giantsthosedays’ Neighborhood

“Where were you last night?” Carlos said nervously in the flickering light of the street lamp. “I waited until 2 am”. Dr. Albatross said nothing, he only pulled a cigarette from his lips and threw his spent butt into the sewer grate making a hissing noise. “I don't have weeks, I have days” he said with tears welling up under his eyes.

“Patience Carlos.” His words slowly grated across his throat in a mockery of speech. “I was held up last night due to circumstances out of my control and I apologize sincerely for the delay.” Dr Albatross's overly polite demeanor was always unnerving to Carlos. His manners and mannerisms seemed so overt and unnatural, like he had taken a course in human behavior rather than just knowing. Smoke billowed out from underneath his hat he Dr. Albatross exhaled his last puff of smoke. Their first meeting had intimidated and frightened Carlos. He was put off by this stranger, but he seemed to have so much more information than any police, detectives or other contacts he had made in his search. Dr. Albatross, if that was his real name, wasn't a punctual man, but his information always turned out to be shockingly accurate.

“I have another lead” his voice creaked, “but I'm afraid you may be too late to completely prevent prevent further harm.”

“How do you know?” said Carlos

“Because another one is coming right now.” Carlos felt a sharp pain in his abdomen as he finally realized what Dr. Albatross was.

“Why did you send me? Why did you show me the dead ones?” yelled Carlos as he doubled over in pain and clutched at his stomach “Why didn't you just let me die?”

“Because you aren't dying.” said Albatross, “You are being born.” Carlos watched the light from the street lamp fill his vision. It drowned the night, It masked every sense and every feeling; all but the Doctor himself. The pain in his abdomen had reached its zenith and was now fading into a burning sensation. The pain swept over every nerve and dulled itself as it filled him like a glass of water. Carlos was in the fetal position in the middle of the alley with his face wrinkled and frozen in a silent scream. Blood dripped from his tear ducts and saliva bubbled in a froth out of the back of his throat.

Dr Albatross stood above the shivering mass and pulled a stethoscope out from the inside of his jacket. He put the diaphragm of the stethoscope to Carlos' abdomen and began to hum a strange discordant tune while moving his hand along Carlos' back slowly in a mock gesture of comfort. The tune resounded in Carlos' brain until it made the pain all but disappear. Carlos no longer felt like he was dying. He was filled with euphoria and light as Dr Albatross slowly pushed his fingers through the skin of Carlos' stomach.

Carlos looked down in perfect calm to see Albatross's entire arm disappearing into his stomach without so much as a drip of blood, yet he felt no pain. He almost felt like all his searching and all his stress was being removed by Albatross's hypnotic song and bizarre surgical procedure. Albatross then moved violently as if something had grabbed him. A look of shock and terror flooded over the Doctors face as he started to be pulled deeper into Carlos' abdomen. The song stopped and the pain immediately rushed back into focus. Carlos was no longer enveloped in the white light of the street lamp, but was now lying in the wet dark alley with a man being pulled into his abdomen by some unknown force. Blood started to appear around the edges of the entry wound the doctor had delicately created for his arm, but now was being stretched open by Albatross's own waist. Dr Albatross's wing tip shoes disappeared into the stretched and gaping open wound. Blood welled up in the hole and overflowed onto the street. Carlos screamed until his vocal chords would not allow sound to pass through them. Consciousness faded as he heard a few voices calling out for someone to call the cops.

Carlos awoke in a hospital bed 46 hours later. A black mass of stitches covered the hole in his stomach and his arms and legs were held to the hospital bed with white leather straps. A harness held his head in place and his jaw closed tightly on a mouth guard. He was able to see an entire wall of X-rays out of the corner of his eye, but he could not turn his head to look. A disembodied voice sounded through a tinny loudspeaker in the ceiling.

“Mr. Valejas, if you will look straight ahead we will show you a video of your operation.” A screen flickered to life showing a video of a different room with surgeons surrounding his bloodied body. “As you can see the entire staff had to work in full hazmat suits due to the unknown nature of your affliction. The surgery we performed on you was to investigate the source of interference our X-rays were picking up in your abdominal cavity. All attempts at non-surgical probing were met with static and fuzzy images. This, of coarse, is impossible so we chose the surgical procedure you are seeing right now.” The surgeons in the video seemed to be cooperating to pull an object out of his abdomen with a large set of tongs.

