Beasties and creep crawlies abound…
You might have heard of a guy by the name of Chuck Wendig. He’s had a series of fantastic books featuring his trailer-punk death psychic, Miriam Black. My personal favorites though are the many sourcebooks he wrote or co-wrote for White Wolf (now Onyx Path Publishing or O.P.P. if you know them) for the World of Darkness, and also for a book I don’t think gets as much credit as is due: The Blue Blazes.
But, apart from the free advertising here for Chuck (which hell yes, I support; buy his books), he also has a blog at http://www.terribleminds.com. On said blog, he’ll put out a challenge or two fairly regularly.
The most recent challenge was to take two random genres to mash up and then let them have at each other until you have 1,500 words, approximately. I got:
Space Opera and Splatter Punk.
So… this is going to get fucking disgusting pretty goddamned quick. I’m temporarily calling this one ‘Beasties.’ Maybe I rename it, maybe I don’t. Either way, enjoy – provided you can hold down your lunch. You’ve been warned.
The drop craft’s landing was much smoother than its orbital entry. It’s captain, Narthan, was irked at having to walk through one of his newer grunt’s vomit on his way out. According to the pilot, they were only minutes away from the last known location of the prospectors. When he found them, he would put his boot up their collective asses for dragging him down to the surface of… whatever the fuck this shitty planet was called. As the Fury’s Executive Officer, he resented going mudside in some ancient drop craft that his syndicate wouldn’t even retrofit. The smell of defoliant only made him more insufferable.
He gulped a lungfull of air from his rebreather and shouted at his crew.
“All right. You all know the reason we’re here. Get to the prospecting team’s transponder and bring back information on what happened to their party. This planet is property of the Noborov Syndicate now, and we’re to bring back anything useful concerning the missing prospectors as well as any survey data. Faster it’s done, the faster we can get our cut of everything valuable on this festering shithole. Fucking get to it.”
The crew split up into pairs to begin investigating while Narthan went back to the craft. He ducked his head into its access point and spoke to the pilot.
“We have a reliable linkup back to the Fury?”
“It’s thready, but it’s here. Even our amped up transponder relay gear is having trouble in this magnetosphere though. Cap’n ain’t gonna be happy, but… nothin’ to be done, XO.”
A scream came out from the jungle. Narthan was on the comm channel immediately.
“What in the fuck is going on? report in!”
“XO, you’re gonna wanna see this,” came a staticky voice. The channel’s signal was poor, but Narthan could make out the voice of Darby, one of the grunts.
“Locked on to your signal. I’m coming to you,” Narthan said, grabbing his gun.
The corpse was all but broken down into a twitching, bloody pile by the local wildlife. A small swarm of tiny, five-legged, eyeless creatures no bigger than a child’s finger were feasting on it, their mandibles clicking and clacking as they shoved gristle into their conical maws. They’d taken out the softest parts of the prospector first – the genitals, the meat near the armpits, spaces between digits on hands and feet. The skin was almost entirely devoured. It could barely be identified as human. Ropes of veins and nerves stood out in sharp relief against ravaged muscle. Bones could be seen in a few places, mostly around the ribs. The limbs looked deflated and withered.
Narthan did his best to look unfazed.
“Where’s his fucking head?” he said to Darby.
“No clue.” Darby’s voice was dull. Narthan recognized him as one of the crew’s only combat veterans.
“Any other bodies?”
“Not yet. If the scavs on this one are any indication, any of the other prospector corpses might be gone by now. These bastards are good little eaters.”
“You sure these things aren’t what did ‘em in?”
“If they were predators, I think they’d have started eating us by now.”
“Probably. But, never trust an alien ecology to be like ours.”
Narthan turned to look at the other crew mates. “All right. I want a standard sterilization here against known insect-like life. Hose this whole place down in a hundred meter radius from the landing craft. Hop to it!”
The men scattered to comply. As they did, the XO began to take count. The crew’s math didn’t add up.
He checked his roster in his ocular implant’s heads up display. One, two, three…
He counted nine men deployed in his line of sight.
