Crystal Glimpses

Somewhere:

"Don't gawk. Move along," the cop commanded through his armor's speaker box. The static robbed the words of any understandable sound, but he was already swinging his billy-stun in a wide arc into a growing crowd. A few people already lay unconscious on the sidewalk near the cop, their pockets being rifled by hobos and businessmen.

"This'll make a good paperweight with an edge sanded into it," one man in a suit said to a crony while trying to pop the glass eye from the socket of one of the cop's knockouts.

"Try to get the real one out, too," the crony suggested and offered the suit an unfolded paperclip.

"Are you kidding me?" the suit said, standing up and brushing his knees, spherical trophy in hand. "Blood's impossible to get out of a suit like this. Trust me, I know."
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Somehow:

Man sitting lazily at his desk. Thirty-something. Fleshtech cosmetic job for sure with transparent strips running up either side of his neck, the pumping of his jugulars visible along with the constant tug-of-war of his neck muscles as he talks. "So, do you think you can handle the job?" he asks.

"What? I'm sorry," says the man sitting across from him. "I was preoccupied by your tie."

"Oh, this?" Thirty-something says looking down at it. It was transparent, like most of his throat, and filled with sand. Also inside, a small colony of ants was building a tunnel system. "My daughter got it for me. You feed them through this little zipper up here."

"First time I've seen one of those. Must be new," the other man said. "But, about that job, the answer is yes. I think I can kill as long as I don't see their faces."
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Somewhen:

A club kid coated her body in silver grease paint before going to the downtown hotspot. She put it on thick, at least a quarter of an inch on most parts of her body and on the bikini she had donned before this grand adventure. She ran it through her hair. She used it as eyeshadow, foundation, and lipstick. Then the girl left her apartment for the evening, departing for her late-night haunt, Tech Noir. Her car's upholstery and steering wheel were smeared silver along the way.

Once there, she was greeted by the other regulars, though they were anything but regular. In pink feather boas, Bruce Lee sunglasses, Mohawks high, and dripping with the latest Nanowear, they greeted her. Hugging, every one of them took some of her silver costume with them. In the gyrating, finely-intoxicated crowd, those who had touched the silver angel brushed against other partygoers, passing her essence further yet.

And she danced with them, bass thick in the air urging young muscles to twitch, thrashing about passionately, the club kid, hot beneath her dazzling coating, let sweat run down her body in shiny rivulets. Some of the sweat flew off of her undulating body in starbursts, showering those around her, speckling their hair and clothes. The rest landed on the cement floor at her bare feet to be tracked across the dance floor by the crowd's hearty celebration of the moment.

Some time later, she held her arms up above her head to spin in circles under flashing screens of binary code. It was then she noticed her normal flesh tone showing through her bodypaint. Then, as she looked closer at her fellow merrymakers, she saw the silver everywhere, something that had been on her body, now on someone else and dancing in the club's colored lasers.

For a second, she imagined it as love.

Then she imagined it as an idea.

Then she thought of it as a virus.

Then she realized that was how everything spread outward from an origin, how everything overlapped and was connected in the act of becoming one.

Crazytalk

Mister Higgins seemed like a pretty normal guy until he waved me across the street one day as I was getting The Paper. We had never really talked much and he looked very eager to speak with me. When I get over there, he leans in real close and says, "Try not to think about it but they're listening to our thoughts."

Now is a pretty good time to mention that I take medication. This medication helps to alleviate any distress I might experience as paranoia. Oh, the intricate, paranoid episodes where every random occurrence is the next logical step in a plan to kill me. Or drive me crazy. Or fill-in-the-blank. So why Mister Higgins lays a head trip like this on me is beyond my understanding. I suppose that he doesn't know about me. Maybe he had been on vacation on New Year's Eve at the turn of the century. That was when I tore down my house with my bare hands because I thought we were going to lose control of the robots.

And that's just crazytalk.

So, I try to make the smart move and respond, "Okay, I won't think about it." And I walk away. As I'm picking up The Paper, Mister Higgins shouts, "Ever been told to not do something that you'd only thought of doing?" I ignore him and go back into my house. I needed some coffee in a bad way at this point.

