January 2012
1 post
Trolls and Vikings
J: best quote on the internets ever: “Our Viking ancestors spoke stories of battles with trolls, and today we still see them on the internet.”
G: Them who?
J: ?
G: The Trolls? Or the Vikings?
J: The trolls.
G: Orly?
December 2011
1 post
July 2011
2 posts
January 2011
1 post
The snow fell heavy on Jan 17, 2011. Like my...
September 2010
3 posts
This is a recording made from the picnic table...
This is a recording I made in my...
Robot: Hello Pony. Are you a bomb?
Pony: *Silence*
Robot: Because, If you're a bomb, just don't say anything, ok?
Pony: Silence
Robot: Ok. You're a bomb. HE's A BOMB GUYS!
Pony: No I'm not.
Robot: You had your chance.
TV News: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/09/police-detonate-susp.html
August 2010
1 post
From the Walks in the woods series.
Recorded at...
July 2008
15 posts
Remember when you came up with this great plan to cut yourself just to feel _something_? Only, after you finally got the rasor out of your mom’s leg shaver you chickened out and so instead you went into the little secret hiding place you made in the back of your closet and cried yourself asleep? Ok. That never happened. But remember how you figured all that out. That you would like that to...
They never just went bang. That was the problem with them. They always sizzled or beeped first and that was not nearly as satisfying as a simple staccato report would have been.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, there was no need for the bang. It was just a simple little burst of sound that augmented the whole proceedure. And it was kind of scary. But mostly, it was...
“It’s not that simple,” I said.
“Oh, this modern age,” said she.
I am sitting on an overstuffed love seat. It feels freshly uphoulstered, but not new. The fabric on the cushions has the faintest smell of bleach. She, my therapist, is sitting on a well worn wicker rocker. It’s upholsterery— a couple of threadbare seat cushions, is obviously not new, and...
Dr. Rivers leaned back from his terminal, flipping the pen across his desk and spinning the thumbwheel to make the screen whirl back and forth. “Yeah, See. There’s nothing there. It’s all smoke and mirrors. It’s a crime.” “Sure it is, Pete,” said Robert Grinder; “They don’t do have of the great stuff we do here.” I looked across at my...
Water dribbled across the yard, slowly slopping across the gardens and flooding out through the mulch and landscaping. When it hit the large flat concrete surfaces it traveled more easily— less organically— and faster too. It was at the sidewalks, Rose Kingsford thought, that we shall put in our boats. The sidewalks, she hoped, would carry her ship, the supply barges that followed it,...
Marion looked down at her hands, which were dripping with blood. Maybe she’d pressed a little too hard. Yes. that was it. She pressed to hard. She just needed to get the blood cleaned up and someone would fix this for her. She just needed to get the blood cleaned up and find her phone and it would all come out ok. She just had to call. Her heart raced and the bottom of her feet felt...
Monkey on my leg, I tried to stand brave and tall as the swarm enveloped me. It was hard. I didn’t want to be left behind, but traveling via the swarm was so weird and uncomfortable. A countless number of pearly beetles swing around me, enveloping me as they traveled in a cyclonic fashion. I closed my eyes to try to keep from freaking out about it, but as soon as the bugs tiny metallic feet...
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said, standing above me. I shook my hand feebly at him, reaching, clawing for a way to get at him, to hurt him. To break him. It was pointless. “It was pointless,” he said, grinding his boot on my temple. I could bearly move my hands; I twisted and grasped but I was spent. My arms didn’t move where I tried to place them, and my...
“What happened? Who did that? What happened?” She asked again and again, only less enthusiastic each time. “I don’t want to spend the day,” finally she siad. “You don’t want to spend the day where?” I asked. “You don’t want to spend the day where?” I asked again. “I don’t want the clock to ring. I don’t want the...
“Roses have never grown like this on this plat of land before,” is what I would have said, had there been any roses growing. I’d spent most of my morning getting geared up to be impressed and overwhlemed by the sheer volume of roses my students had nurtured to beautiful, living works of art on the abandoned plat of dry, dusty land I had left them in six months prior. As part of...