Ten was a standard drop, plus a pilot.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, lifting his rebreather to spit. “Where the hell is Finch?”
The transponder became more finicky as Narthan trudged through the fetid jungle growth. Based on the Pilot’s earlier comment, he had no reason to believe that Finch might actually be dead – it was probably a transponder problem causing his reported ‘death.’ They’d seen it happen before on planets with strong magnetospheres. They’d barely touched down on the planet for fifteen minutes, how much trouble could a fuck up like Finch get into? Regardless, Narthan took Darby with him to look into the missing crewman’s last location.
Narthan figured the greedy little shit probably saw something that he thought might make him rich. Bizarre lifeforms fetched a good price in certain quarters of settled space, and Narthan was seeing all sorts of it that might qualify… if you were stupid enough to leave your post on an uncharted backwater planet.
He swatted at a stinging creature at his neck. His hand came away red and yellow with goop. Darby had a few critters on him too, but he didn’t seem to mind while they supped on his blood.
“For fuck’s sake, log this into our report, Darby – more insecticide next time.”
“Aye, XO.”
After a few more minutes they found a gobbet of flesh about the size of an apple in the leafy ground.
“Fuck,” said Narthan. “Is that…?”
Darby began scanning the area visually. His implants kicked in, giving his eye a shine like a cat’s.
“Yeah. That’s his heart,” said the grunt. “Personnel transponder is weaved in it day one with the syndicate. We’re right on top of the signal.”
Narthan sent an alert through the comm. “All right everyone. Pack it in. We’ve got hostile local life here not indicated by the initial sat survey. We’re getting the fuck out of here. Dust off in ten standards.”
He shut off the comm and looked into the jungle. That was when he saw Finch staring at him from behind a thicket of leafy growth.
“What the…” he said.
Many things happened almost at once.
First, Narthan heard distant gunfire. Several lights went off in his HUD display implanted in his left eye noting that two of the crew were now dead or dying. Then, that same eye was skewered by a flying lance of bone, sending vitreous humor and chunks of nerve into the blanket of dead leaves around his feet. He screamed and fell to his knees as another sliver of bone flew into his throat. His wet screams were utterly feral.
Narthan tried to rip the bloody dart from his eye socket with one hand and to offer futile panic fire with the other. The thing wearing Finch staggered out of the brush. It was much like the other five-legged insects they’d been shooing away, but larger, standing almost three feet tall and draped in what Narthan had to assume was the remains of Finch. Where the creature’s main body should be was now protected by Finch’s severed head from the jaw up. Bits of trachea, brain, and tongue dripped from its crude armor’s base. Fresh human bones – Finch’s femurs, a humerus, a tibia, and several vertebrae – seemed to cover its segmented legs like extra armor. It seemed to be nibbling on finger bones in it’s mouth, whirling and sharpening them down into darts.
Darby’s autorifle roared. The first hit to the thing knocked off the top of Finch’s skull, exposing the softer, pulsating shell of the beast beneath. The second shot sent a spray of yellow-brown ichor spurting across vines and roots as the thing fell.
The last thing Narthan would ever see, was the squirming of tiny, five-legged things crawling over his remaining good eye and beginning to devour it as his HUD flickered out and died with him.
Darby made it to the drop craft only to find the pilot dead. His head was similarly missing, his body practically rippling with burrowing horrors. He tossed the body out, then gave the craft the command to return to base on autopilot. He found more of the smaller beasts, and killed as many of the squirming things as he could under his boots until he could find no more.
Thirty seconds before docking with the Fury, he hit the airlock controls and voided the craft with an override. He left the airlock open until his skin went icy and cracked, until he felt like his eyes would freeze solid. When he finally managed to close the airlock, he knew he’d be in infirmary for weeks if he survived, laid up with voidbite. So long as the critters were dead, he could live with that.
When he finally felt the dock clamps hit home, the Fury’s alarm klaxons were active with orange quarantine lights. It was then he realized that the death of almost all his crew would trigger a lockdown request after going to an uncharted world.
Darby gave out a wheezing laugh, then lit a cigarette. As he did, a larval creature crawled up his hand. He took one big inhalation of smoke, then shoved the cigarette’s glowing ember into its soft chitin, searing his own flesh in the process.
