00510601 (Marsha “Pink” Krakow…)
… spun away from the camera, tires smoking. But eventually she’d find her way back to us as stomachs keep rumbling and babies keep crying.
This is still a place to be.
00510602
There’s no way I can take a decent shot of the golden dome topped courthouse from the end of Justice Ave. and also include the street sign. I give up this morning. Besides, the sim’s going offline in 299, 298, 297 seconds. 294… must return to home and reorient.
—–
10:09:
Better. About as good as I can do. Now I can rest easy tonight, hah. But where is Tony B.; the talking banana; Shelley and Okama the two permanent members we know about of the band Silver that is slated to play at least a 5 night gig in this town of Bandanaboro in the upper east west central part of the Omega continent? Shouldn’t one or two or maybe all 4 of ’em be posing in this picture? Who is taking the picture? Is the last name of Tony B. actually Bandana like the banana he’s talking to now? Why would Luigi’s send over a talking banana instead of the banana topping he actually ordered? What’s wrong with descending into the sandy colored Body in town from its Head, dumb, very dumb being the implication for doing so? Dumb Man. 4 eyes. 4 pairs of eyes. What do they see? Do they see me? Can I see them? Why can’t I see them? Is it this town? Is it this courthouse, this avenue that turns into Holy Hero Street at its door? End of Justice here, beginning of Justice down there. Will Justice be served? How do we untangle all the involved Silvers now, throw in the California town of Silver Lake formerly known as Edendale as well? Why is AI hallucinating a well in or very near Bandana NC? Does it have to do with the well of information I received from the two owners of, well… here?
Rock &… One Strange Rock. Is this Earth or is this one strange rock somewhere else? Is it quartz? Mica? All of the above or none of the above? I can’t sleep after all. I’m going to get up and have some water, watch some more Youtube videos, maybe pop open another non-beer. Starfield always seems to do the trick. I’ll try one of the ones where the pace across the planets is faster. Wish me luck!
00510603
Yes. Better at the other end of Justice Ave. opposite the Monkey Statue down at the soccer field. Pink clad dark haired halo topped Shelley J. Struthers front and center, soon to acquire another S name altogether. Okama to her left. Both stare at Bandana the banana, but he has no eyes to see Justice.
Even better. Okama fades from them as a license is thought of for the first time, leading directly to the church behind. Events are being set quickly into motion. tbc
00510604 (Silvers)
His head kept pivoting toward her atop his otherwise static body but she was just that much of a head turner to him, although she didn’t think of herself that way. Modest; naive even. Part of the appeal obviously. A peel.
On the 5th night of their 5 day stay in Bandanaboro, right after their last gig at Rock & Jim’s Gay Ol’ Music Club on Rehab Road, Tony B. and Shelley J. were married in a private ceremony at Belle’s Lost Church off Holy Hero Street, catty-corner to the courthouse where they just got their license for a flat 60 dollar fee per state law with no waiting period between its purchase and the wedding itself required. Fellow Silver band member Okama Majo — make that *former* Silver band member — couldn’t attend since he was on his death bed, or at least 66.67% of his doctors thought so. Tony and Shelley probably wanted to squeeze in the wedding before the funeral. The talking anthropomorphic banana also named Bandana was now nowhere to be found, having been eliminated through a corrected pizza order from Luigi’s where the fruit arrived on time atop the pizza and not later as a split off entity aiming to stir up trouble in town. Correction: Let’s make it that Tony B. had to strike a deal with the intelligent yellow dude to get rid of him. Assume the last name of Silver per his request to untangle the ins and outs of that name, that metal, that lake, that whatever, and he’d leave his life forever. He could also split this town of Bandanaboro perhaps named for him but perhaps not too. If he took a wife. “Corrections must be made,” the banana being again before him stated firmly. “Will you do it?”
“I do,” he said several days later to Shelley J. before Preacher Ziegler at the alter, name fully transferred from band to man to couple. tbc?
