That's All He Wrote
And that down there is the last I've written in the "Pure, Simple, Fantastic" vein. Like I said, it was really more an exercise in the "write SOMETHING, no matter what"- school of thought. I've discovered over time that I'm more of a "write when the inspiration strikes" type of guy.
Thanks for reading.
Maybe some day we'll all find out what REALLY happened to Duke and Rock n' Roll...
Pure, Simple, Fantastic Part IX
IX.
The eight-legged creature reached out with two tentacles and delivered the two foreigners from the hopelessness of finding the ocean bottom and a potential eternal resting place. The octopus snatched them out of mid-water and began to pass them from limb to limb to limb to limb to limb to limb like the most skilled juggler of all time, before attempting to feed the plastic men to itself. However, either the taste or the texture of the two misshapen creatures was unpalatable. The humpy beast spit them out and quickly darted back to the anonymous depths, leaving behind a puff of ink to make for a getaway.
As Duke and Rock n’ Roll again sank farther into the blackness they were floating in space, expansive, with no up or down, a great thunderous churning could be heard, parting the water like a giant oil tanker. But it was no oil tanker. This was a living, breathing beast. Lonely, calling out through the void in low moans. The whale, mistaken by ancient sailors as a sea monster, defied gravity as its heavy, barnacled body slowly worked through the water. Eyes closed, he nearly slept as he traveled, no fear of obstacles for miles all around. Mouth open, he sucked up all surrounding insignificant life, a vacuum with hardened, wrinkled skin. Duke’s body and Rock n’ Roll were captured by the direct flow into the whale’s mouth and were soon in slimy, compact world of undigested shrimp and kelp and briny, tiny microscopic cities of translucent non-imals.
But they were not long in the belly of the beast, for the gastroesophageal systems of whales had not evolved to digest plastics and the two commandoes were expelled out of the beast’s mouth like tiny water-to-water missiles. The giant leviathan made a grunting noise similar to an old man recovering from a sneeze and slowly swam away to its lonely, slow-moving future.
Against the Machine
Just got done reading
Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob by Lee Siegel. (Unfortunately the bulk of the book was about how we, the "Internet 2.0" culture, are becoming less human and not about "being human.")Anyway, his last paragraph is a real doozy and pretty much sums up the author's dark predictions for the internet's effect on humankind and very neatly sums up what's at stake:
There is only one person in the world who connects with us entirely, antiseptically, and without fear of judgment or rejection. He is at the very heart of our desire for convenience. He is at the other end of our wrist and finger. The less he needs the actual presence of other people, the more he will depend on goods and services to keep him company and populate his isolation. The more distracted and busy his isolation, the more he will measure people by their capacity to please him, or to gratify him without "getting in his face." For the only face he can bear will be his own.Here's to seeing other people as ends in themselves, rather than as means to our ends!
The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World by
Eric WeinerMy rating:
4 of 5 starsOther than the intriguing subject matter, a real strength of this book is the author's literary style. Weiner is very conversational and humorous at times, but in that unique way that a trained journalist is able... It was a pleasure to read his adventures.
Equally uncomfortable with the "happiness" and positive psychology movements, Weiner doesn't get bogged down in the surprising amount of available research and science and instead presents a (well-informed) regular person's search for what exactly "happiness" is and why it's so elusive and seemingly counterintuitive. For instance, great happiness and misery can be found in similar environments throughout the world--poverty and affluence are no guarantees of either end of the spectrum.
And the author's struggle to face these kinds of contradictions, along with a slew of others, are exactly what made his voice trustworthy and interesting for me.
Part travel book, part soft philosophy book, all worth the couple of days it took to read it!
View all my reviews >>
Pure, Simple, Fantastic Part VIII.
VIII.
And then the crabs came.
They descended upon the action figures like the Americans on Normandy. “Peter and the Wolf”-type music played in the distance as they shuffled about, claws and pinchers clicking. A group of three smaller crabs were linked like a crustacean chain, straining together and pulling in the same direction to remove Rock n’ Roll from his sandy grave as if they were either playing tug of war with his lower torso or saving him from falling in ice, Boy Scout-style. Meanwhile two larger crabs had managed to separate Duke’s head from his body and were bandying it about, applying an impromptu game of midnight catch with a face of chiseled, handsome good looks.
Just as the small group was able to extricate Rock n’ Roll and set him right with the world again, a great crashing wave came from nowhere, sending the whole scene into a wash of tornadoed chaos- crabs flying every which way into the sea, Rock n’ Roll and the headless Duke strewn into the ocean as well, powerless, determined by an uncaring universe.
Farther and farther the tide took the two out to the sea. They had been jettisoned out at least a mile before they began to sink in slow, slow motion amongst the bubbles and darkness. They tumbled an flipped in the inky wetness until a fast, flitting shape appeared on the periphery, jetting this way and that-- a mysterious, graceful shape.
Pure, Simple, Fantastic Part VII.
VII.
There is the phrase “…with lives precariously hanging in the balance,” which would seem an appropriate description of Duke and Rock n’ Roll’s situation, were it not for the fact that they were inanimate objects. Their lifeless faces were like Japanese samurai art, frozen in time-locked with an expression of strain, as if damned to forever be engaged in battle. So, in a way their visions of vistas high above the ground were wasted on them, as well as on the gull and its dull, black eyes.
As the wind battered the gull this way and that, Duke and Rock n’ Roll were held above the ground in its claws like potential sacrifices to the Earth. As mile after mile of marshy coastland unraveled beneath them, it was the closest that plastic soldiers would get to the magnificent last few minutes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 or the first Star Trek or The Black Hole or some other movie with a fantastical voyage through spacescapes. The earth might as well be an alien planet when seen from the altitude and vantage point of birds.
Ocean
Hill
Sand
Cracked-
Mud-
Earth
Hill
Sand
Cracked-
Mud-
Earth
Ocean
Sand
Cracked-
Mud-
Earth
Ocean
Hill
Cracked-
Mud-
Earth
Ocean
Hill
Sand
Seemingly all the elements conducive to the creation of life breezed by below them at a hurried clip.
And then, in an instant, it was over.
The seagull let out a screeching cry and released the two soldiers to the peril of a freefall. Falling rigidly for a couple seconds, they hit the deserted grey beach with a quick THWIP! Sound, unnoticed by man, hardly noticed by nature. Rock n’ Roll managed to land with his head buried directly into the ground, presenting his olive-green-pantsed ass to the universe. Duke survived the free fall by slamming into the sand on his side, reclining like an ancient Greek would while partaking of dinner at table.
And they stayed there.
Day turned to night, receded to dawn. Shadows of clouds passed slowly by.
The moon at night cycled through phases. Waxing. Waning. Gibbous. Crescent. Sliver. Full. Never cognizant of this manmade presence splintered into the coastline wilderness
Homework Sucks
I'm currently reading _Great Expectations._ Here's a passage where Dickens could have just written "I wasn't good at school." But there's no ART in that!
"I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter. After that, I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemd every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition. But, at last I began, in a purblind groping way, to read, write, and cipher, on the very smallest scale."
