Island of Sand and Thailand Travel:This blog contains-buried on the Island of Sand in a Chest-

An Ode to Stephen King

2009-10-25T05:25:00.000-07:00

Thailand Travel Kit: Huts, Trip Itineraries, and Tips for the Budget or Upscale Tourist by a Thailand Insider who has lived in Thailand for 8 years by Jack B. Wily ... see you in Thailand ...

I see that 'Under the Dome' will be delayed for a month on the Kindle. I mean Stephen King has always been an icon for some of us. But I have to wonder what the publishing companies are thinking about. They say they want to charge more for the hard cover edition. I am a big fan of books like Misery and Pet Semetary, books that King will probably never write again. I will probably read Under the Dome as well, but I certainly have no need or ambition to be the first to read it. I have to apoligise in a way. He has been a mentor to me and I am sure to a lot of other writers. Somewhere along the road he decided that it was somehow wrong to write books that don't fit into the literary genre in the way that some famous authors have achieved. I always looked at him as a master of craft and his 'wordy' way of writing never bothered me. Years back I read Needful Things and thought it was fantastic, but after having read him for years, I felt I had had enough of the extremely scary stuff. I never finished that book, due to the number of fantastic examples of people in the store buying those needful things. Each and everyone was a fantastic story, but I had read a lot of his books. Now I want to read another, but he hasn't written another. I saw him on video on YouTube, talking about another writer that wrote about vampires. I mean, I like to read realistic stories of vampires, the rest of the genre doesn't really interest me. But the arragance in that video, he repeated 'this terrific book about vampires molested by pedophiles, sort of turned me off. And all I could think was that somebody had better tell him that the short story stuff of late looked pretty amatuerish. His novels look wordy, without keeping you on the edge of your pants. I don't blame him for that. He said in one of the videos I watched that some had said he was biting at his own tail like a dog. He said he had written all the scarry stuff. And I thought that this amazing writer should let it go and retire. I thought about all the money. I thought I would travel, that I would somehow give up writing. He has had his era. But if he is to have more, he will have to write another Pet Semitary. And I doubt he ever will. I read a lot. Buying a book a month after it is released means absolutely nothing to me. I mean, as much as I love to read, reading a book the day it comes out has never meant anything to me, and I very much doubt that it means anything to other readers. Especially to readers who would like to see real publishers and real editors live once again.

BookMark

2009-09-08T21:15:00.001-07:00

BookMark

Shared via AddThis

2009-09-08T04:33:00.000-07:00

Thailand Travel Kit: Huts, Trip Itineraries, and Tips for the Budget or Upscale Tourist by a Thailand Insider who has lived in Thailand for 8 years by Jack B. Wily ... see you in Thailand ...

The idea that people are the result of some combination of an advanced life form and the animals. That this had something to do with original sin. I am a little bit interested in this topic because it seems to me that people are so radically different from those creatures that live naturally. It is hard for me to believe that we were not a combination. We look so similar and have all the physical characteristics of the animals and I am tempted to say that we are one of these animals, but when you look at the intelligence aspect ... I mean, this seems to be what separates us from them. The question that can be asked is is this intelligence meant for earth. I mean we seem to be the only animal so to speak that is capable of destroying so much of the environment that we live in. We all eat each other. That is pretty much a given ... but why is it that people are capable of polluting huge areas of the planet to the extent that they can not sustain life? I mean a monkey might climb up a mango tree and eat the entire mango, seed and all. I have watched one rip a mango seed in half with its bare hands ... so to speak ... and eat the inside of the seed. I mean not to many people could rip a mango seed apart or would endeavor to do so. I was able to rip one open when I tried, so can I say the monkeys taught me something? As I watched them I could see that they knew their environment, knew what to eat and what was good and edible. They can survive where probably a lot of people can’t.

I Mean ... is it shit or Porn?

2009-09-08T04:29:00.001-07:00

Thailand Travel Kit: Huts, Trip Itineraries, and Tips for the Budget or Upscale Tourist by a Thailand Insider who has lived in Thailand for 8 years by Jack B. Wily ... see you in Thailand ...

Okay ... here’s a little take on porn. I mean ... I am not a big porn watcher. I am not adverse to watching a porn movie while alone in a hotel or on occasion. I am not fearful of admitting that. What got me started on this was a flick I downloaded on LimeWire. I mean we know there is some of that stuff available over there. A lot of us know. Well, some movie that I downloaded really shocked me. I mean it wasn’t a video showing groups and stuff and the standard fare ... get ready ... I doubt you have seen this one ... I have deleted it and don’t have the link ... but I mean it has got to have something to say about the human race. This video. What do you think was in it. Okay, here is the description ... I put it here because like I say it has got to have something to do with us. This download was a group of about seven girls. They were wiping each other’s feces all over their bodies and eating it. They were on a farm. I mean, it disgusted me so much that I almost sent out the link to the media. It went on for quite a while. They painted their bodies in the stuff. They were streaks of brown and ended up in the barn like that. I look for adventure and some of my writing is about trying stuff. I like to try stuff. I mean I live on the fringe. But this was too much for me, even with my naturalistic ways and even being curious as to that heath idea that drinking your own urine is good for you. Even being curious about sex and free sex and sharing sex and stuff. But I couldn’t for the life of me see this thing. I mean, I could only wonder what had been so extreme in their lives as to make them film this stuff. I could even see some sort of skin treatment ... I am that adventurous, but this thing struck me as being pretty sick. Take it from there. Ted Bundy said porn made him kill all those people. I didn’t really buy it. I thought it was more the sexual mores of the time he lived in, or something about his own psychology. I mean the cops knew he killed 36. When they asked him he told them to add a one in front. I mean the guy was sick. He clubbed them to death and had sex with the bodies. The thing was that he was most often taken as a great guy with smarts. I mean people saw him and said he was a gentleman. All the while he was doing this stuff. He laughed at the cameras in the court house.

Which Tonka Toy Will Win?

2009-09-08T04:26:00.000-07:00

Thailand Travel Kit: Huts, Trip Itineraries, and Tips for the Budget or Upscale Tourist by a Thailand Insider who has lived in Thailand for 8 years by Jack B. Wily ... see you in Thailand ...

Mad Magazine VS National Lampoon . A Satire. Which one is the one to bring in to your high school? I mean, I KNOW mad magazine. I never read the National Lampoon. But I have a feeling I would like this magazine. I mean with the way our economy has failed, I guess I would love any magazine that was still viable. I mean this jerk criticized me just now for having a love of the National Lampoon. Excuse me, but has anyone noticed how much better GM is now that the money loving pigs have been kicked out. I mean, they are actually on their way to making cars that people want to buy. You know. The ones that don’t guzzle gas like it cost a buck, like in the days that GM controlled all the markets. Yeah, stuff like that. Like now they are actually talking about releasing the new cars that run on electricity and hybrids. Yep, just like the ones I saw in Japan years ago. That’s why I say the Japanese will take the market long before the American car makers will . I mean if you look at Honda ... they are releasing stuff like that now and our companies are waiting until 2011. I know that market. I lived there for twenty years.

Stephen King

2009-09-06T05:55:00.000-07:00

Okay, here it goes again. My take on Stephen King. I mean most of us fans are still waiting for another Pet Cemetery, another Needful Things. What we see now is a lot of wordy things that don't really include the social commentary and the intelligence of his earlier writing. I mean ... somehow in his quest to write for this new society, he has lost his ability to or has chosen not to write like he did before. He is a horror writer and has been criticised for that. I always looked at him for craft and story telling and like he once said ... he knew his craft ... but i think this new society of ours is taking the spirit out of life. I mean ... you cant't just write and be a terrific writter anymore. You have to directly address ... some created concern of multimedia. I mean, I wouldn't want to write for those people. Yeah, it's 1984, it got here late, but it arrived. It kills off creativity. I mean now we smoke just to stay alive. We've got all these government heads telling us of the perfect society that awaits us. But, now it doesn't look so perfect. Well. I somehow am reluctant to blame King for what America has become. I mean his books were rational. I think his failure to write more are due to kingpins in Washington over the last twenty years who have been anxious to suck off taxes for their own 'polite' endeavors. I don't think it is his fault on the whole. It is more like the weight of the world on one man's shoulders. I mean will I buy 'Under the Dome' in January? I might, but it won't be because I am looking for a King classic. I think he wrote those already. I think, he should write more of the same ... or just move on. Ain't no harm in moving on. If I had that kind of money ... I think I would spend some time on the beach. I would get back to my soul. Because this idea of horror books not cutting literature ... well ... it doesn't wash with me. I think the guy cut it damn fine. He gets in trouble when he starts splitting his genres. I think he should get back to those indian cemeteries and reincarnated zombies and let the good times roll ... please?

Thailand Travel Kit: Huts, Trip Itineraries, and Tips for the Budget or Upscale Tourist by a Thailand Insider who has lived in Thailand for 8 years by Jack B. Wily ... see you in Thailand ...

Island of Sand: The Software Killings

2009-09-06T05:08:00.000-07:00

Thailand Travel Kit: Huts, Trip Itineraries, and Tips for the Budget or Upscale Tourist by a Thailand Insider who has lived in Thailand for 8 years by Jack B. Wily ... see you in Thailand ...

I have been working on this three book series ... Island of Sand: The Software Killings for years. I even submitted it for publishing once, but I pulled out because I did not think it was finished. Well, I'm finally going to offer it as a six part series. It is a bizarre story. I mean this psychotic computer programmer plots to kill off all these people because he doesn't like the new politically correct society and blames the downfall of his company on it and stuff ... a lot of stuff really. Then the economy falls and this guy finds out all of his predictions were correct. It scares him and stuff. I mean he has been told one of these armagheddin stories by this apparition he sees from the porch of his hut while he is in his hammock. The scary thing is the apparition tells him he has to carry out his plan in order to save the world from another plan ... the plan B kind of thing where ... well ... life just ends cuz things have gotten so evil and out of hand that God doesn't like Earth anymore. Should be on Amazon in about three weeks.

Amazon Forums

2009-09-05T06:14:00.000-07:00

Thailand Travel Kit: Huts, Trip Itineraries, and Tips for the Budget or Upscale Tourist by a Thailand Insider who has lived in Thailand for 8 years by Jack B. Wily ... see you in Thailand ...

If you have a Kindle (one of those electronic book readers)you may be familiar with the Kindle Forums where people go to shoot the crap about the .. you got it ... Kindle. I find these forums incredibly difficult to navigate. I mean you go to the first page ... i mean there isn't anyway to know if or what a first page is here even. It says there are like twenty-thousand quote ... discussions. Then it lists ten. Then once in a while somewhere where you can never navigate back to ... you see ... list all discussions. Then in the middle of the page you get this ... related discussions ... like i mean ... related to what. I finally found this permalink thing that says ... this will make it easier to get back ... now i can't find any list of permalinks ... never mind what a permalink is ... do you mean bookmark by chance? To me the format of these forums makes me feel like i am back in the age of the dinosaurs using the first mosaic program where you typed in some number of a forum or something and got a list output. I mean don't get me wrong ... i like amazon ... just not the format of the forums ... i mean you'd have to smoke a lot of weed to even imagine that a person could actually find there way around in that maze. Don't get me wrong ... I love my Kindle ... I just like to write about things in an effort to make them better. And anyway, like I say ... I have never been ... a forum kind of guy ... I like my browsers clean, clear and simple. Sayonara. Over and out.

I Mean the Recharge Cord For the Kindle

2009-09-04T08:53:00.000-07:00

Thailand Travel Kit: Huts, Trip Itineraries, and Tips for the Budget or Upscale Tourist by a Thailand Insider who has lived in Thailand for 8 years by Jack B. Wily ... see you in Thailand ...

I mean this thing is biodegradable to the extreme. It has flaked away in my case. I mean the cord is eaten. It is gone. Amazon made some mistake with this thing. The cord melts like an eatable ice cream cone. I mean ... I like the biodegradeable idea. But I don't like to have the melting cord... I mean ... I can tolerate a melting cord, but I think it is best to report it first. I mean, I don't think this sort of engineering is the final answer ... Okay? I mean, who wants a cord that melts? Stuff like that.

A Bit on Amazon and its Automatic Removal

2009-09-03T20:54:00.000-07:00

Thailand Travel Kit: Huts, Trip Itineraries, and Tips for the Budget or Upscale Tourist by a Thailand Insider who has lived in Thailand for 8 years by Jack B. Wily ... see you in Thailand ...

I just read this stuff about Amazon removing some digital files from their e-reader (Kindle) because the person who published the files didn't have the digital rights. This one guy mentioned that Amazon gave him thirty dollars after the uproar. I guess he paid a coupld of bucks for the edition. If i got thirty dollars for a book that i assume cost very little, i would think Amazon had great customer service. In the consumer realm at least (i don't know a lot about the follow-up on publishing titles etc., though mine have gone through the system well (Thailand Travel Kit by Jack B. wily), I would have to say they are the best in the world. What other company simply removes charges and even sometimes tells you to keep the products when a customer complains. Try that with one of our amazing auto companies. I think this amazon hate thing is probably being financed by the other conglomerates, more traditional vampire like ones ... microsoft mnbc? (so much in the mass media today seems to come spurting at us while having as its basis a simple competitive ugly motive that is being paid for ... really, really sad)and people who are just jeolous of Amazons success? To me this issue of DRM (the Kindle book protection software thing) is nothing but an attack to turn the kindle books into free downloads like the mess that the music arena is in. I was happy to know that anything i write on the kindle will NOT show up on LimeWire. I don't really get these author advocates of an open system. Books don't grow on trees and they arn't anyone's basic human right ... they are donated or purchased by libraries ... not downloaded for free. Just a little opinion here on Amazon digital.

Follow Me to the Stairway to Heaven

2009-09-03T14:54:00.000-07:00

Thailand Travel Kit: Huts, Trip Itineraries, and Tips for the Budget or Upscale Tourist by a Thailand Insider who has lived in Thailand for 8 years by Jack B. Wily ... see you in Thailand ...

I don't usually write about networking, but see that follower icon on the left. If you visit a site you should click it. It will help your site gain recognition too. Those little spiders crawl through their webs gathering information like that. The one on the left here is the google freind connect widget ... it is designed to bring traffic to your site. So, I'm not the pied piper or anything like that, but follow me anyway. I swear I'll get you back.

I Sold my First Book. I am an Author.

2009-09-02T05:15:00.001-07:00

I just sold a proof of my Thailand Travel guide for 500 baht. It is the first of the lot. It means a lot to me on a personal level. I cannot think of too much sarchastic stuff to say about it other then I have always beleived in it. It is very satisfying. It was a direct marketing effort from the heart, but it was real. It was very, very real.

Thailand Travel Kit: Huts, Trip Itineraries, and Tips for the Budget or Upscale Tourist by a Thailand Insider who has lived in Thailand for 8 years by Jack B. Wily ... see you in Thailand ...

Linguistics and German

2009-09-02T03:47:00.000-07:00

Thailand Travel Kit: Huts, Trip Itineraries, and Tips for the Budget or Upscale Tourist by a Thailand Insider who has lived in Thailand for 8 years by Jack B. Wily ... see you in Thailand ...

I met this Australian guy on Elephant Island in the huts at Klong Prao. He was on his way to Europe. When he got there he sent me a rather drunken email. I mean it looked drunken, but it wasn't quite so drunken ... yeah, exactly like that. He said the keyboards overthere are sort of different and the linguist in me was interested. All of his words had a German twang to them. I mean everyone almost. It got me to thinking ... German is a parent of English and the written form when typed on a German typewriter reflects that fact. I am amazed by this. I am weird. I mean the written form when typed on a German keyboard generates German sounding English. I think there is something in that. But hey, I a learned a lot of my linguistics on the street.

Dinosaur Cake

2009-08-30T02:39:00.000-07:00

All the while I have been writing this blog I get these advertisements that are computer generated and usually it has been an add for Scientology. I mean, I don't know a lot about Scientology, but I wasn't that keen on all the adds for it. The other day I wrote this weird piece about bananas or something and a comparison of Obama and Fox news. I won't get into how bananas fit into the equation here, but now Scientology adds have disappeared and I've got the following ... one for meeting Thai girls ... one for the best Obama t-shirt ever and one for hotels. I guess now we need Obama, a banana, and a Thai girl in a hotel. I don'know, maybe Mrs. Obama wouldn't like it ... okay ... okay ... forget it already... Oh yeah, I almost forgot ... I got this ad for dinosaur cake so I guess dinosaurs are coexisting with people as I write. Either that or it must be some pretty old dinosaur cake...

Life's Like That

2009-08-29T16:47:00.000-07:00

The other day I was laughing about this teacher I had in school. His name was Mr. Fish and that alone brought him some jive. He taught auto repair. He was good at auto repair and his heart was in teaching, but he hadn't been a teacher long. He used to tell us about left-handed treads and how you had to turn the bolt to the left to tighten it and a group of us ... pretty near the whole class ... would say - is that right ... and he'd say 'no, turn it to the left' and that's how the classes generally went. Then later in college I had this date where I was hoping to get in her pants of course and somehow I told her about this teacher I had in high school. She listened to my story and then told me the guy was her cousin and that he had quit teaching because of this stuff. That was about fifteen minutes into the date and it was over by then already. Thirty-five years later ... yesterday ... I pulled my Honda Fino off to the side of the rode because the right mirror was loose in its socket. I sat there for about five minutes. It had come off in my hand as I tried to tighten it. I was cursing the Thais (who do have this tendency to not tighten bolts or just put things together to make them work for a bit)for having shoved the mirror into these stripped threads and then tightening the lock-nut down. A week or so later after driving around without a mirror on the passing side, I pulled into a shop and the guy took the mirror and twisted it to the left and screwed it back in. Karma ... whatever it is ... life's like that.

Showing Character in Writing

2009-08-28T06:50:00.000-07:00

I am reading this book ... A Bitter Harvest ... by Anne Rule. I don't know how someone can write a sentence like 'She liked the guy because her own husband would not replace the kitchen floor' ... I mean the husband in this case was a surgeon. This woman was in a bad marriage etc., but what sort of gets me is how a writer can write a sentence like this without considering the sense of it. I mean does anybody expect a surgeon making a couple hundred grand a year to spend days in the operating room and then one day figure that he will replace the kitchen floor himself ... I mean would you even want your surgeon spending his time repairing a floor? It drives me wild reading books like this. I mean I realize that the book is sort of a representation of fact, but I like books that tell me what the writer thinks, that give me ideas. I want to know why the thing happened. I want the rationale ... the nuts and bolts are okay, but I want to see the whole machine. I want to get inside the thing and take it to pieces. But that's not to say that it isn't a fascinating tale of a psycopath. And it turns out the surgeon is actually an anesthesiologist ... so I guess maybe he could replace a floor ...

The Real Plan

2009-08-27T06:55:00.000-07:00

I mean let's keep this guy alive. They shot Kennedy in the head and I can tell you they are waiting to shoot this guy too. He didn't pay off his health taxes or something so there out there waiting to put a bullet in his head. I promise you that.

Who has the Bigger Banana ... Obama or Fox?

2009-08-27T05:39:00.000-07:00

Anyway, I know there are a lot of politicians that are out there that are like the dinosaurs. They sort of eat everything they get their paws on. Mostly it seems like they like a lot of cash. Some of them even put it in the freezer for safe keeping. Some of them sock it away into a second or third home. I mean there is a million ways to hide money. Some of them just give out contracts hand over fist for things nobody wants. Then they spend their money on prostitutes and cigarettes. Then they vote to keep people from smoking in bars. I mean they don’t even allow for bars that allow smokers. Their like so perfect that they can do stuff like that and almost get away with it even. And I for one don’t even care about the women thing and being unfaithful. I think that is for the most part between the politician and the wife or husband. It’s just I do care about what they do ... and this doesn’t seem to carry much weight. I mean they can steal all the money they want to as long as they are faithful to the wife and family ... uh ... I don’t get it. I mean you scrape off a million bucks for something you don’t know anything about and that is okay, but as soon as you give five hundred bucks to a prostitute the whole political world is after you. I mean probably about five or ten million guys pay a prostitute every night so why should this just be a crime if you are in D.C.? It looks to me like being a male politician has always meant wanting to put your dick someplace. By the way ... in case you don’t already know it ... I think Rooseveldt or one of them high-power guys was pretty famous for keeping a tape recorder under the bed. I mean there had to be some reason he was so keen on wanting to know what was going on in the bedroom. The thing that really gets me is that all these politicians are out there screwing women and then telling the rest of us about family ... that really pisses me off.
Of course it isn’t only politicians that piss me off. We also have these so called reporters on Fox that go on and on about Obama. They go out of their way I mean ... and all I have to say about that is it looks to me like it is a N word waiting to come out ... I mean this uppity niger has become the president ... all of this while they rant about racial topics in America. There’s one of them there that I just watch to see the moment when he freaks out and calls Obama a nigger. The real sad thing is that at heart this guy seems to think he is the all defender of the American way. It’s sort of like that. I mean if he did something else he might be a nice guy, but in the media he just comes across as not liking black people or African Americans. I really mean it though, I am just waiting for that day when he comes out and says he can’t stand Obama because he is black. At least that in my opinion would be the truth. He probably figures Obama has a bigger dick or something like that ... and you know what ... I think a tape measure would prove it...

Politicians and Dinosaurs

2009-08-27T04:21:00.000-07:00

I mean we coexist with politicians and get ripped off for medical care all the time. It’s like some of them die while they are giving their speeches or can’t find the microphone. Of course they’ve been there a long time too. Maybe their already dead. I mean we see a lot of them around, too ... and we know we have coexisted with them. God. Don’t we?

