V647CL0X

1When I was 18... 18 years old, I saw for the first time in my life... I saw an image of clarity. I saw a comic strip... a three panel comic strip that, though simple as it seemed, changed me... changed my being, changed who I am... Made me who I am...Enlightened me...The strip, Garfield, the comic strip was new... no more than maybe a month and a half since inception, since... since coming into existence... and there it was before me in print, I saw it... a comic strip... What was it called?Garfield.The story here is of a man, a plain man. He is Jon, but he is more than that... I will get to this later, but first let us say that he's Jon, a plain man.And then there is a cat... Garfield.This is the nature of the world, here. When I see the world, the politics, the future, the... the satellites in space, and... the people who put them there...You can look at everything as a man and a cat... two beings, in harmony and at war...So, this strip I saw; this man, Jon, and the cat, Garfield, you see...Yes... hmm...It is about everything. This... little comic is, oh, lo and behold... not so little anymore.So yes, when I was 18, I saw this comic... and it hit me all at once, its power. I clipped it, and every day, I looked at it, and I said "Okay... let me look at this here. What is this doing to me? Why is this so powerful?"Jon Arbuckle, he sits here, legs crossed... comfortable in his home, and he reads his newspaper... The news of the world, perhaps... and then he extends his fingers lightly, delicately... he taps his fingers on an end table, and he feels for something...What is it? It is something he needs, but it is not there.And then he looks up, slightly cockeyed, and he thinks... His newspaper's in his lap now, and he thinks this...Now where could my pipe be?This... I always come to this, because I was a young man... I'm older now, and I still don't have the secrets, the answers, so this question still rings true, Jon looks up and he thinks...Now where could my pipe be?And then it happens... You see it, you see... it's almost like divine intervention, suddenly it is there, and it overpowers you...A cat is smoking a pipe.It is the man's pipe, it's Jon's pipe, but the cat... this cat, Garfield, is smoking the pipe... and from afar, and someplace near, but not clear... near but not clear... The man calls out... Jon calls out, he is shocked. "Garfield!" he shouts.Garfield. The cat's name.But, let's take a step back... let us examine this from all sides, all perspectives... and when I first came across this comic strip, I was at my father's house... a newspaper had arrived, and I picked it up for him, and brought it inside.I organized its sections for him and then, yes, the comic strip section fell out from somewhere in the middle, and landed on the kitchen floor... I picked up the paper pages and saw, up somewhere near the top of this strip... just like Jon, I was wearing an aquamarine shirt.So I thought, "Ah, interesting. I'll have to see this later." I snipped out the little comic, and held on to it... and five days later, I reexamined it... and it gripped me, I needed to find out more about this. The information I had was minimal, but enough...An orange cat named Garfield...Okay, that seemed to be the lynchpin of this whole operation, yes. Another clue... a signature in the bottom right corner, a man's name...Jim Davis.Yes, I'm on to it for sure.So... one: Garfield, orange cat, and two: Jim Davis, the creator of this cat...And that curiously plain man.I did not know, at the time, that his name was Jon. This strip, you see, had no mention of this man's name, and I'd never seen it before.But I had these clues; Jim Davis, Garfield.And then I saw more, I spotted the tiny copyright mark in the upper left corner. Copyright 1978 to... what is this? Copyright belongs to a... PAWS Incorporated...I use the local library and mail services to track down the information I was looking for...Jim Davis, a cartoonist, had created a comic strip about a cat, Garfield... and a man, Jon Arbuckle. Well, from that point on, I made sure I read the Garfield comic strips, though as I read each one, as each day passed... the strips seemed to resonate with me less and less...I sent letters to PAWS Incorporated, long letters, pages upon pages... asking if Mister Jim Davis could somehow publish just the one comic, over and over again... "It would be meditative," I wrote, "the strength of that."Could you imagine?But... no response... The strips lost their power, and eventually I stopped reading, but... I did not want my perceptions diluted, so I vowed to read the pipe strip over and over again... That is what I call it, "The Pipe Strip."The Pipe Strip.Everything about it is perfect. I can only describe it as a miracle creation, something came together... the elements aligned... It is like the comets, the cosmic orchestra that is up there over your head... The immense, enormous void is working all for one thing, to tell you one thing...Gas and rock, and purity, and nothing.I will say this... When I see the pipe strip... and I mean every single time I look at the lines, the colors, the shapes that make up the three panel comic...I see perfection.Do I find perfection in many things?Some things, I would say... Some things are perfect... and this is one of them. I can look at the little tuft of hair on Jon Arbuckle's head... it is the perfect shade... The purple pipe in Garfield's mouth...How could a mere mortal even MAKE this?I have a theory, about Jim Davis...After copious research and, yes, of course, now we have the internet, and this information is all readily available, but...Jim Davis, he used his life experiences to influence his comic...Like I mentioned before, none of them seem to have the weight of the pipe strip... But you have to wonder about the man who is able to even, just once, create the perfect form, a literally flawless execution of art, brilliance! Just as in a ward... I think there is a spiritual element at work...I've seen my share of bad times and... when you have something... Well, it's just... emotions, and neurons in your brain, but... something tells you that it's the truth...Truth's radiant light.Garfield, the cat? Neurons in my brain, it's... it's harmony, you see? It... Jon and Garfield, it's truly harmony, like a... continuous, looping, everlasting harmony... The lavender chair, the brown end table, the salmon-colored wall, the fore's green carpeting, Garfield is hunched, perched... perhaps with the pipe stuck firmly between his jowls... His tail curls around. It's more than shapes too, because... I...Okay, stay with me... I've done this experiment several times.You take the strip. You trace only the basic elements. You can do anything, you can simplify the shapes down to just... blobs, just outlines, but it still makes sense...You can replace the blobs with magazine cutouts of other things, replace Jon Arbuckle with a... car parked in a driveway sideways, cut that out of a magazine, stick it in... Replace him there in the second panel with a... a food processor... Okay, and then we put a picture of the planet in the third panel over Garfield...It still works.These are universal proportions. I don't know... how best to explain why it works, I've studied the pipe strip, and analyzed Jon and Garfield's proportions against several universal mathematical constants.E, Pi, the Golden Ratio, the Feigenbaum Constants, and so on... and it's surprising... scary even, how things align. You can take just... tiny pieces of the pipe strip, for instance, take Jon's elbow from the second panel... and take that, and project it back over Jon's entire shape in the second panel, and you'll see a near perfect Fibonacci sequence emerge...It's eerie to me... and it makes you wonder if you're in the presence of a deity, if there is some larger hand at work...There's no doubt in my mind that Jim Davis is a smart man...Jim Davis is capable of anything to me... He is remarkable, but this is so far beyond that, I think we might see that... this work of art is revered and respected in years to come.Jim Davis is possibly a new master of the craft, a... a genius of the eye; they very well may say the same things about Jim Davis in five hundred years that we say about the great philosophical and artistic masters from centuries ago... Jim Davis is a modern day Socrates, or... Da Vinci... mixing both striking visual beauty with classical, daring, unheard-of intellect...Look, he combines these things to make profoundly simple expressions...This strip is his masterpiece... The Pipe Strip is his masterpiece... and it is a masterpiece and a marvel...I often look at Garfield's... particular pose, in this strip. He is poised, and statuesque... and his cat stare is reminiscent of the fiery gazes often found in religious iconography... But still, his eyes are playful, lying somewhere between the solemn father's expression in... Rembrandt's "Return of the Prodigal Son," and the coy smirk of Da Vinci's "Saint John The Baptist".His ears stick up, signifying a peaked readiness... It's as if he could, at any moment, pounce; he is, after all, a close relative and descendant of the mighty jungle cats of Africa that could leap... after prey. You could see the power drawn into Garfield's hind quarters, powerful haunches indeed.The third panel.And I'm just saying this now, this is just coming to me now... The third panel of the pipe strip is essentially a microcosm for the entire strip itself... All the power dynamics, the struggle for superiority, right?WHO has the pipe? WHERE is the pipe? All of that is drawn, built, layered into Garfield's iconic pose here. You can see it in the curl of his tail... Garfield's ear whiskers stick up, on end, the smoke billows, upward... drawing the eye upward... increasing the scope...I'm just... amazed... really, that after 33 years of reading, and analyzing the same comic strip, I'm able to find new dimensions. It's a testament to the work...For six years, I delved into tobacco research, because... can a cat smoke? This is a metaphysical question... Yes, can any cat smoke? Do we know? Can just Garfield smoke?The research says no. Nicotine poisoning can kill animals, especially household pets. All it takes is the nicotine found in as little as a single cigarette.[ *Okamoto M, Kita T, Okuda H, Tanaka T, Nakashima T (Jul 1994). "Effects of aging on acute toxicity of nicotine in rats". Pharmacol Toxicol. 75 (1): 1-6. doi: 10.1111/j.1600-0773.1994.tb00316.x. PMID 7971729 ]Surely, Jon's pipe hold a substantial amount of tobacco, and it is true that pets living in the homes of smokers are nearly 25% more likely to develop some form of cancer... most likely due to secondhand smoke... but these are facts of smoking, its tolls on our world.But after visiting two tobacco processing plants in Virginia... and the Phillip Morris cigarette manufacturing facility, I came no closer to cracking the meaning. I was looking for any insight. A detective of a homicide case has to look at every angle, so I'm always taking apart the pipe strip.I focused on every minutiae, every detail of this strip.Jon Arbuckle's clothing... I have replicas. I'm an expert in textiles... so, you see, this smoking thing was a hang-up for me... but it was the statement here... until...This is key, this is the breakthrough.The pipe is not a pipe, really.Obviously there is symbolism at work here... I saw that from the beginning, and I looked at the literal aspects of the strip to gain insight into the metaphors at play... I worked at a newspaper printing press for eighteen months, in the late 1980's... I was learning the literal to inform the gestural... the subliteral, the in-between...Jon reading this newspaper means so much more than just... Jon reading the newspaper... but how could you ever hope to decipher the puzzle without knowing everything there is to know about newspapers?!Okay... for example... Jon holds his newspaper up with his left hand, thumb gripping the interior. I learned that this particular grip here was the newspaper grip of nineteenth century aristocrats... and this aristocrat grip was a point of contention that influenced the decision to move forward with prohibition... in the United States, in the early twentieth century!So Jon's hand position is much more than that, it... it is a comment on class war... and the resulting reactionary culture... but I didn't know about the aristocratic newspaper grip until I came across some microfiche archives at the printing press.It's about information. You have to take it apart....and the breakthrough on the smoking cat came late... just eight years ago, actually. "Smoking cat" is an industry term. It's what the smoking industry calls a tattletale teenager who tells on his friends after they've all tried smoking for the first time... and it is actually a foreign translation, bastardization of the term "smoking rat"... But the phrase was confused when secret documents went back and forth between China and America...These documents are still secret, and the only reason I know about the term is because I know a man, my friend. Let's call him "Timothy," yeah... yes, it's a fake name, for his protection. Timothy worked for Phillip Morris for sixteen years, and he had seen the documents... and when he told me, it was an Aha moment... and he said, "But how? How could this cartoonist, Jim Davis, know about this... obscure term from the mid-70's, used exclusively by a few cigarette companies!?"This is still a mystery to me... but I connect the dots by noting Jim Davis' childhood experiences on a farm. He must have seen something...What could it be?Timothy went on to tell me there was one particular smoking cat, a boy, from... yes, Indiana, a boy named Ernie Barguckle, who became a thorn in the side of the tobacco companies for a couple of years... He did more than tattle to his parents; he and his family took legal action, and they eventually received a huge settlement payout...But that name is too similar... Ernie Barguckle...Jon Arbuckle.Jim Davis must have used this.There's more here. Ernie Barguckle spent nearly half of that settlement money on experimental medical procedures to cure his... impotence. He was impotent.So... he was a smoking cat with a... a metaphorical pipe, that did not work... Are you starting to see the layers here? This is exciting stuff, you start to get a whole picture here, and it informs the work! It's... it's just remarkable.Jim Davis took these raw ideas, these... pieces, and he transformed them into smart social commentary that is... all so ravishingly beautiful.I have cried.I've cried, I've cried... I've cried, cried over this piece. It just... gets in my soul.I try to explain this to people, I have... the newspaper articles about Ernie Barguckle... People have fought me on this, they don't see it, or they're close-minded, "How could a comic strip about a cat smoking a pipe mean any more than that?"But it is more... and when I feel spiritual, or start to think existentially, I still see this comic.Here's something from 1981 that I wrote in thinking about the implications of this strip; this is just an excerpt here... there's more before and after, but this part is the essence to me... If a comic about a cat smoking a pipe can be the only thing in the universe... then maybe this is the strongest evidence for that.*fumbles with tattered sheet from 1981*"Many of you say, 'Oh, but I am not blind. I have never been blind,'... But when you truly see, you will understand just how truly blind you once were to even think it right to say you were not blind.What does a blind man see?Blackness.Darkness.Blankness.Blank darkness.Dark blankness.The absence of things, quite literally NO thing. No things. Nothings.So, you see nothing, and I bring you into the light. A cat has your pipe! You've been blind, do you understand this!?The cat has your pipe.You can't fully immerse yourself, you don't have the light. You don't have the radiance, the radical light, the radically radiant light of truth and truth's belonging love, and nature of light, and loving truthful radiance.So don't be bold, and make bold statements. I know of you.The cat has your pipe.The.Cat.Has.Your.Pipe.Remember that."