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Posts Tagged ‘Short stories’

While the Angels are still being written, I thought a contents page would be helpful:

1) Essays on a Version of God that isn’t religion-dependent . . .

2) A year of short stories . . .

3) The Beginning of the Chronicles of the Angels of Eden . . .

 

May you enjoy!

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Forgive me for not posting the last couple of weeks. Walks and concerts and slicing a finger, etc . . . I’ll post again toward the end of the month, but I’ve made an agreement to rest my normal posting schedule until then. So, until the end of the month when the angels WILL return, take this humble offering and enjoy! (And an extra link toward the end of a favorite, short, SNL clip of mine.

The Name

When the name was spoken, it no longer was what it had been; it had become something more; the same, plus. And so the names continued to make it more still, for what was discovered after many names had been uttered was that so had been created awareness by virtue of the fact that a being could point back at those things of which it was a part, and thereby itself.

Before the name was spoken, It had no reason to think in terms of itself. Once the name was spoken, it could. After that was only the simple realization that it could never be named; for if no tongue could exist from the beginning of time to the end of eternity, then its fullness could not be uttered in fullness.

And so has it ever, it speaks its own name alone for any who wish to stop speaking, and listen.

(As promised, click here. Peace!)

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I actually don’t spend much time at bars. Symbolically I think I think of bars as a place of reflection.

Cheers!

A beautiful women is looking at me from the other side of the bar. While holding her eyes to mine she’s moving her tongue up and down the outside of her straw before taking small, dainty sips while never for a moment breaking eye contact with me. I sit with my elbow on the bar and my hand on my cheek watching her as I rest, a half a smile as though to say, “How nice to share this moment with you from across the room, your company is pleasant.” She is beautiful, but I have another on my mind.

I haven’t seen her for so long that it would be stupid for me not to consider the loveliness whose eye I’ve caught as the possibility of a nest that would not be shaken by hurricanes; a place to rest my heart after wandering a desert in hopes that my memory of water is not merely one more accursed mirage. I’ve met her before enough to know she is in every way likeable, but not enough to know what the feel of her hand tells my heart and hers after communicating for five minutes apart from the speech of the rest of me. Beauty looks me in the eye and says we both have a basic common denominator; identity says there is nothing glaring to alarm. And yet my mind reminds me as I connect with a friend from a distance that at a further distance yet is the reason regret may exist where otherwise my mind would have no reason to exist.

But because I have a mind, and it remembers another beauty in another time that made my heart pump blood where before it only knew how to process bile, I can’t help but be reminded of another face by whose light I began to live as appropriate to one who should see beauty in friendship across a bar and respect that every face contains a universe that bears exploring respectfully before creating eternities more calling themselves by individual names always striving to declare “I Am.” And in light of the importance of mind to reason the desire to see another universe created to flourish, I say hello and shake hands when she brings her drink to where I sit, and we begin to discuss what we really enjoy for the rest of existence when we are too sated to eat and quenched to drink.

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Don’t quite remember where my mind was at when I wrote this one a few months back, but, it is interesting . . .

I’m trapped!

This mind is a prison. The only thing worse than knowing that I cannot escape myself is knowing that who I can not escape fits perfectly as a puzzle piece into the mind that is the unity of all other individual minds upon this planet. Myopically oriented, or aware of my placement within the perfect workings of all surroundings, I cannot escape who I become past who I was, that who I am.

No straight-jacket needed if I be deemed insane, I cannot escape myself. As a bus passes fruit stand after fruit stand; an oasis of exotic strawberry pie by the side of the road to quench one’s hunger on a long summer day. And yet I am not in control of this bus and there are too many passengers to request pulling over. Hurling myself through a pane of glass toward the quenching of desire for a taste a sign creates in my head promising simply doesn’t seem practical in the light of having a genuine impulse to be somewhere, especially in light of not being able to be anyone but this person with the desire to be there. And so hunger becomes only stronger on the way to the next stop of this bus where I have no choice but to pray food resides.

I choose my prison only because choosing liberation in a ditch chomping on poison seems so much worse.

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As I was transcribing the part of this story I wrote by hand, and considering how I wanted to end it, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Plato . . .

