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Bezoar, Part One

2011-11-16T19:43:00.001-08:00

I'd forgotten how good these things taste. So much liquid these past few days.

This bar's a bit sweet, actually. It needs some paper or string to go with it.

Before I eat the whole thing, I get my camera out. YouTube, advertising and PayPal allow me to make a bit of money from this stuff. A bar of soap wrapped in newspaper is far from my dietary extremes, but I figure it's worth recording. Yesterday's meal of shampoo and refrigerator magnets didn't excite me much either, but my audience loved it.
I give my usual introduction to the camera and the newsprint burrito is halfway in my mouth when I notice the cat.

On my back porch, looking in through the sliding glass door. This stray's wandered into my yard a few times before. Might as well make some use of it. I get the knives ready.

Distraction

2011-11-15T18:24:00.001-08:00

The milk had been in that exact same spot on the counter two days earlier. He was sure of it.

Just then he noticed the faint background odour of the house. Bong water and forgotten SpaghettiOs. Beams of sunlight pierced the house-wide trail of stale smoke.

Run, Part One

2011-11-14T22:30:00.000-08:00

She kept looking at her phone for the time. She said she had work to do. I doubt she did.

I'm looking over past the tops of the trees. The no-see-ums and the stars and my eye floaters are all one entity.

School ramble

2011-11-13T18:55:00.001-08:00

They told me I could be confused for an intruder.

This was the same school that forced all of us to wear IDs on our chests for that very same reason. I had mine. My beard's even in the picture.

I told them I wouldn't shave it. There was no reason to.

"Them" as in other kids. As in most of my teachers, who couldn't be bothered to really bust me. They had more important things to do than harass a 16-year-old for having a goatee. My art teacher was different. Told me she'd "write me up" - give a referral to one the assistant principals. The assistant principal told me I belonged in in-school suspension. The in-school suspension supervisor told me I needed to "learn my place".
To write one up. To learn one's place. The oft-heard phrasal verbs of educational authoritarianism.

This wasn't the first opportunity they'd taken to needlessly waste my supposedly-important class time - they'd messed with me earlier about not having an ID, back on the first day of the policy's implementation.
It was a Monday - they'd warned us all the previous week about the "ID sweep" they'd be making of the school - all students without IDs on their shirts would be rounded up from every classroom and punished. I'd gone that last Friday to the cafeteria - "the commons", they called it - to get the ID they'd made me. The assistant principal's favorite bootlicker, who was in charge of handing tenth-grade IDs for last names A through H, had taken ten minutes and still couldn't find mine. He said I could come back Monday. So I did. And I was "swept", along with a few hundred other kids from around the school, down to the commons, where the principals gave out detention forms for Saturday. When I got up to their table, I tried to explain what had happened. "I don't care", one of them said. "Saturday detention". I tried again - "no, sir, listen" - he didn't care. He had other students to mistreat. I told them I wasn't gonna sign the form. I didn't deserve Saturday detention - I'd done as I was told. They were all busy, so they told me to just sit down in a chair in the corner - "we're not here to argue with you".
I sat there for a good ten minutes or so, and then asked the principals if they were ready to deal with me. I was missing chemistry class. I was told to sit back down. It was obvious they weren't paying much attention, so I got up and wandered around the commons a bit, then decided to just walk back to class. They had nearly every faculty member in the damn building packed in there to deal with the rulebreakers (who were nearly half the school's students, mind you), so my stroll through the halls was unsupervised. I lied to my chemistry teacher about what they'd told me, and five minutes later I had to go to third period - architectural graphics, which I might have found fun if it hadn't been a class. The teacher told me to go back to the commons to get my ID, not knowing, of course, the events of the previous hour. I went in, sat back down in the same chair I'd been told to thirty minutes before, and no one had even noticed my absence. Incompetence at its most convenient. I went from there to one of the tables of office workers handing out IDs, away from the principals. I evaded their detection and ended up getting my ID uneventfully. I never did get in trouble for refusing to sign the detention slip.

All that was in November. Fast-forward, back to January where they're waging war on my beard. I got one day of in-school suspension and went back to my classes as normal the next day.

I left the state like a week after that, so no further abuse came to me for growing my facial hair. Florida's public schools took a very different view - everyone I met there was shocked to hear of Texas's draconian tendencies. Forced to shave? Forced to wear IDs? "That's crazy, dude."

Not to say that South Florida's educational prisons didn't have their own ridiculous regulations. At my high school there, the main hallway, which wrapped around the school, was "one-way" - going counterclockwise was a punishable offense. So was not wearing a tucked-in, collared shirt. I didn't mind this much, since I got to keep my prized beard.
At one point, I tried to change one of my classes to Advanced Placement. The counselor I normally talked to referred me to the head of the AP department, who sent me to another lady, who had me talk to a fourth conselor, who sent me back to the first one. A bureaucratic loop.

Fractals

2011-11-10T11:46:00.001-08:00

The light says to walk - not that it was needed. I cross the square. Surrounded yet completely alone. Clouds crumble like cigarette ash above municipal noise.

There's a sort of thick tension, floating somewhere between the atmospheric ashtray and the ninth level of urban development. The attempt to destroy honest chaos with false order.

Milk and Honey

2011-11-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

Living in Martian suburbs, it ain't exactly the idyllic frontier the ads would have you imagine.
Some weird people come out here. They're not here to expand or explore. They're the opposite of pioneers.
There's old people at Arsia Mons who still use manure as money, like they think it's cute or something.
22nd-century Mars is like 21st-century Florida, minus the tourists.

Growing up here, you wonder what it must be like back on Earth. Back where a place like this gets advertised as paradise.

My friend Austin, he has a girlfriend in America. He met her on Cycler B. Cycler A mostly takes cargo, but anyone young enough to tolerate third-wave dubstep revival takes a few drugged-up turns on B.
He was on his way back from Earth when he met this girl - Candace is her name - and she didn't wanna come with him when it stopped at Mars. So next month when it comes back, he's gonna hop on and go to Iowa or wherever to be with her.

He wants to leave Mars for good. He says he'd get rid of his Martian accent if Candace didn't find it so cute.

Austin says they have webcam sex a lot. There's only a 3 minute delay between the planets this time of year. He says Candace has a time lag fetish.

Everlasting

2011-11-04T22:34:00.001-07:00

As the Martian sky marks midday, Stan thinks about his father's death. It'd been voluntary. Nearly all death was, even back then.
His father told him it was better to 'go natural' - there's such a thing as quitting while you're ahead.
Fifty-three years later, no one thinks like that anymore. His father was one of a dying breed - those willing to die.
For most people, life had become so accessible they couldn't be bothered with death.
Survival is now purely recreational. The circle of life is now a straight line.

The gun catches cold sweat from Stan's brow.

Stan is more afraid of facing the end of the universe than the end of his life. He doesn't want to live forever like everyone else. He doesn't want there to come a point when a year feels like an hour. There's such a thing as quitting while you're ahead.

A muscle contracts. A firing pin hits a percussion cap. Stan joins his father.