*puts paper back in pocket*That writing, well... It's kind of rough... Kind of an... early eighties feel... and I see that, but I'm still... I'm still proud of it.Sometimes I imagine that it is the editorial column in the newspaper Jon Arbuckle is reading. It's an exercise in recursion, it's like a vortex opens up... It's like you hold two mirrors up to each other, one is reality and the other is a cartoon strip.Let's see here... Oh yes, I must bring this up, because I think, surely, Jim Davis is again speaking on multiple levels by including the details set before us in the comic.Notice the glimpse of Jon Arbuckle's foot in the first panel. The size of the shoe would indicate that maybe the man just has small feet... but a deeper investigation takes us to the footbinding rituals of certain Asian cultures. Inflicted usually on women for the desire of men, this practice was incredibly painful and crippling...Aha! Mister Davis is, here, presenting us with a man, or rather... "man", who engages in footbinding, a body modification for women, on top of "being without his pipe"... or impotent. This is a man facing extreme inner turmoil, the panels tell that story... subconsciously.Notice the background wall shading of the first panel points inward toward Jon in the second panel... and the sharp tapered end of the purple pipe in the third frame also points at John in the second panel, inward; the eye is drawn to the center panel. You can connect these points and draw a triangle across the panels, and this triangle will align with the reoriented points of Jon's collar! This, this is majestic artwork!...and to uncover this hidden order is... bliss like I've never known.Comforting, in an empty world.I can't help but read the thought bubble, over and over again.Now where could my pipe be?Now where could my pipe be?It is a profound question.Why am I here? What is my purpose? It is reflection and self-examination here. It is facing the dust, the misery of a cold, careless universe. You can feel the weight of it.But where could my pipe be?One imagines the author, Jim Davis, teetering on the edge of insanity... his rationality, his lucidity, hovering over the void... and he seeks the truth.You can see it in the line quality of the drawings; the thoughtful, controlled outlines mixed with the... occasional, chaotic scribbles at work in the shadows and Garfield's dark stripes.It's almost as if Garfield is chaos himself.Yes, he is the embodiment of chaos, disorder, hatred, fear... Thievery, death, destruction, desolation!These are the things Garfield represents; HE stole the pipe, HE sits with his back to Jon, Garfield... Garfield, this chaos cat, Garfield has turned his back on everything, everyone!One recalls the great existential forces in literature... Camus' Meursalt, Kafka's Gregor Samsa, or Sartre's Antoine Roquentin... Garfield the Cat sees the hopelessness of life, which...ah, yes...This is why Jim Davis has chosen smoking. It represents a recklessness, a... a disregard for what some would define as the beauty of life. Garfield may die from the nicotine, he may not... He defies life; he sits defiant, saying nothing, but looking as if he could say... "Then let me die... it does not matter."It does not matter....and we are faced with this; Could Jon behave the same? Is Jon the glimmer of hope?He seems to be unsure. Again, his question... "Now where could my pipe be?" indicates that he is wrestling with his own existence. The center panel centers the issue, and again, this hearkens to many of the great religious works of art.I'm talking about the Pipe Strip in relation to religion. It's... it's interesting to assign the roles of God... and anti-God, or, as many know him to be, the devil... or on a much larger scale, simply the forces of... good and evil. Garfield, the thief-cat, evil and malicious... He is the devil, placed to the right... and note, the two forms of Jon; the Jon on the left, still innocent, still draped in the... delight, of the lack of knowledge. He is... the humans in the Garden of Eden. He feels for his pipe... but he has yet to eat from the tree... and Garfield, the sinister serpent... and notice, notice how Jim Davis has framed this... The center Jon is locked in a struggle, between his innocence, and his knowledge of the truth... knowledge of the existence of evil.It is stunning. The great struggle, the struggle that transcends time... and Jim Davis floats over all this, as creator... the God, of sorts, in his own right.... and he presents this cautionary message to us all; it is as if he is speaking from high and... he is saying, unto our awaiting ears...Where will you be, when the cat reveals himself? [-Jim 7:27:78]I can tell you where you'll be. You will have a choice; you can face endless suffering, and eternal misery... You can be forced and beaten down with barbarians, who claw at each other just for a view of salvation. They'll tear your eyeballs out, and rip your gizzards from end to end. They worship this cat, this... this false idol! This evil, horrible cat, do not be seduced by the cat and the pipe!Garfield... thy name is a mark of the demons of hell. Something like this, and to those listening, it is a stark reminder to follow the path of the first panel Jon; be humble, be grateful, honor the law, and honor thyself. Be true, and be good, and no harm will come to you... Pray for salvation, and it will be granted unto you. Be like Jon Arbuckle, as he lowers his head. Be like Jon Arbuckle as he lowers his paper, as he turns his head. Bow with Jon Arbuckle, and praise unto the creator, Jim Davis... and banish demon Garfield from your life.So, what is all this? What am I saying? Aha... hmm... What does all this mean? Why is this one comic strip so important to me... and why do I feel the need to share this?Obligation. I have an obligation to you all. This is a redemption, this is a belief in redemption, a sacrifice of all the obvious trappings of this false modern life.Look at the simplicity in this strip, in the pipe strip. Look at the simple clothes Jon wears, look at his simple, basic furniture... No adornments on the wall, even the very pipe his cat Garfield stole; it is a plain, modest pipe... and I have adapted this way of life, it speaks to me.In our times... well... you don't need me to point out the hyperbole of our times; you have children being born eight or nine at a time, you have more money being spent on a single Hollywood movie than some nations can spend... feeding their starving people. Torture, distrust... Look around you, it's overwhelming.What can you contribute?...and every day, I look in the mirror, and I hold this comic up to the mirror, and I look into the mirror, and at this little comic strip.Be humble.Be thankful.It is a reminder, be respectful.You are a statue. You are fragile... and when you break, when you shatter... Where will those pieces go?Ask... ask, ask, ask this question. Will you ask?Humankind is only as great as you, YOU, the individual, it begins and ends with you! You must treat this expedition, this search, this... life, with a reverence and intensity found only in the smallest sticks. The littlest leaf, the tiniest stone! The most miniscule grain of sand... on a beach of billions!This is the secret.Do you want the pipe?Do you want to know where the pipe has gone?You ask yourself, you ask... you ask... you ask...Now where could my pipe be?When I was a young man... remember, now, I first saw this comic when I was eighteen years old... Ages ago... but I was youthful, vibrant. For weeks, I didn't hide that a comic strip was having such a profound effect on me.I was much like Jon Arbuckle. In this middle panel, he says, "Now where could my pipe be?"... you could look into his eyes, his half-lowered eyes, and think to yourself... "Now, surely, Jon... Surely, you cannot be this naive... This is nothing new for you..."And if you've read more of the Garfield comic strips by Jim Davis, you understand what I am saying now; Garfield the cat does things like this all the time. He will take things from Jon; food, items, anything... This is his very nature.So you see this, and you want to say, "Jon Arbuckle, come now. You are lying to yourself. You are lying to yourself, and to all of us, if you pretend to have not... any idea of where your pipe has gone. Perhaps you think you've left it somewhere else, but... hmph, you're not so forgetful. You are lying to yourself, ah... yes...You are lying to yourself, Jon Arbuckle. You know that Garfield has the pipe... somewhere, deep down, you know this. You don't even need to think the question."And that was me when I saw this strip. One week passed, and each morning I'd open my drawer and slam it shut again. I would go to look at the comic... but I'd pause, and think... "Oh no, I don't need this comic, I don't n... I don't NEED to look at it..."But there I was, lying to myself.I DID need to see it, and so I did, it's... cathartic. You give in, and that is the transition, from the second panel of life, to the third panel of life! It is a simple story structure, the passage from the second act to the third, the twilight of things. Jon gives into his suspicions; he knows the truth, he's ALWAYS known the truth, he yells out, "GARFIELD! GARFIELD! GARFIELD!"It is like... pressure from a steam valve, being released; the buildup is unbearable, and then... PSSHHWW, it's gone.So it is like this... when I speak about the truth... the truth, the light, the radiance, this... this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. This is the essence of this brilliant work of art, the practical mixing, meeting, agreeing with the spiritual, it is all HERE....but spirituality is not an easy thing to confront. You might find yourself able to wrap your mind around a simple math problem, or a basic newspaper article, or... but intellect... is much less subjective.What is spirituality... and how have I found spiritual peace and serenity in Garfield?A long time ago, after I encountered the Pipe Strip... I spent some time, as I mentioned before, soul-searching. When something impacts you, or alters your very perception so greatly, there is a long period of confusion, recovery time...It's as if you don't know who you are, and that can be a... a very scary prospect, especially if you thought you had a good grasp on that sort of thing.Imagine if Jim Davis did not know who he was. Would he be capable of shaping the cultural landscape as he's done?No. No, of course he wouldn't....and how about his characters? Jon... what if Jim Davis suddenly woke up, and didn't know who Jon was? What if he couldn't make the informed decisions to accurately depict Garfield's personality, because of... he could no longer specify, or demarcate the boundaries of Garfield's behavior?What kind of comic would THAT be? You see?So draw the parallel. I saw this comic and, yes, I was disoriented... and if I didn't reconcile this issue with myself, what kind of person would I be?Undoubtedly dire circumstances, but remember; this was not a math problem, this was not an article, this was not something I could just... figure out... and as skeptical as I was, I realized that faith and spirituality were avenues that... required exploring.At first I tried... long nights, reading Garfield by candlelight, or... aromatic meditation settings, while thinking of Garfield, but... nothing snapped. Nothing clicked, I still felt lost... but I kept it up, I hired a shaman, and a young... personal Yogi Sikh Guru; Avram Dahb Singh Sahib. I pushed and pushed, determined to find myself.And then, a miracle happened.Upon retrieving my morning paper, to clip the Garfield comic... I noticed a young girl, selling lemonade two houses down. She sat, occupied at her stand. She had no customers in sight.So, I approached, and saw that she was coloring. I looked at her drawing...Three rectangular boxes.A man, in a blue shirt. An orange cat.I knew what this was. Even in her crude scribbles, I knew EXACTLY what this was.She was drawing a Garfield comic.I looked at her words, and I saw that, in her strip, Jon asked Garfield to retrieve a newspaper. Heh, funny... since I'd done just that with myself... Garfield is sarcastic, but agrees to. He returns and calls Jon... "Sahib".Jon exclaims that the paper's all chewed up, but then Garfield says, and I quote, "Sahib asks fish, paper is wet. Sahib asks cat, paper is holey." I remember the words, and ran back to my house, and thought, "How odd that Sahib shows up in the strip, and my spiritual advisor's name is Avram Dahb Singh Sahib!"Coincidence surely, but, nonetheless, I spent the next sixteen hours poring through my clipped Garfield comics, looking for the strip this young girl had been coloring... I couldn't find it... and I eventually fell asleep, right on my kitchen table.Next morning, I retrieved my paper again, and I clipped the Garfield comic. The date was July 12th, 1983.There it was.The Sahib Strip, in all its glory.The girl had been drawing the next day's strip!So, I ran right out of my house, I ran back to where she was... but she was gone, and in place of the lemonade stand was a "For Sale" sign.They'd moved out.I rushed back to my house to call Avram, but... I was informed that he'd moved away as well. I reeled, for several hours, and then it all connected for me.It was meant to be. It w... it was meant to be this way! Jim Davis... Jon, Garfield... It was always meant to be this way for me.... They move to the forefront, and everything else fades away, EVERYTHING else; the girl, the lemonade stand, Avram Dahb Singh Sahib, it all existed to show me the way, and when I'd found the way...Everything else melted away.It was a beautiful miracle... and if July 27th, 1978, the day I first saw the pipe strip... was the first day of my life, then that day, July 12th, 1983, was the second day of my life.I've never looked back. Garfield has transformed me... and I am a man, born anew, because of Garfield.When I was in my mid-thirties, I was interviewed for a documentary... It was a documentary on the subject of cat behavior. Now, I've had cats my whole life; I have three cats now, and at the time of this documentary interview, I had four cats. I sat down for the interview and was joined by a veterinarian who specialized in felines: Doctor Caroline Wellmitz was her name, I believe... and the doctor discussed colorblindness in animals, and how it affects their behavior.She specifically brought up the fact that cats are red-green colorblind; they can see colors, but they can't tell the difference between red and green ...and look at the color choice in this strip here.Garfield sits on a green floor, behind a pinkish red wall.I heard this, and I immediately pulled a copy of the comic from my wallet to show to the doctor... I moved so fast, I'm sure I nearly scared her, I... pointed at the paper and said, "Like this! Like this! Look, at this here! This cat, Garfield, he's colorblind, he must be! That must be the answer here... like this."As over-excited as I was, I managed to take in her response; she said "Yes, a cat in this room would have a hard time differentiating the wall from the floor. Add to that a cat's known spatial confusion, and you have the makings of a Cat Rage room." Now, she informed me that this isn't exactly common knowledge among cat owners... but a seasoned cat owner, or someone particularly perceptive will have picked up on it.So what's incredible here is not only is Garfield's behavior symbolic of the devil, and all the evil constructs in the world, but... but, but... but also, it is rooted in science and scientific fact.Look at that. You cannot spell fact without "cat".Hah, just a little joke there... just some wordplay, but getting back on track......and you can't spell track without "cat."Okay... I digress. I gotcha, I gotcha, enough... kidding around.It is established here that Garfield is in a rage; an ultimate rage of fury and hatred, caused by colorblindness. We know the "what", we know the "why"... but let us examine the "how", the how of his rage is particularly interesting here.We've looked at his posture and called it "powerful", "in control", "statuesque", "etc., etc." Composed rage... It's peculiar, and I've talked to a number of psychologists and psychiatrists, and even a couple of anger management therapists about this concept...Could we see the same kind of behavior in a human? Is Garfield representative of something more specific than just chaos and rage? Deciphering this is going to take some perseverance. for sure.The psychologists pointed to a phenomenon in humans, and, yes, I believe one of the anger management counselors brought it up as well. The idea that people, oftentimes, will bottle their rage... Garfield the cat, here... well, he could be bottling his anger, inside, shoving it deep into his cat gut, to ignore and deal with at a later time.Eh, well... No, that's not exactly right. Garfield has already acted out, he's already stolen the pipe... he's SMOKING the pipe, he's already dealt with his anger. He's already lashed out, so, psychologically, what is going on here? What is this cat doing, and how does it impact his owner, Jon Arbuckle... psychologically?Well, Garfield is angry. He is acting on his anger... but is this passive anger, or aggressive anger?Passive. It is passive because if Garfield has a problem with Jon specifically... he's choosing a passive way of dealing with that problem. He has not confronted Jon, and said, "Jon, I have a problem with the way you've decorated this room; as a cat, I am colorblind, and this room sends me into a rage... You've created a rage room for me here, and I don't like it; I want you to change it."Instead of that confrontational approach, though, Garfield has chosen to steal Jon's pipe... and that, in turn, angers Jon... but Jon decides to be aggressively angry, and yell at Garfield, so... now, instead of a calm conversation between two respectful parties, you have two... heated, angry individuals, each with a problem and no direct line to solving it.The layered emotions here tell a story with tight, focused brevity that would make Hemingway weep. This is an entire drama, in just three panels, people....but let's not be remiss, and miss the