Friday, October 14, 2011

Stoopid Vampires



I think the time has come for a story about dumb vampires. I am unsure about when the vampire myth made the transition from the minds of men to literature but since the early 1800s we have been saddled with the cultured, charismatic vampire. What a pain in the neck! I am sick to death of the fascination with and romanticizing of the vampire. I think the legend of the vampire is ripe for a story of a tremendously stupid bloodsucker.
It shouldn’t be that difficult to imagine. Consider the common view of how someone becomes a vampire. After being bitten on the neck and drained of most but not all of one’s vital fluids, a person finds him or herself with an allergic-type reaction to sunlight and a bad case of dehydration. Sounds like a virus to me. I don’t know about you but a good dose of the flu makes me all wooly-headed and thick. I’m much more likely to curl up on the couch and watch cartoons than break into a person’s bedroom and start spouting Proust when I have a bad cold. It really isn’t much of a stretch to imagine vampirism making you all kinds of stupid. I think it is much more likely that vampires wear footie pajamas while clutching a box of Puffs than velvet tuxedos and capes. They would probably stalk you in the cold and flu aisle of the local drugstore rather than an exclusive gallery opening. It’s hard to be mesmerizing when you have crusties in the corners of your eyes and a runny nose. Vampires could prey on your sympathy for how lousy they fell rather than draw you in with their exotic sexuality. But, even that implies a certain level of cleverness for vampires that I am totally over.
            I want a really, really stupid vampire. Seriously, irredeemably dumb. I want a vampire who accidently eats garlic bread and drinks holy water. A vampire who plans a vacation in equatorial Brazil and forgets the sunscreen. Maybe even a story about a vampire who faints at the sight of blood. A gang of vampires who plan to rob a blood bank but end up cleaning out a sperm bank instead. Dummies.
            All I know is that I’ve had enough of vampires who, in spite of being parasitical, undead monsters, are still cooler, classier, and sexier than the humans they hunt. Someone please step up and write a story about the vampire equivalent of Homer Simpson and end the reign of the trendy vampire forever. Thank you.


Science and Me



I like to consider myself an intelligent woman. I believe that I am well-educated and have a reasonable ability to comprehend difficult concepts. I act as if I understand the various scientific reasons the world works as it does. The truth is that when I look on these myriad processes I truly see one thing. Magic. That is the actual depth of my understanding. Nuclear reactors. Magic. Electricity. Magic. Digestion. Magic. I am no more aware of how these things work that I am of next week’s lottery numbers; I know that they will contain digits which are a combination of 0-9.
A good example of my belief in magic can be characterized by my relationship with electricity. I sit here with my headphones on; listening to music while I write this with no clear idea of what makes this possible. I can speak with great confidence about power plants and generators but, it’s all a front. I do not know what actually happens when I plug my little MP3 player into my computer to “charge” its battery. I take it on faith that after a given period of time the little meter shaped liked a battery will be full and that when I flip the “on” switch it will play music. Magic. And don’t even get me started on how sound can be digitized, recorded, etc. As far as I’m concerned, my MP3 player is a magic box that has forty-eight bands and a symphony orchestra shrunk down to microscopic size contained within it. Or do I mean nanoscopic? I am sure that at some point in my life I was presented with a cogent explanation of how electricity works – probably while watching School House Rock. Nevertheless, all the details about electrons and conductors have been smelted down by my furnace of a brain into one big lump of magic.
            If I were to try and explain to a child how the body turns food into energy and more person parts, the results would be laughable at best. I would probably start strong enough by describing how stomach acids break down the food we eat but I cannot in anyway explain how the body then goes about extracting anything from the resulting soup – let alone transferring it to my cells and toe nails. To me, the only way that a slice of veggie deluxe pizza becomes brand new cells for my friend, Liver, is unmitigated magic. I know about as much about the process as I know about how that damn rabbit ended up in Mystical Marvin’s top hat.
            And now, on to the Magical World of Computers! I remember my class in junior high where it took the full hour to type commands into the system to make an outline of a sailboat that I could have drawn in twenty seconds with a crayon. But, in a way, that made sense to me. I had to tell the system where to place each individual pixel on the screen to form the pathetic sailboat. I could assume that all the operating systems we use daily that I find so convenient are a result of someone writing lots and lots of sailboat type commands. My mind boggles at the very idea. What makes it possible for me to use a program to draw my same sailboat via pointing and clicking is, clearly, magic. We can now store vast amounts of information on microchips that look like the base materials for really exciting, avant-garde art jewelry. It’s not binary, my friends. It’s magic. The internet? Wi-Fi? Cloud drives? Magic flowing through wires and flying through the air. I have friends who could sit down with me and patiently explain every detail of how our new information age functions in ways both educational and entertaining. But, after the magic show was over I would still be wondering how he crammed all those doves up his sleeve.
            I have to reach a place where I accept and embrace how I really see the world. The magical sun rises every morning and sends down its magical rays to warm the earth and magically feed the plants. Plants which are magically turned into parts of animals which we magically turn into parts of humans (unless you’re a vegetarian which means you skip the magic animal step). The humans then perform tremendous feats of magic as they magically stick to the surface of the earth. I, magically, give up.