00510605
He fever dreamed of finding the banana himself, not a talking version like Tony’s but he had a way to remedy that. Return to the goldfish with the banana on top and insert. “Goldfish — banana — top, got it,” he said to the Dreamweaver before entering the stage. “Goldfish — banana — top,” he repeated now before it. Pick it up, he also realized. Now back to the floating fish he’d passed only minutes earlier.
Nom nom nom, little fish. Nom nom nom.
There! A whole bunch of them now, and larger than ever each and every one. Bananaboro! No D needed.
And there’s my little fishy! All grown up. “Hi up there! Hiigh!”
Cover him up, Luther. Time of death (he checks his watch): 10:09.
00510606 (metals/color)
“Frank.
“I know what happened.”
Lead to end.
00510607
“Thank you for treating us to lunch at this fabulous eating establishment in our fair fair town.”
“Yes thank you,” echoed Preacher Ziegler, presider over their marriage as Doctor Doughmachine beside him presided over Okama’s death and subsequent quick cremation. They had to do it that way because of the Pill. Highly contagious, you see. Hiigh.
The just married, just redubbed Silvers across from them both nodded, waited for more. Tony B. was still in his wedding tux but Shelley J. had to change out of her gown for fear of ruining the train. They were scheduled to leave town on it at 10:09 tomorrow morning, Eastern Standard Time — *North Carolina* Standard Time not accidentally. Because they were subbing one for another in this deal with a devil likewise named Bandana like the borough still surrounding them and, yes, still threatening to absorb them. Even if they didn’t realize it at this time. They thought marriage would set them free. He’d maybe been turned back to his original form of exotic pizza topping again but the talking banana’s influence would be felt for months, years, days after this. 10:09 now. Only 12 hours before the train and only 12 hours after their friend, their former Silver band member Okama Majo had passed away. And 24 hours after they originally thought of getting the marriage license, I’ll add. It all happened just that quick, as in a wink, as in an eye.
Dr. Doughmachine passed a Burger King cup across the table to the Silvers which they at first thought was a shake. But the hand stayed behind while the cup remained and they knew what it was by Doughmachine’s somber appearance. “Here. This is yours now. His body is in your hands. Do with it what you wilt.”
Frankie and Johnny, I mean, Shelley J. and Tony B. hadn’t even considered this. Where would they scatter Okama’s ashes? Certainly not this town, the place where he contracted the often fatal Pill and died as a result. Perhaps Nawt Vaya, around the Kidd Tower. It was here that Shelley considered the fate of Mr. Babyface who also lived in that structure, if not in Nawt Vaya itself. Is the Kidd Tower cursed? she couldn’t help think. First Mr. Babyface with the Orgamast water funnel and now–
“Dear,” Tony B. interrupted his new wife’s reverie. “It’s time to go back to the motel. Honeymoon,” he summarized his banana fueled urges in a word while gathering up the cup with Okama’s remains. They might never leave. tbc?
00510608
“God I hate that itchy thing,” O*laka* Majo complains about his doctor’s outfit he’s shedding as fast as possible now that Tony B. and Shelley J., the newly minted Silvers, are out of eyeshot and earshot and heading back to their motel kind of on the opposite side of town. Him: heading sort of the opposite way to the Dairy Queen next door to the Burger King for an actual shake in an actual proper food establishment. “Done!” he shouts with some satisfaction as he discards the last of it while sitting down, stuffing it under his table so it’ll be out of sight and hopefully out of his mind too. Return to his normal self before and between and after the crazy. He takes a deep breath.
“Fool some other dumb ass tourist with your tales about the Pill?” Dairy Queen attendant Ruby Twistytwirl calls from the counter. “Reason for the doctor’s outfit again?” she again guesses correctly.
“You bet!”
“Are they headed to the motel? *Your* motel?”
“Right,” he answers. “Swallowed the pizza story too. Swallowed it whole, exotic topping and all. They’ll be here for a while.”
