med

"... and the virus took over his body, the last untouched body in all the earth. All was lost... yadda yadda yadda..." Jeremy was complaining about how all the sci-fi of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first was completely predictable.
"Yeah, I know..." his wife feigned sympathy from the other room. What they both found comforting in those novels was the irony. "But you finished it, and that's what entertainment is!" Jackie was such a realist, that she found it hard not to be optimistic about another accomplishment, even as tiny as finishing a book.
"It's rubbish, not entertainment, and it kept me up too late, now I'm tired and bored..." pause for effect "... but not by you." she smirked at his corny remarks. "Go to work Jeremy" she nagged, he left.
Jeremy pulled up to the complex, exhaled and got out of the car. Once outside, he began his ritual. Thirty three steps to the door; sixteen breaths by then; full contact with handle and fake a cough once inside. Now it was to the elevator, hit each call button, then make sure the elevator stops on floors 4, 11, and 23 but his own hand, since those floors were statistically, the highest population. If not, he would go up to 27 and back down to 23, sometimes taking the stairs. Once on the floor. Just go sit down and get to work.
The work wasn't bad, nobody would say they love being an auditor. But Jeremy found a great deal of satisfaction knowing that he was a safeguard for the company. Knowing that a large corporation put this kind of trust in his department made him weary, but he was satisfied nonetheless. It was simple through. Follow a trail, use randomness to select the trail, mold your logic to the personnel's and follow the path they need to. Once you're at the end of the path, write it down, make sure it's right, wrap it up with a bow and send it to their manager, your manager and file a copy for yourself. He prided himself on conserving the paper and prided his ability to manage data. Something that several auditors couldn't seem to get a handle on.
Bathroom break, to the stall. Wipe off the toilet seat. Sit, wipe, flush. Everything had a process. Jeremy always laughed at the sign "Employees are not required to wash their hands before leaving the lavatory." Jeremy's love for science fiction allowed him the ability to think outside the box, and then to see the humor in their author's portrayal of "the future of man."
"Did you hear about Len?" was the topic of his cube-neighbor's small talk. "He's in the hospital, wasn't doing his routine again..." Len did have a way of forgetting the necessary tasks to protect oneself. "I don't think Len's ever gotten the feel for pack mentality." Jeremy offered up a defense for the absent. "If doesn't soon, he never will"
Len was thirty-five when the baby Kim accident occurred, and had a tendency to be obsessively clean before the accident, and therefor was particularly cleaner than anyone else Jeremy knew. Jeremy had caught Len on several occasions saying "To get that cleaned up..." and did his best to help Len out. As he did with anyone who was used to trying to stay clean.
The Baby Kim effect or just BKE or BKS to civilians now, was a cocktail of poor habits, combined with poor education and the result of incorrect living practices being handed for generations. BKE was a flaw in reason, a flaw in humanity. How BKE was discovered wasn't strange, there was no U.F.O., no atom bomb blast, nothing. There was a baby that died; perfectly healthy. Doctors did test upon test. The parents were testing, the grandparents were tested. They kept searching for months. Months became years. The media lost interest, the doctors lost interest, the family moved on.
Then it happened again. Exactly the same situation. Sterile doctors, the best. Sterile hospital, hundreds of babies delivered in that room. Normal parents; in fact, they had done a complete genetic analysis while the fetus was developing. The child simply died. But this time, the child flagged a test with a false-positive. During one test, one time. The child came up HIV positive. This was a fluke. This child did not have aids. But, it did instigate further investigation on the coroner's behalf into the immunity capabilities of the child.

(will continue)

Ino cont...

"When Ino first laid eyes on the envelope, there was no doubt what it was for. He didn't even open it. He didn't have to. His life was now devoted to his country."

To any citizen, it was a blessing to be chosen to serve. The army had millions of coveted positions, and it's members were paid well. Not only all this; but hundreds of soldiers were able to work from home, commuting to a local base and do their work from there.

It was obvious why Ino was chosen. The military had millions of uses for radio technology and Ino was one of the best. The offer was for more than double what he made, and he was able to choose his own hours. The work was good, but very demanding.

"What are the specs on our 32D transceiver?" quiz time on the first day!

"Well first off it has user-selected scan, duplex mode across several 400+ frequencies, the ability to switch into duplex mode, and my personal favorite; the ability to transmit both analog and digital data lines." Ino paused, "the units were de-commissioned three years ago, but still see a lot of action due to the data versatility."

