Broken Fiction

Today is a soul crushing kind of day.

Interesting article up on WIRED.com today that may be a bit of a hot button issue for a lot of people, excepting the 15% of you who are “non-believers”. Is religion a biological accident? Cognitive neuroscientists are looking at the brain and identifying more and more about the Theory of Mind: neurological states where people have minds, thoughts and feelings that interact.

Unlike other animals, humans can imagine the future, including their own death. The hope given by religious beliefs to people confronting their own mortality might provide motivation to care for their offspring.

Supernatural beliefs may also have produced group-level advantages that then conferred benefits to individuals.

Religion may have developed out of a need to understand what other people are thinking, even when they aren’t nearby, which can lead to thoughts about the supernatural.

This is a story of myth and legend about Thom, or so he called himself as I met him upon the streets of Jakarta.  It may have been Jakarta.  It was hot and miserable and humid and I can’t remember exactly.  He wasn’t a boy when I met him, of course, but so aged he appeared rooted into the heaps of refuse and the cobblestone upon which he was anchored, unmoving, inviting the moss to take residence. I passed him a few times before an unspoken beckoning forced me to stop and kneel, sweat dripping into pools at my feet.  Matted hair fell from him in rivulets, but his eyes betrayed him.  At first he looked to be as ancient as the rock upon which he was tethered, but those eyes were child eyes, vacillating between lilac and wine.  He also was softly chewing, like a habit that couldn’t be broken, lips stained a dark magenta.

Thom, as I told you his name was, but I wouldn’t learn this until later, reached out with a sweaty, spindly hand, partially covered with moldy sleeves and a fingerless mitten and held it there palm down.  Clearly he intended me to grasp it.  I hesitated at first, but his young eyes wouldn’t let me go.  Eyes that confronted me and dared me.  Hesitating with fear I slowly reached out with my hand and grasped his so slightly.

It is bright, hazy with heat escaping the earth. I am somewhere, but I am not sure where and there is a dry breeze sweeping knee high grass on a field.  Trees dance in pairs all around us in the dreamy distance.

The smiling boy Thom puts gum in his mouth, savoring bursts of grape flavor and popping sounds as air pockets form and collapse in rhythm with the chewing.

“This is seriously the best gum I’ve ever had.”  Distant words were mangled between bites, saliva running from the corner of his mouth. “Where’d you get it?”

“Gold’s Five and Dime down on 81st. Now hand it over, greedy.”

He slaps the pack into a friends hand, another boy named Owen with red hair down past his eyes and whom he loved, and continues to work the gum with his teeth. Flavor courses over his tongue and spills down his throat.  Hard to chew isn’t the right way to describe it, but he felt that he had to ‘earn’ the gum; that it was doing him a favor and he’d better work at it.

Owen gobbled up a piece and was nodding sympathetically. They hardly notice at first, but it dawns on them that they are chewing together in rhythm.

Thom felt his cheeks expand as gum flavor pours into every corner of his mouth.  Initially he twists the gum around to make room for the intoxicating flavors, spitting out globules of purple sugar, evidently his mouth running out of space.

Owen’s expression betrayed his bewilderment. Hadn’t they taken just one piece? I couldn’t remember either.

He tried to spit out the gum, but couldn’t.  Swelling relentlessly, remorselessly, it pushed the skin of his cheeks outward. Pain burning in his eyes and misery vocalized as an occasional throaty grunt; would it ever stop? The gum was lodged in there.  Knees buckled.  To stop chewing was not an option- it was compulsory, a punishment for some long forgotten sin.

Panicking, they tried to grab at the gum and pull it from their mouths, lips spread wide from the tension on the cheeks. Striations were bursting in their face like cracks in pavement.  Chewy tendrils spill out of their mouths as hurt wracks their faces.  The size of the gum wad was undiminished.  Still they chewed, forced by the gum into the ritualistic mastication.  They tried again to grab and pull but it wasn’t having an effect - hands were sticky and gooey and useless. What they did manage to throw away was only replaced by more somehow.

Owen’s eyes were wide with panic. The more he pulled, more filled his cheeks.

Frantic; pulling and throwing the gum away, only to have more replace it. Tears were streaming, purple in color, stained by slobber on their cheeks and from the volumes of dyed sugar coating their mouths. Gagging sounds replaced frantic grunts of desperation. Hyperventilate. Terror. Eyes closed tight.

The clarity of I’m going to die with gum in my mouth.

A last expelling of breath and a bubble appears in the wad. It pops so quickly but they realize as it deflates the gum has stopped growing, for a moment. Realization.

