Someday in the future, the world will be divided into two mega-corporation-nation-states: Lance-Corp and Ostrich-Abuv. These two massive entities control all of the Earth's resources and have decided that we, the consumer, will only need two things. Lances and flying ostriches.

There are some by-products. The Lance-Corp factories spew molten effluence. Behind your local Ostrich-Abuv is a pile of bad eggs, some of which will hatch into pterodactyls.

An entrepreneur from the past will awaken from cryogenic sleep into this world of fire and feathers. He (or she) will get a loan and purchase a flying ostrich and lance. Whatever is left over she will use to buy some clones. She will take to the skies and bring down both mega-corporations by killing them all in true capitalistic fashion.

At least that's how I think it will happen.



* * * *

I've been working a lot more at the animal shelter. Sometimes I take care of the cats and sometimes I take care of the dogs. I like them both. I have a stronger rapport with the dogs since I'm a big goofy idiot that likes water and will eat anything. Also I drool.

The cats tend to be more dignified. Felines have a cool, collected demeanor and grace of movement that I aspire to but am confident I will never achieve. They're also a lot pointier. Cats can't seriously injure me. Hmm...maybe if they went for the eyes. I've been bitten once so far but I felt bad for the cat because it bit my knuckle and its mouth was stuck on it like a little kid trying to eat a caramel apple. I have big knuckles. And sometimes they are covered in caramel.

My cats are my little tigers. Fierce, but incredibly vulnerable.

* * * * *

After a while, most of my Pandora stations begin to sound roughly the same.

Borges taught me that when undertaking any difficult task, it is best to imagine myself as having already have done it. I think he referred to it as imposing the future upon oneself. "Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures."

If the path is not fixed, a person can become lost among the forks, strolling down paths of a time not quite their own. This is not a literal thing, except as it occurs in a mind. The absent-minded, dreamers, artists, and the mad are resisting the Now. It is untenable; the Now demands much.

I think about good ideas and bad ideas and how, at first, they can indistinguishable. When the chosen course reaches its resolution, then we can sit back and say "Well that was a bad idea."

Supposedly making an attempt is always a good idea.

Sleep will find me soon. That is the proper time to explore the other forks. See what could have happened. Dreams are not prophetic. People have believed them so on occasions when the paths do not seem to differ. But they always differ, although it is not apparent. Every dream is of the way the Now didn't happen.

Difficult tasks lie ahead. So I will sleep and dream and prepare myself as best I can. I will push away fear because fear is not useful. I'm always afraid of the wrong thing anyway.

I knew Jenny Hanover a long time ago. We were young, or at least young enough that I didn't immediately think she was completely mad. Her hobby, as she put it, was "shadow walking." This slightly ominous name was her term for lucid dreaming, or being aware of dreaming while dreaming. That's how I understood it at first. Since her disappearance, I haven't been able to understand much of anything. All I can do is try to organize the events by the order in which they occurred and keep looking for a pattern; those cause-and-effect moments that let me convince myself I have any control over what happens to me.

And maybe learn enough to keep me out of the insane asylum.

Jenny explained to me that experienced shadow walkers (her term, sometimes just "walkers") mostly spend their sleeping hours dreaming like everyone else. Shadow walking is a controlled process that requires careful preparation and should never be attempted alone.

"Like scuba diving?"

"Not like scuba diving," Jenny snapped. "You can die scuba diving. If something goes wrong after we've crossed the shadows we'll just end up back here." She set her backpack on the floor of my bedroom and began placing its contents in a row.

"Well I feel a lot better," I smiled, leaning across the doorway with my arms crossed. I was trying to look cool. Having a girl stay the night in my apartment was a rare thing in itself, and her backpack full of unusual objects was both intriguing and frightening. I recalled urban myths about stolen kidneys and began to wish I had made my roommate Phil stay in tonight. Then my socks slid on the hardwood floor and I fell backwards into the hallway.

"Ow."

Jenny didn't look up. "Still not cool."

* * * *

I just finished reading China Mieville's The City and The City. There are no unicorns in it. Despite this glaring omission, it is still an intriguing noir tale of a city with unusual borders.

It is dangerous for me to read crime noir. In my head I start referring to women as "dames" and whiskey and cigarettes seem like part of a complete breakfast. The world outside seems full of mystery and sinister plots and unicorns. Maybe not unicorns. Not the nice ones, anyway. Everyone is up to something. Scheming. Brooding. Whinnying ominously.

But after that book I read The World Jones Made by Philip K. Dick. Now I'm more worried about giant protozoan spores falling from space, and also of gaining the ability to see the future. This book was written well before Alan Moore's Watchmen, which also has a character who can see the future but cannot change it. Hmm...Slaughterhouse 5, too. These guys are just piling up.