"Well I won't say I'm not impressed", his supervisor knew long ago that Ino would be the perfect fit, and a huge resource, "but they were de-commissioned five years ago, we just didn't tell anyone until three!" They erupted in laughter, a great bonding moment even though both of them felt slightly self-conscious in new company.

"You'll be doing basically the same thing here Ino, as your last job..." Ino's heart sank. "But here, you'll be given a team of 10 engineers underneath you to actually put your ideas into practice and develop prototypes." His heart leaped, his mouth dropped, and his brain took mental note of dozens and dozens of projects he knew worked already and could be applied here.

"They'll report to you, and you'll report to me. If you need more of anything, you ask, and if you're running on low on time, let me know." He stopped for breath, "your team is anxious to meet you and get to work, we've got two catalogs on your desk. A list of available materials and a list of materials only we have access to. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that the second doesn't exist, now get to work damnit!" he said with a smile and a wave to the door.

Screw the team, I need to see some examples in the catalog! Ino basically ran to his desk and flipped open to a random page. One of the lowest power silicon transistors was something he didn't even knew existed, specifically for an N-channel!

"Couldn't wait to get your hands on the toys I see..." Ino spun around and was met with the stare of his best engineer; Aine. "I guess that's a huge perk of getting hired here, the equipment is top-notch, nothing you've ever seen in a civ-shop." They shook hands and exchanged niceties before Ino started showing him an idea for a modular radio setup.

(switch to another storyline, then more of this; eventually a great thing comes up and he's uniquely qualified because he has no wife nor children)

Ino ran across an oil convoy one day on his way to work. It was huge, like one long train of tanker trucks. The trucks didn't have a lot of security, they didn't need it. There is one vehicle at the front of the convoy with just a few sensors is all they needed. Determine threats, then blow them up, then keep driving. Repeat. To be honest the whole convoy could be destroyed and it didn't matter, most enemies would keep the convoy going to simply find a reserve.

"Sorry I'm late," Ino apologized to his supervisor.
"Not even an issue." Came the expected response.

Ino like his job. He had always played around with radios as a kid, so he fit right in at a development firm for radio technology. A lot of his work was creating ideas that are unrealistic, and making them realistic. Many people also contract him to fix their radios and/or be oncall to fix their business radios. When television was labeled red, and people realized they shouldn't be watching it, the business boomed, the government took an interest and things changed quickly.

When Ino first laid eyes on the envelope, there was no doubt what it was for. He didn't even open it. He didn't have to. His life was now devoted to his country.

Sarah and Joey re-write:

Joey sat down to the supper they had prepared and they played. The way they liked to play;
"How was work honey?" Sarah prompted him like an actress reading a script.
"Tough, my boss is riding me to get a project done..." the charade stops as they erupt in laughter. The mockery was over, their lives continued. The truth is that Joey quit his job. Sarah had already quit hers too, but not of necessity.

It didn't take long for two clean-minded people to realize that the best source of energy isn't something you can burn, buy, collect, save or earn. Humans. The Matrix was right, humans are where the real energy is. To grow and raise food, to clean and build and burn; requires backpower combined with knowledge and experience.

Before the wars were out of control, the two spent one night a week at the library doing research on living and learning applicable trades. There are endless resources online and lots of ancient books from workshop dads who love nothing more than their wives, but if they did it would be there hobby of woodworking, or solar power, etc etc.

So Joey quit his job. He didn't care, it's not like he truly loved it.

(no more time tonight)

Joey and Sarah subplot in "petro wars"

joey sarah

"What if we turned off the electricity in the house?" That's how my husband proposed this self-sustainable lifestyle. Can you believe that? Talk about tact. That "boy" of a husband had the audacity to sell the harshest idea with the most basic of questions. Well, looking back, I'm slightly embarrassed at my response. Something along the lines of "hair, alarm clocks, freezer, cell phone, laptops, reading at night" etc etc.

Two weeks later the idea had rooted in my brain to throw the question back at him by marching downstairs and turning off the main breaker. When he got home and the garage door opener didn't work, we got our first taste of what we weren't even thinking about. He came inside, whispered "thank you" and we made love a good three or four times before passing out.

There is more to life than the distractions we force into our own.

Don't get me wrong, there are times when we used power from the grid initially. We love to entertain and many forms of entertainment require power. So we basically used it until our entertainment took different forms. Instead of playing console video games, we have a bonfire and play backyard games.

