Looking down from the damn dam rail into the still blood stained rocks below, I thought of changing Tennessee into Kentucky again and be done with it.
But then, raising my head and seeing the city-scape still beautiful in the sunset through the gorge in front of me, I turned away and started walking again, contemplating the red (technology) and the green (anatomy) and how to balance the two and not give up hope. Sanity don’t leave me yet!
It happened shortly after the rain started, probably after the first thunderclap. “What’s that, boy? Timmy’s fallen down a well and can’t get out but never mind that now and more important matters are pressing?” Frank repeated after his talking dog (in his head, for now). “Well, lead on!” he said.
The rain had stopped and it had gotten light when they came to this upside down guy with his parachute stuck in a tree down a nearby dirt road. A man from Tennessee, he claimed. No, a man *named* Tennessee, let’s change it. So the Blue Balls/Blue Moons sculptor is actually a man and not a woman as presumed. But what’s he doing in this tree, dropped down from the sky? Helicopter? Better cut him down so we can ask more questions.
Back on the ground, Frank told him that he had Chomp to thank for his rescue. But in turning around to find the dog — nothing. Frank didn’t own a dog, never had never will. And then the parachutist was gone too; Frank Lynn had apparently hallucinated the whole scenario. No more graytop mushrooms! he swore off then and there.
—–
But he eventually couldn’t resist — Mikie talked him into it I believe. This caused the second manifestation of the dog in another thunderclap during another thunderstorm, all part of it too. He was wetter and blacker this time, Frank noted through the gray-ish haze. “What’s that, boy?” he began to talk to the mutt again in his head. “Timmy remains trapped down in that well but there’s still more important matters to deal with tonight over at the damn, er, dam?”
So he followed the dog again down a different road this time to, as it turns out, the Petrochemistry Dam in a whole ‘nother game. The same guy was in trouble once more.
“Tennessee — if that’s your real name. What the hell are you doing?”
“It’s perfectly fine,” he said, teetering on the edge of death. “I just have to finish what the tree stopped before. The parachute opened by accident. I never intended to be saved.”
“Man that’s crazy. Get down from there!”
“Too late! AAAAAAAAHHHH!”
Muttering about him being a damn (dam?) fool, Frank Lynn rushed to the bottom….
… only to find someone totally different lying in the blood tainted stream there. Somehow someway, Tennessee had switched over to Kentucky in the free fall. Then everything disappeared just like before. He had Clyde on the phone in no time to schedule an emergency session, but his therapist had bad news too. He was changing jobs and moving. In the fall. No bookings before then. This is when Fremont came into his life. And Rutherford B. Hayes became the first president of our US of A to never be president. Triumvirate.
—-
“Go see Jonny Silverhhand to end this thing,” spoke Blue Moon to me when she popped up good as new over at the Kabusie roundabout marketplace after about 3 days we’ll say. “Just around the ‘corner’ — you can’t miss him.” And then she came to me and pecked a kiss on my cheek before walking away, saving the best for later.
Oh no Phil’s dead!
Or is he?
We’re burning the only book that can possibly maybe give us some definitive and/or quasi-definitive answers.
Good work “modern” society!
Filed under **VIRTUAL OT, 0043, 0511, GTA
“I tried to lighten the mood early in our friendship by showing him the Tire Nutz juxtaposition, Lichen, which he didn’t know about despite being local too. You’d be proud of me that day. Two big tractor tires on top of an auto repairs shop just down the street from my dealership, with a phallic water tower in back if you look at it straight on. Obviously done on purpose. Can you picture it in your mind’s eye, Lichen my partner? Do you even remember what those things look like, how they’re configured and such?”
“The tires are nuts, right,” says Lichen, serious in the moment while trying to figure all this out with her lesser brain power. “And the Blue Balls were nearby?”
“The Kentucky sculpture, yes, with three balls instead of 2, so: moons. Made by Tennessee. This was the fulfillment of her unfinished Mars project, poked through into another dimension. But Asylum was behind all of this still.”
“So we’re beyond… the Black Wall?”
