blue angles

Black Bavarian Lager runs through my veins this morning. The premium grain elevators have been populating the crispers lately; for in a day or so I'll be rejoining my peers-with-less-years in Milwaukee.

My summer holiday flashed before my eyes tonight, and it looked just like what was, in fact, in front of me. The time I've spent in Bayfield, Wisconsin could be represented on a pie graph. The yellow of a mid-munch pac-man would represent the time spent between the computer, where I kept my eye on the world, and the front stoop, where I kept my eye on the moon. The black wedge between pac-man's jaw would split between the time I spent buzzing myself up at the coffee shop and in my home town of Merrill, Wisconsin. The play of a pac-man game could easily represent my goings on at MSOE--gobbling knowledge pellets of power while avoiding ghosts.

I've been staring into the backlit LCD more than is likely healthy for the retinas each night, sending out lifelines and messages in bottles. Fictionfiction.net was reborn early this season, in a scale of gray. This place ain't no Geo Cities squat house. It's a studio that requires annual attention. For this reason I may not be able to look it up 20 years from now and entertain myself with its quaint sense of humor. Though, I arc'ed a number of dusty files from the family's soon-to-be passed on Gateway 2000 Pentium 166. (How quaint the term '2000' will be in 20 years--and 'Pentium' perhaps.) Viewing these files was like finding a seventh grade English composition folder. They included a Word document of random notes to self, two barely-begun interactive fiction games in Inform, a 24 page hack at a novel, and one sadly up-to-date resumé.

The coffee shop has a public restroom. With the amount of diuretic I'm usually served, I became familiar with the decor of it. I believe number seven on the list of 'How to build a community,' was 'Sit on your stoop.' I wore a hole in the ass of my favorite jeans sitting on the sand laden paint job (of my own work.) What gave the most entertainment was the hive of bumblebees under the oregano patch. At any time, in the afternoon sunlight, there were three to four bees going at it with the herb flowers. I'm not literally allergic to many things. I feel a bit cheated when I see an allergy sufferer enjoying a good sneezing fit. Bees have typically scared the shits out of me, though. These gentle creatures, however, could easily have their Charlie Brown sweaters stroked with an index finger as they did their business. Early on, a gentle creature waved at me from a passing car. Could be that I barely moved from that stoop for the rest of the summer in expectation of another.

Tonight, as I was slugging Sprecher, a bat made passes under the street lamp as I watched until long after I had finally noticed that my cigarette had burned down to the filter. It must be like shooting fish in a barrel, the bugs, for unknown reasons, swarming around the orange glow. The bat systematically fluttered through the beam then back again from the other direction. Here and then, it would pull off some Blue Angles style aerobatics, only to return to its pendulum-like swing under the light.

I took a picture of the the scene to take to school with me. No camera was needed. The bees were asleep, the flying mammals were hypnotizing me, the neighbors' air conditioner was rattling, and Orion and his mighty shlong were rising in the east. Despite the transfixion on the bat, I would have liked to see the breaker reset on the street lamp. The sodium bulbs take a few minutes to warm back up, and the heavens would have become intense.

As for the town. I can't really say too much for it... Or about it. Fuck it. O bury me far away please. For being as small as it is, there are a lot of lost cats. I had never seen a cat look as shocked and confused, or in fact anything besides tired or inquisitive, as I did when one wandered within three feet of me, on the stoop, looked up, nearly shit itself, and bolted into the street, almost getting ground under the tire of an suv, then running to the middle of the street, starting in one direction, stopping, starting in another direction, repeating this three times, then bolting into a flock of black birds feeding in the neighbors' lawn.

No conclusion planned. Though, I'll mention 'the plot sickens' as a new ongoing collaborative project. What will she say next?