Another scene set here: summer of 1986. It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school. Halley’s Comet had been something of a bust, but there were interesting things happening in the summer sky, and I was tracking Mars, Jupiter and Saturn on a huge wall map of Wil Tirion’s Sky […]
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Random thoughts, settings, characters, situations, perhaps leading somewhere
Let’s start off with a truism: for anyone who grew up in the 1980s, the Beastie Boys’ album Licensed to Ill was a seminal piece of work. For those in the know, it was the commercialization of a culture that had been building and evolving for at least ten years. For those far from the […]
Sometimes a song doesn’t have to necessarily evoke a particular, specific reaction in its playing or construction. It doesn’t have to speak to the situation in its words or style. It just has to be at the right place and the right time, and enhance what is already there. The album Reach the Beach by […]
Summer of 1996. I was living with two roommates in a funky little house in central Austin, where the floor in the living room had an odd wobble near the kitchen and you couldn’t run the air conditioning and dryer at the same time or else you’d blow a breaker. Besides that, it was a […]
I love sitting in the shade of the supplants, over in the corner of the plots with a nice lawnchair set up on the firebreak stones. Some of the other gardeners won’t come over here, so it’s nice and peaceful, and the bees hum contentedly along with my iPod. I got the adapter, so I […]
At some point in time, there were no energals. Geomancers could point to general lines in a cliffside: a horizon of rock where higher forms vanished, another where wisp spines no longer sifted out, and a final line where the tiny aerolith fossils petered out. Before that, only solarals: plants, fungi, animals. The debates raged […]
“Dockside” brings up scenes of salt spray, bobbing hulls and screaming gulls, but it’s just about the furthest from the truth in my line of work. Maybe in Solyi Pergani or Isildan, but not in Solyi Avanhoi. Dockside there is sand burn, whipping winds and croaking chensureets. It’s about repacking bearings and training talents. There’s […]
Nothing was getting through. English was not an option. The guy looked at me quizzically, a sympathetic smile forming on his mouth. I said, “Well, maybe I’ll show you where I’m from, that will help.” So I pulled out a pen and a piece of paper, placing it on a flat part of the vehicle […]
You’re never late for maintenance. It’s not just mandatory. It’s unthinkable. People literally don’t think about maintenance, they just do it. Except for immigrants. Immigrants don’t realize that the only way to make a home out here is by unceasing human effort. Nothing is provided by a benevolent biosphere that may give storms, predators and […]
How do I put this kindly? Well, there’s no way to do it. I am probably, as one of my high school friends told me, one of the whitest people in the world. I am a technical guy, a computer geek, a space nut, fascinated with processes and cerebral complications. I can’t dance, I can’t […]