Bed Time Story 2 (51 text messages to my sister)

It was a routine take off.  The sun was low and behind, about to tuck itself to bed behind the Monmut mountains edging the salt basin of the Campmine desert

She prepared as usual when her alarm went off at five p.m. playing loud, nudging her out of dreams

It was her favorite song.  Slow jazz but not easy listening.  The woman on the record asked, in her bowling ball tenor rolling across the jazz lounge smoke through flower hats and bow ties "how are youuuu, todaaaaayayeaye.  I came here to playaaaaayeaye"

She didn't light up after her hand swiped the red digited clock off her night stand

Today was the same, but a little different.  The city lights would be on beneath her.  The stars would wink to life above her, but the X-two two four around her was on her maiden record attempt and her nerves were steel.

At the edge, a mistake of any proportion could be fatal.  Nerves were unreliable.  Senses, however, could get her back home

The briefing went well.  She painted her nails a vioently subtle purple while her black coffee steamed in its styrofoam cup while the lieutenant went on and on about the fighter/bombers specifications in front of the touch screen while she tried to find a comfortable way to sit in a plastic folding chair in a room too hot and not think about where in hell the annual budget went

Janice already went over the six hundred page manual twice and knew it backwards and front.   she could've Built the damn thing in the time the briefing took.  

She blew on her fingertips and sipped some more coffee. 

Outside of the bubble canopy, the sun laid deep red and orange streaks across the salt flats, bunkers, and air traffic tower where dinosaur fish hundreds of feet long used to swim.

She whistled her song into her respirator, nodding her head and thinking about how good it would be to touch down and take off her twenty pound helmet.

Glancing left and right, runway lights came to life, she reminded herself she didn't have to wait for the weapons crews to load up the hard points on the X-224s wings.  Her wings.

It was not a weapons test.  It was a dual test of woman and machine and settling in to her cockpit, adjusting her harnesses, she moved her gloved hand to the throttle without a cloud in the sky


"alright, Lionmane, its just you and me today.  Be good.". She toggled her radio switch with a wink to her in helmet display, the dual turbines thrumming quiet as an aeroplane is capable behind  her head.

"This is Rainbow Nugget, ready for all go on your signal Walking Stick."

The control tower came back, the controller chuckling at her call sign despite himself, "Rainbow nugget, you are clear for go.  Be safe out there.  Don't scratch the paint."

"I'll bring him back in one piece, you get the wine cooling.  I'm gonna need a pick me up when this is over." she winked again at her visor display and took a deep breath.

Without the crackle of the radio, the jet engine buzz was too quiet.  Her left hand flew across the dials and switches on her console, yellow lights blinking softly to solid green.

The chime rang through the cockpit.  Lionmane X two two four sighing back "I am ready"

She toggled the brake switch, turned on her wing tip and running lights and hauled on the throttle with her right.

The tower half a mile away tore through her vision as the engines screamed.  Water condensed on the canopy front, capturing the sun at her back in burned gold droplets as she broke the sound barrier once and then twice.

She winked her radio back on and barked against the breast squeezing gee force: "systems stable.  Vertical climb!"

The X-224s landing gear mashed the sand like a drunk through the middle of a street hanging onto their beau for dear life before finally letting go.

The twin tails streaked into the evening sky as she held the throttle at maximum.  The Tower, miles behind, came back.  "Rainbow Nugget, you are clear.  Have you on the board.  You are on pace for time to climb record."

"Systems stable!" she barked back, Earth doing everything it could to collapse her lungs

Over her shoulder, as the engines screamed and the composite alloy frame of the X 224 shook, the sun began to rise over the sloping peaks of the Monmut mountain ridge.

The basin beneath her shrank to a football field and then a coin.  She held the throttle down.  The Tower came back: "Rainbow Nugget, you are clear, you are clear. Looking good."

Janice grit her teeth, "I know!"

The sun shone like mid day.   her visor tinted itself, twin contrails scorching upward.  "Afterburn!" she shouted as her pressure suit began to force circulation through her limbs. 

With all of the strength she could muster she lifted her hand from the throttle, flipped the clear plastic cover from the bright yellow and black deadmans switch and pressed the lime green button at its center

At the base, 30 pounds of TNT went off over their heads.  The control tower shook like a twig in a thunderstorm as the lionmanes engines tore the sky apart and two new stars blazed to life in the evening sky.

The Tower came back, "we have you on visual!" unable to contain their calm.