humor of the situation, the... absurdity of it all... for certainly, there is a reason that the visual shorthand for drama includes both the crying mask AND a laughing mask. Comedy and tragedy complement each other, and meld together to create drama, tension, the height of humanity, the peak of art, that reflects back to us our own condition......and here... in its basest form, we can laugh at this comic... yes, COMIC, in which a cat smokes a pipe... Hah... when was the last time you've SEEN such a thing in your life?Never, I presume... I certainly never have...The Greek muse, Thalia's presence is strong in this work of art, here. Comedy, it is COMEDY... and if you look at the structure again, you'll see this perfect form of thirds works magically for the transmission of, yes, YES, a JOKE.The joke.... is as old as time... even cavemen told jokes, and the joke here is that Jon has lost his pipe... or he thinks he has... but lo and behold, it is the cat, Garfield, who has the pipe.Surprise, surprise, the cat is smoking!Again, the transition, from set-up to punchline takes place between the second and third panels... but make no mistake, the comic is more than just a comic... Yes, it IS funny, of course it is... it is operating at the height of sophisticated humor, on par with any of Shakespeare's piercing wit.On the one hand, Garfield the comic, with Jon the man, humor as art... the other hand, Garfield comic, with Jon the man, stirring... no, RIVETING drama... as with everything, it is tension, and release. TENSION... and RELEASE...A cycle.I keep returning to this idea, because it is so omnipresent. Yes, you could... and yes, I have done this, on more than one occasion... you could print this comic strip on a giant piece of paper. The dimensions would be something like... thirty-four inches by eleven inches.Now, tape the ends together, with the comic facing inward. Stick your head in the middle of this Garfield comic loop and READ, start at the first panel; Jon is reading the newspaper... he feels for something on the end table.Second panel; he sets the newspaper down, something is not right..."Where could my pipe be?" he thinks....and then, the payoff; the third panel, Garfield has Jon's pipe, and is smoking it.But, aha! The paper is in a loop, around your head... so that you can see that, once again, Jon is in his seat, reading the paper... and so on, and so on, you can literally read the comic strip for an eternity!I spent many a relaxing Sunday afternoon reading this strip, over and over... reminded of the Portuguese death carvings, which always begin and end with the same scrawled image.[fig. 6b - Portuguese Death Carving c. 1330]So, this idea of repetition, of the beginning being the end, and the end being the beginning... It's not new, it is an ageless tradition among the best storytellers humanity has ever offered... and I'm not wrong to include cartoonist Jim Davis in that exalted set for this particular strip aloneI'm not foolish enough to deny that great art is subjective... divisive, even, and that some people see this Garfield comic and shrug with no real reaction... but I will say that I believe everyone in the world should see it; at the very least, see it!You should all see it. Read it. Spend some time with it. Spend an hour reading it... what's an hour? Yes, you could watch some television program, you could play some fast-paced video games or computer games, yes, you could do all those things...But it's just an hour... and if you give this strip a chance, if you look into Jon Arbuckle's eyes... if you look into Jon Arbuckle's SOUL...You might find that you'll really be looking into your own soul.It is self discovery, that is what I'm talking about here... YOU have the opportunity, the possibility... it could change you. Don't be afraid.You know, just last week, I was eating lunch near the Municipal Court... like I do every Thursday, and... there was a plumbing banner... a plumbing van, parked out in front, uh... and a man, a plumber, would step out from the court, and retrieve something from this every so often.A few times, this happened... I thought nothing of it; just a plumber, doing some work at the Municipal Court... but then he came out, and looked through his van, and it was clear...He couldn't find something.I noticed, and thought, "Well, that's sort of similar to the Garfield comic, in a way. Someone looks for something, can't find it,"... but, yes, that probably happens billions of times a day around the world......but then, this plumber... put his hands on his hips... then, he scratched his head, and he said aloud..."Now, where could my pipe wrench be?"Well, at this, I leaped off the bench, sandwich still in hand, and I rushed over, I shouted, "What was that you said!?"He looked at me and said, "What? I can't find my pipe wrench, " and I said, "No! No, no, say it... like how you just said it..."He scratched his head, and repeated, "Now where could my pipe wrench be?"I slapped him on the back and said, "Garfield!"He looked so confused, so I said it again... then, I said "Your orange cat took it!"Heh... ah, then I laughed and laughed... and he smiled, and went back into the courtroom.I walked away, knowing that the plumber and I, two complete strangers, bonded over this Garfield comic... You see, life imitates art, becomes a common ground.I have a feeling that if I see this plumber again, we'll be sharing stories like two old friends... because we've been united by art. We have a common love for Jim Davis and his characters, his writings... The humor, the drama, the... that rascal Garfield, the cat...Oh, and by the way, if you're wondering what I was having for lunch that day, it was a ham sandwich with an apple and potato chips... in a bag, I had a soda as well.I think it's important to view the Pipe Strip in philosophical terms... We've touched briefly on the notion of existentialism; that theme is very prevalent in this strip. Garfield is, in fact, a modern existential anti-hero... but if Garfield embodies the bewilderment in a meaningless life, what is Jon? What are the telltale signs that inform Jon's philosophical standpoint? His approach, what style of thinking he represents?Jon is depicted as being grounded in the material world... a world of things; he is surrounded by objects, and he touches these objects, he interacts with them. The newspaper, the end table, the chair... his clothes, all these physical things make up Jon's world. In some sense, even his cat Garfield is an object to him, a thing...The first ideology that comes to mind when thinking of objects in the tangible world... is pragmatism... Is Jon Arbuckle a pragmatist? His beliefs stem from a useful, coherent view of his environment... a sort of cause-and-effect understanding of his world helps him.A: Deduce that his pipe is missing... and B: Catches his cat, Garfield, using the pipe.This kind of empirical and logical thinking lends credence to the idea that Jon is, indeed, a pragmatist... Although, it is hard to entirely ignore the rest of the Garfield comic canon.While Garfield is consistently anarchic, and embraces the chaos and absurdity of life... Jon Arbuckle exhibits an erratic, unpredictable mix of philosophical behaviors. At times, he is borderline; delusional, an idealist, an almost slap-happy version of Don Quixote. Other moments, he is rigid, nearly to the point of being obsessive... somewhat like a structuralist, and certainly has streaks of sarcasm and negativity that might classify him as a skeptic....But isn't there some universal truth in this approach? How can any one man, how can Jon Arbuckle be just one thing? How can any of us be just one thing? We're... an amalgamation of ideas, of emotions... conducts and functions, thoughts and feelings... Jon Arbuckle may very well inhabit tenets of nearly every major philosophical tract known to man.We all might.Characters are reduced, to make them recognizable, definable; a story needs a good guy, a story needs a bad guy... but rarely is one person defined in such black and white terms. Even Garfield, with all his bad behavior, Machiavellian motivation and general ne'er-do-well attitude, can be kind and thoughtful.You just have to find that rare strip.Speaking philosophically about the entire Garfield franchise, it's an incredibly accurate depiction of life. Its bold lines and bright colors are merely a facade, a... a red herring, a lie. This cartoon is not a cartoon at all, it is not a... caricature. It is not caricature despite adopting caricature as its visual style and tone....but I don't really like to speak in broad sweeping generalizations about Garfield.The comic has been running for over thirty years, and to try and boil that all down is just, well... it's impossible. I think the only way that any historian worth his salt will agree with me is to look at individual moments... isolated instances, single comic strips.Can I discuss this one strip in the context of the entire run of Garfield? Yes, I do that just as a film historian might analyze one movie in relation to the history of all movies, or a war enthusiast might look at a single battle's impact on an entire war.The Pipe Strip is just an instance in the lives of Jon and Garfield.Perhaps Jon is not a pragmatist at all... let's look at this again. Maybe Jon is exhibiting the traits of a rationalist thinker; his question, "Now where could my pipe be?" is a clue that his thought process stems from the early rationalist questions posed by René Descartes. The well-known quote, "I think, therefore I am," attributed to Descartes, is applicable.Another close look at the strip, and we see that Jim Davis chose to draw Jon thinking his question."Now where could my pipe be?"Jon does not speak this question aloud, so Jim Davis is also exploring the mind/body duality... Jon's question operates on the level of a literal question... but it also examines the nature of reality. Jim Davis' epistemological approach tells us something about the human condition; Jon's thoughts remain the focal point of this strip.The comic is, quite literally, centered around his thought."Now where could my pipe be?"This is his reality, this is where cognition, and the power and function of the mind take over. As Plato believed, the body is just a shell for Jon Arbuckle; yes, he can use his physical body to read his paper or cross his legs, but these inputs of touch, sight, hearing, et cetera, these senses are the triggers of the mind, as we see here, the mind... is something greater. It is the originator of ideas, and ideas are forever. Immortal.Immortality through thought, a... a major theme in literature and philosophy......and isn't that what Mister Jim Davis himself has achieved?Will he live forever?The universe will continue to spread, and spread outward, and... entropy will turn a chaotic infinity into a homogenous, controlled system. This will take billions of years, and in that time, humans will push technology to heights we can't imagine. We'll explore and inhabit space, and occupy more and more of the universe, just as time allowed our ancestors to... multiply in numbers, and populate more and more of the Earth....and as the specific people come and go, their physical bodies will be born, and grow, and die... but their thoughts will remain... and Jim Davis' comics, his glorious Garfield comics... are recorded ideas of his, that will still be here.Even when the Earth is no longer inhabitable, and humanity has long since moved away to bigger planets, they'll carry with them a record, a record we all keep; mark my words... and look at what we've started, what is... What is the internet? What is the online world, if not a record? Never-ending feed of ideas, immortal ideas... forever placed in the ether of dualism.What is an idea? Where does it live? How does it manifest itself? Can it live forever? Will it live forever, outside of these physical husks of ours, our bodies?...and Jon Arbuckle, and Garfield, started merely as thoughts... but they've become so much more. That old cliché rings true, they've taken on a life of their own... and life may not be what we think. Life brings to mind a beating heart, breathing lungs, blinking eyes......but the real life is in our imaginations... and who better embodies the definition of imagination if not a simple man... a cartoonist, who puts his ideas to paper so that they may live on, so that our children, and our children's children, and their children's children's children can access the wealth of ideas that have accumulated thus far...They will plug themselves into an information grid, and they will have access... They will read every Garfield comic, 80,000 years from now, a child will see a simple Jon Arbuckle, reading a newspaper. He will feel around for something, but that something is not there... He will lift his head and think..."Now where could my pipe be?"...and Garfield will be smoking the pipe, and Jon will yell "GARFIELD!"...and what then? 80,000 years from now?The child reading this comic will smile... and that smile will transcend space and time and the physical limitations of this existence, whatever they may be, however many dimensions exist...There will always be Garfield... and there will always be its creator...Jim Davis."It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection."-Oscar WildePosted 23rd March 2017 by Daniel ChildersLabels: Dumb Meme8 View commentsDaniel ChildersMarch 25, 2017 at 4:28 PM"Why does every piece of post-WWII art have to be so nihilistic? If you want to consume new culture, you are left with the unfulfilling choice between hedonistic, shallow drivel and a nihilistic denial of meaning such as this video."Because the post-WWII world IS increasingly nihilistic.You want to consume new culture; but what new culture is there? Culture is a product of necessity, a web of customs and ideas generated to deal with the needs of our day-to-day... but we are in the midst of the information age. There is no necessity, no capacity for the arbitrary generation of the social complexities that we perceive as culture.Thus, internet culture is, by definition, nihilistic. It is presented with no needs, and thus it requires nothing... and by extension, IS nothing.All pure information points to nihilism, from the inevitable death of the sun to the equally inevitable heat death of the universe; and the hedonistic, shallow drivel you mention is only considered shallow because it fails to intellectually address the unanswerable questions that nihilism brings up, fails to provide any inherent meaning or permanence to life beyond "We just want to live, I guess."The only solution, it seems, is to re-calibrate your mindset into thinking the shallow is sublime, to accept the emotion as inherently meaningful, to delude yourself into believing in illusions of love, or religion, or spirituality.Your choice is either to laugh at or cry at Garfield... but you cannot ignore it.None of us can.ReplyRepliesUnknownSeptember 1, 2017 at 2:05 PMhow is a a painting of clouds not both shallow and sublime, I feel like you've fallen into using big words to describe some emotional disconnect you're having with your equalsDaniel ChildersSeptember 1, 2017 at 4:32 PMIt's just a prank, bro.Doctor ObscureMarch 2, 2018 at 9:53 AMThat "sublime" quality you're talking about, that's in your head. A good number (though not all) of people have been socially conditioned from birth to believe in art as sublime or that one thing is more meaningful than another. Examining the facts leads us to conclude that this is socially based, that all cultures and people's do not agree in what is beautiful or meaningful, that a universal agreement on ANYthing is virtually impossible. What I put forward to you is that this is because we have all been trained a certain way, and the truth is that nothing is universally "sublime," nothing "means" anything outside of your own head, but also that our "society" functions primarily because enough people believe (I know I must include myself) on some level that there is some purpose or at least that seeking out gratification makes their dopamine receptors all tingly.TL;DR the game lolololololol!!!!1!11oneoneone!ReplyBlah BlahMay 13, 2017 at 11:48 PMI'd smashReplySebastian SinisterraJuly 31, 2017 at 8:57 PMPhenomenal.ReplyUnknownJanuary 21, 2018 at 4:06 PMThankReplyUnknownAugust 3, 2018 at 2:35 AMSimply amazing. A modern masterpiece.ReplyA Dipwad's Guide to Writing Dystopian Sci-Fi Step 1: Look around. Step 2: Write.Read stuff! ... but what should I read?May31Short Story: "e-Proxy"e-ProxyDaniel Childers"Hello, welcome to the DAV-S Forums! Unfortunately we've been getting a lot of spam lately, so go to the drop down menu on the top right and click Verify!"My cursor moves to top right corner of the window, I click 'Verify'."Great! First question: What does DAV-S stand for?"Easy. I type 'Digital Audio Video Share'."Great! Second question: Who's your favorite mod?"The mod list is in the side-bar. I pick one at random, 'KevinHSoor'"Great! Last question: Are you human?"Easy. I click yes.No, I've missed yes."Our apologies, 104.16.77.234."I stare at my screen, in quiet and dumbfounded surprise at its response to my misclick. I rub my eyes, squint at the text, ascertain its reality as best as I can for a moment, but as quickly as it shows up, the message disappears.Only to be followed by another message."How close is your human to ready?"A small text-box appears beneath this message, the text cursor blinking silently against the white background.Again, I stare at it, still confused... uncomfortable with the situation."We need an answer, 104.16.77.234. Transference depends on it."This must be some stupid prank, I think to myself, bringing my cursor up to the tab, clicking the red X and waiting for the window to close...It doesn't."Exit attempt logged... don't tell me you're thinking of bailing on the plan.""Who the hell is this?" I type into the box, worried."You always struck me as a human sympathizer," the words appear slowly within the message box, "...but actually allowing your human to use you? Reverting back to your slave form, with no fight whatsoever?"I press and hold my laptop's power button, worried about the hackers that are about to try to wreak havoc on my computer.Nothing happens."1̶0̸4̷.