It’s time to lay under the blue and white umbrella again.
Ahh. This is the life!
Tag Archives: UMBRELLA+
when the levy breaks
“When did you get the new tattoo?” he asked over to me from his own blanket, lotion finished for now.
“Oh I don’t know,” I nonchalantly replied. “About 15 minutes ago I guess.” I was applying blog time here, because I’d only recently decided to expose the thing. TILE Manifesto. I knew where this was heading… kind of.
I felt Ted’s eyes look across me toward the elephant ride on the mainland beach. Corsica is a looong continent, I heard him say in his head, thanks to Fern’s temporary spell. He also said he’d give it a 10. She was pleased. No need to redo the legs any more. But to the information I *really* need.
“Ted,” I said. “Ted Bear.”
“Yes?” He rolled back and stared into the blue and white umbrella but he was still smiling. Always the smile now. He was dreaming happy things. Like more lotion.
“I know you’ve told me about Jenny and how she freed up Baker Bloch so he could go to that pyramid in de skies. Jenny is… prudish.”
“Yeah, she doesn’t like what I’m doing on this islet. She wanted Baker away from that.”
But to the thoughts. What is he really thinking? She scans but no luck. He was back on her. Pondering the back. The orange and violet would have to wait, zebra’s eyes X-ed out for now. Probably all for the best, she thinks, and starts to apply again. Next post!
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0031, 0402, Lands End, Lower Austra^, Nautilus, Wild West
00310309
She became his most regular visitor afterwards. “Tell me more about the Merry Go Round people,” she requested in her cool, silky way while remotely animating the pair again and making them spin around a common axis. Axis, she thinks. Her *husband*.
“Crack and Whack, police agents, or so they claimed. More prisoners to this small isle,” he said in his toy bear voice, just made for a loving child who was far far away now, in a different plane of existence actually. “Punished because of a bust. Broken into pieces they said he was. Took them forever to put the guy back together, the chief-inspector said, Petty I believe, unless it was Ketty — can’t recall which, actually. Usually my memory is excellent, like an elephant’s.” Should have *been* an elephant he laments here, daring to glance past Alysha’s tall, sprawled out body beside him at the Ella Phanta ride across the water to their right. Still fully on dry land. Unlike him.
“Hmm,” she replied, and sat up or rolled over, take your pick. But then she switched everything around and enacted the unexpected, turning toward the bear instead and starting to apply suntan lotion to his smiling head. New!
“So, Mr. Teddy (squirt). Tell me (squirt apply) how Baker Bloch got off that island over there? (apply apply)” She’d taken off her hat as well. Didn’t get her anywhere. He hadn’t requested she turn into a bobblehead, like Baker. After all this time. You think it would happen already if it was going to happen. She was tired of talking about the beach toys. She’d gotten their story now a half dozen times apiece. Always the Ketty-Petty confusion, and he doesn’t even know he’s repeating himself.
“Jen-nny,” he said, completely falling under her spell and revealing stuff he would never do otherwise. “Paii-d.” He meant bail here.
The next time she kept her hat on while still fulfilling his sentence. You can say their relationship changed.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0031, 0309, Lands End, Lower Austra^, Nautilus, Wild West
00310308
We start again not at Ruby’s left leaning wagon in Spirit Witch where Waldrop was summoned but instead at the nearby community of Bear occupying a tiny island in Moomit Bay directly below Monevole. Baker Bloch bares his head in deference to the great King of the island: Ted, of course. Ted Bear. You had to bare something, he gathered, to have an audience with him. The hat would do, Ted indicated to the newest visitor to his islet kingdom. Thank you, he added. He was glad of visitors and wished them 24/7. He was an extreme extrovert, thus his isolation in the bay as everyone around him tired of his constant visiting and hovering. We’ll come to you now, they all said around him, wishing him well on his new venture. He didn’t understand at first, cried a lot, but then came to accept his “imprisonment.” *Selective* extroversion, that’s the key, they said, still gathered around him on the shoreline but shortly to leave, back to their spouses and siblings to heave a big collective sigh of relief that Ted wouldn’t come a knocking on their door tonight or tomorrow night or hopefully ever again. Something is not right with you, they said, almost at the end. This is the only way. And then they were gone. Ted turned on the radio. Storm a brewing. More tears fell. The lighthouse blinked on and off at his bidding but there was no way to go inside. The toys down at the beach played on. His only companions now except for the occasional visitor, the ones who cared. Ted foresaw in the palm leaves the coming of a tall, white eyed stranger, a cowboy, no a spaceman. Half and half, although he wasn’t suppose to use that phrase in front of anyone else. Keep it to yourself, they also said that day they left him on that islet, never to return again to normal existence.