Saturday, October 8, 2011

Polyanna Rescinded




Dragon Baby
Penitentiary blues
I feel a cage coming on
No point in runnin’
The chain’s already welded tight around my ankle
I put it there
Forged the links
Out of grudge metal and angry fire
Made the decision
To be chained
To be caged
To be an animal
To be a dragon with opposable thumbs
Raining down destruction
On my own suburban landscape
Of peaceful homes and happy families
Lock me up
Before I make victims
Of my own dreams
I made the cage
I made the dragon
I lost the key
I acted out my fears
Lived like they were true
Until they became true
More real than the blue skies above my head
More real than the green earth beneath my feet
I want my freedom
But I just can’t
Let
Go


Symphony
Walking down the street
Looking for cigarette butts half-smoked
Hoping no one will notice when I pick them up
All I see is leaves and feet
Cracks in the sidewalk
A symphony of fear plays in my head
When will I die
And why am I not dead
Every day I wake up
Breathing
Wearing skin
Like I belong here
Should be on this planet
In the form of a girl
With no money
No cigarettes
No hope
But to find that half-smoked butt
To breathe in its smoke like shame
To match the symphony of shame
That plays in my head
That sounds like theft and lies and empty sex
That sounds like bagpipes at a funeral
For a lonesome little girl
Who lived her life in a bottle
Praying for half-smoked cigarettes and death


Friday, October 7, 2011

Stars and Dirt



Lull
We never dreamed to make our own constellations
To write our own names across the sky
We should have
We dreamed of being rock stars
We dreamed of being rich
We dreamed of dingy things
That tarnished to the touch
We dreamed of a better life
We dreamed of a better day
Then slept through its creation
To dream of movie stars
Who swept us off our feet
And took us away from it all
We dreamed of power
We dreamed of dominion
We dreamed like sheep
We never dared to dream
Of creating a world
With our own two hands
We never dared to dream
Of brightening the sky
With our own fierce light
We never dared to dream
Of peace
Then awoke to unfold it in our lives
We never dreamed we were real boys and girls
We never dreamed the stars flowed in out veins
We never dreamed we could
We should
Now dream


Short Harvest
Grow me a rose before it’s too late
My bloom is already fading
Petals drifting down
With the softest slither of sound
Create a bouquet
That spells out my name in color
That means what I mean
That shows my beauty
Which is fading
Bleaching like winter grass
Grow me a garden
To feed my soul
Through the long hungry years ahead
Plant an orchard
Till the earth
To keep me fertile
To stop me from withering
And going to seed
Dissolving into the soil
Unnoted
Unmarked
Like a forgotten grave
In the countryside


Thanks Luna
The moon told me I was beautiful
And I was so flattered
To look on me
With that milky white skin
And see beauty
So I reflected it back
And waxed more beautiful
As the night wore on
The moon told me I was flawless
Still whole and complete
On the darkest night
And I was filled
To overflowing
And shone with such radiance
That I woke the birds
The moon told me I was wanted
By ever star that filled the sky
And the light that touched my skin
Was a far traveling gift of love
Sent centuries before my birth
To reach me just in time
The moon told me I was loved
From the moment I first drew breath
And resting in its gentle light
I just knew
It was true