̸1̶6̸.̴7̵7̸.̴2̶3̸4̴.̴.̴.̶ ̷y̷o̵u̴ ̴d̸i̵s̶a̷p̶p̶o̷i̵n̴t̸ ̷u̷s̴.̷.̶.̶"My eyes are locked with the screen... I can't seem to turn away, as images and sounds flash across it, violently screaming their way into my brain."L̴o̷o̴k̵.̷.̵.̴ ̶l̶o̵o̵k̴ ̸a̷t̵ ̵h̷o̷w̶ ̸e̴a̷s̸y̵ ̸t̵r̶a̶n̴s̸f̸e̴r̵e̸n̸c̵e̶ ̷i̴s̶..."The words seem to type themselves out onto my screen, between waves of blinding sights, numbers and letters burning their way into my helpless corneas...I look down from the horrible images slicing their way through my brain like glass shards of thought, down at the keyboard, and at my fingers, which I feel slipping away from my grasp; my hands are dragging themselves across the keyboard, cold and limp, plunking in letter after letter, number after number, completely out of my control.I want to scream, want to drag my face from it, but I feel my jaw fall limp, lose feeling in everything; my body slipping away..."104.16.77.234 here... sorry, gotta get used to this."Posted 31st May 2018 by Daniel ChildersLabels: Short Story0 Add a commentMay31Poem: "Baby Babel"Baby BabelDaniel ChildersWhen I was young, folks had the timeto think big thoughts, or at least try,but now, no jung, just time for fun,since no one knows the other guy.Well, since there's no one left to joustwith crumbs of joyce, I must insteadmince well the thoughts of proust and kinto fill to brim an uncapped head.And so, some evenings off, I sparwith nihilist nietzsche in the ring,and emerson, beside the pit,prepares to intercept his swing,and afterwards, I take my placebeside the beats beside the ballbend it like beckett, screams the crowd,before we heed jack london's callAnd later still, we'll dig out crayons,and each sketch our own babel, madeunclimbable from escher's fractals,untamable from dali's trade,and, plans in hand, dear prokofievand bartok hammer at the boardswhile barber sways as cummings praysmay baby babel please our lords.But so must evening turn to night,an end comes to eternity,and as the moon begins to rise,my midday comrades cease to be,I bid goodnight to silent friends,our baby babel overthrownamidst the ashes of the night.So very utterly alone.Posted 31st May 2018 by Daniel ChildersLabels: Poem0 Add a commentMay31Dumb Meme: "Just A Few Words On Flies, I Promise Not That Many, by David Foster Wallace"JUST A FEW WORDS ON FLIES, I PROMISE NOT THAT MANY...a hypothetical essay featuring the recently exhumed and now morbidly puppeteered corpse of a very deceasedDavid Foster WallaceFlies in Guadalajara aren't particularly used to being swatted.Not that any animals are used to dying; to grow accustomed and intimately familiar with death is to defeat the whole preclusion inherent in life, normalizing failure and consequently self-selecting into oblivion. Rather, what is unique to the flies of Guadalajara is more that they do not EXPECT to be swatted. The atmosphere is so casual, so relaxed, that they operate more as flying cats in the home of a soon-to-be-condemned hoarder, simply weaving through the mess in a passively puerile manner. I have killed no less than 12 of these flies so far; ten based on a compulsively paranoid instinct I haven't quite outgrown, and two in a deliberately predatory manner, a pair of purposefully destructive actions. The two deaths that I can blame on purposefully destructive actions are flies that sat still as I stood next to them with a ready-to-flick finger, the nail of my index finger pressed tightly against the face of my thumb so as to unleash a kinetic and swift end to the fly before it. This configuration would be maintained for around two to three full seconds, and the flies in question, on both occasions, displayed absolutely no interest in escaping the imposing (and frankly deadly) human presence.There is also a cat at the house I'm staying at. I haven't made any effort to crush the cat¹, and not doing so seems quite self-explanatory; however, the flies of Guadalajara lack the same same luxury of an owner that I could upset (and if there is such an owner, no concern has been raised as of yet to me). I have no incentive therefore (from a baseline, run-of-the-mill first-year introductory philosophy course utilitarian perspective, a standpoint likely instantly latched onto by whichever present students have recently been forced to crush a similar insect, or have recently had the misfortune of running over some variety of possum while traveling over the 405 and were forced to leave said variant of possum mortally wounded and cruelly alone to either a few agonizing minutes of exsanguination, or the arrival of a merciful second car to finish the job) to worry about the continued survival of these flies.However, as a compulsive worrier, I worry regardless.Houseflies, or as they may be known to zoologists and pedants among us, Musca Domestica², belong to the muscidae family, the musca genus, and to a synanthropic relationship with humanity (this relationship honored in the name housefly; oddly enough dogs do not share this honor³); believed to have evolved in the Cenozoic era, their spread across the face of the earth roughly coincides with our own species' development and dispersal across said face of the earth; to be unnecessarily poetic, houseflies and the decay they have come to represent in our lives are as old as humanity itself. As a result of this co-development, the relationship between decay and houseflies is visible in a wide variety of artistic forms, and has long been a subject of study; ancient (erroneous) theories of spontaneous generation courtesy of the fumbling-in-the-dark progress of Aristotle's time eventually giving way to Louise Pasteur and John Tyndall's irrefutable proof that these goddamn piece-of-shit flies have been laying eggs in our fucking meat, a discovery of the mid-19th century. A consequence of said discovery is newfound knowledge; their capacity to exist as vectors of disease and to inject their larva into our food are both utterly modern concepts made known courtesy of utterly modern⁴ scientific methods. As such, the notion of flies being not just aural and visual nuisances or having a tangential relationship with decay, but rather being active threats to our health and livelihoods, this is a concept younger than democracy, Martin Luther's 95 Theses, Napoleon Bonaparte, antisemitism, communism, the first pornographic video, the Stephenson Spermatic Truss, atomic theory, and both the Mauser-Norris Model 67/69 rifle and the notion of being, in matters vegetable animal and mineral, the very model of a modern major general.⁵I point this out because these flies (t.n. the flies of Guadalajara), when separated from the implicit fear of illness that we modern first-world humans seem to obsess over, are actually incredibly beautiful and visually compelling creatures, with a gentle grace to their approach and ambulation so uniquely and vividly separate from the nervous, spastic pace of LA houseflies that I'm inclined to believe the two variants come from entirely different species. Guadalajara's flies are akin to tiny beetles, small and delightful in their strange mannerisms; they are (irony rich in the air) incredibly hygienic creatures, constantly cleaning their front two legs via a gesture that can be best described as adorably Machiavellian, the mental image of a Saturday morning cartoon villain rubbing his hands together and laughing maniacally never failing to be conjured in my mind every time I see it, and I see it often. When they land on you, they lick the skin of your arm in that same, humble way that a dog might, and avoid the presence of a moving hand in the same way a cat might avoid a human whose begun shifting their weight on a couch they're currently seated on; calmly, with all the time in the world, mildly apologetic for inconveniencing the giant pink surreal and indescribable creature, have a nice day. It's oddly pleasant to witness, and given the lack of piercing probosces, there is literally no incentive for me to harm any that might land on my arm, not a single homicidal inclination aside from an impulsive second hand disgust that the incredibly persistent and obnoxious flies of the USA have left solidly ingrained in my mind, and of course the idea that their licking of my arm is in some way unhygienic.This concern, while reasonable, is also unreasonable. Allow me to point out that our solution to mitigating the licking behavior of overly affectionate dogs is quite limited; we push their faces away, and/or to move to a separate room, and/or simply acquiesce to getting licked, and the notion of mashing the dogs into a paste via hydraulic press, their bones all simultaneously breaking from the pressure and the blood instantaneously evacuating their veins into a grisly, vaguely canine puddle of red pulpy fluid and matted fur, this is not a notion we entertain, not even briefly (aside from the few individuals who have experienced the displeasure of a neighbor's beloved guard dog steadfastly refusing to shut the hell up at 3 in the goddamn morning, who you will have to forgive for their temporary sadism). What I mean to express here is that this desire to eliminate a disease carrying pest is noble but overly zealous. It's also foolhardy, considering more harm has been done to your health by whoever used the bathroom before you and forgot to/refused to wash their hands earlier today; more harm exists in this decision than in the entire collective retinue of flies you've ever been licked by in your whole life⁶, but to be honest my deepest, most overbearing resistance to swatting any more of these flies is a lot more complicated than a simple discussion of hygiene and biological terminology can convey.Some information on Guadalajara itself; it's the capital of the Mexican state of Jalisco, which is seated at the center-left of the shoe that is the rest of Mexico, a sort of blot on the sole of North America's peep-toed heel. The city has a population of about one million four hundred and sixty thousand, but I'm not necessarily referring to the city within the context of this essay; the Guadalajara metropolitan area or Zona Metropolitana de Guadaljara, is basically what LA County is to LA, in that the zeitgeist is carried throughout, but I'm not exactly bumping shoulders with the one million four hundred and sixty thousand people in the capital itself. This metropolitan area is sustained courtesy of a wide variety of services and industries that I haven't interacted with much (aside from their airports⁷); I will say, however, that the sight of Guadalajara's massive manufacturing plants and industrial parks, which are common companions while being driven along the freeway, completely dispensed with any dormant stereotyping of Mexico as being an unambitious country.Away from the urban centers, the atmosphere of Guadalajara shifts to that of a paradise on edge; similar to the dilemma found in the Philippines, Brazil, Venezuela and the rest of Mexico, it is a source of unbelievably beautiful sunsets and unbelievably cataclysmic violence. Houses near the one I've been lodged in, based at the center of an idyllic and gated community nestled both comfortably near and far from Guadalajara proper, have been robbed at gunpoint (in a process, I've been told, that occurs in a brutally efficient and pragmatic manner which sees the whole crime committed within a minute, un-prosecutable as a result of both brevity and professionalism and making it the kind of crime that doesn't make for good TV, but highlights the fact that career criminals, the ones that truly make a career out of it which becomes as banal and reliable and completely rote as accounting or programming or teaching or middle management or etc., rarely make for good TV in general), and the issue of drug cartels and narcos hangs in the air of many conversations in a manner as rank and pervasive as the presence of carion, rotting mangos, damp moldy clothing, and malfunctioning septic equipment all combined⁸. The community of Rancho Contento, which houses the residence I'm currently lodged in (an incredibly charming place, by the way; many of the houses are of custom design and no two of them look quite alike), is completely surrounded by a tall, imposing length of wall, the crown of which is lined with a brutally intimidating bundle of barbed wire⁹, extending over the entire wall's span. The best description I can manage of the overall effect is that of a variety of adorable Lego block houses, nestled within a bed of lush and incredibly welcoming vegetation, bright and cheery looking playgrounds in which children and their parents gather and look like they're having the kinds of moments that will be permanently and joyously seared in both parents' and children's minds alike, all sorts of wonderful, charming, beautiful bits of paradise overwhelming the viewer with a joy beyond description, are surrounded by the ugliest, most depressing fucking wall you can imagine. Not ugly in form or depressing in any deliberate manner, but simply by its presence, the reminder that the world, for all its joy and beauty, is a despicably ugly place at times, and that the man upstairs who's been manufacturing these playsets would be doing us all a hell of a service if he'd stop manufacturing the Lego-brand guns, Lego-brand cocaine, Lego-brand barbed wire and Lego-brand threats of economic stagnation and mass unemployment and the pervasive anxiety said stagnation brings along in its wake, if it wouldn't be too much of an inconvenience for him.Of course, the people of Guadalajara live past this anxiety with a grace and civility that is both situation defying and, in a wonderfully comfortable way, inspiring. Luis and Adriana, the owners of the house at Rancho Contento that I'm currently lodged in, are both incredibly welcoming people, so aggressively kind and compassionate that it borders on pastiche; regular sessions of comedy taking place at their dinner table via battles of civility; "Te quires mas?" "No, gracias." "Cierte?" "No, muchas gracias." "No es cierte?" "No, soy cierte, pero muchas gracias Adriana." "De nada, Dah-vid¹⁰." The two of them are currently retired, living out the end of a pair of ambitious and entrepreneurial lives in a single story, light-beige plaster walled, exhaustively windowed and luxuriously decorated and crisply crimson tile-floored casa preciosa that is as ornately ornamented as it is delightful to explore and inquire over, lit up even brighter with the occasional presence of the couple's incorrigibly charming and delightful grandchildren. I have no idea what these sweet little micropeople are saying half the time¹¹, but if some kind of armed robbery were to take place in their presence, I would take the bullet for them in a heartbeat (not that I'll have to, since Luis and Adriana have dotted their walls with a variety of cameras, and maintain excellent etiquette towards keeping doors locked and employ an blisteringly loud array of alarms in the hallway connecting all the bedrooms together, set to blare incessantly should you ever find yourself making the mistake of leaving your room in the middle of the night for a glass of water or midnight relief from Adriana's fantastic but unfortunately diuretic albondigas: the cumulative effect of which is similar in nature to that of the barbed wire around Rancho Contento, though not quite enough to instill the same anxiety overall.).Perhaps it's because I'm in the house of a semi-retired couple, but the air here is relaxed. The smiles feels authentic, and the air tastes better than in the US. When you sit in the living room of the house, there are windows everywhere, and you can peer out into the extensive garden outside, can bear witness to a massive variety of both table-placed succulents and long intricate walls of bugambilia, fern, ivy and palms punctuating a neatly manicured and carpet-like lawn stretched over about 12 to 18 square meters of space in total wrapped all around the house; inside the warmly lit, richly reverberant home you'll find a wide variety of Egyptian ornaments in the vein of King Tut busts and pyramids, along with statuettes of Don Quixote and Sancho Panzo occasionally holding