The dust was blowing in streaks across the dissheveled blocks of cement that served as sidewalks along the pow-wow bowl. A man and a little girl stepped out; her hand reached up and grabbed his finger, and they walked along. Across the street, and over the field of crushed and mangled white clovers, a set of girls watched them cross the street. Nobody smiled. Nobody laughed. Everyone loitered....
Space travel had always been possible, easy even. You just had to get over the initial difficulty of ascending the earth’s gravitation. Some ancient people of what are now know as the south americas mananaged to do it by constructing what ammounted to, esentially, a very long ramp.
To these people, the challenge of traveling to the top of the earth was no less a multi-generational effort...
They had a Wii on the shelf of the IronWood Michigan Super Wal-mart. I saw it. I looked at it through the glass. It was so cute and innocent. It looked up at me with it’s little sad Wii eyes and begged me to take it home with me. “I already have a Wii,” I said, more to myself than to the Wii behind the glass, playing with the other consoles. It stopped and scratched one of...
It was a g-sharp on a g: held indefinitely. The buzzing and cracking of the failed streetlight outside his bedroom window hummed at a discordant g-sharp on G cord. Nearly impossible to ignore. UNless you were Public works, it would seem. Francis Carmina figured he probably ought to complain; it wasn’t reasonable to expect someone would just come along, hear the baleful chord, and fix the...
Ten. Floating down the river, floating floating. The trick wasn’t to tame the river. That would be stupid. The trick was to use the river. To befriend the river. To speak sweetly to the river and convince it that its in the best interest of everyone that you reach your destination. That’s what the old man taught him. Speck Rohmsfortina had been under the tutelage of Henny Irgania, one...
June 2008
111 posts
I don’t have to be an orphan, but I choose to. Does that make sense to you? it should. It’s my choice. I thought it would help my story. I’m a teenaged adventurer. I didn’t start out that way. I started out a regular guy. I was into Facebook and that— hanging out with my friends. I smoked marijana once or twice but, hoestly, it didn’t get me high. It just made...
THere were almost seven ways he could think of that would make a strong metal twist and bubble like that, and three of them were not possible outside a laboratory. The other four involved a lot of heat, and if there had been that kind of heat, the snow wouldn’t be here anymore. Hell, the planet might not have been here anymore. It took a lot of heat to melt starship grade metals— they tended...
I may not have mentioned this, but you might want to make a note of the fact that I have a bad leg. A particularly bad leg, in fact. One with murderous intent. This is important for you to know because I can tell you that many times, only after I become close with someone, they learn that my bad leg wants to kill them, and then we end up not being able to work things out. Or, and this is arguably...
Do you remember the old Love and Rockets song?
We’re going to stay awake…. I always listen to that song when I’m driving alone at night for hours on end. I’m surprised I”m not dead. But I’ve had a few close calls.
Odly enough most them don’t have anything to do with driving alone at night for hours on end, but nearly all of them — my near death...
Leaning over the quarterdeck, and looking down the railing at Jeremy Jacobs, Braided Bill sneered and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “That little one has no idea what he’s in for,” He muttered to his Mate, the capable but shifty man of 25 who he’d sailed with since he first set out a privateer some number of years prior. “Yessir,” said the ever agreeable bosun. “He ain’t got a clue.”...
You’d think it would be more fun, this. But it’s not. It’s not fun to give it all up. TO walk away. How man stories end that way. The grass isn’t always greener and all that. So frustrating. This isn’t happening tonight. It’s just not. I’m a festering ball of doubt, self-loathing and morose. I’m petered out. I’m a stubb. A candle burned down to a waxy grime. I have guilt. Oh yes. I have it. Guilt....
He hacked and out came green-black phlegm; huge wads of it flipped from his mouth as he spat, cracking through the air, announcing their substantial weight and heft in the subtle way it changed the exhalation breath. And splat. It hit the pavement with that same wet solid heft. Spat. No bounce, no splatter, no elegant crown of droplets like spilled milk. Just a sticky pool of green and white...
