Thursday, October 24, 2019

Little Biiits

Sometimes my ideas are ill conceived. (It can be difficult getting things down on paper and trying to formulate ideas.) And there are methods to avoid these endemic struggles with scribbly impotence. I once wrote a blog every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, for almost 2 years. It was a worthwhile project, teaching the art of filling up the whiteness on command. (Sometimes you just need to get something down on paper, knowing damn well that you need to go back, erase everything, start anew.

The below are what I would call “micro ideas.” Or, as I want to call them…


Max Fleisher’s Superman, Episode 1: “Superman”

The Max Fleischer Superman cartoons remain one of my favorite works of animation to date. The entire series, much to my disappointment, remains digitally restored up to only standard definition. (Yes there’s a bluray out there, but it’s nothing but a digitally upscaled lie.) But even with the grain and distortion, the series is a triumph of film making for the innovations Fleisher brought to the table.


But more importantly are two key sequences (0:57-2:15 and 9:48-9:58) in the first episode—the FIRST time Superman was given motion and life—where we discover the world Superman lives in. The first clip depicts the origin story of the Man of Steel, where no mention of Martha and Jonathan Kent are made and his life in rural Kansas. Instead, the Kryptonians are already possessed with super abilities and Clark Kent is raised in an orphanage. The triumphant and hopeful music declares that Superman is a warrior for the people, for Truth and Justice, posing as a humble member of the press. Furthermore the sequence indicates that Fleisher’s Superman arrived very much under the same circumstances as many immigrants. (Fleeing from persecution and disaster.) The second clip is just a simple transition showing a sweeping countryside yielding to a vast urban environment. Realistically, we don’t get to see this very often in our own lives. Symbolically, Superman is returning from the pastoral fields and farmland to bring his ethos to the people of Metropolis.

Recording ideas on-the-go, remembering the “hooks.”

It kills me, sometimes. I will be at work and I suddenly get a great idea for a story. When I get home I forget it, or simply lose momentum. For me, it’s difficult to jump into a story. There’s an inner monologue that is going. It shapes the way I think and lends momentum and immediacy to the narrative. Trying to recapture that train of thought is difficult, so one of the things I do is record ideas in a notepad on my iPhone. Ideally, I would record the idea and then the place where I am when I thought about it, but this doesn’t always happen. Either way, recording these in the moment helps to isolate and freeze that moment in time and then resume the train of thought that produced the story in the first place. Much of the “micro ideas” above and below were recorded this way.

Recognizing the hurt caused by church and community.

I’ve been there before. Being angry at other people, or being disillusioned when something that I bet so much on doesn’t pan out. For whatever reason, when religion plays a role in this, the hurt stings extra. What I never understood can be summed up in the following: person A befriends person B, but after some amount of time a rift develops, people say hurtful things, and the union is torn asunder. Subsequently, person A befriends person C, and it all starts over again—or doesn’t. People seem ready to trust people again, but not institutions. And I suspect this is due to familiarity. You can know a person more than an institution. By default, an institution is the sum of all its parts.

Richard Beck wrote a book titled Unclean (which I have yet to finish) that I feel describes the psychology of contamination and rejection in a very powerful way.  He describes hypothetical scenarios that are presented to individuals. One example was a situation where the viewer is placed in front of an Olympic sized swimming pool of fine wine. At the opposite end a beaker of urine is poured into the pool. The participant of the study is then asked, “would you drink out of the pool?” Many declined citing the contaminant in the pool, despite the scientific reasoning that it was physically impossible for the contaminant to travel quickly enough to comingle with the opposing side before one could drink.

Church/community/fellowship (I’m speaking now in the context of a faithful community of people that worship Christ, with fidelity and authenticity) is meant to be a “safe place” for people of all walks—that is at least the intention. But there are many cases where a part contaminates the body, and the result is a fractured community. Personally, I have experienced this directly and indirectly, and it sucks. It’s like I said before: you can know a person, more than an institution. So, when a solitary individual impacts your walk with God, the ultimate conclusion is often the nuclear option.