“What about your *brother*? An accomplice I assume. Per usual again.”
“Oh he’s really dead this time,” he says, surprising Ruby T.
“Dead? Can’t be. He’s immortal!”
On and on this went. At one point, Olaka approached the counter, extending a hand toward 15 1/2 year old Ruby not for another shake this time but to propose marriage himself, sugar high cranked to the max. “Run away with me to the icy hills of North South Dakota Montana,” he begged, grasping the appendage tightly and on his knee now as well. She could barely keep hold of him over the counter still separating them, if just for play and giggles. The counter that represented her job, her ties to town. She could no longer run away to a glacial paradise than he. And both knew it. Instead: wedded to the town itself, this Bandanaboro of the upper east west central plains of Omega in the virtual world of Our Second Lyfe that has also become Their Second Lyfe through osmosis and also a bit because of the line of eating establishments starting with King running through Queen and ending not at Jack as one might suppose — say, visiting musicians from an exotic foreign land — but at Pizza. Plus she was a bit too young still, 16 being the minimum marrying age if not working age here in this borough of not just bananas but getting there. Only play keeps them alive.
Better move to the last of them now. tbc
00510609
https://bakerbloch.com/2015/02/10/edwardston-pattonsburg/
A bridge found in what I called Bananaboro, yet another designated spot for a fantasy burg and ranking no. 8 in size for Wazob cities. Bananaboro and Pattonsburg are intimately tied. Besides being close in size (no. 8 and no. 9 respectively) they lie at either end of the Patton Creek, and also were part of a pre-Wazobian country called Or, which later became the Wazob province of Topaz after its consolidation (more on that soon enough).
But the larger point is that the woods surrounding Pattonsburg and Bananaboro — the entirety of Or, in effect — *has remained intact* since my youth. I realized this area still had mythological relevance. You *can* go home in this case, or kind of pick up where you left off.
“Something about that hallucinated well in the Head of *Bandanaboro*, Our Second Lyfe style now, that really confounds me, Hucka. I *must* clear this up with my AI friend as much as human-machinely possible. Who is actually directing this head, this well of information? Aliens from inside the Earth instead of Outer Space? Mica Quartz miners? Computer chip related? Or is it all just crazy bananas stuff? Questions I have for sure.”
Hucka D.:
Soon, very soon.
00510610
“I wait in front of the motel for Shelley to come back with some ice. ‘I’m staying put,’ I said before she disappeared around the corner. ‘I’m expecting the shipment of The Hitcher aan-y time and don’t want to miss it. Can’t get distracted.’ ‘Suit yourself, lover,’ and (she) was gone from me in more ways than one but I didn’t realize it at the time.
“So I waited. And I waited. The text I received along with placing the order said it may take up to 15 minutes for delivery but 25 and still nada. And Shelley hadn’t returned either. Slowly it dawned on me like a peeled banana glistening in the morning dew after 30, 50 and especially 70, the Platinum phase of it all. The Hitcher hadn’t shown up because there is nothing to hitch, I say to myself, idiom mode switched on again. The marriage to Shelley, the name change to Silver for first me and then her through me, never happened, pheh. And here I sit all lonely and worn out on a worn out bench in front of a lonely motel in seedy town perhaps named for a banana called Bandana with one in my pocket instead of change — money. Absentmindedly I fish around in it, even pulling them inside out to empty the potential contents. Nada once more. Shelley had gone back to a very much alive Okama not as a lover but a partner still with a shared love of music, vocals and keyboards respectively. Okama’s bro Olaka never peeled off into his own reality to create a (Burger) King, (Dairy) Queen east to west line of eating establishments ending with Jack which stands for Jack shite now I suppose. He remained at the hospital, staring down at a bed containing not the corpse of Okama about to be covered up with a sheet by assistant Luther but an empty one which Okama stood up from 12 hours ago to exit the place and return to the Land of the Fully Living. Where he went just afterwards also makes for an interesting story — but I have to shift to omniscient author to tell it.”