What Dispels the Dark Side

And whence engulfed by darkness I cast forth from my fingers a single spark of light, and could hear in the shadows surrounding me innumerable figures running in every direction from what scared them most. This spark landed upon the wick of what I held in my other hand. Upon landing, I breathed into it ever so softly to start the flame of the candle I now wielded like a knife to the world I kept from knowing by casting upon it its greatest dread; itself.

As I walked forward, staring me eye-to-eye was a nose with a ring, two eyes, and horns; the silhouette of a bull stopping me to my latest footfall. And eye-to-eye we continued to stare. Unmoving did it remain save for its nostrils, its obvious breathing, and movement of the air warning accordingly. I brought the flame of the candle between its face and mine as it continued not to stir. As the light shined closer to its face, it revealed it imprisoned by a mirror, the flame now reflecting its own light most dominantly between its face and mine. Lowering that candle again, I placed my hand before its nose and felt myself warmed by its breath. I reached my hand to its forehead and the glass shattered at my finger’s touch. Holding the light I held before me, I walked forward into the apparent dark.

I walk for hours not knowing where to go, accompanied by the sound of scurrying as my feet wander aimlessly upon the stone. If a spark is waiting at my finger tips, I have a source to illuminate; if I can set my hand ablaze to ward off what monsters lurk in this unknowing, and if I have nowhere to know to go, surely I can extinguish this small flame, a weapon against the unknown, with my breath.

So I continue blind. Let them crawl upon me! I have chosen to see another way. . .

In the darkness I close my eyes. Light appears a way to stars overhead. Desolation is not my fate.

 

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I felt like writing a meditation on the Olympics this week since it’s been taking up most of my free time the last couple of weeks. While I tend to watch the men’s and women’s events about equal, I admit freely I tend to have more interest in women’s beach volleyball than men’s. But, that’s just because Misty and Kerri are fucking awesome, and I’m fascinated by a team that basically has never, ever lost. Why it is I prefer women’s non-beach volleyball to men’s regular volleyball I couldn’t tell you. What I can tell you is, I find water pollo to be frickin’ boring no matter what gender they are!

On Watching the Olympics

“You NEVER watch sports. Why is it you feel like watching EVERY minute of games you never even knew existed all of the sudden?”

“Two weeks out of every four years is a special occasion in which representatives of the world can come together for a few brief minutes without murdering each other, and argue over nothing in a friendly manner. Plus I love having the illusion that somehow I’m a better person because other representatives of the same large section of rock that I was born on have a tendency of winning a lot of the games. Plus there’s all that human drama that usually I just don’t have time to spend an entire season after season after season watching; I mean, it’s hard enough for me to carve out a life for myself as it is without devoting myself to the sports that come more often than once every four years . . .”

“Am I the only one who notices that you tend to watch the women play sports more than the men? I mean, I know you’d like to think you’re better than a guy watching women for their body’s sake, but you do tend like to watch the women’s events more than the men’s . . .”

“Not when it come to running!”

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Lately I’ve experienced pity when running across those who clearly could choose for themselves something better. This being on the brain, I decided to write a meditation on what I would call the source of most problems. I believe this bit of writing reveals good news after all, but then again, I did choose at some point to become an optimist for reason’s sake.

Fear

Here it is so dark that as the question goes through my mind, do I even exist at all?, I cannot be sure that there was a person present to think said thought. Darkness; pure and complete. Blackness implies a tint, a comparison color that betrays some form of hope; such a concept is too bright for this place. The murkiness like drops of ink in water fill the mind slowly; cover through every brain cell and take root down into the base of one’s spine and then back through to surround the heart to stop its beating and suffocate the lungs by making their purpose null. And then the removal of the light sets in as the perfect suffocation of self-existence makes one a slave to any image of conception that could reflect light, and thus betray the broken mind into believing is preferable to the waking death where the absence of even the hope of a promising nightmare reigns supreme.

It is here where the nightmare’s noose tightens its hold around the neck unable even to gasp; to the contrary, the neck is grateful to be able to feel, it longs to have claws to be able to see before feeling that it is not alone as those claws begin to keep the neck company, and even make its acquaintance intimately.

And once the pain has declared loudly for the conception of the blind that that pain is all the world has left to offer, it is only then that an apple made of glass hangs just out of reach with a single ray of light shining upon it to remind the blessed one taken from the perfect non-existence of light that there is such a thing as hunger, such a thing as beauty, such a thing as joy, and that try as the one might, such an entity will always be just out of reach, and false if ever by accident it were to be obtained.

