9:10
Sing to the audience
It used to be they turned the page
To discover the plots that we made
But now, the story’s just words
Living in the cloud that we heard
of
wires and numbers and power that’s burned
It’s so strange, it’s almost absurd
So we swallow and chew on despair
Try to survive on electronic fare
oh
It’s crazy
It’s so unreal
It’s crazy
An electronic meal
It’s seems it was just yesterday
I had a book there was no way to play
I’d settle down under my sheets
Use a flashlight in order to read
Hey
I want go back, to those simple days
Without downloads or batteries to drain
I want my books in paper or hard
Two perfect covers made out of card
You see
It’s crazy
It’s so unreal
It’s crazy
This electronic deal
So do away with wires and steel
I’ll read my fiction and fantasy
Deny them all my money to steal
Give my dollars for book that are real
Because
They’re crazy
With shit so unreal
I’m not crazy
For an electronic deal
oh
It’s crazy
It’s so unreal
It’s crazy
An electronic meal
Don’t
Be crazy
Keep it real
They’re crazy
An electronic steal
9:9
9:9
Gleaming blades of light piercing through windows and eyelids alike; an aching stiffness in the joints; the rumble and moan of the industrious ants of the colony and that thick and gooey muck that covered every lobe and crevasse in his tired brain: these were the things that morning brought.
He hated mornings. Some people awoke refreshed and reinvigorated and more power to them. But he just woke feeling worse than he had when he fell asleep; nothing in the long list of things mornings brought had any appeal, not the least of which was the fact that in always meant he had to do it all over again.
“It’s like a runners’ high,” they’d tell him. “Wait for it, soon you will be bouncing out of bed and discovering that the early morning can be your most productive time!” Apparently if one just grasped the morning by the horns and dove into it, it would become the shangri-la of productivity and bliss. So far all he’d found was that if you tried to grasp morning by the horns you quickly found yourself facedown in wettest and most disgusting corner of the corral.
“Try harder!” they’d say…
And it looked like this morning was not going to be the breakthrough that those ‘morning people’ kept promising. In fact, all indications were that this particular morning was going to be the poster child of of not-a-morning-person’s mornings; a veritable archetype of blech; the epitome of brain fuzzing, body aching, eye crusting, non sensical, pull the covers over your head and hide ante meridians.
“Gaargh! I hate mornings…”
9:8
9:8
Rowan couldn’t believe her eyes. It’s a friggin beaver. A beaver; just like the one Gareth had being going on about. She was sure he’d been pulling her leg with all the nonsense about a beaver and lemon tree. She’d been anticipating a giant guinea pig or something and a good laugh. When they’d got back to the apartment and the tree was gone she had thought he was just taking a joke too far.
Be he’d been pretty adamant hadn’t he? Still, a real live friggin beaver? Well, at least she thought it was still alive. The poor thing was bleeding pretty bad. Rowan stepped back into the apartment and grabbed an old set of sheets from the linen cupboard. The pale lilac sheets had come from her mother’s cast offs when she moved out and she hadn’t used them in ages. She dropped the folded top sheet on the hallway carpet and snapped out the fitted bottom sheet.
The sharp crack of the cotton sheet startled her as it broke the silence that seemed to have pervaded throughout her apartment. Should I wake Gareth up? Silently, Rowan decided to let sleeping boys lie and laid the sheet quietly out beside the bleeding beaver. Gingerly she rolled the limp mass over onto the sheet and quickly wrapped the still form up, trying to apply some pressure to where the blood seemed worst.
After she had the beaver tightly swaddled in the now blood-soaked sheet, Caroline grabbed the edges tightly and pulled. Dragging the heavy beaver backwards to the kitchen was more difficult than she’d thought it was be. This sure as shit weren’t no guinea pig, she thought to herself. One last heave dragged the sheets over the lip and onto the linoleum. Rowan looked up and sighed in relief as she saw there was hardly any blood on the dingy carpet. Well I guess mah damage deposit’s still safe, she thought giddily.
Stepping over the lilac-wrapped beaver, she retrieved the top sheet and some shears from a kitchen drawer. Time to make some bandages: beaver-style!
9:7
9:7
Caroline never did find out if her father had found the Malibu parked at the train station 150 miles away. She’d run out of gas and the $50 in her purse wasn’t going to go as far in the tank of that guzzler as it would at the bus station. She parked it at the train station to try and misdirect any pursuit and walked the two miles to the Greyhound. $45 later and she had a ticket heading east and hopefully far enough away from her old life that she’d never be found.
