God as iterant offender

Like October on Mars

It is beyond nonsense

Crack of history

The snare of your smile

Read sun, yellow sun

Hot-button trend-adjacent

Instrument of soft power

Spontaneous bop prosody

Slays another desert feuilletonist

[September 2024]

Holiday Spasm War

This holiday season's copywriting has enjoyed a hugely successful conversion rate despite an accelerating economic downtown and consumer uncertainties, and it's largely thanks to Chaffbyte, the upstart automated AI marketing platform utilizing machine learning trained on a proprietary dataset of ransom notes provided by assorted police agencies, international law enforcement, and true crime collectors. It's as if Herman Kahn's famed escalation ladder had finally been effectively translated into a rewarding sales funnel. #chaffbyte #escalationdominance #hermankahn #machinelearning #ransomnotes

Poem for Jill and Wonder Valley

JILL WAS RIGHT

It was May the first,
and Jill was right.
Wonder Valley was never designed
to be a success.

The unseasonal Burning Man
reeling drunk on Faux Squalor,
a cocktail of reclaimed wood and rust,
slumps forward, and rests on uncalloused elbows.

The predatory rictus of lax capital fails to conceal
his impatience, awaiting a spark to engulf him
in a side-scrolling self-immolation.
All your tropes are belong to us.

But Jill was right.
Our island floats upon a basin
of fossilized water, a gift of briny surprise
that poisons outsourced dreams and nurses
a Potter's Field of yellowing dice,
bold ventures reduced to bone dust and gossip.

In the desert, shadows are treasured.
We brought our own shadows to mingle with the others
and loved them like our own.
There they were accepted, embraced,
tolerated, shunned, but never chased.
Empty space, like a lover at a loss for words,
the empty space needs respect.

*****

This was written following a spirited community meeting about a proposed 'wellness' resort to be built in Wonder Valley, CA.

Poem for Dale Dry Lake

DRY LAKE

Dale’s glimmering snow white disc
Late Pleistocene plenty
A palace of indifference,
Observant and faithless
Baited brine, noiselessly swelling
A crystal crust,
The day’s pregnant unrest

Hashtagged swag flail desert tropes
While a sunless virus is dreaming green,
Off-grid Dry campers,
Tuff Sheds scatter
Upon the deckled arid shore
Exurbanites bursting
Their Aeolian blisters

140 years of failed dreams
Recovered memory, and managed retreat

* * * * *

Thanks to James Colbert for editing assistance.

Word Slingers, Wednesday 9/8/2021

Some Word Slingers product from this afternoon's session and their associated prompts.

Tail between your legs, getting longer and longer, harder to flick out of the way, the pursuit grinding down while time to tripping accelerates. 

"I think I've found a new SpIn - care to hear about?" 

"SpIn? Cardio workout?"

"Special Interest, abbreviated as SpIn, s, p, capital I, lower case n, SpIn. Neurodivergent love lingo - I could go on and on."

"No need. Parallel Play and all that, got it"

The chase resumes, then peters out. The sun descends and holes the horizon, the flare fans out diluting distance. A light bulb goes off, then on and its noon again. Something to be said about circumnavigating one's room.

Kepler's tale comes to mind. The circle widens and wobbles, just a bit.

Prompt;  Running in circles

* * * * *

Upcycled, the dream fulfilled. 

Unending blue jeans, from horizon to horizon, the sustainable web of hand-crafted crypto-marketing, fashion unleashed in algorithmic purity from forest floor to hi-rise board meeting.

Buck naked but upended, the blue jean reigns.

Prompt: Blue jeans

* * * * *

Swimming-ly. How'd it go? Swimmingly. Swallow much? 

The crawl, or scissors kick, doggy paddle or breast stroke.

Combat swimmer, yeah, it's a thing.

Aqua-culture to cool a Depression Era audience, your Esthers, our Williams, we agreed to be thrilled, dampened and relieved

Sadly, we paddle around now in an arid infotainosphere with thunderous choices sans the aqua-spectacle, reminiscing a glossy smile uplifting from beneath the manicured waves of the studio tank.

Prompt: Swimming

Trona: A Piece at a time

A hush fell on the world. It was a depopulated West but food wasn't a problem, electricity not a problem. It had been a hard landing but the dust had settled and there was enough of everything to go around. 