Then the dock was filled with heat and flame to rival a small sun.
“Fuckin’ figures,” he said as he felt the heat rise, then saw a mass of writing creatures begin to poor out from behind bulkheads and drop cradles.
Then there was only fire.
You might notice that the writing challenges from 2015 have gone the way of the dodo. This is intentional. The Site Update is upon us.
You may remember back in 2016, before my life became much more complicated, I had intended to start editing and working towards publication. That time has come. I’ve taken down the (wretchedly) rough stories from the blog, and I’m now actively going through a review process… and looking for publishers!
I have about three stories that I feel are fit to print as of right now. I’ll be working these through the various publisher options I’m digging up and feeling out the landscape. Keep an ear to the ground for more information as it comes.
For the folks who really liked the stories, fret not – there hopefully will be buying options soon!
A Change In Format
Forgive me for the brief interruption, but I’m feeling like The Cutting Room Floor is shaping up more like a series of lists and one-liners than something more insightful. I’ll still be giving you the content you remember: the good, the bad and the indifferent won’t be going anywhere, nor will my cinematic sins that fell by the wayside. I’ll be trying to expand content in the lists a bit more, but mainly I want to include a couple articles about my experiences and realizations with cinema generally during the nineties and beyond. We’ll get to my topic for this post just after we get through…
The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent.
Cabin Boy (Bad) – Chris Elliott is Chris Elliott in this largely forgettable movie about a man-child brought onto a ship as – you guessed it – a cabin boy. At least his pipes are cleaned.
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (Bad) – Sorry, this was too much of Jim Carrey in a ninety-minute period for me. A Wacky guy with a knack for working with and retrieving lost animals goes after yet another animal quarry. Courtney Cox falls in love with this idiot along the way. Points given for the bit where Carrey’s butt asks for Binaca.
Blank Check (Indifferent) – This film has something to do with Miguel Ferrer trying to get a lot of dirty money back from a kid who he has paid hush money to in the dumbest way possible. Smart criminals don’t write blank checks, dumbass.
Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (Indifferent) – No O.J. this time given the Trial of the Century. It’s probably not the only reason the movie is forgettable though. After a while, all of this franchise’s films feel like they’re just the same movie on repeat. Leslie Nielsen does variously dirty and humorous things while fighting crime.
Clean Slate (Indifferent) – Dana Carvey is not Garth in this ho-hum comedy about an amnesiac detective. I think. It’s hard to remember. And I paid theater ticket price too. Lesson learned.
The Flintstones (Bad) – It’s okay to leave some properties alone, Hollywood. We can just watch the old cartoons. They’re better. Put your money into something more innovative next time. I honestly can’t remember anything about this movie other than wanting to escape despite the presence of John Goodman and Rick Moranis in the film.
City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold (Indifferent) – I can only tell you that this involves Jack Palance not being around anymore and something about his supposed hidden gold which Billy Crystal and Daniel Stern look to find. I don’t think they went for a City Slickers III after this one. Yet. Give the studio time though.
Speed (Bad) – Whoa. The bus can’t stop. Whew, I stopped the bus. Kiss me, leading lady person. Where is my paycheck? This must be what it was like to be Keanu Reeves in the nineties. Sandra Bullock also features as leading lady person.
Wolf (Good) – This wasn’t a bad film really. Had a good cast between Jack Nicholson, James Spader, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Nicholson gets bit my a werewolf. Spader gets bit by Nicholson. Then, they fight over sexual access to Pfeiffer. But… that’s really kind of it.
The Lion King (Good) – You can crib worse plots than Hamlet (you can also rip off worse series than Kimba the White Lion). The technical work was good between the rotoscoping and the shading technologies emerging at the time, but this film doesn’t get me back to watch it too often. It’s a definite highmark in terms of technique. Hakuna Matata will always be better than YOLO. Oh, and Disney, you might pay for the songs you use in your soundtrack too.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Indifferent) – Where it’s cousin, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) had a conversion that moved the dial for me in my inexperienced youth, this just… didn’t. I may also have finally seen this after actually reading Frankenstein… which kinda ruined it for me since adaptations don’t frequently scratch the itch the same way a novel can.
