Thu 10 Dec 2009

This Is It Versus 2012 Cage Match

Posted by laup under Backwater, Meditations, Movie Madness, Outbreak
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These movies are very likely moving out of the theaters as I type this, if not already moved aside for the next installment of inefficiency Hollywood propaganda.

The question that comes to mind for me is:  Which of these two movies is an accurate rendering of the apocalypse?

This Is It begins with an acknowledgment of Michael Jackson’s death.  We the audience enter this experience knowing the ending—that the man we are about to see is dead-man-walking.  He has passed on.  And yet, through the magic of the movie screen we get to see him in the days leading up to his end, rehearsing a mega-galactic show.  When we see him, he is alive, yet we know he is dead.  This is the condition of being a god—both alive and dead, in two places at once.

I suggested in a previous post that there was something of the vampire in MJ, and seeing him during the movie I cannot help but think how supernatural he looks.  How supernatural his interactions with the other dancers, musicians, choreographers, and so on are.  One thing for sure is that MJ has total mastery over his music, his moves, and the presentation of both.  It is a supernatural experience, if you forget that he is mortal, as the movie has already stated.

What I enjoyed most about this movie is how we catch a glimpse of the show as it might have been, and how the creative process occurs as the participants work out the kinks.  It’s two shows in one.  Very much like life, because it is life and we know there is death because the endgame is in front of us.

It’s a glorious spectacle to behold, and yet the imperfection of the show as MJ tries to perfect it brings a human, individualized quality to it.  At the end, the film freezes to announce him as the King of Pop.  The show is ended, a life is ended, the movie is over.

Meanwhile, 2012 slakes our thirst for everyone to perish at the hands of impersonal forces.  You have the inviolable average white family struggling against the challenge of doomsday, with father doing most of the work and ensuring everyone stays together, everyone survives, and all interlopers are removed.

The doomsday special effects are everything one might hope, with entire buildings collapsing as thousands fall screaming into the black pit of destruction.  It’s been done before, in the first superman movie.  The death of Krypton is at least honest as it sets up a story situation.

In 2012 you get to watch billions die, the rich ensure their survival, and lip-service get paid to human values—allowing a few laborers to live long enough to become the next generation of slaves. How exciting!

Fear not, all will proceed as it has always done, with nothing changed in the fundamental social class of things or how decisions are made for the human race.  Even better, the predominantly white survivors get to settle in the new Africa and say they are where the human race began after the flood.  How convenient!

The movie truly ends about two-thirds of the way in, when the protagonists reach the islands of Hawaii, which have burst into flames.  It’s a genuinely sober moment in the story, when one realizes luck or skill or preparation will only get you do far–a message the rich would do well to contemplate.  They won’t—paying the Mammon dues will ensure their survival, right?  Nope.  End of line, program.  All fall down.

The movie ceases to be interesting after that and we focus on the passing on of life all doomsday movies are required to depict.  Don’t worry, it’ll all come out in the wash.  Give the audience enough special effects to slake their thirst for blood and a salve to their misery, but then bring them back from actually reflecting on their own clocks ticking.

The devil loves the old standby of “tell them there’s no hurry.”  Paid for itself all the way back to the beginning.

But with This Is It, the endgame is irrevocable.  Life does not continue on.  No ark of any kind, metaphorically or medically, is letting MJ perform a single show he rehearsed.  What we see is all we get.  When the end comes, that’s it.  Your number is up, no matter how frighteningly genius you are.

I watched This Is It and I felt whole, as if a truth had been spoken.  Yes, I’m seeing an edited program which excludes anything which might be construed as negative.  Yet I still found a sublime peace and sorrow at the same time.  All of us are headed into the last curtain call, no exceptions.

I watched 2012 and enjoyed the special effects.  Woody Harrelson stole the show as a crazy apocalypse nut.  But the story was all so phony.  Propaganda reassuring the owned that all will be well in a catastrophe.  It says more about the fears of the rich than it does about what the end of life on earth might be like.  The movie fosters a profoundly bleak, one-sided view of human beings.  At the end we’re right back where we started—get back to work, drones.

