Nonsense Island

The purple footed hills of the Island of Cattygoina are filled with all types of vicious flesh eating plants. They prey on the be-speckled Boobyfish and the Rockbugs with an uncanny bloodlust. Take the violent Kernid plant. Its roots contain a poison so potent that one poke from one of its many spines would begin to melt the very flesh from your bone.  It then slurps up the gooey puddle of flesh with a long fibrous snout.  The Conandum Dogs know better than to prowl any of the grounds near the Kernid plants.

Closer to the beach areas even more wicked and horrifying sites wait to swallow you whole and spit your bones out in to the sea. Under the edge of the sand, where the grasslands meet the beach, lies the Vapor Frog. It emits a dense fog while stalking its prey, much like a broken gas main, in order to confuse and cause it to pass out. Once subdued, the Vapor Frog, which measures two and a half feet across, lashes out with a prickly tongue and pulls the disoriented prey into a mouth filled with rows of jagged, shark-like teeth.  

The Squealbirds that keep their three eyes constantly on the rocky shoals they inhabit are also quite dangerous. They are not great flyers but they are great at quick bursts of speed toward their prey. They use their bodies like lawn darts and hoist themselves skyward and then drop sharply and impale their scalpel like beaks into the bodies of their intended dinner.  They wear their prey around them similar to a life preserver for weeks as they slowly excrete an acid that dissolves the food and then is absorbed through the skin.

There are larger animals on Cattygoina Island but they appear to be the more docile of the creatures there. The trees further inland are filled with the Burry-Burry Squirrelcats. They seem to subsist on a diet of Rockbugs and the various sticky fruits that dangle from the Coocoonabei bushes. The bushes can grow up to seventy feet tall, and the sticky fruit can weight eight to ten pounds each. The Burry-Burry Squirrelcats can dangle from the branches of the Coocoonabei bushes over the fruit and gorge themselves on the sweet nectar inside. However, like most of the plants on the island, if you eat too much of the sticky fruit’s center, or pit, you can become violently ill. There are many Burry-Burry Squirrelcats that had to learn that lesson the hard way after their stomachs distend and explode onto the forest floor below.

As previously mentioned, the other large animals on the Island are the Conandum Dogs. They are similar in size to a Great Dane but share more features with a zebra or other equine. They travel in large herds and roam the grasslands in search of the sweet Cano Grass that grows wild on most of the island’s plains. They have long horse-like faces except for two large tusks that curl in front. They use them to forage and likely during their mating.

The largest animal on Cattygoina is the Dokodragon. It is a constant hunter of the Conandum dogs, but its numbers are very few. It is about the size of a Grizzly Bear but more closely resembles an iguana. It’s has reddish skin to camouflage itself in the tall Argo lilies and huge nostrils, in fact, they are larger than its eyes. Which don’t seem to be much use to the creature at all. The Dockodragon has feelers on its two front feet that scan the ground like a snake’s tongue as it stalks its prey.

We are lucky to have this information about Cattygoina Island. The only researcher ever to step foot on it was Dr. Richard McCallum. He was the only one brave enough to attempt to observe firsthand the incredible life on this ever mysterious island. He was able to transmit his field notes to the Institute for Higher Studies before his death from a sting in the chest from the Kernid root. The last words in his journal were, “I consider myself very lucky to have been able to bear witness to the amazing… Ooooh screw that, this island sucks, come rescue me, ahhhh it burns”.

We all honor Dr. McCallum’s memory and sacrifice for science. 

La Torche

This morning I saw a security guard near the Board of Trade staring up at the tops of buildings. His hands were fiddling with a piece of paper as he looked skyward. There seemed to be longing in his face. Something that said, “I’m dreaming of something far better than this security gig. I’ve got plans”.  I was tempted to look up myself, but was too focused on just getting to cursed work on time.

By the time I got to my cubicle I was already inundated with mindless work and endless monotonous tasks I had almost forgotten about this guy staring hopefully at the sky. I suddenly found myself hating him; which is unusual because I don’t even know him. I was jealous of his skyward hopeful face. There was something in me that wanted to grab him and say, “This is where you are! This is what you’re doing! Wake up!”

I feel terrible for it. I shouldn’t feel that way at all. It was an awful feeling; especially with the Olympics going on right now. And that made me feel even worse. There’s so many young people that dedicated their lives to pursuing excellence in some sport, be it Table Tennis, dressage, or hurling large objects across a field. Someone in their lives told them they could do it and gave them the tools to make their dreams come true. A coach, a parent, an uncle, someone told them it was possible and pushed them to excel.

And here I was imagining myself telling a humble, slightly portly security guard that he couldn’t look skyward with awe and perhaps imagine himself on the parallel bars, winning Gold. It was a horrible feeling and has put me in a very foul mood as I sit here in my ugly cubicle. It made me wonder where I faltered in my pursuits. It made me wonder when practicality got in the way of the achievement of a dream or goal. When did I accept my fate as a worker drone in an ugly cubicle performing mindless tasks for a soulless bitch corporation?