An hour later, it's still eating at me. Why does this guy, a guy that I don't know from Adam really, say such a thing to me? To me?!? Someone whose already proven susceptible to madness in the past! Then, following its natural tendency, my mind turns upon itself. I begin to question my reality. Had I hallucinated my exchange with Mister Higgins? After going off the deep end, one begins to lose faith in one's senses.

I ask my wife if I've been taking my meds. Puzzled, she checks the records and tells me that I have. Then, of course, she asks if something is wrong. I tell her what had been said. Then I tell her that I might have imagined it, but she shushes me. "Once you start down that path," she says, "nothing can be real anymore." Next thing I know, she is marching me across the street and rapping on Mister Higgins' door.

My poor wife. I'm sure you could hear her screams a mile away when that door opened.

Mister Higgins is a sight, some ghoul belched up by satanic ritual. A scarlet streak oozes down the right side of his neck and into his white t-shirt. The left side of his body is slack, the arm there dangles like an unmanned puppet. His right arm is bloody from the hand to beyond his elbow. There's a chunk of flesh missing from his right hand which continues to bleed freely, pooling on his welcome mat. "Hello," he croaks. But there's nothing to say, no need to ask him any questions, not as his one functioning eye jumps back and forth between me and my wife, not as the right part of his mouth twists up into a knowing smile and the left part remains beyond control. He is for sure the mental one and not me.

As if to reinforce this fact, Mister Higgins shuffles to turn around, exposing a meaty crater the size of a softball behind his right ear. Then he shuffles back around to face us and says in his half-dead voice, "I have a secret now."

My wife was still screaming hysterically when I tapped my relay and pinged Emergency to scramble. I told them that Mister Higgins had dug out both his cred chip and his Brain. They informed me that a mobile medteam had already been dispatched a few minutes ago.

I couldn't believe he had done it. Those were the two devices that made life so hassle-free these days. How do you buy anything without a chip? How do you call an ambulance without a Brain?!? Still, my fingers lingered behind my right ear on my Brain, same spot as Mister Higgins', as I wondered if my wife's screams had caused someone else to notify Emergency before I could or if someone somewhere had read my thoughts and taken the necessary actions.

But that's just crazytalk.

What I'm really trying to say is that you just never can tell about somebody. Mister Higgins seemed like a fellow on the straight and narrow. Two kids. Pleasant wife. Government job. I suppose that doesn't mean a thing these days. Times are changing and you have to be ready for anything in the 22nd century.

Trying Viral

NOW THAT I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION:

Hello there. Odds are you are a complete stranger whose come to snoop through my thoughts. That's because I've begun to drop this URL in every forum I venture into on the Internet. I'm curious as to what kind of traffic and responses I might get when I cast the net that far and wide. Also, it might motivate me to do something more with this blog if I get some unbiased feedback. Basically, we'll see if anarchy can be productive.

Props to Noodleguy for popping my cherry. I'll be perusing his new blog "thang" after this and maybe you should judge it for yourself. What else do you have to do if you're here?

All reactions are appreciated. All suggestions welcome. As you can tell from what follows, I haven't really decided on the true direction I'd like to take this. A news blog seems redundant at this point. I like watching movies but a movie review blog faces the same pitfall. Initially, I wanted this to be a creative venue, specifically in the form of stream-of-consciousness. But this venture has grown lonely, my words have been ghost towns.

But the breadcrumbs I've been dropping have led you here to change that.

I invite you to stay a while and snoop around, sniff at my guts, but let me know what you think of the smell. I'd like to have some fun.

To The Bitter End

Everyone has a story, though most people don't like telling theirs. They're often too full of regret, missed chances where daydreamers make a different choice. That's what set Henry apart from the pack: he never regretted anything. Even as the bombs were dropping and every camera and eye in the world was turned up toward the heavens, while people jammed the phone lines trying to make up with estranged relatives, lovers, and friends, while people dropped to their knees and begged God for forgiveness, Henry set in his hotel room and chainsmoked. He had no olive branches to extend. He didn't appreciate the concept of "the one that got away" because none ever had. And wasn't praying because he was fairly sure that there was no afterlife.

"So this is it, huh?" Henry thought to himself. "Un-fucking-believable." Sure, they had been at war, but when in the last century hadn't they been? Still, nukes flying through the air was... ridiculous. Lunatics were always running around the streets moaning about the world coming to an end. Now they were triumphant. Look, they shouted, look how the fire raineth down! They would be gloating even as mankind's greatest fury tore through their vaporizing flesh. Some people love being right no matter what.