What bothers me is that people are willing to seek out friendship after being burned (most of the time), knowing full well that they can be betrayed again and again. Yet, for some reason, seeking the same kind of community (of the Christian variant) seems off limits. And perhaps this is because the influence of religion impacts the community with a farther reaching existential consequence. But, I would argue, a marriage, a relationship, a place of employment, an institution or heritage society, holds just as much existential weight. (Especially if one is “non-religious.”) As someone who has been there and been hurt by people that you are meant to trust, I would argue that if we are to be like Jesus then we should accept and understand the same pain that Jesus experienced. After all, the Church (as in the entire population of “believers” in any given context) is fundamentally flawed. The people who take part in it are there because they have arrived at the conclusion that they “need help.” To close off communion with these people, for any reason, is counterintuitive. If one is a part that makes up a whole, if too many “parts” abandon the “whole”, what remains will be worse than when it started.   

Buying guitars.

Buying guitars can be an exemplary exercise in racism.

Let me clarify.

The manufacturing of instruments has changed over the past 100 years as pertains to guitars (especially electric guitars). The building of a guitar is an art form, just like any other work of craftsmanship. However, with the advent of technology that was influenced by the “assembly line” techniques that enhance production, there is now an awkward intermediate point in which we find ourselves in. A guitar can be built in the United States and Indonesia, using the exact same equipment, but the Indonesian variant is considered “inferior” because it was made overseas with cheap labor.

I am guilty of this perception. What has changed me from thinking this way is by watching members of the music community invest large amounts of startup capital into overseas development of electric guitars. Solar Guitars is a great example of this. The emphasis on affordable instruments balanced with an intentional insistence on quality workmanship, seems to strike a very equitable middle ground. Not only this, but the work provides jobs and labor to people across the world that might not otherwise have a means to survive. So, in a way, buying guitars made overseas would constitute an act of charity, if anything. I myself have an eye on this one. It’s soo dope!



What would it be like to be two lawyers married to each other?

This is something that comes from my talks with clients at my job, which you would think would provide me  with stories aplenty, but this is not the case. The cinematic universe we see ourselves in, is woefully deficient of hijinks and hullabaloo.

However I was speaking with a customer and found out that they were conducting business as two lawyers, married. This I thought was fucking hysterical. I immediately imagined tense dining room encounters, sweat percolating on each other’s’ brow, embroiled in passive-aggressive cross examination while the children played with dinosaur chicken nuggets, benignly unaware.

Monday, September 30, 2019

iWantToBelieve™

One of the things I find exceptionally funny about theology is how divisive it is. This should not be construed as a pillory of theology or the merit of it being studied. What I mean to say is that theology, both good or bad, predominantly becomes a pain point for believers in a larger community setting. So-and-so is "A," which so-and-so is "B" and, next thing you know, shit is going down.

I slaved over a new "Personal" blog image.
Behold my 18 year old self on the last day of HS!
I made a personal revelation a few weeks back. I tried writing about it, but to no avail. I was far too tired and frustrated. (This has NOT been my year.) The above has merit in that, for the first few years of going to church, I did not put my faith in Jesus, but the traditions surrounding Him and His church.

I keep going back to the night I was saved. I remember that there was a "cool" looking guy with frosted tips and a mild flirtation with obesity performing what I can only describe now as some kind of morality play. He held an apple in his hand, speaking to us about the original sin of eating from the fruit of knowledge. On the stage was a cheap mirror and he proceeded to throw the apple at the mirror. He said that our lives, without God, become like the mirror: shattered and irreparable. And while he was technically right, only today can I point out a myriad of reasons why the execution was, at it's core, a manipulative exercise. Still, it stirred in me a response to follow Christ. And I guess you could say that I've been confused ever since. (In a sublimely good way, of course.)

Something apparent from the several months of counseling that I have invested in so far is my never ending need for validation. It is a pathological fixation, from what I've been told, and the repercussions have sent ripples throughout my life. It has affected my personal life, my professional career in IT administration, and (I've just realized) my relationship with God.