People and Dinosaurs

2009-08-27T04:00:00.000-07:00

There is a stegosaurus carved into the Angkor Watt shrine. Some say this is evidence of of the coexistence of people and dinosaurs ... I mean it does look like a stegosaurus, but then again us humans have made Jurassic Park and none of us has ever seen a dinosaur. I mean what if some aliens come here someday and watch Jurassic Park ... I mean ...they ... would really believe that we lived with the dinosaurs. Especially, if it was their first movie... I mean it’s pretty funny ... here are these people saying that because a dinosaur is carved into a shrine that people lived with dinosaurs. I mean it isn’t as if we don’t have dinosaurs all over the place now. It looks to me like we have more dinosaurs today than ever really existed. Which is kind of odd seeing how they don’t exist. I mean this really gets me. All this stuff about dinosaurs and kids falling all over the place to hear about them. I mean can’t you just see some guy finding a skeleton of a stegosaurus and carving it up there on the columns of the shrine? And then thousands of years later these Einsteins come along and claim that we lived with the dinosaurs. I mean I myself have had several conversations with stegosauruses and they all said naw ... we never saw any humans back then. They were fairly certain about it, too. It wasn’t as if they would have missed one. They were especially interested when I said that people walked on two legs. They thought we would have been hard to miss. They seemed to take an interest in it just in case they had missed a meal. Actually the idea that these things coexisted with people is pretty fascinating. I think it might be true. It seems to me it would explain some things. But more on that later.

Cover Copy

2009-08-26T05:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.amazon.com/Thailand-Travel-Kit-Itineraries-ebook/dp/B002MKOQYC/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1251285090&sr=1-3

Thailand Travel

2009-08-25T23:25:00.000-07:00

I got this idea the last time i was on an island ... I seem to always ... be on an island ... so anyway ... I got this idea to write a book about traveling in Thailand. It's available on the Kindle now in digital form. The book should be out next week. Here's a link if you think you'd like to check it out.

http://www.amazon.com/Thailand-Travel-Kit-Itineraries-ebook/dp/B002MKOQYC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1251262150&sr=1-1

I Saw the World Through the Eye's of a Child

2009-07-21T05:28:00.000-07:00

Sneaking under the fence at the old drive-in theatre to lay on the lot and watch – the land is too expensive now, the shadows on the screen have disappeared.
To run and play as kids –
In the pool - Let’s pretend were astronauts stepping on the moon. I was a dog paddling towards my girl friend – let out a bark and shook the water from my fur. She laughed. I thought it was funny too. I was a turtle and then a flying fish leaping out of the sea and slapping it with my fins. Is this what we have lost, is this what we lose as we grow up?

Inspired by Ray Bradbury his thoughts in Dandelion Wine

They Told Us On Occassion - They Ate a Little Kid

2009-07-20T22:23:00.000-07:00

They ate pieces of themselves to stay alive. That was enough to make the story scary. Then, they lived in the dark basement of an apartment building and much later in back of a mind. It is in the back of a mind where they thrive to this day, never having been forgotten and unable to be clearly remembered. All the result of a group of older kids dragging a group of kindergarten children into the basement of an old building, into darkness on an otherwise bright day.
The things they ate grew back and in this manner they went on, these zombies that existed only in the mind. They were the living dead and hid amongst abandoned water heaters and broken tools amongst dust and dingy rusted out machnes. One might pop out of anywhere down there in the dungeon to snatch the only thing they ate - a kindergarten kid, sometimes. The blood no longer flowed in their bodies or if it did it was powder in their veins, their bodies no longer aged. They never left the basement of the building. The light of day was more than they could stand. This is what the older kids told us that day. And it wasn’t long before we started telling them that we wanted out of there.
I never went back to that place. I didn’t have to, it moved into my mind. They ate parts of their own bodies to survive. That was enough to make them unforgettable. They now had eternal life even as those who took me to the basement have died in my memory as have the other details. There was something down there, something living that was dead. We asked them how they could survive eating themselves like that, since there was no net input of calories, or anything like that. They told us that on occasion they ate a little kid.

The Baby Ate a Stethoscope

2009-07-20T04:26:00.000-07:00

Let’s say for purposes of discussion that a doc leaves a stethoscope in a baby’s tummy. Hum, negligent, inexcusable, intolerable, maybe even indecent. The lawyers scramble for a hundred million dollar lawsuit that no one has the money to pay – except the system designed by lawyers in Washington. It gets reported as being the fairest resolution. That doctor is an evil lonely one, probably was sipping something in the operating room. A stethoscope in a baby’s tummy. Here we had a middle income family – a couple of million going more directly, directly to them, would have been a bonanza in terms of cash – but now we have a group of lawyers taking fifty percent off the top, siphoning in a lot to other lawyers in Washington so that they will keep their traps shut and never say a word to stop it. The next day everyone pays a dollar more the next time they go to a doctor. The cycle repeats over and over until... it breaks.

In the Image of Man

2009-07-16T03:37:00.000-07:00

In the Image of Man

What would life be if we all shared our realities? If we woke up some morning in a house in North Korea to the sound emanating from the box in the kitchen with the news of the regime? It has been reported in the media that this is the only station available, though I find that a bit hard to believe since a lot of stations are broadcast from just below the border and I would imagine there must be some within. But what if we walked in the shoes in one of those parades celebrating our leader for a day or if as most we made breakfast and saw ourselves as human instead of part of an axis of evil? And then the next day we woke up at home and connected to the internet and heard them say that we need to bomb North Korea and not talk to them in any way. Would we be so anxious to push the button after breakfasting at their morning table? Or would we say no... there must be another way that does not involve destruction and the pitting of mankind against mankind on a planet that holds us all. Last night I had a dream. I was on the border between North and South Korea and looking into a mysterious labyrinth of rooms that were in the dream the entrance to the country. I was with a woman and she told me she was going to live in North Korea and I knew I couldn’t run across that border in my mind, and I started to complain, but she ran away from me and then circled back and ran into the room and was gone. She had escaped. I made my way through some complicated maze and was approached by a woman who said she needed to talk to me about something I did a couple of years ago. She was from the NSA or some government person. I was thinking what was it – what did I do; and I asked her if we could go somewhere private. Just a moment before I had looked into this labyrinth of rooms that were the entrance into a place I was imagining there was no return from. Liquid media has been pumped through the pipes of my mind and I am dreaming but somewhere in reality I know there is a room across the border where people sit and chat like we do; where people make meals and strive to eke out a living or laugh at each other’s jokes; where they have been fed information from another media that tells them evil lurks in the South or in the U.S.A. The evil thing that we are all afraid of -- And then one day people on both sides die fighting against the evil thing... the mass media; the, in many cases created images, created on both sides that give us reason to kill and maim and the ability to bring in cash and in doing so ensure that we are our own enemy. Mankind vs Mankind: In the image of man. We destroy ourselves; the most intelligent form of life (some say) chooses itself as an enemy... how intelligent is that? Didn’t someone once say that the enemy resides in our soul? As if the highest species didn’t have an enemy and had to create one for itself. Is this the real reason we left the Garden of Eden? Think about it, we have infectious diseases, but even these are often transmitted by our own devices - look in the paper and see how many of our problems are caused by... us. And then some say - well if there is a God, why do these things happen. I think God might tell us they happen because we do it to ourselves and therein might lie a lesson. If God has been made into a bad word by your media – well – think of it as the great spirit in the sky or that little something that I believe even the most avid atheist must feel within – that the soul communicates with something; that there is beauty in life; that there are times when if you ask you do receive; even in a world where religion is so often misused and where I for one would never wear religion on my sleeve...

Reply to a Tweet I Saw

2009-07-16T03:24:00.000-07:00

A post on Twitter says it is ironic that men always ask you what you are doing when you ask them what they are thinking. Men don’t talk about feelings that kind of thing. I too feel something when talking to some women - that we are not talking about the same thing. Is one of us looking outward and the other inward?
I like to keep my thoughts to myself until I decide to express myself, I don’t like being observed for thoughts that I am having while I am having them. It is as if women believe that the only way they can catch something true or relevant is if they grab a thought from you while you’re not thinking. What? –while you’re off you’re guard. –They are convinced that men won’t tell them anything worthwhile maybe - if they know they are telling it to them. The thought has to be grabbed before it can be guarded- that sort of thing. I believe that there are women who believe that we battle to keep them down and therefore won’t tell them something to their advantage. Is that it?
When I awoke this morning the vine on the balcony had grown two inches during the night and seemed be trying to make an approach to my room. It makes a click click sound when it grows rapidly and sort of slithers a tiny almost imperceptible bit as a minute hand on a clock or the level of water in a pool being filled. Or the tide rising at the beach. Or the Sun falling on the horizon at noon. Or water getting hot in a pot. But I wonder about that vine and why it wants so badly to reach the door to my room. Click click slither glide stop. Is anyone watching? Click slither meander to the side to get a better view, a final click then the plant feigns slumber but I know its watching waiting... for some moment to turn the corner : to head inside, click, tick tick. My heart is readying itself: I guard my thoughts. The clothes have been hung out to dry and the window slides open. Click... eyes. The vine seems to know my thoughts but as I turn the clicks stop – it stops, hesitates. I turn away. It moves again and I feel it watching me. She closes the door. I look out - the vine is no longer there and I wonder have I imagined the sequence. Is it possible for a plant to appear and disappear or have I gone somewhere and come back.

Regrettably, Reilly and Underhandity: The Wily Fox

2009-07-14T17:44:00.000-07:00

They take the words out of your mouth then interrupt you, pump you full of it and then release it as effluent in a stream into mass media. Oh, reilly, is that what they do? They then make you their own point of view. Oh, reilly, is that what they do. They yell and they shout and even give themselves away... you agree with me... that’s all we want - they even say out loud. Oh, reilly... did he say that. Yes, he reilly did. They even said once they get paid by the view. Oh, reilly... yes, reilly. Stop saying those silly words. I’m telling you it's reilly and regretafully true. They say Palin is a victim because she is a woman politician. Regretafully they say. It has nothing to do with thinking Russia is cute because you can see it from Alaska. Oh, reilly, yes regretafully. You say well, it looks like there are quite a few women in politics today, even though things may still not be equal, but they say, yes reilly, they say no it is only because Hillary and Palin are women that they get treated this way. You regretta to say... I talked to a woman just the other day who couldn’t stomach Palin. Oh, reilly, yes, regrettafully. Looks kind a under handitty. Yes, quite so. Regrettafully it is reilly true and underhandity. I mean Biden got the economy wrong, but underhandity they said, as Obama tried to tell us what a true disaster America’s situation had become – that Obama was a doomsday seeker seeking socialism – a member of the evil axis, underhandity they say. I mean things can’t be that bad can they? Yes, regrettafully, it is reilly true. Now when Biden says they underestimated it the conservative translation – BING BING BING – they are wrong on the economy – they were underhandity about the whole thing. It is not regrettable or reilly true but underhandity it is the whole and only truth in the universe – you agree with me – good – but that’s not all we want here on an Island of Sand –it’s up to you – fortunately, open handedly, and really true.

I NEED an Aspirin

2009-07-14T17:10:00.000-07:00

How the stock market is manipulated and a concrete example

Aspirin: A few months back, I don’t know if it is the most recent one – I saw the new news on aspirin – taking it every day can lead to gastric trouble – as if taking any drug every day wouldn’t lead to something. Then there is the real killer release every two years or so. Taking aspirin everyday eliminates the risk of cancer, especially anal cancer. I have seen this one over the last 15 years or so and it fascinates me as it must be such an easy game to play. I mean they don’t exactly say eliminates cancer – they don’t have to – anything that contains the words cancer and less risk is a panacea. After these releases are prepared – let’s take the one that was blasted at us a couple of months ago – the one saying well, actually, taking aspirin everyday may not be such a hot idea. Can you see the guys who have the main chunks in aspirin stocks dumping them all off a few hours before the junk is squirted in the press pump and ejected as mainstream effluent? They bought the shares they dump a couple of years back – the day before aspirin was for the tenth time discovered to cure cancer of all kinds. They have sold all their shares – along comes little Johnny day trader thinking he is clever and he catches the drop in the price of aspirin just a few hours after the release – ah, I am clever – I am first – he sell off his recently purchased shares at just a five percent loss – he has saved his loss and is thinking of the suckers out there who will keep it. Next, the tradition walkers with brokers – the brokers tell them it’s time to sell – within the week the price falls through the floor and the poor cretin on vacation comes home and finds he is sitting on a stock worth half what it was before they left home – he sells, oh well. Then there is a beep on a monitor and all the big players are back in on no news release... two years later... Taking an aspirin everyday reduces the risk of anal cancer... and here we go again... Of course way down at the bottom of the tank we have those dinosaurs that buy a stock and keep it twenty years... they win. Well, they get something... just not the something that the big players get every couple of years. The rest of them, well, they get... hit?

A Virtual World

2009-07-13T21:06:00.000-07:00

Babies rollerskating looking almost real: what will happen when -these computer generated videos become indistinguishable from the real world. When we live in a whole new not so real world where we are doing many things where water appears to run uphill and life is something once known, left outside where baseballs are no longer thrown, where people don't get wet when it rains. Are we driven to make a world as someone long ago created us. Will these animated figures feel pain or will they teach us that people are replaceable - that lives lost can be regained by simply rebooting a computer in the mind. And what will the human race do when it becomes replaceable? Nuclear war not so unthinkable when the creatures destroyed are figures in our imaginations. When automated mass media tells someone to push the button as it now tells what news to tell that will attack more viewers and create a reality of its own by deciding what we hear and what we don't. What will happen when a pet dies and it becomes common practice to have it replaced by bringing a sample of DNA to the veterinarian, when the death of a child doesn't seem to matter since she can be replaced with a new identical one. When corporations view people as irrelevant bodies pushing buttons purchasing products over and over again providing nothing more than a flow of cash into a system running itself. What will happen when those video portrayals are confused with the real thing. Will one day a ship appear and find nothing but automated twits and software finding more followers and followers following yet no living soul reading the tweets. An empty planet of automated tweets found in the galaxy by aliens perceiving microwave radiation in a distant universe and striving for years to get here only to find a deserted automated planet that seems to serve no higher purpose other than tweeting itself. They find on Earth TVs turning on and turning off with automatic plots and twists generated by advanced computer logarithms, each season some new twist that any real human would change the channel on thus seeing no creativity, but alas the automated media long ago realized this and plotted humans out of the story so they could continue on with tweets and twists and generations of video and now those videos projected images onto a real world that portrayed people and before people left they invented lasers to project images of themselves in the third dimension, no longer did we sit in front of a screen, we now watched shows in three dimensions and then one day left altogether, not making it into the fourth dimension, but annihilated in one war or another. Having developed an inexhaustible supply of energy and replicating biological machines we became redundant, books were now read by machines, more errors remained then when a human editor edited them, but the machine marked it in red or missed it altogether and generated another story and projected it and planets in other galaxies saw life on Earth and strove to visit but those who got here saw that a giant video game had replaced the planet. That people felt no pain and could be played as a challenge, killed in wars, slaughtered in inhuman cubicles watched and studied with web cams while their images of God sat at keyboards typing out commands and then one day when man returned and another ship made land this man put out his soul seeking - searching hand to pat a shoulder in a cubicle and say the ship has arrived to bring salvation and that hand went through the shoulder and sliced through the space of the heart, hunting love but finding empty space in a laser light show and this man turned and saw that on the wall was some device that projected this show and that outside the building itself was being projected and that beneath a polluted sky a bright blue one reflected off the orange red hues of mercuric acid dew and out on the horizon a bright sea complete with reflected hues rays of light and swirling currents appeared and this man thought and walked out into the water and did not get wet and went farther and there was no water and continued on and the image never altered but there was not the feeling of the sea or the feeling of laughter though the sound of it emanated from every corner of the planet generated by great electronic harps that stung and sang and replicated life as a processor knew it. A great wave broke over the man but he felt no different than he had in the cubicle. The next computer generated day the ship left a dead planet having found no love and having failed in its mission to meet the people left millenniums in the past but now cloned as projections of light and new shadows of the sun. This was a possible world an impossible one but the bird Venusians destroyed it and in doing so figured Earth was gone but Golem sat on a real planet and waited for the real ship to appear to meld and blend and bring back time and prevent the cloning that had finally led to the destruction of the virtual world, but at the same time decoyed the real Earth that the bird Venusians so wanted to destroy through war, destruction, a refusal to discuss peace or talk to anyone. The birds returned thinking they had now destroyed the world but the world had a little more time. A tiny piece of it remained. And a tiny part of humanity continued on in the voyage towards the preprogrammed destination and gathered knowledge and saw beauty in the creation of life as it was and not as what much of it had become. They looked out at the real colors of an evening sky knowing real beauty could be distinguished from the half million colors of advanced video monitors and they saw.

Israel Palistine Evil and Greed

2009-07-13T16:24:00.000-07:00

I am trying to understand the situation on the ground. I guess it must mean that if a person builds enough houses on someone else's land that they become the rightful owners. If I build a den in your house and occupy it someday the house becomes mine. Interesting idea. Another idea would be to evict those who build the den and to move towards a fair solution. I remember running into a Persian girl on the streets of Tokyo and telling her I wish there were peace and she telling me - wouldn't America love that. I thought she was hardened for war and that I meant peace sincerely, but now I think the reason we don't have peace is because peace is not wanted. It is given lip service, every few years (in the last fifty or so) some peace proposal is shot off in space - then said to be a mistake. Then they say we tried to make peace but those Arabs keep attacking and another decade goes by with war. America sells weapons to Israel, who if given half a chance would have wiped out and taken over a much wider area of the middle east by now. But not only does America sell them weapons and take the cash - it then forbids them to end the war. "IF" and a very big IF someone thought Israel was in the right then hey why doesn't America let them end it? Of course ending it like that would mean that weapons were no longer needed and the profits from them no longer going into politicians pockets and pockets of corporations. Therefore, peace is not an initiative. We draw it out as long as possible and people suffer over decades pain and loss of life more horrible than in any one decisive battle - as if that battle was even necessary. I remember thinking that Arab girl didn't want peace, but now I see that peace is not the issue here. The issue is an economic one. Israel pours money into American military corporations, gives money to American politicians; every time a missile is fired money is accrued at the cost of civilian lives. And no one suggests that a new line be drawn closer to the UN map at the end of the World War II that was closer to half the current size of Israel but had a boundary that could only suggest the way it would end up. How about a line in the middle? No one would ever suggest that would they. Access to the sea for both countries. An easily defined border. Or how about a little land from other bordering nations. It isn't too much to ask and a gesture towards peace. I think with the Internet people are coming to see the goodness in all nations... the every day lives and quests of individuals, civilization... the fantasy evil ingredient is really just greed. Isn't it?

Tiny Plastic Eggs So Silly

2009-07-13T15:14:00.000-07:00

Silly Putty

He and a friend have a habit (not the kind that are worn) that probably more than a few kids have these days. They go to the Lucky’s supermarket in L.A. and steal things. Well, actually, in their case and to be more specific, to focus on one thing, it was usually just one thing that they stole. For some reason they always took the thing that most fancied their soul.
What fascinated the two boys this time around is a new product called Silly Putty. Just push it on newsprint and it copies the print — they did not have the Net — they couldn’t download their homework yet.
It was to them amazing stuff. In these days kids were still amazed by toys that didn’t talk, you couldn’t feed, and that couldn’t be connected to the USB port. On each trip they would put a pack of Silly Putty under their shirt and make their way to the restroom where they would un-package the little plastic eggs that the stuff came marketed in and put said eggs into their pockets. They were foxes in a hen house; they were wild and free. It was not a C.I.A operation, but it provided some initial experience — some essential development — some essence of technique.
In later days it would seem ironic that these tiny plastic eggs might have played a role in the destruction of so many lives, but then again eggs can be important in the future.
The eggs kids play with today can cost ten thousand dollars, pay for college, and be used to make babies. They can be bought in the classified section. Oh, was it really … silly Putty.
All went well with the procurement of the silly Putty until one day when a store manager happened to notice Charls stuffing something flat with a bulge in the middle under his shirt.
The two boys are taken to a dungeon. The kind of place people worked. He referred to it, they remembered, as the back office, where they were severely reprimanded and glad that they weren’t placed on a rack and their souls stretched out to the point where they came out of their mouths like giant tongues or Iguanas. It was scary in there. There was fear, personified.
The store manager looked at Charls’s shoes’ untied laces. “Today it’s toys, tomorrow cars, look at your shoelaces.” His voice stern, his eyes serious, and his face very, very, grim, he picks up the phone and tells the two that he is calling the police. Charls never forgot what he said next. “You are not going to see your parents for a very long time”. That’s it, he’s on the phone. It’s over for them. Then he places the baton in its cradle.
A few minutes later he releases them, and as they walk, slowly and controlled at first, and then scurry from the back to the front of the store, Charls’s friend starts crying. Charls tells him to hurry up and get out of the store before the guy changes his mind. Scott was a pussy, Charls could handle interrogation.

Tweet Tweet

2009-07-13T08:15:00.000-07:00

And then, on return from his morning walk on Saturday they saw a mark on the street pointing to the right and further on there were two—pointing left and right and a bit later they saw a solid line. It was then that they realized that these symbols were there to guide the ant-like ships in. They would land in Bang Saen and from there spread on opposite sides and take over the world horizontally. They would split up at the second mark and then when they saw the solid line lift over the sea on one side and the hills on the other and take the world by surprise. He knew immediately that he had to get the story out—

On second thought, it might have been the vodka that made them think that the right turn arrow and then the left turn next to another right and then the crosswalk further on were actually some sort of guidance as the engraven air fields seen from the sky in other parts of the world. It may all have been a mistake. But it was fun. The islands always were.