There are twenty five little tiny guys sitting on the top of his cube. They’re some kind of counter-culture thing, everybody is sure. They assume that he’s popping quarters into some kind of plastic bubble vendor and then putting them up on the ledge between cubes. They assume that he’d been doing it for a while. They didn’t notice the little tiny guys popped up overnight. He thought that someone...
Nancy pressed her back against the rear wall of the old curio she’d crawled in. “Well, this is it,” she thought. “I’m done. He’s got me pinned.”
At the same time, another voice in her head, the one who was quieter, but that Nancy liked quite a bit more, told her not to be stupid. “They’re not intelligent. If you keep your wits about you, he’ll give up.”
Nancy hated that she tended to listen to the...
“3.141592654The number occurs in nature. That’s what the big deal is. This isn’t something fucked up and uniquely a sign of intelligence. This is a natural number. Any circle, get it? All circles. It’s as natural a number as you can get.
“Some numbers are unnatural. Like One. And Everything in between. Or divisible by it. The whole numbers anyway. Very spooky. A man made thing. Only Man gives a...
I smiled watching the lightening bolt snap from one end of the sky to the other. “I see the ocean,” my daughter said, pointing at the roiling sky in the distance. “Oh,” I said. “I guess that could look like the ocean.” “What’s it doing up there?” she asked. “Not sure,” I said. “Maybe the mermaids wanted to have a look at the tops of the buildings for a change.” She was quiet for a moment, like she...
He leaned back in his chair and patted his bulging belly with his left hand. He laughed in his boisterous, deep staccato way, and then leaned over his legs and peered down at the spot on the floor where I stood. “I didn’t think it was that big of a deal, honestly,” he said, his voice booming. The giant leaned back in his chair and rummaged around in the chest pocket of his flannel shirt. “Probably...
It was as strange a place as anywhere to sit down for a few moments to get some work done. His car was parked in front of the lake-house, and now that he was sitting in the gazebo he felt kind of silly. It would be easy to stop working and just stare out the windows and watch the lake for a the half-hour he had to wait before his wife could be released to go home. It would be easy, but he didn’t...
I'm going to revamp
Hi.
I’m revamping my tumblr site. I have this idea to create a place to park 10 minute writing exercises. Here. Regularly.
Crazy, I know. Defeats the whole point of 10-minute writing exercises.
heygabe: @racerrick It's the defaults. Tumbler's... →
heygabe: @racerrick It’s the defaults. Tumbler’s nice for a free service, but needs to support tagging, ftp, threading, and Widgets
heygabe: @racerrick You can adjust the CSS, but... →
heygabe: @racerrick You can adjust the CSS, but it’s all inline.
heygabe: @emeinhardt Twitters too much. I had to... →
heygabe: @emeinhardt Twitters too much. I had to stop following her. Quiet down, Intern!
heygabe: @littletinyfish I tend to avoid anything... →
heygabe: @littletinyfish I tend to avoid anything and everything with extra P in it. Especially kiddie ppools.
heygabe: Is it really fair to mark a bug closed... →
heygabe: Is it really fair to mark a bug closed with “never gonna fix it”? It’s still an open bug, right?
heygabe: @littletinyfish Normally, I disagree with... →
heygabe: @littletinyfish Normally, I disagree with @therealdvorak, but this week I _really_ disagree. Creating Scarcity where there is none is dumb.
heygabe: Hey! I got coffee finally, so now my day... →
heygabe: Hey! I got coffee finally, so now my day can begin. Anyone have any work for me to do?
heygabe: @jbdryden Talk to me about MWW> →
heygabe: @jbdryden Talk to me about MWW>
heygabe: How long will that bottle of urine sit... →
heygabe: How long will that bottle of urine sit @wttnpnk sb ramp?
heygabe: @WorkingWriter I _really_ like the new... →
heygabe: @WorkingWriter I _really_ like the new installer on Suse. Can’t get through it becuase of the broken nature of my machines. But it’s vy nice
heygabe: ...And a bottle of Vodka. →
heygabe: …And a bottle of Vodka.