To the blind one made to look at the ray of light as though the only blessing in the world a voice speaks muffled by the joy of the dangling out of reach, “Look away from poverty and see inside yourself the light by which you could escape by opening your eyes to the world as it exists in truth,” and those afraid will always look away from themselves: for to see one’s self one would need first to close one’s eyes, and that would mean depriving themselves by choice of the only light they could conceive from the breadth of experience they never chose to enact for the sake of enjoyment as existence they cannot believe because despite the voice telling them something better exists if they look toward what looks like darkness from a lack of experience, their own belief of experience tells them to obey their master.

And so the false fruit dangles, and one may take solace that it is never eaten.

But fear does not like joy, and so the day comes when the fruit is placed in “lover’s” hand to be eaten; and on that day, that one prefers having food to eat as opposed to blinking for a glance inward toward the freedom of all-being burning with joy for all existence to partake.

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This one just kind of slinked its way into my brain and so I started tapping . . .

Everyone Loves . . .

I slink through the creek bed under a low cool stream across the smoothed stones. I then slink onto cool, mossy sandy shore over logs and through bushes. I slink up a tree to rest for the night. Slinking is all I do, you see, I, am a slinky.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, that’s just plain silly! But, It’s true. What you don’t realize is that after the last election, when Mitt Romney became president, he launched a nuclear attack against Iran, accidentally sent one of the nukes into Israel, Israel fired back at the U.S., then China fired at Israel because they wanted their money from the U.S., the U.S. fired at China because the U.S. always has the back of the holy land, and Pakistan started firing in every direction because it got scared, which of course set India off, and all you people died in a horrible fiery mess because you didn’t learn your lesson the last time you hired the town idiot to be president. Of course, the truly odd thing is the way my species was created because of the radiation. The cockroach people of Marseilles were created due to the increased ambient radiation, but not my species; not directly anyway.

No, we formed a slightly different way. After the blasts, several Slinkys went slinging off in different directions from the sheer force of the explosions alone. Those with the most momentum wound up slinking at before unheard of velocities through all sorts of different animal and vegetable matter. A slinky passed through some lichen, the carcass of a opossum, picked up a couple of ants, got wound up in some tree leaves, was drenched in the blood of a moose, then wound up in the festering radioactive abdomen of a human being. After stewing in that abdomen for about five minutes all the genetic material fused, and a new species was born. Imagine if a worm had a spine and was hairy!

Of course, that wasn’t the only of our species created. I mean, that many Slinkys flying off at such high speeds in that many directions through all that raw genetic material with so many radioactive human torsos to incubate in, the odds were simply in the favor of the genus of slinkskus that day! And so, depending on the region where the Slinkys flew and the indigenous flora and fauna of those regions, accordingly different species of slinkskus emerged. Basic evolution for you really.

So, about 500 years after the fact, here I am slinking through a lush wood in North America. We’ve developed a basic society in which we share whatever we need with each other and serve each other all we can give to make each other happy to the best of our individual abilities. We work together to make sure that none are ever wanting the basics for living healthily enough to be able to cultivate more individually than merely health. And the rule of our society on all parts of the world is simple and thereby successful: First, do no harm. It’s sad that the human beings weren’t able to conceive of a concept so practical and so simple, but, you can’t really hold a stupid bunch of primates accountable can you? I mean, that’s the thing about lower intelligence, you just can’t hold it against them for not thinking in terms of their own best interests.

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So the first one I wrote most of while watching improv comedy. This one I wrote while listening to my friend sing the blues with her band. I don’t know if I’ll be writing anymore episodes while viewing other forms of art, but as of now she is officially recurring, if not but just for now . . .

Winding Road

Leslie stood and took one step forward. Two steps later across the carpeted floor and she was walking through the wall painted white; one step later she saw her other foot through to a dirt path winding through the trees, her house nowhere behind her to be found.

Her bare feet continued down the soft, cool dirt. A butterfly by her eyes and the flowers of purple, blue, red, and yellow peeking out through the high, green grass seemed to breathe all around her. Behind her it all began to swirl and blend into itself as slowly the path began to be closed in upon by the colors melting into one another. As she stepped forward along the path, a young deer that had recently lost its spots began to follow alongside her. As it continued to follow, its spots of red, white, and purple reappeared and then shortly after again dropped away as she journeyed onward.