So I don't want to be able to see into the future. I would only misuse the power, like predict a person's movements and make them step into a pie every time they are on their way to a formal event.

Time to start learning how to make pies.

Fiction

She is like the desert. Hauntingly beautiful with long stretches of an inhospitable sameness. She is water but it is best to bring your own. She has left me now to wander through sand and shale. Or perhaps I left her, slipping away under the cover of a monsoon storm. Red sky and thunder and fat drops of dusty rain. For a moment there are rivers carving a little deeper into the earth but pretty much the same for a long time.

The desert is a poor host and does not know how to treat the waters. Past the point of feeling spurned. Her dark eyes flash darkly than pass over me just as quickly back to the horizon. She loved me once. Her instincts know how to hurt me best by not seeing me at all. Not to be ignored. To ignore someone properly requires a great deal of attention. Time, the memory has been relegated to that sameness where she puts everything else.

My eyes now, which looked upon her with love and with love met, are grains of sand shifting against grains of sand. The water we shared baked into the clay. The crumbling tessellations formed by cracks could hardly hold a footprint.

Her instincts are right. I can't remember how long I've been here. Trying to find the last reflection of the way I was when I still loved her, and seeing nothing. Staring back when I look into the shrinking puddles. There is only the reflection of the sky with its wisp of cloud, and the gnarled trees, and the sand, and there is no place left for me.

So I'll go. I'll show her. I'll forget her too. If I cannot defeat a desert I will make my own. She in hers and me in mine, the forgotten and the forgetting. Perhaps all deserts start this way.

I've been going about this backwards. The last part was written first and the first part is being written last. The middle part is still the middle part.

This is a picture of a Space Princess. Democracy may be all the rage on this planet, but the rest of the galaxy consists predominantly of monarchies.


* * * *

Look what I found! I started a journal/letter/epistle to my friend methinks, as I knew her then and think of her still. Back when people still used Instant Messenger programs to chat online, our time zones synced up pretty well. I was always up at some ungodly hour of the night and methinks lives in India so for her it was usually mid-morning. I used to refer to her as a "Daywalker," my term for people who didn't stay up all night brooding for no apparent reason.

Yes, exactly. We would have conversations. We don't talk a great deal now, but our lives were so different then that simply still knowing each other now has taken on a slightly reverential quality. For me anyway. I try very hard not to inspire reverence in anyone and I am repelled and suspicious by anyone who views me any more than "somewhat tolerable."

So this is for her. There is more, but not all of it has reached the 3-year mark and as such, will not be disclosed here. But here's this.



7-30

Dear methinks,

This notebook is yours and I hope you like it as much as I do. The cover reminds me a tiny bit of a circus tent or maybe a telly struggling to get reception.

Odd. I never say "telly."

These composition notebooks usually have questionable color schemes. They are hardy and inexpensive. Perhaps Hemingway and Picasso shunned these in favor of their precious Moleskin(TM) Brand Notebooks but I will write on any portable surface including my hand, napkins, and dollhouse walls. Napkins instill the greatest camaraderie. Different colors, sizes, odd folds. They are better representations of my mind, scattered as it is with crumpled thoughts. And if the idea is no good or good enough to transfer to another home then voila! I still have a perfectly good napkin.

These notebooks used to have a larger space at the top of the page. These new editions have squozen in a couple more lines. Multiply that by 200 pages and that's 400 more lines! What a deal! This boon of space must be cherished. I shall try not to skip too many lines without the best of reasons.

My clock is glowing red midnight at me. I must try to rest and heal. I have many scratches from scrabbling about on rooftops. And a few from leaping from them. Goodnight!

7-31-07

Dear methinks,

Today is the first day of my torrid affair with Paxil. It is a common antidepressant that regulates seratonin [sic]. I've heard mixed reviews from friends who have used it but I'm going to do science and find out for myself. This journal, your journal, is part of the experiment. Have you read "Flowers For Algernon"? It's a short story told in journal format. The main character is of below-average mental capacity until an experiment makes him a genius...briefly. The author uses spelling and grammar to illustrate his rise and fall. So be sure to watch me for spelling errors. I'm usually pretty good about it.

My friend Tana sent me a text message about her day rafting on the river in Idaho, a state north of here. I warned her to alternate paddling on both sides of the raft or else only one arm will get all the exercise and she'll end up with one huge arm.

Tana and I are dating. We haven't discussed the details of our relationship. The conversation we're going to have drifts around us like a balloon someone has tied around my wrist so it won't blow away.

