Weather forecast at 28

“ I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end. ”
— Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

 [Drafted 10/11/17, edited December]

Weather forecast at 28:
 I seem to finally be growing into myself. My behavior has become in-line with my age; my financial situation has become in-line or somewhat above-average, though I foresee it skewing to below-average into my 30s; my syntax seems to still be keeping ahead of my age, according to others; my looks have overtaken my age, also according to others.

When people find out I moved to Colorado, they ask how I like it; this is the most common question I'm asked. Because many of the people asking have also come from out-of-state, I get the impression they're seeking confirmation that we're all having fun and have made the right choice in moving.

I hypothesize there are many forms of vampirism here, not all of which are directly related to Colorado. I do feel more worn down here than I did in Dallas, which is part of the reason I'm abandoning the geography. The atmospheric dryness is one form of vampirism, compounded by my work at the library - books can be very water greedy at times - though I find that to be a somewhat acceptable occasion to be sucked dry, as it were.

I think Tuesdays are my favorite in the work week. Often the office will empty or be mostly empty and I can complete my work and do what I want. It reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode about a man who does to an office-for-one each day to perform seemingly meaningless work for an unseen employer.
Thursdays are my least favorite day in the work week. People linger to meet with a VP who comes in town. It means having to order Jimmy John's. And I want nothing to do with that restaurant. The orders are always wrong. And the twenty-two year old assistant manager mewls from his office: "When will my free lunch get here? When will I have my Jimmy Chips?" And I close the door to his office on him. I can balance budgets, payment schedules, and work flows, but somehow I can't sort out lunch orders. Eventually I am in my car with my own homemade lunch, and it's Fall, and I watch falling leaves cover my windshield. At the end of the day I drive home, leaving a cloud of leaves behind me; the Spirit of Winter casting aside the remains of the living.

This has been a year of large personal growth in Colorado.
Things I have come to realize about myself:
1. I pay more attention to my face blindness; actually noticing my reliance on body structure, and the way people carry those bodies, to recall who they are. People look askance when I mention it.
2. I sometimes feel light-headed. I see things more often, that persist longer; lights, shadows, and random color vibrancy of objects. I have always payed attention to tricks of light, and distortions due to fatigue since I was young. I distinguish past-day examples from present-day occurrences.
3. Small internal battles are ongoing; the challenges to reality; and feeling like everything is chaos and targeting me, when it is within me projecting outwards (I have only noticed this happening once, and it stopped when I noticed it). ["Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - PKD]

This is a survey of themes that recurred throughout 2017. I'm looking forward to the coming changes of 2018 with mute excitement and hope. This is, perhaps, the most human I can be: to turn from the American Dream of a guaranteed comfortable cage and continuously pursue freedom, which carries with it its own special brand of contentedness. Lastly, I miss my books and look forward to being reunited with them.

The Universe

Medium: Sand, Black Construction Paper
Magnification: 100x

Cardcaptor Sakura

Tree Without Bark

Those who react quickly and calmly survive. Those who live very long, perhaps react slowly (viz. via a different time frame), and have other defenses that allow them to survive. Animals use their senses to avoid or overcome peril; trees develop tough skin to withstand dangers. I'm too slow for adequate logical reaction, and too frail for experiences that may wash over me.
A tree without bark.

The Ghost in the Shell

Humans can't help but think of themselves in animal terms, physically and behaviorally; e.g. having a cat-like appearance, or moving with cat-like grace. If they were to come back after death, the answer is invariably as some sort of living thing, often not another human experience. People naturally fall back on what is known and comfortable, which means looking backward. They don't consider machines as an acceptable next step and purposely stunt their evolution. Presumably, this is due to the fear of a loss of human sensations, which some might consider the loss of what it means to be human/alive.

The ecological definition of "keystone species" is one that can be used as a signal of environmental problems, or would lead to drastic changes if it were completely removed. In other words, a keystone species is an important link in the web making up a biome. I think an alternate definition is a species that can replicate the services of another integral species that migrates or dies off. As the cognitive apex species, humans have created problems as well as manifested solutions. But there is a limit to the number and types of gaps we can fill. However, as tool-makers, we are creating thoughtful artifacts that can solve many more problems more efficiently. Prediction: Robots and AI will be the next apex keystone species.

