00510301
00510302 (the other shoe)
“So the other one held on to her apple, the chick with the red dress I also saw just earlier. Redd I’ll call her.”
“Redd, huh,” he said back while I was on my back. Couch. Psychiatrist. Clyde.
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.” They’d talked about a woman named Redd before. Hooker. Backseat. On his back again, getting a b. Just saying what he said.
“What do you think the dropped apple means?” he guides. “Redd holding onto her red one, but the other: butterfingers.”
“Butterfingers, yeah. Just the word *I* was thinking.” They become more in sync with each other as the session goes on. 2:54. This one’s almost over. Not untypical. Now the finish stretch.
“Let’s talk about your book then, Frank Lynn, to close. We have, let’s see (he checks his watch but he doesn’t have an arm, oh well — new one).
“What happened to your *arm*, dawg?” said Frank Lynn, noticing it for the first time since it wasn’t his writing one. Hidden by a writing pad until this new hand gesture revealed it.
“Oh.” He looks down. “Couldn’t bother to screw it on this morning. Just woke up and said, ‘screw it’ to all that… aand we’re down to 5 minutes. Can’t extend because Tom is afterwards. Tom is also a full-timer, in that he completely fills his time with me with words, pages… novels again. Each session is a novel. 4 minutes now; better speak now.”
“Speak speak speak,” says Frank Lynn, getting pretty fed up with the turn. They were soo close! He decides to just start counting down the time. “357… 356… 355.”
“Frank Lynn… please,” mildly scolds the psychiatrist, taking several pills in the gap for his pain. Perhaps the arm, perhaps the army. That shot went directly into the rear instead of the front. Back to front. But he survived to die another day.
“345… 344,” he continued.
“339?” Clyde said after 5 more, pills deep in the gullet now, about to enter the stomach. Then, just like that, they were back on the planet, walking through the tall grass, green and not any other color. Like it could be — out there. Just as it flipped all the cards were over. Tom already had one shoe in the door.
00510303
CATTY CO had taken over the world, this Planet Q of not Earth system, not Orion system, but elsewhere. A nobody planet, backwoods as described by one of our protagonists Michelangelo. A corporation larger than any in Cyberpunk 2077. 96.725% of all fits comfortably in its iron fisted hand. It was up to Okama to save. He saved his work to the external hard drive so he can easily switch from one 13 year old computer to another residing side by side on his desk. Done for the night.
00510304
“How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know. At least 10 years for sure,” he said in an Eastern European accent. “I lost count at some point.”
“At least 20 for me,” said the other person in the room, walking up. Another black man. And another Southern Californian by the sound of it.
Oh my God. Karl!
—–
He told me that they didn’t get along at first but then became use to each other’s ways. Both had been retired for a long time after all. And now Frank Lynn was ready to join them.
But where was Philip? And Mikie? They needed to know all this too!
00510305 (Stranger)
We were suppose to go to Orion together but something happened.
“Apple,” I said, staring at it as the alarms went off. “Something about that apple.”
Meteor! Impach [sic]. Ichelus in effect if Inchelium equals. It didn’t have to be this way.
We plummet down to Planet Q where we weren’t suppose to be.
00510306 (prison)
“We should have never gone down to that f-cking planet, Frank. We’re just Black Men down there. Pitch darkly.”
“I know. I hear ya.” He looks down at his own skin and calms himself with the brown. Man in Brown. Not Black. Discernment. We’re all different, you know. *White* people.
On cue, white men Philip and Mikie join him on each side as Karl points to the only way out he knows. Space. But it could be too later for all that.
“Is that the North Star?” Frank asks innocently as they continue to stare.
“No.”
00510307 (MapS)
“It’s all there in Washington’s green, white, black.” She starts reading from left to right. “Meteor, Stranger Creek, Impach, Inchelium which stands for Ichelus… and then across the lake we have another Stranger Creek unconnected to the first and an ‘Edendale (historical)’ to end, just like Silver Lake use to be named Edendale back in its silent film days. Black and white again.”
It was actually the 3rd Stranger Creek in the area that did the trick for me, disconnected even from all the rest. 3 Stranger Creeks all lined up across the upper west part of the state with completely separate flows (east west east). What could this mean? And the presence of an historic Edendale along the lake was certainly queer too. Gifford… yes Gifford, mouth of middle Stranger. The place of escape. New Island turns into Old Island, er, New Island becomes *Newer* Island. Yes, that’s better. Another place of separation.
After a while I went back to my bunk and picked up the pen.
Now I’m living with a family named MacEvoy in a place called Gifford. It’s a tribe, not a town (long story). My friend Jamie brought me here after I was
caught by the Russiansfound on the beach. I almost drowned, but when I woke up I saw lemurs!
00510308
We began our walk to Samantha’s Wild North in early December. It was almost summer, and the days were getting longer and hotter.
The night before we left, Louise had spread out a map on Jamie’s bed. I listened in as they chatted excitedly about our route while we all loaded our backpacks.
The trip to see Roselin is feeling more and more strange.
Let’s back up, see the bigger picture. Shelley walks on the road to Hazel intent on meeting The Man while avoiding a witch. Soo… take a left just ahead up that driveway instead of keeping straight. I *hate* witches, she thinks. That opinion is going to be hard to change. But maybe The Man can help. Probably will.