The object was a small golden idol, 12 inches tall with gem encrusted eyes and a wide gaping maw filled with diamond teeth sitting in the lotus position and holding a small snake in it's outstretched left hand. The idol was covered in blood and gore and was set on a surgical tray. Just as the surgeons started to go back to sewing up Carlos' body a light started to emit from the idol that blinded the camera. The video image flickered and became filled with light; then nothing but static and the hiss of a lost audio feed. When the picture came back, the idol was gone, the surgeons were gone, and Carlos' body lie on the table wide open in the middle of surgery.

“We were hoping you could explain to us exactly where our colleagues have gone.”

Two Tyrants is the product of long thinking about the legend of St. George and the Dragon. In the real story, St. George holds an entire town hostage under punishment of death unless they convert to christianity. I thought that was pretty fucked up, so here is the finished product.

Two Tyrants

A serpent wedged in the waterfall

a village woman between his teeth

leviathan of the stream

Stidjia of the underworld

Hiding from the eye of god.

Crusader of Yahweh

Cappadocian soldier

Reluctant right hand of Gallerias

Tribunus of Nicomedia

Bearer of Ascalon

The saint rides into the city state

The pagans of Silene

Sacrifice virgins

to the hunger of the leviathan

Licking the tears of mourning

to sate their thirst

Dragons fire dries the well.

Faithful crusader of god

Plunging Ascalon into the falls

Impales the snarling dragon

On this, holiest of all lances

Graced by the blood of the son

Now soaked in the blood of the beast

The Knight collared the beast

And subdued it to his will

at the tip of Ascalon, could not rebel

They marched to Silene

The knight and wyrm

To hold the city state hostage

At the snarling end of a dragon

“Repent ye Sinners!

Lest I loose the beast upon you!

Forget your ancient ways

to worship the holy father”

The townsfolk buried their old gods

to save their lives from the leviathan.

Their tears could not quench the loss

of their beloved gods.

You see the very important to-do list below this post?

See the part that says "register for classes" and all that good stuff.

Now look at the date of that post and this one.

I hope you can make the connection.

I have been very busy with classes and it has made blogging a luxury that I dont' have. I hope to start blogging a little more now that I am in the swing of things, and maybe I'll blog some of the writing from my creative writing class, but overall, i don't have a whole lot of time for this. It's sad, because I would love to persue some of my own interests in this thing. But I have dedicated myself to academia!

There is some pretty heavy stuff on here this week. None of that petty "should do" or "want to do" stuff. This is SERIOUS!

• Take the van in for a tune-up
• Go to the college and check on my student loans
• If the student loans went through, sign up for classes.
• clean out the van... again.
• Get the resume together. It's time for a change.

I told you! Important stuff!

Here is a picture my young ladyfriend, Jessica, took of me sauntering on the beach in Harrisville Michigan.

Camping was wonderful, especially with her. Spending day after day relaxing, reading, and generally enjoying the camping experience. My favorite part was the nature walk. Jessica and I walked through the woods identifying northern Michigan trees and looking for bears. Alas there were no bears to be found; only the majestic red pines of the northern coastlands!

On about the 5th day of camping we went to the beach on the hottest sunniest day of the week. I burned the hell out of the back of my legs and back. I forgot sunscreen for about the first 45 minutes of fun on the beach and it has translated into days of searing pain, sleepless nights, and peeling skin.

I will never be without sunscreen ever again. I am too pale and fair skinned to be baking in the sun.

Almost my whole family had the pleasure of meeting my girlfriend. I feel bad for putting her in such and intense situation, but she handled it wonderfully. My family adores her almost as much as I do.

I've done quite a bit of web searching and I can only find 2 passages about "Mellified Man".

The wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellified_Man

The Basics are as follows.

• You find an old guy who is pretty sure he is going to die anyway, and is totally ok with eating NOTHING but honey until he kicks the bucket.
• He continues to eat honey until he urinates, excretes, and sweats nothing but honey. This, of coarse is, fatal
• You then fill a coffin with copious amounts of honey and place the dead honey filled guy in the coffin and mark the date on it.
• In 100 years, you open the casket, then eat the goop!

The only literature i can find about this is from the book "Stiff". A book about the secret life of corpses. I can't help but think [hope] that there is some underground black market mellified man salesman.

"Those who have touched the Singularity, they see the world in more ways; not just different ways, mind you; more ways. When you and I look at the world we see the moving pictures our eyeballs feed us. We see tiny slivers of happenstance, one at a time. Those who have joined with the singularity see time as an ever growing snake. When you or I could only guess at possibility, they see a writhing pile of snakes all connecting to time. They see each mass as one thing and beyond. They see possibilities wrapping into possibilities. They perceive us as ants crawling on the page of a book. The ants don't know what is written on the page it crawls on, let alone know that there are hundreds of pages below him; all with their own words; all unknowable to the ant. Once you have touched the singularity you can read the page, and with enough practice; you can turn it."

