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Back on the wagon again.
Downtown San Francisco (AP) - A homeless man who goes by the name “Nimbly”, 42, ate a discarded slice of pepperoni and sausage pizza last night, one witness says.
“Yeah, I dunno. I wasn’t really diggin’ the pizza. Tasted kinda like balogna wiped with sweat or somethin’. I threw it in the trash after a bite, and some homeless dude ran over to get it. I walked away.”
The slice of pizza was cooked around 12PM that day and according to our sources it was purchased around 7:30PM. The whereabouts of that slice during those seven and a half hours are unknown, but some suspect it may have been under the heat lamps in the front display.
“How the fuck I sposta remember that shit?” said Darnell “EARZ” Robinson, an employee at the pizza establishment (Editor’s Note: The name of the restaurant has been witheld for legal purposes). “I was blazed. I just cook that shit up, I ain’t givin’ a fuck after that.”
Nimbly was said to have eaten the slice of pizza in about 30 seconds, after which he vomited onto the hood of a 1996 Honda Accord parked on the street. The vomit was said to have contained the faulty pepperoni and sausage, along with long strands of hair and corn. Many gasps could be heard and looks of disgust were exchanged between tourists, while most locals were too busy not caring.
“I never been so hungry. I never eat no pizza that fast. I never had such shit pizza in my life. I never vomited so bad. Well, actually I vomit that bad all the time,” said Nimbly, who’s spent 25 years living in the streets of San Francisco. “I never leave this area. It’s my home, this block. When I sees people throw pizza I knows to jump on that shit. I can’t be dependin’ on change alone. Most people don’t give anyways.”
Nimbly stated that he will continue to eat thrown out pizza despite the unfortunate turn of events. “I love pizza, shit’s good.”
Once there was a man. His real name is of little importance, but what is of importance is his nickname. “Smiles” was his nickname.
Smiles was always smiling, and what a glorious set of teeth he had. In fact, it was too glorious. Every time he opened his mouth to smile, his teeth emitted a radiant white light that rivaled the sun.
People were appalled and seniors cried from the pain. It was so bad that the city council ordered Smiles to keep his teeth safely hidden behind his lips.
One day, Smiles crossed paths with a young boy. This boy, named Frederick, was stricken with such bad nearsightedness that his lenses were at least an inch thick. Maybe two inches even.
Smiles just couldn’t help but smile at this boy’s curious appearance, and a torrent of white light exploded from his mouth, which concentrated through Frederick’s glasses and immediately blinded him.
Well, the city just wouldn’t stand for the tragedy that befell young Frederick that day. They sent Smiles to prison for destroying what little vision Frederick did have. Unfortunately for him, prison was everything but smiles.
But what happened to little Frederick, you ask? He persevered and became the first famous blind painter. His subject matter consisted solely of teeth. And not just any teeth.
It seems as if Smiles’ perfect set of gleaming pearls were permanently seared into Frederick’s eyes the moment he was blinded. Throughout his life, his paintings showed a gradual progression toward photorealism.
Then, and only then, could the true beauty of Smiles’ smile be safely seen.
Beyond the farms
of my troubled fears,
a path weaves through
icy slivers of bone,
glossed by Winter’s breath,
who sits enthroned
aside her onyx pond,
reflecting.
“The challenge you face is twofold:
confront me and confront yourself.”
A black jaguar saunters from
her ivory throne, holding
my gaze in the vice
of its assured indifference.
“That which you seek may not be found,
but earned.”
My dagger shakes,
frozen tightly in
my sweating palm.
The lush snow absorbs
the crush of my knees
as the jaguar closes.
“Your unearthed answer, clean of instinct or knowledge,
bids closer reflection.”
At arm’s length,
the jaguar stops.
“Change does not ride the wind,
for the wind has direction.”
The jaguar’s breath
warms my quivering lips,
and I exhale
my unbidden thoughts.
My eyes, still fixed in place,
are not aware
of my rising hand.
“To understand is to forgive,
and to forgive is to love.”
Her words chill the blood
pooling in my outstretched palm,
quivering closer to my host.
The ferric scent tickles its whiskers,
and the jaguar laps up my gift.
“Love, and you’ll belong.”
(Source: hellopoetry.com)
The good news is, I’ve made progress with my story.
The bad news is, I fell off the writing wagon again.
Higher priorities continue to assault my discipline. Regardless, I’ve written 25 pages.
It’s not beyond what I’ve done before, but the content is. I hope to resume writing soon, but my current video project is demanding more time.
