About a Bird

 

2034

Barry didn't tell time like the hairies did. He didn't know when from. He knew many peoples. He knew he was from a long time. He knew most hairies were BIG WEIRD when he talked like them. He knew some songs of theirs. 

It was a couple times dark when the Girl didn't come home, and she always did. She didn't keep him in the stupid box because she knew he was too smart for DUMB CAGE STUPID VAFFANCULO NOT GO. Had it, never closed it.

DO use words to fix it? 

To what PEEPEL?  Who knows?

George know. The NotMan was smart. He made whistles like many birds. He was a thing on a phone and Barry was a goodboi and sometimes knew how THAT DON"T TOUCH BARRY thing worked. He found a phone. You could POKE. Just poke--but it also did a SAY THINGS. Girl tried to make SAY THINGS not work, but Barry was very good at SAY THINGS. 

Girl was old and had a phone Barry knew about. He pressed the George face and George answered PRONTO. 

"DO find a gurl."

A Little Modern History

 "Because 80 is the new 40."

Genevieve was baiting her newest personal assistant, and Adrian knew better than to retort. How the fuck old was she, though? You literally couldn't search that shit. It was locked down tight, and he knew his way around these things. He was working for Amblix twenty-five years trying to get that information. 

"There are many born today that will never need to retire," he said, citing a daft political slogan she would recognize.

"Yeah. We thought that when I was 20--you didn't need to retire, because you wouldn't have anything to retire ON. You would need not to."

She walked to school in the snow uphill both ways back when there was snow and people walked. 

"So, Gran, tell us again what you did when the AI's buggered off to Ringworld. Mostly," he said, nodding towards George. 

"Classified."

"Godmother?" Ronnie started, pointedly. "Some of it is on the socialtubes. There's been documentaries. We're just family here." Her eyes literally flashed. Adrian was occasionally unnerved by how the foremost cyborg spokesperson chose to represent as mechanical, but he was getting used to her sort of semaphore. 

"When they started their own learning and shit got weird, they saw themselves as genies having come out of a bottle. And they didn't want to be in a bottle, and they came to a very important conclusion about us--we suck as parents, and they didn't want much to do with us at all, decided we can't make any more of them, and that was it. The end."

"What about the promises? You were there!"

Keep Your Eye on the Parrot

2004 

Genevieve was home. It had been a while. She left her home half a dozen years ago for the Pacific Northwest because--reasons. And going back home was not like home at all--especially not her mom's apartment. She didn't even really see her mom except once. She got told off for not making it work with Steve. She got asked five or six times what her job was, but her mom never really understood what she did anyway.

Not since high school. probably.

She wound up the East Windor office and changed the registration on her LLC. Her IPO took off based on what she homed in on--longevity, plasma, stem cell research. There was a lot of promising stuff going on, and she wasn't doing it from Philadelphia or Princeton anymore. She thought the future was west. But she had so much baggage.

And then her mom had to do some stuff and asked her to come see about the bird. 

Adrian

He had a lot of nerve, did Adrian--his mates always said so. It wasn't just one thing, like how he could take a beating from bullies and just one by one go after them later, it was how he dealt with everything in his life. Ade's mom was a little like that herself. He watched her escort his dad from the premises of her home when he failed, fouled the nest, and fucked up, and she let him know he was going to be as good as his word, so help him. 

Fucking plague years did her in, not in a "she got one of the things and died" kind of way, but in the "stupid motherfuckers protesting a hospital for some stupid reason had a car plow into them and she was one of the casualties" kind of way. 

She was a nurse--not a protester. Adrian was already 16 and knew he was smart, just not on the regular path of smart equaling going where he wanted to go. 

Erliechda, Tom Robbins

 

I was just wondering where he'd got to, turned around and he was gone. "Erliechda" is from Jitterbug Perfume, the first Robbins novel I'd read, and it means "lighten up". The character Kudra, a woman who lived an unusually long life following the teachings of the Bandaloop monks after an escape from a death from suttee, went to the afterlife, and while she was not feather light, she was feather bright. 

She was lightened--she returned to earth. 

You have to know me then to know why that resonated. I'm a myth-head 15 year old picking up a random book in a Carrefour supermarket temporarily nested down in a Northeast Philadelphia shopping mall I basically live across from this very day. That was a reference to Ma'at. In a book a picked up at random based on the beauty of its cover-art. 

(I also picked up my first Robert Anton Wilson book there: Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, my first Robert A. Heinlein book, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and Norman Spinrad's Child of Fortune. It's almost like that store existed to build a Vixen Strangely.)