Slouched on the toilet seat in a grimy gas station washroom, she now wondered if anyone had ever even bothered to look. At least after he found the car, why would he have even bothered. All he cared about was his cherished animals and the endless blog of nature he that worked and slaved endlessly on. Her childhood had been an endless nightmare of one torture after another and she had made plenty sure he knew about it. All he cared about was getting back out there and heaping more indignities on her.
Well she we was done with that. She was never going back; she’d die first if that’s what it took. Caroline stood up and leaned in close to the mirror. “It was only a fucking rodent. It probably deserved to die,” she steeled herself. “You care about yourself and not the rest of the fucking world, just like the rest of those fuckers. Then you’ll be golden…”
She wiped her face with her cold hands and then took a deep breath.
“Let’s do this thing.”
9:6
9:6
Caroline was having a bad week. She seemed to have hooked up with some bad people. She had one to many bad experiences and now it looked as if she had done a bad thing. A very bad thing.
Caroline didn’t like guns: they were loud, scary and dangerous. People got killed by guns and it wasn’t always the bad people. Although now that she thought of it, after this week she just might be on the bad end of things. And she really didn’t want to get shot; she really didn’t.
There was no need. They were just dumb animals, there was no need to bring guns and there was certainly no need to start blasting away like they were playing Halo. Thank god they didn’t try and give one to me.
“Oh this is really too much,” she muttered at the reflection in the grimy mirror. Oh my god this is too much. I need to get away from this; who knows who they are going to start shooting at next.
It had started so easily. Just follow a few people around, keep an eye out for some out-of-place animals and keep her mouth shut. The money was good, the wretched animals didn’t belong anyway and she might buy herself some time to figure out how to stay in the city. She couldn’t go home. She couldn’t bare the thought of crawling back to that disgusting mudhole.
Caroline shuddered at the memory of that last day she had spent on her father’s ranch. The humiliation of his ultimatum and that fanatical look in his stupid eyes and he ordered her off his land if she wouldn’t join him in the pen. Oh he never believed for a minute that he wouldn’t win; he had no idea. She had turned and run. She made straight for his prized Malibu in the back shop and fired it up. There as no way she was getting in one of the disgusting pickups—covered inside and out with shit and grime and everything that represented this hateful place— and somehow she subconciously knew this would might actually hurt him; she knew here leaving never would.
She fired up the printing muscle car and slammed the hurst into reverse. As she ratcheted it into drive, she could hear her father finally catch on and start swearing and threatening her, but as she floored and the 4 barrels kicked in his shouting was drowned out by the roar of his precious 300 horsepower baby. Spraying gravel across the yard, Caroline left with just the clothes on her back and a car she didn’t own and never, ever looked back.
OMG: More Stupid Human Tricks
Some one donated $50,000 to a chicken rescue society, which is silly enough:
Their egg-laying days behind them, some 1,200 Northern California chickens are heading for a cozy retirement on the East Coast, where they will live outside of cages and have plenty of room to spread their wings.
The Sacramento Bee reports that an anonymous $50,000 US donation is funding Operation Chicken Airlift …
But then they tried to make the story more dramatic by adding the following statement:
Laying hens are generally too lean for human consumption and are usually slaughtered after they stop providing eggs.
Wow, it really is sad that the poor chickens are slaughtered rather than eaten when their egg-laying days are done. Eating them would be way more humane. And tasty.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/09/05/chickens-retirement.html
9:5
9:5
“Oh what a twisted web we weave… what a twisted, twisted web indeed.”
Edward twitched his whiskers in a most self satisfied way and said, “I knew it. As sure as my tail is fluffy, I knew there would be an equally voluminous tale of greed somewhere in this mess.”
“There’s always a mess when people get the scent of green. More like hogs a than any self respecting rabbits. Still…” Edward looked around and abashedly realized that he was lecturing an empty room. “Hurmph,” he grunted.
The next step seemed to be returning to the environs currently inhabited by the young Gareth fellow. He might have tried his home town first, but all the indications were that events had progressed beyond that. And time seemed to be an increasingly relevant factor.