"I wonder how long we have?" Henry thought. He stared out his room's window at the ocean waves crashing onto shore. The Pacific was dirty and cold. CNN was playing on the television, forgotten. The view now static, centered on an abandoned podium. The ticker was still zipping across the lower portion of the screen: WORLD SHOCKED------NUCLEAR OFFENSIVE CONDEMNED BY UN-----SWIFT COUNTERATTACKS SIGNAL DOOMSDAY------MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON US ALL-----I LOVE YOU SANDY. Just that scrolling by over and over again. Henry had tried to imagine the guy that keys in the words for the ticker, when he realized what the score was, or, rather, that no one was keeping score anymore. Henry imagined that CNN employee writing a farewell to his, or her, mother or daighter or lover, etc. And, he or she had also sent out a prayer of sorts. A prayer that was being repeated over and over on television screens all over the world.

Henry lit another cigarette. "Smoke 'em if ya got 'em," Henry thought to himself and chuckled. At least he wasn't going to die of cancer or emphysema like people nagged about these days. That was a small victory. "Just keep your mind off of it," Henry told himself. "Let it be a surprise." It was then that CNN blinked out of existence and the "dead-air screen" came on in all of its gaudy-colored, geomeric glory.

A funny patch of light caught his eye. It was near a palm tree outside and to the left of the building his room was in. It was eleven o'clock in the evening, but it looked like the sun was already rising, bathing the tree in a dim glow that was still bright enough to cast a shadow. "Of course," mused Henry," I'm facing away from America. I'm missing our finale."

Numbly, he walked out on to the Mexican beach and faced the northeast. The distant mushroom cloud was rapidly fading. Was that Los Angelos? Or Dallas? He knew he'd probably never know. He didn't know if he was glad he was on vacation or not. Henry thought maybe he might finally have something to regret: not dying in his homeland. Maybe.

He knew the xenos probably wouldn't bomb Mexico directly, but he also knew the fallout would spread quickly, challenging the detonation survivors with a second round of poisoned hell. Again, he wondered how long they had.

He lit another cigarette standing there on the beach, barefoot, barechested and breathing in some of the last fresh, salty air there would be for 20,000 years. "The bombs were never big enough for the brass," Henry thought while behind him, across the Pacific but still visible if Henry turned around, the sky was bleached for a moment in a few key spots low on the horizon.

This just in

red hot info channelled into tv, wireless iv dripping tidbits into you and me, intelli-zombies, so we go to work tomorrow telling the few who still don't know, oh my god the info, oil dripping into the cogs of the reality-machine, web spreading in a spider forest, ink spreading lazily in a sea (no that's blood)

there's no learning, only upgrades, only blurbs and buzzword cusswords, only fresh obituaries plus a hint of kiss and tell, admiring locust but 'tis just shell, losing focus so it's hard to tell, to hell you say we're going laughing flaming downward spiral? that's what I heard on my wristradio while flipping through the dial, something about the seventh wave of something viral in the Nile

manmade planet of insanity, I can handle your deadends, your checkmates, and your barbs, but somehow you have no point, no reason, no hope to ease the pain

of datastreams teeming with pathos and fads oft fed to slaves

fiberoptic kingdom sending signals into general population, oh perception has been compromised, common moneybagmen overproducing glossy nothings that catch the light just right, every show live and scripted, televised and shapeshifted, non-informing but descriptive, every newscast a satire and comedy our only refuge.

Albert Hoffman, Father of LSD, Dies at age 102

traveling magically and non-habit-forming, deforming the consciousness and culture with perfected reality torture. ripping away the veil and tripping as we all inhale a cloud of burnt up dreams (a phoneix nest of if and next)

ashes to ashes father hoffman, the one that sired psychedalia in my teenage mind, allowed me to hate myself lovingly and laugh at the joke the universe constantly tells. i wonder if perhaps you've taken the eternal trip, truly tasted the godflesh, imploded in some elegant singularity.

perhaps, perhaps you now know the dreams of the sleep of death.

regardless, you were something else and a wealthy soul, full of knowledge and chaos and questions that nobody knew existed. Father Hoffman, you mixed up visions to show the body a prison and the heady minds rage on in your wake.