Such a Tiny Sliver of Land

2009-07-13T05:51:00.000-07:00

I was napping with the TV on. I awoke and heard the mention of Israel and Palestine. I was waking, not fully awake. I was listening for a discussion finally of peace or what could be done. That's what we are all missing I think. There is ranting there is raving... I thought for a moment that I was going to hear a real discussion of the real question-I heard: sliver of land. I listened for a reference to Palestine and two tiny corners of a piece of land that was divided in half by the U.N. But now is almost entirely Israel. Then I heard-Israel has such a tiny slice of land. We can't talk of taking more of it from them-words to such effect. Then I heard-There is so much land in Muslim areas where they could go. Then I realized I was awake and it was the same old same old nightmare media and a guy I now am very glad did not become the president. Will it never end,stop,subside?

I See Inside

2009-07-12T15:19:00.000-07:00

Being three-dimensional, we are only able to see the world with our eyes in two dimensions. A four-dimensional being would be able to see the world in three dimensions. For example, it would be able to see all six sides of an opaque box simultaneously, and in fact, what is inside the box at the same time, just as we can see the interior of a square on a piece of paper. It would be able to see all points in 3-dimensional space simultaneously, including the inner structure of solid objects and things obscured from our three-dimensional viewpoint.

Wikipedia

Are we all locked in a sort of crystal three dimensional prison, like superman locked in kryptonite. What if something lives in the fourth dimension, and we are only shadows of them. Our thoughts being reflections from another society. What if that boundary is the boundary between what we think of life and death. Each day the sun rises and sets and we are in a cycle thinking we know of life and death. But what if something out their is playing with our souls like a child plays with toys in their imagination. What if we are a game played by the fourth dimensional world. What if they view us as feeling no pain as we view lower life forms: they don't have a brain for pain, as fish on a hook. If we are only shadows of the sun imitating life with video games that show us our own third dimension on a two-dimensional screen. What if a kid somewhere in a different space rams two cars together in play and here in our world a person dies in a crash. Somewhere in the imagination of another possible world?

How Much is Enough?

2009-07-12T06:56:00.000-07:00

I hear Barney Frank telling us that Fannie Mae is A OK. I hear Bush telling us that Enron is great -- don't touch it. I saw in 1980, people paying 1500 dollars to rent a house. Just how important is family really. I wonder what kind of salary could insure that that sort of rent could ... well, be covered. Wow -- 1500 to pay the rent without all the other stuff. The middle class must have suffered. It makes me think that rent controll is not bad stuff. That life in Europe is good. I could write a lot of words, but B. Frank has been in office since 1981 and I think I have to suggest that people do retire. Of course, I could add that if congress stays up all night passing secret plans, wouldn't it be better if those in Washington actually held a civil 9-5 job? You know, I hate to say it, but almost like the rest of us -- that they worked and went home and retired before they died. I mean Frank's upside down smile. I mean I can understand people wanting to own their own home when to rent means paying half a salary a month with both partners working almost. But somehow I don't quite believe that any of them are innocent. Is it just me?

First Paragraph Book Two

2009-07-12T06:25:00.000-07:00

"Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters." - Friedrich Nietzsche—

Much later, when parts of the story were written, Golem would see an Icelandic retiree who had lost his life savings, crying, neighbors had killed themselves. He said he had no food, nothing to leave his children. When Golem thought of those in Washington who caused the eventual economic collapse with its implications around the globe, when he saw that all of those who caused it still sat in Washington without punishment, he thought perhaps the harsh words and hate and call for retribution, while written as a part of a novel, might be better understood. It was just a book. Golem didn’t like violence of any kind and didn’t promote it and wouldn’t pick up an assault weapon, BUT CHarLie would.

Walk the Walk

2009-07-12T06:03:00.000-07:00

What if we all had a chip implanted in us that could tell us where we have walked during our entire life. What if we could retrace each step. I like to walk. What if each of us wrote a book tracing our footsteps through life. It would be a truthful book. If we could remember each and every thought. I walked across Tokyo once. I learned my way over many shorter walks. I never used a map. But I knew the way.

Random Walk : Ten Million Years : Then 8 Minutes

2009-07-11T18:28:00.000-07:00

Random Walk

Random walk, Random walk…Ragnarok…Ragnarok…
Stochastic process (Many steps, a long random walk, yet predictable to some)…tic…tic…tic…based on the problem of determining the probable location of a point subject to random motions, given the probabilities (the same at each step) of moving some distance in some direction. A typical example is the drunkard's walk, in which a point beginning at the origin of the Euclidean plane moves a distance of one unit for each unit of time, the direction of motion, however, being random at each step. The problem is to find, after some fixed time, the probability distribution of the distance of the point from the origin.

(Am I Golem, Jack, Wicket, Charls...? In the end, what will come?)

Farther out the nuclei have electrons attached, so they can absorb and re-emit the photons, but the effect is the same: (You are still not one.) the photons take a so-called random walk outward until they escape from the Sun. The distance covered in a random walk is the average distance traveled between collisions (known as the mean free path) multiplied by the square root of the number of steps, in which a step is an interval between successive collisions. As the average mean free path in the Sun is about 10 centimetres (4 inches), the photon must take 5 × 1019 steps to travel 7 × 1010 centimetres. Even at the speed of light this process takes 10 million years, and so the light seen today was generated long ago.

The final step from the Sun's surface to Earth, however, takes only eight minutes.—when things get near the end they speed up, markets crash, banks fail, people go berserk. When food disappears from the supermarket shelves, there are some—well, they hunt for food. In the cities there is one kind of meat that most of us don’t want to eat.

Ragnarok

(Old Norse: “Doom of the Gods”), in Scandinavian mythology, the end of the world of gods and men. The Ragnarök is fully described only in the Icelandic poem Völuspá (“Sibyl's Prophecy”), probably of the late 10th century, and in the 13th-century Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (d. 1241), which largely follows the Völuspá. According to those two sources, the Ragnarök will be preceded by cruel winters and moral chaos. Giants and demons approaching from all points of the compass will attack the gods, who will meet them and face death like heroes. The sun will be darkened, the stars will vanish, and the earth will sink into the sea. Afterward, the earth will rise again, the innocent Balder will return from the dead, and the hosts of the just will live in a hall roofed with gold.

Disjointed (Multiple Personality Disorder…Genius…He wanted to do the right thing…) allusions to the Ragnarök, found in many other sources, show that conceptions of it varied. According to one poem two human beings, Lif and Lifthrasir (“Life” and “Vitality”), will emerge from the world tree (which was not destroyed) and re-people the earth. The title of Richard Wagner's opera Götterdämmerung is a German equivalent of Ragnarök meaning “twilight of the gods.”
Twilight of the Gods… (I saw these words. I had been sitting in twilight at dusk and dawn working on a plan or was I trying to stop one? So much has occurred since then…so many…Venus at night and in the morning…I thought I saw Inana or a scribe of hers. Could I be wrong? Golem, Jack, Charls communicate—can I reconcile them? Before it is too late.)

Balder

Old Norse Baldr in Norse mythology, the son of the chief god Odin and his wife Frigg. Beautiful and just, he was the favourite of the gods (That’s what I feel like when I am Wicket; can Wicket be wrong). Most legends about him concern his death. Icelandic stories tell how the gods amused themselves by throwing objects at him, knowing that he was immune from harm.

The blind god Höd, deceived by the evil Loki, killed Balder by hurling mistletoe, the only thing that could hurt him.

(I remember now…I paid a Thai cop to kill Wicket…he was smashed against Mabrun Kong in Bangkok. They found pieces of him scattered in the upper floors. A three-wheeled vehicle can hit you hard.)

After Balder's funeral, the giantess Thökk, probably Loki in disguise, refused to weep the tears that would release Balder from death (CHarLie…what’s done is done…). Some scholars believe that the passive, suffering figure of Balder was influenced by that of Christ. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1200), however, depicts him as a warrior engaged in a feud over the hand of a woman. (Could be Jack, in some complicated love story, can’t be sure.)

Loki

In Norse mythology, a cunning trickster (Must be Jack, I feel cunning when I’m him.) who had the ability to change his shape and sex. Although his father was the giant Fárbauti, he was included among the Aesir (a tribe of gods). Loki was represented as the companion of the great gods Odin and Thor, helping them with his clever plans but sometimes causing embarrassment and difficulty for them and himself. He also appeared as the enemy of the gods, entering their banquet uninvited and demanding their drink; he was the principal cause of the death of the god Balder. Loki was punished by being bound to a rock, thus in many ways resembling the Greek figures Prometheus and Tantalus. Loki created a female, Angerboda (Angrboda: “Distress Bringer”), and produced three evil progeny: Hel, the goddess of death; Jörmungand, the evil serpent surrounding the world; and Fenrir (Fenrisúlfr), the wolf.

The figure of Loki remains obscure; there is no trace of a cult, and the name does not appear in place-names.

There are no loose ends, and no one leaves the Window Corporation alive; the plan isn’t written down; I keep it in my head, where It’s safe and waiting to be carried out. Plan A—I called it. I wouldn’t have executed the plan—but Plan B had more serious ramifications and those can’t be good since Plan A involved the killing of four and a half billion souls in body suits called men. Of course, in a politically correct world they would be half men and half women, maybe if I say men things will end differently… my government—in a land where assault weapons kill so many…well, haven’t they been teaching…preaching...that reality depends on words, that when we call something good when it is evil, that it magically becomes good… I think their wrong…

(Factual information on Balder, Ragnarok, Loki and Stochastic Process are taken from the Encyclopedia Britannica—The fiction is mine)

(Encyclopedia Britannica)

The Song of the Sybil
Heidi men call me when their homes I visit,
A far seeing Volva, wise in talismans.
Caster of spells, cunning in magic.
To wicked women welcome always.

(W H Auden & P B Taylor Translation)
Continued throughout tale in pieces.

The Tick Slowed Each Time He Killed an Innocent

2009-07-11T18:26:00.000-07:00

Charls had stayed near that sound now for almost thirty years. Just recently he had stayed on the beach just feet from the waves. It was a gentle sound and it was good. But the fifth week he had feelings of madness. And the sound of waves was the only sound around. The weather had turned rainy and all the other tourists were gone. Humanity had left the beach. He didn’t know how much longer he could take the sound.
It might drive him mad.
Random walk, random walk…Ragnarok, Ragnarok…tic…tic…tic…Bang—
In this case the tick was in Charls head, but it had been ticking for at least thirty years and he wasn’t getting any younger. He could not escape it. If he drank too much in the evening, the tick would go away. But as if woken by a clock, the tick would come back the next day and be regular again.

The tick slowed each time he killed an innocent victim. He was not a killer. He didn’t think he was insane. But that tick. It had to be extinguished before someone else extinguished another candle’s flame that would have dire consequences. He was being asked to kill. His idea at first had been revenge for some grief he had suffered that he had not committed any crimes that would make that grief just in his mind. But it soon spiraled like the tower into something much more than his original plan and into a plan that was not of his own making. Near the end the tick turned into CHarLie. CHarLie had a plan of his own and when CHarLie spoke Charls listened. You see CHarLie now occupied a part of Charls mind; a part much too near his soul to allow him to retain his sanity. And now this man was occupying his bungalow with him on the beach.

Tick…tick…tick… “Hey Charls, this is CHarLie speaking now, don’t worry the ticks are gone.” That voice was terror enough, but one morning on Elephant Island as Charls had just been ready for a new day, CHarLie appeared in person. It was more terrible than he had dreamed. CHarLie made it clear to him that the tick was counting down days to Armageddon. Eventually, another voice asked him to try to reverse the process already on the edge of no redemption.

But He Had High Hopes

2009-07-11T18:24:00.000-07:00

He hoped these actions would bring back common sense to the country he loved most. It was an element that seemed to be forgotten. The language was being confused continually. The gates had been opened way beyond change and a flood was gathering. Tick…tick…tick… It was like the sound of waves he had listened to on the beach. He could even hear them high up on the hill above the water. Someone was trying to build a different kind of tower.

The sound of waves is soothing for almost an eternity, but imagine yourself the last human with that sound your only consolation. Tick…crash…tick…crash…tick…BANG you’re out and into the unknown. A sort of atheist with faith searching for religion.

A Human Spring

2009-07-11T18:23:00.000-07:00

It was as if he had disobeyed the principle of conservation of movement, like he somehow stored kinetic energy in a quirky, tightly wound human spring. When he pushed a button, or someone pushed his, he’d spring up on an intended target. Except for his humanness he might be mistaken for a jumping spider.

A human spring. The thing is he is also like a clock with a bomb attached or maybe even generations of bombs. Occasionally, one went off. The last of the bombs was the big bang. It wasn’t him who planned that one. And how did he get himself involved in that? He was currently putting it together in his mind. Tick…tick…tick…you could not know which tick would trigger the spring that would trigger the end of humanity.

The last bang was reserved for all of humanity. When the tower fell, all knowledge would be lost and Earth would lose its fertility. It would release more kinetic energy than all the tectonic plates if they all moved under the sea together and reversed the poles of the Earth. No matter what the outcome all of humanity would suffer. The seeds of that suffering had already been planted. God would only help those who helped their own. At any rate it was much too late to avoid a tsunami of consequence. The only question of relevance was which plan would be executed. There were two—Plan A and Plan B.

Uncorrupted Faith

2009-07-11T18:22:00.001-07:00

I think she found me. Later I would read of the existence of a kingdom in Sumeria long ago that was since corrupted by men. Its I.D. had perhaps been stolen by men wanting to pose as God for their own material benefit. I’m not sure if any current religion can claim to possess a totally legitimate I.D.
It seems to me that currently all religions are bent on being the only one and the only legitimate one. Buddhism seems a bit different … just advice … follow me or not. I could be wrong, but since I’m here in Thailand it surrounds me. I see the good part of all religions in it. I respect it as I respect the Muslim Koran and the advice in it. As I respect the Bible … All when separated from any vision of there being just one way to believe. I look at the good points — the rest I have no need of.
The Kingdom of Sumeria was polytheistic, they believed in a bit of this and a bit of that. Its god was not separate from the world. It could not be a man or woman. It seemed to be the first written record of faith. Its story paralleled those in all the religions, but was told 2000 years before the birth of Christ. It was my kind of religion….
Certain things had happened on the island that made me want to know more about faith. I knew that faith could be pure when separate from religion. I read that Venus and Mars were more visible to the naked eye in twilight because they were not hidden by the moonlight. I read that Inana was the goddess of love. I waited for her after that in the twilight hours and what I learned, shortly thereafter, has given me a new view of our world and heaven and life. I sat out in the twilight again and one day soon after I came to realize that I had met her. It was the most amazing experience I have ever had and I plan to follow it up. I may not now have known her name if not for the internet and some research. I already had the faith, but not the knowledge of a very long time ago; but actually probably right now.
If you take away the tense, does time really matter?

There are all these guys in my mind now. I started out as one. Golem, Charls, Jack, Wicket, CHarLie. I don’t know which one I am now. I think Wicket is real, but can’t be sure. It’s not as if life is simple anymore. It’s a complicated world when all these minds exist as one … or two … or three … or more. Tick … tick … tick … Bang—

Through the Top of the Head

2009-07-11T18:20:00.001-07:00

Candy’s brain was taken through the top of her head. The cap cut with a laser and removed like the top of a pumpkin on Halloween. The top was fused back on and a specimen brain, received for research, a dead brain, put in its place. The fused skin and bone was so perfectly replaced that medical examination found no trace of an intrusion, an intrusion into the human race.
Golem kept his brain in a jar next to the door, no make-up was required, no body to be hidden, all was revealed in a state of affairs, grace.
It was not easy to get Candy to his lab and the body back again before the police arrived. When he took Candy’s brain, she was a tad alive. He had to remove the organ before the cyanide deprived it of oxygen and it died.
He may have been aware on some sub-subconscious plane, of the role he played in stealing the brain, but Charlie made the plan;
Charlie knew things before the end. He knew Candy was suspicious of Golem in the beginning. Charlie saw behind the second door; thought he saw behind the third, but in the end…

Candy Kane

2009-07-11T18:18:00.000-07:00

When Candy’s husband, Shaun, asked her to keep an eye on Window it had not been his idea to break into the house to look for documents, but she wanted to impress him. She thought she would get away with it. She also had no idea that Golem was in the basement. She was nearly unable to escape. At first she froze with fear. She regretted killing the dog, but after realizing that she would be first mauled by the dog and then caught by Mr. Window, she had seen no alternative to using the phase-laser device on the dog. She had no idea that her aim would be so accurate or the results so deadly and instantaneous. The laser went through the dog’s skull and burned a hole in the linoleum kitchen floor. The dog had not let out even a simple snarl before collapsing without even bleeding. The laser cauterized the wound as it made it. She had been tempted to use the laser on Golem himself. She had never liked the man and it appeared he was involved in much more than running a shoddy internet company. Sweet Candy, dog killer, the thought caused her grief. She had been in such a hurry that she nearly dropped the laser on the kitchen floor, an action that would have given her away as an employee of Window, since the laser had been Mr. Window’s idea in the first place. Candy didn’t know why she loathed Mr. Window in the way that she did. She really only knew that the U.S. government suspected him of embezzling funds from The Iguana Bank. The rest of the story was at this time a mystery to everyone. It had to do with the look in the man’s eyes. There was something broken behind that gaze. There had to be. He looked at people as if he saw through them and not at them. There was something whacky behind those eyes. Everyone in the company said he was an eccentric genius who was prone to such actions as shaving his head in the middle of the day before letting his hair grow out over the next few months. He would even wax it. The truth was he could’ve used it for a flash light. The bright white dome was exceptionally smooth with no scull cracks visible. It made his squirrelly, melon shaped head even odder. When he shaved his head people had to get away from Golem L. Window. Upper management dreaded going to meetings lest they break out laughing at the strange alien-like creature-owner of Window Corporation. A lot of cubicles had little doodlings on scratch paper of a round head with cauliflower-sized ears on each side and an unsightly scar in the exact middle of the forehead. People would chuckle as they visited their colleagues’ cubicles. Whenever she passed Golem in the hall she would feel a sharp pain in her back at the point where her backbone began to curve to one side, demonstrating her mild case of scoliosis. The pain was sometimes unbearable and she’d fall to her knees. It made her feel more strongly that he must be some sort of alien creature with the power to cause pain. Even she, however, had to admit that attached to that robotic like man was a nice sexy ass. She couldn’t help but enjoy the view when she was on her knees in pain.

They Told Them It Was Motorola It Must Be Good

2009-07-11T18:13:00.000-07:00

Wicket figured Iguanians had better start getting out on the street in foreign countries and looking at the market. Products don’t sell themselves simply because they say Made in Iguania on them. As for Thais, they might buy one Iguana phone before realizing the software was awkward to use and then would forever go with Nokia. Hey, Wicket didn’t dislike his country, but facts were facts and he himself had bought at least two Iguana phones in Thailand. The second one had no switch to turn off the beeping of incoming messages. He remembered seeing a student in the elevator looking at her friend when her phone beeped. They thought it was ridiculous. So did Wicket. Or how about the car market in Japan? For just how many years did Iguanians try to sell cars there with the steering wheel on the left side in a nation where they drove on the other side of the road? Is it any wonder they made no inroads into the market? Once in a while Wicket would see one of these vehicles in Japan and only surmise as to just how dangerous it was. And to top it all off, every now and then the various industries that had somehow been discriminated against would ask for protection and money. In many cases the money would be paid by Japanese corporations earmarked for use in the modernization of Iguanian industries that would never be modernized. These were just some of the deals made at the end of World War II and after. Wicket figured everyone in Iguania knew what happened to money arranged to be given away for free. The executives and politicians must have had some nice days as they sold Iguania down the drain.

If Not the Birds Would Inherit the Earth

2009-07-11T18:11:00.000-07:00

Have man chase women around. That will make things unclear. Tell them it is a sin. Have them go back and forth and gather knowledge. Have them make war and fight amongst themselves. That way they will never have our power. He was one of the rebels who knew the cloning operation was wrong. He rebelled and now was one of the few remaining watchers of the horizon. He had to get back. Had to get back. The two worlds had to meet as one in time and space. The ship was gaining distance with each passing moment. The future of another galaxy hung in a balance. They had to find him. The angel Venusians had to be taken home. If not the birds would inherit the universe. An evil chasm that would simply cease to exist.

There Was an Eerie Silence

2009-07-11T17:06:00.000-07:00

This time there was almost an eerie silence at the KC Bungalows. There were people on the island. One saw many at times, but for some unknown reason there weren’t but a few in the bungalows. The tourists stayed at the more expensive resorts down the beach a ways. Gone was the busy atmosphere of the area, with cleaning crews wandering around in the morning and a security guard or two walking at night and the cry of Thai kids and the cry of farang from their parents.
Last night there had been no one. A few people walking down the beach was about it. Hadn’t the Thai staff told him more than once that the bungalows were slated for extinction? A hotel was going to be built. Golem had watched the surveyors a year previously and come to that conclusion. It would hit at the end of the 2007 high season. Another new hotel on the beach; watching the waves at shore here a bit of history, no longer possible as Thailand figured out how to bring in more cash than it had ever done before. Koh Wai, just a short trip on the Island Hopper would now be an option, the thing about this option was that the beach was short and the sun blocked by the mountains as the huts were on the opposite side. The sun sets in unusual ways.
In a way it was fortunate. If the beach had been crowded someone might have seen him shoot Wicket on the previous night. As it was he had attracted attention and could not even ascertain if Wicket was, in fact, dead.
It was getting light now. The light of the lonely lampposts would soon click off along with the room electricity. There was only electricity in these bungalows from dusk to dawn. There was not a single luxury. Occasionally, the lights would go off for short intermissions at night and one would here hoots and howls from the dancing joint next to KC. If Golem was writing at these times he would reach for a knife and stand in apprehension at the door, looking from side to side. He knew the kinds of things that could happen when the lights went off. He had done a few of those things himself. Touristic areas in Thailand were safe, but when the lights went off and all was black, Golem could still see a guy who turned off those lights for a reason and he stood at the door with his knife in hand listening for a sound.