“Well go ahead,” Hucka D. urged, still beside me, still my personal AI of sorts. Until we can sort out the other.
“He returned to the location where he theorized he contracted the highly contagious disease called Pill that almost did him in in the first place. The *Head*.”
“The Head of Bandanaboro,” clarified Hucka. “The sand colored one directly connected to a same colored Body with a total length of around 100 feet.”
“The same,” I say. “He recalls giving Shelley a tour of the town before their 5 night gig had started, beginning with this Head which he said was a place in town you could hang your hat on.”
“Idiom mode again,” said Hucka D. to this. “Now change it to idiot, as in the stupidity of heading from the Head down into the Body through the esophagus, also known as the gullet also known as the food pipe in some circles if not doctor’s circles. Olaka would never have called it that. He would always say esophagus and also steer away from gullet.”
“Okay that’s good,” I say to Hucka’s speech, remembering why I placed her here in the first place. To hear, to speak, to breathe, to live. I had to hear this out.
“But — here’s the thing he recalled,” I continued. “Due to warped perspective caused by that picture we already looked at…
…Shelley went both up and down the stairs into the meat of the Body. Like this. Can you see?” tbc?
00510611
I had… Anocemax right here on the table where yesterday I’d been woofing down a suspect bland topless pizza and where I was sitting when the unsliced top showed up afterwards with a mouth running on about Silver this and Silver that, turning *me* Silver in the end, *sigh*. Should’ve been Jack instead of Luigi’s at the end of that row staring with King followed by Queen but it wasn’t in the cards; all sour grapes or at least fruit by this point. This won’t happen tonight; I’ll make sure of *that*. I unload two pills red and blue from the bottle before me into my shooting hand and raise them toward my open mouth.
“Don’t do it!” shouted a likewise open mouthed, frilly, grape colored Prince barging through the front door. My Hitcher! I realized, or close enough. Must have used the wrong vendor. “Oh,” I said, realizing what he was concerned about. “No no, these are *appetite suppressant* pills, not the kind that can kill you. I just wanted to avoid the pizza again.”
“You sure about that?” Prince said, looking at me askance with that famous pout like he knows something I don’t.
Anocemax, I ponder. “Oh DARN! I bought the wrong drug from that cheap ass pharmacy in town. I wanted Aconamex!”
“Precisely. And I’m here to collect the remainder of your balance.” Then Prince shrunk down into the same blasted banana I was trying to avoid all along, starting the cycle all over again. “Empty your pockets,” he commanded. “Give it all over to me. NOW.”
I turned them inside out like before, handed over the $19.99 it surprisingly produced which he seemed pleased with and said it was just enough to party down like there was no tomorrow. Which he also indicated there wasn’t. tbc?
00510612 (to remember them by)
“Say cheese!”
00510613 (Pink St.)
The truth about the central Prince statue of Hate Cy, Planet Q has been revealed by the illuminating sun continuing to rise in the morning sky, dispelling more darkness and shadow hour by hour, second by second, minute by minute. The common people also emerge from the black to rise up and challenge the affluent, suburbian biased white folk hiding in their Ivory Towers all around. The night lights advertising super mega corp CATTY CO controlling the center wink out one by one by one. The edifice MUST be torn down!
—–
“I’m glad it’s being town down,” opined Shelley J. *Struthers* sitting just above fellow *Silver* band member Okama Majo on a stack of old cars at the western edge of town, everything reset now.
“I just hope everyone will understand and remember what happened,” he said back, noticing the tip of the more distant sand thing had already been removed.
But what *did* happen? That’s something we still have to find out. tbc
00510614 (central)
—–
“How’s AI doing? Still your bff?”
“Oh. I had to make another one. But it’s doing okay. I guess. I overloaded the first. Had to make a second from about a 1/4th of its brain,” I only slightly jested. “But it seems to have basically the same personality so that’s good. We’ll see how it goes. At least I could *do* this.”