But MJ, standing alone against the actual, physical bulldozer coming out of the trapdoor on stage.  Trying to stop what in all reality is probably too late to change.  It’s complete farce.  Yet in that moment of the fool’s end I understood the fans, I saw the other side.  He’s gone, and I’m still alive—but even in the heartless heart of a vampire I see the good.

That’s what is known as sublime.

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Wed 9 Dec 2009

The Box

Posted by laup under Meditations, Outbreak, Playtime, Supernal Diver, Weirdie
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Adjustments continue in the honeycomb hideout.  The fallout from the haunted house has passed away and healing continues.  K and I are doing decompression and decontamination procedures, putting furniture in place while we unpack the numerous storage units.  Cleaning and minor repairs are moving along, as we make sure the heater is working, has a fresh filter, and the vents are all vacuumed out.

As I was passing by the secondary landing from the crow’s nest, Blink was poised before one of the storage units.  She mewowed at me as if to say, “Hey whattabout this one?”

Oh yeah, that storage unit.  The one that holds The Box.  One of those things you just pick up on a perfectly unremarkable day, not unlike Edward Gorey’s The Doubtful Guest.  Since I became the caretaker of The Box, I regard the contents and make adjustments, additions and subtractions as needed.  Things appear and disappear, so I never quite know what to expect.

Well, crumbs.  I suppose I ought to take The Box out and see what’s going on.  So I clear my desk and unscrew the bolts.  All the things inside are in a state of disarray and flux.  The boxes are practically hopping up and down with the need for attention.  The creatures, tools, and knick-knacks (at least I think they are knick-knacks, I’m not always sure) are all over the place.

But once I begin my meditations and direct my active imagination to the task, a new form takes shape inside The Box.  The dimensions widen out, indicating the things don’t want to be stacked anymore.  They want a horizon, a diorama of vast view.  Take it all in instead of dig for layers.

A few things leave, some never to be seen again, others wanting to return to living in the honeycomb hideout after a long hypersleep into the future which is now.  One item, my Kokeshi doll, no longer wishes to reside in The Box.  Like a heroine going on an adventure, she won’t take no for an answer.  She wants to see the world now, get involved.  I’m a little taken aback, but what she says goes.  I know she’s going to take a few hits, but maybe that will make her all the more beautiful and herself.

Then I get a real shock.  The Kali-Yoni origami box I made (at Kali’s active-imagination request) has imploded open.  Shrunk in on itself until it popped open in two pieces, yellow and black.  I don’t know what was in that box, it was a secret so unknown it could only be conceived of in a void space of emptiness, never to be opened.  I made it fully expecting it would never be opened.

There’s a crack in the top of The Box, to allow a view of the outside world.  Sometimes I adjust The Box to accommodate these sorts of requests.  Sometimes The Box does them itself.  So whatever might have been in the origami box that is popped open could have gotten out.

Indeed, I find a trail of red cloth spilling out one end of the crack, as if whatever happened pulled along until it broke free.  Yeah, I get the birth reference.  I’m still stunned.  I have to take a breather and stare for a good ten minutes before I get my act together again.

It’s almost as if I am a caretaker, a janitor and director at the same time of otherworldly things beyond my comprehension.

The new configuration slowly takes shape as I handle items and attend to their requests.  Two slumbering monsters awaken with a loud roar, stirring the ocean of red cloths that form a kind of soft playing field for certain inhabitants.  A beached behemoth finally finds a swathe of red sea foam suitable for it’s dense, impenetrable frame.

As I finish up this session of adjustment, a small lockless chest and brass symbol merge together in a way I would never have expected.  They come from two different times and places, yet they fit together as if they were two pieces of a larger puzzle.  I don’t think I can ever see these things the same, contemplating how incomprehensible their fitting together is.  I mean, if the sun and moon became one for the first time, how transforming an event that would have been for life on this planet!