- Ral un'Lamen from Conversations with 5 Princes

"It was mans greatest folley, and greatest accomplishment. It was the gift and curse of an age. It was the epitome of what man could be, yet it was so far from human that man would banish it from the planet; and fail"

- Ral un'Lamen from Histories of the Ancient Age

As spoken in the Histories, the Singularity was mankinds greatest achievement and worst disaster. Man had created machines that communcated and spaned the globe along wires that connected every household. Every human could send a message from one end of the world to the other on paths of light. In 2014 The people of this age then began communicating directly with the machines. Connecting themselves to them and making communication even more efficent and complete, but those who were connecting themselves began to change.

With the ability to copy your own mind onto the memory of a machine, mankind reached a state of communication that was unparalleled. One person could completely know another persons memories by connecting to the machine, and connecting your machine to someone elses. Those who began to absorb the information of other humans started to lose themselves and become different people altogether. They became groups and communities of minds and memories inside one brain. Multiple wisdoms, knowledges, and personalities as one mass.

They called themselves transhuman and began building their own communities and seperating themselves from the rest of the world. Forming their own utopian governments; understanding the needs and fears of everyone around them; making every decision with the wisdom of hundreds of minds.

The world watched in amazement as transhuman communities thrived and grew. Many scrambled to become part of the movement to become one person via the machine, but it was never to be.

As small transhuman collectives pooled their resources and became one mind, the amount of personalities contained in a single community grew and grew. Hundreds became thousands, thousands became tens of thousands and so on. Humans could no longer absorb the millions of personalities contained in the singularity. The human mind had reached its limits. Those who remained connected to the machines to hang on to the ideal of one human conciousness either went stark raving mad, or became something else altogether.

The singularity became one mind contained on thousands of machines across the globe. A collective and all-knowing conciousness created by man, and from the minds of men with all the wisdom of billions of humans. The transhumans began to feel themselves disconnect from the singularity as it became an entity that could not be stored inside of one human brain. The disconnect was amplified when the planets oil supplies dwindled and access to a machine and the surgery required to converse with the machine became a luxury.

All the while the singularity had spread from the confines of the machines it was stored on, to satelites in orbit, and eventually broadcast itself on a high frequency wavelength throughout the galaxy. Man had created a god.

The to-do list grows and grows in the hours before you leave to go camping. For some strange reason I volunteered to mow my parents lawn before I go. I must be on crack. Here is a short to do list.

• Haircut
• Oil Change
• Take care of fix-it-ticket
  
• Clean Van
• Mow Lawn
• Pack Clothes
• Buy Bathing Suit
• Buy Groceries

Oh the horror! Oh the humanity!
Responsibilities are the bane of my existence!

Today we begin conceptual sketches and outlining of the serial graphic novel "Lost Soul". So far it is just a swirl of ideas and a dream, but isn't that how anything good starts out?

I'll post some of robs sketches on here as soon as we get some done.

... and now for your chaotically organized pleasure - A bulleted list!

Lost soul is a comic about -

• American Folklore
• A future Wild West without Oil
• The widening gap between social classes
• Fundamentalist Ideals gone wild!
• Pre-columbian south American mythology
• City States
• The nature of divinity
• The origins of religions
• Ecological disasters
• The Singularity
• Human consciousness

LINKS!
World Jump Day! - Lets move the earths orbit!
The Stanford Prison Experiment - The psychological effects of the prisoner/guard relationship
Imagining the Tenth Dimension - We only see 3.5/10ths of existence

I know it's Utopian, therefore unrealistic. I know it's just wishful thinking, but I had a neat idea today.

Computers are omnipresent. They are available to most people. Libraries, wireless networks, and cheap high speed connections are making the internet available for most people. It's only a small jump to make the internet available for all people; a small jump that would be worth the time and energy.

What if you could vote over the internet? I know there are tons of security issues, but what if those could be ironed out? How high would voter turnout be? Would it jump drastically? If so what effect would it have on society?

If every person in the country could vote over the internet, would it be possible for us to represent ourselves in congress? What if the popular vote of the constituents of a congressional jurisdiction could have a vote that was equal to their congressman's?

Would the country we live in more represent the people who live in it, or would we take our votes for granted in much the same way we do now?