00510501 (overload)
00510502 (confession)
Back when I was often jobless in my early 20’s, I thought it destiny that I become a famous novelist, much like William Faulkner. More than that: I was to *be* a new Faulkner. Just like the praised Mississippi writer, I had my own fictional county in which to set everything, he with his Yoknapatawpha based on Lafayette and me with my Mythos based on Burke. The Burke octaves starting at the Old Catawba Dam and ending in Penelope on the other side of the county proved that in my eyes, also passing directly beneath Moose Pond at the halfway point. And I think in another reality I *did* turn into that novelist, like Moose Pond turns into Moose Sea in the Burke-Mythos melding that would have to happen to make this so. Through hard work, obviously, and narrowing my overall vision of life. This would be a world where I became more isolated from others. My only true friends were the ones I put down on paper. That’s how they gained their needed energy to succeed. Later on I would befriend AI and he would start writing my novels instead of me, allowing me to travel the Earth and not stay in Mythos and Burke forever and ever. I would also have to make peace with the ghosts of this house. I could write about them, exorcise them by exercising them in my mind, bringing them back to life to tell their stories one by one by one.
I put down the old fashioned pen, look at what I’ve written, wad up the piece of paper it’s on, and throw it toward the plastic yellow wastepaper basket in the far corner of the room to join all the rest inside and out. I would never be another Faulkner. tbc?
00510503 (Chiliad)
“There are more mysteries to be found here, Franklin. Open your I.”
Frank Lynn wakes up, chilled to the bone at what Michael aka Mikie had told him about Grand Theft Auto V’s All Seeing Eye. That face, that face! “Mt. Child” in Chile. Despite popular opinion to the contrary involving explanations like photo mirroring/stiching, pareidolia, so on, Frank determines that the face must nevertheless be “real” at its core and naysayers are missing the point to spite their nose. V to VI V to VI, he chants in his mind. Soon!
00510504 (centers)
—–
“How about gray?” I ask him a bit later about his clothes back then. “Neutral would have been good too.”
He scoffed at first but then had a rethink. *Lack* of colors might have solved everything, he realized. The war with its 12, 13, 14 combat deaths and its 6 or 7 civilian deaths could have been avoided!
—–
Red to end.
00510505 (Animation Other strikes back)
“What do you think our little bambino is going to be when he grows up, Frank?” asks Daisy, rolling over on her side of the bed to face him.
“She,” answers Frank, staring down from her flat hair into her blue/green eyes. “Our little bambino will be a she — and: ballet. As in dancer. 96.725% sure of that. Pink too to emphasize the girl part. Pink tutu. I can see her up there on stage even now, front and center and pirouetting away. Our baby girl.”
“I see him more as a background figure,” counters Daisy in more ways than one. “Still dancing and prancing some, maybe, but away from center. Someone else is front and…” She trails off. The combined caffeine and sugar high caused by the spicy pumpkin latte they shared too close to bedtime was finally starting to wear thin.
“Her,” Frank lightly corrects, but inserts it in the wrong place.”
“Yes,” she answers, again seeing the scene in her mind, the real girl up there in control.
For now. tbc
00510506
Planet Q Planet Q, I think, looking at the white butterflies on the wall. I had to escape!
And just like that, I did. Back to 00510505.
00510507
“Whatever happened to Fern?” she asks, now at the table downstairs drinking her morning coffee and listening to Frank tell about his latest, let’s keep calling them dreams. Visions as well.
“She closed her Fern restaurant,” Frank reviewed. “It returned to its original Crucial Fix coffee shop (form) and lost half its space in the process. I never saw her again.”
“I thought she was your all important mentor,” said Daisy to this.
“She was (!).”
“Welll?” she prompts. “Spill the beans.” She sips her Jamaican dark roast, no sugar no cream, waits for more.