The Santa Clause (Indifferent) – By the time I saw this, most kid movies had lost their charm. Tim Allen plays a guy who gets roped into becoming the real Santa Claus. Tim Allen’s not bad as a comedian or an actor – I loved Home Improvement (1991 – 1999) – but… eh.
Leon: the Professional (Good) – I saw this one late. Like, last year late (2016). So a lot of the stuff that was over the top for its day didn’t have the punch I suppose to make it one of my higher rated films. It is however definitely worth a watch, not only for Gary Oldman’s performance, but also that of a very young Natalie Portman. Additionally, anything with Jean Reno is worth watching. It’s about a little girl who loses her family to some very crooked people and wants her neighbor – an assassin – to train her for a path to vengeance.
Star Trek: Generations (Bad) – Another Star Trek plot that bring the original series and the Next Generation cast together. I’m assuming that what left a bad taste in my mouth was the thing that kind of gets me with all television-to-big-screen adaptations: it’s just another episode and Trek isn’t really my go to sci-fi franchise. This is just a longer episode with better special effects, a couple tacked on big names, and a mild crossover from the original series. Features William Shatner, Malcolm McDowell, and the Star Trek: the Next Generation(1987-1994) crew, including Whoopi Goldberg.
Junior (Indifferent) – Another foray into comedy for Schwarzenegger. This time, he’s carrying a baby inside of him! Not as funny as it sounds.
Dumb and Dumber (Bad) – Is there something wrong with me? Maybe I just don’t like comedy?Two idiots embark on wacky adventures in their dog grooming van. While I don’t really like Carrey all that much (as you can probably tell by now), Jeff Bridges is kind of awesome. He at least should have moved the dial up to indifferent but… no.
Maverick (Good) – This western, focusing on gambling and riverboat casinos, didn’t quite move the dial as much as Tombstone did. You do, however, get great performances by Mel Gibson, James Garner, and Graham Greene.
True Lies (Good) – I remember this film clearly. My cousin and I took my dad to go see this as a surprise for his birthday I think. He’d helped my cousin and I a lot that year, and Dad loved it – especially the bits with the Harrier Jet. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays an undercover agent. His line of work gets in the way of his marriage with Jaime Lee Curtis though. She feels alone and wants some excitement in their romance again. Unfortunately, this gets her tied in with his work, which both she and he are totally unprepared for. Good supporting cast in the form of Bill Paxton and Tom Arnold.
Music To Outshine the Movie
Let’s take a moment before we get to my cinematic viewing failures to discuss something that’s been on my mind for the past couple of nineties posts: music.
You’ve no doubt seen music come up in the notes for a lot of my favorite films already. It goes to say that most movies that grip you in your very soul have some musical accoutrements going on, even if you may not be consciously aware of it. Graeme Revell is one of the best guys at doing this, though I’d also credit Trevor Jones and James Newton Howard. You also get the household names who ubiquitously stand out for their significant melodic contributions, such as John Williams or Danny Elfman.
But, there’s another kind of soundtrack that comes up again and again: the ensemble soundtrack. These are performed by the famed and justly popular ‘Various Artists.’ This leads to a weird phenomenon that I’ve noted when it comes to the ensemble soundcast. Their collected artists blend to form exactly what the movies need, above and beyond a score (soundtracks and scores being very different).
But, sometimes. Just sometimes… you get a lackluster or even terrible film that has a great soundtrack.
I have a couple of these in mind, but the one I’m going to use as an example is the movie Mortal Kombat (1995). This movie is pretty awful. While some video game franchise adaptations have gotten big (Tomb Raider 2001, Resident Evil, 2002) this was not the era for that kind of outcome (though Mortal Kombat did spawn several, equally awful sequels – so they must have done something right). Video game adaptations were more likely to come out like the much maligned film, Super Mario Brothers (1993). Mortal Kombat wasn’t quite that bad, but when you cast Christopher Lambert as the Japanese God of Lightning, you have failed spectacularly. Even with Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as Shang Tsung, they still had a lot of explaining to do.