Somehow, Wicket had Gotten a Glimpse Inside Golem's Mind

2009-07-11T17:05:00.001-07:00

Somehow, Wicket had gotten a glimpse inside Golem’s mind.

The cute little Thai girl now leaning over him took his attention. She was asking him if he was OK, which was something he was currently wondering himself. Was he okay? He was bleeding from the head, but conscious, always a good sign. He reached up and put his hand to the side of his head. It came away bloody, but convinced of a flesh wound, just a graze even. Still, he seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness. The last thing he noticed before passing out was the girl’s hand going for his wallet. He recognized her as one of the girls sitting next to one of the little rectangular tables in the sand. She was sipping a drink, smoking, and occasionally using her phone. He had thought previously that she was a bar girl waiting for a customer. Would you know more?

Golem made his way back to KC and went straight to the restroom, entered a vacant stall, turned on the shower water, letting it run more than he ever did and took out his razor and began to shave his head again. It was not an easy task, made slightly more interesting by the apparent sexual encounter going on a few stalls down with an occasional ouch muttered by one of the occupants. Golem let the water run over his head as he ran the razor over his head repeatedly, cutting off limited amounts of already short hair with each labored run of the razor over his scalp; emerging sometime later with a roughly shaved scalp. He remembered hearing a guy tell a virgin that she had to get wet before he stuck it in. He drank a can of beer in the shower to throw off CHarLie. He had a little plan. He was going to get off the island tonight. CHarLie would finish the job in the morning with a new razor and a little shampoo, before heading to the ferry. Little did he realize that in the morning, when he looked in the mirror, he’d see a crease on the left side of his head and have a vague memory of having a beer in girlie bar, he figured he must have gotten drunk and fallen down. He felt like a coconut had hit him on the head.

He Liked Life and Viewed It With Reverent Wonder

2009-07-11T16:59:00.000-07:00

The number 72. All of the structures he was building around the globe were planned around it. Each marked a point of impact. Linked together they gave the magnetic pole of the planet and the location of a ship. He was trying to get a message home. Like a ship banned from making port, appearing always in a fog. He was trying to contact someone out there. And trying to stay alive long enough to be rescued, long enough to save a lot of souls at least. He knew the planet had a purpose, carried a torch that needed to be handed off. He liked life and viewed it with reverent wonder. The fact that he knew a lot of the secrets of what he revered was irrelevant to him. He saw beauty in the scheme. And with all his knowledge, he could not get home without the people of earth with him. No one person knew all there was to know about the ship. Like the space shuttle with all its intricate systems. It took a society to put it together or take it apart. It took mankind. Oh, he knew a lot of things, but he was stranded on a desecrated planet, an island in space.

This Brain in the Bottle

2009-07-11T16:52:00.000-07:00

This brain in the bottle was made to replicate billions of times and errors in DNA replication showed the future of the species. Windows lab had created an alien far ahead of its own time. Just how many people disappeared beneath the tower is unknown, but the brain was mated with many others in order to provide genetic variation. By the time it closed, Window had become a sort of nightmare Auschwitz-like scenario where anaesthetized bodies were brought in, never to be seen again. While they remained alive each body had a cubicle of its own and was awoken enough to of use in clerical work, recording activities that they would not be alive to tell others about. These things that were created: THEY HAD NO SOUL
The lab had one other tightly yet so tightly held secret. The virus that caused the mutation had escaped from the lab and was now infecting a million humans a day, causing all of them to give birth to kids without souls or the ability to reproduce, psychopaths, every last one of them. This was still early in the eighties but even the normal folks realized that something out of the ordinary had occurred, marriages were failing at ever increasing frequency; these kids without souls were driving their parents mad. This, along with the current propensity of the government for making rules caused society to meltdown like a stick of butter in a microwave oven – from the inside out – leaving a very sticky non-salubrious substance stranded like an island without a bridge to the mainland... the heart... of society. As these kids containing genetic aberrations realized that they could not procreate, they more and more came to sleep with a large variety of the new citizens of the world, a world where birth control was no longer necessary, ironic in a world where the new government had just come to ban the pill and the use of the condom was controlled – to be used for planning families – families in excess of six kids already – and thus hopes of owning one’s own baseball team faded, until it was realized that through divorce and remarriage families could put together nine kids. Of course these souls became jealous of the new people and the freedoms they perceived them of having while they were caring for their baseball teams, unable to enter into orgasmic entwines with other souls due to some almost genetic disposition that made one of them jealous of the other one like a male poodle growling at a man when the female poodle smiled fondly at the man.

The Animals in the Zoo

2009-07-11T16:46:00.000-07:00

I got around to reading the Satanic Verses and while reading about the possibility of sudden mutation saw that the world was inseminated. That each organism holds the possibility of all the others. That if the earth was destroyed and a single bacteria remaining people would evolve again. I saw a lot of stuff in an instant. I saw that like a twig, giving growth to a tree, a seed, a bacteria could give rise to man. Everything needed was there in some simple form in that DNA. Is this why when looking at animals in the zoo we see something that all of them have in common with us? Is it not because each and every one of them is a part of us? On some level I imagine that we photosynthesize. That we absorb energy from the sun - that monkeys almost made it to human hood.

An Ode to Palin

2009-07-10T07:15:00.000-07:00

Follow the money. Cross that bridge. Palin and a meeting of execs all putting nothing in to the investment. All taking money out. Progress in Alaska. Home on an Island of Sand. A simple island, wouldn't it be nice to have a bridge? They give money for pipelines don't they. Snuggle in that house, we are coming for you. A few people living on an island. Can't be hard to find you. Run away... the lease is on the net. Not that tough to find it really. Hook up that conkshell to your ear. Oh, shell can I find you. That pipeline might be dear. Exon, do you want to hear?

What is a Monkey?

2009-07-10T06:10:00.000-07:00

I rode up a hill today in Bangsaen and observed the monkeys. One looked at me as if to say 'What is that tool you are using?' It may have been considering the use of sticks to get ants out of a hill. It was obviously pondering the bicycle... how did we get it... how did we use it. And I was thinking this monkey was only a step away or two from me. When you ride closely by them and they see you coming they think 'why are you threatening me. I think. Now, I think of those who disclaim evolution with the simple question, why aren't there any monkeys with faces identical to humans... why is there no midway. Then I thought... no one survived the collision, the impact of the meteor. All the humans died... then evolved again... which is the reason we don't have a record. There were no survivors. Everything needed to make a human is in the most simple form of life. What ever happens... we evolve again. The space ship must survive. Take a walk in a zoo if you must and look how every single animal has something in common with humans. Five toes, five fingers... well four legs. We call them arms now. But just the fact that so many animals have five fingers, toes, is enough to tell me that we are a part of them and they a part of us. So let us understand them.

Fox Smears First Family

2009-07-09T21:17:00.000-07:00

I just caught a few minutes of Fox's Sean Hannity: He is showing off a photo, claiming Obama is looking at a woman's leg. His eyes aren't even on the leg... as if anyone should care. He went on to state that the president would have a 'tough time going home tonight'. As if it weren't enough he proceeded to claim the first lady had a six thousand dollar purse and thousand dollar tennis shoes. And oh my God, she travelled all around -- almost like a first lady should...

I can't speak for you, but I was repulsed and I have had enough. If I was the owner of the network I would put him out on the street this moment. And if you happen to agree, be you of whatever political belief, why don't you @this... let's do to him what Fox is so good at doing to others. In your post, put the words: We want him off the air: Sean Hannity... let's make it clear.

Where Do They All Go?

2009-07-09T16:57:00.000-07:00

I’ve always wondered about cemeteries and why they never get full and how the people make a business when all their clients are dead. Yes, they sell the plots initially... forever they say. I guessed there must be some maintenance fee, but then who could afford that... forever. It was always a mystery, these graves taking up spaces and how many there certainly must be by now, and then today I saw on the news that bodies have been dumped and graves resold at a cemetery. It is one of those things that go unsaid... once in a while they dig up the bodies and resell the plots. Come to think of it, I sometimes wonder how many people would be on earth if all of us lived forever: According to some anthropologists 106,456,367,669 people have been born. Well, that means a lot of people... just sort of dissapeared.

These Characters Didn't Have a Conscience

2009-07-09T16:34:00.000-07:00

This scared me. These characters didn’t have a conscience; they didn’t need one. The waves cleaned the beaches by morning. They started fresh. Like psychopaths, they felt no shame. One of the ectoplasm entities was the same as sand — wreaked havoc worse than the Ash Wednesday storm of ’62, dissipated, and was gone. The other one has some memory but didn’t know the whole story. It’s tough when the guy with the conscience doesn’t know the story. That’s why I couldn’t write it straight away and be done.
Charls knew in some way that once something is written in sand it is done. The letters wash away, the actions fade to nothing, but the action is completed and written down, somewhere, in someplace, on some slate reserved for yourself and no one else. Shamans like that kind of thing. (But how many of us have wondered if a time will come when we die that a movie of our lives will be viewed in front of us, complete with every action we have done, and how many of us would look forward to that? —you know — like the time you were on your webcam sipping beer and looking around the electronic gallery of minds….) They like things plain and simple. They know one day that all that’s done is placed in the Akashic Record and cannot be erased.

The Fox Bites Shaun

2009-07-09T05:34:00.000-07:00

Shaun, the childish liberal music, super imposed. The mullah has decreed - the black man doomed, responsible for all the worlds problems from day one. Obama didn't get up and say "Kill all those M-F Iranians, didn't stand on the podium in Russia claiming America solved all their problems... the one and only country of 200 or so. Didn't stand up for the Iranians in their time of need. Hey, you're the guy who says everybody loves us cuz two of their nation were killed in the towers. No research that, huh, you didn't see the Taliban slaughter thousands while the U.S. sat back and not a word was in the press. Of course, after a week of saying Obama never backed the Iranian revolution Fox went all over Michael Jackson's death. For seven days straight never reported a word... it wasn't on that white board in the back room - I mean the one that says this is what can make your salaries bigger... Put up Michael Jackson stuff... they will all watch... then O'reilly comes on and says he doesn't know what all the media fuss is... excuse me, I think Fox has covered it more than any other... now they are moving into the racial element... big bucks their huh... people killed in the streets... Iran... take a break... M. J. bringing in big bucks. North Korea... 24/7 demands, well, fill up the time. The computer can do it for us... predict our salaries... Hey, Obama, read a history book next time... so cute... since I have never seen anything on Fox that would require the reading of one. And let's not forget national health coverage... we have to beat that down. Those pharmaceuticals have drugs all over town. Look at Enron... it's your model. It can feed you better. Presidents... which one... supported it... it brought the bucks in. And lastly Shaun, I always wanted to know... how much more than a months salary in a developing nation do you spend on your hair each and every day. 24 hours. Spew out all your facts. Tell us how it's gonna be. I like it. The middle class point of view from a group of people who make more in a month than the middle class makes in a year.

Col Pot FInds a Letter

2009-07-07T17:16:00.000-07:00

Colonel Pot could not make a lot of the intricacies and details of Iguanian politics. He knew on his days off that he loved to fish. The pages of his dictionary seemed to be warming up with all the flipping through them and he thought he had an idea of Charls’s motivation. It was something that Pot came across that wasn’t in the book that made him think he knew a tidbit about what had gotten Charls mad. The other day while boxing up things found in Charls’s bungalow, he found a letter worn and dated and folded many times. It had scotch tape along one of the folds, and the paper was yellow and stained. He found it inside the Samsonite canvass wallet that was stuffed between the walls. He might never have seen the letter, except that the Samsonite wallet was the one little thing that he thought he would do for himself. It was nifty and he was going to hang it from his belt. Not a lot of island cops had a twelve-hundred baht travel wallet. The letter was from Charls’s days in Japan and was dated June 2, 1985. ________________________________________
Dear Charls, I am the mother of Kazuko, the girl you taught in high school in Saitama Prefecture. I don’t know if you remember me but we met in a coffee shop with my daughter once as she was much interested in studying in L.A and you gave us some tips and pointers. She adored you and you were an example for her in her life. My husband died three years later and while I was getting over that I received a call from the police telling me that Kazuko had been killed in a random shooting at a McDonald’s in San Jose. I know you two were fond of each other. I felt you should be told. I am sorry for your pain. She was something for me in my life. Gomen Nasai warui news o oshieta.
Tsunayama San

Pot got the gist of the letter right off — the one thing that was going through his money quickly was his daughter in medical school at the University of Iguana. She had been there three years and Pot worried every day.
The letter was from the past, Charls today couldn’t comprehend how a person in another country could even consider sending a loved one to study in a land where so many people were shot every day. And a thing that amazed him was that so many countries continued to send their kids there. And when Charls thought about that, he could only think that goodwill was like a bank account and Iguania had earned a lot of it in the past, but as Charls saw it, the balance was getting very, very low. Well, it’s clear… Charls was not a flag waver, but his country to him was dear. There may have been something about true love that meant one didn’t have to say I Love You all the time. At least, that’s what he thought, and America was a lot more beautiful before people on TV started spewing off about how great she was.

Diary Entry:

Today I met a guy sitting at the side of the road not far from the Calypso Bar. He was working on a large bottle of Chang beer before noon. He said he was a working diver once and when I told him I was considering going on a tour to swim with the sharks, he said he had no interest in swimming with sharks. He said they eat people and he had seen them. He once had a boat in Florida, though he was not Iguanian. He loaned it to a friend who hit some rocks and sank it. He carried only a radio through immigration on his way home. He said he remembered the islands before they became commercialized. He was sad to see them gone.

Charls clicked off the light and set his notebook on the mahogany end table that he kept there as a resting place for any final thoughts he might have and considered any segments of society that at this point were not pissed off at something they had read, and considered ways of getting under their skin and make them think before Iguania fell off the edge.

The Tip of the Iceberg

2009-07-07T17:08:00.000-07:00

November 9, 2008: This part was done a year ago. Enron was the tip of the iceberg, the housing scandal lay further down, and under that, as for now intact, the credit card companies. Food was dear as oil spiraled and profits fed Bin Laden, who a man had warned the UN of in 2000, had told them the USA and Europe would be next, after Afghanistan, had warned of all the bases; the US turned a deaf ear until the towers came crashing down. Turned a deaf ear as the Taliban massacred people in Afghanistan, refused to treat women in hospitals, beat them for being out alone, executed civilians in a stadium, raped, pillaged, collected people’s houses for their own. Forbid people laughing in public…forbid people laughing in public…

Golem Watched Them Use His Software For Free

2009-07-07T17:07:00.000-07:00

What Wicket thought was that Golem had become an embodiment of the new age media. A media that with advanced technology was capable of putting together stories as no media before in the history of mankind, and on a truly global basis. They could put together a story that wasn’t even true. When a school shooting occurred in the U.S. it was indeed a shot heard ‘round the world’. Perhaps, Golem himself was not aware of the extent to which he mirrored events around him. Maybe his shaved, reflective, melon green face had absorbed so much that he himself no longer could digest all of it, nor make sense of the incoming signals. Maybe events had taken over Golem L. Window, and he was now merely a puppet, the puller of the strings something other than mankind. Was that something higher good or evil? The answer was not necessarily clear to Wicket. Maybe it was good fighting evil or some combination of the two, the results of which would test the nature of humankind. What would happen if 400 million people were killed in some bizarre turn of events? Where would mankind go from there? Would it not be a sort of a second Noah’s ark scenario, or even not unlike the second coming of Christ?

Golem was asking questions at the very moment that Wicket was asking his. The video TV tuner capture card killings would necessarily be random would they not? Well, most of those killed would probably be guilty of using software without paying for it. Some would be down loaders of music without fees. Would these people represent the evil amongst us, though, in any meaningful way? What would they all have in common? They would have all been trying to get something for free. Most would rationalize it with the notion that software was so easily reproducible, or that they didn’t use it commercially, or that software was just too expensive to buy all you wanted of. It just didn’t seem like a big deal they would say. There are so many movies. Why not buy pirated DVDs? They would have all been trying to get something for free. Golem stopped there. That was all he needed. All of them would be freeloaders.
Some of them who had been to Thailand must have felt like kids in a candy store. Everywhere pirated software existed for three dollars a disk and almost any program on the planet. Wicket knew that when the newspaper said that a shop had been shut down that it meant maybe five out of thirty thousand or so. Did the Iguanians buy that story? They better get out on the street and have a look around.

Now Lest You Think Me Crazy

2009-07-07T17:04:00.000-07:00

Now lest you think me crazy, let me say what follows is a story of a soul. I am Charls — I have remembered the name given to me when I was born, after all these years of thinking I was Golem. At 87, I offer a confession. I will be gone before this reaches you. May God be with you… I have chosen to write this memoir in the third person as a way of observing myself as I was and what I became. It is the human spirit that motivated me and its destruction at the hands of a politically correct society. As I write I am watching a piece on news telling how a twelve year old boy was arrested for patting a girl on the behind and kept from his parents for two days. It is not Mao’s China yet but seems to be getting there. There will be those offended; they may be many.

The Most Horrible Word on the Planet

2009-07-07T17:02:00.000-07:00

One insight that might be telling and pertinent to just how much Golem’s mind differed from so many in his nation was the “V” word mentioned on the Today Show. Fox reported it and went on about it all day long, calling it the most horrible of all dirty words, the horrid monster from the deep that had somehow surfaced on morning TV. When Golem saw the V he went through his list of dirty words and could think of nothing that started with a v. He put it down to some naiveté in the area of dirty words and made a mental note to run a check on Google for “dirty words” and try to find one that started with a v. Later when he learned that the v stood for vagina he was dumbfounded, as he always thought vagina was the most polite of all words for what it represented. It was the dictionary word that those in his generation had by the age of eight or so found in the dictionary and didn’t think much of, and then came to see that the dictionary didn’t contain the words that so enamored them. Golem loved pussy. Somehow Golem all his life thought that vagina was almost the scientific word, the one word that was in the dictionary, and to hear such a lot of fuss about it amused him and told him how out of touch mainstream media is with reality. He even considered for an instant renaming his tale (with Jack’s permission, of course) to The Vagina Monologs or Vagina Monologs on an Island of Sand. Suddenly, he remembered the kid in his class that called him a butt fucker and things like that, and thought of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie he had seen the previous week where Arnold told a kid of twelve or so that he will grow up to experience all the wonderful experiences in life — premature ejaculation, one of the examples he used to make his point.

They Told Him There Were Birds Everywhere

2009-07-07T17:01:00.001-07:00

There are a lot of birds in Thailand. It is beautiful — yet Charls seeks a land where there are no birds. A land he cannot understand. He is told to seek at birth a land with no birds. Now, the birds are singing at seven in the evening. He wants to understand what they are saying. It is a story written in preparation for a time when all will listen and hear.
The birds — they sing of a road that leads somewhere. They are not baptized, but they have faith and follow their magnetic compasses. The birds listen. Their fate, they know at birth. There DNA has heard.
People told him … but there are birds everywhere. Where is this place with no birds?
A guy he met when he was a kid told him the ocean was the best place to live. This guy ate a lot of nuts and fruit and said he really lived. Golem went there. He told Golem he would be a singer one day. Golem sang in words, he thought he could sing. He wanted to sing like the birds — fly free like them — visit foreign lands. He did visit foreign lands. He wanted to know what he would see if he could fly and he wanted to know where the birds went. What did a bunch of birds finally see when they got to their destination? Where do birds go to die and why do they never fall from the sky?

***

Dead birds are falling from the sky in Australia for the second time in seven months, raising fears of a possible public health threat. Golem stopped and stared at the article in the paper. Dead birds, dead birds … don’t fall from the sky. He looked at the net:
Thousands of Birds fall from the sky dead ... on two continents, Chemtrails are now worldwide and they are not innocent … Golem knew that the magnetic field of earth had been diminishing over the last century. Golem had a vision of birds flying endlessly around the earth unable to find what they were looking for.

But the language of the birds was different from those of the human race. It took some time to learn. They toll for all, but not all listen.
The sound of music, it was near, if only people came together.
Golem maybe wanted to be a pirate. He liked it when the women were raped on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

“Jack, ‘he liked it when the women were raped’, surely controversial. How will I win the election?”
“Don’t let the news media destroy your ability to see the metaphorical Golem. When metaphor is dead the human spirit dies with it.”

I Saw the Beginning of Hate

2009-07-07T16:58:00.000-07:00

I watched as he found nine dimes under a swing in kindergarten and kept them when the teacher appeared with her politically correct jargon — jargon a four-year-old had no way of knowing at the time was leading his nation down a road where consequence would catch up with them. They were after all a treasure he had found. They were his to keep. Funny how things that happen in the sixties are here for keeps.
Photographs and memories from the moment we open our eyes to the moment we close them in that finality we call death. Come to think of it, we are a record of experiences, life, might be useful in another place; sent here to gather information for another time and place. I snooped, I admit, a bit:

They Knew to Leave Some Things Alone

2009-07-07T16:55:00.000-07:00

But only a kid could be roped in to tell this tale. Older shamans wouldn’t touch it. They had taken too many random walks — they knew to leave some things alone.
Kids have few complications in their lives; they can go on patrol in Vietnam, unaware of what lies in the jungle; and maybe my father and the village shaman knew that. I was, after all, not really given any test to pass — had only been assessed for a gift. I certainly was not given any training to prepare me for tests of angels I had not yet met. What were they thinking?
If I knew that one day I might be tested by an angel, I may have passed — a thesis left untested, like a Doberman behind a gate. I may have passed…
The testing done, as I observed on Charls L. Window was not the usual kind. I would have changed his name like his parents did. I would have tried to keep him out of the picture, but he persisted on his own. Sometimes I look back on the Book of Jobs for consolation in this matter. I keep the faith.
I observed the narrator. Someone would have to write it down if they all got killed. I was starting to think that the village shaman sent me here for reasons related to the possibility that the story wouldn’t be told — the Akashic Records skipping a scene. This scene was important.
I was tempted to jump in at times, even influenced the atmosphere a smidgeon, but I have left the things that happened happen. There are things better left alone. Don’t ever try to beat the Devil at his own game.

