Punk rock dating chapters 49-53

Punk rock dating no. 49: The Funeral of Orion...

The Cold Bed:

7 nights after my death, my closest friends and family gathered at the banks of the Mighty Mississippi for my funeral.

Catfish swam in slow mournful circles as the Siamese pallbearers lowered my coffin/bed into the storied waters...

Bernadette and Dorothy in pitch veils, Dorothy holding a wreath of white lilies, Bernadette holding a bouquet of black roses.

Her hands bled rivers as the thorns sank deep.

The Commissioner flicked his lit cigar onto the floating casket; it burst into flames, which still burned strong even as the pine box sank into the dark water.

Bernadette walked slowly into the Mississippi, following the wake of my coffin; her head disappeared beneath the waves, the underwater fire burned brighter.

Black roses rose to the still surface.

7 crows on a crumbling bridge sing:

"O, rion,
His burning heart now a cold stone,
Betrayed by his wife and the scorpion's sting,
O' rion,
Wand'ring the forest of time so alone,
Laid to rest in the river, where the ravens now sing,
O' rion ,
His song will carry, the listener's knowing,
Take comfort in the stars, where he will rise in the end,
O'rion,
Some day the summer stream constantly flowing,
Will warm the fires in Orion's cold heart once again...."

The song was somewhat of a rush job but then again the crows didn't have much time to
prepare....



Join us tomorrow as the funeral party gathers at the V.F.W hall for cold ham sandwiches and punch...

Punk rock dating no. 50: The Bridge...

The Water:

The old days have faded away...

The seeds planted long ago, now ripe in full bloom, but these flowers too are doomed...

The latest things crumble in the parade of years that inevitably follow...

We tried to make that special day last, remembered hazily now as a day long past...

Although, a long dead sun may flicker to a new life in the fondly remembering eye...

Up above the new star shines. Yet, new suns turn old and die....

The best we can hope for is our names in brittle yellow pages, ignored by bored new generations...

Now I'm closing the book, my story done, let's turn the page for another one...

Yahoo...

Now, even in my current state of death I'm going to attempt to continue to narrate this story. I was originally going to bestow the honor to my only daughter, Dorothy, but she didn't inherit my omnipotence, which is unfortunately a prerequisite in this kind of ensemble piece...

*******************************************

Punk rock dating Act II: Blossoms in the Dawn of Doubt...

January, 2006:

New York City:

Dorothy walked down the polished halls of the Artemis Building. Past the 20 second chatter of the Marketing department and the sexually-deprived jargon of Research & Development. She arrived in the publishing division with an armful of loose pages, spilled them like a waterfall onto Mr. Karlov's desk.

"Jay-sus! Watch what you're doing, Mizz!" he exclaimed.

The messy desk made him nervous. His palms were clammy, his upper lip sweating, his testicles shrank.

"You've got to read this...It's amazing!" Dorothy gushed.

Karlov shook his head, "Dorothy, the question isn't whether it's good or not. The question is...is it marketable? This better not be another one of those artsy ramblings some hippie scrawled onto a few hundred napkins at 2 a.m. in a Denny's when he should've been doing something productive...Like working!"

"No, I think you're going to appreciate this one, sir. It's very marketable...I can see it now! 'Finnegan's Blog!'...The Movie!...Anyway...Read this book and tell me you don't see it on Oprah's book club list..."

"Ohhhh. Oprah," drooled Karlov, "I like what I'm hearing..."

Karlov's money-hungry grin turned to denied-credit-card shock as he looked at the manuscript.

It was literally printed off of Marie Lansing's blog.

Ads for Viagra where margins should be! An 8 point font you had to squint at! It was all too much for Mr. Karlov.

You see, most people that work in publishing have been specifically bred for the role. Evolution has blessed them with specialized eyes that quickly pick up spelling and grammatical errors. The drawback is they are genetically incapable of reading single-spaced pages, right-justified paragraphs or proportional fonts....

...This is a common ailment that also occurs in College Professors.

"Denied," he said on sight.

"But..let me re-type it...I'll properly format it and.."

"DENIED!"

Dorothy angrily scooped up the pages and walked out the door...

She spent the next few days squinting at the microscopic font and colons-where-semi-colons-should be...

...Finally! she had a perfectly laid-out novel! So fit for publishing that when she anonymously mailed it to a rival publisher they signed Ms. Lansing to a multi-million dollar book deal within a month!

Behold! The most commercially viable novel ever conceived!

Finnegan's Blog

by Marie Lansing.


Join us tomorrow as the black-masked editors convene in the Neon Abattoir for their most base hatchet job yet....


Punk rock dating no. 51: Quiet Livingston...

Rich girl/richer girl:

March 2nd, 2006:

Dorothy showed up to the monthly meeting flush with the kind of morning adrenaline you can only produce if you wake up exactly five minutes before work.