The soundtrack, on the other hand, is amazingly good. If I’m sitting down to write or to get work done, I am very likely to have Mortal Kombat’s soundtrack on hand. It’s high energy and features a lot of great acts like KMFDM, Juno Reactor, Gravity Kills, Orbital, Fear Factory, and Type O Negative. These are not mainstream acts either. Most of these guys are hailing from the school of electronic and industrial music. But good goddamn do they put on a hell of a show.
Not only bombs get stunning soundtracks, though . There are other good films whose soundtracks really outshine or perfectly compliment the film. Empire Records (1995) comes to mind as a good example of this. While it was a great film at the time I watched it, it’s impact has lessened over time – but the soundtrack has not. It’s not a bad movie per se, but the music definitely outshines it, at least for me.
There are also great movies that get even better soundtracks. Stuff that gets watched again and again, but you listen to the soundtracks way more frequently. A great example of this is Grosse Pointe Blank (1996). It’s soundtrack is like a love song to New Wave and the eighties in general.
Here’s a couple more examples (from both good and bad films) of nineties soundtracks that get listened to more than the movie gets watched. I think you can figure out the good from the bad:
- Batman Forever (1995) featuring Seal, U2, Massive Attack, and the Flaming Lips.
- The Crow (1994) featuring The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Stone Temple Pilots, Jesus and Mary Chain, and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult.
- Judgement Night (1993) featuring mashups such as Biohazard with Onyx, Cypress Hill with Pearl Jam, Sir Mix-a-lot with Mudhoney, and Run D.M.C. and De La Soul.
- Demon Knight (1995) featuring Pantera, Ministry, the Gravediggaz, Rollins Band, Megadeth, and Filter.
- Dangerous Minds (1996) featuring Coolio… and surprisingly little else, but I listen to that song way more than I watch that film (I don’t think I’ve revisited it since the first watching).
- Romeo + Juliet (1996) featuring The Cranberries, Garbage, Everclear, Radiohead, Butthole Surfers, and the Cardigans
- The Matrix (1999) featuring Rammstein, Rob Zombie, Rage Against the Machine, Rob Dougan, Spybreak, Ministry, the Deftones, Marilyn Manson, and the Propellerheads.
- Space Jam (1996) featuring R. Kelly, Seal (by way of Steve Miller), Tommy Chong with Cheech Marin, and Salt-n-Pepa
- Clerks (1994) featuring Bad Religion, Stabbing Westward, Soul Asylum, and Alice in Chains.
I am positive that I haven’t even hit a fraction of the soundtracks that are going to push peoples buttons. These are just mine. But the fact that the byproduct of the film can be just as engaging or even better than their films boggles my mind sometimes given the difference between the cost of making a film and finding suitable music.
Cinematic Sins
As always, there were some films that were explicitly blocked by parents, others that came and went too quickly, or that I was too limited in personal growth to see the potential value of. I’d like to think that by the age of seventeen that I’d have something resembling sense, but… nope. No such luck.
Blink – I vaguely remember this title pinging the radar at some point, mostly because it was about a person who through medical advances gets their sight back. Further research showed it features Madeleine Stowe, which is a plus given how much I like 12 Monkeys (1995).
The Getaway – Mostly this would be good to watch just for the basis of its cast. It didn’t have robots, zombies, aliens, or anything ‘weird,’ so it failed to draw my attention. With Alec Baldwin, Kim Basinger, Michael Madsen, Jennifer Tilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and James Woods, it probably wouldn’t be a waste of my time.
Reality Bites – Sullen and single me wouldn’t have been down to see this at the time. I’m glad I’m not such a moody shit anymore. This was Winona Ryder in her prime. Plus Ethan Hawke, Ben Stiller, and Janeane Garafalo before she really got famous.
Sugar Hill – Another gritty portrayal of people involved with the drug trade. So you can imagine this one didn’t pass muster for parental funds. Also at that time I hadn’t really got into the genre of crime movies yet. That’d change in the next year with The Usual Suspects (1995). It’s got Wesley Snipes before he went batshit crazy too.