Why didn’t anyone hand me a torch and say, “Go”? I know I received the greatest encouragement from my family, my mother; I’m not criticizing the support they gave me.  I love them for what they tried to encourage me to do. I just wish I knew that moment when I gave up. When the accumulation of money to buy food and beer became the motivating factor in this meagerly survivable life I have built myself. How did I lose sight of the lighting of my own Olympic torch and wind up in this damnable cube, typing away about things I do not care about?

It’s a mild self loathing brought about by the realization that I hated someone else’s dreams. Even worse, I don’t even know what that chubby security guard was actually thinking about; I was merely projecting my own insecurities and thoughts into his fat brain. Which is just as damnable as this cubicle.

I’ll finish my mindless tasks and then continue my search for something better. Something to smile about as I look skyward.

   

Late... again

The first blog I ever wrote here was about my inability to hear my alarm clock and wake up in the morning. You'll be pleased to know that nothing has changed. I have been working on my internal alarm clock, repeating to myself as I start falling asleep, "6:48 am, 6:48, am", but that doesn't seem to work either. I almost immediately diffuse it by mumbling, "I'm an artist.". And then falling asleep.

I know I'm really a Joe Punch Clock, but I'd rather believe otherwise.

I was late and have a lot of catching up to do.

Maniac

Larry hung his chainsaw up on the wall of the shed and wiped the blood and hair from the chain. He chuckled to himself remembering the faces of those teenage campers as he drove the saw blade deep into their bodies. After all these years of slaughtering drunken or high sex crazed teenagers the thrill was still there. He was doing God’s work after all so why shouldn’t there be some pride in it.

 It wasn’t always the vicious slaughtering of teenagers that got Larry excited. He was once a used car salesman; which to some doesn’t sound like much of a step up from completely insane serial killer. But he did enjoy selling cars to people. He felt like he was helping them, even if he had to turn a blind eye to all the injustices in the world. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time when God spoke to him and told him to purify the wicked with blood.

He was driving a pretty beat up pick-up he’d borrowed from the used car lot so he could get to his nieces birthday party when it happened. The pick-up truck just lost power in the middle of the woods and just wouldn’t start. This was just too much for Larry. All the things in his life always seemed to go this way. A car stalling. A missed train. A girl rejecting him. The rent going up. His paycheck too small. His ceiling leaking. His parents rejecting him and moving out to be Amish. His sexually abusive priest. The crime. The guns. The stabbings. The rapes. The wars. The bickering politicians. The world.

Larry snapped. He left that pick-up on that two land road and just walked into the woods. It was then that the light came to him. The blinding light of the heavenly Father who commanded Larry to take up the sword of St. Michael the Archangel and become his wrath on Earth to begin the great purification.

He was initially a little resistant. He wasn’t sure why God commanded him to only purify half naked post coital teens at their summer camp but he did not question his holy charge. So he began. So far it was going pretty well. He’d only been shot three times, electrocuted, set on fire, stabbed, run over and drowned and still the Lord kept him moving on his quest.

Larry closed his shed and headed up toward the cottage he’d found and had been slowly restoring. It was a true labor of love and since he knew he couldn’t ever go into town he had managed to do a pretty fair job using the materials available in the woods and from the summer camp. He was just about to settle down into the armchair he’d made from the bones of two teens he’d caught smoking grass when he heard a familiar sound.

“Come in the water Johnny”, giggled a woman from the river.

“Oh my god Sarah, you’re naked”, said an excited male voice.

Larry sighed. His work was never done.

Distracted

There’s a thought I

was looking to

complete but I just

ran out of….

It was something about

beauty,

or grace,

or maybe something

something…

There’s other things

on my mind

keeping me from

focusing on the

something…

It was,

She was,

I was,

We were,

It was…

It’s a good distraction.

A pleasant diversion

from the hum-drum

beating I take every

something…

I was saying?

Something?

Oh, my thought, I

can’t seem to complete

it something…

Storm Cloud

Aaron woke up in his dark bedroom to the sounds of water pinging and clanging on the exposed portion of his window unit air conditioner. Thunder rumbled in the distance and bolts of lightning flickered through clouds, briefly illuminating the bedroom. He tried to check the time on the alarm clock but its face was black. Aaron guessed the storm had knocked the power out which meant he would have to get up and check his cell phone for the time.

Aaron leaned up on his arms and looked over at Eve lying next to him. He could only make out her ever expanding figure as a deep breathing, slightly snoring, silhouette. He sat up with a minor groan and then chuckled at himself for being mean to Eve about her weight. Aaron hadn’t exactly kept himself like Adonis in their 24 years of marriage. He thought about waking her up, maybe fooling around a little. He still loved her very much. He considered that it might be time for both of them to start getting a little more active and maybe eating a little better. Lighting flickered across the walls of the bedroom and Aaron started counting the seconds as he was taught. The thunder finally rumbled when Aaron got to thirteen one thousand.

