MeLos the Memory Loss Drug

Zombies? There aren't any zombies. It's a word that got used over and over again until... 

There was this experiment done decades ago with monkeys and cocaine. A lab monkey could press a bar in his cage and get a dose of cocaine. Eventually the monkey pressed the bar so often he forgot to have sex, forgot to eat, or drink and eventually pressed that bar until he died of an overdose. 

Decades later, science in concert with large corporate pharmaceutical financing, invented a memory erasing drug. It’s original intention was to relieve the patient's chronic stress caused by irreconcilable memories. War vets were some of the first test subjects, looking for relief from post traumatic stress. Desperate to forget the horrors of war. It seemed to work as expected. For a while. The government gag order kept a lid on details behind a sudden increase in violence and homicide on military bases and in vetren hospitals.

Then the drug began showing up on street corners, eventually ending up in suburban living-rooms of middle America. People became obsessed with forgetting. Black market demand for the drug even outstripped the demand for marijuana. Then things really started to change...

Once some manmade synthetic is released into the natural environment, there’s no control over it. Genetically modified crops first proved migratory data on this scientific short-sight. Then came mutating viruses from animal to human, another overlooked aberration. When the pharmaceutical companies started pushing gene modification injections, they frantically attempted to cover up the monstrous, unexpected genetic outcomes. Think tank committees, quickly hired by the companies, were coerced into a consensus that the Memory Loss pill was the only way to return things to normal. They called the pill MeLos and advertised it on television and over the internet. Misguided visions of profits and absolution danced in their heads.  

When people began taking MeLos the memory erasing drug, it blended with a battery of pharmaceuticals they were already codependent on. These people lapsed into semi-functional, vegetative states. Already at the time, the word zombies had been over-used and adopted by pop culture and infiltrated it’s way into the lexicons of municipal departments and social institutions. The advent of Melos usage just cemented the label Zombie into reality. Only the few people who didn't take the memory loss drug-  didn’t buy into marketing hype, were able to fully realize the drug’s hideous result.

MeLos zombies proliferated every niche of society. Service sectors, even governments became useless. Before Melos, people who took drugs -over the counter medication or illegal controlled substances- could hide their addictions for a period of time, still function at their jobs or with their families to a minimal degree. But when people started taking Melos, they couldn't hide it’s effects. They couldn’t remember how to do their jobs, care for their families, be responsible for their actions. MeLos made them forget everything- and people felt good about that. They felt so good, they didn't feel a need to interact in any functional way with their communities. They simply didn’t remember anything. 

After a month, the person's mind and body started to organically self-produce the drug. This was a big shock to the pharmaceutical companies that held patents to profit from the  drug’s manufacture. The scientists, micro-biologists, developers- no one saw the memory drug high-jacking the patients genetic codes and begin to internally manufacture the insidious chemical on it’s own. 

There's an old saying, "it's never just one thing." When people fixed on an agenda of profit to invent that magic bullet, they often overlook the other "things" that might contribute to wrecking the outcome of their greedily imagined agendas. GMO pesticides, antibiotic over-use, polluted water supplies, microwave radiation, designer gene manipulation and yes, the copious production and use of more and more pills. When you combined MeLos with this already festering chemical- cocktail, somebody should have seen it coming. Nobody's run of blind luck is THAT good. 

Zombies? There aren't any zombies. Don't you remember? 

Time Spheres

Palm-sized spheres with deep grooves purposefully incised around the circumference and strange, spongy material insides. A warm tarnished bronze hued ball bearing errant reticulated scabs. The most unlikely of time travel devices, yet... the story is now dead. The spheres have lost their energy. The technology is light years ahead, yet millions of years old. A quick wonder about the choice of such distant antiquity to have arrived and maybe, possibly not returned from. It's frivolous speculation. A dreamer's folly. Folly that stems from belief in physically existing objects. 

There's an object, and an unknown origin, function and intent. This unknown outweighs physical evidence. Time was traveled, then forgotten. Eventually, measuring with increments of time was rediscovered, reinvented. But the applications of manipulating time, traveling the winds between then- now and beyond hide, still denied. Maybe that was the intent, to bury the secrets of time travel, prevent a dark and dour eventuality from millions of years in the future. But that only raises more speculative and unanswerable questions. The dull voice of distant drums echo more dreamer folly.  

