Ass Over Teakettle

[Fiction] The Dead King's Stories, Chapter 1

2012-01-07T20:01:00.006-06:00

His grasp of the Firstblade slowly loosened as his senses returned. Although he'd been conscious for almost twenty minutes, only now could be feel himself breathing. Only now could he feel the shaking of the carriage. Only now could he smell the patchroot and bitterfrond he'd been marinated in. He felt himself breathe a sigh of relief.

For twenty minutes, he'd stared motionless at the dragon clutching the ceiling. A bronze depiction of Mnir, the smallest and craftiest of the gods, pruning with shears of lightning his own tail's spikes. As the legend goes, once he'd gathered a thousand thousands, he plummeted from the sky and threw them like javelins into the ground. Protruding upright from the earth in neat rows, he'd brought the people agriculture. Every seed since planted came from those spikes, and every plant—even the leaves of the witch's tea that still coursed through his veins—was a descendant of those first crops Mnir flung from the heavens.

He heard a voice, but could not turn to look. It was the voice of the High Smithy, the man who'd helped him escape the fires of Kingsfeast. "Your Majesty can hear me now, I'd wager? We're nearly to Quarantine. Just try and relax."

Immobile, he idly considered whether such ill humor could be construed as treason.

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[Mission Statement]

2011-09-02T02:29:00.000-05:00

We live in the future.
We are giants in our own bodies.
We are less than dust to the universe.
We talk to the stars.
We casually make our way towards immortality.
We tell ourselves someone else knows better.

[The Day I Stopped Serving God]

2011-07-03T00:45:00.004-05:00

My road to atheism was tortuous, frenzied, vacillating. For a very long time, the rational thoughts came to me, and I denied them, simply becoming a progressive Christian. Then, I just accepted these atheistic thoughts but held them alongside my belief in God. Eventually, I decided that the Freethinkers were probably right, but that I would keep God on the backburner in case of nukes/tornadoes/car accidents. Finally, a year or so ago, I quit being such a nincompoop, quit being so intellectually dishonest, and accepted that I was a godless heathen.

But really, it all started with a newspaper column.

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[The Private Lives of Men in Monocles]

2011-06-27T21:42:00.001-05:00

Little break there. Multiple sicknesses in the immediate family - some of this family so immediate that it is actually me. I'll be pre-scheduling multiple poems (ie. chambering them) for the next few Fridays, and hopefully this will minimize the pressure for me to get on here and post, oh, I don't know stuff like...

more OtherNick chapters;
femto-fiction;
haikus;
Tweets from the sub-moon, #reallyabout, #tenwordstories, and a yet-unknown trucker (#WillBargsom);
blueprints for rocket-powered treehouses;
ridiculous science fiction; and
even more poetry.

Just off the top of my head, anyway. Stay tuned.

[Poem] Bastard Livings

2011-06-24T21:26:00.001-05:00

Drastic measures and ornery cupboards and lean-tos and cornrows and souvenir mileage and cabernet pistols and equestrian screams and composted tomorrows and virgin puppetry and alas! alas! the last little minotaur and androgyn meteors and old soup and lost names and fire breadlings and "Follow that cab!" and pagan beverages and cancer and limos and the floor is lava and bankers with tall hats and greyed-out masters and dropping acid and single-file lines and breakfast in Hell and smoker's cough and he's got a gun.

The brains are everywhere now,
Crackling with Leviticus and gingersnaps,
Their ceilings collapsed,
Bartering softly.

[OtherNick] An Uneasy Prologue

2011-05-08T19:42:00.000-05:00

The record skipped, hissed, then shattered into dust.

Nick reflexively leapt out of his chair, away from the sudden, distinct pop of the turntable. This was a fortunate maneuver since the floor beneath the chair crumbled almost immediately after. The floorboards groaned with new weight, and he froze, staring at the sudden hole in his apartment.

He felt a tickle on his scalp. Running his fingers through his hair, they came back smeared. More dust. It crunched between his teeth now but had no taste. Nick looked up and saw the cracks forming. He could hear the hole in his floor growing larger. Backing away, he slowly picked up speed. Once he'd cleared the door, he burst into a panicked sprint, nearly taking a spill when the stair's railing evaporated beneath his hand. A small dusty cloud traveled along the rail like a lit fuse.

