Tears to Ashes

The streets were painstakingly quiet, the choir was definitely singing from the streetlights. I loved living in the city, but I missed the stars. They were rarely visible from street level. Unless the night was the aftermath from the forth of July or a city-wide blackout, you never saw them.. Back home, where the grass stayed green and dirt, instead of gravel, still established some streets, the one thing I could always count on was seeing stars in the night sky.

Downtown reaked of drug enhanced misery and government failure. I was still four blocks away from home with no transportation private nor public thanks to the Bolivian Bomb Parade that erupted between two rival backdoor plastic surgeons working out of motels down the block where I live.

I walked past two men, one black, one hispanic, both wanting to make a deal. Their handoff was horrible, but it didn't matter. Police never came here unless they wanted whatever the black guy and the hispanic were pursuing.
A shadow twitched in the darkness near the street corner.

She seperated herself from the cloaked backdrop and posed like a Peruvian model in Hawaii, but her face cried desperation encouraging death. She could not have been older than fifteen. Her skirt was shorter than a military private's haircut and as loud as the sun in a room full of mirrors.

"Hey, mister. Need some relaxation?"

She was trying too hard. Her pimp had coached her well, but she needed to shorten the line delivery.

"Aren't you a little young to be out here all alone?"

"I'm not alone," she turned back, alluding to a shriveled sad species of a dog. The gray color of the tle fur was either natural or this thing was really fucking old.

Neither sad creature looked like they had eaten a decent meal in weeks. There were bruises and welts parading down her neck, past her shoulders. I checked her bracelet laiden arms for tracks, but there weren't any. Her sunken eyes suggested she was in the midst of a yayo crash. Her coarse, discolored teeth implicated some dabbling with crystal meth.

"Is that your guardian?" I asked about the dying heap of saliva that was her canine protector.

"He's my angel. Right, Angel." Angel lifted his raggedy head, but promptly returned it to resting on top of his paws. "So, how bout it? Can I help you relax?"

"How much?"

"Twenty for a skull fuck. Fifty for soemthing deeper. Eighty if you want Angel and me to give you a show."

I nearly vomited on her generic brand stilletto boots upon which forced something else in mind. "Here's a hundred," I yanked a c-note from the wad in my pocket. "Angel can stay in my kitchen. We'll get you both some food."

Back at my apartment, Fiona and Angel finished off some chicken that I had been saving for tomorrow's lunch. Her stomach was bloated after three pieces..She was cheerfully pale in the light as she was pleasantly shaded in the shadow-strewn cloud on her corner. I noticed more bruises healing along her wirey legs.

"I might need a minute, let the food go down," she said. "Thanks,by the way."

"Not a problem. But, if you really want to thank me you can give me some information."

Fiona's eyes exploded nearly through her skull. "No way - No - No way. I'm not rolling on anybody." She jumped out of the chair and headed for the door. I grabbed her by the arm, gentle enough not to completely frighten her, tight enough for her to realize I meant business.

"All I need is a name. I can handle the rest."

"No," Fiona insisted. "Angel," she called. Angel pushed himself up to four legs. He started to growl. I pulled the silverware drawer open and pulled out my silenced .22, then pointed it at Angel and checked if his soul lived up to his name. .

"ANGEL," she cried. Fiona tried to run to him, but I wasn't letting go. She didn't have enough strength to tear away. She barely had enough to struggle. "You killed my fucking dog, asshole."

"A name," I reiterated.

"Fuck you. What're you gonna do, shoot me next? Then what, huh?"

I looked her square in her eyes. She wasn't scared, she wasn't angry. She was just getting by until someone finally came along to send her up to her newly dead dog. She had given up on life a long long time ago, but business was still business and my rent was overdue.

"Then there's just one more dead hooker, and the world moves on. Or, you can give me a name. You come with me, I make sure what you tell me is legit, then, you go to my friend. She helps out kids like you, kids in your situation."

"Fuck that, I'm not going to no foster home."

"It's not a foster home. It's just a place to help you until you get back on your feet. You won't be told how to live; it's just food, a place to sleep, and a roof over your head,  and protection. The real kind of protection."

Fiona thought it through. It seemed to good to be real, I'm sure, and she had probably been lied to all of her life. "It won't be any worse than how you're living now," I assured her. She was about to speak, but I needed to enforce one last thing. "The drugs stop, though; understand? You stop using - completely."

The remainder of her soul clawed its way past the despair that had cemented itself within her for so long.

"Victor," she finally complied.

"Victor what?"

"They call him Big Vic. He's over on 13th street, near the porn shop; that old loft on top of the herberia' store. His mom's like a mexican witch or something, a - a..."

"A bruja'," I finished.

"Yeah. Whatever."

I called some friends from the police department, enquiring about Big Vic. It turned out he was a pimp speacializing in underage prostitutes and dealing narcotics. The address matched Fiona's information. Then, I called Nicole. She came over. I introduced her to Fiona, then she asked why I had to shoot the dog. It would take some time, but eventually, Fiona would warm up to Nicole. Nicole wasn't the type to quit on anyone.

When they left, Fiona thanked me, but she was still drawing a blank, but it was a fortuitous blank. She had no idea what was going on, she could sense that she was finally on her way to being free.

I made one more phone call that night. It was to a local group, some old friends that owed me a favor - a big favor from back in the day. By the time the morning sun bloomed above the clouds, Victor's mother, the mexican witch, was well on her way out of the United States, and Big Vic himself was reduced to an ash skeleton.

Breakfast tasted twice as good that afternoon.

