Midnight Jolt Run

By now the fanboys are rushing to the battlements, trying to prepare for the uncouth masses waking up from the last three months…no…the last several years of blind lust for Apple Computers Inc.  I can only imagine how it must feel to know you’re on the other side of the coin when the Second Coming turns out to be a sham, the Lotto ticket is a fake, or the Pregnancy Test and the Colon Cancer results got mixed up at the clinic.  But that’s exactly what happened here.  The company that “Revolutionized” the industry just fucked up their chance to continue to suck unquestioned and untold amounts from the collective credit-card teats of the Starbucks crowd.  Hallelujah.  At least…I hope they have.

Now, this post has a higher purpose than just Apple bashing, so let me get it out of the way that I admire what OSX does for portable devices, and think it’s an excellent match on the iBook and Powerbooks.  Even the iPhone is the best at what it does, and I cannot argue the iPod itself is single-handedly responsible for saving Apple’s ass from the late 90’s.  However, after listening to the last three months of meaningless, useless jabber from the professional computer industry about the iPad, and for a moment actually thinking that MAYBE Apple would create a product I’d be interested in, I feel fully justified in bringing the fire.  You fucked up, Apple. Your one chance to woo me outside of me getting bored enough to Hackintosh a HP Mini and you lost it. Read the rest of this entry »

>part 1 >part 2 >part 3

They spent the evening in a mad dash of furious lovemaking. Making up for lost time, maybe.  Or maybe they both just realized that tomorrow they would have to return to their regular routine.  It didn’t matter.  Tomorrow didn’t matter.

Wet, soggy, but no longer shivering, they managed to make their way up into the bedroom.  Maybe it was the magic in the air, but Tom no longer felt like an old man, and Maria definitely didn’t feel like a little kid, and neither thought it completely strange when, as Maria was trying to coax him into another round with little kisses all over his back, that the sun came up before either of them felt tired.

They both used some minutes on Tom’s pay-as-you-go phone to call in sick, then continued to fuck like hyperactive teenagers until there was a real and serious danger of the bedroom floor cracking like the bathroom’s. Read the rest of this entry »

I used to think that changing the world was something anyone could do with the right idea, and honestly, I still believe it is.  The right idea at the right time with the right strengths and skills can be an amazing combination.  I believed, naively as many young people believe, that you could help change the world if you got into politics and made fair and just laws, or marched in defiant protest against the demons of the world.  There was even a time where I had reasoned out and decided at which point I could answer a call to arms to defend myself, my family and my country, and it pleased me to know that anyone can exercise their free will and become an extraordinary example of humanity, faith and inspiration to countless others.

But, if I knew then what I know now, I would probably want to grow up to be a terrorist.

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>part 1
>part 2

Scraping together what he could afford and borrowing what he couldn’t, Thomas bought a warehouse in the middle of what was laughingly called the rough-side of the tracks area of the city.  There were no tracks here.  Hell, most of the roads should have been condemned.  But there was plenty of poverty.  Plenty of crime.  Plenty of angry.  Plenty of tears.

He was working three days a week.  Just enough to pay the bills, eat, drive and have an active pay-as-you-go cell phone.  The rest of his cash went into his project.

Week one was painting.  Repairing.  Reconnecting ancient circuits in the walls to make it all work.  The building he bought never had been up to code, but it had been wired with thick, heavy cables that had survived decades of decay.   Where floors would rot, at least he could be certain of heavy wire underneith.   He knocked down walls, laid tarps and did emergency surgery on a top floor that was one good thunderstorm away from falling down anyway.  All the runes in the world would account for nothing if what they were burnt on fell apart.  And he needed space.  Lots of space.

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>part 1

** 5 Weeks Later **

The pulse lit up the old junk yard like a meteor flashing across the sky.  The four students looked to Thomas, who knelt next to the protective circle he had arranged from bits of scrap metal around the area.  “We’re good.”

“How can you be sure?” Josh asked with his arms crossed.