Thom mimes to Owen through tears that blind him to the world to blow by expanding and contracting his hands then pointing at his mouth.

They blow, miserable little weak spasms, but growing in strength as the wad starts to inflate. Relief seasons their eyes as cheeks are no longer being assaulted by the growing gum. Once, twice and then a third time the bubble doesn’t pop - it continues to grow. Breath comes easier as their chests heave and nostrils flare.  Air tears it’s way into their lungs and out again as they remember birth pangs.  They couldn’t, of course see what happened next.

Reason had them believe they could tear it off for good once enough had blown, but reason is a miserable liar.

I closed my eyes as a gurgle of panic split the air. For an instant I saw years blow by at speed unimaginable to me.  They were flying, amateurs at first, but quickly these adventurers mastered the details of navigation and were off to those parts of the map inevitably labeled ‘Here There Be Monsters’.  A blink later I see his beloved Owen flailing his arms around and pointing downward.  Thom looked down and screamed in the back of his throat.

The first tentative steps are always the most frightening.

They were a mile away and rising. A bubble occulted the sun, giving it a pale wine color.  The winds caught them, gum now about the size of  beach balls.  Had they chosen to spit, or had been able to, they would be falling to their death. I shielded my eyes from the harsh light and laughed - Owen was flapping his arms like a bird. Lift wasn’t a problem, but he would figure that out soon enough; nothing was helping or hindering it. Thom sought to calm him down as they started to fade away. Clouds were drifting in from the east and the wind was carrying them on.  Owen’s hand then grasped at Thom’s and held tight, the only warmth up there.  They sailed on, sun peeking over the white towers of moisture, blinding. It was cold, miles in the sky with no end in sight.

And in touching I learned everything he wanted me to know.

You may find this too fantastic to believe, but I swear to you it is true. Every word of it. Well, mostly every word. Several select words are definitely true. At any rate, it begins, as all good stories should, with a dare.

The dangers of keeping everything is that eventually you might run into something you’ve forgotten about purposefully.  USB drives are notoriously devilish about this.  I found the following lurking nested in a few folders on said key and it clubbed me with a pipe wrench in order to escape.  Naturally after divulging my WP username and password, it came here to post this, in my voice, the bastard. (That’s him, not me.)

No one online can agree where this came from, but it makes me laugh nonetheless. An oldie but a goodie:

Shakespearean Insult Generator

Combine one word from each of the three columns below, prefaced with the word “Thou.”

Column 1        Column 2            Column 3

artless             base-court          apple-john
bawdy               bat-fowling         baggage
beslubbering        beef-witted         barnacle
bootless            beetle-headed       bladder
churlish            boil-brained        boar-pig
cockered            clapper-clawed      bugbear
clouted             clay-brained        bum-bailey
craven              common-kissing      canker-blossom
currish             crook-pated         clack-dish
dankish             dismal-dreaming     clotpole
dissembling         dizzy-eyed          coxcomb
droning             doghearted          codpiece
errant              dread-bolted        death-token
fawning             earth-vexing        dewberry
fobbing             elf-skinned         flap-dragon
froward             fat-kidneyed        flax-wench
frothy              fen-sucked          flirt-gill
gleeking            flap-mouthed        foot-licker
goatish             fly-bitten          fustilarian
gorbellied          folly-fallen        giglet
impertinent         fool-born           gudgeon
infectious          full-gorged         haggard
jarring             guts-griping        harpy
loggerheaded        half-faced          hedge-pig
lumpish             hasty-witted        horn-beast
mammering           hedge-born          hugger-mugger
mangled             hell-hated          joithead
mewling             idle-headed         lewdster
paunchy             ill-breeding        lout
pribbling           ill-nurtured        maggot-pie
puking              knotty-pated        malt-worm
puny                milk-livered        mammet
qualling            motley-minded       measle
rank                onion-eyed          minnow
reeky               plume-plucked       miscreant
roguish             pottle-deep         moldwarp
ruttish             pox-marked          mumble-news
saucy               reeling-ripe        nut-hook
spleeny             rough-hewn          pigeon-egg
spongy              rude-growing        pignut
surly               rump-fed            puttock
tottering           shard-borne         pumpion
unmuzzled           sheep-biting        ratsbane
vain                spur-galled         scut
venomed             swag-bellied        skainsmate
villainous          tardy-gaited        strumpet
warped              tickle-brained      varlot
wayward             toad-spotted        vassal
weedy               unchin-snouted      whey-face
yeasty              weather-bitten      wagtail

(Apologies for the crappy formatting - being tackled by 5 year old)

This fascinating creature was first encountered over 2200 years ago in the doldrums of the Qin Dynasty.  Known for it’s colorful assortment of bureaucrats dedicated to the art of burying confucians alive, Qin nonetheless was a time of the great catalog of fantastical animals to which we are indebted down through the ages.

