Memories of Futures Past

There I was picking up a couple of take and bake pizzas for the family and what did my eyes behold?

Oh my! Even had chocolate chips in the crust!

I love living in the future.

I created this post using just my voice. apparently in the future there won’t be any capital letters.

Posted from Lord Darian’s fancy new Android phone!

In my random leaps around the internet, I will on rare occasions find myself  staring at greatness.

Such was the day I found the Books of Adam. Adam Ellis writes stupid stories about his life and creates hilarious drawings to go along with them. He lives in Portland and never eats tomatoes, ever. He also has a fantastic sense of humor. I recommend to any and all that you stop by his site and read a few of his stories. If your anything like me you will continue reading until you have reached the end. Then you will pine away waiting for the next story to brighten your dark and dreary existence.

We live among ghosts. They’ve always been here, but as I get older they become more apparent. Dotted along the side of the roads are shrines, everywhere, echoing tragedy and loss. Even the simple ones posted by the state reminding us of the cost of drinking and driving, stand as markers where loved ones fell. They were the sons and daughters of someone, possibly the brothers, sisters, husbands and wives of someone left behind.

When I was a young man, I drank and when I became a Marine I drank and drove. It wasn’t smart, it wasn’t responsible, but I was immortal – bullet proof even. In my barracks alone no less then 16 of my fellow Marines had been injured in alcohol related car accidents in a single year. There were broken backs, broken necks, punctured lungs and other vital organs. Still, we drank, and we drove. That we survived our youth is a testament to the grace such young fools live under.

Still, not all of us do survive. A family up the block from my home buried there son last month. Not even 19, he and his best friend in the world died on the same spot one cold dark Saturday morning. The fire that engulfed their car after it slammed into a reinforced power pole left so little of them behind, it took two days before they were officially identified. They were my sons friends too and I thank whatever angels watch over him that he was not there that morning as well.

Our time on this plane is short, of those planes that lay beyond I can not know with any certainty. I believe there is someplace beyond the brief existence of the flesh, somewhere that the soul is free. Those that have fallen along the way still exist, they walk among us and call out to us in our memories.

We live among ghosts, remember that as you drive by that marker along the side of the road. Someone fell there, lost for a time to those who loved them and miss them dearly. They will bury three more young men this week, in a town not too far from here. No lessons learned, immortal and bullet proof the game goes on.

Never leave what should be said for later. Our chance to tell the ones we love how we feel is so very brief and though no one is ever truly gone, the chance will never come again.

My son is an Internet Gypsy, that is to say he wanders from friends house to friends house every night looking for an on-line fix. He hasn’t slept at home in weeks. It would not be too far a stretch to claim he actually lives on the internet and visits our world during downtime. Like many of the once called ‘middle-class’, I have felt the crush of the second great depression. Through manning reductions and cuts in pay, my family has lost an entire mortgage payment in monthly income. Due to this we have had to cut all non essentials, so no more Xbox-Live, no more Netflix, Cable, land line phones or internet. For a kid that is used to playing two MMO’s at the same time, while laying down suppressive fire in a live FPS and all the while keeping a running dialog on several open chat windows it’s tantamount to the zombie apocalypse.

My earliest memories of Joshua’s computer wanderings go far back to his early years, perhaps at as early an age as four (for those uber geeks who may have caught it, yes indeed Joshua was named after the computer in WarGames). Joshua loved wandering through my computers hard drive using Norton Commander, which I had setup with some hotkeys to allow the kids to play edutainment games. Joshua especially liked Reader Rabbit, but was never content to limit his explorations to those offered by the menus. Josh loved to get the women of the house to freak out by opening Daddy’s porn. So after several hysterical calls (All beginning with the phrase, “Do you know what your son just did!”) I would relocate the offensive images to less accessible places. That never seemed to slow Joshua down, almost as fast as I moved them he would track them down and display them for the world to see. Thinking I was smarter then this child whose sole experience with modern computing was chasing letters with an EGA rabbit, I used the zip commands of good ole Norton Commander to archive the files (we used Gif’s back then) into abstractly named lumps. Did that stop Joshua? Not in the slightest. Needless to say, Dads porn collection went offline after that.

So, wherever you are tonight Joshua. We miss you! Be safe, and watch out for campers.

Oh, it’s snowing!

So, it started to snow. Not to bad just a dusting. Still had power, heat, lights. Just another Autumn day.

All hell breaks loose, but the dog seems to enjoy it!

Then it really started to snow, cars slamming into each other everywhere. Roads closed and the freeway moving at 2 miles per hour. There was a 20 car pile up not 15 minutes after I left work! Kids walking home from the main road and the daughter had to abandon her car for fear of the rather steep hill we live on. The dog certainly seemed to enjoy it though.

Now just silence

No power, no heat, no street! Still I have 300 lbs of concrete in the back of the SUV and the Four Wheel Drive engaged. Looks like I’ll be moving Thanksgiving dinner over to my sons apartment across the water.

Stay warm out there! This is me, in the dark and posting from work .

A short story by the world renowned author: Arthur C. Clarke

As described by Wikipedia

This short story tells of a Tibetan lamasery whose monks seek to list all of the names of God, since they believe the Universe was created in order to note all the names of God and once this naming is completed, God will bring the Universe to an end. Three centuries ago, the monks created an alphabet in which, they calculated, they could encode all the possible names of God, numbering about nine billion and each having no more than nine characters, in their alphabet. Writing the names out by hand, as they had been doing, even after eliminating various nonsense combination’s, would take another fifteen thousand years; the monks wish to use modern technology in order to finish this task more quickly.

They rent a computer capable of printing all the possible permutations, and they hire two Westerners to install and program the machine. The computer operators are skeptical but play along with the monks.

The operators engage the computer. After three months, as the job nears completion, they fear that the monks will blame the computer, and by extension its operators, when nothing happens. The Westerners delay the operation of the computer so that it will complete its final print run just after their scheduled departure. After their successful departure on ponies, they pause on the mountain path on their way back to the airfield, where a plane is waiting to take them back to civilization. Under a clear starlit night sky they estimate that it must be just about the time that the monks are pasting the final printed names into their holy books. They notice that “overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

I thought it might interest some of you to glimpse the strange and sometimes terrifying places my daily wanders take me.

So I created a new category and this will be  the place I post such things.