Thinking back on my life, always wanting to be in the right standing with society, becoming a Christian was likely, in my 15 year old mind, the best possible decision. Existentially speaking, I could now be in the "right" with almost 2000 years of tradition and structure to cement in the certainty that I was "doing the right thing" by accepting God's promises. The irony here is that I was violating the entire paradigm of Christianity by doing something, to get something. I accepted Christ as my authority so that I could be "in the right."

Now, it certainly didn't help that I was attending a church that produced, with factory-like proficiency, people that walked, talked, acted like Christians, but whom may not have even been Christians in the first place. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that it was a "Non-Denominational" church, which without qualm produce the least common denominator of "Christian," many of whom I imagine practice because their belief was passed from mother to daughter, father to son. They, in essence, operating from the same position I was. "I'm doing this because this is the right thing to do."

So imagine my sudden shock of arriving at the conclusion that I had not really accepted Christ because I wanted him, but because I wanted something out of it: the certainty that what I was doing was the "right thing to do."

There are so many ways to proceed from here and I am content to stay on the page, but with all of life's changes in elevation I suspect I will be thinking about this more as time goes on. Ideally we should believe in Jesus like we believe in superheroes. We love what he does and how he saved us, and aspire to be more like him everyday.



Sunday, September 15, 2019

Crawling From the Wreckage

Oh! The joy of a wireless hotspot. As I write this I'm on my way down to LA to visit my sister-in-law in Redondo Beach. My kid has yet to meet her cousins . It's only been two years, right? (And one of them was born on the exact same day as Eowyn!)

Many moons ago I wrote my last update. suffice to say the last month or two has been harrowing for a handful of reasons. I had a nervous breakdown (was due for one) and had a spurt of creativity fueled by the turbulent period. I wanted to, as well, invest some time into some more developed ideas. At least one of them will get a longer format treatment to be featured at the end of my next book.

LA is a strange place. The heart of such whimsy (made fun of in such films as Demolition Man and Beverly Hills Cop) and violence. It's likely the home to California's future mega-multi-metropolitan-dystopia. Similar to the adage "you are what you eat," if the city was conscious, it would be screaming with existential terror because so many of it's inhabitants yearn for the end, a la Mad Max-styled diesel punk or the neon highlights of a Blade Runner-esque cyber-punk vista. (Pick your poison.) All of this is popularized in the film industry that has so molded the psychological and topographical landscape of the LA city basin. I don't think I could do it, living here. When the big one hits Sunset Boulevard will erupt like Vesuvius.

It's nice to finally begin the third edit of my new book. It's the final stretch, after 4 years of working on it. I had originally told myself to finish the book in two years, but, unless that's the only thing I'm doing, fat chance. I vacillate between the two, but the third draft is the most important draft in my mind. It's like sanding a piece of wood, or stitching up a laceration: the work isn't done, but its LOOKING like it's done. And that, if anything else, is a salve on my addled brain. Seeing that all that work and perseverance wasn't just for nothing.

If any of you have been following me in this journey, thank you. Seriously, thank you. It can be infuriating writing a book, especially when you know damn well that there are so many other books out there that you are fighting to compete with. With as little ceremony as possible I must say, Let me be YOUR author, friends. Nothing in this world gives me more joy than telling stories.

On another note, I got my fist unsolicited review! Very excited! See it below:


Thank You Mystery Reviewer!


Sunday, September 8, 2019

"Madison Monroe: Investigative Therapist!" - An Original Short By Stuart Warren


I had this idea when I was on my way back into work. I had just seen my therapist and was working out the idea that I was one of many patients. Which isn't unreasonable to think, but in a profession that focuses on mental health and wellness, I wondered how empathy played into it. To see a patient, to want good things for a patient, it all seems a bit Hollywood. But then I had this funny idea that led to this, and could turn into something more...