Earth is becoming cognizant. In the pursuits of efficient information sharing, consumption, and leisurely distraction, humans are laying the needed infrastructure of tubes, lines, and satellites. The planet is receiving an artificial nervous system on top of the natural nervous system. Like ants manipulating fungi, assisting the creation of networks, who knows at what point a global consciousness would arise, and what it would look like.

Reality, As We Know It

Sleeping In

Weekend Plans

Atey Ghailan

Serial Experiments Lain

Serial Experiments Lain

Seen at a Thanksgiving Table

A long ovular table comfortably surrounded by chairs. Family is seated to dinner: old and young, immediate and extended. The typical dinnertime conversations of those who don't get together often: where one is and what one does. Occasional pseudo-intellectual topics proffered over the glowing screen of a smartphone. At the table, I feel like I've seen this before, and I have. The family/friend reunion meal shown in innumerable movies and TV shows, inspired by, or modeled after, us. Only this time I'm in the movie, although too perturbed to participate in the acting. I look over my shoulder and see myself standing in a doorway, seeing the scene from the appropriate perspective of a camera - watching me watch myself.

Images of Love

Compression (Fragment)

My body is actively compressing itself into a single point in space. The bridge of my mouth closes in and teeth jumble together. The body naturally falls into a sitting position, followed by slouching, and continued crumpling and folding. The body shrinks with age, making the mathematically perfect form of a point the oldest thing in existence. Upon closer inspection, what appears to be a point gains depth and texture. Like approaching and entering a perfectly circular hole in the ground, the sides of the passage develop higher resolution in passing. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that, with careful observation, I can feel my body converging and I am becoming infinite.

Toradora

Toradora

Yozakura Quartet OVA

Inverse Camus

'In the midst of summer, I found there was, within me, an invincible winter.' -inverse Camus

Sex

Sex is an activity that is referred to as a possession. In conversation, people say they have sex instead of doing sex. "Doing" is straightforward, but I don't understand what it means to "have" it. Therefore, it eludes me and I cannot have it.

Images of Love

Dust

Hour ten. I-70.

The beginning of the transition to numbness, the liminal moment of a road trip where you are too far to turn back and too close to stop for the day. You got up early, ate a filling breakfast, and have been stopping only to fill the tank. You aren't yet at the point of hallucinatory fatigue.

The drive is smooth and straight, and the landscape is a rolling gray-green, a red barn or silo every so often. The drive is an extended classical ambience, like the instrumentals in Moby's When It's Cold I'd Like to Die. Cars drift close behind, break slightly as they shift lanes, and very slowly drift ahead. If you weren't moving they would essentially be passing at one miles per hour.

A compact SUV passes in front of you at a distance. The driver's window lowers and a white cloud emerges and begins dissipating. In a few seconds, you drive through the transparent veil of dust. Thousands or tens of thousands of particles enter the front grill of your car, a large percentage immediately wiping out on the metal innards. The remainder enter the air intake for the interior fan and bounce through the plastic tubes until they emerge from an interior vent. Another large amount wipe out on the interior, and your clothes, and your skin. The remainder wind up in your nose, bouncing through the fleshy tubes, into the blood stream to the brain.

The back of your head prickles with gooseflesh; your hearing sounds like listening through cotton; your pupils pulse. You become aware of the various materials of the car stretching and sighing. Clouds appear to form and burst. The sunlight trickles through them causing shadow waves, like on the bottom of a riverbed. Your car passes into an extended shadow wave, the shade immediately perceptible to all senses. You shiver.

You aren't in a hurry, but you are on the run. The objective is to stay one step ahead. Sometimes you feel like a giant fleeing a human; the slowness of a single step is all that's needed to stay out of reach. The time between steps can seem long and become comfortable until the pursuer is spotted at a distance. Death approaches patiently, unperturbed. You can feel the proximity and know the time has come to move again. Time to take the next step.