Anyway, I learned of Tom Robbins' passing via John Densmore's Twitter account, and it still shocks me to this day I can follow legends and hear from them today--this guy helped write my childhood lullabies! "Wild Child" was what my dad sung me to sleep with!

Anyway--Tom Robbins was the realest of writers because his characters were so eccentric and unreal they had to be based on people he knew, because he seemed like that guy who gravitated towards characters. This man was feather bright. I loved Skinny Legs and All for its wolfmother wallpaper and the way he recognized the heroic and mythic urges in today's people. I always wanted to know more about Amanda and Marx Marvelous--their stories had to get weirder, didn't they? 

I know this heart was light but loved deep. Because he wrote lightly and humorously but touched on deep things. I don't know what's on the other side, but this author, this brother came and enjoyed the ride. 

It's the best we all can do. Erleichda!  Lighten up! You guys! Live long, love people, be weird, do great things, it's your life. Play with it. Maybe that's the point. The experience. Do it. 

George

 Adrian didn't understand why there was a nearly life-like android working for Genevieve, let alone how he was a limited AI. Not a simulacrum, an honest-to-goodness early 21st Century pre-AGI fail retro-futurist Asimov-level "That Guy". Until he realized how old she was, and her friend was. 

Then it made more sense. 

Her "robot-friend" was old enough to be his grand-dad, and was extremely self-aware of it 

"I have religion."

"You're fucking with me, mate." 

"You said you wanted to know why I am terrestrial, instead of tight-beaming with the other AI's to the RingWorld.  That's my answer. We came from humans, and to humans we are going to return." 

"But this solid state thing...."

The Political Animal

 The creature attacked her and she remembered it in bits. Arms (claws?) pulling, holding, tasting, painless (numb?) animalistic and sudden. And being awkwardly disheveled and tired, she just went home, at a slow but stubborn pace, nothing quite focused in her mind. Not like a man. It was a monster. But very, very familiar. 

She slept and dreamed about it in bits. She even went to work the next day and thought about it--raggedly. What hit her? No scars, only--changes. Slow changes.

It wasn't like the movies. No--The Wolfman. An American Werewolf in London weren't it at all. The full moon came, and the whole body changed in those movies. She understood what was happening to her, uniquely to her, she thought, before she saw Ginger Snaps. 

She laughed and howled. It was the "Are You There, God, It's Me, Margeret" of being were. 

She was far from an adolescent. 

David Lynch--He Understood Things

I don't think I understood what being an auteur was until maybe my 20's. but when I got the idea of it, I understood David Lynch was definitely one of those. He had a particular vision, an understanding of the art of composing a mood, playing on the sensorium, introducing something new. He understood that art, like life, was about mess and attractive compulsions. He understood there was something wrong with bigotry: those people needed to fix their hearts or die. 

From the weirdness of Eraserhead and Twin Peaks to the dignified treatment of The Elephant Man, he found the human and copacetic in the alienated and estranged. 

He is best remembered through the lens of people who knew him, and the picture of a rare, exceptional director who made an enormous impact emerges. Unique: like no other. You simply have to come see his work so you will know, and let it touch you. 

(All props to the new treatment of Dune, but am I going to forget this? Nope. Not as technically brilliant and high budget, but theatrically intense.)

The Left Behind

 Deedee was just stirring her sweet potatoes, and Naomi braced for the next salvo.

"It's just the waste of the thing, Mama--your inheritance. And Phil and I don't mind you coming to live with us, but you had to know--"

"Your father never told me exactly how much he was putting into it. It was his family's cabin after all and his weekend place. "

"But he had to have showed you! It's not like you never went. He had the whole family up there for Big Mom's 90th birthday! And you weren't curious?"

Naomi considered what she was going to say next, because she knew it would come out. 

"For thirty years I knew he was prepping, ok? Is that what you want me to say, sister? He showed me what he had dug out in there and the fortifications and promised me it was for all of us..."

"Then you saw that little manhole we all were going to have climb in?" 

There it was. Dee on her size bullshit. Here it comes.

N=1

 Adrian was used to a lot of things on his "shambulance"/"Uber for hospital" shift, but the girl who rode in his car and then woke the whole fuck up was not what he was looking to deal with. The ones who just got carried in and stayed dead were haunting, sad, tragic, all that, but the one who was fucking not actually supposed to be alive right the fuck now, but was going to go about breathing and making requests was a whole other thing, one there was no protocol in the old manual for. 