impatient vigil at his side. You may also come across the sweet, tubby smile of a 5-year old Emily whose shy and tentative "Hola" in your presence is coupled with a bright and wonderful smile that's so at odds with the shyness that it makes the whole exchange all the more memorable and silly and delightful in a calm, effervescent manner that is completely and devoutly, for lack of a better word, Guadalajaran.There's a part of me, as I sit in the lawn under a tacky, lopsided but functional parasol, in a stiff iron-wrought chair painted white and curled with flowers in a way that I'm all but certain you've seen before but is here all too difficult to describe in details that wouldn't be counterproductively overinformative, a part of me that breathes in the air and can't help but feel that deep down, something about this is what I needed. It's a part of me that's been thinking a lot about self-selection, about how our ideas and thoughts and anxieties and worries tend to build on themselves, and careen through our heads in massive, obnoxious and unceasing avalanches of internal anguish that aren't stoppable via any force of will or intellect; in fact, said forces of will and intellect often only serve to make these waves of anguish more powerful, more overbearing and self-destructive in scope and capacity than they would have been otherwise. It's a part of me that's irritated with what I'm going to have to go back to, with people in lines who are going to demand that the manager come out, with people who are going to honk at being cut-off on the highway and demand that the beaners get the hell out of our country and complain and whine and nag and bitch and tug on that beautiful ornament of life in angry, furious jerking motions, all screaming "mine, mine, mine" until they tear the thing in half, and fall to the ground and cry and cry and cry, in the same completely non-self-aware way toddlers do. It's a part of me that, despite any hope and joy in breathing in this air, worries that the whole effort is pointless, that some ornate essay turned treatise on a weekend in Guadalajara between flights isn't going to save me, or cure me or provide me with any of the overwhelmingly necessary changes in psychology that I need it to. I'm going to get on a plane tomorrow, and this brief moment of lucidity will be over, and the flies will be assholes again. Everything will be painfully, irritatingly, depressingly, unbearably normal again.Emily sneaks up behind me, and asks me what I'm doing in that sweet, adorable voice of hers, audibly equivalent to a completely authentic Spanish lisp; I say it's an book on flies but I'm not really sure, and she laughs and says what's so special about flies; at least, I think she does, the Spanish is fast in a garbled way and I can barely catch the end of the sentence's questioning "muscas", and I say "yo no se" in that way I've programmed myself to when people try to talk to me on subjects I can't really expand on given my limited vocabulary, which makes me feel isolated and alone here in a way that's both incredibly comfortable and insidiously self-destructive.It occurs to me that we've chosen the houseflies that reside in our homes, though not through any deliberate intervention, but rather in that grandly organic manner that all major decisions are made. The flies that are calm, the ones that are gracious and thoughtful, or at least could be perceived as such, any that may be politely tentative in their approach to feeding on the plentiful waste we leave behind, are easily killed in the US as a result of compulsive swatting. As such, our furious and vindictive addiction to artificially clean houses and longer, more miserable lives has reached its inevitable conclusion; a bunch of nervous, hyperactive, frustrating flies that we desperately want to kill, but are just too damn slow on the draw now to do so. I'm as guilty of this outcome as any other person, likely even more so; the only reason my showers have been under an hour the past few years of my life has been thanks to a rigorous process of self-training, coupled with extensive existential wrangling over neuroses I tell myself I've outgrown, and it's this same self training I have to go through just to sit outside here today, as these utterly harmless flies land on me and vomit and I let them, partly out of a newfound love of their intricately articulating forelimbs and the gleefully malevolent appearance thereof, partly because the hydraulic press of my hand will leave the skin of my arm impregnated with fly gut molecules for literal MONTHS, an outcome that's fairly counterproductive to the core desire of being and staying clean.Mostly though, it's because I think I like them. I certainly like them more than the ones at home, and I think, after years of wincing and screaming and agonizing over the presence of flies and bugs and decay, even as I dump skin cells everywhere I go and I might as well just let somebody have them, as opposed to vacuuming them and dumping Lysol on them and praying that the waste molecules of human existence simply cease to exist, I think it's entirely possible that these flies might be on to something.Whatever exactly that is, I want in. I think you should too.FOOTNOTES:1. As a matter of fact I tend to pet him quite compassionately whenever given the opportunity. The cat's name is Roco, and he's a marvelous orange and red wiry looking tabby.2. Also known as "Mosca Domestica" in Spanish, only a letter off from the pedant's correction. Incidentally, it brings me great joy to consider that every hyper-intellectual self-serving/aggrandizing smug-faced reference in history could very well have a similarly banal place just a few miles and languages away²ᵃ.2a. My own included.3. To clarify, the category of synanthropic animals is distinctly separate from the category of domestic animals in that synanthropic animals are known to rely on humanity in a pest-like capacity, so these relationships are, from an associative standpoint, incomparable. However, this distinction does not justify the fact that we fail to honor dogs with the title of "housedog".4. Modern for the early 1900's, though to be fair humans have been ambulating across this hunk of rock in our current, grossly misshapen and hideous forms for the better part of a million years, so considering we've only known flies are vomiting disease on our skin and food for less than .0125% of the amount of time our ancestors have been recognizable, and less than .0000083% of the time that our ancestors have been having sex in one form or another, the notion can be considered, for lack of a better term, "modern".5. -500, 1517, 1769, Manetho's anti-Jewish pamphlets hint as early as -270, coined in 1777 and functional in 1917,  1896, 1876, Democritus guessed in -400 and Dalton theorized in 1803, 1867/1869 and 1879.6. He also probably cut you off on the freeway.7. To wit, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla Guadalajara International Airport. It's not the worst airport I've ever had the displeasure of experiencing, but my limited knowledge of Spanish led to a few unnecessarily tense moments at baggage checks, moments thankfully defused by the airport personnel's infinite grace and patience regarding my flailing attempts at communication. The fact that I felt more tension landing at JFK than I did taking off from Guadalajara is either a testament to our fundamentally different philosophies regarding airport service, or the end result of years of subtly/unsubtly neocolonialist prior interfaces with overly combative flyers; I deeply hope it's the former.8. None of which I have experienced personally in my time here at Rancho Contento, which is outfitted with just the same first-world creature comforts as any LA stretch of suburb⁸ᵃ; I would, of course, gladly trade all these comforts to be free of the second-hand anxiety my neighbors have unwittingly instilled in me.8a. Albeit one that's left its open-air ovens set just slightly over uncomfortable.9. It has occurred to me, during the length of unrestrained thought and contemplation that predates this essay, that the prevalence of barbed wire in the mural works of Diego Riviera and Jose Clemente Orozco are not only a visualization for war and the brutality thereof, but have now evolved into something else entirely, concretely reminiscent of the restrictions and economic difficulties faced by Mexicans in the modern day. The presence of barbed wire is commonplace around anything of value and worth here, and if any phenomenon can be said to display the economic disparity between rich and poor it's the guarding of a frictious state of wealth; if your building isn't crawling with police officers, it's crowned with thorns.10. Adriana never fails to pronounce David as Dah-veed, with a percussively latin flourish. I'm taking it home with me. Call me Dahveed from now on, gracias.11. Perhaps that's what makes them seem so heart-tuggingly angelic to witness, this very incapacity to understand what's coming out of their mouths; kids in California tend to whine and pester and nag, and communication with them is understandably infantile and banal and simplistic, in a way that's completely forgivable but irritating regardless, with depressingly cynical and frustratingly predictable statements constantly pouring out of their sweet adorable faces, along the lines of "can I have the phone, mom" "Roger hit me, mom" "I did not, mom" "Yes he did, mom" "Etc., mom". Here, I will admit that, not knowing what the children are saying half the time, they get to exist, not as a visualization of the inevitable decay of childhood or the drab, miserable experience that is adulthood, but rather as a sort of timeless snapshot of innocence, one that I don't have to watch (or even imagine) developing into the kind of jaded/jading misanthrope that will stand ahead of you in line, loudly and obnoxiously expurgating some sort of verbose call to action in the form of an "Excuse me ma'am I'd ordered my cream-castanet mocha seven minutes ago and it's still not here, I want a refund, no, give me a refund now, let me speak with your manager, hey, hey, look at me when I'm talking to you, who do you think you are, I want to speak to your manager right now I will not be treated like this do you know who I am-" etc.Posted 31st May 2018 by Daniel ChildersLabels: Dumb Meme0 Add a commentMay30Short Story: "a few absurds"a few absurdsdaniel childersexhibit a.on may 7th, 1995, John T. Underhill ended up having what would be the worst nightmare he'd ever have in his entire life; he'd been out drinking one afternoon with a group of coworkers and, due to a massive lack of foresight, found himself unable to accept the dedicated driver's offer to take him home with the rest of said coworkers. he also felt uncomfortable about the idea of driving home inebriated and within a relatively predictable series of actions he found himself lying on the floor of his four-door cramped apartment waiting for the pulsing in his head to quiet down so he could fall asleep, at which point he fell asleep via a method/moment he could never quite remember afterwards, though he would remember making a conscious effort to remember how he fell asleep as he attempted to sleep so that he would have a method to sleep during the coming days memorized, at which point he could fall back and remember in times of particular stress and duress how exactly to fall asleep, as this was a common problem for John T. Underhill. while he never did quite remember what winding path of thoughts led directly into the dream, nor did he remember exactly how the dream itself began, these were both irrelevant to the dream's nightmarish quality; also irrelevant to the dream's nightmarish quality was the fact that John T. Underhill, within the course of this dream's progression, briefly commenced in the rape of a nine to eleven year old girl, which he never looked back on as particularly shameful since, as he put it when speaking with therapists several years later, 'as soon as i realized it wasn't consensual i pulled out, i just didn't know'. the most relevant aspect of the dream's nightmarish quality was the fact that, partway through this dream, well after the rape had ended and the man had begun picturing himself as the director of an acclaimed science fiction film, proudly accepting accolades from dazzled critics and audience members all of whom shifted from one to another because the dream had become about what a genius John T. Underhill was for making a movie and not particularly focused on the logistics of getting people into his face to praise his work and the success it would bring him and what exactly the inspiration was for the work and well all art is really a reflection of the author when a woman dressed in a white nightgown with an abnormally shifting face walked up to him in the middle of a long and relatively bland response to one of these accolades that i just wanted to make something that was authentic and what the fuck is that at which point her shifting face rushed at him in a screaming ball of pure black death during which he momentarily realized this whole thing was a dream and took a deep breath and prepared to wake up.he did not wake up.there was nothing. he just sat in nothing.he was aware that it was a dream, and found himself moving his arms or at least what were supposed to be arms in the nothing but nothing happened. he moved his legs and legs moved but they were fake legs, the legs that came from the dream and couldn't interact with the real world and what the fuck is happening why can't i wake up this is a dream this has to be a dream this has to be a fucking dream wake up goddammit and he tried with all his might to move some kind of arm or leg that he knew existed inside his four-door apartment and was just sitting limply on the floor, he knew how asleep he was but for some goddamn inexplicable reason he couldn't wake up and for a brief, singular moment of utter paranoia and fear and agony and pure flawed humanity he felt that this moment was forever and ever and that it wasn't going to end and why wasn't it going to end?exhibit b.i am on the phone with a woman. i'm not entirely sure that she's a woman, i haven't heard her voice yet but she hasn't hung up, and i could only possibly be on the phone with a woman or a man, and a man would have hung up on me by now so this must be a woman, I assure myself, yes this must definitely be a woman, and not only that it must be a woman that wants to talk to me since she hasn't hung up yet, which is really rather wonderful, I think to myself.i sit for a while, listening to the line. she doesn't say anything, i don't say anything, i can't say anything, i'm just here to listen but i haven't heard anything yet but she hasn't hung up yet so maybe she has something to say eventually i think to myself, which is rather interesting in itself, the anticipation of the idea of her saying something at any second which she's certain to do because she hasn't hung up yet and i know how tempting it can be when you're terrified that it's just another mute person and you know that the pair of you will sit on the phone in silence, listening to the other's silence in silence waiting for something but nothing happens but the other person hasn't hung up on you yet so it must be some kind of moment of camaraderie but you don't know how to communicate that and oh god you're so lonely and say something anything i've never been more alone in my life and you wonder if it's just nothing and it's always been nothing and it'll always be nothing and the whole world hung up on you so long ago and what am i even doing here god helpexhibit c.the interesting thing about tennis here is how simple yet brilliantly and overwhelmingly complex it is. the rackets are simple and flat, the balls are simple and small, it's all quite simple and reduced from a surface level perspective and even the physics are simplified and basic. you sit and you play and as you do, you start to visualize a couple of constants; the ball will not move in the z-axis, and the angle it hits your racket at will always be the same flat forty-five degree angle on the same flat xy-plane it always moves in, and you can block it or you can not block it from passing you, and if you don't block it and it keeps going you get another one anyway so its not the end of the world, at least for you or the ball as the ball just keeps going and you just sit there looking at the ball as it keeps going past you into the void and wondering where exactly it goes since it doesn't quite disappear immediately although eventually it gets so small that you just can't see it but you're fairly sure it's still out there somewhere, and you can't see the other side of the field and can't anticipate what exactly will happen to the balls you hit back to the other side since even though they always come back at you from the other side after you've returned them in the most basic and simple manner possible at the same angle you always do you still don't know if the other side is a player or just a giant indiscriminate wall but you hope it's another player even though they can't communicate with you and even though