Janice held her thumb to the switch and touched the stick with the gentleness of a mother cleaning a kitten.

The canopy turned, too quickly at first, and more slowly.  Janice gave a ferocious glance across the console before risking turning her head away.

The canopy spun at her fingertips and as she climbed the sun set again behind the shadow of her wing tip.

The sky began to darken and the lights of Santa Monica, Las angeles, Eugene, San Antonio, Austin, and Denver grew brighter and brighter. "Where's Mexico city," she chuckle rasped to herself.

"Rainbow Nugget, you've got the record, bring him in whenever you're green."  She nodded, tearing her eyes away from the ground. 

"I hear!" she barked, not yet ready.  The sky turned blue and then black and in that midnight blanket the stars came to life in front of her. 

All around they shined with a brilliance that pulled at her heart harder and harder as she held her thumb to the afterburn switch

"Rainbow Nugget, be advised you're running out of air up there."

"Walking Stick, I hear y-" the X- 224s thrashing rumble ceased.

The g forces crushing her body reversed direction and threw her forward hard enough to send her hand through her head up display atop her console, shattering it

"Rainbow we have you losing speed, copy?"

The stars began to spin outside of the canopy.  City lights, then stars, then cities again.  Her eyes raced, cueing the visor display to go to this and that menu, lines of information and diagrams and maps whipping by.  They raced like one hundred horses loosed from their  pens across her in helmet display

Steady green lights turned to flashing yellow and then sharp and solid red.  "Rainbow, do you copy??"

as her eyes raced they picked out pieces of information. "Flame out," she shouted to herself as she rammed the throttle to zero and worked her hands across the dials.

"Come back?" the Tower shouted through her earpiece.

"Flameout!  Walking Stick!  Flameout!" She winked at her visor to close the radio link as her hands continued to work furiously.

The X -  224 no longer arrowed upward.  It spun end over end until momentum could carry it no further and began its descent.  With no more air to feed engines, the lionmane became a  fuel filled 3000 pound free falling bomb

"air brakes," she told herself, "now!"  her hands flew and the lionmanes frame rumbled with the back up hydraulic systems effort beneath her ejector seat

"im not giving up on you!" she shouted at her console, her eyes flying behind her visor as the stars spinning outside her canopy began to wink out and the sun began to rise again.
She pumped the fuel from nothing to the kitchen sink as the X 224s end over end flattened out into a frisbee toss. "god damn it, remember!"

Her mind tore through the pages of the manual and the briefing and the sequences as she read her speed by altitude and knew she could fire the landing gear without ripping it clean off.

The city lights slipped completely from view as the Monmut ridge rotated in and out of view
She pumped the fuel from nothing to the kitchen sink as the X 224s end over end flattened out into a frisbee toss. "god damn it, remember!"

Her mind tore through the pages of the manual and the briefing and the sequences as she read her speed by altitude and knew she could fire the landing gear without ripping it clean off.

The city lights slipped completely from view as the Monmut ridge rotated in and out of view

She pulled up her backup head up display inside her helmet and caught her heart in her mouth.  The zeroes on the altimeter were disappearing much too fast.

She pumped the fuel from nothing to the kitchen sink as the X 224s end over end flattened out into a frisbee toss. "god damn it, remember!"

Her mind tore through the pages of the manual and the briefing and the sequences as she read her speed by altitude and knew she could fire the landing gear without ripping it clean off.

The city lights slipped completely from view as the Monmut ridge rotated in and out of view

"Fire!  You son of a bitch, fire!"  The fuel light blinked from yellow to green.  The main hydraulic light showed solid green. 

She tore her respirator from her face.  "Start!"  she rested her left hand on her ejector lever and hammered the throttle.

Above the tower a roar tore through the late afternoon sky.

Miles up two contrails ran like rails to the east as one and then another sonic boom rattled windows across state lines.

Janice pulled back on the throttle once the lights held and began a slow and looping decent to the salt basin, her heart still pounding.

She winked her radio on.  "This is Rainbow Nugget for Walking Stick"

"Walking Stick here."

"Bringing him in."

"We have you on the board, the field is clear Rainbow Nugget.  You've got the altitude record too"

  The twin turbines thrummed in Janice's ears as she sighed, "glad to hear it," and winked her radio off.

The debriefing was going to be harsh, but no one could ever take the record away from her.

