Ghosts

About four and a quarter years ago, I sat in a cold room in an uncomfortable chair with my eyes locked onto the screen of an expensive and sophisticated video player. The screen swam with gray criss-cross patterns. Data transferred back and forth on the screen giving coordinates, atmospheric conditions, and conditional release information for the product materialized in the sky by the work of my team. The room was striped in the garish colors of an old and tired unit established in the dawning days of aviation. Pictures on the walls proceeded through the years of fighting machines launched and recovered in the hands of men with uncommon knowledge of simple physics and smiling skulls on their jackets. The picture ran from the Curtis-Martin biplane prototype first launched off of a converted oiler through the heyday of Grumman’s legendary run of cats, Wildcats, Hellcats, and finally, the Tomcat.

The screen showed the middle of a town I have never had the opportunity to visit. The grids of streets slowly pinwheeled giving some scale to the enormous distance between the video capture and the target. Numbers cycled through while the screen switched back and forth between a tactical loadout of the plane and the resolutions offered of the town. The screen went back to its original target, white crosshairs arbitrarily selecting the tracked vehicle with the protruding weaponry. White ghosts milled around the machine, heat registering strong on the infrared. A mechanical and bored voice interrupted the silence of the taped occurrence. A new set of numbers on the left of the screen started a downward trend. The numbers grew smaller, into the teens, as a large and glowing machine pulled up to the track. The machine began expelling occupants, dozens of men who sat around smoking and talking. The truck full of men was not a target. The numbers fell past three and the screen flared white.

My job started then. I had to sit with my clipboard and estimate what the mess of white splotches represented as losses to the enemy. I had to estimate the number of dollars lost to our single drop of a ton of steel and PBXN-9. White shapes slithered away from the burning vehicle parts leaving trails of white, liquid warmth. None made it far before all movement ceased. The room I sat in was cold, as all steel rooms are, and festively decorated for the season. Behind me, the man who had dropped, or "pickled," the shot gathered his papers and his coffee cup.

He spoke from behind us, "Night, guys."

"Goodnight, sir."

"Oh, and Merry Christmas."

Pride and Prejudice: Notes

These are notes from the movie I had to watch for ENGL 112. I took mostly serious notes, but these crept in there. And I left them in when I posted these notes to the class' shared folder. I kick ass.

1. Austen's use of cultural abnormaily -> expound later

2. We must have a ball! Oh, a ball! Tee hee hee. Bitches.

27. I hope someone dies of something violent soon.

35. God please make it stop. Pleasepleaseplease something explode.

38. How is this movie still going? Nothing has happend for FOURTY MINUTES

45. Darcy could beat the fuck out the skinny dweeby rich guy.

46. Bitch, he already chased you down in the rain, quit playing hard to get.

50. I could take Darcy.

51. Scandalous bitches.

53. Thankg you God for American orthodontic prowess. Keira's sister looks like an enraged squirrel.

72. For fucking finally. Two hours all to say three people get married.

Linguistic Differences

I have been making great attempts at the language of Spain lately. I am in no danger of falling into fluency anytime soon.

The problem is that Spanish is so much damn work. Keep in mind that my native tongue is Rural-Coloradoan. Most of my English speaking experience is a little soft on technique. The key to speaking my native tongue is pronouncing most vowels identically and routinely dropping consonants that seem like too much work. You city folks like to call it mumbling. For instance, were you to want to explain to your Rural Colorado that you are not concerned with a choice, it would help to say this:

Ah'on't cur. Donm'ckno diffurnce t'me.

The key is to pretend that every movement of jaw and tongue is an extravagant effort that shouldn't be wasted on just any occasion. I have since learned English, but my native tongue keeps wantint'crep up. That is why Spanish is so difficult. The pronunciations are all so expressive and the mechanics pay so much attention to precise flow. I really didn't like the language until today.

You see, in English, I play guitar. It is an object held in my will, iron fists extracting some trivial game from the polished wood. In Spanish, toco la guitarra. To play insinuates a lack of concern, an informality in the approach. Toco, tocar, tocando, all mean to "touch." I do not play an instrument as a baggy clothed teenage boy plays a girl, I touch an instrument like la esposa. There is respect. There is an implied permission granted by the subject.

The difference in language carries into the musician. I submit that Jimmy Page, with his lightning speed and lightning jumpsuit is merely playing while he sashays and pinwheels all over the stage. He is producing music and putting on a production. He is using the instrument as a tool. As an axe. This is why his riffs make me want to drive fast, fuck girls, and punch faces.

Compare and contrast to the great Andres Segovia. His phrasing, so respectful, so tender, borne of years of intimate knowledge, makes emotions I have never been properly equipped to deal with flood into me and well up in my throat. I want to sit in a dark room and love this life, love a woman, feel every breath enter and escape. I want to hear every day begin again and share it with a warm body, light slanting down from the window in tiger stripes of rose and gold.

This is the difference in "to play" and "tocar."

This is Bullshit

Shit, that is what I should be feeling akin to.

I do not feel like the aforementioned excrement, though I am righteously perturbed. See, I have a little tradition. On Wednesdays, for no reason whatsoever, I like to go out and eat a quality meal. I eat a vast amount of pasta-based one-pan creations throughout the other six days of a week for the intent and purpose of having enough extra money to enjoy my Wednesday night meal. This is normally not a problem.

Well, I rolled out of bed, shook off the feminist literature hangover, and what to my wondering mind should appear, but the CBS morning show (damn them bitches is hot), and some guy cooking up some type of lobster weirdness. He carved the carcass of the previously living, and one can only assume happy, lobster and put it into a feast for "someone special."

