lost time incident 76 – personal slime time

lost time incident 76
Hey, party people, what’s happening. I’m writing to you from the middle of wide-open/do-nothing vacation and it’s been a delight. Got time to let the slime drip all over me and just hold my breath ’til it’s over.

I’m just pullin’ your leg there. That’s not me in the banner image. I’m just givin’ you the run-around. Just joshin’ ya. Just … just lying right to your face with no consequences, 2018 theme of the year.

I just spent a week in a lakeside cabin in the middle of nowhere. I went down by the water once and confirmed that lakes are full of bugs and fish and moist plants, just as I remembered. Then I read a lot, moving from couch to other couch to chair to rocking chair to bed and so on. Lots of different places to be and read stuff. Could I have saved money and read while not at a lake? you may be asking. Well. Aren’t you impertinent.

Probably.

But the way I did it was: I was by a lake.

Saw brightly colored birds. Watched geese lead their goslings across a neighbor’s lawn, eating fresh shoots of grass. Saw a moth the size of half-a-fist. (It wanted to smash itself against a ceiling light and we did not offer this opportunity, offering a screen door by way of exchange for the unreachable false-moon-lightbulb.)

It was a good time, this lake time. I guess. The wifi was kinda slow and spotty, if I’m being honest. I’m hoping I live long enough to be able to journey to the heart of nature, set up a sleeping bag in a hibernating bear’s cave, and still have high speed wireless internet so I can check my email before the bear eats me.

Some day.

Anyway, here are some words.

 

you have been judged by experts and found wanting
By 35, retirement experts say you should have replaced at least one of your eyes with a dark mirror that separates truth from lies, crafted a hutch of sticks and leaves outside the village, and said at least 300 sooths a year on average to build a sooth stockpile for lean years.

By the age of 35, retirement experts recommend that you have your entire body replaced with a crude straw replica with buttons for eyes. The trained wolves sent by debt collectors will tear apart this effigy in your stead while you safely hibernate beneath the cracked earth, waiting for the rainy season.

As soon as you become 35, all clocks stop. The Retirement Experts descend through the clouds, lightning heralding their coming, blackening the sidewalk out front where you’re expected to meet them, clutching your documents, your net worth tallied. There are four of them this year. You heard the fifth was struck by a plane last year, but no one can confirm this news because the remaining four don’t answer questions: they ask them. “Do you believe in the passage of time?” they ask you. From behind curtains, your neighbors watch you trying to enter your bank password into your phone to show them your savings account, which would look better if you didn’t still have a few birthday checks from relatives you haven’t deposited yet. You’ve been busy. “How much longer could your retirement last if you didn’t eat anything now?” one of them asks. It’s hard to tell which of them is talking because their faces shine like new coins that have never kissed a coin slot, never been idly chucked into a change bucket, never ridden around in a pocket with keys.

Retirement experts agree: they’ve never been retired themselves but even so, they maintain a matchless confidence about their expertise.

By the age of 35, you should remember that the average rock is 2 or 3 billion years old and they don’t work at all. Never did. They’re all retired. What if you just quit your job and became a rock?

By the age of 35, retirement experts expect you to boldly wear the red sash of the Duelists Society, have won at least 3 duels with peers, trained a young ward, and accrued no more than 2 dashing scars. If you manage this, you’ll be on track to retire on a bed of swords, or to die before retirement in a duel with a masked opponent, their identity revealed during your last few breaths… It was your young ward! They of the mysterious background, now revealed to be full of cunning and vengeance, their parents having previously fallen to your flashing blade— but you haven’t taught them every trick you know, such as the value of having your blade envenomed, and as they fall at your feet twitching with poison you tell them at least they never felt the dread of being 35 and knowing that they’ll never retire… they’ll never lose their savings to a medical emergency and be chased by debt collectors until they die in a break room, clocking in to an hourly job where they had to place goods on shelves for 8 hours.

 

the trifold brochure may have excluded a few key points re: the experience
Hey, get on the boat!
Going for a cruise!
Parasols and drinks!
Shuffleboard and naps!
Clinging to the nets!
Salt encrusted hair!
Gems around our necks!
Seaweed in our eyes!
Swearing a new oath!
Vengeance of the sea!
Death to all who sail!
This cruise ends in blood!
Blood and endless shrimp!

