Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
I pray for hope
I haven’t kept you too
long as I know that you’ll
always be the drink for
me and you, it always
seems like we’re getting lost in the
words can make a difference, especially how
they come and go through the spirals of
our changing lives and times because
what was once familiar has become
strange that I think of this now in
conjunction with where we’ve been and
where things have
gone are the expectations and
dreams are what keeps me
going for the goal that
I pray for hope.
Digging into his pocket, Chasm pulled everything out, dropped it on the counter, and took in the lifetender. Her neck and arms were lean and bare. Alabaster skin and sculpted coal black hair accented her blue eyebrows, green eyes, red pearl earrings, and brown lips.
Leaning forward, the lifetender watched Chasm’s discs take on green, gold, and silver. Her name holo said she was Kymeri and she was not available.
“You got something,” Kymeri said. Her long, flashing red fingernails raked the discs into order as their denominations came up. “Thousand dollar goldisc, a D, silver century, a wide array of greendiscs.” Her fingernails flashing gold, she tapped the individual discs. Each spoke its value. When she’d tapped the last greendisc, she clicked her fingernails together. Changing to green, her nail said, “Seventeen hundred sixty-seven dollars.”
Just short of a day’s pay, a reflection of the six hours Chasm had worked. “What can I get for that?”
“Night room, joy doll, two squares, dozen drinks, new clothes.”
“What would that leave me?”
“Depends on particulars.”
“Of course. There a budget package?”
Shaking her head, Kymeri said in a low voice, “You don’t want a budget. Get a deluxe, at least. You can afford it. Budget drinks are well liquor or piss beer with compiled food, and the clothes are plastic.”
“Can I budget and then upgrade the drinks to IPA? I don’t need many, maybe three bigs.”
Her fingernails flashing green, the lifetender said, “Okay, a budget room is a bed with a pop out commode, access to the ionizer, private sink, standing space and one chair.”
“Bedding?”
“Included. Joy doll?”
“No. Trade in for the clothes?”
The lifetender shrugged with a dispassionate scan over his black plastic-encased torso. “Your stuff isn’t much. Probably a ten.”
The negotiations were continued. When it was done, Chasm had spent eleven hundred. It scared him to spend so much.
He was ported into his pod. Soft white lights came on. No windows, one large monitor, doublewide bed, chair, sink, port token switch for the ionizer, and popout commode, as promised.
Squirming into the chair, Chasm guzzled his first IPA. Decent stuff, but most importantly, cold. Tension sloughed out of his shoulders. It’d been a good day. He’d found work and was promised more. He was off the street, had a clothing credit, two meals paid for, along with the IPA and water, and still had almost five hundred in discs.
Life was good. Kicking off his shoes, Chasm unfolded his laptop from his hip pocket and plugged it in to play some games.
For the first time in at least a year, he was looking forward to tomorrow.
She used love and hate extensively. “I love pizza.” “I hate peas.” “I love Ricky Gervais.” “I hate heavy metal.”
He couldn’t remember her saying that she liked something. It always seemed like either love or hate. They seemed like narrow borders on a broad wasteland.
I wonder, as many probably do, how my piss tastes. I also pondered whether I’d ever eaten my boogers as a child. Mom has never mentioned it, but many children do, and I was a child who did a lot of things because I was curious.
I’m not sure how I feel about eating baby feces.
This isn’t a gross-out post. Honestly. Perhaps it is, from your point of view. That’s why I bring it up, not to gross you out, but to bring the subjects into the light.
The three subjects, tasting urine, eating boogers, and eating baby poop, are part of a larger subject, the human body, and trends. Thinking about them came from conversations and reading. I finished reading An Instance of the Fingerpost this week. Book One is about a doctor. He mentions tasting people’s urine as part of the examination process in the sixteen hundreds. Yes, I remember from other reading, doctors tasted urine when they were examining patients long before the sixteen hundreds.
I don’t think many doctors do that these days. Most people are probably horrified about it, but I dipped my finger into my stream this morning and gave it a lick. I thought, why not? I’ve tasted my blood, sweat, and tears before, because I wanted to know how they tasted, so why not my pee?