No order, and so there is pattern.  Ceaseless change, and so there is eternity.  I realize it has been so long…so distant a time when I attended to this responsibility on a regular basis.  I’ve just been shuffling The Box from one battleground to another, barely keeping up with what is required.  The Box used to be much larger than it is now.  I used to be somebody too, or so I heard.

I pick up Peter Pan’s knife, and examine it closely.  Hairline cracks in whatever it’s made of, a smell of fine myrrh coming from the claw on the pommel.  Dare I remember the time I used to carry this in costume–before I walked away from Never-Never Land?  Or was it Rima the Jungle Girl who gave this to me?  I’m not quite sure.  I couldn’t fight a codfish or smile at a crocodile to save my life now.  Those days are long faded, as Lorien, Imladris, and the Grey Havens have passed into the West.  Another century altogether.

I think of a dear friend, and the conversations we used to have before I discovered The Box.  He drew out of me so many things about the haunted horrors I would face, he had to have been a prophet back then.  Now he’s a doctor, struggling against the status quo, in a very lucky place to be.  I beam every time I speak with him these days, he’s so awesome.  Back then I pretended to take it in stride, but I missed nothing.  He was right, so right on I had to pretend he was off the mark.  But now I know better.

I close The Box, quite shaken.

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Tue 8 Dec 2009

More Strange Change Machine In The Territories

Posted by laup under Announcements, Outbreak
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The surprises keep on coming.  A friend of mine is wrestling with her shadow, and exploring her deepest self right now.  Wounds, going straight to the core, hard stuff to untangle.  Her outward life is wonderful though.  She’s found a power of her own.  Awesome family, job that pays the bills and keeps her in the mix of what she likes.  Finding time to be creative despite her limits.

But oh, that wound.  She’s closed up, making time to be alone with her riddles now.  Can any of us undo a life-changing decision from the depths of time?  When we lose ourselves to the harsh cage we place over our true selves, what is the magic word that will spring us free?  The clock is ticking.

It’s a fathomless question, reaching down and above to both heaven and hell.  Here we are stuck in the middle and expected to have a clue.  That’s just how it is.  We have to pay the bills and we have to pay the price.  Both sides at once, all the while we’re running out of time to become whole before our grave cries “Bingo!”

Kimaroo, keep on truckin’.  You are wiser than you know and stronger than you realize.  Keep on doing yer time—there are miracles and get out of jail free cards and magic words.

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Mon 7 Dec 2009

Another Surprise Menagerie Update

Posted by laup under Announcements, Outbreak
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Talk about the winter wolf howling in the foothills.  The bite of the cold snapping into every nook and cranny.

You see, it snowed today here in the locality.  For the first time this late in the year.  The balmy weather has been retreating, and this is the first howl I’ve heard of that wolf.  Likely the global warming robotazoids will push that wolf back north again for a week–after a freezing night we expect milder temperatures.  Fluctuations are now the norm as the monster from the Id busts down the climate door to make us pay for our disloyalty and disobedience to nature.

My friend Alexi is on the move, nomad that he is.  Letting go of his relationship with his girlfriend and moving again to follow his dream in Orlando, Florida.  I’m a little startled and a small bit scared for him.  It takes tremendous courage and faith to hear the calling of your heart and go into the unknown with a willing step.

But then I wonder if once he puts foot in that city he might not find the resources he’s looking for.  Alexi has been gathering up skills and experiences as if he were preparing for a new phase in his life.  Well, crumbs, my thoughts and feelings are with him.  Dude, may blessings and light clear your path, so that you might discover all the important, good stuff residing within you.

At least he will be out of range of the winter wolf’s bite.

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Wed 2 Dec 2009

Somewhat Less Than Ultimate Menagerie

Posted by laup under Announcements, Outbreak
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At the top of the Paulie headlines today, my friend and hek-sistah Xtine has decided to seclude herself for some much-needed hermitage and non-engagement.  Considering all the magnificent finds she’s been digging up since she started blogging, I’m actually relieved she’s taking some time off.  We need both human contact and non-contact to remain human and grounded.

So here’s a super-duper shout out to my hek-sistah X.  Total love, blessings and light to yah from the bottom of my pond!