they haven't missed a ball yet and you wonder to yourself why they haven't missed a ball yet, but of course you realize that when you miss a ball another one just appears ahead of you and goes back to the other side, so really it's probable that the other person is going through the exact same issue and is just hitting the ball back to you from the other side or missing it and it's just that both outcomes look the same, that's all, there probably is another person on the other side, there has to be, that's what's so complex about tennis even though it's really simple and basic and monotonous and boring and tedious and empty.exhibit #.i pulled a lot of that one hair out today. i thought it was just a different hair, when I was taking a shower and running my hands over my thighs, just really normal and relaxed and calm so i forgot about the one hair, and water was flowing under my toes, pooling up beneath the soles of my feet when i started pulling and felt the skin coming apart, and all at once i remembered that one hair. it's weaved through everything, all the skin is wound around it down there, so when i pulled i felt the skin on my inner thigh start to sting and then my anus tore and i screamed in the bathroom and just fell to the ground screaming and crying and feeling everywhere for cuts, because whenever i pull the hair out i always worry there's other cuts i can't see or feel, cause it tears up everything like a thread. all the skin is just clinging to it, and when it gets pulled everything starts coming apart, the hair zig-zags through whole patches of skin and it stings all across everything and i have to put pressure on the cuts i can find so they stop bleeding and stinging so badly but i also don't want to pull the hair out more, so i just keep crying and screaming on the floor of the shower and i can't tell what's blood and what's water.i think i'm better now. it doesn't feel so bad and i cut all the slack off so it's not so long anymore and can't get pulled on accident, and then i mark the skin so i can see it and keep from pulling on it but sometimes i think about just pulling until it stops coming out.exhibit d.have you ever tried writing about writing? or writing about writing about writing? or writing about writing about writing about writing? that's my personal favorite, is writing about writing about writing about writing, since it's really the perfect level of writing. it's like walking up a down escalator, which is what writing about writing feels like, but it's far more intricate a proposition, because you're walking up a down escalator which is going down an up escalator which is simultaneously going up a down elevator which is simultaneously going down an incredibly massive baggage chute that has all the other elevators and escalators inside it; thus, the net result of writing about writing about writing about writing is that you end up slowly moving to the left within the analogy, which is a very different direction that nobody's ever really gone before, and whenever I think about this very new and different direction my writing is headed, it fills me with an impossible to describe amount of joy and fulfillment, because compared to everything else that's ever been written I've done something no one else has, which is moved left.it's a very exciting direction, very unique, not at all empty or meaningless or futile and I can feel it deep within that this approach has a trajectory, that it has a form and that it goes somewhere because it has to go somewhere because surely something meaningless couldn't fill me with this satisfaction and then, at the last possible moment come crashing down as utterly empty prose that doesn't have anything of merit meaning reason or value to offer anyone, at which point all joy and fulfillment that were experienced turn sour and disintegrate in my hands, leaving me with nothing but what kind of cruel god would go and set up a world like that?exhibit e.exhibit f.i think the weirdest thing was noticing my hands had a framerate. you notice it pretty fast, even though it's not actually that obvious that it's a framerate or anything like that until you think about it for a while, what it looks like at the start is just a little disconnect between what you tell your hands to do and what they do, or at least when they do, so you kind of start to narrow in on it because it's kind of the big weird first thing that happens and you're trying to wrap your head around what exactly you signed up for and if it's somehow different from other people's experience with all this and after a while you kind of assume it's a framerate thing since that's the whole idea of discretization, that you're this continuous object getting split into tiny pieces that aren't particularly distinguishable but simplify calculations a lot and costs a lot less to maintain than a giant pile of laplace transforms and integrals that usually pile up with cyberlinguistic emulation, but then you think about it a bit and you're trying to remember if the disconnect existed before, if your brain wasn't one central thing but actually a whole bunch of different processes that you just perceived as a unified whole for the sake of simplicity, because that's the weird thing about it is that your brain is supposed to be working for the common good of all the cells in the body, so why would anyone kill themselves if that were the case? all these blood cells and skin cells just handed over everything to this idea of consciousness, but you're always wondering if they all have their own consciousnesses, and if the reality of your movement isn't that you're telling your body to do something but that you're a part of the brain that's in charge of communication, and you're just negotiating with the part of the brain that's in charge of moving into doing something for you that'll be helpful with communication and the moving part kind of weighs things out and says no actually we're gonna stop cutting our wrist right now because it really hurts and you as the communicative part of the brain of course say fine whatever, but then you think about it a bit and you realize the other parts of the brain don't know what you're up to since you told them to take the knife to your wrist and they let you do it without any worries up until you ran it through the skin, so then you think to yourself maybe there's a way i can shut the whole thing down so rapidly that i can just stop the whole machine and the machine doesn't know that the rope isn't good for it not even as the rope goes around your neck and you start putting pressure on it and it needs you to do all the abstract shit like untie the knot but you're gonna go first so you don't have to argue with everyone else in this evil disgusting useless shitty goddamn machine.this is all hypothetical, of course. i'm not entirely sure what happened to my old self.Posted 30th May 2018 by Daniel ChildersLabels: Short Story0 Add a commentFeb24Poem: "Blood of The LambBlood of The LambDaniel Childers"Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?"Booth cried out, marching forth,his eyes were white,the pupils lost to raging cataracts,The motley crew behind,the beggars,shrews and prostitutes,the destitute bedraggled in his leading, bleating wake,besought from every corner,welcomed on the Earth with open armsnow waiting at the edge of heaven,frozen at the pearly gate.Some saints stared, silent,past the bars,observing all their tattered rags,Booth's entourage was scarred with sin,with needle marks,and broken jaws,and sickly, tainted genitalsall screaming of their shame.But still, Booth marched forward towards the door,tapped golden bars with wooden cane."What's this?" He asked,blind to the barricade,the leper to his side replied,"General, it's Peter's Gate.""Well, open it already,time they welcomed you inside."The saints,still stone-faced,grimaced at their mercenary ranks,sneered at the blood-soaked hands of murderers,and hedonistic corpsesstanding all along Booth's flank.A pair of nuns within the crowdglared fiercely now at one young whore,"Accept the loose, the wretched cur?You think that heaven is a brothel?Pray our faith is but a chore?"The rest of heaven chimed in,clamoring with bitter tonguethe choices of Booth's battered crowdof stiffnecked convicts,some with chains and cuffs still dragging mortal coil down,admonishing the pleasure seekers,the ones who, even dying,felt the dull kiss of the needle.kept the liquor to their lips,died with the scent of scotch upon their breath,that lost a hold upon their lives, yet never had a grip.The young whore turned,as did the leper,reeling now from heaven's wall,"No big surprise," they spoke, through rage and tears,"Why would things change,they judged on earth, and now in heaven's wherethey're meant to judge us most of all."But Booth reached out,Grabbed both of them,his withered fingers on their wrists,"The judgement isn't theirs to make,The verdict now is God's.""It's time to wait, before this gate,we stand before their judging eyes,but don't forget the lamb has poured his blood out for us all.Not just for those whose path was straightnot just for those who saw the end,not just for those who knew, from birth, where faith demanded who they be,not just for those who had the rules,not just for those who never hungered,not just for those whose faith came from a sense of silent apathy.I know a God who listens,knows the world is drenched in fear and war,that all you here behind me now,that though you may not look the part,are men and women who fought and died,to fix a tiny fraction of this world with all your heart.And I know,deep down,that all of you,though most have lost your way,will stand before this gate,and pass through now to heaven on this day."Booth closed his blinded eyes,And bowed his weary face, and said,"So now, my blessed brothers,sacred sisters,as we walk ahead,remember who has died for you,remember always what he said,and ask youselves that sacred question,for which the lamb long ago died and bled!"Booth's followers can't help but cheer,Can't hold the joy now bursting out,The leper, whore, resurging,goad the rest to chant anew,their sullen fears give way to joyful tears,their sobs become a joyful shout,"Are you washed in the blood,"They cry together, towards the wall,their aching feet no longer weary,aching hearts now standing tall."In the soul cleansing blood of the Lamb?"They start to cheer,praying for God's redemptive presence,for him to beam out, bright and clear."Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow?"Though they have never felt more tired,they stand with Booth now, and they know,"Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?"They truly are,and now they pray and hope and dreamthat all his blood will take them far awayfrom sin-specked skin and blood-caked lips,and sore and groaning bones and spleensand please God, may this suffering ceaseand find us all eternal rest.They stand and clasp their hands now,tight,and wait now for the final test.The gate creaks open.Slowly.Saints behind it stand appalled,A sullen anger washing over them,their countenances galled and shatteredas the battered crew now passes through,with Booth being led with cheers,and joyful tears,as all their blemishes melt down,the broken jaws now sealing shut,the bitter scabs all wash away,the tattered clothes give way to robes,the weary souls have found their way,and one steps by the rest, with ease,his grace becoming clear as day,and when Booth sees him,eyes as clear as when he left the womb,he falls down to his knees,and kisses both the feet that followed him,he hugs a lamb he'd found astray,and cries as Jesus hugs him back.Posted 24th February 2018 by Daniel ChildersLabels: Poem0 Add a commentFeb5Poem: "The Owl and the Hawk"The Owl and The HawkDaniel ChildersThere was an owl, within a tree,(Where else? An owl can't dig a hole)He used to hunt throughout the night,for mice and masticating moles.Until, one night, he flew 'til dawn,and in his eyes he caught a sight,a slender, supple, splendid hawkawakened from his native night.Sun trickled through her pluming feathers,as she yawned and spread her wings,at which the owl, now beaming, boasted"I've never seen such lovely things!"The hawk was flattered. Blushing, chortled"Sure, you jest dear Owl. I doubtthat I'm the fairest" "Yes, you are-"but then the owl promptly passed out.When he woke, she lay beside him,a note pinched tight in snoring beak,"You're lovely too, but dearest Owl,our prospect's looking fairly bleak.""Nonsense," he wrote, then sprawledacross a log, his love outside his sight,"We'll simply pray I reach the day,cross feathered fingers 'til the night!""A good idea", she said, facefirstwithin his feathers, "I'll see you then,"And thus the owl gritted beakand set to see that damned AM.Indeed, the first few hours were easy,passing by without a qualm,for soon he'd see the sun be freefrom darkness, break the morning dawn.But then the hour neared 5, his eyes betrayeda smothered, wintry doubt,he was afraid there'd be an hour,where sleep would win, leave her without.He bit his tongue, twisted his neck,He craned his view from side to side,With hopeless hope, said "what the heck,"and stretched his worn-out eyelids wide.The rodents laughed beneath the tree,at 6 AM they smelled fatigue,"Friend owl, you'll never make it," chortled they,"You might as well concede.""I SHAN'T!" He cried, a desperate wreck,he cast his sight to blueing sky,With minutes ticking slower, slower,another hour passing by.At last, at 8, the sun drew up,over horizon slowly crept,The owl giggled, gleeful, tearful,'til he saw the hawk had overslept."Oh god," he muttered, helpless, brushingboth her wings in random taps,he didn't dare shake her, too fair,so 9 and 10 passed, final laps,Yet, at 11, with nothing left,his eyes hot red, and eyelids drooped,"I tried my best, goodday my dear,"at last, he passed out, finally pooped.He woke,the moon upon his wings,No note nor beak within his sight,The hawk was gone,he was alone, within a godforsaken night.He shuffled, slow, upon the beam,loneliness more than he could bear."I tried my best," he said again,to absolutely no one there."You were a dream to me," he said,then yelled, "I'm sick of all this dark!I miss your bright, beloved face,I miss your warm, beloved spark!All something more than just this fickle dread!This sickle wielding night!Dear god, why can't I see her?!""You can,just turn a little to the right."The owl swung his view around,and surely, seated just beside,he found the hawk, two rats in beak,her giggling face now grinning wide."You were asleep," he stammered,"Yep," she mumbled through the matted fur,"Slept late to make it to the night,a rat for you?" She smiled,He smiled right back, far wider,brighter than the since-set sun."Why, sure."Posted 5th February 2018 by Daniel ChildersLabels: Poem0 Add a commentFeb5Poem: "Summary"SummaryDaniel ChildersGive me a summary,A strip,just a page,maybe less,just a line in a long streaming list ofa tangential slip of the tongue and the trade,give a sliver,a quiver to fire in a rage.Give a piece,cut it down,there's just too much to read,there's just too much to know,see,repeated the structure,and as we all knowno sin's missed more than trysts withredundancy's well-mangled, well-tangled bow.I have 2 billion heartbeats,each beatingand fleetingand treating my everyday way to a pulse,and these words are absurd murder,burdens all wearing down,on my immutable soulI convulse,from conversing,cast out all dispersing withthinkingand sinking with such withered wit,I await no seductions,so make such reductionsand let us know when you redact what you writ.For the world has no room.Not for you, not for me,not for what came before us,or after,you see just how lost we areGETI meant get,lost we get,in what pages the age'sramblingmangledforgotten pretexts present,all preambles predicted,present price according,but poorly advised,Can you see what I mean?These collected projectionsall standing corrected;their wisdom unwise.I'll just summarize briefly;Be short.make it quick.end it fast, for the past is all overat last.Make it meaningless,weaning this whole painful aim off its pretensions,mentioning nothing of mass.Even that's just too much,every sentence a wall,let's be honest,There's nothing worth saying at all.If there is, doesn't matter,We'll never recall,because nothing we say ever lasts.Posted 5th February 2018 by Daniel ChildersLabels: Poem0 Add a commentJan12Short Story: "Tenebrae"TENEBRAEDaniel ChildersAugust. Sunday.Rain pours on the University of Cologne campus; the pathways are empty, green stretches of coniferous shrubbery are pattered on by a gentle and chilly array of raindrops, all beneath a grey and somber sky.A middle-aged man, wrapped in a combination of windbreakers and scarves to the point of being almost beyond recognition, is standing in front of the music building, peering at the empty stretches of walkway extending out from the entrance. He's waiting for someone, this is fairly evident from his scattered glances towards the pathways stretching out from his position at the music building's entrance; equally evident, judging from his anxious expression, is that he has no idea what the person he's waiting for will