Eventually our power saving and power creating devices were saving too much energy. So we took some old car batteries (not too old though) and converted a shelf or two in the yard-shed-thing to an energy outpost. So now we're able to charge our cellphone (which we share) laptop (which we rarely use) and even bake in an oven, use a dryer in the winter or if we're really feeling wasteful, turn on a light.

The hardest part for us wasn't the energy loss. It was the daylight. What time does the sun set? What time does it rise? If you can't answer either of those you are still a slave to the lightbulbs in your house. Our schedules match the natural rhythm of the daylight, and I have yet to miss seeing a sunrise or sunset.


________________
notes: I don't like this format... she's preaching... I'm going to create a more storylike method of revealing these points, but it's nice to have them written down.

insert for "blah blah" on Chuck substory

just a sketchy idea after re-reading the petro wars entries...
--
talk of dog fight, owner being furious, chuck teaching him a lesson. Chuck defending himself. Chuck and Winter run. Lost, suburb of Chicago south. Keep heading south oilfield? Job?

Off the grid

There were two really bad decisions we had made before we even started. The first was that our house was huge. Twelve hundred square feet for two, maybe three people? The second was the location. Minnesota. Land of 10,000 lakes and sub-zero winter temperatures.

We wrote these two obstacles into our plans and decided to deal with them as best we could and then just improve on them as we needed. In retrospect, my husband Joey and I should have started from scratch to save money, but tearing down a house in the middle of suburb wasn't our best way to garner support from our neighbors.

"Sarah's place always smells like caramel corn..." I caught our neighbor saying one day. They had forgotten we don't close our windows in the summer because don't have air-conditioning. I actually took the time to explain it to them too. We had fired up our corn stove early summer because that night it was supposed to get below freezing and we couldn't risk bursting any water pipes. It was also nice to have really hot water that morning.

If you hadn't gathered it yet. My husband and I converted our suburban cookie-cutter house into a self-sufficient energy producing home. We are completely "off the grid." We haven't paid an energy bill in years and we don't ever plan to. But it wasn't easy to get to this point.

-----------------------------------
notes: This is going to be a side-story to the petro wars. The narration format doesn't really leave a lot space for lexicon, or prose, but I think it might be a great mix-up to be able to switch styles during the writing and reading....

past the past

Today I biked home past a cemetery. Outside, a 1950 Schwinn bike was leaning against the oldest oak I could see. As I passed further on I could see just beyond the fence an old man strolling... past his friends? Past the past.

It's nine-o-clock at night, the neighbor's bonfire roars so loud I can hear the snaps in the furthest corner of my house. All the dogs in the neighborhood are on edge and sensitive to the slightest snap of a twig.

My wife comes home from chaperoning the football game with stories of mosquitoes and smelling of high school. ers.

"6 to 40, visitors" And I'm done for the night.

Long time no post...

Sorry it's been so long since I last posted... I don't think anyone reads this anyway...

AT3

This is part fact part fiction... just plain rambling

The frat boys in the airport grab for the tribune and the post like it's going to provide some level of wisdom greater than a book or a person could ever expunge. When they get on the plane they groan to find out that the flight has free copies. They outline, they draw, they highlight, they've got their sports bets ready. Ready to throw their money out of the wallets on the "statistical best" choice.

Me, I travel light, and for fun. If I were going to a new place, why would stay in a stuffy room cramped with people who are lucid (barely) and happy (barely) to be wasting their money on gambling.

Stewardess. You learn to close your eyes a lot when you are facing passengers in your seat. The fact that you've been awake for seventy two hours straight has not contributed to your eye strain. It's the people, the questions, the food, the kids. The altitude. When is the last time you knew you were going to be to work at 8 and get off at 4? When is the last time you were on the ground for more than a week.

It is proof perfect that a company is represented at all times by the smallest employee. One person can create a relationship with a customer that sells your company for life. One person can ruin it. The problem therein is that those two people can each do each other's job. Sally makes the day, but Bob ruins it. Therefore Bob's poor efforts to please a client cancel out Sally's success with the same client.

nf 2

There is a woman hanging around the toilets using her cell phone. It smells bad, has she lost smell, waiting for someone or just incredibly polite to the point where she won't talk in front of others?

In the bathroom I notice one of the urinals has a hair on top of it. Upon further inspection I come to realize that, not a hair, but a thread from someone's clothing a thread. Someone got intimate with the toilet so much so that their clothing became entangled with a part of the receptacle. I throw up into the urinal.

non fiction? wtf is that?