“This one,” Madison thought. “He’s a jumper…”
A languid fan turned side to side in the dry heat. Midday sun overhead heating the adobe husk as if they were roasting in a pizza oven. Madison twisted in her seat, chewing on the end of her ballpoint pen. Her blouse was sedate, a paisley amalgam of earth tones that emphasized space, secreting away the physical alacrity of three hundred combined hours of expensive yoga and personal training at Perpetual Fitness. It’s what the job required on any given day. And, despite maintaining a slight—though healthy—distance from clients, nestled into the fortress of throw cushions surrounding her, she awaited the call to go over the top into no-man’s land
Across from her, reclining stereotypically on a couch that she scored from a thrift store two blocks from her downtown office, was David: typical white male, mid-thirties, struggling with anticipatory anxiety and workplace stress. Additionally: fear of bright lights, obsession with oil slicks, mentions blood every so often with uncomfortable familiarity... David’s proclivity to fiddle with his clothes, to nervously pluck at his anemic beard: tell-tale signs of clinical compulsion. Deliberate and textbook. She knew now, without exception, that David was the murderer. Christ, he even had dried blood under his fingernails. Oil painter, my ass...
“It’s the same thing, every time. The lights. They’re a trigger,” he said.
Looking at her notes, a scrawl of shorthand psychiatric notations, she circled the macabre profession casually, written out with paradoxical whimsy. It was almost two in the afternoon. Her next client was already out in the waiting room, scrolling through social media and listening to the warm and fuzzy NPR broadcast featuring a documentary on the lives of polyamorous circus musicians.
“So, David, when you avoid this…” She paused, prompting the word in her mind like a late night talk show host. “You avoid this stimulation, right? You’re building it up. Making it out to be something catastrophic, like that stone that was rolling after Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
David sniggered. “Mmmhmm, I loved that movie.”
This was typical David: escape coping through nostalgia.
“David? Did you read the chapter in the workbook yet?”
He tilted his head sideways. Madison saw the reflection of the ceiling light in his glassy stare.
“No,” he replied. His posture clenched and relaxed, like a blood pressure monitor. “I’ve been wanting to, meaning to… It’s just been a hard week.”
“I’m sorry,” Madison cooed.
Quickly changing topics, she continued.
“We’ve established that you tend to worry, think apocalyptic thoughts. But… you know… not everything is the end of the world, David.”
Madison watched David roll over, onto his right arm, placing his head on his pillow as if he were about to sleep. He laughed. A disembodied voice, strained, nervous, unraveling like a roll of toilet paper.
Pushing against her couch, making a half-hearted effort of a pushup, he replied, “I know, right?”
“And you still think this is because of the loud noises that you were subjected to? As a child?” Madison probed further. Time was cheap, borrowed at this point in the session. The sting was in process. The cops were already outside. She could hear the police chopper cutting through the air overhead.
“My father had a gun. Late at night on the farm he would go out to check the traps around his chicken coop. And it was always unexpected, the shot. You would hear it in the night echoing through the hills like a jet engine, or a bundle of dynamite. Fourth of July, I hated the most. I would be dragged there by a babysitter or family friend and cover my head under the blanket for an hour. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! And I would shiver. They would laugh and cheer like it wasn’t a big fucking deal. And afterwards, I would look up and see it: the phosphorus afterglow of smoke, like blood spilling out onto the night sky.”
She needed more time. “David, did you come up with that right now? That’s really creative.”
Immobile, he looked up while lying prone. “Yeah? It just came to me…”
She leaned forward, masking her victorious smile, making wide strokes across her note pad. Not circles, or even underlines. It was the signature brush stroke of an epiphany. “So… okay, David. This is an ongoing thing. What steps have you taken to desensitize yourself to sudden increases in volume? What do you feel does the most to walk these panic episodes back to a place of calmness?”
But, it was too late. Chatter in her ear. The extraction imminent. The shrill ping of microphone feedback made her wince. David sat up. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“Ah, yeah… Just a migraine,” Madison replied, irritated. “It’s that time of the month…”
So much for the signed confession, she lamented.
At the corner of the office, from a slim five panel door—exit only—a sudden compression of blasting air. An explosion of brass colored woodchips, projectile fragments of door knob, and deadbolt barely missing her head. Through the haze, David scurried like a rat, rolling off the couch, and clumsily pushed the air conditioning unit out of the window frame.
“Down! On the ground! NOW!”
Ignoring the officers, David stumbled through the open window, reaching out for a railing that was not there. Afterward, Madison heard a scream and a chorus of cries below.
Fuck. She rolled on the ground in pain. “Why? I was so close!” she shouted.
As the officers swarmed in, inspecting every inch of the room for danger, they parted for Detective Jefferies. A gaunt face with high cheekbones and wiry hair slick with oil, he wore second hand slacks and a ragged windbreaker stained in the color of blue ice. He circled quizzically around the ruined office, sucking on a lollipop. It was her fault. Once, she made the recommendation for seeking a health substitute after watching Jefferies chain smoke a pack in two hours. Not candy, though. She didn’t recall recommending grape flavored Big League Chew to baseball players hooked on chewing tobacco. And carrots would just exude the aesthetics of wise cracking rabbits. Jefferies kicked a piece of wood across the floor, distantly remorseful. “Sorry about your place…” He grimaced, crunching into the candy and discarded the stick, flicking it like a cigarette butt.
