Turtle

Ninja as Child - #12 - Licorice

I've always liked black licorice, but it might be attributable to a particular babysitter on whom I had a little crush.

"Here. Pretend it's just your gum." I'm not supposed to have any candy aside from my gum but she hands me the little black licorice chew and I swap my gum for the molasses masterpiece, rolling it around with my tongue, squishing it against the roof of my mouth, all the while miming the jaw marching rhythm of chewing gum. We hide under the cheap apartment complex stairway and tell stories about what the world will be like when we are older. I tell her my dream of flying one day.

"No wings or anything. I'm just going to jump into the air and it'll be like a vacuum roller coaster, sucking me up and twirling me around...but I'll control it. I'll get everywhere that way." She giggles at my naive charm.

Of course she was much older than I was, probably by four or five years. But she was way cooler than the bible thumping granny that my mom fired last week.

The old lady had whipped out a graphic novel version of Sodom and Gomorrah as soon as my mother left the apartment. I followed along in the pages, marveling at the gore and horror within. My brother realized this was not what our mother would have wanted and when she got home and heard what happened, our mom was furious. The wretched old lady is out. The hot young girl is in.

hmmm... got a lot more to say on the subject of black licorice... and cute girls... but running out of evening hours... to be continued...

Oh, night time...

Oh, baby girl, how difficult you make the night time.

When I come home at 11pm, after being gone all day, all I want is to hold you high in the air and laugh with you. We could make the mome raths and borogoves envious of our joy. The sacred Navi stone of the northern nomads, said to forever point toward paradise, would divert its perfect compass precision toward us, just for a glimse of inspiration, returning only to find that paradise is not where it once thought. We could make the stars toggle a morse code glimmer, shouting jokes into the midnight sky, sharing the fun with the rest of the universe.

And you fold and bend like a fortune fish against my torso, professing that I must be happy. You roll over and nearly fall off. I must be in love. You look up at me as we walk and stare with such wonder and awe. I want to sing to you. I want to show you the beauty of the world--your little smile and sweet eyes in a mirror. I wish for camera eyes of my own to capture what only I can see--these looks that you won't give a camera, only meant for me.

Against my chest, you wiggle and burbble, spraying raspberry kisses and looking around the room frantically. It must be playtime because daddy is here. It must be time to run around and giggle. Isn't it? Can't we jump and fly, become airplanes and rockets, bullfrogs and kangaroos. Listen, daddy, I've been working on my creekity croak. And you inhale with a long, bubbly croak like the smoothest, softest bubble wrap, gently being squeezed, one bubble at a time, in a perfect pitch stream. Are you a frog, a baby raptor, a mythical beast that no mortal has ever heard and lived? How much I struggle to resist mimicking your sound, encouraging it. I love when you make that sound.

I wish it were time to play. I want only to play, to laugh, to make silly mouth faces and noises with you. But it's late. Your mamma wants to sleep. I must do the same. You must do the same. If only we could stay awake all the time...

Wordless Wednesday

Instant Purified Water

OK, that's it. It's over. It's officially over.

Everyone is still working at the company that just laid us all off. We're working for stock options during this little financial meltdown period. To limit liabilities, the board of directors came down with an order to lay everyone off, cash out all debts to employees, limit all financial liabilities (limit translates to eliminate) and made sure we were all OK with that. Yeah, I was OK with that.

But today, I go back into the kitchen to freshen up my glass of water with some of the UV purified, icy output of the hot/cold water machine only to find that the awesome black box that was there an hour ago has now vanished. They sold the freaking water machine!

I LOVED THAT MACHINE!

That's it. No instant hot tea. No hot or cold water of the so fresh and so clean variety.

I now sink into an abysmal pool of unfiltered dispair. No! Wait. That's not how a Ninja goes down!

Grrr.... *inner peace* Grrr... *zen calming* Grrr... *psychic Gatling gun, derailing my tranquility train*

The office explodes in a flurry of papers and computer disks as people begin to twirl and twist into a spiraling wormhole in my soul. My turmoil is too great for the fabric of spacetime. All carbon substance compresses into diamond streamers as people, desks, walls all rip apart and smash together, fighting for their place in line at the entry to the abyss. Soon, the 30% of office workers that is not water has been removed from reality. All that remains is pure, filtered water. I zap the floating bubbles of liquid as they hover in the air, waiting for me to slurp them dry.

Refreshing.

Oh, yeah... well... oh damn!