Standing in line for the security check--in, I am shocked awake by a parent that finally knows how to discipline their child. She is wailing, literally, as if someone were about to take away her life, chucked like some empty shell of a peanut onto the floor of so many other happy lives.
"I don't care," he says, forcefully but not angrily, "I want you to stop." And as if the child understands this desire it nearly immediately abandons all purpose, resumes a plain but now somewhat flushed pudgy faced girl.
I wanted to reach out to him, I wanted to thank him... to somehow yell and scream and shout until he agreed to become a prophet to the masses. "Please sir, please teach others. Please guide them on the shaky road of parenting.

Sitting in an airport terminal. I can't believe I need a boarding pass for this. The "people-watching" as I call it is worth thousands of dollars alone. I want a camera in my brain to capture images of the faces of longing. The faces of determined people, determined to get there, determined to be there, determined to be confused as hell.

The last words a coworker said to me were "Think of Christ and what He (carefully capitalizing his chat text) did for you on the cross." He then went into something about how I might die or the plane might crash... bastard. My wife reads it starts crying. Thanks a lot dude.

There's a child wandering in the concourse now, a mother knowingly picks it up and says "Whose child is this?" Fricken christmas songs. The father comes forward, thankfully the child is cute, everyone smiles instead of cringing.œ

just a start...

Dan spilled coffee down the entire front of his shirt because he was watching a dog take a crap on his front lawn while he was drinking.

Charles - substory to Petro...

This is only par... very rough... needs retouching and continuation... the only part I like is the last paragraph :) lol

Charles was homeless. He could call himself "vagrant" or "without home" or some shit like that, but that wasn't Charles. Charles knew where he sat and it was nowhere near where he started. People on the street didn't meet his stare, didn't shake his hand... didn't solicit; even friendliness. They stared... oh how their stares burned through him but they never saw him. They saw every homeless person they had ever seen and they reveled in it.

There was something special about Charles "Chuck". He was homeless in Chicago. What this meant was one of three things. One. He didn't take the free ride to somewhere warm to be the same, or worse. Two. He didn't seek home or "shelter" somewhere warm like a shelter or public walkway... even the subways or buses, bars or strip joints. He seriously had no home. Nothing. Not a drop of warmth all winter long provided by a furnace or fire.

Life was simple. Summer was a time for making money, raising funds for food and starving. Winter (the second of a two-season year) was for staying warm, eating hot food and feeding his dog. Had he thought of eating the dog? Endlessly. If he kills the dog, he gets one full night of sleep next to it's warm innards and then frozen meat to cook for weeks. Months if he had the stomach.

He named his dog "Winter" for the same reason he got the dog. A huge fur impenetrable coat for him and the dog to share meant warmth every night till he shuffled off the mortal canine coil. A huge furball laying with him meant automatic protection from other vagabonds, canine and yuppies.

Winter was a Rhodesian Ridgeback with a touch of Huskie. This dog was big. About the size of a standard German Shepard and the coat of a lab. A deep orange-red and a willingness to bear its teeth at a shrub. Chuck had trained the bastard to eat anything. This dog was survival. And survive it did.

A child laughed at Chuck and he had to hold the dog back. A dog barked at Chuck and Winter slaughtered him. "Shame we can't eat him" Chuck had thought after the kill, not "how will I payback the owner" because it wasn't his fault. The other owner's dog was aggressive and not Winter.

blah blah... then.

Chuck could see in everyone's houses as he and Winter roamed the streets at night. It was just him, his dog and a few cars sharing the road. Everyone else sat inside their warm houses, huddled around the televisions and keeping the lights on in the house. All he could see was waste. Now and then he would see someone was doing laundry and the heat from the dryer was just blowing out the side of the house! He ran to the heat and cuddled in it's warmth only to freeze shortly after when the cold froze the moisture that had gathered on his chest.

...cont...

He fell instantly asleep. Like many people, Cartwright had been shocked to realize that we were at war with unknown forces... sure we didn't have a "totalitarian" government per se, but big government thought we did. They kept their secrets inside the country, and everyone else's outside the country.

Cartwright like most his friends, most of his family, used the television as a pacifier. "When I'm off work, I want to be soothed..." he said to his wife one day as he grabbed a beer and couched. Silvia clutched her newspaper, cringed, and returned to the comics section.

What people like Cartwright and suburban Joe, their family and friends didn't realize... is that their patriotic nature, their "numbness" is what was hurting the nation. Much like the media who decided to hide the fact that we were at war with unknown forces, these people were killing the country from the inside.