Madison clambered for the windowsill in a daze. She saw onlookers gathering around what remained of David after his three story fall. It was a waste, losing a client. He was worth, at the very least, four more sessions.
Reluctantly peeling herself away from the tragedy, she left the window and slumped down in her chair. Drywall dust scattered out from under her.
“We raided his house this morning, in front of the bodega on Third Street. One of those craftsman homes with the paint peeling like at get out. Finally got a judge to sign the warrant. The construction work in the backyard on those new condos was the perfect cover, you know… for hiding the bodies. Just like you said, all of them were members of the gun club in the valley.”
Jefferies unwrapped another lolly and put it in his mouth.
“They all were—get this—partially exploded! As if fireworks were jammed down their throats.”
Madison hung her head, massaging her temples. “The confession… it was almost there…” She muttered.
“Sir?” One of the officers came in, dragging a fragile nymph of a boy. “This one was in the waiting room.”
                Madison leaned forward, peeking around Jefferies.
“Mark? Hey, I’m sorry... Can we reschedule for Thursday? Something came up…”
For the rest of the afternoon she sorted through her case files: photographs, slides, newspaper clippings, and whatever notes she had written down from her sessions with David. The office space she rented out was a part of a historical location from the turn of the century, before there was such a thing as global warming and the nights still got chilly. She lit a fire in her office and tossed the paperwork in, almost nostalgic. Mostly angry.
Weekends. That sacred time when one could lay out on the beach and get a $100 tan while shooing away the peeping homeless. It was time to get out and see the world. So, that night she met up with Joselyn and Steven, a pair she had met at the county correctional facility the year before. They had good energy, well balanced. Yin and Yang. Steven’s tendency to overanalyze and hyperventilate when his favorite character died on television and Joselyn’s frenetic and manic fascination with World War Two trivia and samurai swords. Kat-something…
They were at the local favorite of hipster and disenchanted youth renown, Your Face’s House, at the end of the bar, holding down the corner closest to the bathroom and the karaoke machine—just in case. Joselyn was jawing on about her latest client, Charlie, who committed suicide the day before the failed arrest on David.
“And that’s another thing. They never teach you how to profile. You think you have a jumper, but he’s really a cutter. You think you have a cutter, but she’s really prone to shoot up and OD.” She took a long drag on her cigarette, burning away a centimeter of tobacco. Into her chest went all the spite of the world, Madison figured. A convection oven dotted with freckles and rosacea. “I mean… fuck me for making a difference…”
“We do what we can,” Steven murmured. He took another sip of his Guinness and wiped the foam from his moustache. (Joselyn called it the “Tom,” as in Tom Selleck. Madison would always cringe, knowing damn well that it was a walrus moustache, trimmed short to the lip.)
“This last week,” Madison slurred. “I almost… I almost got ’im. Fuck… Fuckin’ cops… Shit.”
“Next time sweetie,” Joselyn stated with certainty. “Remember: the opioid crisis is the best thing since 9/11. Fuckin’ Pandora ’s Box. You’ll get another one, eventually.”
Madison swirled her drink counterclockwise, She bent over it, slumping down.
“When do I stop, you know? Caring?”
This caught the others off guard.
“Where do I draw the line? These aren’t just paychecks. They’re people.”
“Never get attached to the client,” Steven cautioned, nonchalant, flattening his cardigan closer to the bulbous outline of his torso. “If you did, life would be romantic comedies.”
“The shitty kind,” Joselyn agreed, smothering her cigarette. “Like, Bridget Jones’ Diary shitty. And you can forget that Hugh Grant shit…”
“I have one guy,” Steven began, calm and collected, staring too hard into the wood grain of the bar. “He’s nice, good kid. Believes—hands to God—that there’s lizard people, as in the conspiracy theories that you see on the Youtube. He’s intelligent, polite. Sometimes even poignant… How to proceed—that’s what they don’t teach you at med school.”
The bartender broke away from a group of college kids and checked in with the three, wiping the inside of a pint glass and setting it behind the bar.
“You guys good? Need any food?”
Joselyn declined while Steven search through the menu hastily.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” He replied.
“And do you want that medium or welldone”
“Medium.”
The bartender smiled and collected Steven’s menu, leaving a card behind with a number sketched onto it.
Joselyn eyed the card jealously. “Medium, huh?”
“Medium,” Steven repeated. “I don’t spend much time in restaurants, but I know how hard it is to cook hamburgers.”
Madison was busy looking at the card. She smiled, surprised, frankly.
“You’re gay, Steven? Aren’t you married?”
“No… and yes, I am married. I just like the validation,” he said professionally.
Madison lifted her drink. “I’ll drink to that.”
After the burger came, which was on the edge of medium-well, Madison gathered her things and left the bar, hoping to get an early start the next morning. Saying goodbye, she ventured out into the wet October night, checking her phone as belligerent students weaved across the sidewalks. 16 messages from Mark. Jesus Christ. Another from a number she didn’t recognize. She checked it as she jaywalked across the street. The noise on the other end was modulated.
“Of thirty bare years have I
Twice twenty been enragèd,
And of forty been three times fifteen
In durance soundly cagèd
On the lordly lofts of Bedlam,
With stubble soft and dainty,
Brave bracelets strong, sweet whips ding-dong,
With wholesome hunger plenty,
And now I sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing…”