In Search of HDTV

2009-07-07T16:40:00.000-07:00

You feel you are a very little thing in a big universe. If you do something wrong the mountain could be fatal.”

The problems continued on, however, because some of the humans were actual physical beings created in the image of the pure Venusian, before corruption created almost a different race of them, and thus had to interact with the virtual projections of adult and child Venusian spirits, who were just, in their minds, having fun. Venusians who played these virtual games with Earth thought it was all some sort of electronic game and no one ever did get hurt. They didn’t know—some of them, that when they chose to watch a natural disaster that a lot of Ape Venusians really did die. And there was also a sect of rebel Venusians who from their ship enjoyed watching real pain.
Golem, with a large percentage of spirit genes was pained as were all humans who lived through war, natural disasters, politics, and other childish games. Golem was enough of a soul that when he saw a person trampled to death in a Wall Mart, by others rushing to by HDTV’s, he could see it was a mistake, while this sect of rebel Venusians delighted in the game. Hey, look what I did, was all an undeveloped Venusian spirit said when he put super cheap TV’s in stores as bait.
There was a war going on in outer space that mankind was not aware of, though was a part of. The really good Venusians were nearly perfect. The really bad ones were oh, so imperfect. The really good Venusians wanted to solve the problems on planet Earth. The evil sect rather enjoyed the carnage and even had suggested Plan B—the plan to eliminate all life on planet Earth.
The God sect was looking at a plan He called it Plan A. That was a sort of another Noah’s Ark scenario to straighten out a bunch of stuff that had gone wrong before colonizing planets and establishing life on them was abolished. No one ever thought to think that Eve would screw with Adam. Millenniums in the past men had been so careful not to bring back any contaminants from the moon, and then all of sudden there was sex with creatures found on other planets. God. Who would have thought that clones created in the image of God (shadow) would sleep with the apes and create a semi-intelligent race? Even God now thought of Earth as having been a mistake. He had allowed them to eat meat before He left. Let them eat the animals. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. The group had to be left on Earth, Cain sent out to multiply, and there hadn’t been any viable alternative at the time. Earth was the planet that was supposed to provide an environment to save the Venusians as Venus got hot. And to think that these humans were now contemplating inter-galactic space travel and the creation of clones in the image of themselves. They were even selling their eggs on the internet— a record of the human race not so unlike the Akashic Record of Outer Space—but lately Golem had come to think that we were the Akashic Record. They either had to improve or be eliminated, and God was thinking every minute of whether Plan A or Plan B should be used to correct a situation that had gotten out of hand.
What bothered Golem most was that he Foundout that we were clones. And lately he was gathering evidence of a fourth dimension; THEY were coming back to right a wrong. The production of clones in the cloning factory, the inclusion of a human soul, a cerebellum, a tree of life; the Bird Venusians hadn’t counted on that. The seven fallen angels. Stuff like that. Now these humans wanted a life of their own, and a few from the mother ship had given it to some. At first, everything was under control. The clones agreed to care for the ship, provide comfort to the Birds, allow them to live in the Garden of Eden. Met their every need. But then, some of them learned they were alive themselves and had a soul and they had to let them go. Cain jumped a trench and went out to populate the world, in accordance with the plans of the spiritual Venusians. He didn’t want to go at first, but they gave him a mark, circumcision and told him he’d be protected. Everyone would want to kill him he said. Especially, those without a cerebellum who still defended the original plan and claimed that it was wrong for people to build a tower of their own. Those who believed we shouldn’t know, were programmed to think along those lines, followed their DNA, inserted in them by the Birds. Some of them would continue to follow the plan … seeking to kill and hide knowledge, seeking to thwart people from coming together, seeking to promulgate war, refusing the reconciliation of Israel and the Middle East out of greed, and the concealment of a plan.

Another Sun

2009-07-06T04:14:00.001-07:00

Were we preparing a new record on the internet that would tell other generations about their past when the rotation of Earth had slowed to the extent that life was no longer possible on it? Were we preparing now to leave this planet someday with our exploration of space? Had another people prepared and left Venus long ago when that planet ceased to support life. A cat has nine lives. Venus and supposition was a part, but the faith part Golem had down pat. He had communicated with someone and was writing it all down and editing it. A scribe writing down a tale of long ago and now.

The Kingdom of Sumeria

2009-07-06T04:11:00.001-07:00

The Kingdom of Sumeria was polytheistic, they believed in a bit of this and a bit of that. Its god was not separate from the world. It could not be a man or woman. It seemed to be the first written record of faith. Its story paralleled those in all the religions, but was told 2000 years before the birth of Christ. It was my kind of religion….

The Kingdom of Sumeria

2009-07-06T04:11:00.000-07:00

It was a Very Hot Day in Sunnyvale

2009-07-06T04:06:00.000-07:00

What Golem didn’t realize was that Candy Car in research and development was a hardheaded woman. She was diligent and enjoyed her work so much that her husband Shaun sometimes wondered if he would ever see her more than thirty minutes a day while she was awake. Lately, she had taken to analyzing these highly secret mixtures that Golem had been adding to all sorts of gadgets. Today she was going to spray a sample of the mixture on a video capture card and plug it into a running PC. It was a very hot day in Sunnyvale. It would soon get hotter. What concerned Candy was that she had identified a cyanide derivative in the lacquer. As long as the lacquer remained a solid it would not pose a significant health hazard. What Candy wanted to know was at what temperature the lacquer covering would start to melt. She was concerned that the level of cyanide in the surrounding air might reach dangerous levels. She had sent Golem an email the day before and had received assurances that the cyanide would be bound by other elements in the lacquer formula. Golem told her he had tested it himself. The problem for Candy was that she couldn’t get the chemistry straight in her mind. It bothered her that she couldn’t identify a chemical compound that would bind with the cyanide. It was odd that he had come to her office and insisted on knowing what she was working on, he was bald and the corner of his mouth had an uncontrollable twitch that was matched by her shaking arms. She was lucky to have gotten out of his house without getting caught. Why had he chosen that day to introduce himself? He never introduced himself to an employee.
She wanted to test the melting point of the lacquer or at least bring it up to a fairly high temperature to see if the chemistry changed as the material got hotter. What she didn’t know was that Golem had arranged to have the melting point lowered considerably without informing all of the concerned departments. Candy plugged the open USB unit into a computer. She had an analysis probe in her hands. In approximately 25 minutes she would be dead. Her death would remain a mystery for many years. Now that was a hot second date.
Golem was informed of the lab mishap about 30 minutes after Candy was dead. He grinned at himself in his office mirror on his way to “personally investigate” the tragedy. He knew she was dead when the pc she was working with registered a defective video TV tuner capture card; Golem watched from his webcam as she fell lifeless to the floor. Watching employees covertly with their webcams was just a little something Golem did for fun. Sort of like peeking into the neighbor’s window when the woman next door was undressing. He demanded a full company safety investigation into the incident and strongly lamented the loss of a great person and faithful lab tech. Heart attacks unfortunately take some of us at unusual moments. They are usually not planned. One doesn’t say “Today, I think I will have a heart attack and die at one forty-five.”

Golem wondered now if he could think someone dead. He had fantasized about killing this woman who killed his dog, but in actuality he probably would have fired her or reported her to the police if he could. He chuckled when he thought that somehow Candy had gotten her hands on an infected modem. It appeared to be a really big cloud of gas and Golem was a bit perplexed. The amount of cyanide on the main boards was not enough to be so visible—not much more visible, in fact, than a puff of exhaled smoke from a cigarette. Candy must have fucked something up bad. She must have really fried that modem somehow.

Somewhere Charlie was watching Golem now in another window and he fell off his chair in hysterics and rolled on the office floor. He probably could have been heard in heaven.

Putting Together the Solution

2009-07-06T04:02:00.000-07:00

He spent several hours a day over the next few weeks putting together this solution, that later would be mixed with lacquer and sprayed onto the circuit boards. By this time employees at Window were used to Golem tampering with products at the last minute. They looked upon him as at best eccentric and at worst as a lunatic, someone who the aliens had turned into a green biscuit long ago. They knew him as a secretive, compulsive, competitive person. Computer companies were by nature somewhat secretive in some areas, so people had learned to accept Golem’s secret changes to products. They wouldn’t question him when he told them to add a liter of his liquid to every one hundred liters of lacquer. He would tell them it was to improve the adhesion of the lacquer to certain materials used in the USB capture components. There would be no memo ever found that said that Golem told them to carry out the plan. Only CHarLie was fucking with the numbers in his mind. Four billion was pared down to four hundred million. CHarLie didn’t see the difference, but Golem would have had he been aware. He was human enough that he still cared about people. Some days now he would sit in the Mulberry and figure his life was fucked. He was now in charge of a dysfunctional institution that was working on its own solution to the population explosion, and it wasn’t exactly copper oxide infused condoms that it had in mind.

CHarLie and a Modem

2009-07-06T03:54:00.001-07:00

Charlie was the one associate hired that Golem didn’t know a lot about. Charlie had taken it on himself to protect the company. He was like a one man mafia who got things done. He did all the dirty work at Window and Golem didn’t even know he was an employee. Charlie had a lot of training while Golem was away in hospital trying to recover unrecovered memories—while Golem talked with psychologists about his past, future, and present. It was at this time that Charlie concentrated on his studies at Annapolis, in a special compound underground. Golem was so far gone that he wasn’t even aware he had been accepted into the academy. But Charlie saw him around the campus. Charlie was an ace cadet who learned to fly in his first year and yearned to set an airplane down on the deck of a ship in the dead of night, in the rain and in the dark. Golem was afraid of flying and opted out, but Charlie kept an eye on him. Golem was someone Charlie thought he could depend on. Of course all of this was shortly after the car accident. Charlie had cut the brake cables in another accident that left Golem’s sister dead and out of the equation. Charlie had actually become aware of Golem long before that accident and even when much younger thought he and Golem would be the best of friends if only Charlie could persuade him of the balance of good and evil and of the permutation in the sand that showed that evil had surpassed good. Charlie loved it. That may have been why he now lived on planet Earth. God may have had a bit more of Charlie than he could take. Earth was supposed to be hell for this guy, but Charlie thought he knew how to make it fun.

A Bit on Wicket

2009-07-06T03:49:00.000-07:00

One of Golem’s previous business associates at Window (back when Window was Window and Associates) was not as stupid as Golem reckoned. He was only twenty-one when he met Golem in prison. He had been convicted of fraud. The crime was committed when he was a minor and, thus, he received a light sentence. Not many seventeen-year-old high school dropouts were doing time in adult prisons. And none were doing time for the type of high-tech financial fraud that Wicket planned and executed from his parents’ home. He later regretted having used the home computer and having been so confident that he could hide his internet footprints from the authorities. It was the only reason he’d gone to prison. He would not have been caught, except for that one fatal error, and an exceptionally bright FBI investigator, who was exceptionally lucky. He might be in South America now, sitting on a beach sipping an exotic tropical coconut drink. The 45 million dollars expertly transferred to a Swiss account would have kept him going indefinitely. As it was he’d have to settle for the several accounts that he still had that the authorities were unable to identify. It would be enough but less than 45 million dollars.

A Sound Downstairs

2009-07-05T07:35:00.001-07:00

The Potato Bugs and a Sound Downstairs

As Golem’s thoughts drifted from his immaculate bank robbery to a seventeen-year–old girl he once had over at his place for three days who asked him to marry her so that she would not have to return to her parents’ house, he had a fleeting glimpse of reality and did not like what he saw. He saw a guy who had failed miserably; a guy who had started out in life with dishonestly gained income; a guy who had cheated by actually infecting the public’s information systems with viruses. A guy who made straight A’s in his first semester of high school, dreamed and had a goal. He remembered running around the track that year thinking he was going to ace school, and from there… somehow from there he’d gone a bit downhill. It was at that point that Golem started to switch off the sane part of his mind for good. Something told him that if he continued to think along those lines he would not have the will to carry out his original plan and it was the carrying out of that plan that would redeem him. If he faced himself, he would realize that he, too, was complicit in his fate, and thus shared in the guilt. He glanced around the basement office that he had set up in his home. There were no windows. He had a urinal, a sink, and a bunk bed so that he could almost live in here and work without interruption. He didn’t like distraction. Perhaps he felt safe surrounded by the four walls and buried beneath his house. He was bothered by two days of heavy drinking, but what bothered him more was the food poisoning that he had gotten from eating left over chicken soup that he left out on the counter the night before. He blamed the soup and not his action. He remembered a previous bout of food poisoning and how his intestines, after a week of constant diarrhea, felt as if someone had removed them, wrapped them tightly around a pipe, stretched them, and tied a knot to stop a leak for a few days, and then had politely replaced them back in his body. He walked upstairs to find some leftover antibiotic that he had taken for a fever several weeks earlier. He had a habit of not finishing his prescriptions. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and saw the early signs of graying around the ears. He was not happy with the halo of balding on the back of his head. He was almost forty years old and felt too old to fight another corporate battle.

Diary Entry:

I looked in the mirror that morning and saw no way around it. My actions were linked inextricably to myself. I cannot separate them from my personality. I feel sure that I will follow my own footsteps into deeper waters. I may have no say in the matter.

It was the potato bugs that made Golem squirm as he read the article on the internet version of the Bangkok post. The story in the paper described a group of people who were working in an unfinished subway tunnel in San Francisco when the nuclear device detonated above them. They thought the setting had saved them, but as the plot thickened realized that setting had other implications. Just a few hours after the sun-like flash that they could not see, something started burrowing in from the roof of the shored up area of the tunnel they worked in. Potato bugs preferred a moist, cool climate, and the ground above was hot and barren. The creatures were curvaceous. They showed a lot of leg; would never have adorned a steel lunchbox. Grotesque is too light and airy a word. Waxy and puffy fit them to a tee. They did not mix well with whatever it was that lubricated the human soul, enabling it to instinctively know beauty and horror. The things now became a steady rain and collected on the floor as if the tunnel were a giant communal bath. There were other kinds of bugs mixed in and most of them did not provide comfort, but it was the potato bug in abundance that drove most of them insane before dying. Just before their batteries went dead and darkness enclosed them in their tomb, they had one final view in dank, dim, musky light of fifty workers up to their knees in potato bugs. They had no potatoes to offer these bugs that could deliver a painful bite. The collective scream and it was as the lights went out, just one big scream, would have been heard on the surface if anything had still been there, which it had not. Four hours later they were up to their necks. They could clearly see the waxy rings of the abdomen and the crawly legs and mouth. Those who were not killed by their terror had an hour to go before they would be submerged in the mass of crawling, wriggling, and perennially walking potato bugs. They would have another problem— the bugs were tired, agitated, parched with thirst and ravishingly hungry. Having escaped from the heat on the surface they wanted something to eat before settling in for an orgy in the night. To make matters worse, for some biological reason, the bugs on the bottom were hungry first. They worked their way up. At some point these people would, had they been reading Golem’s tale, have understood his terror perfectly; might have known what made Golem L. Window— Golem L. Window or someone.

Golem took a break from writing his memoir and came back from the past to present time.

Golem turned his head from the mirror and looked down into the sink merely to avoid his own reflection. He had given this part of the story to an intern taking English 101 and the guy had turned it in to his teacher. He got a D and a reprimand to stick with prettier subjects. In very polite language the pith was: This is a sick story and you might be sick. Stick with sugars and spices and everything nice. Golem was determined to tell the story the way it had occurred and would not omit it. He had read that story in the aftermath. Something you will learn of much later. He felt much older than he had when he had awoken. But 87 is old. It was just that when he glanced up in his present mirror he didn’t see the Golem that the one in the diary had written of so many years earlier. But that had been before the final revelation — The moment in the hammock when God came to him and told him of a little plan he’d inserted into creation. The old man had a sense of humor, Golem gave him that, but that, that’s later. And the ants, they’d crawled all over him, tried to eat him alive he thought. But that couldn’t fit in Book One. It happened somewhere in time and was put in Book Two. The four and a half billion, well, that. That had to be near the end, and the way this story was filling time and pages, the end couldn’t come until the third and final revelation. People could find it in Book Three — the patient reader could. If people still could buy books by then. The credit situation was looking grim. A meteor could hit Earth by then. Anything could happen Golem reckoned, and Golem knew he’d better have some fun along the road, cuz some who didn’t woke up dead. Golem at this point didn’t know how it’d be to wake up dead, but he’d a story to finish and thoughts to think. He wanted to know what it was like to be dead. He wanted to live, of course, but he wanted to know why we were here, where we came from, and where in hell we were heading, and he’d felt a lot more comfortable about the last question before the eighties hit. Some, him included had said, it wasn’t ours to know what will be. What will be will be. But Golem thought the mystery was solvable and that we might be a little better off if we knew a little more about life… enjoyed it a little more for sure… took a little more responsibility for our own lives, for sure, but we might be better off if we had some idea of what it was like to be dead. Strange thought. What if we found out we were clones, on a ship heading for new lands, not really doing anything that hadn’t been done before? What if we were a life form that could exist, through replication long enough to explore the universe. What if we were already on a ship? What if we were made in the image of God? What if our intelligence was a bit shy of being able to fully understand. What if we understood? Or another line of thought, what if we are what remains of God after some apocalyptic event. What if a meteor hit our planet long ago and wiped most of us out? What if the meteor was beyond our control and everything we strived for, we were doing again. Golem had a feeling in his heart that we were rediscovering. Rediscovering what someone once already knew. Why if we are native inhabitants of Earth are we so different from all the rest? What is that part of us that can communicate with animals while not living in some garden, eating fruit… that part of us that searches out ideas. Do the animals already know them. Are they more advance than us? Did not lightening and electricity exist before us. Have we not learned to harbor electricity like castaways on an island of sand looking to improve their quality of life… the professor and Mary Ann. The skipper too… and every time there is a chance of rescue don’t we mess it up. Oh, Gilligan. What if all of us, members of the Tower of Babel, got along. What if we helped ourselves, rather than killed. Wouldn’t we be better off. All the bullshit in a book, but I’ve always seen this. This fact that the human race fights against itself. Is this the way someone planned it? I. I for one, am sick of that. A writer can work in several ways. He or she can work front to back, back to front, middle either way, can think thoughts along the road, along the way. Can put elements of fiction into place, the best of them can use these elements like a painter can. Can use a true story if they have one. Golem was a teacher, he switched points of view in sentences sometimes. He broke the rules, but more than one character was living in his head. The point of view… well, if two people live in the same bungalow and the point of view gets switched, is it really a change of point of view. Golem, he broke the rules. In search of some higher form of art. Sometimes genres got crossed. Literature, pornography. Catholicism, Puritanism, those were different thoughts. Commercial fiction, literature. Crime, psychological thriller. He didn’t know what to call his book. Were the elements of fiction exhausted? Not if imagination made new ones. In fact, Golem thought the imagination could ensure that the elements of fiction were never really finite. If something new was imagined, it was possible, he thought. Generosity, generosity, those were words for a novel. Tell people your mistakes. Tell people what you were guilty of. Isn’t it a bit too easy to write of others mistakes?

Shut up Golem, get on with the book.

“Don’t taze me Jack and don’t spell taze with a z. It’s an s.”
“Sounds better with a z to me… zap.”
“Golem and me smoked a bit of pot Golem. This is Charlie, do you know me yet?”
A scream was heard, it was Jack realizing he was Golem.

A forth-dimensional object, if shined on by the Sun would project a three dimensional shadow. Fuck, that’s us, isn’t it. Some higher power’s shadow. Are we dreaming or are we a dream in a three dimensional world? Are we projecting our own dreams too? Are they testing us with challenges before we can get back to the Garden of Eden? Or are we goldfish in a bowl. Pets. Do we provide entertainment for someone? “Let’s have his girlfriend get killed and see his reaction. We’ll watch the whole thing on HDTV.” Then again is not day by day footage of crime a sort of entertainment that we humans are watching. It used to be As the World Turns. Now, it’s reality TV. Does anyone else get sick when they watch that? Here’s mister so and so, he’s killed three wives, physically beat them, and now he’s writing a book. Wow. I guess if that’s the road were on we deserve to be someone’s pet. Throw up a tsunami, see how we react. Let the crust of earth slide around its core. Freeze Golem in his rocking chair. Kill off anyone who could read his flash drive. Let two thousand years go by before a computer is reinvented and someone can read his book.

“Funny Jack, let two thousand years go by before someone can read my book.”

“No, Golem, I rather think a higher power is speaking here. It’s not Jack. I’m gonna get frozen before the end of the book. See you don’t have to worry about killing me off. The beaches of Thailand are gonna become the new North Pole.”