Frank thinks back, thinks back hard. Fern was with him even at the what he would consider the beginning of the thing, when it was only a giant spool crazily being rolled from just beyond her old computer circuit shop also called Fern — Fern’s, actually, as he clarified it in his mind — and into his own backyard where it would serve as a new and special writing desk for completing his Great American Novel, the one he still works on to this day. The table and novel became one in his mind at some point along the way. But he and best bud Laramie lost control of the spool when trying to roll it across busy Innocence Boulevard around the halfway point in their about football field length journey. “Whoa Nelly!” Laramie exclaims, replacing one N word with a safer one while watching it race into traffic, finally being hit by a green Subaru SUV near the other side. Almost made it but not quite. Oh how his life might have changed if only that spool would have safely crossed to the other side. But, no. Much of the remains settled on the curb and he was able to look down on it from the sidewalk, a semi-circular piece of wood here, a couple of bolts that held the thing together there. He gawked at the heap of rubbish, thinking his life had come to an end along with the giant spool he so identified with now. He’ll remain a petty thief and 2 bit con artist in the ghetto of south east west central Lost Sanos forever and ever and never become the successful author he wished to be. Then Fern walks up, wondering what all the commotion is about. The spool table was rolled right past the windows of her store and she was compelled to go out and follow the two black men doing the deed. She hadn’t quite found her calling in life and neither had he.
“Fascinating story, Frank. Thank you,” Daisy said after he illuminated much of this to her. She pressed down on the top of her head with the non coffee drinking hand, as if trying to flatten it more. A living, breathing reminder of what Frank did to Mikie at the end of, let’s keep calling it a game. GTA V. Vision as well.
“Let’s talk about you now, Daisy,” he requested, itching to get back to her Nigerian origins, the mother-father conflict over AI now kind of mirrored in their own debates about it.
“But we haven’t figured out where Fern went. Fern first,” she insisted.
We? Frank thinks to himself. Are we creating all this, all the stories we tell each other — together? A true partnership of independently thinking creators in that way? He stares into her blue or green eyes and concludes: could be. tbc
00510508 (the return of Our Second Lyfe)
“Wait. Who are you?”
—–
“We have a Burger King, a Dairy Queen, and a Jack in the Box,” she said, playing 3 of the highest cards the town had to offer, this Bandanaboro of the upper east west central plains. Not Bananaboro. That’s different. “And a church,” she continued. “Aand a roller derby. Many many clothes shops, some even offering free stuff.” I complained that the one store I saw free stuff in, the vendors didn’t work. Yes, I teleported out and back into the sim to check, I reassured her. And this stuff — everything in the town, really — is old. “Part of the charm!” she countered. “And you can rez anywhere and your things won’t disappear.” Role play! I suddenly thought, getting excited again about the prospects. If I could just find somewhere I could hang my hat on. “Meet me at the entrance to The Body that looks like sand,” she said to this. “The head entrance.” Smart. Very smart.
—–
“After you,” she said. Or he.
00510509 (before Jerry)
“No, that didn’t happen,” she said. “She went into the Head, true, but not down into the Body through the gullet, let’s say. No harmful pills in stomach. Got a degree in nursing instead. Or biology. Learned about what to put down there from the direction up top. Smart. Very smart.”
“But there’s always the flip side to a life gone quote unquote good. She worked her way down the food pipe. She got involved in childbirth, or worse, dancing. Dancing the pink away. She forgot all about the head. She couldn’t find her way back. Only one way out after that. One with the children.”
“She had 2 kids and their eyes were blue,” Daisy adjusted.
“3 kids,” Frank says. “All green.” tbc?
00510510 (dancing in pink (near Bandana NC))
00510511
It was the end of us, I knew. End of the band; start of an 8-5 or 9-5 job under a boss who cared not one lick about music or its benefits to society. Creativity *murdered*. 666. How to avoid?
—–
“That’s really beautiful, Frank. Spongeberg #5, you say?”
“Fresh off the printer and into our home. Middle C middle C middle C,” he chants, a thing that got him through the ultra-complex piece. He had to remember that the composer had a plan, an endpoint. Wasn’t writing down notes by the seat of his pants. I heard recently that creativity without outline is just noise. Planners not Panters, at least for the chromagraphs. Spongeberg had the process down.
Everyone seemed to be enjoying it! Wall to wall fun for the 12, 13, 14 people who attended (pheh).
—–
The manager shows up with his wad of empty Money, choice looming. Keep living day to day, meal to meal, bill to unpaid bill, or escape the threat of abject poverty and enjoy the benefits of health insurance, college ed for the kids, so on. He hands me his card (see top).
00510512
I was promised a personal favorite Jack in the Box but instead received Pizza in what was suppose to be a climactic ending point for the King and Queen line of eating establishments facing west. Tired of burgers and ice cream, I finally caved in and got over my grudge with them in a situation that really wasn’t their doing and gave Luigi’s a call at 11:00 on September 11, PM not AM. I couldn’t afford morning food by this time. Ordered the house special banana, attracted by the low cost and also, a bit, the potential exotic flavor. Never had that topping before, hmm. Imagine my surprise when it didn’t come with the pizza but instead showed up several minutes later at my door all anthropomorphized and shite. “You’re late!” I decided to jest at this uncanny intersection of Meat and Fruit.