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[Poem] Docile Reckoning

2011-05-06T00:17:00.000-05:00

That last time that I checked in
Your English wit was tragically irradiated
Your force majeure femme-hooks aflame

What was that waitress' name, again,
the one with the purgatory laugh?
The one with the mandatory crucifix?

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[Not Today!]

2011-05-04T04:13:00.000-05:00

The teased fiction will arrive sometime this week. Friday's poem is already holstered. Twitter feed is active.

And I outlined something. And I wrote something else.

(And I tanked something.)

Hot dog.

[Femto-Fiction] The Tree-Kings Were Burning

2011-04-28T19:17:00.005-05:00

They could see much further through the smoke while lying on the ground, and so they crawled, dragging their limbs across the steaming granite, towards the distant light, towards the hum. The two brothers suddenly yelped, then stopped, dead in an instant. A moment later, six more died almost without warning, each of them bright blond. The sun-witch was calibrating her hexes, the smarter ones realized, and then they died, too.

[Tease - Death of a Thousand Thousand (1.50x10³¹) Cuts]

2011-04-27T23:16:00.000-05:00

[I'm trying to decide if I'll actually post this, but I guess if I'm teasing it here I have to. ~~Details forthcoming.~~ Post forthcoming.]

[And this post represents the General Prologue's phallic symbology.]

2011-04-24T01:24:00.004-05:00

I had this idea for a crazy blog entry series wherein I describe in detail all the high-falutin' faux-literary connections I see in pop culture, ideas that would automatically be accepted by the more open-minded breed of Liberal Arts professors. I take these generally outlandish and rarely sober threads and weave them into a modest tapestry of analysis and metaphorical insight.

Dude, I'm way too freakin' busy for that. I could probably budget the time for 140 characters or so, though. (#reallyabout)

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[Poem] Gavel Coronae

2011-04-22T15:46:00.001-05:00

The smoke and mirrors and pressure fronts,
the dormant, empty clouds,
the casual glare,
the Boolean mayor,
the Jovian whereabouts.

Metered lane dissecting suns,
the outer spiral cluster,
the lanyard black,
Jack Ketch's sack,
the sub-light filibuster.

[Poem] Venture & Murderesque

2011-04-15T00:09:00.001-05:00

Scurrilous end-games of wrought cantankers,
the enmitous sweep,
the un-derring vulturesome, the candlelit blithery.

"Hover a while," says the kidnappee,
proffering plague.
Vyers and velocities, mashings for the dim.

[Corrupt judge is kind of like a really boring Batman.]

2011-03-30T00:31:00.003-05:00

At the gas station today, I discovered that someone had peed in the squeegee bucket! (basin? reservoir?) And that's just horrible. But other than, you know, accidental exposure to someone's waste, it could be worse:

I could be accused of a drug-related crime in Glynn County, Georgia.

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[Ach, again with the no posting!]

2011-03-27T01:03:00.001-05:00

My connection's all shot to hell and back. The ISP's fault. I'll make the scheduled posts as soon as I can access the interbutt again.

Sent from my Windows Phone

[Time Travel Post #2 - Egads!]

2011-03-24T09:05:00.006-05:00

The following is an e-mail from the past, composed on February 22, 2011, and sent into the future (now the present) through FutureMe.org

The reasoning behind the strange numbering will become evident eventually.

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[More like Squawkins! Am I right?!]

2011-03-23T01:02:00.003-05:00

It's not that I intend for this blog to act as a vehicle for expounding upon my various (and likely idiosyncratic) beliefs about evolution. It's just that lately I've been thinking on it rather a lot, for some reason.

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[Cross-linking! It's a pun. Really.]

2011-03-20T01:35:00.000-05:00

You prats don't need to know about my allergies. We'll skip that. I've been out with a little bit of personal stuff these last few weeks. I've neglected things here a bit while recuperating and, more importantly, while working on larger-scale projects than are easily posted.

Another reason for the hiatus: coming out of the atheist closet. The truth of the matter is that I used to be pretty devout, but that was a long time ago. These last few years have had a lot of thinking, and these last few months a lot of hiding. A lot of resentment. It felt good to come out, but it was also a pretty difficult transition - as you might imagine, me being a married fellow and living in Texas.