“Sure, Jack. Anything you say. You smoke a joint or what?”
“No, I’m serious Golem. I’m gonna get frozen in a rocking chair, if you can believe that.”
“Just don’t get frozen before you finish Book 3. I’m getting used to the bikinis, the missing tops, planet Earth in general Jack. Don’t tell me it’s going to end soon.”
“Better enjoy it while it lasts. Jupiter and Venus appeared last night, visible to the naked eye. All lined up against planet Earth.”
“Naked, Jack. That’s the way to write a book. Sure is a lot of bullshit in a book containing quite a lot of philosophic shit.”
Golem, the other day I read a story of Socrates. He claimed the record of the human race was all wrapped up in a helical structure. Bands wrapped around each other. Shit like that. A few centuries later a couple a guys wrote a book that claimed that life consisted of a helical structure. They called it something bizarre like DNA.”
“Roll yourself a joint, get some beers, as you said I wrote the book. I’ve seen it all before. You’re right. It is bizarre. Now, why not stop pretending you’re writing a book and put your head on a pillow and get some sleep. These are secrets you could not possibly know. You’re not developed yet Jack. You’re just a character in a book.”
“Fuck off Golem.”
“You ain’t freezing me Jack. I am not just a character in a book. You let me get a hand in it, remember?”
“This is just the type of writing I hate. Wordy words separated from reality. Get a grip Golem. The public will hate you.”
“Nine out of ten editors should never be near a book of fiction. You taught me that Jack. I’m gonna say it from the heart.”
“Little motherfucker, you belong to me, I created you.”
“Created Jack. That means that I am supposed to be free. Join an egg and a sperm and what do you expect to happen? Egg meets sperm and wants a life. Wants to do the things that you have done. Did you really expect me to sit in a book and not start fucking chicks on the beach. Did you really expect me to listen to you in your room and not get one of those topless babes for myself?
‘Well, Golem, looks like you got a bit of philosophy in your jeans.”
“One more thing Jack. You insert a section of a book in a book like this, later on. People are gonna think you stuck it in there at the last moment. Sort of an afterthought. Sort of like you didn’t plan it and sort of like you are breaking a rule. Sort of too long to allow people to stay in the ‘fictional dream’. You taught me that Jack.”
“There is the fiction dream Golem and there is the story. This is story. Some books it’s hard to get the story across without breaking the fictional dream… the suspension of disbelief… is that what they call it Golem? The story has to be told exactly the way it happened and if a jerk like you came out of a missed period, well then, I can’t hardly get around it. Can’t lie Golem, ‘bout a matter like that. Course, a good lie makes a good book, but this story is true Golem.”

He drifted back in his kayak, paddled a bit forward. Then caught a wave and came upon the shore. Jack stepped off the dingy. His sailboat was just offshore. He was certain he knew how to tell a story.

“Jack… Jack…”
“Yes, Golem.”
“Wanted you to know that your dialog is getting damn good. Better than before. Almost natural for a Californian, frozen Yankee who couldn’t speak Japanese before.”
“Yes, Golem. I’ve been workin on that. Even read a few books. Tell me one thing Golem, are you bein kind to me cuz I told you I was gonna get froze in a rocking chair. I’m a bit suspicious of that. I haven’t changed yet. I’m workin on that one. Are you tellin me I’m getting better cuz you don’t have to be killin someone no more?”
“I wrote the story.”
“Yes, Golem, you write the words that make the grown men cry. I told you, you said the words. You said you didn’t. Which is it?”
“I gotta tell ya, at first I thought it was all a bunch of crap, this book. But now I’m starting to see some story in it. Some character development so to speak, but I want to see more generosity, You gotta tell me where it was that you made your mistake.”
“Golem, I’m fifty, I made my first mistake just the other day. I was honest with you.”
“There you go Jack, honesty, now keep it up, forget about the commas and tell us where and what it was that shows people you are not an infallible creation of mine. That you are not just another boring character in some dishonest book.”
“Golem, there is something worse than I’ve said before. Yup, sort of like that ain’t it. Sort of like I created you, understand you, shit’s just like that. Fuck, life’s like that ain’t it? But my son, he’s getting on fine. Had a mom with cash and a good heart. I think I’d have to say, had a mom with a heart and a sense of society, more than I can say for you Golem, you’ve smoked a bit of pot, drunk a few beers down, had sex with biks on the beach, been afearin of the sharks sense the day you been sun… Son. Thought you were better than me since I’d been on the beach. Thought your native-like Japanese would get you through the swamps. Thought you’d avoid the gators and come out on top. Let me tell you, in my country we had a Santiago who caught a big fish and made his way to shore and when he got home he had bones. Bones son. Got it. Just bones. Got himself a big fish and went home. Thought all his neighbors would understand him, but when he got home no one really gave him a second thought. He was still an old man with a skeleton and not much more. Factually speakin, son, I don’t think the inhabitants of the town even saw those bones, or realized that an old guy had caught a fish. I’d say Hemmingway’s life was pretty much understood in generosity and not taken credit for in the story, but you know more than me son. I’d say the people of that great town saw the bones and figured that it was just that—bones. That the great big fish never did get home. And I’d say that’s why they call Hemmingway a member of the lost generation, driving jeep ambulances around pickin up wounded empty bins, cans. Cuz, they saw the necessity in it, nothing else. And I’d say that’s why a great guy killed himself. Flesh on bones, Golem, it’s something that has to exist in yourself.”
“Purdy heavy for a first novel, Jack. This generosity. In a way I’m your son then. You created me. I see that now. Sperm, eggs, bullshit, Jack. You created me man. It’s sort of like you’re my father.”
“They say Hemmingway needed a well-lit place to write.”
‘They say that don’t they. So do I, I need a well-lit place to write. A place outside a box, cubicle, whatever, but I’d never kill myself Golem. Know why?”
“Why Jack?”
“Cuz I started out life on a good ship, headed for a good place and now I want to write. If I never write a book, I’ll write and do some work. But no amount of work that goes into a book is worth a life.”
“It’s lies Golem, all of it. It’s just a story. If you write, no one wants the words. Work. Make a life, keep a writing the stories. Van Gogh never was known before he died. But his memory is higher than all the pyramids Golem. He made gold with ink, didn’t cost him a thing. Now, his immortal soul lives on. That’s worth a lot of words Golem. Egyptians paid in gold, and generations of slaves to build those pyramids. Golem, hear my words, art can be appreciated by a living generation, can go unheard, can re-surface even, one day. Art has value whether or not the living can see it. Art is ever-lasting words. The juxtophakasinon of elements. The painting of words.”
“Yeah, like a surfboard, Jack.”
“Yeah, like a surfboard, … Golem, flows through the waves, sentences have direction, SVO.”
“Jack, did Stephan King use some plot for a book from Fall on Your knees? No, I don’t think he did. I think he was just tryin to one up hum.”
“I mean the book with the pics he’d never seen.’
“Yup, know the book, story was rather like it.”
“Jack, he was your hero wasn’t he?”
“Yup. his imagination is my words, his story on the beach, the guy dead up against a trashcan, lookin out to see. Them are words Golem. That book, it had a rather different ending put up against some. Never sent him an email, but was pissed about the ending. Those the words. Then again he’s always written words with a non-conformist endin. I myself wanted to hear about the dead guy’s story at the end. I wanted to see that the lady found the end of the story, she didn’t. But then again in Book Three folks, some folks, may say that I didn’t end the story. I did really Golem, its just that I didn’t end the story the traditional way. I rather than that left it to folks to figure out on their own. I am a witch, wantin sex before marriage?”
“Purdy long flashback Jack. Donaknow if the editors will go along with it.”
“Golem, I a donta know if they will goalong with it either. Gettha your point…A…”
“Jack… Van Gogh…ink?”
“Whatever. What? You never read Van Gogh, A Rose in the Sand?”
“Love ya Jack”

***

He drifted back to the time of the events (And Fyodor Dostoevsky) and typed these words… and continued typing in the words in his mind. Later he would transcribe them. He had a brother who had been in jail on and off. He had talked to him behind glass. It had always bothered him, and when he looked in the mirror now, it still bothered him. It was a different offense, but his brother was behind bars for a year again. It was as if prison was a lifestyle for him. Eight years younger made his brother a true generation X. Did x stand for erased? Was x a big mistake? Golem didn’t think that x was given a fair shake. He thought they may have been fed so much bullshit in school that they saw the world from behind a different lens. A lens that let them think that they were perfect and only others had imperfections and what can be expected when the teachers are perfect humans that don’t discriminate in any way and never have. That it was only them who somehow understood the fallacies and pitfalls of marriage even though in many cases they have never been married. Brainwashing is not a thing that can be blamed on the recipient. The guilty parties would have to be older than they. Kind of strange isn’t it, so many people coming out of school, hell bent to change the world. Almost as if they’d received something a little more than education. Sort of like an Al Qaeda camp school. Odd. The teaching of opinion is a dangerous thing.

***

A much younger Golem twisted the cap off a bottle of Norfloxacin and took two tablets. As he replaced the cap on the bottle, he heard footsteps below. He glanced out the bathroom door just in time to see a woman, her back emaciated and her shoulders resembling those of an aids victim towards the end of the progression of the disease. She looked like a stick. She was disappearing into his basement door. Before he decided how to handle the situation, she had reemerged at the top of the stairs. She spied him on the second floor balcony and ran for the door. As Golem went out the front door a car pulled off the curb and quickly left the house. Golem ran to his basement and discovered that the woman had taken his briefcase. He had no idea what she was after, but was well aware that he had information in his briefcase pertaining to his exploits at the Iguana Bank. He thought that she had looked familiar but couldn’t place her. Possibly someone he had seen in the offices of Window. He would pull some employee photographs tomorrow and try to figure out who had invaded his sanctuary. If he found out who it was, he would kill her. The information in the case was damaging. With the government investigating, he couldn’t help but wonder if it was some sort of high-level intelligence operation with Window’s activities as the target. He knew that the lady was not a complete stranger. She looked to be in her fifties but going on seventy in a hurry. What bothered him most was the look of hatred that he saw as she turned and looked directly at him before running out the door. She looked like a woman who had used a lot of LSD in the sixties. He went back inside the dimly lit first floor of the house and made his way into the kitchen. He was not a completely cruel person. He kept a German Sheppard for just this kind of event. The thing was the dog had not made a sound.

Exercise, drink, Exercise, drink. Not the other way around. Leave the knife in the drawer. Don’t punch out, don’t ride the motorbike drunk.

Lying just inside the door of the kitchen, head angled up in an unnatural position; the pungent smell of burning hair. Some sort of burn on the dog’s forehead that looked to surround the entrance of a hole. The lady had killed the dog somehow. The weapon was not obvious to Golem. Whatever it had been it had been quick. It had taken the brain out of the dog. The dog had not even had time to think with a single bark. It may have shown some emotion, a growl, a quick reaction, bared its teeth. But then the lady stole its brain. There wasn’t any evidence of a stolen brain so to speak, but maybe she’d put the skull cap back on the pumpkin. Intact. Golem had stolen a few brains like that. Intact. Took them back to his lab and lived their lives, each and every one of them had a life complete. Shit. Someone had stolen technology from Window’s labs. Golem held the patent.
The lady was a killer. Golem wasn’t so much of a dog lover (He loved dogs, but certainly did not love them the way the mass media did.), but he wouldn’t unnecessarily kill any animal. Golem enjoyed killing when he was in the midst of his condition, but that enjoyment was locked behind a partition and at other times he abhorred the idea of killing any of God’s creations. Even in this pathologic state, his prey was limited to people. This time, though, he was going to enjoy killing this malnourished woman with the hateful eyes. He didn’t need to become his other in order to fantasize this time around. When she looked at him he did not see a personal kind of hate. It was more of the kind of hate some people have for successful people: the kind of person who, perhaps, believes that they are the only person in the world who should be allowed to be successful. The kind of person one imagines to be a back stabber. The kind of person that one day would lead him to simply say no way when he viewed Hilary Clinton passing out coffee, crying on TV and holding a dog in a pet cage the very next day after her advisors told her she needed to appear more human. When she said “I really do care about people, he thought of other people who said they cared about people and knew it was always the ones who didn’t that were prone to use the words when it suited their purposes. The stilted previously put together prose designed to perpetrate a plan; designed to further their ambition of controlling other people.

Golem wanted desperately to find and kill her. He wanted to get started now, forget about tomorrow. He went out to his car, drove to the building and called personnel from the parking garage and told them to meet him at his office. He nearly tripped walking from the garage into the lobby and was sweating as he reached to push the button for the 64th floor of Window. When he walked into his office a young woman was waiting for him. He described the woman he had seen in his home. She gave him a few names. She left the office. Golem pulled up photos of eight women. Within three minutes had identified a lab tech by the name of Candy Car as the woman who had been in his home. He wanted to know why. He called security and two men headed for his office. He told them he wanted to know everything they could find out about this woman. Then, as they left the office, he opened a game of scrabble on his computer. He did this to calm himself. He had always done this to calm himself. He didn’t know why it worked. He only knew that it worked. He wasn’t even any good at the game. He didn’t like playing games with himself. He just played it because it worked. When he wasn’t playing scrabble he worked on crossword puzzles. He kept a crossword puzzle dictionary on his desk. He had never been any good with these puzzles. His hands were shaking badly. His mouth quivered with an uncontrollable sneer on one side; an affliction that he could not control when he got angry. He reached into a long cylindrical steel tube that sat upright on his desk and withdrew a shish kabob skewer. He ran it through his forearm, pulling the tip of it, as it popped out the other side to bring it completely through his arm. He wrapped his arm with cloth the way teachers with tattoos sometimes did in Thailand. Most schools had rules about visible tattoos. These rules did not match the people of Thailand who got tattoos for fun. The people who taught school in Thailand were there to show them how things should be done, whether or not they taught them anything was debatable. (But students in Thailand did write a lot of assignments with their mother as the topic. ‘I love my mother, she does everything for me.’ was one of the most popular themes. Students in Thailand knew how to get an A on a paper. It was exactly what all the old ladies in the institutions wanted to hear as the students sat on the floor begging their forgiveness and making them feel as if they were something much more than they were...)

Golem L. Window was not a regular kind of guy. He never had been. His hair looked funny, and his ears were too big for his head. His hair was thin. He looked on the surface like Bill O’reilly on steroids. Sort of ultra-clean, the shiny example of the C.E.O., but this one appeared to be crossed with an alien. His head was a bit high, ears poking out to the side, skin paper white, face curved like some sort of melon. Only attractive in the way that any real clean person appears attractive. On impulse, he reached down to the bottom right hand drawer, pulled out a razor and shaved his scalp and then his eyebrows clean off. He looked just like a honeydew melon. One of the really white ones without the hint of green. His eyes were blue with green specks that looked like flowers though, so people who needed green to see the melon could get it from the light of his eyes reflecting on the white of his skin. Don’t ask me about the rest of him. Just let it be known that his body was not proportioned in the way that most are. Use your imagination.
He popped his mp3 player into his head and clicked on Reggae. He sat just that way for forty-three minutes, (It was measured in time, reality was unreal now for him.) and then reached into his bottom left drawer and pulled out an automatic pistol (Since cops were no longer allowed to use big guns, they chose to use mini-submachine guns—ones that pumped out lots of bullets in order to be politically correct. Golem wasn’t a cop, but he sometimes wanted to be one.) He got up, jumped on top of his desk, and over it. He was faster than lightening. He was the king of the sea. (CHarLie had good taste.) Walking to the door, he turned around and took a look at the picture behind his desk, and once again wondered if it was just a bluff, and then proceeded to make his way down to the laboratory. He had a date with a very hot woman. It would be a first date; sort of an introduction. He wanted to kill her, but would not. He had hired people for the tough ones.

A Roll of Fax Paper

2009-07-05T01:12:00.001-07:00

He wanted to kill her, but would not. Charlie grinned and warmed on the tint of red and smelled the bathroom tiles in his home. The iron in them was rusting just a bit and the aroma was sweet to him. Charlie lived for these times when his services were requested. He saw a lot of things in Window Corporation and had always taken care of the really tough problems that even the Pinkerton boys refused to touch. Take for instance the girl on the sofa and Golem passed out at his desk. When Charlie saw what was going down he made up his mind to kill her. He gave her a bit more of the white powder than she had taken before. And when Golem woke up and saw her and thought to call for help, Charlie gave her a little more and using a roll of fax paper—that stuff was heavy when in a roll—hit him on the top of his head, and he slept while he did his work. That Wicket had seen the dead girl on the sofa. Charlie would take him out of the story later. Charlie for now yearned to see Golem’s inner thoughts when he woke up and found his fantasy was true and how it felt to kill suddenly all around him, in the air, on a sofa, and hard to deny.

First They Tried To Seal Bottles

2009-07-05T01:01:00.001-07:00

In twenty-five years people would start popping up out of society, picking up guns and shooting humans. As if implanted Russian Agents awakened on demand they would more and more approaching once a week pop up and fire off fifty rounds. What is it in the soul that absorbs things and adjusts in this manner? They wouldn’t receive a lot of attention except from the people who missed the dead, until the numbers became so many (just recently five mass killings on five consecutive days and still not a lot of attention being paid) that everyone knew something was terribly wrong. That thing that is wrong has to be identified, Golem thinks as he sits on the edge of the sea. He started out life so right, proud of his nation and omnipotent and now it was as if the very mention of the words: proud to be an Iguanian made him sick. He wanted to be proud of something in the future. The past was far behind. He wanted to be proud of his nation right now. Of course at the end of Chapter Seven he is proud, it was a bit strange that pills now had to be wrapped in containers that couldn’t be opened in the store because someone had put some poison in a bottle. But he was a kid when that happened and it registered in amongst the summer days and running around creating havoc. Yet that incident would remain in his mind for many years, and he would look back at it one day as a sort of a beginning to sordid ways. Even then he might have known that producing sealed bottles couldn’t stop it. They would always find another way. A sealed bottle was a sign of hiding. You can run, but you cannot hide. Tic…tic…tic…

Is the third dimension written by the fourth and read by them? Would the fourth dimension care if a few ‘pages’ of the second were burned and thrown away? It’s only writing after all. A few pages burned, Like a book thrown into a fire. The book cares or is cared for by those in one dimension. The third might be of interest to the second, — the fourth could barely care.
For those of the fourth dimension all the stories told by the third were stories they’d heard before. If one story, one epoch, was missing, not many would notice. Just as if a few books were burned, so many would remain. A page or a hundred missing from millions of video games played—by humans trying to represent the third dimension, when they were in fact living in that third dimension. Those of the fourth were interested in their own dimension. The pyramids played a role (not virtual) in that. They had written a lot of stories, but they always looked upon them as just that. Never pretended to see the fifth dimension. Things were clear to those in the fourth dimension, they could see through doors, could look into your heart.

Love At First Sight

2009-07-05T00:58:00.001-07:00

The Love Story

After completing initial training they were ready for women. No agent could act out his situation without a beautiful woman. They knew this from having watched the original James Bond movies. ‘I Dream of Genie’ may have played a role.
When Charls looked into Madeline’s eyes in the seventh grade, he saw Europe for the first time. He fell in love the instant he saw them. The irises I mean, somehow they were very beautiful and beyond him. And she was untouchable by him. That much was clear, and he would come to seek things which were clear. That much was clear to him.
He would regret it for the rest of his life.
Her eyes had color and compassion he had not seen before. He didn’t look for more. She was Iguanian but had family in Switzerland. Her family was very well off. He, a brilliant student, from a broken, then fixed middle class home; and now when he looked in Madeline’s eyes he saw love and understanding. They played tennis daily until driven by independence Charls kissed another girl at the high school dance because Madeline had not wanted to accompany him to the dance because she, too, was independent. She agreed to meet him there; their arrival together disguised; unseen eyes. For Charls this was tantamount to treason. He danced and kissed another girl, and the one girl he had truly fallen in love with at first sight would ignore him throughout high school and later call him a pervert for calling her after he graduated from college.
She lived in a mansion in lush green hills covered with daisies, off the main highway and up a gravel road in San Juan Capistrano, and the onetime Charls visited the place he could only think of it as a castle. There was a wooden observation tower situated so as to have a view of the valley. For several years after he dreamt of that tower and being there again, but as it is with dreams, the tower was always just a little out of reach. If he was lucky he’d make it to the base of the tower before waking up. On occasion her family came in to the restaurant for a Sunday lunch. She was within his grasp, there at last, but didn’t see him. She would break his heart again when she changed her name to a more independent masculine sounding, Germanic one. Charls in the innocence of being young never even kissed her.
She was obviously very pissed off.

There had been a previous affair played out in the third grade with a girl named Shelly Quinn. It centered around a tether ball pole on a playground in the morning and walking home together after school. When plans were made and his family preparing to move from Redondo Beach to San Juan Capistrano, he hid a rose in some bushes on the way to school, on a morning he didn’t meet her, with the design of giving it to this girl on the way home.
When he pulled it from the bushes it was wilted and dry like a raison. She said she thought it was beautiful.
Golem was born a hopeless romantic. Would you know more?

***

Holding her left breast as she readied to leave the water, the swimmer slowly made her way back to her bungalow. She was watching Golem, making sure that he was alone. He was with a woman the last time she saw him. Golem sensed the heat of the hunt. He would be looking for her tomorrow, when she satisfied herself that he was alone. She wore goggles when she swam. She was an experienced swimmer. Her hands made no splash as they entered the water. Both Golem and CHarLie wanted to enter her in another way. Both knew they could have her before the week was through and the great boat adventure to the mainland. She was a swimmer.

***

Twenty-five years after Madeline, Charls would write these words down and then a few days later see that another Madeline had been kidnapped. By that time things would have gotten way past bizarre. Fate would be taking him to many places and many of these places would have been in his consciousness before he got to them. Things he asked for were being given to him and desires satisfied.
He would become very aware that he had better make sure and ask for the right things. It scared him. He would appear to be following a path to his own destiny and that was one scene he wanted to get right. More poignantly, he seemed to be able to control his own destiny. Twenty-five years later there would have been one too many coincidences for any of the story to be coincidence. Bizarre as it might sound now, Charls would almost believe that this kidnapping had happened because he wrote an evil thought about another Madeline. Could the Gods have had a case of mistaken identity? Had this other Madeline been kidnapped because he had asked for it somehow? He knew at this point the readers would think him nuts. You would have to have been there to believe it. Later in the story when we reach that destination together you may come to see that you too may have come to the conclusion that the Gods had kidnapped this Madeline by mistake. Don’t worry; this isn’t the tale of a fake or a charlatan. There are no blurry people in pictures to be shown. There are no unidentified sounds that go squeak in the night. It is a tale told exactly the way it happened.