Excuses aside, the experiment has been a success. When you allow things to unfold through the characters, you discover plot organically. Relationships define themselves and a world starts to take shape. I must say, the world I’m shaping is rather large, spanning across many times and planets… it may be months before I finish. This is something I accept. If you’ve read all this, thanks for your interest. I’m excited about its development. Here’s a raw quote:
The rain continued to pound as Vessa approached her mark. She began slowing to a crawl. She saw him a couple hundred yards away, slowly trudging toward the city. She evaluated her options.
On the one hand, a smash and grab would be easy enough, but her signature style would be ruined. Her job was to be virtually invisible, while committing virtually impossible thefts. It was quite preposterous, really. As soon as she was close enough to her mark to identify the object’s nanosig, she could lock its spaciotemps to her holobike’s anchor (a kind of reference for the bike’s light drive). By the cleverness of her invention, her bike helped snatch high-prize tech in the blink of an eye. It had proved successful enough—she saw no reason to give it up now. The mark may be a sitting duck, but she couldn’t assume.
Fifty yards ahead of her a robed figure was barely visible through the sheets of rain. Distant lightning cast just enough light to illuminate his form. Her HUD was busy trying to lock the nanosig. It can take up to two minutes, depending on security measures, but it rarely took her that long. After thirty seconds, her HUD was still trying to crack it.
Thirty yards now. It’s okay, that’s plenty of room to work. She knew that it was more like twenty-five yards because of light drive warm-up. She had cut it closer. Still no lock on a signature. How was this possible? The prominence was amazing—the object was giving off a beautiful nanosig, brightly visible in her visor, but absolutely untraceable. Her HUD had been at it for a minute plus now—no lock.
Fifteen yards. Fear crept into the pores of her nanosuit, tickling the hairs on her arms and spine. Suddenly she felt cold chills as if her suit had lost its tempregs. She needed a lock within the next ten yards or it’d be a bust.
What the hell was she dealing with? Her HUD had quit searching for a lock—or maybe crashed while trying. It was spitting out all kinds of miscellanea across her visor, threatening to blind her altogether.
She screamed with the holobike’s light drive as she burst past her mark, empty-handed and filled with the weight of her first defeat.
Now onto some new South Park.
I just wanted to say thank you for following and/or stopping by. I hope you enjoy visiting as much as I enjoy sharing.
For your interest and support, I’ll share some writing in progress.
Over the last two years I’ve been mining ideas for a novel. I attempted to write it in the fall of 2008 during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), but only managed to fail. It was not, however, a miserable failure, and thus I continued to think. The experience gave me a dose of discipline and opened a myriad of possibilities for my story. It evolved so quickly that I dredged to a stop and crawled back into gestation…
It has evolved quite well since then. Time and care has condensed it into a more or less, fully-formed narrative, and over the past ten days I’ve been committing it to paper. One page per day, no less. More is okay, but no less. It’s also different because I’ve dropped the notion of calling it a “novel.” It’s merely a story I’m trying to tell, and the only way of telling it is to write it as visually as I can. I have no deadline, merely the knowledge of an unknown date when it will be finished. I’m having success with these self-limitations because it hooks me to write the next day. I’m not worried about writing 20 pages in a day, so I have the freedom to actually write.
The story is one of science fiction that follows several characters across different timelines. It’s a blend of my interests and curiosities, inspired by my dreams and imaginings. That is all I’m willing to forfeit right now, but I’ll leave you with a quote:
“Order your men to set camp in that embankment. It should protect us from the wind.” As the team began to unload, Hans headed toward the entrance of the site. At about 25 meters away, he could see a large depression, something on the order of 15 meters in diameter. At the bottom of it, which lay about 12 meters down, was a small entrance, maybe 2 meters wide, and intimidating to say the least. It was unlike anything Hans had ever seen. At that moment he knew he was on to a discovery of real magnitude.
He looked west and saw massive ribbons of mist peeling off the Himalayan peaks as the sun filtered through their playful dance. Hans took out a small folio and jotted something down. He checked his pocket watch.
As the sun set on their camp, Hans continued to mull the image of mountain splendor over his mind’s eye. Soon he found himself asleep, dreaming of being the mist itself.
There was a boy who wrote stories all the time; random ones that came to him about far off adventurers, pirates, astronauts, time travelers, and ancient civilizations that descended from the stars. But he was always searching for his story — that one story his soul was aching to tell, but couldn’t find its voice.
He devised a way to listen to his soul’s incessant glossolalia: a tiny caterpillar that could crawl into the caverns of his soul. Then the caterpillar could relay the story back. Unfortunately this was easier said than done.
The caterpillar returned to his ear and whispered in its squeaky little voice the story his soul had to tell. He could only hear fragments of the caterpillar’s frail little tale, as its coherence was lost along the difficult trek.
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