“I’m not ready to go that far, my blonde buddy. It’s beyond me right now. And you know how I don’t like limitations of the mind.”
“Dangerous,” responds Lichen to this. “Keep ’em at bay with jokes.”
“Hmm.”
—–
One sector over, Clara Bellissaria is keeping tabs on tobacco selling Redd back at her station, noting that she is a 2n1 now and that the new left is different from the old right. The white horse leads, the black horse steers. Hasn’t gone off the rails yet. But soon she knew there would have to be a decision made, and Fern through her.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0043, 0304, C2077, Castle Town, GTA, Hana Lei^^, Mars^^, Nightsity, Omega^^
“There’s Blue Moon again, Lexi. Bigger than ever in life.”
“Just keep looking for clues,” she responded, not wanting that many distractions on the way to their ultimate goal. “The city will not give you everything. You must keep walking around the margins, poking around here and there and everywhere. Characters are obviously important. Blue Moon. Panama perhaps. Judith who is, well, *me*. And you seem to be the same as (1st person) V or Val, with an oppositely positioned Valerie lurking around the corner as well. The dam, boss. Keep poking around that damn dam.”
—–
The date attracted me. I had to ask. “Do you know… Tennessee?”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0043, 0206, C2077, Hana Lei^^, Nightsity, Rancho C, Small China
She sits in the dark and stares at TV static while thinking about the artist whose first name is Tennessee and the musician whose last name is Kentucky. Both “former,” it seems, as in dead, possibly even murdered. Maybe even… one and the same? Shelley phones up Edward to talk about it. Hubby Arthur is off acting again in a far away location. The boyfriend will have to do.
“Meet me at Sarah’s,” she requested. “Let’s walk around the town together.” She didn’t add, “then come back here,” but it was implied.
“Let’s make it Lexi’s,” altered Edward, knowing Sarah was quite the gossip.
“On my way, then.”
Contractually, she was required to wear the Crazy Blue outfit at all times now, no exceptions. Except one.
Later she studies the sappy “Abduct My Heart” lamp given to her by Arthur for her birthday before he left. She begins to cry.
What did she figure out? That Tennessee and Kentucky were indeed one beyond the Black Wall.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0043, 0203, C2077, Hana Lei^^, Nightsity
“What did you just call those rocks over there?”
—–
“Cleveland,” Fern repeats to partner Lichen what Asylum bartender Teebestia said to her while they were standing with their backs to the hole, gazing up at it. And the co-manager of the Yalta Bar and Grill happened to have the same name. Fern quickly determined it couldn’t be chance. They had to confront Drew “Grumpy” Cleveland with the news.
—–
“Little Big… right up on those rocks… was *taken*. Flung into the far corners of space against his will, his better nature. (Old) Mabel has been looking for him ever since. She thought the hole would provide the answer, or at least relief from her suffering. So she jumped… and came out the other side. Black to white; space again. The hole was a portal to a ship of vast dimensions. She didn’t find her big brother, per se, but found what happened to him, why he never returned. He was *assimilated*. Grumpy — you listening to me? You found that second list, said it was just on the floor when you finished dusting those bookshelves in back. But, truth be told, you’ve *had* that list, probably for a long time. What you didn’t know about is the other, matching list, our first but your second.”
Former porn star and current nudist Drew “Grumpy” Cleveland tried to retain a face of stone but failed. The facade broke down, he started crying even. In the animated blubbering, the huge package down below swayed back and forth like a swinging bridge disconnected on one side and in a heavy gale. He often wondered how it would be displayed when he passed on. In its own big, long jar of formaldehyde at some kind of porn flick museum? He didn’t want that future for himself. He wanted… more.
“I was told,” he said between sobs, “that it would make me *immortal*.”
A phallus! Fern realized. The Martian rocks represent his own. She needed to take a better look at them with this information. Where are the balls, for example?