 

ending theme song
You’ve made it through another email! How many more unread emails in your inbox? Let’s see… Oh. Oh my. How did you even find time to read this email?

Tell you what. I’m going to help you out. Here’s a coupon. Use it.

——————————
| Good for 1 email       |
| BANKRUPTCY         |
| just delete them all |
——-clip and save—–|
—Michael Van Vleet

[image credit: Zachary Darren Corzine: instagram.com/zachdarren (from a video on Super Deluxe)]

 

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retirement planning

By 35, retirement experts say you should have replaced at least one of your eyes with a dark mirror that separates truth from lies, crafted a hutch of sticks and leaves outside the village, and said at least 300 sooths a year on average to build a sooth stockpile for lean years.

By the age of 35, retirement experts recommend that you have your entire body replaced with a crude straw replica with buttons for eyes. The trained wolves sent by debt collectors will tear apart this effigy in your stead while you safely hibernate beneath the cracked earth, waiting for the rainy season.

relaxrelaxrelaxrelax

Believe me, I’d like to relax, Rental Cabin, but with how often you’re telling me to relax, I gotta wonder: are you trying to get me to let my guard down? Are you not /actually/ a cabin but some sort of house-shaped Venus Flytrap thing? Are you planning to EAT me, Rental Cabin?

camouflage everything

1 – 

Out in the woods, I become as vapor. Invisible. Unseen. Even when I chop veggies for a salad, the deer are unfazed.

“Must be a woodpecker,” they antler at each other.

The fools.

2 – 

Only a fool hunts deer wearing a belt. To a deer, a belt is like a foghorn wrapped in a freight train with an explosion-in-a-cymbal-factory glaze.

“Here comes some fool with their pants up,” the deer antler at each other, scornful. “As none dare hunt us with their shame uncovered, by their belts shall we know them, and we will always be safe in these woods.”

To hunt the deer, your pants must defy both God and gravity UNSEEN.

3 – 

“I just had the craziest feeling,” a deer antlered at another deer. “As if an entire territory, where we’ve lived our whole lives, the shape of which is alien to our conception, formed by other minds that cannot speak via antler… just vanished.”

“Where are we now, then?” antlered the other deer.

“Lost,” came the antlered response.

scifi sketchbook

Jellyfish jackets that use photoreceptors to slowly charge a shock weapon. Gangsters walking around with iridescent long coats, casting colors on the walls, indicating a full charge.

Once the trigger is pulled the coat drapes, floppy and dark, until it can recharge.

Which leads to an arms race of developing the look of light-up coats without the weapon, so you look dangerous but the fuzz can’t hang anything on you.

Or faking the light so no one knows you’re out of ammo.

an empty train car and a sentient sword leaning on a chair, sighing as the stations roll by

She’s the Chosen One, gifted with Firefang, a sentient sword that’s also a wizard, but she keeps leaning it up against things and forgetting it.

A Voidcrow big as four houses pecks the roof off and she’s on the phone with Lost and Found, finger in her ear to hear over all the caw-ing and screaming.

The ocean has receded and a tidal wave is coming and she’s flipped over every couch cushion, yanked ever drawer out, cutlery on the floor. “It was JUST … HERE.”

the changeling… the change-leg

The faeries came and traded our baby for a fake leg. Thing’s totally made out of wood and there’s not enough liquor in the house to help us see a resemblance to our missing kiddo.

But the clothing store doesn’t take returns, so that leg’s getting dressed up in a sun bonnet. That leg’s getting a stroller ride along the beach.

Eventually, that leg’s getting a college fund, faeries. We don’t care. We had life plans and we’re sticking to ’em. Us and leg baby.

Hear that, faeries? WE’RE FINE!

different than the brochure seemed to indicate

Hey, get on the boat!
Going for a cruise!
Parasols and drinks!
Shuffleboard and naps!
Clinging to the nets!
Salt encrusted hair!
Gems around our necks!
Seaweed in our eyes!
Swearing a new oath!
Vengeance of the sea!
Death to all who sail!
This cruise ends in blood!
Blood and endless shrimp!

disrupting the model

Venture capitalist finds a way to paywall death itself.

There they are, standing outside the hospice, screaming through window, “If you don’t want PREMIUM, then just WATCH AN AD!” and all the old people, brittle and immortal, watch the soaps and eat the soups.