Saturday, August 3, 2019

"In Observance of Space Time" - An Original Short By Stuart Warren


 Seems like everyone is doing a video with DeepFake these days: a technology that allows the over laying of a digital face onto a real body. (But of course you know that.) It made me think, “why not a DeepFake for reality?” Once we know the ingredients of the universe, what’s to stop us from baking?


In downtown Santa Barbara, in the Neon District by the train tracks, venture capitalists gather at a coffee stained countertop, cramped with cracked cell phones and money clips. Across from them a haggard grad student in a threadbare T-shirt—once red, now pink, perforated around the neckline—types into a simulator awash in cyberpunk highlights. He’s about to change the world.

It couldn’t be possible, even in Frazetta-scaped science fiction rags, they said. The universe is made of strings, infinitesimal and taught with reality. One needs only to equalize the frequencies, mix spectrums across the dimensions, and you can be an astronaut-ballerina, that puts out fires and has x-ray vision. For one hundred million dollars and change, pocket dimensions fit in your coffee tin, palmed like a silver dollar populated with sentient life.

Anthony sits in his living room, plastered with melting clocks and anorexic giraffes. The Napa valley sun, wet with dew, stabs rays through the crystal endtable. In his hands is the DeepReality™ projector. It’s shivering in 5 dimensional light, and Anthony can’t shake the image of liquefying porn stars from his mind.

