tag/fiction

Found an old DOS "lworks" text file (luckily ported to html by my past self at some point since then) containing a diary from my senior year of high school. Interesting how at the beginning of the year I weighed "still 197 pounds" - what I weigh now - but by the end of the year I had lost "about 30 pounds worth" of weight.

Man, my writing was insufferable. Very difficult for me to look back on.

Since misery loves company, here's a story I wrote 7/31/91

Jones and his Flight
Kirk Israel"My God, this is like a dream!" thought Jones as he fell and fell and fell and fell.
Jones was not falling down in the sensible fashion. He was falling up.
He was hard pressed to explain exactly how this odd reversal of events (and gravity) was taking place.
So up he fell, slowly at first, and then faster as the savage acceleration gripped him. Vertigo caused his head to swim amusingly.
Jones was not amused.
He had been in his back yard, leaping to make a spectacularly athletic frisbee catch, when he inexplicably failed to return to terra firma. His friend was staring at the patch of grass Jones would have landed on (had gravity not been slightly inebriated,) utterly bewildered.
Now his lawn (not a huge lawn, but a fair sized place for the occasional casual frisbee toss) was just one of many lawns that Jones' commanding view afforded him.
The air started to get quite cold and moist as he continued his ascent.
It was getting harder and harder to breathe.
He could see the curvature of the Earth in the distance. Wow, was it big.
Then, popping out of the atmosphere like a cork out of a champagne bottle, via laws hitherto unknown to modern physics, his lungs exploded as all the pressure (14.7 pounds per square inch) inside of Jones struggled violently to equalise with the pressure ouside of Jones, namely next to zero pounds per square anything.
Thus ended Jones and his flight.

And a poem (8/11/91)

And in the distance I saw
A city of white that gleamed:
Metropolis;
sitting
in imperial splendor
its defiant towers of ivory
thrust against the crystal sky
besides an angry green sea
I examined the mud and earth around me
that covered me and merged with me
untill it was not possible to tell
what was first dirt and what
was first me
so I set out to enter
Metropolis;
I pulled my weary body
through the common sludge
untill I came unto the edge of
Metropolis:
splatterings of mud
(or was that me? I could not tell)
fell of me, staining the
pristine road that I then
stood on
And on these defiant towers
I could see no doors and no
windows and no Cosmopolitans
conversed, standing between
towers of Ivory and so
I threw my head back and
screamed and laughed and
yelled and cried untill
breath came reluctantly
and my echo was my only
companion in
Metropolis.

Yeesh.

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The donation bucket is always open! ....Actually, that's kind of how buckets work.

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'Know what I saw? On fire off the Shoulder of Orion? ATTACK SHIPS.' -- Norm McDonald as Roy Batty in 'Blade Runner'

Bad Literary Bit of the Moment
Cleaning out myh office before our relocation, I found this story start in curisive on a "Rational University" sheet of lined paper:

Lydia sat in the diner. Her eggs^^{and coffee} suddenlyno longer looked unappealing. She Usually a good dose of caffeine and grease was just the thing for hangovers, but today she this morning she couldn't stomach it.

She asked Well, the bacon was pretty good, two ^^dark unbending strips. She finished her bacon while catching the waitress' attention for the check.

The sun outside pounded into her head.

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Celebrity Fitness of the Moment

He told me he didn't count reps, instead just doing four sets until exhaustion. "I don't want to get too big. I'm a comedian," he said. Joe Piscopo, he explained, is a warning sign to weightlifting comedians. Piscopo, really, is a warning sign for non-weightlifting comedians too. In fact, you can replace the animal in any of Aesop's Fables with "Joe Piscopo" and it still works.

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Acronym of the Moment

--via The Sexy Name Decoder...you can get your name done and order T-shirts and other schwag. I'm completely stunned by the cleverness of their name generation algorithm.

Quotes of the Moment

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulder of giants.

If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.

In computer science, we stand on each other's feet.

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Animation of the Moment

--this happy frolicking monster, via Bruce Sterling's Blog, but he doesn't know it's origin either. Still it's absolutely great. UPDATE: Dan points out it's Bunchies!

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Story of the Moment
"No, you don't see...this is a dream...I'm dreaming you. I'm dreaming this. All of this."

She reads the disbelief in my eyes.

"Look...I can do this, just by wanting to--" She takes one step, two, down the sidewalk, then begins a glide down its length, her feet a few inches above the concrete, her white skirt fluttering around her legs. She touches down lightly, returns.

"So?" I say, "What do you mean? What are you saying? What does it matter?"

"It's...it's just..." She slumps onto a bench, runs a hand across her face. "I don't want to go. I don't know if I can come back to this. But where I come from, where I really am...I need to move. Shift, in bed. I can't help it. And maybe you won't be here when I come back, if I can come back."

I join her on the bench, afraid to touch her. "It's ok. Do what you need to do."

She gives me one last look with wide, wet eyes, then leans back into the bench, eyes closed. I wait. The wind shifts, a new breeze from the east.

Her eyes open. She looks at me, smiles, stretches. She punches me in the arm, stands, takes a few running steps that skip into a glide down the sidewalk to the corner.

I follow.