Enemy

The Thirteenth Floor

In for the Night

Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo

"The snow was as my mother's tablecloth, carefully ironed each night." - Henry Thoreau
 

Cleared for Takeoff by Sammy Slabbinck

Waves

Sallie Harrison

Nichijou

By day, a wild-mannered accountant; by night, a mild-mannered swordsman.

Honey

Emma, MO

Heading west on Interstate 70 through Missouri at midday offers many picturesque views of a rural and hilly America. Even with the sun overhead, the chiaroscuro of hills and the occasional tree is evident, and the light lends that golden hue reserved for sunset pastoral scenes in landscape calendars. Everything appears still at seventy-five miles per hour; and though there are many barns, houses, and other structures for a place so remote, there are no people moving about.

The city (or town?) is Emma, MO, and if you don't recall seeing the Welcome sign, it may be that you have already left its legal vicinity. Emma, MO is 0.43 miles in area, all land, and is shaped roughly like a cheap diary's key laid north-south. The drive across the northern end, on I-70, lasted approximately 21 seconds at highway speeds. It is one of those cities where the calculated population density is a larger number than the present population. The post office closed decades before alternative written communications were invented.

Supposedly named after Emma Bemetrio, a local minister's daughter, you may anticipate a story of a father's loving dedication to his daughter; or, perhaps, a show of affection of a suitor who would very much like to offer the world to the one he loves, but only has the funds for a thin slice of Midwestern farmland. And would Emma have stuck around with such a gesture, or make the less than a minute commute on to bigger ventures? What is apparent is that the Interstate was built through it after its founding (fortuitous, or the founder's gamble in buying such a long, thin strip?), and Emma will be remembered by those who travel the road.

Mushishi: Belldrops

Lost Highway

Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo

Road Sorcerer

Sorcerers have two main methods for overcoming the obstacle of slow drivers on the road, and the choice of method is based on skill and indicative of that sorcerers personality.

The first method involves the car falling to pieces, in the pattern of an explosion, with the parts flung around the slow drivers and recombining at the head of the pack. This is flashy and intended for an audience, but requires little skill and is used by the, usually young, cocky sorcerer.

The second method is more subtle and controlled. The sorcerer, not wanting to draw attention, will act well before becoming part of the slow-down on the road, and will act only during night to remain unseen. If one follows with headlights off, the sorcerer may not notice he is observed. The vehicle will appear to get four flats at once, but without the sparks of rims scraping on cement. Gradually, the vehicle itself will appear to get flat as it submerges underground, and the sorcerer will drift through substrate until well ahead of the obstacle, and reemerge. It is a myth that sorcerers become more powerful with age; as they become older, their power simply becomes more inconsistent. For this reason, unless safety glasses and hat and scarf are worn, it is not uncommon to see sorcerers with pocked skin from rocks and chips of material that have penetrated their guard.

Caution

Through an Empty Place (The Fox Emerging from Shadow), Beth Cavener

Nichijou

Made in Abyss

Fading Light

Melissa Johnston

Spirit of Winter

The parents melded through organic chemistry
amateur engineers coalescing proteins and minerals
making the instinctual body, instructions not included.
The people grow weary of unrelenting Summer
of atoms shaking with energy until they fall apart.
The collective dream of gears slowing to a halt
in the quiet of cold fill the body. The peasants
have revolted, and the Knights of Summer
have fallen, and all becomes anew.

Sleeping In

Untitled, Bill Henson

Images of Love

Bruno Ripoche

This Isn't Happiness

Yozakura Quartet OVA

Noodles at 2am by Koutra

Nisekoi

Spirit of Winter

For someone who loves Winter's cold
you sure keep a lot of insulation, She said
dragging fingers along the walls made of books
Two feet deep of paper separating the world, realities
black ink ideas keeping out the Winter of Others.