“The circuit is still intact,” Thomas said with a shrug, standing up from the circle.  He carefully broke the chain of metal with his foot, and a green spark fluttered to the ground as the protective shield was dropped.

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There are days in which the endless insanity rolling through my mind spills out onto the sidewalk and people around me are suckered into asking me:  Chris…what the fuck?  Well, to help explain some of that fuck, allow me to introduce:

A List of Personal Memes: Part 1

“Marple” – Definition:  The colour of the sky in the old 1970’s Spiderman Cartoon.  Reasoning:  The animation director, Ralph Bakshi, invented this colour after injecting liquid LSD under both his eyelids, snorting the ground up ivory of a woolly mammoth’s tusk, and forcibly swallowing seven litres of uncooked fortune-cookie dough one terrible evening.  The resulting vomit was used in many of the background shots as paint.  When asked why he coined the colour “Marple” Ralph said that it was the sound the vomit made as it ejected itself from his mouth and landed on the tile of the restroom  in a downtown Toronto police station. Read the rest of this entry »

Thomas Markham had a habit of completing circuits.

When he was nine years old, he fell from his tree-house and became momentarily suspended between two high-voltage wires running from the alley to an electrical transformer.  The jolt had been enough to stop his heart for almost a minute, and his mother’s CPR practice had been the thing that saved him after those terrifying fifty two seconds.  He never told his mom that it was more interesting than it was scary.

In High School he became known as the Mad Scientist.  Undeniably brilliant, (and terrifyingly fearless) he would often tinker with electric motors while they still ran, slap patch cables together with the wires hanging out of his mouth, and had been on the receiving end of no less than three lightning strikes.  None of these accidents, experiments or coincidences were fatal, of course, and despite the grey hairs on his parents and teacher’s heads, he always shrugged the events off as “not that big” or “safe enough”.

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There’s a lot of talk about Big Government in the media these days.  Health care, war, education, economic protection, and of course, how all of it is either good or bad.  I’ve heard the word ‘communist‘ used more readily and fluently (and fraudulently) than any year post Cold-War Cool-Off, the ideas of Socialism, Democracy, Capitalism and Freedom hacked to pieces and represented by all sides of every debate, and have seen irony of ironies as people argue, protest and wage rage-fuelled wars against the very ideas they claim to uphold.  What a load of epic bullshit.  And while it is easy to pick on the Right Wingers of the World right now due to the collapse of the economic stability they crave as a reason to toss off the shackles of oppressive rule (imagined or otherwise), this is something we are all guilty of doing. Of complaining about.  At one time or another, we have all bitched about someone with authority getting in our business, and we think it would be better if they didn’t.  Well, I’m sorry people, but as a collective species, right and left, up or down, vertical or horizontal, none of us have any fucking right to complain, because we all need our babysitter.

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I read some good shit from the White House yesterday.  Ahh, to be a political speech writer…

loved or hated, at least you get a solid paycheck and someone else’s neck on the chopping block when the book burners and critics come calling.  Cherry jobs like that don’t just come along every day, and you certainly don’t get to them by writing about Snape and Dumbledor’s backstage sex romps or debating Twilight VS Hellsing!  Hell no!

The message that the great Super-Obama, his underlings and his team of fanfiction.net forbidden writers have come up with is a good one, nonetheless:  Don’t give up, do your best, and use the Education System to your full advantage, because you’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you end up as a Wal Mart Greeter at the age of thirty.

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-     For the last couple weeks of Summer, (this being a relative term in Calgary) I have been pleasantly surprised by how many times I have been proved wrong.  One example in particular was that out of the several hundred homeless people that I’ve passed in these warm, moderate months, I’ve only ever had one ask me for a bus ticket or some change.  My error is in thinking that same old line I’m sure plenty of us use when we’re out walking about and see some poor old scruffy soul.

Oh, God, another beggar.  He’d better not ask me for anything.

Of course, when the poor souls (or maybe just more enlightened souls who don’t give a crap about what I consider to be important in society) just mind their own business or smile and nod politely, my first thought is to think the next one probably will instead of hey, maybe I’m being a dickwad. Read the rest of this entry »