The Hudsucker Proxy – I like Tim Robbins. Let’s give it a go. I’ve heard you either love this film or you hate it. Not a lot of middle ground.
Threesome – See Reality Bites above for the reason and replace the actresses and actors with Lara Flynn Boyle, Stephen Baldwin, and Josh Charles.
Surviving the Game – I don’t remember this one coming around but it came up in my research for this year. It’s Rutger Hauer and Ice-T. I’m down for that.
Brainscan – I can hear my friend Nick tutting at me for not having seen this. I shall have to reach out to him for a viewing. I would not be surprised at all if he has this on DVD somewhere.
PCU – This film is another example of what I call ‘The Shawshank Factor’. It is a movie that I have seen bits and pieces of, multiple times, but have never watched in total. I am unsure as to whether or not I have seen all of this film. It’s got some great work by Jeremy Piven and David Spade, so I’ll need to get back to this from start to finish.
Crooklyn – Another Spike Lee Joint. He was a voice for both my generation and the one before it. And, arguably for today’s as well. I really need to catch up on his work. Plus one of my favorite actors. Delroy Lindo, is in the cast.
Renaissance Man – I like Danny DeVito. Sure, why not?
Wyatt Earp – I like the lore of the men and women involved in Tombstone’s history, but I never had the three hours and ten minutes to sit down and watch this film on one of the most famous of those people, the titular Wyatt Earp.
The Client – Maybe if I like The Firm (1993) I’ll watch this one too. Lord knows I can’t seem to sink my teeth into Grisham’s novels, so movies are probably the better way to go.
Clear and Present Danger – There are so many Tom Clancy adaptations that this one just became another in the mix. I don’t typically go out of my way for Republican ideology in my fiction either. But this is Harrison Ford. I can trust him, right?
Natural Born Killers – This is where my parents drew the line in 1994. I may have gotten away with Pulp Fiction. I may have snuck in Clerks on VHS. But they were not putting money into my hands to go see a movie that they felt glorified serial killers. It didn’t matter how cool Oliver Stone might have seemed after JFK. I just never got back to this one, not even with its great lineup: Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr, Tommy Lee Jones, and Tom Sizemore.
Quiz Show – So many people have talked this one up and at the time I couldn’t have cared less. Now that I know a little bit more about its background, I think I’d probably enjoy it.
Ed Wood – Given my leanings, I have no idea why I wouldn’t have gone immediately to the theater to watch Tim Burton’s biopic on Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp.
Shall we play a game?
Some of you may be aware that this is not the only place I where put my metaphorical pen to digital paper. I’ve been known to drop some words over at another blog: HeyPoorPlayer. It’s a haven for all sorts of gaming news, primarily focused on video games. It’s been wonderful writing for them, especially given my somewhat different slant on their site.
They let me in because I’m a gaming fanatic. Always have been. When dad came home with our first computer, a Texas Instruments 80, and plugged in Alpiner, that was all it took. Many other games followed, and not just on the computer. Sure, Coleco Vision, the Sega Master System and Genesis (and their expansions, Sega CD, and the 32X), and others followed. But, one of my true passions is the roleplaying game. I first discovered them when dad was holding court over a game of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. He’d invited his students from his high school’s Wargaming Club (later renamed to the ‘Conflict Simulation Group’ ) to our home for an extended day of play. I was eight. They all looked to be having a lot of fun. I asked when I could play and dad gave the answer all kids get: when you’re older. Older was four years later. The game was West End’s ‘Ghostbusters: The Roleplaying Game.’ That pretty much sealed the deal.
RPGs offered unlimited possibilities. Anything could happen. Nothing had to be on rails. You could do whatever you wanted. Theoretically. You try to shake an owlbear’s hand, you’re gonna have a bad time. But, I digress.
I still acquire RPG games today because even if I haven’t the time to play them or the dedicated group of people to come to the table once a week, I love the industry and love the new ideas that crop up. The physical books are a hefy investment, with most titles starting at about thirty dollars nowadays. So, I have to really want something to get a physical copy anymore.