Those walls are real in a world of propped up facades
and the natural cold of Winter did not burn his skin blue
like the air conditioning under which humans basked
Won't you fight reality with me? He asked
She didn't know if his unreality could beat reality

He recalled Tennessee Williams departing
with no certain place to go

I was human out of curiosity and, in time, I forgot who I was
The speed, distraction, and subtle intricacies of human living
I don't know who or what I am, only that I must go, find out
And you may find in the end that I was never there to begin with

In the Meantime

"A young woman who'd never been in love fell for a stranger she met through the chat program on her phone, but she discovered he was only a perfect bit of conversation software. Yet, the digital boy loved her back, and they happily spent a lifetime together. After the woman died, a record of her life - her frowns and laughter, her actions and reactions - was uploaded to the cloud, and she became the shared goddess of people and AIs."

- Xia Jia

Yozakura Quartet Hana no Uta

Field of Dreams

Ashes of Time Redux

Census

Do humans value human life? If humans were proud of human life and considered it valuable, they would be more aware of their numbers. Does anyone actually know the number of humans alive in their country, let alone the world? Google says there are 323.1 million people in the USA; 7.6 billion on Earth. Does the number round up or down? Humans without form springing into existence when the digit reaches point-five; currently living humans ceasing to exist when it is four or less, lives suddenly deemed an error of rounding.

It is too difficult to keep track of these things in real-time.

The same is said of bacteria on a microscope slide.

My Little Monster

Magikano

Fallen Angels

Fragments

He wasn't happy in high school and he didn't speak to people often. When he did, he spoke of angels.

or

By the time the company decided to offer a large salary to retain the employee, he had already turned to a mist, cascading backwards, exiting between the atoms of the walls.

Kyoukai no Kanata

Wittgenstein's Habit

Life is more enjoyed with risk. People sky dive and use strange drugs, for something different and the uncertainty of what may happen next. Other sorts of risks can be taken that are as dangerous but without action. Some people, dependents, or things inadvertently anchor you. Loosening anchors in order to experience a disengage from reality bears risk. Slowly letting the string run between your fingers, you kite upward into the atmosphere, gliding and hovering. Below, one small anchor holds down the end of the string, this thin filament that is the only way back. The ecotone between fugue and non-fugue states. It's the sky diver just before pulling the chute cord; it's the drug beginning a road trip on the body's interstate.

Ashes of Time Redux

Tale of the Phone Scammer

Under dim lights, the scam artist absentmindedly dialed the next phone number on a wrinkled piece of paper. It rang and went silent.

"Hello? Are you the homeowner? Am I speaking to the homeowner," he asked.

The phone was silent for a moment before a quiet, short-breathed whimpering came through the receiver.

"Nothing is real nothing is real nothing is real nothing is real..."

The scammer pulled the phone from his ear and looked down on it ("Nothing is real nothing is real nothing..."). He slowly looked around the room filled with dim light, which made the night coming in from the window seem even darker. He raised the phone back to his ear, and heard silence.

"AYEEEE! HAH-HA-HA-HAH-HA!"

A cackling laughter, followed by a click and a dial tone.

The scam artist called the number a few times over a period of years. There was always a busy signal.

More Things Seen & Felt

Nothing feels real here
besides the sky
like wandering onto a movie set
outlines of things propped by boards
nothing behind them
facades dyed red-blue by a volcanic sky

Chungking Express

Musaigen no Phantom World

Work (Fragment)

I work between hallucinations; alternating between ecstasy and anguish.

The Shell

The boy saw the violin on the table. He knew what it was and what it does, and he also knew he could not make it do it. He sought to understand it in his own way. So he picked it up close to his face and looked at the planes of wood; he tilted it and looked at the thin width that made up the perimeter of the F-hole. He could not see any tree rings. Holding it away from himself, he tried again. He saw the sleek curvature of the wood and the spines that were the tuning pegs and the darkness of the F-hole. He brought the violin to his ear and found he understood. He heard the sound of the forest.



*** Note: While very high, I was reading a psychology book that mentioned a test where an image is shown and the patient must make up a story about the image. The example mentioned was a boy and a violin. This is the story I made up.

Dogs of New York

Dogs of New York

Nisekoi

Mushishi: Belldrops

Dogs of New York

Images of Love

Dogs of New York