As the tires on the X 224s landing gear hit the salt and sand and rolled the beast along the runway past the control tower, Janice began to whistle and think about sleep.  She sang softly as she shut down the engines "how are you today?" and the sun set behind the Monmut mountains

Gnite. <3 div="" u="">

///Cleveland Lounge - "Drowning (Scuba Mix)"  all the best to you on your sleep swim

Good Night

It was a productive night. Got some things done. Bits For Flames got an infusion of life. I still have to start composing the page indexes. Gotta do it by hand because there's no Wordpress to do it automatically, but that's okay. I'll start them later today. I feel pretty good about it. I feel calm. Almost undeservedly so. Be back at it later.

///Unkle - "Heaven" like sex with someone who cares more about you than you could ever care about yourself and you put it away in a box for a rainy day, though you can't remember the last time you checked the forecast or opened the pages of a newspaper and read about the rest of your world.

The Fringeness of Earnesty and High Cycles

I'm sort of coming to realize, well first of all I think I've been talking too much again, but I'm sort of coming to realize that I am a fringe personality. I was pretty delusional back in 2004. I thought I was cooler than the other side of the pillow beneath the boss cat's hipster transformers cartoon printed footie pajamas. Then I started to see the full Lawrence of Arabia letterbox landscape of who I was. Then even seeing that I started to believe again. Then I thought maybe the strangeness was the strangeness of perhaps a Kramer and desirable for the sake of its own quirks and prats. Now I'm beginning to understand that what it is really is the quality of fringe. I was beginning to think about what I could do to tear that away and assume a lower charge. No clue. My charge is way too high. By the time I get near to people I'm ravenous for company and traveling at speeds that break bones and all of me wants to talk at once. Not that quiet is a bad thing. I'm a fantastically introverted extrovert. I couldn't live with me. I shouldn't expect other people to. Right?

Well anyway, I'm going to try and keep these shorter. There's no lightness to being. There's no likeness to seeing. I'm camping at the edges of some things I shouldn't be near. Not that they keep calling me, but it's more like a landmark that lets me navigate the rest of the solid world. Or not even that. I have a hard time keeping track of progression. The importance of cause and effect is. I suspect the problem might be that I am difficult to relate to, but with slight effort able to be comprehended and possessing sightlines worth following when I am close to my best, and I am violent, obscure, unpredictable, melancholy, intensely introspective, restless, and largely inchoate and impossible to relate to when I am not near my best. Problematic. But at least I'm starting to understand how or at least why it seems I'm regularly fallen into Kuiper radial movements. I'll stop calling them every weekend. They'll get out the telescopes and rovers and years of planning and clean rooms and staffs of scientists and damage controllers when they're ready to see me blow by along the edges of the perceivable solar system.

I've also realized that my head is most active when I'm turning my motor at work. So now I take notes on my phone. Good. A fine start. Because by the time I'm ready to leave work and I get to my door at home I can't remember half of the things I started in my head while I was there. I'm losing lines. Each object in is another out. So now I can chase the high cycles like dust motes. I don't know why it didn't occur to me sooner. I guess I thought they'd think I was texting people. Just texting myself. Tracking my information. Taching my spin. My head always seems to run the hottest when I can forget my body or perhaps simply push in the clutch linking it to. Corporeal fault lay line.

Some advances were made at Bits. Not many. I like the layout, but I need to learn how to manipulate the blogger gadgets so I can create my own with proper attribution. Still waiting for the end of the world, but I'm happy to be doing so in a city I love. Let's dance till the sun comes up. I'll bring the scissors. Sometimes they tell me things I don't know.

///Juno Reactor - "Las Vegas Future Past" She runs great. Good idle. Clean title. Half the miles were done a quarter at a time too. Been to Vegas a couple times in it. You ever see one of these wide open on the interstate? It's got a sound like you wouldn't believe.

Tired, but Still Looking

But I don't want the rest of the world to know I'm ready to call a time out. More movement in the bedroom again. Had to turn all the lights on yesterday to verify there was not a foot and a half tall little round black thing running around the edges of my bed. A face poked through my cigarette smoke. Scared the living shit out of me. Not a human face. Kind of looked like a really big nosed lizardy thing. Where do these bastards keep coming from.