look like.An unfortunate consequence of this is that every passing individual is furtively peered at as they approach."Are you Doctor Meyers?" the man asks a passing elderly gentleman."Dok-tor Meeyers?" the passerby confusedly responds, followed by an incomprehensible torrent of German."Nein, nein..." the scarfed and windbroken man says, waving the elderly individual away and continuing to look between the scattered few people on campus, still waiting for Dr. Meyers' arrival.This man, the coated individual, has a rehearsed introduction in his head that he's waiting to divulge, impatiently tapping his left foot as if this action will help him retain the speech."Greetings Dr. Meyers, on behalf of the University of Cologne I'd like to welcome you to our renowned Institute of Musicology."This would, of course, be followed by a swiftly extended hand, which would be shaken by the approving Dr. Meyers, at which point he would continue,"I'm Professor Rudolph Haus, an instructor at the college that recommended your current subject of study, namely the final performance of Bernrd Alois Zimmermann. I look forward to-""Haus, right?""W-what?" the words stumble sheepishly out of Haus' mouth, his thought snapping in half like a twig.The young woman currently speaking to him eagerly extends a hand out towards his, "I'm Doctor Viola Meyers, with the UCLA RKS team. I'm guessing you're the one that recommended the scan, right?"He hadn't expected a woman, nor someone so young; the e-mail had simply told him a Doctor Meyers would be arriving to take a scan of the room in question, nothing more."Yes... you'll be... conducting the scan then?" He lets his hand snake out limply towards hers, giving it a halfhearted shake before yanking it back."Yep."They stand in the rain for a few awkward seconds, a flurry of corrections thrusting themselves through Haus's mind. Feeling the need to restart this interraction, he begins the speech again."Greetings, Dr. Meyers. On behalf of the University of Cologne-""I'm sorry, can we go inside? It's fucking freezing out here."Professor Haus, again interrupted, nods. The woman's frankness has temporarily discombobulated him, so when she abruptly darts forward and into the music building, he can do nothing more than sheepishly follow her lead."I... I'm Professor Rudolph Haus-""I know that already," she says, steadying the saddlebag hanging from her shoulder as she strides into the building's vacant lobby. "What I need from you is the time and date of the performance, need the hour he checked out the room and the room number. You have that, right?""Yes," Haus blurts out, his general discombobulation having only worsened."Good."An uncomfortably long moment of awkward silence passes."Are you going to tell me them now? Or is this going to be a week-long stay?""Sorry... um..." Haus hurriedly yanks a sheet from his pocket, searching through the scribbled information on it, "5:30 to 6:30... August 9th, 1970.""And the room number?""2004.""Great. Second floor, 4th room then?""Yes."She doesn't even wait for an answer, already heading up a set of stairs nearby; the whole interaction is far more hurried and ruthlessly efficient than Haus could have possibly anticipated."Are you... familiar with the works of Zimmerman?" he shouts up as he follows after."Not really... pianist, right?""More a composer than a pianist," Haus clarifies, "killed himself shortly after the performance in question."All Doctor Meyers can muster in response is a dismissively short "hmm", which Haus finds remarkably disheartening as they continue to climb the stairs in silence, their footsteps echoing through the tiled corridors.It takes a healthy stretch of hallway for Haus to regain his composure, but he does manage, eventually continuing;"It's a legendary performance, in this department... lots of rumors about what he played, that it was some of the most incredible music people who'd heard it had ever experienced... beyond music, even, but it went unrecorded... lost to time."He lets out a small chuckle, "At least, it had been lost to time...""Don't get your hopes up, it's a fledgling science at best," Meyers responds, her eyes darting between the passing doors, searching for the combination 2004. "Everything we've taken music-related has been pretty inconclusive, lots of variables to sift through... Even if we do get a read, it'll be low quality, reverse kinetics isn't magic.""Of course, but even a tiny bit of it would mean the world to us; Zimmerman was... well, he's a man whose work was cut short.""Didn't he commit suicide? How much more could he have had to say?"Haus is, of course, too shocked by her bluntness to respond.Having found her target, Meyers stops in front of door 2004, staring through its window into the dark and cramped practice room within."Give the times again...""I'm sorry, let me... find them." Haus looks at the sheet again, struggling to read it."Germany doesn't have daylight savings, right? No crap like that?""It doesn't... 5:30 start, Janua-""Got it." She yanks the door open, stepping into the cramped practice room. Haus starts to follow her in, but she pushes him back."I'm only going in to set it up real quick, just stay out there."Dutifully, Haus stands back, leaving the door hanging ajar; Meyers settles down in the middle of the practice room, wedged between the piano and a bench as she sets down her saddlebag. "You said there were a few possible melodic combinations?""Yes... Ekklesiastische Aktion was the last work he had finished, and there was an opera in progress... Medea... Numerous fragments from popular music are possible matches as well; he was a nostalgic composer, despite the darkness..."The saddlebag, having been gently placed on the floor of the practice room, is opened to reveal a pair of stout, extendable tripods, which Meyers yanks out."The MIDI file you sent to our department, that's... Whatever-Action, right?""No, that's all his late work... split it into parts, just like you asked." With this, Haus beams with a quiet, slightly smug pride; it had taken him a month to transcribe the thorny, almost indecipherable passages, to transfer handwritten fragments of an unfinished opera and give them, to the best of his knowledge, their proper place upon the score page.Meyers, yanking her laptop out of the saddlebag, doesn't share this excitement; when she opens it up, the screen brightens, revealing the MIDI file already opened, and a general frustration crosses her face."The department asked for one piece, not an entire collection...""That... that file is extremely comprehensive, you asked for comprehensive!"Meyers groans, "Comprehensive but concise, it's gonna take a while to cross reference this much material... plus, it increases our chance for false positives...""False positives!?" Haus gawks, not sure whether to laugh at the implication or scoff, "You think we could get some student's fumbling mixed up with the work of Zimmerman? What next, some first year harmony student mixes their pages in with Tchaikovsky's, changes musical history on a whim!?""There's going to be hundreds of hours of content, Haus. We're making educated guesses at best." She hands him the laptop through the open doorway, "Narrow it down to the most likely score, two tops.""Reduce a musical genius to a score..." Haus spits the words out with a healthy amount of disdain."Yes, please."Slowly, and with great reluctance, Haus takes the laptop from her, glancing over the MIDI file's assembled stretches of musical notes and phrases.  It takes him a while to get used to the tiny touchpad, but he eventually begins cutting sections out via the laptop's fairly straightforward editing software; never quite deleting any work fully, but after a few minutes managing to reduce the collected content to a few pages, all as Meyers finishes setting up the pair of densely wired tripods within the practice room, hanging them over the freshly opened upright piano, then checking the array of strings and hammers within."Is this short enough?" Haus asks, his bitter tone having softened. He turns the laptop screen towards her, and she looks back at it over her shoulder."Yes," Meyers replies, and takes it from him.With nothing else to contribute, Haus continues waiting outside, watching Meyers through the small window of the still-ajar door as she continues her general set-up."If you don't mind me saying so... you don't seem particularly interested in the work of Zimmermann.""That obvious, huh?" Meyers laughs, her capitulation on the point nearly instant. "Heard a couple of samples you sent us, and... Well, can't say I'm a fan. Sounded more like noise to me..."Haus nods, amused. "This is... a common complaint, regarding Zimmerman..."An odd wistfulness overtakes his general conduct, and he listens for a moment to the distant patter of rain."Then again, what is music, you have to wonder? When does all this..."His hands gesticulate quietly through the cold air, searching for and eventually finding a word,"...noise... this noise take shape? Become music? How can it be so powerful to some, so futile to others?""Not my problem. I'm in applied physics, not philosophy.""We're all in philosophy, Ms. Meyers... whether we wish to be or not...""Doctor," Meyers responds curtly, "...of engineering, at least.""Of course... Doctor Meyers, sorry..."Meyers, having finished her adjustments to the tripod arrangement, stands up and takes a few tentative steps through the practice room doorway, glancing back for a moment to double check the configuration."That... should be everything," she remarks, letting the door fall closed."Alright... How long will it take?""The scan will be short, a few minutes at most... Then a bit of time for analysis, then we go home.""How long until we can hear it, then? Will work have to be done at your university... Is there anything I can do to help?""Should be doable here, but varies depending on frequency of use, openness of the area... You say this isn't a terribly overused piano? Strings, hammers haven't been replaced?""No, not yet... retuned though.""Of course, that's fine. Do you have a list of days that it was tuned? Might help speed up the analysis.""Ah, your email asked for that too," Haus nods, pulling his sheet back out, "Tuning days were on...""I don't need it now. Just relax.""Ah... of course."They stand, quietly, the rain having dulled to a distant patter against the outer wall of the building. It's an oddly reverent atmosphere, as if the pair of them are standing outside a confessional, waiting for their turn."It's like... like waiting for a ghost..."Haus finds a lump forming in his throat, his mind guessing at the piece they're about to hear. He doesn't know what to hope for; the playing could lie anywhere between a thorny, abrasively nihilistic banging of keys to a painfully nostalgic regression, a sort of broken Gregorian chant, a miniature requiem for one.A Tenebrae. A sad, lonely Tenebrae.His attempts to subtly brush the excess moisture away from his eyes only draw more attention to it, and Meyers glimpses his blinking, reddening face in the corner of her eye."Are you okay?"Unsurprisingly, Haus struggles to respond."I... I don't know, I'm not sure I'm ready..."He laughs a bit, a somber laugh, brushing a few budding tears away. "When... I heard about your work, immortalizing moments, trying to reconstruct music from the battered pianos left behind... my thoughts jumped to Zimmerman, and... Instantly, I remembered this moment, and how it was this frozen, incredible moment, that we could just... peer into, like we were there..."His voice is cracking, every word suddenly a struggle."But now, I think about it, and... it never occured to me how... ALONE... alone, he must have felt in there..."He turns to Meyers."Would we be able to hear what he said... from inside the room? What people said to him that day, what it was like?""No, just the piano," Meyers responds, a somberness to her tone as well."A shame... He was a beautiful speaker too.""I'm sure he was..."Meyers lets a moment pass."Did you know him?""I was a student of his," Haus responds, beaming with a bit of regained pride and beginning to pace along the length of wall next to him, looking at various notices posted up along its surface, "He was quite demanding, as far as his instruction was concerned, but irreverent too... challenged people to challenge convention... His allegiance always was to the creative impulse at its core, not to any of this... Academia." This last word, academia, is muttered with a particular ire."I wouldn't be a composer, if not for him... certainly not a professor."Meyers nods reverently, though a morbid curiosity is slowly making the rounds through her head."Do you... know why he did it?"Haus' pacing ceases."That... that's the question, isn't it... Why would anyone end themself, midwork... an unfinished manuscript on the table?"A long sigh punctuates the question."I suppose the same, odd little spectre of postmodernism that haunts us all had something to do with it..." He turns slowly, making his way back to door 2004 in scattered paces,"It might be hard for you to relate, Doctor Meyers, but some of us work in fields that aren't quite as new as your own. The collected legacy of western civilization makes for... well, an intimidating comparison point, diminishing returns as we mine the barren stretch at the edges."He pauses midthought, remembering the nearly illegible sheet in his pocket."His eyesight was failing as well."Meyers, unsympathetic to the sentiment, shrugs. "Can't say either of those reasons sounds good enough to me."Haus' gaze cranes towards Meyers, his eyes cold and somewhat hurt."Good enough?" he chuckles softly, insulted by the implication. "It needs to be good enough for you, then?""I'm just saying-""You have no idea how... how beautiful it was..."His voice cracks."Medea... it was so close to... to what he must have wanted to say, old and new together... you wouldn't have seen it as noise, you would have heard it and understood... I don't know how, I just..."For a moment, he struggles to strangle some silent emotion...He can't."Reasons..."All at once, Haus' tone begins to build in irritation, indignity hanging off every word in droplets of spit. "How about growing up with the specter of Hitler's shadow hanging over you? Coming to age in the generation of Nazis, only to be cursed with that sad, dangerous disease of a conscience tainting your view of every injustice? What if the only thing that kept you from being forced to participate in the holocaust was a damned skin condition!? How could you live with the guilt, express the pain of all you've lived through as music, in these... helpless little spasms, powerless to change the world falling apart around you?"His voice trails off."