Madeline is on her way into the office, lying on a pristine private beach in French Indonesia. On her customized planet, orbiting three suns at the edge of the galaxy she named “M-243”—M for Madeline—she is the majority shareholder of Fabian Micro Technologies. She is experimenting product rollouts there, and in sixteen other dimensions to predict Fall projections. Platinum lily sells better in the Asian markets. Chrome olive didn’t test well in QA due to poor color retention.

Thugnanimous is at a golf resort with his menagerie of publicists and promoters. In the hotel sitting room, a pound of cocaine is being haggled over. Out on the impossible green—an emerald island outside of Phoenix—his girlfriend is training for the US Women’s Open. Far away from his lawn chair perched on the deck, he is a child, running across a beach with his father (who stayed) and his brother (who wasn’t killed in a drive by shooting when he was 3 years old). Afterward, they are going to get ice cream in Cardiff, and then drive back to Carlsbad.

Despite the personal testimonials by tech moguls and pharmaceutical companies, the premier success of DeepReality™, as reported by the New York Times, is the testbed of constitutional reboots and experimental politics. “Despots, 39% of the time, avert ecological catastrophe by implementing climate change policies at the onset of the industrial revolution, whereas democratic socialists have a mean of 85 years before open hostilities between constitution adopters and anarchists erupt into full-scale genocide. ‘DeepReality™ succeeds where all speculative fiction and philosophy fails,’ said the company founder, Horus Cort. ‘It’s the ultimate thought experiment, the wet dream of R and D firms everywhere…’ When asked about the controversy over the sentience and preservation of life within these fabricated dimensions, representatives for Cort declined to comment.”

There is no actual way to escape into the facsimile realms, according to experts hired by the DeepReality™ Board of Directors. Despite the advancement of aggressive bacterial strains, overpopulation, and radioactive contamination, “We are here to stay. This is our world to fix, not to escape and do it all over again.” Outside the DeepReality campus protesters wear lead lined ponchos and pound the gates ineffectually. Horus’s son is escorted by military contractors to and from school. Melanie Cort is putting flowers on her parent’s grave at Hollywood Forever. Within minutes they shrivel and boil like salted snails. She is thinking about her husband, and his dirty secret.

By the time the last leaf falls on to the polonium caked earth, Osmund Cort, steps into his private projector with his girlfriend, never looking back. The sky is oily and metallic. The air is phosphorescent. Vacant skyscrapers covered in ash stand silent, their skeletal remnants melting together on the horizon like Lovecraftian horrors. Here, on Earth Prime, not even the cockroaches survived.

Sunday, July 28, 2019

The Art of Pissing on Things And a Confession


This week I purchased a car, against my will, due to the untimely demise of my semi-reliable 2003 Honda Civic. This will be my first “big loan” I have ever endeavored to pay. So you can imagine the intensity of feelings going about the Warren apartmenthold. There were many signatures, many squiggly lines, on digital and paper mediums. This, incidentally, provoked something in me today while I was on my way to church: the nature of signatures, instances of them in nature and society, and what they ultimately mean in various contexts.

Signatures are official. They afford a sense of ownership or liability (or both). Typically I sign about 20 forms a day on average, be they while shopping or while installing software on a client’s machine. The EULA (End-User License Agreement) is probably the most common. Another is the Acceptable Use Policy, when signing into a server (intimating the credentialing requirements for the user signing in). In other situations, for instance when signing a check or loan contract, signatures are also an admonition of responsibility.

This then suggests the binding nature of a contract, typically concluded with a signature. A contract infers that the signatory (the one who signs) will meet the requirements of a bargain, or face consequences (financially or legally) when they don’t.