I have ideas about how urine should taste, based on statements like, “This coffee tastes like piss.” I’ve read a few things about it, and we’d discussed it once while talking about survival training. Today’s piss reminded me of a bitters beer. I don’t know if that’s normal. An ongoing cold and head congestion are sabotaging my taste experience this week.
That done, I turned to the question of eating boogers. A friend, talking about his grand-daughter, mentioned that she often picked her nose and not infrequently ingested her boogers. Another friend present, a retired doctor, talked about that and said that some booger eating can be beneficial.
That second person is also the one that talked about eating baby feces. He and I had read about probiotics in infants’ fecal matter, and he’d read other periodicals about how a small amount of baby poop could be therapeutic restoring digestive systems. I pondered what kind of beer or wine would go with baby poop.
Well, I didn’t eat a booger, and I haven’t sampled baby feces yet, that I know. Tasting my piss was my step forward today.
I often think about what might come next in my WIP, plot arcs, character growth, scenes, and dialogue. Sometimes I use what’s produced but I frequently go with something that erupts in my head when I sit down to write.
Got my coffee. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Did you ever think about what it might be like to actually melt away?
Would you melt all over simultaneously, or start on the outside? Do you begin melting at some specific body part, like your heart? Perhaps your brain starts melting first, giving the signal for the rest to proceed to melt, like the green flag at a car race.
Maybe you start melting from the bottom, growing shorter as your feet melt in a pool below your ankles, causing your pants’ hems to drag along the ground, lowering your inseams by several inches. It starts with your toes, soles, and heel, and then you melt up through your legs. The ankles melt, followed by your shin and your calves. Then your knees droop and dribble away. Next are your thighs, pursued by your butt, hips, and your pelvis.
Everything is melting from your bone marrow out. Soon, you’re just a torso in a pool of your liquid self, a being whose head looks too big, with arms that are two long. Then your abdomen and back joins the melting. Eventually, all that remains is your head on your neck, sticking up from the ground like a flower blooming toward the sun.
I did my Sudoku puzzle this morning. I like doing them early in the morning. Completing something, accomplishing something, gives me a pleasant lift.
It was a two-star puzzle, not very complicated, lots of clues. But the two-star puzzles feel more difficult to me. It took me six minutes this morning. I thought, I should be able to do them faster than that. Why do they take me so long?
The harder puzzles are more enjoyable and actually seem easier, even if they take longer. In the two-star and three-star levels, they give so many clues that the clues seem to exhaust me. Whereas, when it’s a four-star or five-star puzzle, with more blank spaces and less clues, I seem to see the patterns and employ logic more quickly.
I wondered about that, reckoning that I like the math portion of the problem solving less than the logic side of it. That sent me on a quest to understand more about solving Sudoku problems. One thing led to another and before long, I was exploring the complexities of time. An hour later, I found myself rushing to leave to write, at once celebrating that there’s so much to know, lamenting that I don’t have the intelligence and capacity to understand more, celebrating that I have the urges to explore these things, and wishing that I had more time to explore and understand. Then it was off to the races to write, and more thinking about my choices.
Along the way, I thought about how I used to work, as in, someone employed me, most of the day, and at last I have the freedom to indulge myself and pursue my dreams. Then I came here (to the coffee shop), wrote like crazy, and then wrote this little piece, reflecting on that as a choice as well.
This piece took about ten minutes to write and edit. I didn’t think much consciously about it before beginning to write it, but it was turbidity in my streams that I felt like I needed to write about it to explore my thinking and understand myself.
Meanwhile, I entered the coffee shop, got my coffee, plunked myself down at the computer, and wrote almost non-stop for ninety minutes, making great progress, adding another four thousand words to the total, after editing.
Now the coffee is cold. Most of the cup remains. I’ll chug it and leave, declaring myself done writing like crazy, for at least one more day. I expect there to be more days.
There’s always so much to read, learn, experience, and think about. Then there’s writing about it. It’s a never-ending demand. TGFC (thank God for coffee).
Cheers
Michael Seidel, writer 