Devoted to collecting the Inheritors hug the desert dry lake and shun the the curationism that had poisoned the Gone world through a disastrous distraction that was global in scale.

Literally the inheritors of the world, they had no illusion about weaponizing nostalgia as it was already demonstrated to be a loaded gun. Loosely aligned across several cadre type organizations, they were the children of dispossessed consumers, rummaging through the middens for Dean Martin's drivers license.

Craft historians were revered and life was now organized by a striving to establish meaning in the accumulation of seemingly worthless and obscure objects organized into opaque hierarchies of value.

Spare parts and salvage, there was now enough of Ground Zero to go around.

[A bit of world building for a game scenario that was being kicked around last February.]

Council of Missing Persons: Mojave Chapter

We are missing you say. Maybe so. Missing or vanished?

The Mojave desert is both thin place and dumping ground. The latter, just look at the suburbanites tenanted upon its arid shores (the tide is long out, but never far away, listen). And the former, the surface of things hide their perforations. Finger-traced and ready to pry open, only a keen and indifferent eye can locate them leaving them untouched until disappearance and a way-in calls.

Advice. Gather your own lost souls, ones not yet willing or able to vanish. Disappearing into one's life remains mysterious and elusive. There is, after all so, so much, and so many things that seek to gain our attention and work our needs.

Questions. Doubtless there is much you want to know of us (and we want to know why the posted portraits are universally so unflattering - Interpol does a much better job). Who are we? Some of us are touched, intuitives if you prefer, and others are secret shoppers. The list is long and its very hard to pin us down despite the piled up saccharine comments and shotgun spray of personal identifying details platformed as flypaper upon our departure. This clumsy display acts as artisanal reclaimed wood to prop up and enliven drooping gossip, yet we remain hidden within the folds of a fantastic listicle.

Found. Yeah, that's agreed, Search & Recovery. But it's only remains, not animal and not really us as the DNA, the bone dust and dental records are all borrowed, passed on and bring no reward.

Many. Yes, there are enough of us to fill Amboy Crater but it's an inebriated rumor that we meet there annually. 

Gone. Do not distress. You're not yourself, they say. Get started and find something of substance, then we'll talk. Some of us have tinnitus as constant companion and may require repeated inquiry.

Our journey is not a quiz. There are only questions, and the answers lie elsewhere, dissolved and dislocated from an effortless causation. The journey is not over for us, just started.

Get yourself started. See you there!

Waiting on Pangea Proxima

I look at my wrist. 300 millions years to go, more than enough time to sell real estate. I'd finished with undiscovered countries, those hidden from maps, but was still to negotiate a string of Late Pleistocene lakes that draped themselves across the Mojave. Beach front property, sold vertically, up-and-down across deep time, my clients learning the meaning of sunken costs while basking upon the bleached shore of a dry lake.

[Submitted to The Short Story Postcard Project, April 29, 2021]

Dale Basin Haiku

DALE LAKE 1
Pleistocene plenty
A palace of indifference
Observant, faithless

DALE LAKE 2

Mist veiled nabkhas

Dale glimmering snow white

day's pregnant unrest

DALE LAKE 3

eye drink Dale Lake dry

the baited brine noiselessly

swell a crystal crust

FIVE ACRES 1
Virus dreaming green
off-grid, off-green, dry campers
Tuff Sheds on the lake

FIVE ACRES 2
Desert tropes, Dear John
140 years of failed dreams
Ain't enough for me

FIVE ACRES 3
Bad actors under
Aeolian blisters bake
ham-fisted desert

DESERT MODERNISM

Hashtag swag, Dear John

suburban feralities

Ka-Ching, greener Green

GREASEWOOD

Recovered memory

Larrea Tridentata

and managed retreat

LATE PLEISTOCENE LAKES

On deckled shores

dry lakes measured in bits of

Rhode Island units

[From a work in progress]

Al-Jabr 57

Spatchcocked on Al-Jabr 57 in a pigtail of a shipwreck, Braedon is reduced to a off-brand sigil. Ozone, burnt sugar, and wet dog flood the sensors, all needles bent. Fortune has undone his legs, Sly and Robbie, seeding a compass rose on a new world. Restless sugar sand erase all memory of animal joy. Al-Jabr is trouble, round and dangerous.