We've only been dating a week. We've been friends for over a year. She is younger than I am, 21 to my 25. When she begins school, she will do so at NAU, a university in northern Arizona. The North seems to be conspiring to keep her from me. The blame rests upon me, or it may, if I follow my plan to move to New York City. NAU is richly forested and gets snow in the winter. Its climate, so different from my dusty desert, belies its proximity. A couple hours of mildly reckless driving will bring me to her. And to the snow, in the winter. I don't care for snow. Interesting stuff, but I rather enjoy it only at a distance.

I've only known one Arizona to New York relationship attempt, and though they struggled mightily to connect across the country in the end it proved untenable. Middle America can be a formidable obstacle.

The rain came today. About this time of year the frail shell of the desert is ravaged by waters celestial as they're banished from the Heavens. Encrusted in concrete as our city is, the waters become violent commuters, ignoring speed limits, stop signs, and traffic lights. We put up with it because we know the waters are just tourists here picking up souvenirs from people's landscaping and going on their way.

It's hard to believe I've had this webjournal for seven years. It's changed a lot since 2003; I suppose it had to along with my own stubborn progress and our preferences in mass media.

The "mass" is the biggest difference. With so much information, it has to be compressed. Even Twitter pretty much proves that people want little delicious niblets of information, and lots of them. So there's that.

I've been reluctant to bring the blog around to meet my new Facebook account for that reason. I guess I don't want to be a brand. Or maybe I do want to be a brand but only if it's a cereal with fun marshmallow bits. "Guillermo: Part of Your Complete Breakfast-Oh-Damn-He-Is-Eating-Your-Breakfast." TM.

So right, be concise. But that's not why I'm here, is it? No, I come to the internet to waste time or maybe to look up the cast of the original A-Team. Shouldn't there be more stuff like this, shouldn't there be someone going against the grain and writing long-winded doubt-filled musings on how they're dissatisfied with themselves? I have a whole stack of notebooks filled with exactly that. Probably it's most interesting to me, but this is about connection, finding common ground and sharing experiences. How many times have I believed I was in love? How many friends have I raised a glass with who I never see anymore? Should I have used "whom" just then? Why are many of the questions I had when I was 18 the same as the questions I have now that I'm 28?

The biggest difference is the hopefulness. Oh, I have plenty of pages of terrible poetry, but the hope is still there. Ironically, my impulsiveness led to the more interesting episodes in my life. Now, with my diligent adherence to my brain medication, my impulsiveness is...not very.

I can already picture people who haven't known me as long thinking, "Wait, you were even more impulsive before?!"

Well, yes. Heh, check the blog archives. I couldn't go two weeks without doing something I horribly regretted and writing a bad poem about it which I also regretted.

It certainly wasn't boring.

Seven years and many scars ago.

I'm hardly unhappy. I can still get pretty moody now and then but I don't do anything drastic. The period of time following the death of Luis does not count, because, I think I was supposed to go a little crazy and be a little terrible. Also, driving 4,000 miles was surprisingly therapeutic. Not nearly enough, but it certainly helped.

That reminds me, I kept a video journal of that particular journey. I'll have to put them up on my Youtube channel and it will probably be in annoyingly small chunks since I don't have any video-editing software.

Many years ago, my friend Juliet worked the graveyard shift at a hotel and had read everything I had ever written because she had nothing better to do. So when I was writing, it felt like I was writing to her. Not just her, let's not get all romantic here (unless you're feeling...amorous). In my head, I could picture my friends as I tapped away at my little laptop keyboard. It felt personal, and it was personal.

It was a brave new world, and I knew people by their writing. Images used to be a pain in the ass, I'd have to find a site to host them, upload them, size them, all that nonsense. So writing reigned. And it will again.

In this glut of information and meta-information, looking inward is as vital as ever. The unexamined life is not worth living, or so I hear. I've been trying to understand this world and my place in it for so long that I've become complacent. Like checking the mailbox for epiphanies. Nope, nothing today, maybe tomorrow.

I'll try harder. Theoretically, I should be smarter now today than I was seven years ago. Maybe I'm close.

But now it is time to go to bed and fall asleep listening to H.P. Lovecraft stories on my ipod. I read a science article that explained it isn't possible to read in dreams (okay, it was an episode of Batman: The Animated Series) but I can. Last night I dreamed of a huge book of illustrations. One drawing spread across both pages, showing hooded monks working by candlelight in a huge cavern or monastery. Across the top was the word "Illuminate." It could have been a reference to the illuminated manuscripts from days of yore, but my dreams usually aren't that clever.

Then again, it is possible that I'm much more clever in my head than in the real world. This has also been suggested to me by more than a few people.

So, once more unto the breach, dear friends. Armed with a pen and an introspectiveness that borders on narcissism, here I go again.