I missed you all week. It sucks that we can't hang out more. On working days I have to chop 10 to 11 hours out of my day. 8 at work plus 2 in transit plus an extra one to two depending on how huge a slacker co-workers are being and how much work has to be made up at the end of the day. Out of the 12 hours left I usually have to spend at least 8 asleep so my muscles can knit up again for the next days work (if I don't I've found fatigue stacks up like bad heartburn and just as suddenly). So I've got 4 hours to handle midweek clerical stuff, working out, showering, making lunch for the next day, making a breakfast, and making a dinner if I want one. It's tough.

Discovered bits for flames is gone yesterday. Apparently the domain lapsed. Bad news. Worse news is I'm pretty sure all the files are lost except for the templates and graphics I saved on my desktop which is still trapped in NYC. So now there's a new one I made on blogger. It won't be as functional, but it'll be the story store house. Bits For Flames. I'm so tired tonight. I got lost again in Edgewood. Not on purpose. Have been doing a lot of traveling in dreams though I can't find the train station I used to use so I got lost and aggravated there too trying to find the bus station. Eventually I gave up and hopped in a car with a jitney who took me down to the industrial complex. I don't know why I wanted to go there. In fact I think I was supposed to be somewhere else, but he took me there anyway. I took some great pictures before I woke up. Wish I could draw them for you. It was breath taking.

///Air - "The Vagabond (featuring Beck)" I do the best I can not to worry about things. It's stupid, but all I want right now is god damn hug before I go take on another day of work instead of writing. I want some scotch. I just want to be a little warmer inside than I am right now.

Think Harder

I take back what I said about New York not being an art hub. If you think about it, the population density is what makes it something of an art hub. If, as I previously suggested, it is no more an art center than any other city because art and art production chiefly exists within the minds of a cities occupants, more occupants means a denser more interleaved art community (not necessarily more interconnected). If we want to value a cities artistic merits based upon production and the potential for creative growth then NYC rightfully ranks high. If we want to assign value to the degree of interleaving and interconnection that produces art like a gene pool than NYC likely won't rank nearly as high as smaller cities and that is because smaller cities possessing the critical mass of community participation that makes increasing densities only marginally more appealing or useful to the community of artists then a smaller city would easily rank higher for the simple matter that the weave will have fewer threads and more contacts between the threads that do exist.

Surely the potential exists for a person who specializes in technical writing to meet up with a fashionista and produce something God awful or God sent, but as the population density grows well beyond the critical (and indeterminate) density of creating minds the chances of that meeting shrinks and the potential for compartmentalization and xenophobic design grows. I think that's what I was trying to get at before. NYC is not what I expected because I hadn't considered the difficulties in meeting with other people across the geographic mass (if you laid out every floor of NYC in a two dimensional plane it would probably be half of the size of New York proper) or the difficulties entailed in navigating the purposeful dilution of the contacts being made by those who aren't actual producing artists, but who seek to participate for lesser motives (if personal motivations can be ranked from the pure artist to the profiteer and name plater). And that is what has been a little bit of a let down.

The upshot of this is that the individuals are statistically "out there". I just have to find them. So I'm going to start actively looking through my terrible internet connection. I doubt I will find many in Queens, not as a generalization of the population's abilities, but absolutely as a generalization of the population's visible activities.

I think there was something else. Was there something else? Well, look, I wanted to do the inception poster and I am fed up with thinking about it and knowing that I can't upload it even if I did do it so check this out:

_h

^^^There's your poster. I was going to draw an old school circa 80s architecture chair falling backward into claw foot tub with geometric water and various aging and weathering appliqués and pastel Pantones. Since I'm on a 56kbps connection you'll have to settle for the low low loooow fi version. Bam, done. Well at least now you have the recipe so you can go do it. Stick with reds and grays for the text and a faded yellow tub with seawater colors in the tub or some combination of those colors with a two or three color palette for that really nice low budget mass distribution feel. At least that's what I think about the matter.

Lastly I hate middlemen. I spent some time today trying to think of a fun way to describe them. The hand shakers. The go betweeners. The thing is, middlemen are essential to civilization, but even in "uncivilized" society they serve fairly critical roles. I tried to find an axiom that painted them honestly without coloring the words with my own misgivings and hatred of where I fall in the relationship of middlemen to the greater contingent. I came up with: "Middlemen: Making Life Easier and More Expensive for Everyone Since the Dawn of Time". I think that about sums it up. They let us all be lazier. They give us opportunities to pay for opportunities to pay for things and it's so difficult to be on the paying side of their equation. If you're on the production side, you love middlemen. Middlemen find you purchasers. Middlemen create your demand where none may otherwise exist. They help you find customers and they help customers find products, but for absolutely everyone involved costs go up. American is the land of the middleman and if you produce anything or buy anything your dollar costs just went through the God damned roof of what they ought to be. Your time and energy costs may have gone down, but that's an artificial deflation. A trick of conversion and magical math and the incomprehensibly tangled relationship of the greenback promise note to what it cost you to get that slip of paper. There's a special hell for the middlemen. And wouldn't it be hilarious if it was managed by middle managers who answered to no one.

