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.