He stood up from the bed, looked back at Eve, and smiled a little as he was sure she just farted a little. She only farted in her sleep. He slipped his slippers on and started toward the hallway and downstairs.  Aaron had forgotten how hard the hall was to navigate when all the power was out. Usually a street light outside kept the hallway lit enough that you could see well enough to make it to the bathroom with running into that damn end table. Which Aaron promptly walked into just as he was thinking about it. He muffled his cursing and reached down to his big toe. He was just glad he was wearing his slippers or he could have lost the toenail.

After working his way around the damn end table, which was a gift from Eve’s long dead Aunt, he found the top of the stairs and carefully made his way down holding the banister, still being mindful of the light throbbing in his left grand toe. He wondered how humans ever became bi-pedal walkers with the threat of stubbed toes so ever present in their early world.

He made it to the bottom of the stairs and squinted through the darkness trying to see the clock on the fireplace mantle. The darkness was impossible to penetrate. Aaron reached out with his hands in front of him, trying to find the corner of the living room wall so he could feel his way to the dining room table where his cell phone was plugged in. Eve and he had developed a talent for piling things on the dining room table. There were bills and papers and books and more clippings and a laptop and Eve’s sewing kit. Aaron had asked her to please put the sewing kit away two years ago but she just never got around to it and Aaron just sort of stopped seeing it was there.  He couldn’t remember why she took it out in the first place.

Aaron found the dining room table without smashing his toes into anything again. He found his cell phone, just because he always put it in the same spot without exception, and he hit the little button on the top; 3:47 AM, it read.

That didn’t seem too bad to Aaron. He might actually be able to get back into bed and sleep for another two hours. He turned the cell phone toward the room so its bright screen could illuminate his path back upstairs when he heard something clang in the basement.

Aaron was not a fool. He knew better than to go investigate that noise in the pitch blackness of the basement during a serious thunderstorm. Plus he was afraid it was a monster. It was always a monster lying in wait in the murky darkness or some kind of flame engulfed hell beast ready to drag his soul to hell for that time he accidentally kissed Sherry at the company Christmas party 18 years ago while Eve was in the other room.  Aaron wasn’t going to fall for it. If anything, he’d check it out in the morning, in the daylight, when the evil spirits of the night couldn’t get him.

He pointed the cell phone toward the stairs and made his way back up toward the bedroom. He avoided the damn end table with ease. He walked into the bedroom and sat on the bed, kicking off his slippers. He set the alarm on the cell phone and placed it on his nightstand and laid back down into bed.

“Everything alright”, sleepily mumbled Eve.

“Everything is fine. Go back to sleep sweetheart”, said Aaron.

He nuzzled the back of her head and she patted his leg and they both quickly returned to sleep while the storm raged outside.

When in Rome

This morning was exceedingly difficult to get motivated to come to work. I had Friday off and then a pretty swell weekend so Monday morning seemed like the most horrifying, death inducing, and hell drenched experience of all time. That and I kept having terrible dreams about the Zombie Apocalypse which kept me from getting a good night’s sleep. I can see how being a worker drone, shuffling mindlessly about the streets could make me think about zombies, and the toils and troubles of the day to day skullduggery.

With that sort of thinking running through my head this morning it was no wonder I noticed certain things this morning. The first thing was a woman drinking her coffee from a big cup capped with a big white lid. The woman had been sipping and sipping her coffee for so long that a huge red lipstick ring had formed around the mouth of the lid. I watched her take drink after drink and I couldn’t help but think, “Ick. That woman must be dead inside if she is just mindlessly sipping this lipstick flavored coffee”. It looked as if she had been drinking pig’s blood for her breakfast snack.   

The next thing was the kid sitting next to me eating an apple. It seemed so strange to me that someone would be chowing down on an apple on the train. It wasn’t cut up into slices, he was just eating it, bite after bite, “chomp, chomp, chomp”. It was disturbing. I kept thinking about his sticky hands, touching everything. I could imagine him biting into the lady’s skull in front of me and hearing that same, “Chomp, chomp, chomp”, sound. I couldn’t wait for him to get up.

It wasn’t till I hit the sidewalks that the real horror show began. I continue to blame the slow walkers for most of the congestion Downtown. They really do just shuffle like the living dead and seem not to be aware of anything around them. I swear I heard one on a cell phone, “Brains, ba-brains brains? Braiiins, ba-ba-brains”.

So I was rather surprised when my mind shifted gears once I walked past the statute of the god, Ceres, on Jackson. I found myself thinking about Ancient Rome. I started thinking about the congestion on the streets of Rome on a day like today. I imagined everyone in togas or in similar ancient world garb, all shuffling along to get to their respective businesses or do their shopping. It made me remember that this day to day rat race we call a life has been going on for thousands of years.

It wasn’t that I was afraid of Zombies or that I was bothered by the mendacity of a steady job. It was the trap of history I was in. It was that I’m so much a part of the history of the world just by doing what I have to do every day. It made me want to stop, turn around, go home, get in my car and never come back. But then I thought, history is also replete with idiots who did that too and rarely does history even remember them, unless they were pals with a conqueror like Alexander the Great.  

Life is too short and I should make a more concerted effort to live one I can be happy and proud of. I’ll have time for the daily grind once I am a Zombie in Rome.