No, I suppose it wouldn't be hilarious. It would be Six Flags America.

You know how I know we're not in hell yet? Scratch that. I don't know. Added a story to Bits. Suck on that. Or just read it. Is it bad if you go to a job interview and they don't tell you what the job actually entails, but ask you to come back for an all day interview? I hope it's a boiler room orientation and not the beginning of a real life Battle Royale. Both were good movies, but the main reason why I would prefer Boiler Room to Battle Royale is that I still have writing to do and can't really afford to risk death on an Island. Well, no I take even that back. Lots of take backs today. The thing is, if I die, something is bound to be published. And that's all a body can really ask for. That and a spectacular death.

///Pink Floyd - "Shine on you Crazy Diamond VI" It takes a lot of musicianship to hold a listener for 12 solid minutes. The Red Hot Chili Peppers almost nailed something close in their song Californication, but they fell several hooks short and ended up with something you can nod off to after the first minute and wake up to in the last minute. Floyd nailed it. Experience enhancers optional.

Bits for Flames Front Page is Done!

Click the screenshot to see it close up. I am so thrilled and tired and thrilled. The only thing missing is the "about" and "contact" links. I dropped out that entire poor excuse for a nav bar because it was making the page way too long and chunky and it is awesome without it. God damn, if you could see me smiling right now. I almost don't know what to do with myself. I feel like a kid who just finished a macaroni and glue master piece and I want to show everyone my grimy piece of paper. That's how happy I am.



///Aim-"Fall Break" I am looking forward to an Autumn that'll cool summer's misgivings and rages and bruises.

Front Concepts and the Update Status

This is taking a little longer than I expected, hence a lack of fiction updates. Hopefully now that I have a much better idea of where I want to go with it, the actual php execution will flow fast and hard.

Concepts below.


I'm leaning much closer to doing something in line with this:



This one feels a little to much like cut and paste clip art to use as a header for the more organic processes I go through in creating the fiction on Bits, even though I feel it does capture how I feel about the story ideas that strike me and burn up my brain cycles until I get them down on paper:



Maybe a cross between the two we let me rest easier.

And with that, I am hitting the hay. More tomorrow, and I will do my damnedest to add one story to the fiction content every two or three days while I work on the graphic presentation. Promise.

///Ladytron- "CSKA Sofia" A dreamy anthem for a sleepy kid.

More Panels and Main Mock Up On Deck

So I think I might be done with panel art for now. Time to make slices and dress the site, but first the show.

Redid the GolfcartFlamingo logo entirely because the previous one looked way too everything. It was, in a word, tacky. I think it worked out better the second time around. A little bummed I didn't get to work an old Camaro into the motif, but it's better without it.



And the main panel for the fiction portal:

I haven't decided if I want this to be it:


Or if I want this to be it:


Well anyway, main page mockup is finally on the work bench. Here we go...

///The Arcade Fire - "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)"

Back at Bits for Flames and Hearing Some Hip Hop

Well the recap will have to wait until later tonight. Right now I'm back at Bits For Flames content injection into the fiction section of the site.

More graffix. This will be the Rant.Muse logo:



graphics will go up once i finished the other three panels. Partly because I want to do all the php at once, and partly to crack a whip on my own ass to "get 'r done". Hope you're liking the new and improved use of grammar. Remember when this thing was entirely stream of consciousness? Ah, the rebellious days of a couple weeks ago. Feels like it was just yesterday...

///Five Deez - "Sexual for Elizabeth" If hip-hop, at it's highest, most visible, most accessible and marketable levels were all about the instrumentals for just one month out of every year, it would be a beautiful thing. I would say "bring art back into hip-hop", but art didn't go anywhere. Sometimes you just have to look a little harder (something I'm honestly not always willing to do when it comes to hip-hop). This track, though not brand new, still inspires me to look a little closer instead of turning away from the entire scene altogether.