Apocalypse Thanksgiving

After the apocalypse, renegade hordes of fake-tan polo players rode their ponies through the streets using their polo mallets to whack decapitated heads with. They rode through the avenues, the by-ways and out around through the countryside. Their long-legged ponies trampled seedlings and sod like buffalo herds grinding grassy plains. The men kept their chins tucked and their white and red helmets securely strapped. Post apocalyptic polo was a serious game. They gave no quarter and took no prisoners. Who ever fell behind, got left behind and no residuals were given to the families of the fallen. 

The mounted gamesmen swung their mallets with acuity, striking any orphaned skull with gusto. Little boys in white undershirts and sun lighten hair watched the cavalier polo riders from behind elm trees that lined matured boulevards. Visions of envy danced in their young, sky-tinted eyes as their hearts beat faster and they unconsciously scratched at their belly buttons. 

The hard ridden ponies frothed around their bits and their manes tangled in the reins. The polo players kicked their mount’s bellies with rich leather boots polished to a high shine. Abruptly, at the end of an unkept park pasture, the players rode up upon an old cemetery. A battered head with it's esophagus trailing was cracked high into the air, over the iron fence, landing with a dull thud in the middle of the cemetery. 

The players pursued, goading their mounts around tombstones and ricocheting the head off marble and granite monuments like a snooker ball. This play occupied their focus for a long time. Long enough for a scant number of spectators to spontaneously gather. Their eyes grew wide at the garish spectacle. If any of the onlookers took sides, they didn't outwardly show it. The game of head polo continued into the early evening, splattering almost every gravestone with stains of blood. No one saw it happen directly, but a player and his horse collided with a tombstone and went down followed by another. 

The still mounted players viciously began attacking the dismounted ones, striking them with their grim mallets. They continued to mindlessly attack each other as more riders went down. The cemetery seemed bent on claiming it's own victory. The post apocalyptic polo player's soon dwindled in number. The sick cracking sounds from their mallets became fewer.  Soon all the polo players lay dead amongst the stone markers, the cemetery lawn awash with fresh, ebbing blood. 

The loosely gathered spectators stood mute. Their boney hands grasped the iron rods of the cemetery’s fence. Then almost as if acting as one hive mind, they entered the hallowed grounds and began dressing out the bodies of the fallen polo players, removing their entrails and dismembering their arms and legs, leaving the heads where they lay.  The spectators then took the spoils back to their hovels and basements and cooked the delicacies in a feast of thanksgiving. 

Ape Astrophysics

Everything organic or inorganic degrades. It's inevitable. Well, maybe a package of Twinkies and a couple of cockroaches will shelf-date into the future. But this planet was originally a slick, tiger-eye glass marble and then all these panspermia organic things started crapping and trashing and stuff. Eventually over billions of years that shiny marble is now covered with mile thick layers of crap, detritus, MANURE. Dead stuff, rotting stuff, excreted stuff, fossilized and petrified stuff. We beings at the supposed top of the food chain tend to forget stuff like that. Memory lapse is in our genetic nature. Where else is all this decaying baggage gonna go anyway? So it piles up in more and more tectonic plate strata of putrified complexity and Voila! A planet is born, genesis. Yeah, man wasn't exactly made from a lump of clay, probably more like a loaf of dinosaur turd. Then someone invented lip stick. 

Stellar Cherry Pie

Six unidentified flying objects descended upon a sparsely populated mountain town. Twelve diminutive aliens disembarked from their ships and combed between the buildings and properties for traces of cherry pie. Cherries were aphrodisiacs to the space travelers, who hadn't had any physical concourse in several light years. Strictly by coincidence the town was having it's annual cherry festival and homemade pie contest.

Spurred on by the pheromones the tiny red fruit exuded, the extraterrestrials zeroed in on the festival held at the river front park. As they neared the area of the homemade pie contest, their shiny silver spandex spacesuits began to display various throbbing bulges and juicy wet spots. An emerald green river ran through town. The residents of the town hunted and fished along it’s banks all year round then celebrated year’s end with the cherry festival. It was in the center of this park that the cherry pie contest was taking place and a mass of people had gathered and brought their appetites. 

The small aliens assembled into a flying wedge formation and used their advanced laser weapons to cauterize an open path through the humanoid crowd. The pie contestants and pie judges scattered away from the long tables displaying the juicy red and sugary brown cherry pies. All twelve aliens jumped upon the tables and gorged themselves with pies, letting the glossy red syrup run down their chins and arms as they ate. Their shiny spacesuits became a sticky, syrupy mess. An orgasmic frenzy began as the aliens performed an orgy of wild sexual positions and acts across red-checkered tablecloth. They ripped their spandex spacesuits off and squealed in high-pitched gibberish as their thin-limbed bodies wiggled and rhythmically flopped atop broken pieces of flaky pie crust and gushing geysers of cherry syrup filling.  