Second-person is fine in blogs, yeah?

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[Poem] Trodden Fragrant Prophecies

2011-03-18T01:39:00.002-05:00

Disheveled Lancelots firing barley-holsters
          in the Claire de Lune night sky

Bossa nova guarantees mimic only the
          finest in neo-post-post-deca-nil

Grainy subway pictures of various unpotentiated saviors
          of discrete unhappened alternata

Endangered migratory neuroses have self-
          altered into religious substrata

Basalt gangsters & the case of the temperate
          vegetation theogony

Purgatory for birds, exoskeletal wrathful mom,
          deliberately shiny fish

Exonerated lovers--aghast or otherwise--
          their lambful deco monorails
          accelerate like preachers

[I hope you fellas like Shakespeare.]

2011-02-23T03:04:00.003-06:00

I'm doin' my damnedest to keep up here. I've made decent headway on that novel I vaguely mentioned last week, put in some writing practice (including several time-traveling letters sent via FutureMe.org,) fleshed out a couple settings, and started in earnest on three major projects and a short story. That short story will make an appearance this weekend, with any luck.

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[Flight of the Turtlenecks]

2011-02-16T21:32:00.000-06:00

Things have been a bit dry here this last week - I've been sick, my family's been sick, my phone has been sick. All this alongside work has rather prohibited me from posting, or even mobile posting due to the infirmity of my cellular device.

Nonetheless, my spare moments have been spent scribbling madly, often pages at a time. That is, while I have no content today, I've gotten plenty of work done regardless, primarily getting back to one of my novels and beginning a new short story (or possibly novella.) Wordy as these may be, I plan to post more poetry this Friday, and some new content this weekend if at all possible.

Until then, rest! And alternate histories.

[Poem - Sixty-four haikus, // with many more still to come. // Here's just an excerpt.]

2011-02-12T04:13:00.003-06:00

Eschatology, // Parthenogenesis, & // A Theogony
(A serial poem

for the end of the world and

whatever comes next.)

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[Mobile Post - Confession #2]

2011-02-07T14:42:00.006-06:00

If it takes a good writer to know when to give up on a bad idea, I must then be a phenomenal writer, because the idea put forth in my last post was quite bad. As I began constructing a patterned synonym web, searching for the first syntina candidate (or cantina,) I realized that writing the piece would likely involve maths of one sort or another. I do not begrudge myself a little pagan number manipulation done by moonlight, but at the same time, these cantinae would clearly be a burden beyond any comprehension or even caring.

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[If not for Wikipedia...]

2011-02-06T02:27:00.000-06:00

OMFJamesRandi, I am running behind on Friday's poetry. I don't even know what I'm gonna use yet. I don't even have it written. Let's do this Johnny Blue Jeans-style and do it at the last minute. I was thinking earlier today about sestinas (sestinae?) and thought - as I often do, and without provocation - about how repetitive they are. Synonyms, I thought. Instead of using the same word over and over (which I don't do anyway because I'm one of the original bad boys of poetry,) we use synonyms. Could maybe get some sort of rhyme scheme out of it, I don't know. All I know is the name: syntina.

Oh, heck yeah.

Syntina to be posted tomorrow after some half-price burritos, by Jove.

[Mobile Post - Good Advice]

2011-02-03T14:18:00.001-06:00

A school counselor of mine sometimes comes by my office, and this last time we spoke at length about writing. While she was very polite about it, she did at one point state, "If you can at all avoid being a writer, do so."

I couldn't agree more.

[Flash Fiction] The Thousand-Year Girl

2011-02-02T02:01:00.002-06:00

It was not the tallest garbage heap he'd ever scaled, but it was the tallest this week. At the summit, he stood and surveyed the landscape, the skyline blemished with rotting cardboard and fossilized vegetables and computer parts beyond repair and condiments still fresh in their single-serving packets. He took his bearings, noting the sun's position, and began the descent. At the foot of the heap—if this heap even had a foot, for many of them ran together in crooked, rusty valleys—he would try to find a clean place to set up camp. Bugs and sand were preferable to the copperworms, no matter the temperature or detours involved.

A can of golden sweet corn slowly boiled in water and ketchup. He considered the end of the world, the end of his civilization, or of his species, maybe. In a moment, the world had been up‑ended, but not in the horrifying, erotic way that they make movies about. It was as if time had frozen.