Two trees arose either side of her and met at their tops where the branches swayed together as though holding hands in a gentle dance. From that gentle swaying their arms descended together slowly before her, and Leslie took the ends of the branches from both trees in her hands for a moment as though making the acquaintances of both. The trees then raised their arms together again toward the heavens where they returned in holding each other in reverence to the light and vapor suspended in the blue above where occasionally a bird would pass by.

The path slanted ever-so-slightly upward between the trees as, accompanied by her sometimes multi-spotted friend, she made her way onward. The next butterfly to pass by her eyes winked at her from one of the spots on its wing; she decided this particular forest was without question a friendly one.

Looking backward for a moment, she saw the colors swirling over the path behind her. She smiled and stopped walking. She stood still and waited while staring forward. The colors continued to blend forward over the path until at last coming to her heels. She felt herself lifted and carried, her journey forward begun again, the deer just ahead of her and to the side out of reach of the melted forest. Forward the journey continued, and Leslie was delighted to feel herself sliding ever forward, wound around trees as she was glided to following the same path upon which she would be walking had she been left to her own two feet.

Upward it carried her off the forest floor, her four-legged companion continuing its following alongside the path alone down below. Standing still, she felt herself being levitated over the tops of trees and toward the mountain’s summit. Over the next half of an hour she found herself encircling the protrusion of rock, soil, and trees. Round and round was she raised until to the top, where land plateaued, was she brought to rest by that which had carried her this far. Brought no further, she took a single step forward onto the clearing that which she stood upon was now perfectly aligned with. At the other end of the clearing she saw the end of a simple path of dirt where a young deer with spots occasionally dropping off was eating blades of grass sticking out between the flowers.

In the field before her were many flowers, like large daisies, with petals that alternatingly flowed black to white to black to white to black to white continuously through every petal almost as far as her eyes could reach. In the middle of this clearing was a single, giant red rose that reached high upwards and bloomed toward the heavens. It was to the rose she walked now.

There at its base, she looked up and down at the many thorns that grew from its stem. The thorns were so large, though, that they posed no threat of accidentally sticking her. In fact, she assessed at a glance that they seemed to be close enough together that they formed what looked like a sort of ladder that went all the way up the flower’s stalk. Taken as such, she grabbed onto the thorn closest to her accordingly.

Hand-over-hand, foot-by-foot, until coming finally to the hip of the rose, she plunged her hand into a petal sticking up from it, then her other hand into the petal beside it, and between petals she climbed her way into the giant flower. Once her feet were inside, she climbed up a particular petal until it took her up to the flower’s edge, and there she sat.

The scent of the flower filled her as rose while she looked below between forest and path and the swirled color that had brought her to the field below. Then, turning, the sun’s iris looked at her. The eye lighting the sky stared only for a minute or two toward Leslie, then looked down, followed by an eyelid that closed over it before it descended for her below the forest’s floor. During the minute it took for the sun to set, the sky filled with color before opening to black embedded with diamonds everywhere she set her gaze. She marveled to see what she was made of shining upon her from every direction. She turned her body toward the center of the flower and lay down to better breathe in the rose-scented universe with her eyes. She allowed every part of her musculature, mind, and heart to relax. She felt her self as though dissolved into the petal atop which she lay; she felt her self sway coolly, gently with the breath of the cosmos; she let the dazzling jewels of stellar flesh above her fill her eyes and her smile.

Some hours later the sun decided to raise itself again to a place where the sky filled with rainbow, and there the sun stayed. She raised herself by her fingertips atop the petal and inched forward toward the rose’s center until gravity could take the work over, and she glided down into the rose’s core. Feet-first she flowed down, and in, surrounded by fragrance and the silken smooth of the petal upon which she rode. She felt surrounded and hugged by its heart as she continued sliding downward and through. Laughing, she blinked while being engulfed in the pure red. When her eyes opened from her blink, she stood again in the middle of the carpet, surrounded by the white walls of her home. She wondered where her next step would take her.

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Hi all! I’ll be walking Relay for Life this weekend, and, as is such my new story won’t go up until next Sunday. Hope y’all have a good week, and, if you haven’t checked it out yet I hope you take a look at the two-parter I posted most recently Wizardry part 1, and Wizardry part 2. Or for that matter please peruse older entries. In the meantime enjoy the walking-related music below.

TTFN!

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