The need for there to be something like a signature is, make no mistake, branded into us. (Considering both evolutionary and sociological systems.) Tribalism begets ownership, to declare sovereignty. From cave dwellings to gang graffiti nothing has changed. In sexual politics, likewise, feminism and chauvinism are methods, ultimately to claim dominance over another—control, as much as ownership, is just the means to declare freedom of purpose. In order to make a declaration, there needs to be a signature. To even put it crudely, the existence of something called a “money shot” (please don’t look it up), is proof of the biological origination of the signature and that it is as bestial as a dog pissing on a fence.

So far signatures carry a negative connotation, one that is permeated with ideas of control, dominance, ownership, and consequence. I had difficulty coming up with examples of instances when signatures had good intentions. A marriage contract is an acknowledgement of a union, I assume for tax purposes. In religion, of the Judeo-Christian variants, a contract is not really present. A covenant is not a contract, because the agreement does not terminate when one or both parties fail to meet the criterion specified. A signature is used, either ritually or liturgically, but a covenant ultimately is about what a person will commit to. On either side, the required action proceeds outward, onto another.

Maybe the reason for all this is the anxiety and trepidation I feel about loans is the uncertainty of being able to pay them? And when I get scared I react by "being strong," which by my definition is reading books and acquiring knowledge. It's like, if I know more about something, maybe I will be able to control my destiny that much more. I can't even watch television without getting stressed, hoping the guy gets the girl, that everything will be okay. That's this whole week. (I could write a whole blog on it. Maybe I should?) Excuse the sudden outburst. It's tangential. My whole life I have been hurt with misinformation, with people misleading me to conclude wrongly about something. I never expected to write about signatures today, but behind every signature is a statement and an agreement. What if I don't know what will happen next? My psychiatrist has encouraged me to think "So What?" statements instead of "What If? statements, and that has helped a lot. 

"What if I need to buy a new car?" 

"So what if I buy a car? It's a common life event that everyone experiences, rich and poor, and I have nothing to fear. God takes care of me and loves me and shows me that he has helped with bills before. He will again." 

See what I did up there? That's me taking advantage of the moment. That's my queue to lie down for a little while... 

Saturday, July 27, 2019

"The Wake" - An Original Short By Stuart Warren


Awash in cerulean light, I’ve walked under the firmament all my life. Never left the hanging city though... Scholars and natural philosophers debate to no end what is, or what could be, beyond it.

Like them, I live in the Wake, where waters flow eternal, from pole to pole.

The hanging city goes by a proper name. The elders call it Loo’alblo. Still, most just call it the Wake: the everyday “Average Joe” folks. Hardworking schmucks. Myself? I’m a priest and, or, local informant—should the need arise. I interpret the scrolls of time. Long ago, the Great Sculptor held his chisel, and he hammered into the coral to make our world. Like mold, we grew in the crevasses, spawned in the open air of sunlit plains. Our first nomadic ancestors journeyed here, following the living path—the algae, grown in the rock. Divine times. Good times.

While I meditate on my mat in the great light, I consult with those seeking the will of the Great Sculptor, occasionally making a deal or two in the same stride. Lots of kids… Young, eager to be closer to the source. Some are cheaters. Want to spawn with another mate, recreate on the side—I have a notebook for that, when opportunity knocks. It’s a simple life. Mostly, I enjoy their stories: to be connected with the culture, the mire, the gestalt of commonality.

For instance: a farmer came to me once, confided in me, said that his living path was dying, that the great light was too great, burning it. I proceeded through the “thees” and “thous,” naturally. The beasts beyond the firmament came up. Titans and giants, treading the horizon, afterimages projected onto the sky full of cosmic terror. Wild shit, I know…

One of my regulars, who spawns for payment, came to me scared out of her wits by a “vision.” She told me, quite confidently, that the eternal gods that be were to shut down the great flow of aqua. After that, the great drying will come, and we will burn on the surface of the coral, forever and ever, again. It’s “routine,” she said.

I sent her away, promising her peace, diffusing the chaos, making her feel all warm and fuzzy.

Later now, I regret that. Their fibrous hands, their sweet looking faces, their implements and the tremors produced by them, cause quakes that shatter our homes. They seem to like their work, the bastards.