have to to accomplish this important important mission,” spoke his most immediate boss. And so he found Nikki at Silver City when the rowdies that had been hounding him since almost the beginning finally and completely dropped away (siren calls just here there and there), rode alongside her until the Shakespearean end. He didn’t plan to fall in love on the other side but love happens, as they say. Yeah, he also thought of the triangle as he made his plans for the future with her, used that negative energy to propel himself away away away from Burro Alley and the possibility of return.
He sat here like a lifeguard on that fated day, actually imagining blonde Nikki from the future before (and below) him. Across the namesake cove, not quite in the corner but getting there: the 4th, the future — without Elvira, Our Second Lyfe, his triangle of bratty kids, pheh. “Elvira can take care of them,” he said aloud, still staring down at the form that had taken shape. “They all take after her anyway; best that like stays with like.” He refused to see his own brattiness, the bully that he’d become in his negative thinking about this that and that. So if Nikki likewise betrayed him… well, it won’t end pretty.
“How pretty,” he said, oblivious to this possibility.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0037, 0212, Nautilus, New Mexico, NORTH, Slaashsides
He pulled up to the station even though he didn’t need gas, just to look like the rest of the crowd. Despite being unmotorized, he’d outraced half of the choppers here he blended into around Los Lunas. Rowdy crowd — didn’t take to his showoffiness. Tried to shoot his tires out a couple of times but he just weaved and bobbed his way to safety. At one point he had to ride through the desert for a couple of miles to avoid bullets. Finally around Silver City enough of the real troublemakers had dropped out so that he could feel at ease with the rest — attached to one bar or brothel or another along the way — siren calls. He’d actually made a friend, he felt. More on that later: an escape hatch from a lifetime of crime and corruption otherwise. Penny might be her name. Wanda?
—–
*Meanwhile*, on Nautilus…
Shelley Struthers got her wish. We, the Baker family as a whole, have returned to the Nautilus continent, which she’s decided should remain an Our Second Lyfe focus. Now the big Nautilus map in my skybox becomes very relevant again. I bought waterfront property quite cheaply, so I can, in all likelihood, recoup my money and then some from the purchase. Not far from the old Collagesity location in Fordham. More details soon!
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0037, 0209, Lower Austra, Nautilus, New Mexico, Wild West
weekly message from the Spiritually Okay League (SOL)…
They say in order to properly enter the Void, you have to leave the old self outside, crushed by its dense, massive weight. Another trick is that you have to come in aerially through the hayloft instead of the front door, else you just find yourself entering yourself entering yourself in a kind of mirror world funhouse that never ends.
Once safely inside, you can do a massive amount of good and evil to the world you then control, depending on where the Void is placed, in this case the central lawn of a New Mexico ghost town, turning it from dead to living, if at a price. Thank you Aztec warrior! For being so valiant and brave. For carrying things through to their logical conclusion despite the rather overwhelming odds against you, materially emotionally mentally. Tintown, the true and real one as opposed to those fake, reflective others, will not be forgotten. It lives on, if only in a type of graft form. Good enough! Better than evil enough.
On with the show…
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0037, 0208, New Mexico
Barry DeBoy with his latest work: “Does This Look Square To You Too? (Cancan Girls)”.
“No mirroring involved,” he adds.
“Hmm.”
“Do your worst,” he says to observing Hucka D. on the bed. She dutifully begins.
“Irma was in mother Isadora’s shadow at the time, joined with her at the hip as it were.”
“As it is,” Barry DeBoy automatically inserts, but then remembers the year is 1923. 1923 1923, he ruminates. Where have I heard that before?
“Irma wanted out from the shadow but that would come later. For now, for *then*, they were the Cancan girls, twinned dancers in this provocative production.”
“You are soo good at this.”
“I know.”
“Let’s go back to the lounge and talk to Hal about all this.”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0037, 0206, Bogota, collages 2d, New Mexico, Willow Hill
And so they traveled from Mountainair down to Lordsburg, Hucka Doobie’s old stomping grounds. Before she died and was reborn again anew in her old bee form. Now she’s progressed far enough back to human to also more closely examine her human past, pre-bee. She retracts her antennae for good and dives in. Would they make it? Would Duck prevent the success of the journey? The point is that they made it. And Antony at the bottom again or at least Anthony, two of ’em in fact; double the fun. Border towns both. It was not all about Anthony — unlike that other claim — but at least the first 7th was (approximation). I don’t have many friends. Let’s call him up.
“I have to take this,” he said to visiting Hucka Doobie and Barry DeBoy. The Devil, he knew, because of the timing.
“Hallo?”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0037, 0201, New Mexico
The Void had come to Mountainair in January 2008, drove right through the middle of the town *basically* unnoticed. Probably on a bike. Probably unmotorized so as to cut down on the attention. Barry found this out on his computer back at the hotel, only 2 blocks away from the passage. The Void was making a statement, he knew. Best to get out of town before “accidents” happen again. The Duck was presently gone but for how long?
“The bottom of the state,” he urged to Hucka Doobie that night. “That’s probably what it means.”
And indeed Shakespeare is to be found there. Hucka D. knew the area well.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0037, 0116, Google Street View, New Mexico
“Is this the one with my father in it?”
“Just keep watching,” Hucka Doobie requested to her sometimes lover, all times friend Barry DeBoy, secretly, way down deep, our own blog core leader Baker Bloch again. Thus the question… and the confusion. Only Hucka Doobie can see this through.
—–
“Is that the Vampire Planet?”
“Close,” answered Hucka Doobie. “Very close.” And it was upon them.
—–
“What’s all those Shakespeare quotes at the bottom of the screen about?” continued DeBoy with the questions after they arrived at the studio.
Hucka Doobie sighs. “That’s what we have to get to the bottom of.”
Pause. “Oh.”
“Shakespear Club.”
“Yes. Of course.” He continues to study as this line fades and the next one appears. “Antony and Cleopatra,” he believes. Although it’s been a long time. Something about indecision…
Spaced Ghost receives his first guest.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0037, 0115, Arizona, Jeogeot, New Mexico, Towerboro
Sunklands 