First seen along cluster of small fishing village on the Yellow River, the Exploding Carp was initially believed to be a omen of impending doom.  This observation was born out by the loss of several villages in netting accidents.  Wu Pei later noted that if caught properly, much like the blow fish, it can be prepared as a tasty and exciting delicacy.  Unfortunately, many Qin Dynasty chefs learned quickly about this delicious but dangerous fish.  A little known fact is that the famed Terracotta army was in fact a memorial to those cooks lost in service to the Emperor.

Lack of attention to irradication efforts from pest control authorities allowed the Exploding Carp to increase it’s number, although not greatly, as a particularly virulent strain of Spontaneous Combustion Disease kept them in check. Furthermore, over the years into the successive Jin Dynasty, it’s numbers were again reduced, having seen action in battle by the forces of the Forbidden City against Mongol incursion, who had no fish defense.

Their numbers continued to dwindle over time, and the Exploding Carp became quite valuable.  It was for a brief time considered to be currency among the upper classes.  However, the philosopher Qi Yuan cautions against gifting the fish, as a Japanese Emperor discovered sheepishly when his imperial carp gardens were destroyed.

Often I forget things. It’s not old age or infirmity, but what I like to think of as a curse; it eats at my mind. I can’t remember who I am, or where I’ve been for periods of time. My mind is a chalkboard that has been erased, with just a tantalizing shadow of what was written before the cloth swept over it. A never-ending fog in the chill dawn air.

I doubt it’s really a curse. More to the point it’s not mystical at all, unless they’re engineering that into us these days. Not that I could remember. I’ve been so many different people in so many different times that there’s no point in counting them anymore. The sick thing is that they left in the what I call the ‘nag’, that annoying tickle in the back of your mind that is telling you something else is in there. My life is like the first minute after waking up from a dream, fleeting in every respect, every day.

So you might think I would be more than a little disturbed to reboot this morning in the snaking line at the Department of Public Absolution and Ethical Judgment, covered in blood and waiting (114th in line) to pay a civil fine.

Fourty-one freezing days and colder nights we all spent on that hiccuping old Trailways, as it bumped and blistered along the last broken highway to California like a lonely Magellan forcing his way through the Pacific.

We listened to static on the FM and pretended to recognize an occasional pattern in the noise. It reminded me of when our grandparents built crystal radios and began the first desperate hunt for electronic contact. People were always searching for order in the chaos and this was no different. Perhaps it was even more important now, desperately so. Every once in a while we could swear that heard something that sounded like morse code, but no one on board could tell. Frankly, it sounded like nothing to me.

Twice a week I sat my shift on her scratchy old roof, scanning the highway for traffic, pleading for any soul to pop out and yell “surprise”! I often begged for someone, even a hostile, to prove we weren’t alone. It was hard not to lose hope, even after passing town after obliterated town and the hundredth abandoned mom-n-pop shop. The sky went from black to red to black and back and forth without end. Fuel would be running out soon and we still had a lot of mountains left to cut across. That was going to be dangerous. The plains were easy; you could see in any direction. But those mountains…too many places to hide. It made me scared. Still, there was a eerie beauty to the quiet and when I did have free time, I stole away to the back of the bus, let my feet dangle out the back and ate candy bars that would never be made again, smiling at the world gone bye.

And you know what that means…

Shamelessly stolen from SF Signal, among others.

This animated short was created in 1983, but my first viewing was today and frankly, it blew me away.  You don’t see this kind of risk-taking in mainstream animation these days.  No dialogue to speak of, except the melodic grunts of an alien race dwelling in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant.  The twist at the end was profound and gave me much to think about.

You can ask me again and again, but my answer will never change.  Twelve is absolutely a magical age.

It’s a between time that exists after you’re (mostly) through being a kid, but still not quite ready to put your toys away for good. It’s before those heavy, scary trials to come as a teenager.

You know the ones - they’re all over the afterschool TV specials and made-for-cable movies.

Too many choices, cliques, conflicts, resolutions, loves, hates, friendships, promises, betrayals and a range of emotions as wide as the horizon.

Which is why one cloudy fall day Owen took out his styrofoam glider, the one his dad built with him right before he died on his way to the moon, and kept flying forever.