[Submitted to The Short Story Postcard Project, April 4, 2021]

Rolling with the changes

It was an experiment but it was well organized. Just a few simple rules.

Adhere to clock time. Go ahead and look out the window and continue your morning and evening walks. But obey the clock, or rather the clocks. (Note this doesn't include your mobile, that's not a clock, it's a camera with a tracking device).

Twelve or twenty four, your choice but your appliances prefer twelve hour shifts so most likely you'll stick to this.

When the power goes out, light a candle or be gloomy about your misfortune. When the power comes back on, your appliances take over and their revived clock faces are you new life-organizing standard.

You'll probably do some subtraction and addition maths at first but after a few cycles that will be nearly impossible. What is life like in this new world revolving around happenstance time? Talk it over with your Maytag and your Amana.

And it's a good thing you ditched that VCR. It would stubbornly blink twelve, zero zero, ad infinitum, tapping its feet waiting for human intervention. That defeats the whole purpose of the experiment.

[This was written for a Word Slinger session, Saturday April 3, 2021]

Bloodfast ‘85

[A slightly edited transcription of a resurfaced page typed in 1985. Some decent ideas but perhaps reading too much J.G. Ballard, which leaves me wondering what if I'd discovered Barrington Bayley or M. John Harrison back then? Still like the radio-borne virus, as there have been recent science papers about quarantining received SETI messages to prevent contagion by xeno-software viruses. Also, I still prefer the term CETI over SETI].

BLOODFAST

No one noticed when the remaining TV stations went over to continuous reruns and looping public announcements. Surely at this late date, appetite had triumphed over reason, or simply overwhelmed any pretense of logic. And yet, there was a logic still working, and not so alien as it might first appear. It was a half-forgotten logic, infantile, claiming itself as personal history. Too authentic to be denied, too thirsty for identify.

By the late Eighties, the sophisticates had reestablished their complacency, so thoroughly shook by the events of the mid-decade. To the few who still nurtured a need to know, the sophisticates this time had gone the championship distance to prove to be a sophisticated, cultured thinker was to be a domestic creature… It wasn’t the door kicked open at Trinity that spilled the slop. The door was pried open by Mr. Marconi, although the meat was already well tenderized by Herr Gutenberg.

Gutenberg, Marconi, and Oppenheimer, and all the Edisons and Fords, they laid the path to CETI... 

Communication, with or without purpose, driven by the nightmare of ultimate destruction, diluting, then sweeping away all transmission of the evolution of good and evil. Now there was only good and not so good. Maybe bad, or least desirable. But where was the Evil? How nature abhors a vacuum!

The theory of radio-borne virus was novel, but not without some theoretical underpinnings. There was no research on the subject at Arecibo earth station. The most able mathematicians and exo-biologists were the first to go.

The pulse of the galaxy was interrupted by a infinitely sharp lance, a dagger shaped signal, a scalpel driven at the speed of light, a precision thrust to the stem of the brain, wielded over cold dark light years, piercing a soft pulpy vestigial gland. Radio-borne, then airborne and ear-borne.

The body was replaced by a wound. A wound with a mouth, and eyes and ears and intestines, ass, cock and cunt.

A new birth perhaps, actualized on a fully traumatized population so eager to be entertained, enthralled by a message from space. Yes, space! Out there! Space indeed, not this oozing pulp we inhabit in our isolation. The  loneliness of a sterile earth-bound life, made personal, millions and millions of times over and over.

In the cities sodomic zombies ride out their flesh play, dimmed character of reproduction, coming in pools of pus and bile, torn by competing orifices permanently pried open by a ferocious hunger beamed from beyond. The highest species of the blue green planet pimped to the heavens.

In the fitness of our wounds we find vision.

[Written sometime in 1985]

Drexel, Burnham, Lambert and a Drop in the Ocean to Go

[The accompanying text for my first assignment in George Legrady's Art 410.1 course at San Francisco State University in the Conceptual Design/Information Arts Department. The reproduced page at bottom has the classic Chicago default sans serif font for the Macintosh. The top image is a DDR worker finishing work on a typewriter, circa 1987, source unknown. Drexel, Burnham Lambert was a investment bank forced into bankruptcy in 1990 and was associated with junk bonds and Michael Milken.]