"Thank you for showing up late, Mizz Dorothy, we all appreciate sitting around waiting for you so much! Thank you," sneered Mr. Karlov. "Now... Artemis Publishing's profits are in the toilet AGAIN this month! Who are you people?"

He stared wildly at his dejected employees, looking for a concrete answer to a rhetorical question.

"Why don't we just fire you all and hire goddamn BUMS off the street? I saw one on the way to work this morning! Had a sign that said 'Will WORK for food,' can you imagine? He's willing to WORK?!?!?! Hell, that's more than any of my employees are willing to do..."

A tempestuous quiet filled the room. Mr. Karlov stood silently seething, waiting for a trigger to continue his raving.

The squirming in seats became unbearable.

Dorothy attempted to suppress a small cough...

"...ahem..."

Mr. Karlov sprang back into his tirade:

"You know...I'm going to write this idea down! Maybe I should just go to the fucking homeless shelter and re-staff instead! What do you think of that?!?!?!"

Nobody answered because nobody thought much of it.

"You know what we need? We need a hit! We need something that will make people put down their Playstations and pick up a goddamn book! We need something like 'Finnegan's Blog'!"

Dorothy shook her head in hushed disbelief.

"Why can't you lazy bastards stop screwin' in the break room long enough to go out and find something new and exciting instead of the half-cocked SHIT you bring me to read every goddamn day?!?!?!" Karlov ranted.

By half-cocked shit he meant stuff that was typed poorly.

By new and exciting he meant commercially viable.

...............................................................................

March 3rd, 2006:

Marie Lansing was living on her own by this time but she was by no means poor.

She worked as a receptionist but this was basically an empty gesture. Her parents still paid her rent, bought her Foie Gras, expensive dresses, and the odd new car.

On this morning when she opened a letter from Spencer & Shoesworth Publishing that contained a check for $800,000.75, she decided her parents were off the hook...

Marie remembered talking briefly with someone on the phone about publishing a book. She did also receive some documents from Spencer & Shoesworth in the mail last month (which she promptly signed and sent back) but since then she hadn't heard a word from anybody.

If Marie had watched TV she would've heard a little something about a certain book called "Finnegan's Blog" being something of an overnight sensation.

Copies sold out everywhere! Oprah talked in endless circles about how this novel changed her often-changing life! Marie missed all of this due to her belief that television waves turned the human skull into a jell-o mold.

She called up her contact, a flattering red bat named Barta.

"Hello, Barta?"

"Yes, Marie, dear! How's my million dollar genius?"

"Doing Good. Listen, I just got the check you sent me. The one for 800 grand..."

"Yes! Yes! Don't worry, we're not ripping you off, darling...that's just the first check! We sent out another one for $9000.00 today! Your checks are weekly dear..."

"W-weekly?" This was the only time Marie ever stuttered. She knew that one day she would be a millionaire but to actually hear it for the first time did cause her mind to stop calculating for one one hundredth of a second.

This, in turn, caused the 'W' to be repeated twice.

She saw to it that this never happened again.

Marie took the check to the bank. She deposited half of it, and took the other half to a reputable broker who invested it in dependable stock.

With that first check her only extravagance was a three thousand dollar bottle of 1995 Krug Clos Ambonney champagne and a Mahogany Mink Coat she bought for some random chick she wanted to nail that night (it worked too!).

She continued to stay in that same $400 a month apartment for the next year until one day she decided to move into her own Ivory Manhattan Highrise...

...Nearby in the parking complex, a conflicted stranger paced in nervous circles...



In 24 hours Air guitar becomes an Olympic sport and Marie and Dorothy go out to dinner! How will you survive the suspense?



Punk rock dating no. 52: The Golden Dawn of Greener Lawns...

The X:

One morning in 2007, Marie walked out to the parking garage to take out her '08 Jaguar when she was stopped by a mysterious woman.

"Hello, Ms. Lansing, let me introduce myself. My name is Dorothy, I work for Artemis Publishing. I'm kind of the one responsible for your book being published...I found it online and re-typed it. Did a bit of editing and sent it to Spencer & Shoesworth after Artemis rejected it... "

Marie didn't know what to say. Dorothy seemed sincere and relatively professional, but this sounded like the setup to one of those stories that normally ends with "Can I borrow some money?"

Dorothy could see she was losing Marie's interest.

"I don't know why this seemed important to tell you. I don't want anything..."

Dorothy stood lost in thought for a minute.

"...I guess I just wanted to let you know what a big fan I am and I wanted to take you out to dinner! Tonight!

Marie smiled. Who was she to turn down a free dinner with a beautiful woman?

.....................................................................................

Planet-Bill slicked back his pompadour with the femur of somebody else's girl...

He stood leering outside of Carmine's phony Italian restaurant where the doorman wouldn't let him in; the sign clearly said "jacket and tie required." Bill wore only a blood-soaked undershirt and the all-American sneer of James Dean's skull.

The Skeleton Nurse unzipped herself from her body-bag, "I smell misplaced dreams...the smear of hormones...dead lovers..."