I got a physical copy of Unknown Armies from a store out in Phoenix, AZ (Imperial Outpost) . And it’s a doozy.
If you want, you can go learn more at HeyPoorPlayer about how the game puts you in the midst of an eternal struggle between angels, demons, magicians, and even stranger things. If you’re down for a dark trip down a strange street, it could be just the thing for you.
And while you’re at it, give HeyPoorPlayer a follow on Facebook or Twitter for more as it comes on Unknown Armies and other great titles we come across. Because games that don’t get talked about don’t get played.
The second of the writing exercises I’m working on today is “Imperative.’ The goal is to write a story fragment that is 500 words long, but that only uses imperative commands. I though this exercise to be an act of punishment by some far off person who claims that this will bring me some kind of unexpected result.
It kinda did.
The exercise forces me into a particular structure of narrative. It forces things to move along, sentence by sentence, which as the author of the book I’m using notes all writing should do – one sentence takes you to the next in a progression that’s always moving forward.
It belabors the point a bit, but I can see what he’s getting at.
So here’s the snippet I wrote. It’s a part of some of my upcoming surprises.
Please step forward. Please remain still while our diagnostics take count of your various biometric data. Please inhale deeply, then exhale. Now, provide one sample for each of the labeled samples in the seven containers in front of you. Take as much time as needed to complete this task.
Please remain seated for the next several minutes and confirm all information on the touch screen in front of you. Be sure to sign off on all documentation with your approved fingerprint as use of any non authorized fingerprints could result in the activation of the countermeasures agreed upon in your employment contract.
Stand and go to the decontamination shower unit adjacent to the intake center area. Wash everywhere thoroughly, rinse, then repeat on more time. Do not wash and rinse a third time as this may scrub off trace elements that we will need to continue monitoring your wellbeing within the facility.
Please walk through the exit and into the dressing room area. Change into your approved clothing as seen in the bin at your feet. Be sure that all sleeves and pants tuck neatly into your gloves and boots. Fasten your headset firmly to your crown, placing the earpiece in your right ear. Adjust the microphone to a space approximately two inches from your mouth. Test the microphone by saying: Hello, my name is ___________ my employee ID is _________. Do not take this instruction too literally. Say your full name in the first blank and your ID number in full in the second, as leaving the blanks empty may also activate the countermeasures outlined in your employee contract.
When you hear the beep in your left ear as a low noise, raise your right hand. When the noise becomes unbearable, put it down. Repeat this again upon waking if you have gone unconscious as a result of high sonic resonance Lower your right hand before it reaches the previous threshold if unconsciousness has occured in prior hearing calibrations.
Remove your headset now, and do not wear it anywhere else but in the listening facility at the end of the hall. Proceed to your Medical Overseer. Provide him or her with any information he or she may request.
Please provide one secret to your Medical Overseer that no one else knows. Write this down in your provided spiral notebook with your approved number two pencil. Do not include the names of family pets, spouses, prior addresses, or the name of your god unless they are one hundred percent uncompromised and secret. Once your secret has been extracted, proceed to your Floor Manager.
Please read today’s instructions extremely carefully. Do not skip any text, no matter how boring it looks. Especially be sure to review the countermeasures of your contract as they may be deployed at any time for failure to comply with facility bylaws and regulations.
Proceed to your listening station. Make sure that it is kept orderly and tidy. Please place your listening gear back onto your head, plugging the jack into the port provided on your desk. Ensure that your spiral bound notebook contains no traces of your secret. Rub your number two lead pencil over the top page until you are sure there are no secret traces remaining.
Make sure you are comfortable.
Please begin listening to your assigned transmissions and allow the Harcourt Group to welcome you to your new home at the Transmissions of Interest Program.
When my girlfriend and I started dating, she knew that what I wanted to do was write. She read my work, gave a lot of good observations from the reader point of view, and encouraged me to write more. As I did, she observed that I was always looking for ways to sharpen my skills.
So she bought me a book called ‘The 3 A.M. Epiphany‘ by Brian Kiteley. It’s mostly a series of exercises with some explanation on writing process and expansion on said exercises. I’ve used it on occasion with some random exercises where I thought I could use the lesson being taught, but I think I’ll start going through them sequentially now that I’ve got some time on my hands.