Description

Three US pennies and a five gallon plastic 'bladder' partially filled with water. Objects related by color: "transparent." A collection (of coins) and a body (of water). The discrete and the continuous. A soukous guitar solo by Franco. Chords versus marimba, rhumba! A string of readings; a rigged wishing well for corrupt travelers with car phone, a late 20th century cargo cult wristwatch (digital works and liquid crystal display), a chance operated processing device (I Ching with monitor cube), obvious (cash flow), less obvious (cold fusion), government agency ad for peace corps and conservation (the collected water vapor of a Peace Corp volunteer and his/her contribution to world understanding/national security measured in GNP units), etc.

Evaluation

A simple opening statement of interests. The quantitative is a fast lane to God. 320 shot glasses of water, 3 gallons, water gathered from the shores of an ancient (dry) lake in the Mojave (Trona). Pennies from a collection approaching the weight of a human body. Cerebral and computer-aided modelling proliferates in the masses, common objects are reassembled into machine/models appropriate for the task at hand. The "Romanian Model" running simultaneously at Los Alamos National Laboratories and across the squares and airwaves of a distant land. "We almost lost Detroit": "one of our algorithms got loose and it may be in enemy hands."

References

"The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins, subtited "Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design."
Two five gallon water bottles, one full and the other an inch deep in pennies.
"One Human Minute" by Stanislaw Lem, an essay/review of tomorrow's almanac.
Final scene of the "Creeping Unknown" (Hammer 1954) where Professor Quatermas leaves the scene of disaster averted to "start over" in the morning!

Ken Sitz
Art 410.1 (George Legrady, SFSU)

2/15/1990

Word Slingers, Saturday 12/26/2020

Some Word Slingers product from this morning's session and their associated prompts.

The ground was uneven, a little soft in spots, but we were dancing, dancing on a cold New Years Eve, on the impromptu graves of the lumpen futurists and dystopian world builders who had gone back to starvation wages and dug themselves spider holes to wait out the dreadful, unforeseen year.

If anything, they were good for a quick lash-up and had had a nice living as late arrival disrupters for visionary CEO's with an opening in the calendar. The last pitch I'd heard was for an exchange of a 12-month hi-desert August for the entirety of 2020. It might have gone down too if the negotiations hadn't been undermined by a loud and barely maintained swamp cooler drowning out the nuances of the barter.

Now it was time to dance again, Emma Goldman-type dancing. Imagining the end of the world had gotten easier, and imagining the end of Capitalism was re-illuminated and back on the menu.

 Prompt: You should be dancing

* * * * * 

The marketing was intoxicating and I was drunk on France, or rather some part of Northern California not reduced to ash. Freely flowing and with a hint of a stolen mother from a religious cult's kombucha brewery, the bouquet wasn't quite the punch in the face I'd hoped for. Still it was flowing and my limbs were melting, not from the heat of the loud, darkened cavern, but some cold glacial slide. My legs and arms like stretches of permafrost awakening to a warming season, and my body began to feel porous and open to opportunities that only the next few minutes might provide. Breathe, remember to breathe, I remembered. Agustina nudged me and I refocused momentarily as a glistening waiter approaches us tray aloft and floating above his decorated arm. Keep it flowing, and upright for the moment, Agustina indicated with her glance and whispered "More prehistory later."

Prompt: Keep the champagne flowing

* * * * *

Planning was not my strength after all. It was a fault of our times and I take no personal responsibility for it. We were all being curated, or complicit in deejaying our way into the abyss, while missing the journey and oblivious to the end, even if there wasn't a recognizable end, like the flickering black-and-white title card on a imported Swedish film. I'm saving myself, the best for last, despite all those heads and torsos bobbing up and down around me. The last look at the night sky, the cold plunge, dipping beneath the surface, one warm breath, held tight, exhaling a final performance followed a few sustained moments later by a violent bow. The last, not necessarily my best, but the last.

