A Temple.

There exists a temple.


Banished beyond elemental plains,
Seven vaulted chambers of dragon-plate,
Chain-locked coils like riveted reigns,
And triple-thick walls of obsidian slate.


Where behemoths are ripped asunder by Might,
Eons of crusted, sedimentary rock,
The sorceress thrives by the sleight of her mind,
And the assassin ticks like the strike of a clock.


Sunken 'neath shadows; a voyagers fate,
Steadily buried by the dust of time.
A balance of purity, in sync with hate,
And from where he stood, the voices were fine.


Boundaries crossed in a hologram of light,
And all the minions, deflected by spells,
Eldritch wizardry and infinite sight,
A brimming white crest, the ocean swells.


Awash with neon, a glow you can feel,
Living colours blending and weaving so well,
Warm fluorescence, like liquid red steel,
Broken reticence brings freedom to dwell.


Doors unlocked and fantasies wrought,
In a sequence of passages, veiled in bloom,
A bouquet of pixels was what she sought,
But what she received was much more real.

There Was A Time When I Gave A Fuck

Back in the day, I sometimes gave a shit about stuff. If I remember correctly, I was trying to be cool and smart at the time, but that all failed miserably.

I don't remember who I wrote this letter to, but I do remember (hazily) that I was drunk at the time.

/rant

(I also remember that whoever I wrote this to did not reply. Lololol).

27/06/10

Did you give your laptop a good smack? Technology... man. There are so many things about our fast paced hyperculture that I hate, but there are others I am amazed about. For example, the dialogue we're having, or even the nature of this website, where people actually READ and discuss their ideas, is something I find lacking these days. Not to sound elitist, bias, or what have you, but it's hard to carry on a good conversation with people of my age-group. I feel isolated in my pursuits, and it is often lonely to be interested in things that many of my friends think are a boring waste of time. It's hard to find people who take the time to enjoy sharing their own thoughts, even in university. It's all about the grades. It's all about brown-nosing to get recognition and acceptance. Individuality is quelled under tight deadlines and strict adherence to policy and the challenge isn’t even there, because the feelings of competition and success have been sterilized and reformulated in such a way that the spirit of discovery and 'newness' is totally downtrodden; though this is not true in every case. Put a group of people who really know their own minds in a room together, and you have yourself a beautiful thing.


I guess the idea is that the world can just go fuck itself, because nobody really needs to clean up the mess. It will take care of itself, I’m sure. Oil is natural and maybe fish even like the taste of it, so there’s no need to worry. Who are we to give a shit?


I'm sure the Dark ages weren’t so bad. Maybe the enlightenment was a bad idea. Instead of universal gravitation, calculus, optics, and alchemy, Newton would have done much more for the advancement of humanity if he had burned witches and invented rap music.




Hell, there's been more than one occasion where I've come across people (whose rapid-fire texting a machine gun would envy) that are so disconnected with things, so drowned out in the background noise of over-consumption and ignorance, that I became mad and reclusive. Dealing with these people is not just a waste of time, but a complete waste of life. Feels like Gibson's bizarre experiment in social Darwinism, where some bored researcher held the fast-forward button.


It makes it difficult to share ideas and reinforce each other’s interests. I like the kind of people that never stop asking questions, and who are willing to be selfless in the pursuit of answers.


I am just starting to get perspective on how my generation has developed through the years, and it really scares me. Most of my guy friends that did go the post-secondary route are completely lacking in motivation and interest. They seem so discouraged with academia that I don’t know how they even made it through. But then again it could just be history repeating itself, and that there is little difference from this time and another, although I would argue that university attendance has certainly exploded in the past 50 years, but then again so has the population.


I couldn't agree more with your insight about work. So many people do things they hate everyday and it takes real courage to break the slavery. It's so easy to be taken advantage of in anything. It's so easy to get lost in the shuffle as you get stepped on by backstabbers climbing the pyramid of material wealth. They are idiotic and useless.


People ask me why I even like science. They ask me where the money is, and try to convince me that it's a waste of time to fiddle around with questions involving the origin of the universe and why we are here. Maybe those are pointless questions, and there is be no final answer at all, but just thinking about it drives my passion for exploration. I'm not much of an academic success to be honest. Even though I work hard I do well enough to pass. It could be that I'm not cut out for cosmology or particle physics**, because I find that what they’re really looking for is number-crunching automatons who memorize the names of everything without knowing what they mean. But I too am a smart-ass, so I won’t listen to what they say anyway. Smart-asses are what this world needs more of.

**I was obsessed with physics at the time.

(Right now, I am obsessed with video games and creative writing)

And now would be an appropriate time for Star Wars.

Feel the Voodoo

The night drifted blankly, brazen yet somber. Buck Rodgers and his company would have had no problem examining the thing; faded recordings containing scientific officers soon to be exposed to the vacuum of space, regardless of actions that might have prevented such measures taking place. It was a haywire blitz, a euphoria of the highest order, intended for once and perhaps twice the effect that drilled within conscious thought an issue of supreme importance, not seen since the faded tapes and disintegrating images of visages fading away into infinite darkness.

Neon Forest

         Faded black ink visible between her collarbones, slightly beneath the pit of her neck; an Isis eye of tapered Egyptian mysticism. Her glasses were white and wide-rimmed, inset glass sleek and clear with eyes blue and sharp, in sync with the faded shades of her uniform. She'd seen life, all sides of it, despite her reluctance to share this information.


The isis eye seemed to shift as she smiled a coy smile. 'Security is here most nights.' she said. 'Without it, we'd be threatened on a nightly basis.'


  'Welcome to the graveyard.' he replied. The granite counter-top between them was speckled with decades of careless indentation; millions of tiny scratch-marks extending millimeters beneath the surface like bad memories. Dead fluorescent lamps shed a flood of light at an angle oblique enough to draw upon the pockmarked surface a miniaturized web of shadows, emphasizing the abuse.