The festival crowd stood back, shocked and aghast. Almost breathless as they stared at the tiny creatures from another galaxy. Mother's shielded their young offspring's eyes while snickering teenagers used their cellphone camera's to record the bizarre sight. Paunch bellied men in camo vests began fantasizing about oozing slices of pie and looked wanton at their wives. The event lasted no more than a few minutes, after which the aliens lay motionless atop long tables dripping with violated pie filling. 

The small aliens purred in a state of orgasmic fulfillment. The shocked onlookers began to shake off their surprise and initial fear. They momentarily looked back and forth at each other forming a mute resolution then all rushed the pie tables. Angered and maddened for the unprovoked laser attack the aliens perpetrated upon them, the townsfolk took advantage of the aliens’ lapse in awareness and wrecked upon the creatures, earthly revenge.

The cherry festival’s homemade pie contestants later made pies filled with alien entrails and held a new pie contest. The residents of the town never touched another cherry again as long as the vision of the mad alien orgy lingered in their memories. 

Final Frontier

While taking the dogs out for a walk in the forest one last time before bed, I looked up into the clear night sky and enjoy all the stars I didn't see while wandering through my many years of urban life. Amongst the scent of pine and deer droppings, I casually wondered if all the ancients that ever looked up into the same night sky, up into space, -those that obsessed with it's mysteries and vastness- I wondered if they ever entertained thoughts about escaping this planet. 

So far we can't escape our planet, like taking a Disney vacation to the moon or colonizing mars on the lay-a-way plan. And if you adhere to the concept of the earth as center of the universe, then you’re instantly at your destination. The place every other sentient entity in the universe strived to come to; but didn't. 

Today I don't think we wonder about the mysteries and vastness of space, I think we selfishly want to leave this planet and go somewhere else, screw the mysteries, we're bored, discontent and lack unselfish thought. 

Not until Uranus has cable and wifi will we even consider venturing into the final frontier. Not even if Capt'n Kirk has expanded a Trekkie hamburger franchise in the middle of the milk-shake way. 

We've lost our eloquence. We've shed our pioneering spirit. We've abandoned our golden age, all for a super sized, Kali Yuga happy meal..... 

Ask

It's not good to ask why. It's not good to constantly ask what if. Asking detracts from the beauty and serenity of the now. Becoming obsessed with the whys and what ifs surrounding us generates a compulsive lust for discontentedness. But asking questions is seductive. Questions are beguiling conceive-abilities that taunt us and demand to be vocalized. It’s then the trouble starts.

Conversations, jumping in, interrupting- expressing thoughts, feelings, notions, wonderments aloud. Communication has become a lost art. Fight or flight are the guidelines of conversation in non virtual world. So why bother? Considering the content of the conversation these days, it's not worth bothering much. Conversations today are not much different than how people dress for shopping at Walmart.

Talk, talk, talk. Text, text, text..... somewhere in between the importance of content and communication gets terribly lost. Then it becomes Jabber. Gibberish.  Maybe that's what it was in the beginning, before guttural grunts and clicks became words and words strove to have meaning.

How quiet the whole planet used to be.

But then all the words had to be used in definitions, the meaning of people places and things, beyond what the eye and mind could distinguish in silence.  

People places things. Mass tribes of neanderthals holding a mastodon barbecue, Tropicana casino slot-machine arena, Beverly Hills swimming pools filled with condoms and ecstasy..... people places and things...

Its all kind of like a game of rock paper scissors.
Rock paper scissors- flint knife.....horse shoes and atom bombs. The games people play.

Isn’t naked Twister outlawed in Utah?

Ever feel like your thoughts are like chase lights on the old Bijou marque?
Ever feel like you're one of the fish in a barrel and the guy fishing is using a shot gun?
Ever feel like you should stop the runaway train, but you don't feel like stopping it?

Its all a magicians act. Stuff, all stuff is pulled from a shiny magic hat. Is it a trick? Is it real? You pays your money and you takes what you get.

We should respect space more, strive to acquire gravity, fertilize where we stand. Kinda like trees.

Youth passes, middle-age ends. There’s a brief period of wicking consciousness- then old age sets up like cement. Your heart beats and your lungs breathe long after you stopped knowing or doing anything. Then it’s too late to ask questions. But, what if...