Prompt: I'm saving the best for last

* * * * *

A celebrity in debt is a fascinating object and ultimately a wonderful investment opportunity. I offer you this premiere financial product before it's official debut on the platform. Risks are substantial but the rewards are astronomical and participating in this fund is a pleasure that you'll be proud to flaunt. The initial offering is a collection of Coreys, Amandas, and syndicated chefs. Rebooted sitcoms, mall openings and car shows, public humiliation and psychic meltdowns, threatening paternity suits and slow, drawn out public suicides, all to a schedule of returns and options. It's fleeting fame and money-in-your-pocket fortunes!

Prompt: Fame or fortune

Word Slingers, Saturday December 5, 2020

Some Word Slingers product from this morning's session and their associated prompt.

Spare me, it's just a blank canvas.

Yes, but that's the point.

Okay, I'm intrigued. Go on.

Um, that's it. 

What? That's it? If that's just a blank canvas, I'd call that a stretched canvas.

Aha. Cute. You're not really into this, are you?

No, I think I'm getting the hang of it. It's just that as a gaseous being, sentient for sure, but relatively formless and colorless, my perceptions align across several different spectra that are currently well outside your ken.

So you going with that one? I'm colorless and undefined. I do reckon there's a vicinity of some nameless scents, unless I'm having a stroke. You're obviously capable of dialogue.

Maybe I'm just beauty-blind. It's been a lovely visit, I'll grant you that and I do enjoy our exchange.

Prompt: Let me tell you about the time I was invisible

* * * * *

No doubt there'll be a job posting for a new senior program manager on Indeed and LinkedIn within the hour. It wasn't so much that the party was out of control, it was just invisible. If you looked around the office, things seemed like a regular mid-week, mid-afternoon slump, the effect of hastily eaten lunches now midway in process of digestion and the familiar but crushing routines rounding on overdrawn late night streaming. 

It's come to this. Showing up was trigger enough, and the project management role had devolved to a lowly pedestrian form of cruise director.

Some holiday shindig even with the budget recession. Party favors was filling out the checklist. The crescendo was reading out the results of a survey. The walls were covered in tabloid-size Excel printouts , artless pixelated grids of fading four color toner. The supply cabinet had grown skinny with irregular restockings of mostly non-requested stationary seconds and castoffs.

Prompt: Wild party

* * * * *

Delayed and deferred. I could of waited for them. 

Prompt: If I knew then, what I know now

Word Slingers, Saturday November 28, 2020

Some Word Slingers product from this morning's session and their associated prompt.

WASP PRIME was scheduled for Wednesday morning. All the projections and final review of the modelling was signed off. Mercury was bustling with some high level visitors from the capitol. A 18-megaton underground test is nothing to sneeze at and we had our Brit counterparts looking over our shoulders.

I was looking forward to the celebratory dinner planned for Saturday at the usual casino. 

As the public affairs officer liked to comment about the naming process for the test series, "some of the lads prefer cheeses." MISTY ECHO was my first, than CANVASBACK and INGOT. DISKO ELM was my contribution. Wasn't there for FONTINA but heard it was less than a success.

Sitting down after all those months of preparation, the suspense of the detonation, and the first roll-out of the data in the immediate aftermath, it was a real relief to toast our collective efforts with a dry and bracing burgundy.

Prompt: All that, and a glass of wine

* * * * *

Jack London was a piece of steak

Rather, that was his short story

A Piece of Steak

If only he'd had a piece of steak to consume before the match

Tom could have taken the kid

But gravy and a little bread, that was his lot

Youth will be served

and the gravy will be cold and lumpy

Prompt: It was gravy

* * * * *

If you had wings, it would be the worst thing.

You're not talking feathers are you, cause there's mites you know?

I'd rather have a good snout. Take it all in, on the wind, keeping my paws on the ground.

Bird's eye view? I don't think so. Keeping track of all that space, that's why their bones are so thin and hollow. About as practical as a Brontosaur, supposedly one of their distant kin.

If you had wings, someone would, you know...

Prompt: If you had wings (Monsanto, Disneyland)

* * * * *

Has he confessed yet?

Give him another 90 minute treatment, selection 23 with binaural beats and isochronic tones.

He'd give up his own mother rather than get a second helping of that.

The enemy combatant was far from contemplating the weaponization of mindless ditties played at insidious frequencies. He was struggling for his sanity in a world claimed by the Imperial Disney.  