'Graveyards are all I know.' she said. 'Just another sideshow in Neon Forest. And it doesn't stop, night after night.'


  'The only way to deal with them is to respond with violence,' he said, sparking a moment of mutual clarity. 'They'll understand that. And tasers. Lots of tasers.'


   'That's what I'm used to.' her smile returned. The soft crease formed on her upper lip when she smiled was a welcome distraction.


An air of transience marked the transaction, carefree and simple, as if a glorious ringmaster had plucked the rush of a roller-coaster drop and plunged it through the prick of a hypodermic needle, slicing through skin. Her other thoughts held themselves within locations locked and wrapped in tightening tendrils, patterns repeated and re-uploaded on a consistent basis like the flow of a railroad track; a game for him.


And the night-rain was comforting in the cityscape. It fell in sheets, wet as can be.

Again, and again.

'He'll adjust. How was your visit to old man Grommik?' the dark man said, his visage droughted by electronic boxes and hexagonally formed wall-blocks.


'Barely worthwhile.' he replied. The response was cut from a dryness duplicant of rubbish-bins toiled for not fortnight but perhaps several. 'Grommik's senile- talked a whole lot of garbage...'


'Schematics, survey maps... we should be able to determine the facility's exact coordinates.'


'Let's take out Leksande, first.' and his wrists were outlandishly decorated with stabilizers inset with lcd panels, readings showing statistics requisite for galactic travel.


'But... a lot of this territory is unexplored. Locals talk about the Dusted ones, communities of them, dragons the size of starships.'


'Well that's plainly ridiculous, and not worth even a single percent of mention.' came the stalwart reply. The conversation was diluted by the systematic rainfall dumping buckets of bleakness across the barren city streets. The two men parted ways just then, destined to assimilate this new-found knowledge, and impart with it a gesture of fortitude harkoning back to the ways of black-and-white investigators, whose intriguing cases were once painted graciously upon vacuum-tube televisions encased by imitation wood panelling. 

'Never again...' he said, 'Never again.'


And the streets themselves seemed to be alive. The buildings took on human characteristics. Every window and sculpted concrete wall, the obliqueness of it all, within which activity on a daily basis occurred; individuals mining computer screens for the purpose of data-processing. The rain never stopped then, either, but the people continued on their way down paths of destiny inscribed on the pavement; careless, indicative of mindlessness. 

And many years later they would be defined as being partially robotic, arcane subsystems whirring about with an intoxicating grace. The system of gears grinding solemnly one day after another in an endless sea of progress, never to be seen of or thought of again.

citydrowns

'There was a disreputable encounter no less than twelve nicks of a roundabout, but neither he nor I could make sense of the thing,' she said, words dangling soggily like poignant Victorian overcast. She balanced the silverware cautiously, almost to the extent of over-protection, but was unable to take into consideration the effect to which the glaring candlelight danced away like a fire-furnace. 'And nor does my patience permit any extra dollymopping, so perhaps we should mend the issue.'


And within several possessions of a Trinitron screen they did have a go of it, and his reclamation deemed necessary her apparent surprise. 'Well this is new,' she said in-between breaths. The windowsill held station over the presiding morning flood banked notoriously and sharply angled to the paired amalgam of Swedish homage and New York complexity, wherein personalities of sports, music, politics and popular culture flourished unabated, by willpower alone.


He started. 'No, it's not.' He paused. 'But I'm glad you noticed.' In that momentary glint of consideration he took time to examine the curiously ribbed window-boxes, their faded black branches sorted in a matchbox criss-cross pattern intersecting six times on the horizontal and three times on the vertical, evenly spaced.


'Well that was wonderful,' she said. 'I'm going to put on the tea, don't forget to remind me.'


'I never do, not even once.' he replied.


'Hogwash. Don't spoil my temperament with your nonsense.'


Were there to be a satchel rimmed with honey-dew, not even Ms. Brollixworth could pry it free, and the comfortable analogy suited quite well once the aftermath was recapitulated. Again, and again.

Duality Grid

But there was nothing to hide from. In actual fact, the sunset draped from one side of the room to the other. Her sublime expression was reflective of this, and no sooner had he crossed the line than she was administering skill-shots in the direction most conducive to wholesale massacre. ‘Never mind that,’ she said lazily. ‘Where are you coming from, seeing as the route’s off the grid?’ her words sounded unsure.

‘The Infiltrator’s Guild, the one apart for the Acadamy,’ he said. ‘All verses scrawled in barely-legible dactylic hexameter.’ And at that point in time, nothing seemed to matter.

‘That does seem pliable, and with regard to what was mentioned earlier about the blasted paperwork, you can ignore it completely.’ She fumbled blithely with the carriage-shaped transparencies before allowing them to spill to the ground completely, but the teal logistics forms were of little concern to her. ‘Now look what I’ve done,’ she said. ‘It’s your fault.’

‘I can’t help that my mind is geared for war,’ he said, disregarding the accusation altogether. ‘Despite the names, and apart from the blistering heat, waging warfare is not dissimilar to our current predicament.’ He felt the humid warmth pass between them, carried away by wisps of black-night residue provided by a buttressed gothic window, kept open most nights at her request.

‘That’s exactly the response I would have expected,’ she said hastily, moving from atop an obsidian sphere polished to a soft sheen. ‘And my commander would be wise to refuse the request altogether.’ She paused. ‘But you would have the benefit of the doubt in either case.’ The allusion to limited justice dampened the night air to the point that she could feel a noticeable change in the room’s temperature, causing her to shift expectantly.

‘I have hope,’ he said. ‘Just like before.’