surreal estate

The rate at which we kill is alarming. Homeowners try to cash in, make the most they can on the insane inflation, kill all their bushes and plant whatever they think will get them the best offer, then the new owners come in and kill all that stuff and plant what THEY want to see. Then not leaving enough time for irrigation, all those plants suffer and die, or maybe the guy gets a new girlfriend who wants camellias out front, so all the jade plants have to die ...

Trees which try to shelter us, shade us, keep us comfortable -- they get hacked down so we can have a better view of the beach instead. Then those people complain about being hot all the time.

A strange diversiona few months ago, I was looking at real estate in Alberta. Sure the houses were affordable but that usually menas there are no jobs in the area. How odd to see whole pages of listings, photo after photo of houses buried in snow. Just one white lump after another with only the descriptions to tell them apart. Is that really where I want to be?

That made me think about the Moon. Thinking, if we could figure out how to make lunar adobe without choking on the dust, how would that play out? I wonder about the effect on property values if there's no atmosphere, if you step outside and your head just explodes. Will these lots also sell for a quarter million dollars per acre someday? Will the insanity go on forever?

audio oddities

I just posted three odd audio pieces I thought you might enjoy ...



The Killer Sandwich (funny flash fiction)




Overshadowed (poem)




Moondust (wild sci-fi story)

train escape & astro accident

From a two-dream night ...

First we were running through a forest, skipping down overgrown slopes, trying to get away from the wizards who were chasing us. They were wimps, but they could set our clothes on fire from a few hundred feet away, so we didn't want them getting too close. The woods ended at a gorge, crossed only by a narrow railway bridge. We heard the ancient locomotive huffing closer, then leapt out and caught the caboose railing as it rounded a sharp turn. The antique train took us across the gorge and away, and we knew our foes would never pick up the trail.

I don't know what we did to upset them. Apparently just visiting their secretive town was enough to get chased off and set aflame. Anyway, we enjoyed the short train ride, through a tunnel, and dodging the conductor who expected riders to have tickets. Security chased us around the terminal, but we caught another train through some rocky foothills and ended up at a roadside attraction in Arizona. Apparently, we'd parked our cars here about a week ago, got on the little cheezy wild west train ride, and somehow found another dimension ...

===

I was filming a documentary about an astronomer from about 1910, who built an observatory on the roof of his old Victorian house, only to have the roof collapse under the weight and kill his whole family. Only a daughter survived, and the granddaughter still owned the house, now an old lady with the sad story to tell. I found a time capsule beneath a flagstone by the back porch, and it had old photos of obscure scientists, including the great Bernard Apocalypse or Cambridge.

Something about the photos and the man's old notes -- so many nights spent, so many numbers captured, looking for meaning in an infinitely vast universe.

eye on the hill

There's a jewel in the eye of the thing on the hill. It
drips sweat and bleeds sin. It lies in the hole, waiting for
night. It suffers thru midday, but the children didn't know. A
boy and a girl walked up the hill, the pail in his hand clunking
along. He cranked up the bucket from within the hole, but no
wanter came up. Instead came a huge eye which glared at him from
the bucket. Then followed a sticky limb from below which swatted
him away, and something flowed over the lip of the hole and
became a man. This man lashed tentacles about the girl and cast
the boy from the hill. His screams were caught up in the air,
muted, repeated, then digested as his head hit a rock below. The
girl screamed, but the man took her and forced her down. Jill
went tumbling after.

---

a dream found in a journal dated 10/17/1983

So you want to be a stuporhero?

I never really got into superheroes. Or supervillains. That whole hidden identity thing, and then having to put on the silly spandex costumes before doing battle. What kind of freakish mythology is that anyway?

I have no problem with mutant powers. In fact, they could be a lot of fun, when they're not a complete curse. So the X-Men were a bit more realistic, except that they turn funny colors or dress in cool tailored leather to show the world how different they are, while trying not to be different. Yes, they'd probably be hunted down by the silent majority if they ever got too public.

Right now, Smallville has is doing a fine job of showing life as a young superhero. In fact, it's more effective for me if you don't know who has powers. Well acted, too.

Then there's "So You Want to be a Superhero", which I promised I wasn't going to watch one minute of. But it's cute, a bit satirical, and as Fermius said, Stan Lee really is a legend to those people, and they really do appear crushed when they let him down. But I don't want to be a superhero, and those folks are mostly just posers, and I can't believe one of those bums is going to get a saturday night movie of their own.

So we have a media engine that creates celebrities, and a mass audience in a stupor waiting to be told what to think, who spend more time watching other people's lives than living their own -- I think this is the point in history where the only thing that can save us are a bunch of bright blue mutants. But nobody wants to step up and drink the toxic goo, or zap themselves with gamma rays, because 99.999% of the time it kills them.

So Big Brother kicks our asses, and the mythos endures.

Crossed on Malta

We were vacationing in Malta, tracking along rugged coasts and through ancient weathered ruins. There were jagged black cliffs dotted with old pottery shards. At one spot there was a melted trickle from a Roman-era lead mine, but the sky grew dark and I was hit with lightning.

We went to a salt pan, where fingers of black primeval stones poked up from an unknown civilization. But the sky grew dark and lightning chased us away.

There were temples from the dawn of time, sandy stones baking in the centuries; traces of artwork, and the heads of bulls looking blankly down over altars that hadn't seen action in ages. Darkness fell and the electrical storm blocked our way.

There was a sign boasting about the oldest known human habitation, but when we got there it was just a crack between two slabs of granite, filled with water and covered with a tarp. The sky grew dark and I was jolted again.

Private planes became whooping cranes. Cars turned to turtles. People became savage things, splitting skulls with heavy rocks. In the end there were only stones, studded with the fossils of things to come.

===

A dream from sometime this week. I've never been to Malta, but it's on my list of things to do. Just enjoy the vision. The lightning storms seemed to be a carryover from a vacation Fermius just took. They became a sort of politically correct guardian -- any time I looked at something that might give insight into history, it chased me off.