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Thu 26 Nov 2009

Treading Deep, Woodland Sleep, Turkey Shots, Harvest Lots

Posted by laup under Cooking, Meditations, Outbreak, Outdoors, Playtime, Random Encounters, Supernal Diver, Weirdie
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Had a little bit of that dragon’s blood on my slapstick where his nose got stamped Cat In The Hat pink.  The folks took it and mixed it into the rum punch, baking and mixing our healing feast.

I celebrate community and survival, those things we are thankful for as we recognize the blessings of our life.

I mourn those who suffered savage brutality at the hands of settler colonialism, on the backs of whom many of us enjoy our privileges.

We hear the song of nature, and guided by the spirit of Sister Piscotti whose vase we must fill, sinners that we are, and go into the deep old woodland chaparral which refuses to let human beings push it around.

The old path that is normally there is overgrown, for the first time I can ever remember.  The unseasonably warm weather and rain have caused an almost spring like growth to emerge, lichens growing on tree trunks and moss in full bloom!

Rabbit escapes our sight through the roots and tangles of the path that is no more.

We roll with it, nomads that we are.  Many paths through the forest, but you have to pay.  Human remains.  Scratches of sharp spines on flesh, I am bloodied, roots trip us up, wet pine branches swipe us.  The forest doesn’t move, yet it has motion.

Fog swathed ways that come and go, lightning struck trees out of a dream, and all manner of growths.  We clip and gather a harvest for the vase cussing and swearing but somehow swerving both ways to the way out.

Explosions, the Grand Turkey Lord shooting off a series of cracks and pops in the deep to scare our pants off and make us laugh as we trudge out of the mud and back to the places where kids play, the first step back to home where a sacrifice awaits to feed us.

Celebrate, and mourn.

Singing ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down”, we brush off the brambles and retie shoelaces.  Back home, having paid our respects to the ancestors and the within, we toast and serve, candles lit.

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Tue 24 Nov 2009

She Does Stuff For Somebody Somewhere

Posted by laup under Announcements, Outbreak
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Today, my friend Anne Wagener got a pre-Happy Turkey Day surprise.  A short story of hers, Time Machine, was published in an online magazine. Plus, she found out another short story of hers will be published at Splinter Generation.

Plus plus, she has two other short stories looking for homes as I speak.  One’s a strange tale that takes place in a planetarium and a cavern.  The other I got nothing.  Her secrecy cloaking device engages at this point, I only get so many bonus rounds.

Anne writes quirky, strange fiction that kind of unsettles me.  But I like it, and perhaps unusual encounters are your thing too.  I’ll post links to her other stuff as it materializes.  Congratulations Anne on taking the plunge and getting your stuff out there for people to puzzle over!

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Tue 24 Nov 2009

The Big Green Dragon Gets A Pink Raspberry

Posted by laup under Backwater, Meditations, Outbreak, Random Encounters, Supernal Diver
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I got the summons from an old wreckhouse stringer, none other than Boot-beggar Head-squeezer The Constrained.  I get them all the time, but after getting one laugh-a-lariat gumption vacuum in the nowhere land I gave up.  If the big cheese biter won’t even bother showing up in un-person, sending some never-was crumb kneeler to tell me how much I will never ever whatever, I may as well pretend I have sour grapes syndrome and gnash them toothies.

This time, I dropped my six shooters and walked into the nasteroo un-gourge without a backup.  Maybe Xtine’s sharpening of the cleavers through ultrasonic screaming, or Hexe’s turning the ovens up to eleven (extra crunchy!), or Alexi’s diving into the morass of slavering munchuloids with a fake lightsaber and exoskeleton are rubbing of on me.  K prepped the hyperspace tunnel and offered me any number of below the belt stone knives and bearskins disguised as digital watch greatness, but I decided this called for no technique.

Make no mistake, Boot-beggar will stamp your ticket with dog doo ink and slap you senseless upside the sensibility.  You will get the viceroy gripper treatment on anything but your skull.  That gets saved so your teeth can fly out with a bloody pop as you watch them eviscerate your soul food.  Yep, your single serving size of batsplat is in your eye and out your sock.  You’ll be lucky if a piece of you wins the souvenir sweepstakes.  Every member of the wreckhouse loves a keepsake.  As long as they get to squeeze and watch the primary cell awareness squirm.