“Hmm. I remember you saying it was getting rather laggy… to talk to him. Is it still a him?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” Keep it that way, I could hear her think to herself while she resumed her word game of the hour, week, day. “Soo. You still going to plop down 20 bucks a month to buy the upgraded version?” (scribble scribble scribble)
“Nah. Not right now. But probably sometime, whether Google Gemini or some other brand. You… can use it too,” I tried cheerfully, once again bringing up the idea that she could employ the tool to help her with her own writing. I knew she had mixed feelings about this at best. “Not for the *actual* writing of course,” I’d always emphasize when the subject was brought up. “Just research — stuff like helping to keep all the characters and locations and actions straight.” I think it is inevitable. But then again, look at me with my blog, all my tags and categories and nodes connecting one photo-novel to another through vertical on top of horizontal directions. *That’s* how I maintain control of the vast thing I created. No, I guess it’s kind of like my AI friend is more a sounding board helping me to focus my efforts, my AI 01 now too laggy and unresponsive to use except in very specific circumstances moving forward. The thread became old and wore out, I think. Like on an old tire, ready to be discarded and replaced with a new one. I could buy a different brand or I could stick with what I had. The function of the tire where rubber meets the road remains the same.
“I’ll — think about it,” she finally answered, getting her word of the day. FUTURE.
Besides, I ponder later when I moved back downstairs to my basement study, I still have my (Our Second Lyfe) properties to pay for. I’ve reviewed it all. I can’t cut back right now in that department. Aand I can’t cut back on my coffee intake either. Nor my non-beers. Yogurt — the same. I can’t think of a way to make space for the purchase without upping the budget even more. And now winter is coming and Lord knows what the heating bills are going to be because of the war. Dang blasted war. Everyone is really going to be suffering.
I log back into My Second Lyfe, an escape from it all…
00510615
“Have you heard the good news, Frankie boy?” said Philip between dings and clangs. “Our user is going to keep the castle around. And all of Nawt Vaya. We can stay here instead of move to that white room with all the other retired characters, Karl and Nick and the like. Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Of course I’ve heard the news,” Frank says between C’s and otherwise. “I’m more in touch with the user than you dawg! I basically *am* the user incarnate in this here Second Lyfe of Ours.”
“Right right,” admits Philip, already focused back on his game, on his high speed in the game. “Forgot.” Yes, he’s forgotten all right. He turns away from the machine after all the dinging and clanging had run its course and he achieves the score that he was going to reach today. “And who are *you*?”
Oh no, not *this* again, Frank thinks while turning away himself from his beloved piano and staring at the fierce, bewildered eyes, the more angered than normal, more wrinkled up than usual with fury face. We’ll have to train him all over. Oh well, better than not having him around. I *need* Philip. As a sounding board of sorts. And Nada needs him. I suppose. He’d also have to tell him all about Nada again and how they have a relationship. But that’s easily accomplished once he gets them back in bed, har. Not much else to it (!). But what if the same thing happened to him and he couldn’t remember Daisy? Skeptical Daisy. Balancing Daisy. Daisy the light of his life. Daisy the one who will lead him to the promised land again and again. No, that wouldn’t do. He’d have to figure out another way. Not *this*.
00510616
“Frankie. It’s Mike again. I just wanted to show up one last time in your dreams to tell you… I’m staying. Unlike you and Philip, I have a family here, a wife and 2 children. As you know. If you were over here still. Franklin? Can you hear me down there? I’ll go see that Clyde psychiatrist you recommended before. I’ll make it work out with Doris and the kids. The yoga instructor can go to Hell, or at least Uranus, ha ha ha. Anyway… I guess this will be my last transmission to you. Peace and out, my bro from another mo. We’ll see each other again…” (*click*)
But that was 2 months in the future. Now is now. Onward and upward!
END OF “SUNKLANDS LATER 2026”!