I decided to do one this morning called ‘The Reluctant I.’ The goal was to pop out a six hundred word piece in which the writer is not allowed to use the words ‘I, me, or my’ more than a total of three times. The goal is to have a narrator who is less interested in his personal feelings or thoughts, and more interested in what has occurred.
I decided to do this in the form of a witness statement being given to a police officer by a security guard who got brought in on an odd call.
I figured I’d share it here. Enjoy.
Incident Witness Statement: 7204-028
Witness: Brendan O’Niell
Crime Scene: Castro’s Convenience, corner of 17th and South St.
Look, you’ve asked three times already between two officers. But, sure. We can discuss this again if you want. The facts ain’t gonna change though.
The store was a mess on arrival, okay? It was fucked up when I got there. You can tell the pricks in the company’s liability department that. The security gate on the convenience store window is busted in like it got hit by a truck – no big surprise the burglar alarm went off. Glass is all over the place and the alarm is blaring. The lookie-loos aren’t out on the street – not yet. But, people are lookin’ out their windows, both from above the storefront and across the street. There’s stuff all over the place. Cheetos, soda, cigarette lighters, smokes, and that vape shit that’s got so popular. Junk’s everywhere. You can’t walk around without hearing something crunch underfoot. Protocol says that it’s required of all guards to take a look around the place before shutting off the burglar alarm. It’s policy and procedure. Standard stuff. So the book gets followed, no matter how fuckin’ weird the call site looks.
So there’s a mess, but it ain’t so bad that a walkthrough can’t be done. Anyone who comes in to do anything afterward is gonna make the same kinda disturbance. Sure, it’s dark – whatever made the impact knocked the shit out of the fuse box – but that’s what the maglite’s for. And yeah, the pistol for anything unexpected. Totally legal, permit and everything. Book says guards on call can carry licensced sidearms if they want with client consent, which is also in place. Check with the company. All above board.
Anyway, gettin’ further into the store a smell comes up. Not exactly sure at first what it is. Then it hits: ozone. That smell you get when you have a bad storm comin’ on.
That’s when shit got weird.
Cause, there’s this guy in there, behind what’s left of the counter. He’s not easy to see, right? Like a black human outline surrounded by, no shit, little bolts of lightnin’. Raisin’ the gun isn’t a question – that happens as a reflex. There’s some yellin’. Might have called him a motherfucker. Understandable though. Dude shows up lookin’ like somethin’ out of a comic book, some f-bombs are gonna drop. Harsh language ain’t against the law yet.
Then the second guy swoops in.
The other dude is dressed up in some kinda ninja outfit. He’s got a pair swords in his hands and he tackles the guy who looks like the end of a severed livewire. The lightnin’ arcs off his swords, and it’s runnin’ over his arms and legs and… fuck, how is that even possible? We both know that ain’t possible, but… shit. God’s honest truth.
They tussle. Lightnin’ guy gets tossed over the counter with the ninja guy wailin’ on him to beat the fuckin’ band. The swords aren’t doing shit to lightnin’ guy. They’re bouncing off the bolts like goddamned Nerf blades. Then there’s this huge jolt of electricity and I go blind. But they’re still goin’ at it, makin’ a racket like you ain’t ever heard. Next thing it’s totally dark. Musta passed out or somethin’. EMTs are there, askin’ about injuries, doin’ their thing. Someone gets a gurney while they start askin’ about vitals.
Look, it sounds crazy. I also understand that the body cam the company mandates is all fucked up. It was next to a guy who looked like he shoulda been playing dress up as one of Thor’s fuckin’ brothers. But honest, man: that shit happened. So you do what you gotta do. Send in the headcase guys, make an arrangement with a psychologist, reserve a padded room if it makes you feel better. If the cameras in that bodega are still working, they’ll corroborate the whole thing.
Those guys were real.
Real and dangerous.
And beside – you got all of the people who were standin’ out there when the EMTs came on scene. Ask them. They’ll tell you the same.
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