Being Here

Dawn was never the same after the first snowfall in over 100 years. The grass never clung to my toes like it did that soggy, melting morn. It was only one night - one night of the purest white over the ground and the warmest coat around my heart. Even the air resembled a freshness sensed only when the biggest surprise anyone never expeced wound up on their bed, or when someone held their first child for the first time.

I sit on the ground where warriors once clashed, and where the Ku Klux Klan held one of their first rallies. I walk the earth where gold used to be the blood in the veins of the streets, and where birds of every creed and code have perched at least once on the branches older than any generation living now.

If I did not know that there was another world outside of this town, I wouldn't feel so bad being here.

Guts In the Water

I've been trying to work around this one dream, but everything I throw at it comes back as crap.

In a nutshell:

There's a group of native americans performing a ritual. There is a car-sized whale straddled between two gigantic trees by ropes. They are chanting, and a selected one raises the longest scythe I've ever seen. He slices the stomach open and all the entrails rain down into the lake.

I've been working on my book again. I've been thinking about other things again, and with that new ideas are popping up like rats in a leprosy colony. I'v been throwing out new ideas every day.

It took me an hour to get water.

Dream Gig 48: Slicing Clouds

There I was, not paying attention again; restless and lost without the ocean by my side. I walked too many miles on anything that wasn't grass for all those years, and now, I was back in civilization in the midst of the self made problem solvers. All I wanted to do was look outside the window and hopefully have the clouds slicing their way through the sky, and past my vessel.

I wasn't awake. I never had been.

Destination W

Women.

Women?

Women.

I know nothing about women. I grew up with five of them, and I'm just as clueless now as I was back when my aunts dressed me up in little girls clothes, and made pigtails out of my - then dirty blonde- hair.

What does that tell you? Since I can't say what I don't know about women, I can tell you what I see about women, but to see what I see I suppose I'll have to open up a bit.

There is a connection that I can seemingly make with women, and more that I do not. This doesn't keep me awake, by the way. I'm not trying to solve the mystery that is women; I stopped thinking about that a long time ago. The answer would have never made me any happier, so I didn't bother.

I never stopped listening. I can say that. I don't like speaking, yet I can speak more to women than men, and I will listen. I have listened beyond the realms of pain, having nearly collapsed from overexposure twice. I fight to listen, I am cursed to listen.

I say I fight because lately the voices have become broken records speaking in harmony. Details are always a bit different, but pulling back and looking at the little things, it's the same old stories.

Older women and I mesh splendidly, for some reason. I am easily frustrated with the eighteen to twenty-five year old crowd. They always think they're eighteen, with some exceptions, naturally.

My best relationships have been with older women.

...to be continued.

To the Bone

Scientists break speed of light
Last Updated: Friday, November 10, 2000 | 11:57 PM ET
CBC News
Scientists have finally exceeded the speed of light, causing a light pulse to travel hundreds of times faster than normal.
It raced so fast the pulse exited a specially-prepared chamber before it even finished entering it.

The experiment is the first-ever evidence of faster-than-light motion.



The NEC Research Institute lab

The result appears to be at odds with one of the basic principles of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, that nothing can go faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, about 186,000 miles per second.

However, Lijun Wang, one of the scientists from the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J., says their findings are not at odds with Einstein.

She says their experiment only disproves the general misconception that nothing can move faster than the speed of light.

Continue Article

The scientific statement "nothing with mass can travel faster than the speed of light" is an entirely different belief, one that has yet to be proven wrong. The NEC experiment caused a pulse of light, a group of waves with no mass, to go faster than light.

For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapour of laser-irradiated atoms that boost the speed of light waves causing a pulse that shoots through the vapour about 300 times faster than it would take the pulse to go the same distance in a vacuum.

Light travels slower in any medium more dense than a vacuum, which has no density at all. For example, light travelling through glass slows to two-thirds its speed in a vacuum. If the glass is altered, the light can be slowed even further.

The NEC team produced the opposite effect. Inside a chamber, they changed the state of a vapour in a way that light travelling through it would travel faster than normal.

When the pulse of light travelled through the vapour, the pulse reconfigured as some component waves stretched and others compressed. As the waves approached the end of the chamber, they recombined, forming the original pulse.

The key to the experiment was that the pulse reformed before it could have gotten there by simply travelling through empty space. This means that, when the waves of the light distorted, the pulse traveled forward in time.

The NEC researchers published their results in this week's issue of the journal Nature.
______________________________________

My interpretation is that the vapor became solid enough to reflect light within itself, allowing this secondary light source to find its way back on to the scanner ahead of itself.

They gave a soul a body.

King Pig

Tapping hard, he tapped; could have pounded nails through wood. Quickly, heavily, and there would be cracks on the keys before the sun ascended amidst the clouds.


Robots. Maynard loved robots. He thought it awful amusing when that golden colored group scattered, frightened to scrap when their censors registered Maynard - - beast.

Tapper harmed his left pinky; feeling it snap as when it made contact with the "shift" key. He cursed an admirable amount. His neighbors figured is world had just came crashing down around him - sharp shards, bridges obliterated. The walls shivered as if the pulse of his apartment flatlined.

"That was a rumor," Maynard exclaimed.

"Hey, I'm just the messenger here, buddy," said a cool and comfortable, delightfully devious British govenment-employed magician Devin King. "Tap, tap, tap,and his brain crumpled away, absorbed back into his blood. Swears to my mum."

"King, you know damn well about the law, swearing to yuh mum like that."

"Then, I'd be a pig caught licking his own sausage by a pack of wolves then, wouldn't I? Trust me. Believe me.

Or don't."