He was pretty sure that time had actually frozen.

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[I don't even know what "heady" means. Seriously.]

2011-01-31T18:23:00.002-06:00

Let's not get into specifics. Suffice it to say that--remember the short story I promised earlier?--the story is growing and growing. It's not ready for at least a week, and even then I would want to give it another week before editing (and, burdened as I am with an obsessive perfectionism, another week after that to edit my edits, etc.) Ah, the heady task of revision.

I'm working on something Melville-ian (no, not that.) Hence the floral prose. But enough of all this. I'm gonna pull something from the archives here shortly, so as not to disappoint (and so as to avoid being perceived as a poetry blog.) Stay tuned!

edit: I'm preparing something I cranked out last night. Another piece of "sad boy" fiction! I'm gonna have to work on breaking that trend. More fiction for you. More unforgiving introspection for me. Hell. You bastards.

[Poems] Cop-Out Haikus for the Miscreant Soul

2011-01-29T11:14:00.002-06:00

This post is a bit light - I'll be dropping a short story here in the next day or two to compensate. This post is also a bit late, since a food allergy (or, more precisely, the subsequent antihistamine) rather knocked me on my ass last night.

In the meantime, here's a handful of haiku!

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[Freakin' Wizards, Goddangit]

2011-01-26T03:07:00.006-06:00

Admittedly, part of the reason I'm posting this is to test how well mobile posting works (~~which is why there are no tags right now.~~) This also means--O merciful Oort Cloud--no revisions until I get home. Heavens to Betsy!

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[Poem] Gertrude and the Garment Bag

2011-01-24T21:18:00.001-06:00

Pavement and banisters and copyright law
following tracks in a grimly-lit kitchen,
as snow pummels curtain
and the servos drink deep
of the one last misfortune
of the demolitionist's brother -
the incidental coveting
the incidental chorus
the too-loudly spinning perpetuities
of unknown symptoms,
of whales and men,
of filibusters and doorways -
with a twinkling eye and a
wink from the audience,
the sunken-faced and dulcimer
manufacturing
of a brown boy's geometry.

[Poem] Staircase Mendicant

2011-01-21T21:45:00.005-06:00

Drowning ankles in purchased anthems –

squinting for bread

squinting for fear of idleness.

Fingertip allergy persuasions, intensely

feeling intimidated

feeling around for the light switch.

Be doctor, mentor, coroner, lung, and still

trafficking the usual, the ground floor

the grandfather

trafficking to the layered metaphor for

sex or priesthood or liniment or

ergonomics or carilloneurs or side gates or

stupid languages or multiples of five or

fingertips again or calluses or callous

Benedictines or Copernicus or the glimmering

reincarnation of Cicero or money pile murders

or some combination of the above.

[Flash Fiction] Register

2011-01-20T01:56:00.004-06:00

Danielle accepts my agreement, I accept hers, we log each other's digital signatures, and we do a little making out while we wait for the results. The cloud starts in on the various databases, and before the first kiss is really over, we've both received preliminary go‑aheads. She is warm, and she places a hand behind my neck, hovering there.

I open my eyes for just a second and find that hers are already open. I stop. She's not moving, not responding. Barely breathing. Maybe she got a false positive on me, though I can't imagine how. I haven't missed a swab in four weeks. Some error, must be. Maybe she's glitching, I worry, but no; this has gone on too long for that. My vision becomes slightly blurry as my ocu‑console heats up, flashing dozens of stills per second, my taskbrain scanning for negative microreactions. Nothing. She comes back into focus, the exact same look on her face. She still hasn't responded. Her hand falls away from my neck, into her lap.

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[Let's call it "threekly"]

2011-01-19T00:34:00.010-06:00

I had a blog here before this one. That's a confession. The short story is that it was a failure. I'd like to change that, and this is the reboot. New look, new approach, and more content. It's not a New Year's Resolution or anything so ridiculous; it's my panic button for a life moving too quickly through the calendars. It wasn't so long ago I was less-than-or-equal-to 25, and while I may label myself an extropian, or even occasionally a Singularitarian, I won't pretend that a selfish fear for the end of my own life isn't at the heart of that belief.

It totally is.

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