Love At First Sight

2009-07-05T00:58:00.000-07:00

The sound of fusion of melting plastic globes

2009-07-05T00:52:00.000-07:00

At times he would burrow his hands into the sand and feel the origin of man. At times he would sleep on this sand and dream of things undone. He remembered dreaming that he saw lights in the sky and that it looked as if some alien force was photographing the planet. He was somewhere in Southeast Asia and it must have been sheet lightening. There was no thunder. The flashes seemed to capture segments of the Earth’s surface. It was cloudy that night. Perhaps, their photographs did not capture it all. Still, the flashes lit up whole sections of sea in eerie forlorn silence, foretelling in pictures the ending to the story. It was as if giant flash bulbs were being ignited. There was no more sound than the electric sound of those old flashbulbs that people used to fit in a socket. There was the sound of fusion of melting plastic globes and a singeing crackling sting in the air. It was a force only a higher being could have brought to bear. Poof, another picture and location pinpointed. Again and again as if Google maps were taking pictures. Charls could imagine an Enterprise docked in space — meetings taking place to decide the fate of the planet.
The next day a fleet of ships made their way to shore to plant the devices that would end the physical world.
His girlfriend said she had no idea what he meant when he told her that he could feel that life originated in the sand. Then she walked away.
The ships were approaching the shore. These beings had a plan. It was time to end the experiment called planet Earth. Things had not gone well. Something had been corrupted. They wanted to start over again. This was way back then, but even then the aliens had a plan. They were studying the birds for ways of infecting them with an agent that could carry death into mankind. It would take some time. Charles woke up and thought again of a place with no birds. He did not know why. Were all the birds going to die?

Summer time proved to him that time was an illusion. The three months of summer went by in a day. Nine months of school took forever. He never forgot those summers spent in Southern California. He sometimes spent twelve hours at the beach on any given day. Body surfing was where it was at; sometimes with a couple of friends and a chart of the tides. At that time they figured they knew everything about tides. They had a table of times for the high and low tides and figured they were linked to the moon. Little did Charls know at that time that there was a lot more to determining those times in the table then the position of the moon and its pull on the oceans.
One summer vacation day he was walking home nursing a bad jellyfish sting and in the hills of Laguna Beach he saw a dead stingray on the sidewalk and just for adventure stabbed it with a stick. When he speared it in the head a glob of white sticky stuff shot out and hit him in the eye. The goo grossed him out. For a moment he couldn’t see clearly. He wanted to shout as he walked up that hill from the Pacific Coast Highway. If he did, somewhere surly a much older man would have heard him and waved him on.

“Hey Jack, tell me about those California girls. Don’t you wish… Shut up Golem, it’s an old song. “Hey Jack, what’s a gamahuche?” I don’t rightly know Golem.

The ticks were getting quicker and the clock speeded up.

2009-07-05T00:48:00.000-07:00

In an instant he knew that a child wasn’t there in his current psychological regime of weapons and other things, it had not appeared and yet, now this child appeared before him. And a man with a wife. And Charles underwent a tinge of a change and it may have been in baht. He didn’t speak of men with kids much or what was necessary when you had them, and yet deep within he knew the love of a child and knew that love could be a love greater than baht or dollars or currencies of other nations. Somehow, he’d always known. A family he met on a beach. He won’t go into it much. But it taught him some things.
His rationale was the bars that held him in prison. At this point in his life he wanted out and away from the Western daemons that made him think so much of obligation and contracts signed and cash put out. He wanted to be himself. And yet he, too, knew the love of a child and its disintegration. And what it meant for society, and he thought of himself. How could he make a wrong right? Greed would have to be conquered, and those that were wrong would have to be made right. Back story in a back story, the ultimate sin. The kind of sin that we are taught by the religious right. Sometimes it takes a bit of back story to make a story right. He came from a nation that was for fun and now was perverted by the religious right. The FRC, the far right Christians fighting for their rights — to control who worked and had a home and who didn’t have the right. So right. So right, and yet in some un-media way so wrong. Like a word meant to be a pun. So right, and yet so horribly wrong. Enough wrong. Now. let’ make it right. To make a lot of money is my main goal. I wouldn’t say it’s my main goal. But I do want to make a lot of money. The expectations were huge, the pressure was enormous. It is a disease; well, it takes a world to cure a disease.

***

He always remembered Anna who one night drove her compact under a semi-trailer and would serve no more people and receive no more tips here.
Just eight years later, the busboys (kitchen helpers) in restaurants in Southern California put broken glass in the water glasses with ice and gave it to the customers. Charls never saw the humor in it. It just wasn’t cool. It rather felt like there was a storm brewing in 1980. The first of the MTV generation didn’t seem to like life. Charls didn’t think much of sexually oriented videos and music linked together. He figured they were two separate things; beauty should be in the music; the other in Playboy magazine. He liked both of the genres a lot, but he liked his sex sex and his music music. He was of a different generation, only separated from the first MTV generation by eight years or two Generation Jones’ years. A lot could happen in eight years. Am I ashamed in a society that knows no shame? No I am not. I’ve seen those who know shame and yet in an instant are unwilling to admit that shame. I think not.

The ticks were getting quicker and the clock speeded up. He would reach his destination sooner than expected. He would have to write faster now. Only eight years separated two generations. Would the generation after his own be separated by just four years? Could they keep their senses straight, or would they be discombobulated and confused? They would all have a common language (If twelve million Mexicans were not considered), but would they be able to communicate? Would the Tower of Babel once more be destroyed? Not by not having a common language but through differences created between people, space, and time?
Will the next advanced civilization once again be dispersed? Will God’s I.D. be stolen — identity theft of mega-proportions. Just as the tower reached the sky would it babble, then bobble and fall over? These were thoughts that Charls wasn’t old enough to have yet, but would consider later in the tale as his own life became entwined ever more tightly with the Devil. He was spinning a tale on a spool. He didn’t have a plan at first, only a plot. That plot was growing darker as the days on Earth grew shorter, burdened by tidal drag. He was trying to slow down the Earth. He wanted to get off.
Someday there would be those who tried to explain what happened and why the tower fell. Charls figured later that it would all be written down in code and inscribed on stone. The story would first be written in sand, but the tides would not be able to erase those letters in the sands of time no matter how much water washed over them. Things once written in sand might make their way to stone. Transformed by many groups with many reasons for committing treason and whatever political party — a new testament of sorts — that happened to be in power at any given moment. Once again things would be jumbled and a lesser human put in charge — another Nimrod taking over another people’s will and once again the human race will go on fighting for thousands of generations. Each drop of blood depletes the human gene pool, until one day people realize that there are not enough genes left to go around. And Armageddon rears its ugly head and once again life is hell on Earth and not only for the puritans who having been expelled from England now had a new land to humiliate and new souls to torture. Skinny dipping was a no-no in puritan land.

News Flash: Scientists have determined that after the final battle there are not enough genes left to ensure genetic diversity sufficient to recreate the human race. The Earth is no longer fecund. The horizontal and vertical lines of the cross have been made parallel. There is not enough knowledge to fix the problem. Even if all the animals in captivity are captured and put into PC prison they will not have their own identity. It will have been stolen. They will not have a soul. They will all be politically correct and exactly the same. They will be like Sea Monkeys in a bowl. You will have to get a pair of X-ray Specs to see them.

These were all thoughts that, of course, now, Charls could not have. But twenty five years later he would start to have them and to live them. He would start to question God and his nation. He would figure God…damn it would the real God please stand up and do something to solve the problem before the Tree of Knowledge and Fertility was broken; before it was too late. He would be finally … pissed off with the world. When twenty- five years later it would seem to have gone mad.
It was about twenty-five years later that a Korean immigrant would kill thirty students at the University of Virginia and that, almost daily, killings were reported. Just today a mother drowned four children in a tub and called her husband to explain that they were at peace now. At least some are.

We Have Taken Control... Do Not Change the Channel

2009-07-05T00:32:00.000-07:00

What if the children know? What if they grow up one day with knowledge and a soul? What if the children come to know what their government has done to keep them without knowledge of good and evil? If they get the idea that they can decide things on their own they will kick us out of office and send insecurity home where it belongs. What if all the child molesters and women who hate men and men who hate women are put in prison to reconsider. What if the people in the ivory tower have to come down and meet the people who they have been pushing around? If they have to return all the money they have stolen and that thing called individual liberty and freedom of expression. And the right of a woman to decide if she wants to have a baby, and control her own body, and whether or not she wants to get married. And the right to talk about God or prayer without being looked at as evil reincarnated: the Devil surely smiles on that one. Run now this generation and turn on Fox, and see if you don’t see four or five murders being detailed and watched like a new sort of soap opera, or child molestation, or ladies killing their own babies, or husbands killing wives, and then consider what the government has done to Iguania. Then watch how they make laws for baby seats and smoking in bars and letting multiple offenders out of prison…. Who do they think they are?

Is It North Korea Now

2009-07-05T00:28:00.001-07:00

Some teacher in school; chaining student’s feet together and telling them they knew what it was like to be a slave. They did that in North Korea — punished people for what had happened three generations ago, for something one of their family members may have done. Making them feel so guilty that they maybe didn’t really want to live and years after being released would feel some guilt that stayed with them that told them that human nature was love and that if they had been starved in prison then certainly, they must have done something wrong.
Trying to break their spirit, for what? For understanding? Or for personal gain and the right to become one’s own god. It had gone way beyond the correction of a wrong in Iguania, had crossed some edge and into a realm of destroying the souls of people of any color.

Charlie Wouldn't Let Him Make the Call

2009-07-05T00:19:00.000-07:00

Wicket would be dead if for no other reason than Wicket had relaxed while Golem worked. This was the extent to which Golem had become perverted. He no longer saw the world in terms of a mix of sociological events. He saw it as the world against him. This was what led Golem to kill the girl on the sofa, he thought. She had OD’d. He could have saved her, but he let her die. He had put her in the shower to wake her up, but had then put her back on the sofa and allowed her to fall asleep—for no reason really. He possibly thought she might talk to Wicket but that was an afterthought. Actually, he thought he had killed her for the fun of killing. It must have been something like that, but his last memory was of reaching out for a telephone. He would not say that at his trial, of course. He would plead insanity. But he would say he was trying to do the right thing. He was trying to get the girl off the sofa in his own way. The truth of the matter was that he was bored with this chick and that recently she was making claims on his life. At least this is what he perceived. He had gotten what he wanted from her and it was time to move on. As a human mind will do on occasion, Golem’s mind did not let him see that he did have a reason — he would have gone to prison if the girl told of the relationship, but the intricacies of human thought sometimes lead a soul to forget what is in their interest to know. It may be that Golem tortured himself for the murder as a self-inflicted punishment and closed the door on any thoughts that made him out to appear innocent. When he resided in the chamber of good, Golem could only think in terms of being responsible for every result of his involvement in a situation. It was a kind of private torture chamber or a kind of personal hell where he held himself to a higher standard than even an angel measured off with a ruler. Life was tough when he looked at himself with those eyes and saw how he was responsible for, or should have been able to prevent any evil thing that he was a part of merely by having gotten involved in a situation. If he had not brought the girl into his office she would still be alive or so he thought. Like a pebble dropped in an ocean, he had created a wave on the other side. He blamed himself for the ripples he made in the world even though those ripples were turned into tsunamis by the movement of the Earth’s crust. Still, if the ripple hadn’t been there. Yet, this sensitivity may have been the same sensitivity that allowed him to see the beauty in life and into the inner workings of the mind of God. Golem may have been living on Earth when he should have been in Heaven. He sometimes considered that it was the physical existence on Earth that got him into trouble—some material element like temptation that a soul was attracted to while on a planet. A planet where even angelic people could find themselves mixed up in some horrendous situation. If only he realized that no one expected people to be perfect, he may have been more satisfied but for now this concept was not a part of his psyche.

Wicket on Phi Phi

2009-07-04T21:06:00.001-07:00

Several years later Wicket survived a tidal wave on Phi Phi Island, Thailand. Not only survived, but for reasons he was not entirely aware of he stayed on the island throughout the rebuilding and cleanup process. He was sitting in front of a dive shop when someone yelled that there was water coming up onto the island. He had to make a decision fast. He could run left or right.

He thought of a time when he saw in a road a right turn arrow and a left and a little further up a crosswalk and then he went to the right. At the time he had thought the marks were made by aliens from outer space to guide some birds in. He was glad he made the right decision.

He later felt fortunate that he had not gone to the left. “Not many of those that went that way survived” would be what he told those interested in the story. People would ask him what it was like when the tidal wave struck and maybe be thinking that he was tired of telling the tale, but he was never tired of telling the tale. He had run right, up the street, and had floated up with the rising water and had clung to a second floor balcony, saving his skin in the process. He would later see one of the foreign operators of a tourist agency on the island telling the CNN guy that the worst thing was the terrible smell. It was estimated that three thousand people died on the island that day. Three of the bungalow areas and one house that he had previously stayed in were completely gone. One was set on a slope rising some 150 feet up. The water had surged nearly to the top of the slope and then receded, carrying the debris of the crushed and broken bungalows and many bodies out to sea. A lot of people never would be found. There was a tremendous amount of sand moved around on the island that day by the surge. Some would remain buried beneath it. One thing that seemed to be everywhere were sandals and thongs. It appeared that these things had alone remained on top. At one time each of them held a human foot. At first he thought he would evacuate. Even a lot of the old time foreigners were leaving. “It was just too much” were words often muttered by those that left. He had stayed in one guesthouse that was picked up and set down a mile inland on a sewer reservoir. The owner of the house was on the second floor when the Tsunami struck. He was carried with the house and sat down, an amazing story of survival. Inside the water treatment pond were the bodies of 1000 Thais who had somehow come to rest there. A year later his hands trembled as he drank beer in the early evenings and recounted the story to Wicket, but Wicket didn’t leave. He had even started an honest business and had developed a sense of society and with age had become a better guy. It might be true that he was still living on money amassed in a life of crime, but he was done with that and was content in life. He ran a dive shop now and an internet café.
He really only still had one nasty little habit and one that he thought would harm no one. He had honed his skills at computer hacking to the point that he might very well have been the best at it in the entire world. His reputation on the net was revealing. People would talk about his exploits but only surmise as to identity. There was one computer that he would regret hacking. That was the computer sitting on the desk at the home of Golem Window. He didn’t know it at the time, but his act had not gone undetected by Golem. Golem even knew who it was that was going through his files. And this was not the time to have people looking at his computer. He was getting ready to kill a lot of people, and now, damn it, someone knew about it. And that someone was sitting in an internet café on Phi Phi Island on the other side of the world.

Wicket didn’t know that he was going to have a visitor. He spent the days on the beach and evenings listening to reggae at the Hippy Bar. Generally, he didn’t have a care in the world.

He sat in the bakery on the main street and sipped his twenty-baht coffee and contemplated ordering. Why did he have to get clever and snoop on Golem’s computer? The wife of the man he had not seen since the Tsunami came to the table with pad in hand. He looked in her eyes and saw something there the first few weeks after the tsunami. He remembered sitting in that café a year later when the piece of glass arrived to replace the one broken in the showcase in the front window that had good looking things to eat and smelled of bread. Why did he have to be possibly the only person in the world to know about a mass murder that would potentially kill millions? He ordered muesli with yogurt and an Iguanian breakfast. He watched as the solemn woman took his order to the kitchen.
And why, damn it, did he care about it? The place was full of morning tourists now. They were chatting of today’s adventures and yesterday’s follies.
He already knew the answer to the last question. He cared because he genuinely liked people. And now he might have to risk his newfound happiness on Phi Phi Island to try and save a good part of humanity.
Some of them would observe that he was Iguanian and take an interest in his way of speaking. Why did it have to be him? Was he finally being punished for prying into people’s private lives? Some people got up to leave and some people entered.
He even knew the date of the planned holocaust and was trying to ascertain the method.
A couple stopped outside the showcase to order a loaf of French bread. A few mothers pushed kids in strollers by and looked in. The TV, hung from the ceiling, blared out news.
This was certainly worse than being an Iguanian Idol contestant and having pictures posted of your naked body on the Net. The news was sort of always in the background in this café. Chat was of the essence. Golem picked up his fork and put the ham on top of his buttered toast. He cut out the soft yolk and put it in his mouth whole. That way it didn’t drip all over his plate. He looked around the café and up to the second floor that was always closed in the morning. It was the best place to eat breakfast on the island. The twenty baht coffee screamed this to patrons, and the menu offered more. The place across the street was always almost empty. It seemed they never learned. Their menu was confusing, and prices tricky to understand. It could have been a lesson in Business 101.
He thought of the pain in the woman’s eyes and the air of grief on the island that was there even while the island continued on in its pursuit of pleasing tourists. He noted that many of the Thais on the island seemed to be Bangkokians now and did not have the warm island spirit and eyed foreigners as if they were separate from them. The temperature of the island had cooled a bit. The happy carefree island Thais were gathered in the sewer pit. He left a tip on the table and made his way to the beach. He needed to see the sun.

If only Wicket had realized that his intrusions had not gone undetected, he might have protected himself better than sleeping in a hammock in front of his bungalow, in the dark of night, protected only by the canvass of a two hundred baht sling. He spent the nights snoozing peacefully in his hammock when he was not thinking that the time was approaching when he would have to help save some of the world. He was trying to come up with a way of revealing Window’s plan without implicating himself or his identity. He thought he knew what to do. He was about to do what he planned, when as he approached his bungalow after a night of dancing on the beach, he saw someone with a flashlight in his bungalow. He saw a man leave the bungalow and it did not look like a tourist. He could not believe the sight presented to him. It was Golem Window, a flashlight in one hand held above a gun in the other. He had gone into the bungalow S.W.A.T style. For a moment, Wicket had wondered if Golem had had some training. The only reason he was not asleep in the hammock was that on this particular night he had stayed out later because there was a full moon and the partiers were having a particularly good time. It seemed to him that Golem knew what time he came home and was waiting for him. He searched his bungalow for web cams and other such devices but found none. He did find the three condoms sitting on a homemade shelf that he kept there in case of need. He spent the night on the opposite beach and left on the ferry the next morning. He ended up on Elephant Island. The next best to Phi Phi or maybe even better he thought. He had never been to Koh Chang Island before and did not really know why he picked it. He also did not know that that was the one island that Golem had been to several years earlier. If he had access to that tidbit of knowledge, Wicket figured he would have chosen a different island to flee to.
It was a decision that almost cost him his life. For some reason, Golem, possibly out of a sense of déjà vu, decided to kick back on Elephant Island for a few days before heading back home to initiate the holocaust. One evening as Wicket had just relieved himself at the back of the KC Bar, in a place that was dark and just down a little sand alley, more precisely, a ways behind the bar, he heard a shot and simultaneously felt a searing pain on the left side of his head. He tumbled to the sand. Golem approached. He was going to run past as he made an exit and get a look to make sure that Wicket had taken a direct hit, but as he started to run towards Wicket, two girls walked out of the bar and screamed. Golem was forced to flee in another direction and, thus, never knew that Wicket was alive. Wicket observed Golem running off as he lay with his head to the side and saliva drizzling down his chin.

Those ears, that shiny head. Charlie pulled it off perfectly. He’s killed Wicket, and now finally it looked like Golem had done it. Charlie had followed Golem to the island and killed Wicket, and he did this as Golem was following around Wicket to talk to him…to have a little chat.

Charlie shot Wicket and got away clean and now Golem looked like a beacon running away and out the back gate, up towards the main road of Elephant Island. Wicket barely made him out jumping on a motorcycle and skirting off into darkness like one of Santa’s elves caught with a glass of Chablis on Christmas Eve. A little red suit would have fitted him perfectly. He even had a sort of evil mischievous grin on his face. Maybe a Grinch costume could describe it better. Wicket imagined that he heard the cackling laugh that he had heard so often while they were in prison and later in the executive suites of Window. It was a laugh that Golem didn’t seem to know he had. The man was bat fucking ape shit was all that Wicket could fathom as he lay in the sand feeling the blood trickle down the side of his head, over his lips, and into the ground of Elephant Island. At this point he had a vision that he could not explain:
The government man from the NSC told Golem that all the married people he met never had money. He talked about controlling the PC market and the idea that the technology had duel purposes that could also be used by a military. Golem knew there was no way to control the PC market. Strong encryption was everywhere. Copies were made or downloaded. It was like a dinosaur in Jurassic Park. They were later found on other islands. It was like the bird flu. It couldn’t be stopped by killing off the chickens. Any natural immunity the birds might have would be eliminated but that was about it. Birds flew over every trench in the world. Those with some immunity would survive. Those without would die. Nature was like that. Golem saw a school of fish in the sea today. The jellyfish were on shore. He wanted to see a fish caught in tentacles, but thought best to leave the school alone rather than to interfere with it and chase one member into the arms of a jellyfish. Nature could decide it. He saw a jellyfish left on shore by the tide. It was wiggling and he thought to save it, but nature could decide. Maybe there was a reason that jellyfish wasn’t meant to live. Nature needed that jellyfish to die. It would make her stronger. Why intervene in a process begun millions of years ago. Best to leave well enough alone.