Built right into the corner of the compound, as it turned out, the whole thing towering over the Asylum bar itself. But the overall smooth, classical phallus shape still lies unhewn and unexposed beneath a rough rock exterior. The sculptor, named TENNESSEE, still had much work to do. Trouble is, it had been over 100 years since she started.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0043, 0107, Castle Town, Mars^^, Omega^^
Past the pond and along a path that followed Wine Creek he went until he came to a grove of beech trees. There he built a fire against the side of a log and sat down at the end of the log to think.
Ward George had to escape art but Tennessee was all around, ready to embarrass him and make him turn red (as an apple) at every turn. Through his late night research, he knew about “Flapper” and a promise not fulfilled of artistic success, perhaps the point of it all. He was using his magnifying glass of a brain to focus on sewers and monsters therein and the death of Allen Martin who was actually a Martian (green hair in back giving it away, like a Conrad Bain). He had to find the beech grove, a place of sanctuary.
“Martin is alive,” he’d heard Duncan say while talking about the old days in good ol’ VHC City, before the coming of the… hotel? Anyway, it all started/revolved around that Black Hole of a structure created by Pitch Darkly. 97/97/97: triple number. If only the powers of VHC City back in the days had listened to his warning about the coming of The Diagonal that would link the whole continent, southwest to northeast, so powerful that its rather malevolent energy, or what turned out to be so, had to be counterbalanced by a second sw-ne line called Heart. Heart balances Head, like in a Hand (Health). But it was all suppose to happen like this most likely, George had also determined with his own head. But where, and who, was heart?
“No way out this way,” gruffed Suisan the pyramid shaped hat wearing fish butcher without turning around, bloodied cleaver at rest for now. George would have to turn back out of Kentucky back to Tennessee.
“Kay,” he said simply in response. The smell of chopped fish was overbearing.
Heading home.
“Found it!” he cried.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0026, 0407, Heterocera, Tennessee, VHC City^
Adelaide crawled around and crawled around, but still was unable to find New Island under this bed. Maybe the others would know more, she realized happily. I haven’t *thought* about asking them yet (!).
But in truth she had asked the other patients at Baumbeer Mental Hospital in the Tethia sim of Heterocera’s Pond District over and over this same line of questioning: Where is New Island? What happened to my art colony? Where are my *paintings*? She couldn’t face the fact that it was all gone, as if in a poof. Mid Hazel was the culprit. She grew tired of watching energy grow in that direction and put a quick halt to it. The catastrophe. Radiation in a lime green kiln. BOOM! But strangely, no harm to the involved buildings, and, outwardly at least, to the people either. Until they started dropping to the ground 4, 5, 6 days later. Not the people, the *art*. On display no more, and soon to derezz away into nothingness as creative energy continued to be drained.
Ground Zero?: the chair that the Tronesisia robot sculpture currently occupies at the Artist Point Interactive gallery, former location of the kiln where sculptress Tennessee Nuffin Butler fired her male parts in. It was a particular Red bit that Mid Hazel had chosen for the nascent seed. And it came from the future and had something to do directly with Bill and cheese.
Adelaide waves her hands in the air, trying to decide, once more, which way the wind blows.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0009, 0610, New Island^, Pond District^
Annie sneaks up on Trashy the Clown from behind this time, surprising him.
“Gimme some pills!”
—–
“You’ll have to stay behind from this point on, Young Ruby,” commanded Annie, hands on hips at the entrance to the sugar house.
“I thought you were an *artist*, Aunt Annie.”
“I’m slipping. Karl is threatening to turn blue again. I need a cash replenishing. This will do it.”
“Don’t do it. Think of Tennessee. Would *she* stoop this low?”
“Many times,” countered Annie to the youngster, not her real niece but a faux relationship Ruby deemed necessary. And she had that power, thanks to Mabel. But she couldn’t take away her free will. “Many times with many men,” Annie furthered. “And their many parts.”
Ruby continued to pout outside while Annie signed up for her new business. “If you tell Karl, I’ll kill you,” she told Ruby later. Annie may have to have some therapy soon. I chalk it up to the recent pill popping. Red and blue are all mixed up for her, undifferentiated.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0009, 0105, New Island^
Sunklands 