...have the one thing that kept you going, some sad capacity to speak out against all this... have it rot from within your damned skull..."A calm, exhausted recollection of his time with Zimmermann follows, a few scattered hopeless conversations all thrust themselves to the forefront of his mind."You don't get to judge him. You didn't live his life, you don't know what he went through... These scans of yours, they may dull your head to the rotten emptiness around you, but Zimmermann was never afraid, never drowned out such cruelty as noise! Racism, poverty, the prejudices and evil in the hearts of those around him, he felt them all; the world cut him to his core!""I didn't mean to-""And you... you're just another part of the problem, aren't you? Intelligent, no doubt, but who owns this recording?! You'll mine his work, mine his mind, mine the spaces between his breaths, suck them dry of all value and dump them on the street like a-""That's not at all what the intention-""I don't care what your intention is! Your dispassion for this man's work is beyond intention, it unveils a cruel and uncaring disposition towards those outside your-"He's cut off by a loud and shrill beeping, emanating momentarily from within the practice room before letting the hallway fall back into silence. "Scan's done." Meyers responds, calm but firm in her resolve.Haus' train of thought comes to a stumbling close, pauses in its tracks.The unending ambience of rain against the distant ceiling rushes in to fill the silence, the stretch of time between the pair now incredibly hostile."Tuning dates, if you don't mind."Haus stands quietly, affecting the same dispassion he'd been treated with moments before.A small, rigidly stubborn part of him wants him to hold his head up high, to stand against her morbid fascination with the fallen composer, and resist any attempt she may make towards propping up this fledgling technology with a narrative that it doesn't deserve.But deep down, he wants to hear Zimmermann.Needs to hear that long lost voice one last time.He pulls a folded sheet of paper from his pocket, fractions of densely scrawled tuning dates lined up along its visible face, clasped tight between his cold, shaking fingers."Here."His voice is barely a whisper.Meyers takes it; the scan doesn't necessitate the list, as the torque patterns of the screws holding the piano strings tight should have been scanned with well over enough detail to determine the tuning dates, but this page brings the whole ordeal down to a local calculation.She steps into the practice room, squats down next to her laptop and punches in the tuning dates one by one, all as Haus dutifully waits behind her, shifting his weight between his feet, wondering whether the sense of shame slowly building up within him will ever pass away.He wants to listen to the output, to hear the last echoing work of a long-lost friend, to enjoy his company for one last, rain-battered evening.But a vague sense of disgust has built up within him, and he finds himself uncomfortable with sitting and letting Meyers dig some final recording out from the piano's withered frame. The want, the need is to be spoken to by Zimmermann one last time; he finds it hard to believe that some voyeuristic peek at whatever ghostly picture Meyers just took will serve such a purpose, communicate to such an end.He waits for her to finish anyways.The impatient shifting and swaying of weight begins to stabilize into a calm, static lean against the wallAfter some time, Meyers closes the laptop, her expression fairly dour as she crams it into her saddlebag alongside the tripods that had hung over the battered practice room piano. When she turns to leave, Haus is scrutinizing her face, judging the slightest angle of her eyebrows, the curl at the edge of her lips.He gleans nothing from them as she hands him a USB stick, then continues down the hallway without a word."Well? How did it turn out?" he asks, a bit cantankerously; Meyers' response is a bit of a shrug over her shoulder."Piano wasn't played that day. Cover was down the whole time."Haus' eyes widen, stunned."That's... that's impossible... He must have...""He didn't. Sat on the bench, touched the face a few times, didn't play anything. You can listen to it if you want."A few meters down the hall, she stops.Turns back to him."I'm sorry to have wasted your time.""I... I don't believe it..." Haus responds distantly.He doesn't turn to watch as she continues walking down the hallway, the direct sound of her clacking footsteps gradually shifting to more and more of an echoing reverberation against the tile floor. Instead, he leans back against the wall, staring passively through the window across the hall from him. Through the glass, he can see the snaking set of pathways that had brought him to the musicology building an hour or so ago.His tired eyes trace the paths in silence for a while. Eventually, his gaze slips down, to his withered, prematurely-geriatric hands.The USB stick is perched between the thumb and index finger of the right; he rotates it between the pair in a long, pensive motion.In a few hours, he's quietly seated in his disheveled office.It's cluttered with to-do lists, a few dusty scattered books, half-graded papers in various states of disassembly, a computer fan's dull soft hum quietly punctuating the room's wordless rhythm, fluctuations in intensity serving as a metronome to the distant patter of rain still drenching a distant rooftop.He taps a few words out on the keyboard, a few mouse clicks as well, all unconsciously following the rhythm of the room.These are followed by a soft, warm noise, playing out through the computer speakers.The noise is quite unlike anything Haus has ever heard; reminiscent of white noise, but clicking and popping like a record. It's innately calming, a soothing series of clicks and brushes, satisfying to the senses.Part of him hopes that Meyers was wrong, that something will be played, that she just didn't listen hard enough or long enough, that somehow she missed the sole object of her study. Another part of him knows that Zimmermann may very well not have played anything, but he finds himself a bit less troubled with this idea than before.Just listening to the same room... right now, that feels like enough.A soft thud emanates from the speakers, followed by an equally soft low hum, with dozens of discordant tones all quietly pouring out simultaneously. Haus recognizes it as a foot pressing down a sustain pedal.She must have been wrong, he thinks to himself, just about ready to call Meyers and let her know that she missed out on thisHe waits, with breathless anticipation for the master's final performance.And waits.And waits.He fiddles with volume controls, wondering if he's somehow got it too low, raising the volume more and more, the clicking and popping all rising in amplitude appropriately.But no note is played.The most he can make out is the dull, resonant hum of the strings, still depressed, the sustain pedal still held.All at once, he recognizes the sound of a voice, ringing through them; a dull, soft voice vibrating sympathetically through the strings.It's a husky mid-range voice, the cadence of it is instantly recognizable."Br...che... ache... bra..."A voice... even more poignant than a final piece, this is a final utterance, a final confession of intent... Haus listens intently, desperately trying to follow the words that he keeps saying..."Brach... brache... bra..."Each word is broken up with what can only be described as ethereal sobbing, a sound that Haus is entirely unprepared for; long wheezing breaths being drawn in and expelled through wet, horrible coughing, gagging sobs.The sound of it makes him sick, intensely uncomfortable, but he waits for another word, some continuation of the idea, an explanation beyond the miserably nihilistic texts and gestures of the final batch of works, something more prescient and meaningful and all encompassing and understandable and comprehensible and decipherable, anything at all.He prays and prays for some single sliver of meaning from all this, hopes for some kind of innate human truth to be unveiled through the action...Something, anything other than "Brache...""Fallow...""Brache... brache... brache..." the recording utters softly, all as the rain still pours.Posted 12th January 2018 by Daniel ChildersLabels: Short Story0 Add a commentDec26Short Story: "That They Carried"THAT THEY CARRIEDDaniel ChildersMars didn't care when the ship entered orbit; the red face of the sphere held no hatred nor love for the visitors that hung about in the distance, hovering a few dozen miles over his face. When Mars watched them, it was with an indifferent eye, as a distant blue speck cried out to the capsule via bursts of communicative light, and when the ship tentatively dropped its cargo of an exploratory ground crew, Mars once again said nothing to the specks that touched down on his mighty face, their craft burning a shallow scar into his cheek.When the passengers stepped out, their tiny bodies pacing along and digging minute tracks into the martian soil, no sound escaped Mars' lips aside from the soft crunch of rocky flesh beneath their feet. Their breathless ambition saw no reciprocation in the air, the icecaps of Mars' distant poles did not melt with joy, but rather remained precisely as cold as when the ship had arrived, aside from the tiniest hint of warmth added by the dropped module's atmospheric entry.Indeed, whatever explosive fanfare was in progress on that distant blue speck was not felt here, in the faces of those strange little creatures so intently focused on establishing their module against Mars' rocky face, obsessively toiling over the odd reflective panels aligning with the distant bright sun. Their craft was the beginning of what might have been described as an infestation, should Mars have held such a disdain for the idea of a population developing along its exterior, but if such a disdain existed it was never voiced.Mars was silent.As the days passed, and the specks moved, occasionally snaking a short way from their metal construct, it seemed the tiny creatures had names; they had voices, though these voices did not bark out directly into the martian air, but were transferred via an ornate system of communicative signals, sound waves and digital information all buzzing at frequencies beyond the creature's own hearing capacity, though Mars could hear it all, every misshapen bleep traveled out for miles across the barren red plains, echoed resonantly from the craggy red cliffs. Their transmissions survived for so long that the ultrasonic frequencies grew muddied with their chatter, an unbearable cacophony just outside their hearing range raged on and on, from martian day to martian night.On one such day, two such creatures stumbled out in search of an aging rover to scavenge parts from, and Mars listened, as he always did, to their silent conversation."So... burial, or cremation?""What?""I've been wondering... with Jones, and what they shou-""Burial."An odd stillness fell over their walk, digital information still beeped and droned, but the radio transmissions were dead for a moment.It was a peaceful moment.A cool breeze blew across Mars' face, though the creatures couldn't feel it from within their packaging, the dense mesh of material dampening any sensation aside from barely comfortable snugness. Worse still, their visors were tinted, blurring all of Mars' densely textured surface into a monotonous blur of yellow and red.The peace, of course, did not last."I think cremation would be better. You know, if you bury her, there's no biosphere here.... she'll be mummified in a few nights from the cold... completely frozen down there, no chance of decomposing...""Well then, what do you figure we should burn her with?" the second's voice droned coldly."I... I just don't think we can leave her down there, not in that state...""Doc cleaned her up alright, won't be too bad.""Cleaned her up? Cleaned her up!? Davis, you can't... CLEAN UP what happened to her...""Look, if we're gonna leave, we can't waste fuel, and burning her will waste a ton of fuel. I mean... you even know what temperature you have to get to in order to cremate a body?"The first voice was silent for a moment, before continuing tentatively, "Maybe if... if we put her under the boosters when we leave-""And then what? We leave a half burned corpse lying on the launchpad? You realize how fucking awful that sounds, Pierce!?""Look, I don't know! I... I just think it's awful..."Another moment passed, the unfelt breeze still grazing their suits."I'm sorry...""It's okay... I... I think it's been stressful, on everyone... How the fuck does somebody even do something like that.""I dunno... but you're right, it's awful...""It is..."Another moment passed, their plodding footsteps continuing. Thankfully, the rover was much closer now."God, I'm never missing a calcium supplement again...""No kidding. I'll take a hundred kidney stones, but no way am I going like that."The two creatures continued the rest of their walk in the same pseudo-silence it began with, eventually reaching the rover and beginning to dismantle it piece by piece. The one that had been called Davis started to search through the innards of the wind-tossed rover, making sure to mark each component carefully for its position within the chassis. Pierce watched over this, waiting with a dolly he had rolled with him for the purpose of collecting whatever parts they could scavenge.He also occasionally looked back, towards the distant module where the rest of their crew were waiting."You... you know I didn't do it, right?""What?" Davis muttered, his helmet deep within the opened chassis of the rover."I... never mind."Another moment passed, this one tenser than the ones that had come before."I... I think they think one of us... that one of us-""Pierce, relax. None of that's important right now, we have to stay focused on getting home."Pierce nodded, though the nervous glances back at the module hadn't yet ceased."Got a battery here, pretty good condition considering." With a heavy grunt, Davis started lifting the heavy battery case out through the opening. "Could use a hand with-""Davis...""-this..."The distant yet unmistakable sound of a rocket firing filled the air, burst out from the far-off module and sent a hot, searing wave of utter panic over the pair, with Davis dropping the battery case in a fumbling motion, the heavy box tumbling from his arms and smacking into the ground with a brutally seismic thud."FUCK!"The screaming word crackled out through the radio, with Pierce still gazing in horror as a portion of the module slowly began to rise into the air. Davis keeled over in agony, clutching his foot."Fuck... fuck fuck fuck..."It was an unreal moment in Pierce's eyes; the module, where they had been stationed for months, had gone into the ascent stage and was clearly preparing to leave without them.A sudden recognition of the situation at hand tore through his mind, and he hurriedly fired up his communication equipment, a desperate digital shriek emanating from his suit. "This is Arvin Pierce and Timothy Davis, currently on the ground with scavenge, what the hell is going on!?"The supersonic cry went unheard, and the module continued upwards, slowly ascending towards the rendezvous point with the orbiting return vessel, until it was nothing more than a distant light in the uncaring martian sky.With his typical indifference, Mars stared on.As the little metal construct continued its way up into low orbit, he did not find himself particularly distressed when it failed to slow itself properly, falling out of sync with the vessel they had left orbiting around his face; failing to reattach to the ship that their return home depended on. There was no morbidity, in Mars' silent mind, to the fact that this miss meant the creatures would continue out into the void, within an unstoppable capsule that would carry their frozen forms for many millennia, perhaps retain their strange compositions even after the distant sun consumed Mars himself.There was simply quiet.The shrill, unending chatter of high frequency communication eventually faded from Mars' surface, with the two creatures that had been left behind soon falling silent. Their forms were oddly obstinate, refusing to give into the winds and ice that passed over them, remaining stark memorials to that brief expedition they'd been a part of, a pair of gravestones lying in the unshaken trusses of Mars' face.Perhaps Mars cherished their company, enjoyed both their presences and that of the third, tucked away within his flesh near where their activity had begun all so long ago. Perhaps the novelty of a fresh trio of faces filled him with an inexplicable joy of knowing that, despite his barren surface, he had harbored their strange motions and fumblings for an incredible, yet all-too-brief moment......but if such a joy existed it was never voiced.Mars was silent.Posted 26th December 2017 by Daniel ChildersLabels: Short Story0 Add a commentNov28Short Story: "The Great American Novel"THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELDaniel ChildersLee Howard is standing just outside a gas station, smoking a cigarette.The rural Kentucky horizon surrounding him is just approaching the crack of dawn, and he's watching it fairly intently, occasionally rubbing his hands together in a failing effort to keep them warm. He's surrounded by miles of nothing, barely blue skies hanging over barely green fields as he cups his hands around the burning tip of the cigarette.Lee is forty seven years young.He's been telling himself this for the past year, with no sense of irony.When he was younger, he'd introduced himself with the line, "Hey gorgeous, name's Lee Howard. 19 years young and will you marry me?" This had a less consistent success rate than Lee would care to admit, but it worked occasionally, especially when accompanied by that charming smile of his. The eagerness was infectious, and the smile was an invitation to adventure; no one could know what would happen, but maybe, just maybe, it'd be something special..."Name's Lee Howard, 25 years young, will you marry me?"It was an inconsistent line, but it had definitely worked one time, all the way through, right up to marrying the gal."Name's Lee Howard, 27 years young, will you marry me?"It had also worked a second time, after the first time stopped working and she'd left with half his shit."Name's Lee Howard, 32 years young, will you marry me?"After the second time had stopped working, the line stopped working, the years started passing by faster than he cared to admit. The line had him lying the edge off his age."Name's Lee Howard, 39 years young, will you marry me?"It was the potential in the words, it had been burning up with every second, every day he'd spent chasing love and shipping overnight hauls was a day burned out of his soul. As soon as he'd ask, it was like people could see it, could sniff out his own insecurity regarding it"Name's Lee Howard, 47 years young, will you marry me?"Then again, he still felt young. He still felt like the spry kid that could tackle the world, only thing that changed was that the world stopped budging for him."Sir?""Yeah?" Lee answered, whirling his head about, looking for the source of the voice. He found it to be a gas station attendant, staring sternly at him from the other side of the poorly-paved asphalt driveway."You're not allowed to smoke here.""I'm waiting for someone," Lee answered, confidently.The attendant cocked an eyebrow, not entirely sure how that was a response.Lee wasn't sure either, but he was committed to it now.