Wicket on Phi Phi

2009-07-04T21:06:00.000-07:00

Wicket Catches Golem on the Sofa

2009-07-04T21:01:00.000-07:00

When Wicket began working at Window and Associates, he recognized the sort of cyber crime that Golem was into. He knew the viruses that he was writing were being introduced to the World Wide Web by Golem himself. This did not, in and of itself, bother Wicket. He smiled at the irony of an antivirus company producing a market for itself by releasing viruses. He was getting paid plenty to do work that he enjoyed doing. He kept his mouth shut and minded his side of the arrangement.
Things went on that way for several years and then Wicket walked into an office and was shocked at what he saw on the sofa. It was a seventeen-year-old girl. Her bruised body was stiff and there was dried blood coming from her nose. Wicket didn’t like it at all. Wicket knew the blood was symptomatic of guano powder use, but what bothered Wicket were the bruises on the girl’s body. They were not symptomatic of guano powder use. He turned around to see Golem passed out at his desk.
For just a moment Wicket paused and stared at Golem as he lay unconscious at his desk and fancied for just a moment that he was looking at himself. He thought that one of Golem’s eyes opened briefly, as if to take a picture; and then the shutter closed. For a moment Wicket thought that Golem had taken a picture of himself. Wicket briefly considered killing the man behind the desk but didn’t have the courage to kill. He rather figured he would be doing the world a favor. The thing was he didn’t reckon that, under any circumstances, Golem would take his own life. If Golem couldn’t do it; Wicket wouldn’t. Wicket was not the sort of chap to rubberstamp a suicide; and knew that he himself wanted to live forever. That would change later when Wicket would know that Golem needed killing. Several moments after Golem’s window on his soul closed, and after several moments of contemplation, Wicket opened his eyes wide and looked with consternation at the girl on the sofa. Maybe she had been complicit. He looked once again at the bruises and knew he didn’t want to work at Window anymore. Once again he thought about putting Golem out of his misery. He rather figured that Golem was in a way innocent, and that society had taken advantage of this characteristic. Wouldn’t it be an act of mercy to pick up a rock and crush a dying man’s head if he lay like a test pilot trapped under a burning plane, surrounded by spectators, who because of the fire and the newness of the situation would not chip in together to pull him free. Rather than let him suffer wouldn’t it be better…
He looked back towards Golem and still did not have the nerve to do it, or the inspiration and turned back and went out the door. He had seen enough. He had money in the bank. The next week he resigned from Window. By that time Window had already lost the Associates part of things. He told Golem that his mother was ill and that he was ready for another area of work. He even lied to the extent that he told Golem that he had come up with an idea for a legitimate computer program and was striking out on his own. He knew Golem too well. He did not want Golem to know what he had seen the week before or the real reason that he was leaving the company. He already knew what happened to people who left Window when they learned of something they couldn’t stomach. None survived to tell their tale. Golem didn’t believe in loose ends. He had been in prison once and had no desire to go back. Golem would miss him sorely on two fronts. He was emotionally attached to Wicket. They had been friends and he was the best hacker that Windows ever had. There had been only three high level executives left and two of them lived in Golem’s head for sure. Wicket was the conscience and the vessel of shame at Window. With him gone things would surely get worse.

Golem went into a fit of rage upon learning that Wicket was leaving and threatened to kill him; but had felt, as Wicket closed the door behind him, that Window might do better without him. The man had too much of a conscience to be of much use to Window. If he came across the man again he figured he would kill him just to make sure he never came back, even though he was pleased with his absence. He liked to keep his bungalow clean. The guy had some goodness in him, but there was something about his goodness that Golem didn’t like. Wicket was slippery and never around when there was dirty work to be done. He didn’t like violence and thought he could siphon off money from the public, but somehow not get his hands dirty. Wicket was like a young girl who fucked, but claimed she was a virgin.
Wicket could not have known the history of what led Golem to associate with a girl of seventeen, if he had known he might have had a tinge of sympathy.
For as Golem’s eyes opened momentarily as Wicket contemplated putting him out of his misery, Golem did not see anything consciously. He was in the midst of kissing Sumiko in a dream.
Everyone in the girls’ high school knew that they were in love, even the school principle, and while Sumiko was just seventeen and Golem, thirty-five, no one gave it much attention as it was a platonic love and neither of them showed signs of impropriety, but everyone understood that one day Sumiko would finish school, and the two of them, if fate had anything to say, would become man and wife. It was not manifested through physical touch, but something between the two of them clicked, and Sumiko had written to him for seven years and he responded in a most prompt fashion. Of course he had twists with other women to satisfy a hormonal necessity, but these twists were mostly biological and did not involve any unique emotion or a deep level of attachment. In their hearts both of them knew when Sumiko finished her studies, and returned to Tokyo that the two of them would marry. During the seven years of her absence, Golem saw her when she visited Japan. They talked about a myriad of things, and Golem brought up a lot of extraneous topics to avoid discussing with Sumiko the subject of sex. She had been his student, and for this reason, combined with her youth, Golem did not plan to sleep with her before they were married. The age difference between them was nine years, and though not huge, it was enough that Golem needed to know for certain that a marriage with her would not mess up her life. These were the days before atrocity; before the killing; before Golem went insane. Those were the days before the end of her third year of medical school when inexplicably she stopped writing. There had not even been a letter to say that she no longer wanted to see him.
Her parents were steeped in Japanese tradition like a cup of macha tea; her father was the mayor of Shin Rin Koen and her mother a daughter of the LDP. When they learned of the swaying of the two hearts, they did everything in their power to keep those hearts apart; their private investigator told them that Golem spent time in prison; when Sumiko stopped her writing, it took her mother four years to write to Golem. Perhaps it was an action undertaken out of desperately needing to communicate with someone who had feelings for her daughter. How often had he said her name as he laid on a sofa with another seventeen-year-old in something that started as compensation for the loss of Sumiko in his life, and was for the most part now just lust and physical gratification. And now he found himself in an office with a girl half his age; and a government that would put him in jail forever if it found out. The same government that had neglected its basic premise of existence of providing safety for its people and that had allowed Sumiko to be shot to death in his most thoughtful, considered, broken-hearted opinion. When he was moving his hips against this new girl, he was silently mouthing the word Sumiko over and over again. And intermittently cursing the government of a nation that the government no longer represented.

Just Like Enron

2009-07-04T20:58:00.001-07:00

Window and Associates now controls a huge security software market and an equally huge corporation. That there are not any associates left does not bother Golem. He now associates exclusively with girls mostly in their thirties on the sofas in his executive offices. He has one executive office on each floor of the fifty floor complex of Tower One. Tower One is now exclusively used for executive functions, and since he is the only executive, the offices are deserted.
Tower Two has taken over the function and everyday business of Window. Tower Two dwarfs Tower One and now the first tower is simply what Golem refers to as his command center. Only he has his retina scanned into the locking mechanism of Tower One. It is here on the four floors called B1, B2, B3, and B4 that Golem devotes time underground to research on cloning and cryogenics. These are his pet projects, have been from day one.
He has girls on each of the sofas. He assigns them to a floor. His favorite is Katrina on floor thirteen. He thought of the young amongst them as his flower children. He was taking care of them. When she cried it was as if a poorly maintained dam had broken somewhere. As if she had no plans for the future.
He has several corporate jets affixed with lots of sofas. He can’t say what it is about sofas he likes. He might have known before the accident. He has a huge house with an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and a Jacuzzi the size of a residential swimming pool.
He has three wives and three children and a partner. One wife thinks he works in intelligence; one thinks he is a professor. One thinks he is a computer analyst. The partner doesn’t care. She’s in it for the endorphins, plus some cash. Sometimes one wife drops him off at the airport and another picks him up and brings him home. One thinks he is off on an international spying adventure and the other thinks he is returning from a computer seminar.
Golem has a group of top executives on the lower-rung that is currently embezzling funds while he plays on his sofas. They are using two of his jets to party on world tours, and are bent on partying until there are no funds left to party with. They are members of a group of ex-yuppies that had been responsible for the elimination of ketchup packets from fast food chain restaurant food orders in the seventies. Now, if you want ketchup you ask for it. It saves corporations millions of dollars, but half of those dollars ended up in these yuppies’ pockets.

The Sociological Aspect Bothered Him

2009-07-04T20:54:00.000-07:00

CHarLie was pretty much in control of Golem’s mind now. Golem had opened the door on that one with the girl on the sofa. From that point, CHarLie had one foot in and one foot out, but was never far away. When the day came that Golem came to see him on the balcony of his bungalow, the take-over was pretty much complete, yet a few neurons remained his own for a bit after that. The mind is deep. But the split was pretty much complete. At this time Golem and CHarLie became two separate entities, at least from Golem’s view. They were as separate as an iguana on a coconut tree, but Golem was aware of CHarLie’s presence and any rainbows or truth and beauty were isolated in Golem’s side of things. CHarLie had other things in mind. Still there is the beauty and truth pervasive on the islands. That was Golem’s true identity. If he hadn’t let the girl on the sofa die, he may have been at peace with himself and the modem incident may have indeed been terminated without further consideration. Mere revenge in a magnitude as this requires a bit more than a failed software corporation, but then again the sociological things bothered him. It can’t be said for sure that the islands would have cured him, but they certainly could cure a lot of situations. Most who know them would tell you that. Swimming in the morning, walking along the shore, hiking on the road, eating seafood in front of the sea; lesser evils than Golem had seen most certainly are erased, memories not needed anymore washed away by tides and things written in sand no more. For Golem though, there may have been too many things already transcribed in stone, that an even relentless tide could not wash from the shore. It may have been that the things that troubled him were written before the seas were salted or the shore apparent, or a three dimensional world received its dimensions. These things that troubled Golem, as we have seen, were intrinsically entwined with life and when humans broke certain rules the three-dimensional existence of man was at stake. The sea itself.

His nation seemed everyday more soulless, more reckless, more uncaring of life. It was living in cities with crime everywhere.

It Was Here that the Game Attracted the Attention of Interpol

2009-07-04T20:46:00.000-07:00

Was Golem still in possession of enough of his mind to even make such judgment? Wicket couldn’t know for sure. He had read enough on the Window home computer to know that Golem had some underlying theme guiding his plot. But these thoughts were mixed with incoherent ramblings of a madman. Had the nature of his plot brought him to the edge? Had it been more than one mind can be responsible for? Had his reaction to events in his life led him to insanity? Wicket couldn’t know for sure.
It was here that the game attracted the attention of Interpol; a man once related to Window dead in Thailand. Someone they wanted to talk to away from Window and most likely in Thailand. It was here that the game ceased to be between Golem and the world and temporarily between Golem and Wicket and became a more serious matter about saving the world from Golem.
What Interpol wanted to know was why a software company was purchasing so many cyanide-containing compounds in the first place. What started as an investigation into Window’s involvement in some missing Iguana Bank funds had escalated into a full-scale investigation of Window and Golem. They interviewed a lot of Window’s people and were convinced that no one knew of any wrongdoing at Window. The employees thought of Golem as being eccentric but not as being much of anything else. They rarely saw Golem these days in any event if they ever had and he wasn’t on their minds. Writing anti-virus software that they figured would lose money was what occupied most of their days. In fact, the only thing different this year than last was that they had been busy assembling video TV tuner capture cards. They told Interpol that they didn’t really know what they were for. They had not been advised of how they fit into Window strategy and didn’t know if they really did. For all they knew they were just some sort of side contract that Golem had been working on.
Only a few people were aware of the special compounds being sprayed on the circuit boards of the video TV tuner capture cards. The key one who had gotten suspicious was dead and the others didn’t think putting a compound on a circuit board was a matter of interest to Interpol. All Interpol knew was that there were a lot of cyanide containers that laid empty on Window property. No one seemed to know what the contents were used for. They had simply been told that a substance was being produced at the corporation and that its production had been contracted to Window by Intel. And indeed, Window was supplying cyanide containing industrial compound to Intel. The thought of an involvement with Intel excited some of the employees who had long since given up any hope of making any exciting money from their stock options that Golem so generously handed out at the end of each year. The problem was that at the end of each year the value of Window’s stock more closely approached the dollar level. They had been in danger now for some time of losing their NASDAQ registration and most of them foresaw that in the near future Window would become a penny stock destined for the pink slips.

Window had had its cyclic tides. The flood tide had made its advance up the beach and become high tide. There had then been a slack tide as the water rested at its peak height briefly before turning and starting its retreat. For quite some time the Window tide had been ebbing. This ebb tide seemed to last for a year and then the water reached its low tide; only this time there would be no turning back. Golem had tempted fate and fate was out to get him.

Is Media Dangerous?

2009-07-03T08:33:00.000-07:00

As I was walking along the beach road here in Bangsaen the other day I paused in front of a little stand selling shrimp. They had a little windmill built with a straw bent around a little propeller to chase the flies away. Some of them are battery powered and use an old PC fan, but this one was a drink straw with a hand made propeller and I thought to make something like it for the balcony of my condominium to scare the pigeons away from the sink and cooking. As I walk I plan this device. I pick up bamboo and stuff. The propeller will scare the birds. The swine flu is spreading now. The bird flew is incubating I guess or it was exaggerated by the press. I guess incubating. The press. I stopped trying to imagine anything about it ever since I read of yellow journalism. There is nothing to imagine. War can be created. Give me a pen and I will give you a war – taken from the beginning of yellow journalism. I saw it with my own eyes in the eighties when journalists followed news and often printed things only because there was money in it.
I remember sitting in eighty-one watching TV news and thinking what a lot of bullshit it was and then later watching Fox several years later and thinking how much better it was and now today thinking about what a lot of bullshit is on Fox. Is it all bullshit?

What: No Guns?

2009-07-03T07:55:00.000-07:00

I remember even now crossing Tokyo on foot, sometimes walking late at night and never having in twenty years once been assaulted. The day I left San Francisco someone took my bag off the bus. Another guy threatened me in the subway station. Then while I was in Japan someone in my home town of Dana Point walked into the post office and blew everyone away with a rifle. An employee they say.
I never forgot the way this kid walked into the post office and shot them all dead except for a guy who hid under the desk. The kid told this man that he didn’t want him. Maybe he was the only one in the post office who understood youth. As for me I was inside that post office on one or two occasions and I remember a grumpy rude government worker who didn’t give a shit. It formed my opinion of government operations. And now that I think about it it may have been this guy that the kid didn’t want. Maybe the guy knew just how corrupt society had become and while the others harassed the kid, who had worked in the post office, he let it go, let the kid make a mistake or two. And I admired this kid for having gotten a job, though in the end I think this was the kid who on the first day of his job, left the emergency brake of the letter truck and as he brought the mail to the door the truck rolled down a hill and totaled my brother’s car at the bottom. He had come to our house and offered to pay cash for the damage if only we wouldn’t report him because it was his first day on the job. These are the kind of things that stick in my mind.
Yes, I definitely remember living in Japan, where the average citizen would wonder why anyone would want to own a gun. I wonder how many Americans can really appreciate how people in so many other nations see guns as something bizarre that no one in their right mind would want to have around. And then I think of America today and a nation actually moving towards allowing handguns on campus as I realize I would never live in that country.

They Imagine Their World

2009-07-03T07:32:00.000-07:00

They imagine their world – a concept that fascinated me. I have always imagined my world. Who imagines me? As a high school student I used to throw dice and say the number before the die landed. This is the way life has been for me.
Now, I try to define the singing I heard from my hut. The high tone... the remorse... a ghost in the night. Looking for her culture. And I knew what it was to look for one’s culture, having not lived in America since age 22. And now the culture I knew no longer existed in America anyway. The America I left had become a nightmare. People shot each other in Malls. The government made no sense. Once I thought America didn’t think about money enough and now I see people calling private homes explaining how they can pay off a loan with another loan.

They Saw Beauty and Then They Knew Truth

2009-07-02T07:25:00.000-07:00

He had decided to stay on earth. He knew the consequences of leaving earth behind. He told them to put him and his double in the pyramid. The bird Venusians would never leave a known rebel behind. His double was with the birdmen now. They probably knew of their mistake. He walked out of the pyramid reborn. People bowed before him. They followed his commands. He told them all of what needed to be done to ensure immortality. They thought each and every one of them could live forever. Their souls could. As a people they could go on. He never promised immortality to them as such. But the people believed, had seen with their own eyes. Had watched the granite blocks rise up in the air and settle down as if some attracting beam from the Enterprise was doing the building, yet all they saw was the hand of a man guiding each block into position. Soon, none of these people would be around. The man knew that. He knew it was too late to save them all. He knew that the day would come when people would look at the pyramids in awe and with reverent wonder again, wonder who had built them. At least there would be some reverent wonder and that was a step in the right direction he thought.

IOS NEWS NOVEL

2009-07-02T06:24:00.001-07:00

The archeologists studied the pyramids for years. Said the people worshipped from inside. They said they looked like machines. They talked of tools... plumbs... used to build the structures - said people sat inside and worshipped. Golem knew why the pilots sat inside. When the plumbs, the declinometers moved from vertical, it meant that these huge structures were indicating that an object was approaching Earth. Noah knew. He built an Ark. It is said they sat inside every night and... prayed... watched... watched the horizon, but Golem saw the truth in the clouds and design... they sat and watched... the horizon.

How Much More Yellow Can They Get

2009-07-01T18:22:00.000-07:00

Funny... a week straight Fox is bent on saying that Obama didn't harp enough on Iran. Then M. Jackson dies and Iran is all but gone. For a week now they report news wrong and then days later give another version. First Mike owes 500 million dollars. He has died in debt. Fox reporters spike their salaries on that. Five days later... Mike owns property... on top 200 million dollars... kids won't be fought over... now they are being fought over. Funny... if only it were funny to watch people fighting for freedom and then having a channel scrubbed with news of a family that has to be dysfunctional at best. Am I the only one who has heard all they want to hear about who will get the children in immoral relationships over the years... Isn't it time we stand up as a nation and tell them we don't care. They get paid by the viewer over there. And apparently their are people dumb enough to just sit and eat it all up.

If only it ended there, with nonsense news about a celebrity, but often Fox does the same with real news. One day it is one thing. The next week it is another. One day the wife of a man has been murdered by her husband... viewers increase... three days later the wife is the lover and has been having his kids. A slightly different story now... but no one cares... they have already been paid by the viewer.

Oh, don't get me wrong... Fox has its good points... it's just that news isn't one of them-unless you watch it with a huge sense of humor.

Three Gold Nuggets

2009-07-01T15:38:00.000-07:00

The Antenna next to the hut has downloaded three bits of info that have been placed in strategic locations throughout this blog.

1. The pyramids are the declinometers spoken of... they were built to predict the approach of large objects to the Earth. Noah's ark...How did Noah Know?

2. The S.E. Asian quake gave mankind more time to correct the environment and its own behavior.

3. The existence of Inana... she is communicating through the antenna. She is connected with the fourth dimension. We can all connect to the antenna.

They May Have Died to Give Us A Second Chance

2009-07-01T15:24:00.001-07:00

The Earth rang like a bell... 230,000 people died in the quake and resulting wave in the S.E. Asian tsunami. Golem sat and watched the horizon two years after swimming in the gulf of Thailand on that fateful Boxing day. For the last two years the temperatures in Thailand and world-wide have dropped and some use it as evidence that global warming does not exist. As Golem looked at the horizon he thought the quake was a wake-up call. The slowing of the rotation of the Earth. Days are shorter now, when considered on a cosmic scale. God had decided to give Earth a second chance, perhaps an extra amount of time to get the environment right. He was currently considering Plan A and Plan B. They say God works in strange ways. Why did so many people have to die? Perhaps, their death was the best that God could do... the only way a long-term plan could be worked out... Golem never thought the real point was global warming... just look at the dying oceans and the destruction of nature and the numbers of cars on the surface spewing pollutants. Their are those who claim cars are clean now... it doesn't really matter... It may be true that emmissions are much lower per car... but when the number of cars are considered no amount of emmision can be considered low... The point of environmental responsibility lies in keeping nature prestine, keeping it alive... and when one looks around the world... no matter how hot or cold it is... nature is being destroyed...

Welcome to the Future Again

2009-07-01T15:04:00.000-07:00

The earth is ringing like a bell— … still, four years after the quake that killed 230,000 people. Winds from heaven have come down to earth, shaken from the sky. They don’t know what to call them. At first they thought they were tornadoes, but no one saw a twister. It was just a current of wind knocked lower from the sky. Thailand has been cooler, since the tsunami. Seasons have changed. Days are just a thousandth of a second shorter; the earth’s rotation slowed by the quake. When the meteor hit Hudson Bay days were seven minutes shorter—the destruction relatively more. One thousandth of a second left 230,000 dead. Golem could only wonder what the energy dissipated as seven minutes did.

There was an Accident

2009-07-01T15:02:00.000-07:00

When the sun touched the surface of its son the effect was instantaneous. People were vaporized—a new planet was born. Venus lay on the horizon—souls, records, DNA instantly mutated, struck with neutrons, and gave rise to man. Yet, man could not fathom the death of so many so pushed it off as some sort of bird that had created earth and heaven. And that all of us were the result. Could not be reconciled with the idea that an entire planet’s population was being annihilated. Again. This was an Act of God beyond reason he would say. Yet, he knew that it had been the only way. Radiation bombarded earth, barbequing its inhabitants, as opposite to the concept of humanity as this may be. We were barbequed alive and all else was lies.

Of what we cannot see we want to hear. It’s a sphere that was heard by those in flatland to exist. Now some were trying to crawl out of the third and into the fourth. Those in the fourth had quite a tale to tell. As for those who had always watched the horizon … it may be that they had a burning desire to get home. And if they were to ever get there, they had to have the cooperation of the planet. The father is engendered by his son. His plans for the future depend on the deeds of the son. The father knew why he was here, where he came from, and wanted desperately to get home. For now this bearded white man traveled earth building what the future would refer to as temples and in his mind he carried around the number 72. A magic number to them. The concept of pie integral to the plan. The planets were almost round.