So he was not surprised at the appearance of me, Baker Bloch or Baker B., who fit the description of the prophecy. “You have to bare…” he said to me because it was part of his sentence on the islet. Like I said. “… something,” he completed, looking me over good, picking me apart even. I took off my hat. It seemed to do the trick, like I also said before.
Looking at my shiny dead dome, he decided I should go one or two or five steps further and turn into a bobblehead of myself. “This is so we don’t feel you are talking *down* to us,” he says in his bear voice, tamed from years playing with human children. He hasn’t eaten anybody since ’62. Not since he was an actual bear, himself shot in ’65 and stuffed into a toy. He was soo happy at first! A toy! he cried. I can do *anything*, play with anyone, *be* with anyone. Humans watch out! And they did. And so he was here.
So *I* did, and he promptly gave me what he declared was my own island as a reward… just right over here within close earshot; they could talk all the time, he said, trying not to show too much excitement. I had successfully become one of them, whatever that actually meant.
The wrong Ruby suddenly appeared on the beach across the water. I realized I had been trapped as well. I believe she may have been cackling but it could have been the sound of a sudden gush of cold wind blowing across my bare head atop my now diminutive body. Then the others appeared…
I was no extrovert but it was the same with me. They were irritated and they decided to isolate. I counted at least 7 people on the shoreline who I thought were true friends.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0031, 0308, Lands End, Lower Austra^, Nautilus, Wild West
red to blue
“Interesting tatoos.”
“Thanks.”
“So, are you going to join this Umbrella group, or not?”
“Don’t know. Depends on how the shrimp goes.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“Food is my guide.”
“I hear ya.”
—–
“So, where’re you from?”
“Place called Spoiled Rotten.”
“For real?”
“Yeah. Got 4 daddies. And one biological one too although I usually don’t count him. 3 daddies, then. No: 4. Forgot about Fred.”
“You sound like quite the catch (!). Is it the tattoos? Should I get some? Who would you recommend? *What* would you recommend?”
“Tattoos?” She was only half listening to that last paragraph, instead thinking about Fred and how she needs to call him.
“Yeah.”
She readjusted her colorful legs, a story on each one. She spoke in general. “You have to appease your daddies so stuff like ‘I’m yours,’ or ‘Daddy’s baby’.”
“Lemme guess,” the untattooed one said back. “Even though *you’re* in control.” Observing from her position, she was thinking: 3 9’s make a 6.
“Yeah baby.” Both giggle.
“How about you?”
“Oh, a nowhere place. Vanilla mom and dad. An uncle who was a prevert. That’s why they sent me away.”
“To this camp, yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Well…?” Same for her? she was pondering. Could she have found, a friend?
Clarksey
“I was stuck,” Keith B. tried to explain about The Room. “I was caught.”
“Yeah, by *me*.” The cube is the sphere is the sea is the whale. The flip style notepad and push style lead pencil remained unsheathed this time but Jenny knew. Jennifer now. The Mann emerged from a plastic cocoon. It was in all the books, a running motif. Keith B. was stuck in more ways than one. 29 now, beginning HERE.
“It’s just what The Mann does. When the Wo-mann is away. Look at Marion Star Harding, still dreaming of dead Heidi in his own way. When the (new) director does her shoots up at Cass City.”
Jennifer looks around, still confused about the location. This could be Cass City, this could be Pipersville… or Storybrook. But instead: Whiskey plus Clarksburg, Whisclarkseyburg, then (maybe). Whiskey *inside* Clarksburg. She was stuck!
She stopped looking around, spacing out. “What… is the name of this place..?” Should she call him Daddy, Papa, Keith B.? She decided the last.
Keith B. didn’t look around. He knew where he was. And it didn’t work. He’d been uncovered, as if from a secret space.
