Coffee Rant

I had to give up the one thing, the first thing I looked forward to each morning. A cup of coffee. It seems my over-stimulated, urban-abused body just won't tolerate the cup of joe anymore. Well I thought, maybe now things will slow down, go at a more recognizably human pace. Not even close. Without coffee, I feel like I'm in a time warp as seconds drag like hours and I stumble around in an opiate state. The old television commercial that said, "Coffee, it picks you up and calms you down." like hell. I've always known the effects of coffee, one cup leads to two, leads to a coveted pot that you won't share with anyone. The addictive affection for roasted beans and home grinding and french steeping. But it's so much more than that. Everyone silently claiming allegiance to the coffee club by aimlessly stumbling through their morning commutes while mallet-clutching a paper Venti. Young office hipsters slouching a anonymously in the back of meeting rooms acting like totally "in" while they barely keep a grasp on their personalized mugs. Yeah, coffee, the syrup that fills the cracks of virtual reality to make it all seem real in geophysical reality. The stealth speedball. The ubiquitous heroin. None of this comes as any surprise to me, I've cold turkey-ed the caffeine tar three times, so I figure, once more into the maw of oblivion is no problem, right? It's not so much the actual abstinence, but the timing. It's like being in the high-speed-car-chase-of-life and suddenly just opening the door and getting out. Folger's doesn't come with skid leathers. It's not a matter of red pill or blue pill, that's just Hollywood psychosis. You just make a choice between brown liquid or clear liquid. It’s all a matter of perspective. I thought maybe I'd lose my razor edge, that I wouldn't have that anime katana like mental prowess. Then I imagined how brutal and Caligula-like trying to cleave a winter squash with a dull butter knife is, and my caffeine deprived ego was marginally eased. Coffee doesn't make you see goddesses or machine elves, you're moving too fast, way out front, standing on the accelerator. Funny car, formula drag racing is like nursing home bingo compared to a java jag. "But it's all for the best" the tea totaling suffragettes sing-song and we all know what happened to prohibition. Remember the ad campaign against drugs, with the egg, "this is your brain on drugs" hook line? The one for coffee would be a nice juicy bug splat on the windshield of a Bonneville Flats speed record vehicle, THAT's yer freaking brain on caffeine dude. 

It's ok though, I'll just do a Miss America beauty pageant white-gloved hand wave as life now blurs by me, the rat race is more over-rated hype than pay-off anyway. Yeah, you guessed it, CHEESE is the next thing I'll have to give up. 

william calkins | Drawings

william calkins | Drawings

Corporeal

     Worldly events are bending and warping like a "Rubber Man" sideshow contortionist. Even an unbiased observer with 20/20 vision can't manage to focus the abstracting images into anything recognizable. A matter of mass hallucination. Hysterical, manic, machinations. That's what reality actually looks like. The only way to make it behave as something different is through aggressive application of mass hypnosis. The use of somnambulistic phrases and shiny objects to pendulum-swing before rose tinted eyes. Contact lens blinders superimposed upon self-hobbled victims. An easy enough feat exercised upon victims that want to be entertained, not held to the grail-light of truth. Looking behind the curtain wasn't part of their front row ticket price, and yet, jumping off cliffs is free of charge. 

Our planet still hangs suspended in a revolving universe, stable as a pizza box hiding a molten mozzarella core. Oceans of soda and forests of garlic breadsticks compose the flat-earth geography. Self-imposed celebrities perpetually chase themselves ‘round ninety-degree corners. All is as should be in the abyss of Dis-reality Complication. 

One way to simplify life is to stop looking under pillows every night expecting gifted currency from fictitious entities acting out enamel fetishes. 

"Now what?" is a question more people should ask themselves in lieu of sentimental, self-indulgent ramblings about what they used to do, or who they used to be, or worse, bragging about how they haven't changed. Gets old fast. The often overlooked secret is- it's never too late to start something new, even if it's only switching your morning breakfast beverage from frozen orange juice concentrate to artificial vegetable flavored puree. That one minute change could domino-tilt the entire universe on a different course. 

Observe and absorb. Rhetoric is meaningless. Your arsenal of senses are your best conduits for learning. See, hear, smell, taste, feel, then THINK. Search for answers to questions. ASK questions you’ve never thought of before. Questions are the catalyst for growth. 

It's folly trying to “teach”. The best hope, is to plant a seed that will germinate into action at the most opportune time. It's not about rote, but about comprehension that begets epiphany.

Physical world, physical reality.... gravity plays a big part. Imagination isn't affected by gravity. Freedom from that ankle-yank pull is what sets imagination to FLY....Quantum Theory is pedestrian compared to imagination. It's bogged down by numbers and formulas, never ending equations.... chalk scratchings on dull slate, a poor substitute for the velvet sheen behind the cosmos.... 

Time is a rudimentary construct of man to aid him in keeping events organized, categorized and hypothesized. Time is merely a measurement, and not a very accurate one. There is no such thing as time fueling thought or imagination. But there is pulse. Fast, anticipated pulse, slow bemused pulse, a brush swish on a snare drum, a pluck of a bass string, the flutter of a heart in love. Pulse drives everything. Incremented time only cheapens the phenomenon of moment. Each heartbeat is an infinite moment. 

Distraction is a terminal path. Pillar of salt stuff. Mind to ash. But moments filled with imagination, discourage  distraction-rot. 

The night sky used to be filled with rainbows and strings of pulsing color spooling across the naked universe. 

Examination

Pretzels, New Offering on Amazon Kindle

Another new Ebook listed on Amazon Kindle site. Pretzels is the third in my "snack stories" unofficial series. It has all of the addictive goodness of the first two snack-story Ebooks and more. More fun reading entertainment than a bowl full of popcorn. (which was the title of the second Ebook) Popcorn by the way is FREE for the rest of the week. Get your's while you can. Enjoy.

https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/books/book-detail-page?ie=UTF8&bookASIN=B00JHPWNI6&index=default

Newest Ebook Offering Announcement

This is my latest book of short stories published with Smashwords. If you like Apocalyptic science fiction and Distopean settings and quirky-twisty literary fiction, then this book is definitely for you. Some of my latest favorite works are in this Ebook. Stop by and give it a look.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/426650

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?