Being a ninja and a computer geek has its disadvantages. Take, for instance, the time I was escaping a horde of undead, mutant orchids, which, due to a mystical curse, had grown both arms and legs and were hell-bent on strangling their woven tentacles around my innocent torso. You can imagine my dismay when I attempted to produce a flurry of ninja stars and discovered that half of my stash had been mixed with floppy disks. Lucky for you, you don't need to imagine too well since that events of that day have been painted in the HEAD (Hall of Eternal Ancestral Dismay), which is basically a glorified Hall of Shame for ninjas.

Of course, this battle should have been painted on the COCK (Corridor Of Certain Kills) but my killer floppy disk throws kind of turned into floppy miss throws. Those things are quite powerful if you leverage them correctly but you need to account for a different wind pattern than with standard shuriken...

Kids and Drugs

When I play with Code Name Alice, I sometimes have flashbacks to high school drug trips.

We're on the couch and she's laying on my chest, giggling.

"Check this out." She psychically projects, "I can eat your shirt."

"Hahahahutha... you're eating my shirt... hahaha."
"huthuthuthahahahah.... I'm eating your shirt... hahahahahaha!"

I start shaking my head back and forth with reckless abandon, making farting noises with my lips. "Hahaha... I can move my head from side to side..."
"hahauhtthuuthhahahthuth! That's the funniest thing ever! haha. I can't stop laughing."

"huthut.... Dude..."

"Hahahahahahahahahahahah... you said dude! hahahahahahahahah."

"Oh, I'm loosing it."

We digress into creatures that can only laugh as a form of communication.

Transmetropolitan

I was having drinks with a friend the other day and we got to talking comic books and graphic novels. Somehow in my drunken stupor, I failed to mention one of my all time favorites: Transmetropolitan.


Written by Warren Ellis, this 60 comic series features the exploits of one Spider Jerusalem, a columnists and author who does more ranting and raving than writing. Spider is my hero. He's a lot like a ninja, but instead of being stealthy, he openly runs amuck, shouting his identity into his victims fearing faces. Instead of killing people with concealed weapons, he stomps on their faces. Instead of bowing into a dark room to achieve inner tranquility and god-like zen, he screams his head off until people realize they are complete morons who must commit suicide. It's brilliantly written. The visualization is a perfect representation of a grotesque future. Dig it.

Other must read comics here (oddly all Vertigo comics):

Ninja as Child - #11 - Bees

I am one year old. I don't remember this but I can imagine it clearly from my mother's stories.

I'm naked, of course, as I have not yet learned to be ashamed of the awesome ability to pee anywhere at anytime. As I wander out onto the back porch, my mother hears me happily proclaim the identity of an insect.

"Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeee....." This is followed by a moment of silence, which is then followed by incessant tear jerking screams of childhood terror and dismay.

My mother rushes out to see what's the matter. "Are you OK? What happened? Did you get stung by the bee?"

As a one year old, caught in a hysterical fit of shock and pain, I have trouble following and answering these questions. So I continue to wail. Suddenly my mother sees the problem.

My penis is turning a bright shade of purplish red and is swelling up like a frat boy at a strip club who just got the shit kicked out of him by a bouncer.

My mother rushes me, naked, to the car and straight to the hospital. The doctors inspect me and recommend several shots and some medication. As a hippy, my mother objects.

"What is the worst thing that can happen if we don't do anything about it?" She asks.

"Well, if the swelling doesn't calm down, it could stay swollen for a while and he if he has to pee, it could get blocked up and that could cause some serious trouble."

"Ok, but do we have time to wait and see if the swelling goes down before we pump him full of drugs?"

"Yes, you can take him home but call me if he has trouble peeing."

We exit the hospital and as my mother is putting me back into the car, I begin to calm down. This is when my penis explodes. I spray urine all over the car. All over it. The roof, the back seat, the front seat, the hatchback trunk, the whole inside of the car is covered in piss. The swelling and discoloration nearly vanish and I'm suddenly fine.

"I go bee-bee..." I say, woozy and fatigued.

Ninja Nervous Breakdown

aaAAAAGgGhGHGhGHGHAaAgHGhGhGHgH!

epiphany...

I don't have to do anything. I'm a fucking ninja.

Tranquil waves of joy
Carry happy autumn leaves
Through my blackened heart

Wordless Wednesday: Wacky

Unemployed but still hard at work

You might think being unemployed means you suddenly have all this free time but, strangely, unexpectedly, touching up a portfolio, updating a resume and contacting all yer peeps to spread the word and setup lunches is rather time consuming... especially when your so preoccupied with feline theoretical physics.

I promise more enlightened posts once I cough up this fur ball and get my feet back on the ground.