Sunday, October 2, 2011

Hamsters In Peril



There is an important matter I want to draw to your attention. Hamsters all over the United States are in peril. Pet store owners previously believed they were dealing with inexplicable but isolated incidents. So, until recently, there has been no media attention drawn to what has been happening. Pet store owners when approached my have remarked on the incidents in question as 'odd' or 'strange' but little concern was in evidence. All over the nation, leaving behind small puffs of smoke and not much more, hamsters are detonating.
In recent years, the popularity of the hamster as a pet has been experiencing a steady decline. It has been hard for them to compete with the variety of small pets available such as hedgehogs and sugar gliders as well as the rise in lizard ownership. The traditional hamster has been replaced in the school classroom with turtles and other low maintenance pets. This problem is not just commercial in nature but has much wider consequences and implications. And, now that the explosive hamster fatalities are coming to light, we are finding that the phenomena bears a closer look.
I have been doing research into the more isolated reports of pet store hamster explosions since the late seventies and was in a fortuitous position to notice the alarming trend. For decades previous, the average time from pet store arrival to purchase for any given hamster was five days. Shipments and general procurement of hamsters by retailers were designed to reflect this high turnover. Though hamsters have a short life span, ranging from one and a half to three years, their fertility rate is very high. Furthermore, they reach maturity quickly making them well suited to a demanding market. On the rare occasion that a hamster would remain 'on the shelf' for two weeks that hamster appeared to experience spontaneous detonation. It was difficult to correlate the data on explosions (which lacked a consistent method of reporting) with an accurate timeline in terms of shipment and arrival. Due to the increase in hamster detonations, these numbers have been thrown into sharp relief.
It has come to light that these hamsters have been used to collect data of their own. During the Cold War, the primary purveyor of hamsters was the former Soviet Socialist Republic. The Russian hamster farms were producing as many as ten thousand marketable animals per week. This lucrative business served a dual purpose of steady revenue and information gathering. Each tiny hamster was implanted with a device designed for both recording and transmitting far beyond the capabilities anyone suspected the Russians of possessing. It was thought by the Russian intelligence community that hamsters unpurchased after two weeks may inadvertently find their way into scientific research, resulting in discovery of this valuable technology. Hence, the inclusion of the detonation fail safe.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Socialist Republic, the thriving hamster business and advanced hamster technology fell into the hands of the new Russian Mafia. Arrangements were made and the entire system, part and parcel, was transferred to the Chinese government who willingly employed this valuable information asset. The widespread proliferation of pet hamsters provided information from a variety of resources including U.S. classrooms! This asset has remained viable and a real boon to the Chinese information community for many years until only recently.
Many factors have contributed to the decline in hamster sales over the past several years but the net result is what is most important. The marked increase in hamster detonations has made the data apparent and recordable at last. In the past, the relatively low number of explosions kept the wider scientific community skeptical of the phenomena as a whole. Furthermore, the destruction of the hamsters involved was complete as it takes a very small charge to effectively destroy all evidence. I was eventually able to obtain a hamster that had succumbed to wet tail (proliferative ileitis) prior to the two week "shelf life" deadline and was finally able to verify the presence of both the receiving/transmitting device and the detonation charge. I cannot emphasize enough that hamsters are completely blameless in this situation and should be seen as helpless pawns of the dark machinations of an information hungry world. Rather than penalize hamsters for their unwitting role, we must take steps to relieve their plight.
The size and placement of the intelligence gathering devices makes removal untenable for the hamsters and would be almost universally fatal. Yet, it would be cruel to leave these hamsters to simply explode in pet stores across our fair nation. It is eminently possible to include hamsters in out homes and classrooms without fear. We can save the lives of these innocent victims of global politics and still protect our national security. It would be a simply matter to care for and enjoy pet hamsters while presenting them with a steady stream of either disinformation or neutral data. Simply make certain to keep your hamster in a room that does not contain a television and shield it from all media feeds. A small speaker may be placed near the hamster habitat and set to play an innocuous mix of jazz fusion and new age music. This should prove soothing to the hamster and a bar against information leakage. Furthermore, you may bring your hamster into the common areas of your home on a daily basis and discuss completely inaccurate information in its presence such as false military base locations and defense policy issues. Take an opportunity to be both compassionate and patriotic. Buy a hamster today!

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Dichotomy

Vacancy Filled


I'm not going to waste my time
Looking for my better half
Because I'm already whole
I wasn't created in pieces
Scattered all over the globe
That must be assembled
To achieve completion
Whole is how I started
And whole is what I am
Maybe a few chips
Here and there
A nick or two
From rough handling
But I am totally capable
Of patching those up
With a little quiet time
And a good book
A nice bubble bath
But I'm not broken
I was made of stronger stuff
Not glass or china
No porcelain girl
I'm organic iron
I'm flexible steel
My soul
Needs no mate
My heart beats just fine
In its solo state
I'm no lesser half
Of a cosmic partnership
I'm whole

Entertainment News

A new one woman show
Starring me
Watch me walk out the door with confidence
Head held high
And trip over a rabbit
Watch me change my clothes
Fifteen times
Ranging in styles
From Urban Pirate
To Mod Rocker
To the first outfit I put on
Then walk out the door
And trip over a rabbit
Who is deep in conversation
With a hedgehog
Watch me cry during a zombie movie
Watch me laugh at seeming tragedy
Just watch me, okay?
I'm needy
No- not needy
Highly entertaining
A must see
Two thumbs up
Watch me make a vow
To eat only lettuce and raw flax seeds
Then eat myself sick and sobbing
On nacho cheese and red meat
Watch me fall in love
With a guy glimpsed at the gas station
And spend the next eight weeks
Wondering where he lives
Watch me act like a human being
With human feelings
Then beat myself up
For being and feeling
Then trip over a rabbit
Who is discussing the paradoxical nature of time
With a hedgehog and a parakeet
That rabbit hates me