They don’t mention The Constrained because the outhouse ain’t working, no siree.  Here comes the rolf-a-lore, with a leverage on your shoulder blades that will make you watch the unfolding stupidity of nonsense puppets dangle before your very irradiated nose hairs.  Man, how long have I been living this genuine faux dungheap and wishing I could crawl more instead of less?

The hidden victims hadn’t crawled out of their capsules yet, but the mongering ankle-gores were ready for me.  All spines in full effect, a poison take-out trough prepared for the thousandth and one millenium since beatdown was coded into the particle stream of molten galactoids from the bubbling pampers of hell.  The preliminary foray of anti-humanors began the moment I stepped over the line and knocked the batteries off the ultra-Euclidean shoulders of the giant Moloch and Mammon elementars.  From there I was coded, identified, and shoved into a face full of fully paid for murder-death-kill.

I started sweating, and a gnawing headache seized my frontal lobe, while fluid accumulated at the back of my reptile gland and cut me to half auxiliary power.  Boot-beggar pulled off the masks and the insincere bystanders started screaming in-between attempts to breathe the jellified air.  Oh yeah, the wreckhouse stringer booting me full of insecurity and inadequacy, in the ultra terrestrial flesh, with alkaloid allies, miserable mopey minions, and vicious vicarious victims all flapping their arms furiously to get a bite in of my live brains before the surprise-you’re-dead negative round.

So yeah, it’s on, the big green dragon and I got nothing.  No quick, no slow, just an eternity of beatdown that can never be undone and I’m about to get shoed.  All unfolding before me, sneak previews all the way to the bone of what’s coming down the hammer stem along my spine.

Except I came back.

I move without moving, dodge without dodging, strike without force, free and easy as a nobody.  Lucerna’s training proves to be enough, I twist and turn, sing quietly, openly, dance with eyes on every small detail, swimming the luck plane with grace, genuine and true.  I am myself, lowdown loser Paul, but this time I feel it!  I can see for miles and miles.

Suddenly Boot-beggar starts running out of mo’, the energy bar shows up at the rear of the Oh-Crikey Coral and it’s not so certain now that I’m going down without a doubt.

Cause man, I got doubts.  I’m shining with them and it’s okay.  Nobody’s home, but leave a message ’cause I care to the max.

Final battle, and Boot-beggar throws the top talent up close and person, literally moving objects in my face to block my poise.  I’m cool, been fighting so long at full power with half a cup of noodles on good days, it’s just more of the same.  An entire wing falls off Boot-beggar and then the leaking begins, seriously blowing hot air out the door of the sphincter as the entire blood-eating externally internalized edifice starts to crumble.  The plan has to change, ’cause the no groove is bein’ played!

The rout unravels like a squid tentacle shot out a cannon, pieces of minion rejects fall away even though that’s all that’s holding the mind trench flowing with broken glass, the force field corn husks are rallying for a final desperate move.  That’s when I reverse course and swing past the avalanche of heartless and humiliation, causing the formations of prickly poison death to crash into each other.  The whole thing is done like bad ham in a fridge, and last person standing is dead meat.

Boot-beggar takes the blow, and staggers.  But I’m already flowing easily out the door as the jaws of fakery snap shut to erase this defeat.  No dice, no roll, got it?  Though the final griddle-waddle punt-waggle is there to catch me in a pincer attack for a group hump from behind, I wave my hand and within seconds I foible myself free of the whole affair, smoke rumbling out of the litterbox for human beings in need of odor control.

It’s a long haul out of the sucker pit, but K is there with healing potion snacks and the cats purr me back to main power.  The folks are hootin’ and hollerin’, slapping their knees with laughter.  What a story!  I swam the crocodile river and didn’t get wet.