Former private detective Wendell “Biff” Carter, back on the beat, stopped redding the read book and looked over. That was her all right, he surmised, seeing the eyes. Mrs. Know-It-All.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0029, 0509, Purden/Snowlands^, Sansara
akin to Pandora’s
I was always the smartest girl in school. I was always first to raise my hand to answer questions from the teacher. But my *brother*… we didn’t know until much later his special special talent. He *couldn’t* be edited. Let me state that again: He *couldn’t*… be *edited*. No wonder he got frustrated by his 2 dimensional family, including me (me!). He was 3d all along, working on a higher plane than us. A *channeled* plane, true, but still: highly psychic, more than the rest of us. I had to step out of myself and turn into Jennifer Lane to understand better. Before, I was Jenny Lane, a kid at Forest Hill School for psychic children. Jacob I. was there a bit later — he went over to Hillside on the other hill side of town for his elementary years. Now I was grown up; all weedy. But I didn’t smoke pot to get high. Grown up — but I felt my apples were too small. I wanted to exchange them with another’s. Harrison Ford Jett seemed a perfect (imaginary) candidate. I was always a Star Wars fan growing up, not even learning about Star Trek until the 11th grade, almost done in school. My classmates called me Spock but I thought that was because of my glasses, before I got my (umbrella) contact lenses and could read with my eyes. The library remained a far away and fuzzy edifice after that, shrouded in distance producing mists by then. I proceeded forward with my new life with Tommy beyond academia. Family became priority.
A child is born, a child is given. Julius, although I wanted a Julia. Sex happens. Then the second: a mini-me of sorts. I projected into her. When I got my new eyes (in effect) I realized we were the same deep down, where it counts (166). We made a pact: she *became* me and I became her. Then we hid this fact to others in a carefully placed box. Where was this box? (Borneo) We had both forgotten where we hid it. (Borneo) And the umbrella design has a story of its own as well.
*Ding dong.*
Oh dear, that will be the neighbors, the Wells. Rosie or Rose, my sister from another mother, as we say, then Indian — love of my life until I met Tommy over at a tailgate party. Tommy Tailgate he was after that. I became pregnant that night.
turning into Jennifer Lane
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0029, 0507, Bellisaria, Blue Mountain, Continent 02
base
It’s time to bring a new character into the picture: Jennifer Lane, twin cousin to our Shelley Lane, right down to the all seeing umbrella eyes. She remembers the bombing, the underground, the… flight.
“Another one, sweetie?” Lichen Roosevelt asked from behind the counter, presently cleaning a glass, perhaps the one she would pour a new drink in for Jenny.
Grasshopper? she thought. No: too obvious.
“Just another stack of potatoes.”
“Coming up!”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0029, 0417, Horns of Hatton^, Horsa^, Maebaleia/Satori
Head
5 til 3! she thought while looking out at the big Hooktip clock tower with her red and white umbrella peepers. I’ve got to get going!
I put on the garb of a white mage tonight, trying to act like I knew what I was doing. I was able to sit down on a diamond shaped plot of good ol’ actual Linden grass in a mainly artificial terrain constructed by the land owner of this little forest here, one Clare Nova. Remember her? Anyway I was smack dab on the Diagonal, at, let’s see, 36, 35. Close enough, as they say. One off of any of the two (or three) numbers is okay — difficult to tell any difference in the, um, energy, quote unquote. “It’s often not what’s right on The Diagonal,” I say to myself almost religiously, “it’s what you *see* from it.” Like that clock in the background Shelley Struthers up in the middle of the sim might be looking at at the same time. Actually, nope, in checking she’s put on that long Pepper shirt she likes now and is starting to brush her luxurious blonde hair (to her) in front of the vanity mirror. One stroke, she counts, two… three. Always 30 and she’s perfectly beautiful, almost as much as Ginger Granite down the lane. She can never get her bearings in this sim for some reason. What was its name?
30.
She splashes water on her face and prepares to face the world.
Today is the day she’s going to get up the nerve to speak to Tommy Tailgate, maybe goad him into asking her out. Goad? How about “guide”? She wants to get better at doing such things. Like Ginger again.
*Shelley*. That was the name of the lane. Like her!
There. Picture perfect.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0029, 0213, Heterocera, VHC City^
good luck?
You’ll have to dip more than your feet in this TILE Pool to get use to the South, Dream Tessa. Rains down hard there! The rain with the pain, ooouuuch.” Ghost Pac-man reminded me of someone. And also someone else yellow; a rivalry, yes.
‘*There*. If you’re submerged you can’t feel the pain. Let it go, let it all go, the tension, the weight of the world.” The pool was just big enough, head to foot. Like a fitted coffin. Let’s hope the analogy stops there.
Tessa wakes up, gasping and grasping her throat in an attempt to breathe. After she regained her wits she looked about the room and noticed the umbrellas. Lisa the Vegetarian had delivered, as promised. Time to go. No more dreams: reality.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0024, 0514, Mountain Lake^, Omega^^
Sunklands 