Don't get me wrong, I love cooking shows. I also love to cook. That being out in the open, hopefully some shining ray of heterosexual prowess will burst forth to quell the suspicions you may have, I would not consider in a million years lobster on a weeknight. So, why on this green and purple bentonite mud earth (and thus I submit the obligatory geology reference) would I have to watch some goddamn frog with a white coat decorated up like a goddamn NASCAR driver fireproof gay-o-tard cooking lobster? It is Tuesday, motherfucker.

Oh, that's right. Tomorrow is that day. That one day where everyone pretends to like each other more. I have no problem with any of that. If there is anything I learned from the string of pork rind women dressed up like tiramasou, it is that relationships thrive on the two people pretending to like each other more than they do. Do you women realize what kind of hair you leave in the sinks?

No, friends, what thoroughly annoys me about tomorrow is that I will not be able to go out on my date with the only person who's tastes I always agree are good and who's company is guaranteed not to annoy.

There is something wrong with the world when a man must make reservations to enjoy his own company. It takes all the fun out of being single. And thus I submit the tragedy of this February day, that I will have to order pizza or visit some sandwich shop on my hallowed day. It just don't seem right.

Flying V's and Charity Work

This post is in two parts. One is drunken rambling, the other a plea. You figure it out.

Subject One:

I have decided to get published and therefore I need an editor/proofreader sometime in the next week or so. I am serious about the proofreading part. I would prefer someone with an eye for mechanics, word usage, subject/object issues, etc. I like my prose the way it is, so I would only need minimal content direction, probably centered around the fact that I sometimes take vague way too far. Pay is not an issue, because you won't be paid. Obviously, this makes it an imposition if you have a busy schedule and I understand. Blah, Blah, and so forth. Anyway, volunteers should contact me by whatever means get their goat.

Subject the Second:

Albert King is cooler than you. Albert King is cooler than most, so your tears are wasted, mortal. On the eighth day of creation the Serpent tempted woman not with fruit or knowledge, but with the subtle sinew of a fretboard burning up the key of Bb. This is not in your Bible, or in some creation legend from the plateaus of shadowed Ararat. Those legends are fine, imperfect as they are.

Eve, Lilith and the tenderized portions of your mind left open to loving the soft touch and vanilla and quince scent of the one woman you never truly got to know sings in round and full harmonics and symphonics. In the raised voice of a thousand parishioners in the Burning Church of the Mortal Human, you hear the wail of a Gibson Flying V scything down the furrows of brown, sweaty, and slick women with eyes the color of ebony, skin borne of the plains of Mahogany.

The Serpent is the twisted and strained neck, fretted in wire, strings so loose and detuned they hang precariously over the inlaid dots that are meaningless in the note-and-a-quarter bends fluidly draining you of the will to work, pay, or buy. You simply want to give your soul over to all the demoniac passions robbed of you by civilization.

Albert King is the silent dictator of a thousand shining cities where the citizens vie for the chance to cry in the streets. In the palace of the cool, he sits entombed in hazy, smoking tendrils. He brings Hell up to us as a shading cloud and Heaven down from the sky as a flaming pillar of fire. All your lonliness he'll try to soothe. He'll play the Blues for you.

Be awed, mortal. He once shared this Earth with you.

Snippet IV

Got drunk by myself last night and they say that's no way to make things right, I just didn't have anything better to do.

That is a bald-faced lie.

Well, yes, but the song is amazing, though the production is terrible. I did have drink, but it was over pizza at the bar.

What song is that?

"Proud Souls" by Cross Canadian Ragweed.

That was real slick.

Hopefully enough people will like the song and buy their albums and they'll make music forever.

Always scheming. You are some sort of mastermind, aren't you?

Yes, but I try to veil it behind heavy doses of complete incompetence. Or heavy handed maneuvers like opening cans of beans with hatchets, keeps 'em guessing.

Funny, I thought the revolution is over.

That's exactly what I want you to think. See how genius works?

Awesome.

Speaking of awesome, I have new links. I might explain that my links are more for my convenience. I like to be able to hit everything of interest from one site.

And comment.

Um. Sure. I do that sometimes. It's only polite.

I am your conscience, I know when you lie.

Too bad you can't tell me when I drink a fat girl skinny at the bar, asshole. So, no, I don't comment much. I know how amazingly refreshing it is to have thirty people saying "OMG, I totally love, love, love ice cream TOO!!!LMAO!!!" It's reassuring on some level and Blogger has no referrer logs, so lurkers are unaccounted for.

What if they link back?

My links are for my own use, they're not recruiting tools. I don't care if they don't link, I don't even want them to in some cases. I don't think I'm the kind of company they want to keep. Creepy desert dreams, rants about killing people, posts that all seem to be about sex even when they're about rocks or guitars or some shit, not really blogosphere material. People's minds are dirty.

Or you're just always horny.

Such a crass word. I prefer toey. No one is sure whether I want to get in a fight or hop in a sack.

So, have you considered trying to write more to an audience instead of self-centered rambling?

No.

Hmmm.

Ok, yes. I even took pictures of squirrels and made up cute captions. It was real blogger activity, I even found a way to complain about Bush in a psuedo-informed manner using the squirrels as a foil, then I figured out ways to link all the people more popular than me in that post. It was amazing. I come this close to buying an iPod.

And then?

I shot the squirrels and made them into fajitas. Would it be gay to put recipes on here?

Probably.