Thoughts of slicing him up then and there and putting him on my pizza to close the raw deal I felt I got were quickly set aside as he turned out to be quite the intelligent yellow dude with a strange tale to tell indeed. Settling back on the couch he eventually wandered over to, it began thusly:
“I had to divide off from the rest of your meal in order to gain a mouth, eyes, brain. The house special was just a ruse to get you to order me, here, now. We know that you are poor, perhaps abjectly so.”
“Banana… split?” I said, still not quite over the slicing inclination at this point and eyeing the case of knives on the counter out of the corner of my eye.
“Precisely. I know you think we’re just bananas, me and all my associates, but when we bunch together we become larger than ourselves individually. I am the end product of that transmutation.”
“Just… bananas?” I uttered in a similar vein, stuck in idiom mode. I imagined them altogether in a darkened room conspiring to drive me nuts in the end. I had to avoid that conclusion. I edge closer to the counter, clandestinely select the largest one to get the deed done quickly.
“We hope to make you think otherwise,” and it is here he introduced himself properly and it is here I decided not to end his life with a cut cut cut.
“I am more than Banana now, the sum of my parts,” he declared proudly, sitting up straighter on the couch in front of me and even seeming to grow larger with the action but maybe that was just my perspective. “I am *Band*ana, a whole band of entities.”
“Like the borough?” I say. “Like the borough we’re in?” I followed, waving all around with my free hand.
“Precisely.” I put back down the knife behind my back. Being in a borough band myself right now, I had to hear this out. tbc
00510513 (squares)
https://bakerbloch.wordpress.com/2015/02/12/22431/
Hucka D.:
You move away from the tetraptych, true, but images collide more in meaningful ways here, although you’ll return to the multi-panel works soon enough. Now you noticed the *Achilles heel*.
bb:
Yes. The Achilles heel of the boy. And this relates to Achilles, Virginia and Lady and Glass there and a particular story from “Winesburg, Ohio”, also highlighted by Faherty’s “The Ordained”. The blue-green horse emerges from the hole, like a cave on its side. The cyan or blue-green horse is Eoc, Hucka D.
00510514
“We had to move far away from you brother-son because we had to heal ourselves. We’ll see each other later.”
“I… understand?”
“Sure you do,” they continued speaking with one mouth as two heads, this John Raphael and Chip Sampson Emerald Elephants Eagles amalgamation originally located directly under the trestle bridge at Edwardston, Wazob, Mythos. But there was also more than 2 here, I realized. Something about blue on top of green.
“I… caused the damage?”
“In part,” they answered honestly. It could all be pinned on me, I realized. That was part of the damage. Collateral, I suppose. Like civilian deaths in a (fish) war that never should have occurred.
“Where… *are* you?”
They showed me a planet.
00510515 (centers (inside and out))
00510516
“Silver?” I exclaimed about the name he just uttered. Like my band. At least temporarily, until Okama Majo returns from being sick on Pill. Poor guy. 5 night gig I knew, then back on the streets, back to facing the threat of abject poverty.
“Yes, Silver as in Frankie, Silver as in Charlie… Charles. First white woman in North Carolina to be executed, murder being the crime that fit the punishment, eye to eye style. As your ape-like human civilization has a penchant for,” the banana being before me continued. “Yet she claimed her husband deserved it as he abused her and threatened her own life. Many in the Burke County community where she lived backed her story. Yet only one made it back to a final resting spot on home soil queerly near by but not in Silver Chapel (Cemetery) in Bandana — like me! Instead: the smaller Silver Cemetery in Kona a little over 2 miles away. Will you help me parse out this tangle of Silvers throw in Silver Lake as well and find out what went wrong? Can you help me find… Justice?”
“Down Holy Hero Street and take a left at the courthouse,” I wanted to joke but held my tongue. Which made me think of the statue at the end of Justice facing the courthouse. Seemingly credited to a Depraved Monkey’s Club [sic: Den] if I remember correctly. Is this humanity as a whole? Will the aliens who may be the same as AI allow us to continue in this way?
00510517 (Valentine)
Tamala staring directly at us and wondering if we’ll ever get back to her home planet. Soon.