—–
“Come in come in!” he said enthusiastically while swinging the door wide. “Glad you made it back. Just working on a painting about you, coinkydinkily enough. I call it… ‘Woman in Red’.” They enter the house where he reveals the work almost 96.725% done. TBC
00510309 (on the beach)
“You just don’t remember (the meeting), Franklin. Just like you don’t remember the mid-life crisis, my obsession with Uranus and those yoga poses, 1st at my house then up on top of Mt. Gordo with all the mountain lions. Remember? I always had to take a shotgun up there to ward them off. Couldn’t do my yoga in peace. That’s all I wanted anyway. And finally, after long long hours of work, I did. I reached 96.725, as high as I could go without killing either you or Trevor. I didn’t want to make that choice. I didn’t have it in me. So you took mine instead, Franklin. Do you remember?” He pointed to his head that was suddenly revealed to be cartoonishly flat on top; aftermath of a great fall. “This ring a bell? Because it certainly did mine, ha ha ha. Seriously… it *hurt*”
“Golden helix?” he muttered when awakening beside fiancee Daisy Flathead on the highest inhabitable level of his castle. He recalls!
00510310 (missing)
00510311 (center (old is better?))
“Black men. Taken advantage of. Slaves again, even. Do you want that? Will you follow her… all the way to the grave? These are the things you should be asking, Frank Lynn. As I asked them before.” He waved his arms all around. “We’re in a prison, a white prison, a white *man’s* prison. Mikie and Philip Strevor on either side of you are equally to blame. Good you killed Mikie, good you killed Strevor in that other possible ending. Leaving only me, and you. And, yeah, Nick Barkley (the Eastern European). One for each of the last 3 main versions of the game.”
“Void, huh?” Frank Lynn says, scratching his head but avoiding the temptation to scratch somewhere else. Don’t want to go down that road.
“Beyond,” Karl clarifies. “Worse than anything you can imagine.” TBC
0050312
“The blast verified my theory of the three-dimensional property of Hum energy. If the blast was *two*-dimensional, it would have killed some people still, true, but just in the immediate area — say, ninety people — and probably left a narrow but incredibly deep hole, perhaps only a foot or so in diameter.”
“*Ninety* people?” I responded.
“*Foot* in diameter?” Louise said in turn.
“Yes, *just* that. Instead, well, we have this. Our entire Island blown away, leaving a crater in the ocean. Soon it will be as if we never existed.” And perhaps we didn’t, thinks Roselin to herself, not seeing any sign of it on the globe below them.
“All along, I thought the Hum was just this feel-good sound everyone loves to hear.”
“I wish with all my heart that’s all it was. The Hum always had a dark side, Gordy.” Silence for a long time. Each were contemplating their own deaths and the meaning of their lives just exited. Finally:
“You mentioned a Plan B,” Louise said, trying to recover any spark of hope in the darkness of space.
“Yes.”
—–
I kept running and running along the edge of the tide on the day after I met him, thinking of “The Hmm”, how I would organize it differently from his own book about New Island. Go back to his original blog story set mainly in Hazel, bring in MICHelle from MICHigan City, true, but have them discover a new portal overlapping fantastical and real to extend its untimely end. Right here in Hazel. Right over there in Michigan City. Wormhole. Yes, I have big plans. TBC
00510313 (Leeman = Adrian)
https://www.newisland.net/2016/02/65-michelle.html
“So when Michell arrives in Hazel, that just means Alan woke up in Michigan City, Michelle jiggling his shoulder, for example. Michelle didn’t come to New Island. This is more realistic and I think more correct. We can continue in this direction. What did Alan do after he woke up? Did he even remember much about the New Island dream just completed? Perhaps it was a rainy day, just like the day Michelle arrived in Hazel. Or maybe it was sunny in contrast. And what of Mid-Hazel, the witch from the old New Island. Is she the same as Roselin?”
“Yes. I think so, yes,” spoke Leeman, still working on his “Woman in Red” painting. But he’d changed the title to “Woman in Red Rain”. Was this Michelle? TBC
00510314 (Blue Mountain)
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bestselling-author-hugh-h_b_9538676
Within a year of feeling that (imagining my books really getting out there), WOOL started taking off. Now, I don’t want to make it sound like it all came so easy. The years I spent writing with a day job were brutal. I lived in the mountains, and the mornings were cold in our tiny home, but I forced myself up before dawn, trudged to campus in the snow, sat in a chair up in the whisper section of the university library, and wrote until I went to work. Then I wrote on my lunch break… And then I wrote at night and on the weekends. I managed 2-3 novels a year for those three years, and it was brutal. But I loved what I was writing. It was 20 years of frustration pouring out of me.
00510315 (no more turning into Jennifer Lane)
So what happens on Planet Mythos? You go down down down from the North through a place called The Point of No Return. Something happened there: crucifixion between pillars white and black, Joaquin and Boaz in Tarot terms, Lenoir and Spruce Pine in real geographic terms. Already much has been mentioned about this. James Bruce flipped from Bruce James takes the “documents” to Eoc but this was obviously derived from Enoch — thus Bruce with his Book of Enoch (link). But that’s not who we ultimately focus on. It’s exploring partner Cline not Bruce who becomes the important one for us. They have returned from now fabled Brown Mtn. which equates w/ Venus. The Venus energy is brought to Wazob of Mythos via Cline and his Clineism religion. Or maybe it’s a cult. This balances the Bruceites instead devoted to the writing and beliefs of James Bruce. 2 visions/interpretations of Venus, 2 separate groups of followers. That is the original dichotomy we face with any study of that cursed, dense planet. Prison? Perhaps that too. TBC
00510316 (St. Catty)
Long long ago, in a different planetary system altogether, Tamala was tied to the owl’s head cross and hoisted to the highest building of Hate City, Planet Q for all to witness, her heart glasses removed, her eyes sown shut in effect. Life snuffed out
Sacrifice to the aberrant powers of an extraterrestrial cult in order to be reborn again and again in commercial displays for the next hundred years. The ritual reached a crescendo with the alignment of the stars. Orion power ON.
You will find her, in a basement. In a basement…
00510317 (tomorrow was too late)
Sunklands 