Inside, Marie and Dorothy stared clueless at upside-down menus, this must be a good place! No one knows how to pronounce any of the dishes and everything costs way too much...

"So, you from around here?" Marie asked in a voice that was half predatory animal/half inane small talk.

Dorothy was actually hatched from an egg in the year 2093, but figured this might be a bit too exciting for a first date. "No, I'm actually from Kentucky" she answered shyly.

"Oooohhh...Shy girls and their deep dark secrets," Planet-Bill sneered to himself outside, humping a trash can. "Oh, yea, the shy girl wants it the most...bang...bang..."

"I find the south fascinating," smiled Marie, " The mystery, the heat, the fever...I love it! I think my next book is going to incorporate a lot of that southern style. It's funny, though...you have no trace of a Kentucky accent..."

Dorothy thought hard about this for a moment.

"Well, My mother was from Minnesota and my father was ...uhhhhh...a lizard."

"Oh," Marie oh-ed.

Marie believed she could make things happen with just her stare and the world's top scientists still hadn't disproved this.

She would eye a dress in the window and someone would, invariably, come along and buy it for her.

She now eyed Dorothy.

"Why did you really bring me here, Dorothy?"

"I... I don't know... I feel like something pulled me to you...Does that make any sense to you?

Marie nodded her head yes, "No," she said.

"I feel like I might be responsible for ruining your life....in a way..."

"What do you mean?," Marie cross-examined. Displaying the icy tone she would later become famous for.

The waiter walked over (stick comfortably up his ass) and lifted the dome from the tiffany sterling platter.

The skull beneath grinned, "I know what she means! Clotting sky! Dusty heart wheezing beneath the rusty rib cages... the sacred grove...the golden dawn of greener lawns... the throat disintegrates, the song disintegrates, the dream disintegrates..."

Planet-Bill snapped his fingers, "Jazz, daddy, Jazz..."

"I think somebody put something in my drink..." Marie fainted....

The only thing in her drink was a foo foo umbrella...



Join us tomorrow when something exciting almost happens....


Punk rock dating no . 53: Binary Brain Tree...

The Link between Parent and Child:

April 1979, prior to my visit to 2080:

The Laboratory of Professor Patina:

Gray bearded Patina rubbed the pink sunrise of his balding scalp in deep thought.

He was undoubtedly a genius. A man, whose dazzling inventions were so revolutionary that they had remained hidden from mankind until the very end of time, and yet deep thought was rare for him. He usually got by in minute-to-minute "Eureka!" outbursts...

"Eureka! The secret to time travel lies in the marriage of Special Relativity and the haunted science of E.S.P! "

"Eureka! I'll have a boiled egg for lunch!"

"Eureka! I have to use the restroom!"

"Eureka! The secret to immortality! That Disc in Eindhoven!"

Professor Patina was referring to the first big demonstration of the compact disc in 1979.

"If only I could have access to a storage format that wasn't so...linear..."

A few of the problems with Patina's Soul Downloading project were evident from the very first trial...

Patina decided to start small. On April 8th 1978, he decided to start small by transferring a few of his fondest childhood memories directly from their current location in his hippocampus to their new home, on a reel of magnetic tape.

The transfer was successful.

However, as Patina listened back to the tape, he realized that he no longer had the memories himself. A black hole swirled in the very center of his childhood, and the memories on the tape seemed to belong to a complete stranger.

Another drawback was the sequential nature of recording tape.

The mind and soul are almost never linear. They access information and sensations randomly, and the only storage device that could properly store such a vast amount of information safely and access it properly hadn't been invented yet.

Or maybe it had...

"The compact discs hadn't been promoted as a means of data storage but what is music really? " Patina quizzed.

"Data?" I pondered.

"The soul," corrected Patina.

"Well, usually a little bit of soul and a whole lot of artifice," I counter-corrected.

"Yes, but I have yet to come up with a way to backup the body."

"Fair enough," I conceded, "Still, what is the storage capacity of these disc, really?"

"I don't really know. I did briefly speak with the developers but I didn't get enough information. If I had to guess, I'd say 600 to 800 Megabytes, possibly.."

"How many discs would you need to download your entire consciousness?" I hypothesized, "Millions? An absurd amount!"

The Professor stroked his beard. "Yes, Orion...I see what you mean...We would need multiple discs...but you simply cannot chop up the mind and expect it to still work..."

"But who's to say what kinds of storage devices are available in the future..."

"I try to keep my research pure and not poach ideas and methods from the future, you know that..." Professor Patina huffed.

"I know! I know! But I'm planning a trip to the year 2080 in a few months anyway and I'm certain that data storage will have evolved dramatically by then..."

"Yes!" Patina enthused, "A hundred years ago the most state of the art data storage unit was a book... Now look at us! Magnetic tape!"

"Look at us indeed," I agreed.



Join us tomorrow to check out the blueprints for Project: Binary Brain Tree, also we'll check back in on Dorothy and Marie...