Prompt: It's a small world after all

Word Slingers, Saturday November 14, 2020

Some Word Slingers product from this morning's session and their associated prompt.

Stalled, if that's the right work for it. I was still revolving, still clinging to the fixtures, trying to re-orient myself to the spinning interior lit by flickering pulses of recessed light. It was the jagged orbit as projected, but I was powerless and had no option but to hang tight.

Usually I took such an "option" - what a nice characterization for an nonrefuseable choice tarted up as an "option" - to reflect on things, go over the bullet list, construct a haiku, etc., but reflecting and wondering was probably not the best way to fight a creeping nausea. 

Focus, that was the ticket. Stalled and focused. Waiting for impact, but most likely just waiting. Gradually, it always seemed to lazily follow the sudden, the spinning wound down. Was I still waiting or am I done?

Prompt: Hurry up and wait...

* * * * *

With Westarkana, that 79 States now reporting and the Decision Desk has shuttered it blinds and gone offline. Updates at 2300...

Bad math maybe, or lazy logic. Seems inconceivable that we've reached this point. Really? Yes, really: the cola has lost its fizz and the non-dairy drink has gone sour. We bought in and we sniffing the results now, and the bloodhounds at the Decision Desk are circling the stinking mess.

I like a good joke, and plot them all the time. My belief in unforeseen consequences and an indulgence in worst case scenarios and 'natural accidents', not to mention legal liability, has advised me to just enjoy the mental modeling and avoid springing the trap.

Obviously there are theorists of jokes paid in blood and not content with mere punchlines.

UPDATE: The outstanding 23 States are refusing to release their results and we're calling the contest hung. A redo is expected and a new slate of comics will be announced tomorrow.

Prompt: A Practical joke that backfired...

* * * * *

"Circumnavigation, it sounds so expansive. I've been around, it's not what it's cracked up to be" muttered the grizzled old man at the end of the bar.

"But you can see wonderful things, out there, almost over the edge, the wilderness. I go every chance I get!" Polly snapped.

"Yes, wonderful. Buy me a drink, I need to forget" he replied.

"Kevin, another Natty Ice for Gramps here and a Europa IPA for me. Thanks!"

"What do you need to forget?" Polly continued.

"And you think remembering will help me forget?"

"I'm just curious"

"You'll mess-up your pretty makeup pressing your face against the glass. Try and take a step back, close your eyes. Wake up. That's all I can tell you."

"I just want to go all the way around, see everything, capture it in my water colors, tell others." Polly was being honest but looked hurt. Gramps was a downer.

"Here's your drinks. Would you care for any meal worms or flaked food?"

"Nah, thanks Kevin" blurted out Gramps "I have to swim back to my castle"

Prompt: Like a goldfish in a bowl...

Word Slingers, Tuesday November 10, 2020

Some Word Slingers product from this afternoon's session and their associated prompt.

Cheyne was flawlessly good at ignoring directions. Or so it seemed, until now. Something shapeless and dark was brooding about in the background. Even a swift turn of the head and attention focused on the corner of her eyes did not reveal it, yet it hovered, dull and heavy in some place directly behind her and slightly above head height.

Discomforting sensations were not a stranger to Cheyne. She was a keenly aware of her options for self-medication and self-illusion. It was only when this unseen dread, still unnameable, was well into it's second week that Cheyne went looking for whatever it was that might have prompted this unshakable darkness. Had she missed some prompt, some simple instruction?

Could she just turn and face it?

Prompt: Just when he or she thought it was over...

* * * * *

Dumb struck, or I hope it was that simple. I would have shaken my head but I thought maybe it best to stare straight ahead and drop my eyes, going with a soft focus instead of having my head becoming heavy and rolling off my shoulders.

It was technically just news, information, second-hand even, but it was meant to inflect pain and I was caught unawares. 

I have options, sure enough, but what if I didn't reach for them and just stopped. How much can one withstand? It's not pain, but one can still hurt and move about, and learn. 

How reassuring to know it won't hurt a bit. 