(next)

"Patriotic power will end..." Ino listened to his radio blare when he switched it on, accidentally turning the volume up too high. They had to use radios, television was the enemy now. "A new era is coming where our oil exports are more valuable to our country, than every other aspect combined. This is, for our citizens, the most important and rudimentary task. Keep the oil safe, keep us safe." Ino didn't know it now, but that statement would be more important than he could possibly fathom. In a quick decision by Ino's leaders they had not only built up their army ten-fold but had quickly realized why they were so prone to invasion.

The facts of the matter were thus: China had the oil, they found their sources mostly offshore, but the real reserves were already pumped up, placed in manmade dredges and were being tanked to hidden locations twenty-four seven. The discovery had been made about five years prior that they were going to be a world power, by their oil reserves, and they had cheap labor. These two factors combined created a super-power in the energy crisis. China had wise leaders. Those leaders scrupled and scrimped to gain every inch of power they could out of every drop of oil they could. These very same leaders had a great sense of world-awareness. They knew they could build, and they did.

First came the massive rewards. The Chinese government held a massive auction for over fifteen billion "barrels" of crude oil that were already floating on ships, ready to be delivered. They had predicted that the U.S. would outbid everyone, and they were right. After quick delivery, they rewarded their citizens, they rewarded the oil workers, they rewarded themselves. In that order.

Next came the planning. They knew they had to build up a quick way to protect their oil reserves while protecting themselves. The base salary of an army lieutenant skyrocketed. Suddenly, China had a more powerful army than any other country.

And Oil.

(...cont)

cut that last paragraph out and stick it way at the end or in the middle for a plot change...

Cartwright wandered the halls of the courthouse for days on end. There wasn't anything to accomplish, he was just doing his job. Protect the local government, downsize the threat. On a minuscule level they had no chance against attackers, the federal government was unreachable... impervious... or so the public thought.

"Step down" the page yelled at him while he daydreamed... he didn't even notice he had raised his gun... raising alarm in the vicinity. He lowered his gun and blushed sheepishly... he was there to keep the peace, not disturb it... he would surely be disciplined for this, and all because his mind wanders. He radioed in to his relief for a break and sat in the hall, gun tucked between his knees and his chest.

(...cont...)

The petro wars

Just sketching out some ideas I've had for Sci-Fi... since my reading tastes are starting to follow that trend, so should my writing?
----------------------------------------------
It wasn't a war. That's what every American believed, every television watching drone of the "democracy" was given excuses for what was happening, the shortage of fruit, the airlines being "on strike" all the bullshit. And the news stations, instead of doing what is constitutionally protected to them (freedom of speech) decided to flood the public with numbing information.

Then the spy drones started falling. Then the bombers starting falling from the sky. The satellites came down like rain. When the first passenger airliner landed in downtown New York; the result of a missile from an enemy plane, the public recoiled.

There were skeptics still, and people had not planned on waking from their media induced stupor... there was panic. The government wasn't concerned with peace within it's own borders anymore and hadn't planned for the chaos. All our resources were abroad, getting killed... and for what?

Oil.

In 2012 a gallon of 80 octane fuel cost nearly twenty dollars, if you could find it. The hippies knew what to do. They knew in their hearts what they needed to do. They conserved, they rationed, for them it was as life hadn't changed... it was just harder to travel long distances. For Joe Suburban, life was eradicated. If you can't drive to work, you can't work. If you can't work, how do you pay your pool boy?

The truth of the matter was this: self-interested government topples the country. We wanted oil and we didn't have it. Instead of increasing our exports and keeping friends with the countries who did, we invaded. We took before asking, and much like the child reaching for the big kid's desert, we got hit. As it turned out, the countries with oil were concerned with peace inside their countries and they were ready.

(more to come)

(none)

Really busy at work recently... going to post more soon I promise...

"Hold... me close and hold me fast..." Louis Armstrong's recognizable voice pours over the audiophile's speakers annunciating each scratch of the record, every nuance goes unscathed; perfectly pronounced at exactly twice the volume of the original recording.

The next song on the list is a real dark one, "Piano Concerto No. 2. In A: Adagio Sostenuto Assa" a piece by Sviatoslav Richter. He cranks it up as high as the amplifier allows.

The third selection is the winner, "So What'cha Want?" composer: The Beastie Boys. The goosebumps ride his spine from bottom to top and nearly raise every hair on this head as he jumps hard up and down on the floor.