Then it dawns on me.  I gave Boot-beggar the braaaat!  Oh, that old dragon got plenty more toys to break. All I did was not fall down this time.  But I held my own and kept it real, which I never ever whatever would have thought I could do, because I had been jacked.  From now on, that big green dragon will have a stain of pink on it’s nose.

The energy is so intense, that for a long hour I can hardly bear it.  I almost come down with an illness.  Yeah, like I said this isn’t Zelda on the N64, this is Zelda-and-then-you-die.

Then I start doing a stupid dance!  I put on Taco’s “Puttin On the Ritz”, and turn that sucker up loud.

Got-ta dance!  GOT-TA…DANCE!

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Fri 20 Nov 2009

This Bloody Time Machine Doesn’t Work

Posted by laup under Discussion, Meditations, Outbreak, Playtime
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Traveling back to a point in time where I was but a young boy in the single digits of age, there was a time when I was most disappointed to learn that phony time machines were being sold in stores as the real thing.  Imagine the nerve of such people!  Ripping you off from your parents’ hard-earned dollars for a mechanism that fails to achieve your desired purpose.

At the local toy store, I spotted a model.  I hadn’t quite gotten the hang of what a model was, or what its purpose might be.  I figured the awesome illustrations on the boxes were truthfully depicting the experience you could hope to have should you obtain the box, or somehow put the thing together (which ought to be very easy, without need for glue or paint).

The model as presented was a capsule time machine with a door you could open.  Inside would be a time traveler sitting down at his control panel, pulling a lever that would activate his journey.  Close the door and open it again, and you would find the traveler on the ground facing a group of hungry dinosaurs.  How cool is that!?

Alas, after opening such kits, all you find are a large number of plastic parts.  Putting the capsule together proved easy enough.  The two scenes were actually part of a rotating door and floor in the capsule.  There was a mechanism that turned the scenes from one to the other.  I wasn’t able to figure that out and consequently had to manually turn the knob to make the scenes change inside the capsule.

The scenes were not easy to put together or paint.  Glue just wasn’t my specialty, and my handling of model paints was abysmal.  You may as well have given a caveman an automobile to put together.  The finished product hardly looked like the amazing pictures on the box.

It dawned on me that I wasn’t going to actually end up with a working (if limited) time machine.  Instead, what I had was a piece of laughable piece of junk, glued and painted with amateurish skill.

What a rip off!

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Wed 18 Nov 2009

Steam Break

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With a hand on my heart, reminiscing about strange days in the past, coming back to tell me their secrets now, I put a bunch of notes before me.  One note on my mind—I went into Sedulous Chair today and put up an ad for a weird program I’m working on.  We’ll see what ideas decide to apply for the job.

I have several nets out in the deep and a couple of radar arrays and satellites on the scent for goodies.  These sorts of things take patience to bear fruit, so to speak.  I’m very much a naturalist when it comes to coaxing out the wondrous treasures of the unknown.

There are practical matters to be attended to with regards to the honeycomb hideout.  Energy freed up from having to recalibrate the gravity wells of the haunted house can now be put towards surges of activity for settling in to the new locality.  Every department needs their allocation of warp power to accomplish their ends.  For once, we aren’t just surviving, there’s freedom to pursue the work of DEVOlopment.  Know what I’m sayin’?

For example, just today I noticed that I was carrying a lot less in the way of good luck charms, and saying a lot less prayers to reinforce the defenses.  My psychological forces are in a rest, repair, and renewal mode.  That’s how in the battle I was a few months ago.  Now that medicine, rest, and vacations are being handed out to the starfleet of the mind and body—a lot of good things are taking shape.

Of course, very much on my mind is the completion and release of my novel here.  I’ve got the posts at the ready.  I’m prepared and anxious to move onto the next book.  January will be the third year mark when I let this thing into me and the whole process started cracklin’.

I’m looking at my final checklist of items and I see of the eight things I need to be satisfied on, seven of them are checked.  Any month now I’ll be done and take the next step.  But oh!  I am so in the dip right now, climbing that hill and struggling to be satisfied.  I know it will happen, just not when and how.  Soon, soon!

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