Prompt: This won't hurt a bit

* * * * *

Rocky planet: check. Magnetic field: medium, but strong enough to be outside a few hours without shielding. Atmosphere: Not much to speak of but plenty of ice, so we can breath well enough after a bit of brewing and processing. And fuel, no worries. Starlight: damn, A Plus, a blackness to die for. 

Once we dig a bit deeper we'll know more where this rogue originated but for now we'll settle in and get comfortable. Imagine, a place with no Sun, just stars, and stars, and stars. 

Prompt: Where the sun don't shine

Bonus Reality-Check: Unattached 'rogue' planets discovered in the Milky Way

 

Word Slingers, Saturday October 10, 2020

Some Word Slingers product from this morning's session and their associated prompt.

It was number 7. The third RiteAid that morning, and the 3rd RiteAid on Highway 62. So much for the surveillance state, HIPPA and digital privacy. I was on my seventh flu shot of the day. Still not sure how I arrived at this challenge, but I was well into it now after a false start last year and just 3 flu shots in as many days.

I had my Rhodia notebook to collect the set of peeled off band-aids. I was still feeling good and had a boost of adrenaline when I gave out my false identity to the pharmacy clerk. My left arm was definitely tingling but didn't look worst the wear for all the morning's vaccine pricks.

A cheap high thanks to the borrowed Medicare credentials, but the mileage was adding up. What kind of high? Hard to say. Maybe just the hill topping, rock climbing type high. The trite "because it was there."

I wonder if the casino is giving out free flu shots today. I'm definitely feeling lucky.

Prompt: You're never going to believe this.

* * * * *

Due to technical difficulties and a bad connection, our previously schedule guest Mother Nature, who goes by the name Gaia, will not be joining us today. We hope to resolve these issues and have Mother Nature, whose goes by the name Gaia, back very soon in another installment of the Bodega Biosphere podcast.

Our deepest thanks to today guest, Diana, the Moon Goddess, who has agreed to  join for an in depth discussion of all things moon related. Let the lunacy commence...

Diana: First off, I like to tell Elon Musk to go fuck himself. What's with his Mars obsession. Such a little boy. Terraforming the moon too difficultt for you, you billionaire brat?

Prompt: The special guest on your podcast today is Mother Nature

* * * * *

Food poisoning goes by many names. One of them is Mayonnaise.

Used successfully against against a superior opponent, it's called Miracle Whip.

Practically unregulated, the single use poison packets fly out of eateries unsolicited and concealed in packaging and if you are lucky enough to survive, you will no doubt have new appreciation for the phrase "food to go..."

Prompt: Mayonnaise

Word Slingers, Saturday September 12, 2020

Some Word Slingers product from this morning's session and their associated prompt.

Greased pig? 

Where can I find that? 

Encoded in that phrase, some yesterdays, probably many, coming and going, peering out, returning again, disappearing again. 

If you're not lost in the archive, you haven't really visited it.

Some yesterdays are huddling for warmth, while others are contrarian and loners. 

Better to not make too many judgements, and just root around, the random walk, the drift, and leaving your wake to fractally assemble itself into... something. It's best not to get ahead of yourself.

That dog don't hunt.

 Prompt: Holding on for yesterday (song title)

* * * * *

It's a ball. It rolls, round and round.

Not just any ball, it's red and free and will certainly kill you, but in the meantime, have we got an adventure for you.

You don't have to squint anymore and the dollars seem to just keeping rolling in and vanishing (do the Martian canals really drain into subterranean bank accounts buried beneath the Swiss Alps)?.

Look up! Oops, did you drop this? It's mine now and I don't know how I got along without it. That red ball, that's opportunity and these giant silver Coors cans that look like reuseable rocket boosters are stuffed with cash. 

Dedicated to Earth-bound visionary space oligarchs everywhere.

Prompt: Life On Mars (song title)

* * * * *

Hard stop. Dark mode. Lean into it, future-focused.

Never mind someone's objective and key factors keep getting trod underfoot.

Has anyone seen a steamroller lately, or have they all been replaced by phantoms?

The horizon turns out to be the limit, to no one's surprise.  

Prompt: Don't stop me now (song title)

* * * * *

Am I ready for a brand new beat? You asking me, or telling me?

Streets? Sounds like another name for a cul de sac. Did I win anything?

Prompt: Dancing in the streets (song title)