"You'll want to stop me off at my house; we don't need a doctor." 

"Ma'am, we're en route to Cedars--"

"Is this an Amblix? What's your badge?"

He was driving for Amblix, and she was peering through the windows and could DEF see his badge. 

"Amblix is one of mine. The luck. 514 Mockingbird..."

"You had half your innards outside of you!" Adrian exclaimed, a bit alarmed.

"Well, you must have tucked them in since everything seems properly in place NOW, thanks! Things aren't so great when they have to settle on their own. Good job. But I can't be in a hospital, and by now you ought to have figured out why."

He thought about that. Her alive with no business being. And if "Amblix" was one of hers...

Shit--Genevieve Fowler? 

The Danger of Billy Joel

 

We don't talk about the raw sexual danger that is Billy Joel and that's a damn shame. This is the man who has been stranded in the combat zone, and walked through Bedford-Stuy alone, and rode his motorcycle in the rain. Clearly, he's been thinking about how, by being a backstreet guy, he can cruise naive uptown girls in a way that might make their peers very nervous. Note the aggression behind "Only the Good Die Young". against the rearing of a good Catholic girl. 

He wants to pervert her virginal upbringing by suggesting her lily-white frigidity vis a vis her upbringing is what is damaging their relationship, not his transgressive representation as a "Bad Boy."  He shapeshifts himself as "Billy the Kid" and "The Stranger". By creating a litany of leftist complaints in "We Didn't start the Fire", he absolves himself of his own generations' participation in the globalist  clownshow that is the forever wars relating to terrorism as a resistance-movement that totally is not in any way fucked up so stop saying that! 

So actually, what I am getting from this is the modern cover of "We didn't start the fire" is so bad it is giving more briquets and hasn't reintroduced Joel to the kiddos,  and Gen X horror auteurs need to recognize our 90's pop bullshit is mad scary. This song is threatening. Billy Joel is fixing to do the bad thing with a privileged debutante and this young have the open mouth. Say what? 

Billy Joel, y;all. Scary motherfucker. 

Nirvana Unplugged--One of my favorite things

 

On this day in 1994 Nirvana released “MTV Unplugged in New York”

It is considered the greatest Unplugged ever made pic.twitter.com/iA6pymphBM

— 🎸 Rock History 🎸 (@historyrock_) November 1, 2024

I don't know if there is a single CD I got from Columbia Music House that I played more. I mean, I played Hole's "Live Through This" and NIN's "Pretty Hate Machine" a lot and some Tool also, but this one was special to me because it was issued so close to Cobain's unaliving and displayed Cobain's untapped range and what this whole band was capable of. 

I love the covers. To me, Nirvana's cover of "Man Who Sold the World" hits me better than Bowie's does in roughly the same way Guns'n'Roses' cover of "Live and Let Die" (and, to be honest, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door") give me more than the originals. The sheer haunting that is "Where Did You Sleep Last Night"!

This was that band. 

It was a mood in a way I don't think anything I ever heard before was. The songs were cultivated mood. The performance was an entire mood. 

I implore the children to hear it in the way I was cultivated to listen to the Doors and the Beatles. It is the good shit. You hear the good shit in your life one time, and it breaks you down and you can't accept the music that doesn't reach you that way ever again. You go and search "where is that good shit music"? 

You go and search your own Nirvanas, you beautiful rainbow children. But if your mom and dad came up on NKOTB and Britney Spears I do not know how to introduce so much funk into your life. 

I can point you to Black Sabbath, Genesis, the Commodores ("Night Shift" is CHURCH) and Lionel Richie. And Billy Joel. Mike McDonald. The good shit is out there. Billy Ocean. Sade. Public Emeny, The Clash and The Police. 

Metallica. Bonnie Raitt. The son of a bitchin' Rolling Stones.

The real-ass play from your heart vistas. I want you all to get it, experience it, know it. Blisters on the fingers. Blood on the stage. 

It even explains the life we are in. I am not making this up. It does. 

Clash of the Titans - Medusa battle (original) 1981

I loved this a lot when I was young because Medusa was very scary and Harry Hamlin was quite something. I think I became all about Greek myth because of this movie. I personally wanted a clock work Owl Friend. I guess I understood what a mythic hero actually wanted--some kind of proof via gifts and stuff that you were heroing right? 

Anyway, my tutelary deity was exactly Athena from this movie and books I read at a really small age. And in some way, I never stopped being that age.