“Well,” he addressed the empty room once more, “Adieu, farewell and auf weidersehen! Until we meet again!” He swept an elegant rabbit bow to the invisible observers and silently slipped out.
9:4
9:4
June the second, nineteen hundred and fifty
He says I have to practice my script. He says that if I can’t write properly then I can’t think properly; and if I can’t think then I’m just a waste of His time, that He might as well take me back to the bridge and toss me over like my father was going to.
And so I will write for Him. But I will also write for myself. This will be a journal for me and me alone; He will never see it, never judge it, and it will be my secret. Not like that tatty leather book He has. I bet He doesn’t even suspect that I’ve been reading it. And that is justice: I will steal from him as He steals from everyone. And now I’ve stolen a new name from Him too. His book ‘gave’ it to me and who am I to refuse. Let Him call me whatever He wants, for I know someday He will call me it for the last time.
For He is the master of chaos, an illusion of the devil and the very incarnation of destruction, and I will contain Him. I will bring order to the world and lay Him low.
And so here I set out my plan.
Ordo ab chaos
Barnabas
9:3
9:3
Edward gazed across the water. It really was amazing what people got up to when they had the time and resources. This vast reservoir of water was entirely man made. And it was completely out of place here on the prairie, as the prickly pear cactus that Edward had narrowly avoided sitting on attested to. Leave it to people to put a lake in the desert.
The sun was slowly setting and the light twinkled and bounced off the water, and the occasional sail, while Edward let focus slip from his eyes.
It hadn’t taken that long to find it. It hadn’t really been hidden, just placed out of view under a pile of old musty saddle blankets. The ratty notebook had been filled with page after page of neatly written script and a most informative, yet horrifying, story.
And, most importantly, it had provided a vital clue to why the beaver seemed to be messing about in his business. Not the whole story, at least not yet, but there was now a logical connection between Edward’s mission and the beaver’s constant interference—and that was what he had been looking for. Better yet, it also provided a pretty good idea where he might find what the flat-tailed pinhead was sticking his nose into this time.
9:2
9:2
It was cold here in the abandoned farmyard. The failing summer left little heat to keep the air warm throughout the night, and as the wind whistled off the nearby reservoir it made for a chilly morning.
A few more moments, just be sure, and then we’ll move in. Edward, being a rabbit after all, had lots of experience ignoring the weather and remaining still. That didn’t mean he liked it, however. And if he was to be completely honest with himself, he may have gotten a bit spoiled over the last few years.
It hadn’t taken long to backtrack the beaver’s movements over the last little while. Most of it was of an insubstantial nature and seemed to have left no opportunity for gleaning any facts. But he had found out that the furry rapscallion had spent a significant period of time one summer in a small town in Alberta called Magrath. And a little research into the town’s history indicated that a potential nexus of events had occurred surrounding a solitary woman name Meredith, who had lived on this very farm on the outskirts of Magrath.
Unfortunately for Edward, the farm seemed abandoned. There had been no record of this woman’s death and no indication that she had moved or relocated. But there was definitely no one here and hadn’t been for months. Something at the edge of Edward’s mind seemed to think that observation was somehow significant to his purpose, but he just couldn’t make it connect with anything.
Well, enough of this. Edward emerged from under the rusted corrugated sheet metal that was leaning up against the shop and slipped around the corner. There was an old cat flap in the sliding, paint-flecked shop door, and Edward moved swiftly into the warmer interior.
Low morning light streamed in from the east through the high windows in the door, and as Edward moved across the floor he disturbed the dust that had accumulated there, sending up sparkling clouds that twisted and flowed through the beams and added a mysterious feel to the empty space. But a not altogether unpleasant feeling — really quite homey, Edward noticed.
This main floor was tidy and organized. A worn wooden bench filled the long wall, and neat wooden cubes mounted above the bench held all manner of nails, bolts and assorted cotter pins. An old seed drill was in the back, seemingly abandoned midway through some repairs. Parts were neatly arrayed before it, and on the workbench all the bolts and fasteners were lined up like freckle-faced army recruits doing drill. Edward could appreciate the meticulous nature of the farmer who worked here; it wasn’t often he found some whose appreciation of order and harmony approached his own.
“I’ll find nothing of the beaver here,” he murmured smugly.
In the center of the shop there was a set of stairs up to the attic that would swing down from the ceiling. They were held up by a coffee-can weight over by the door that was filled with bolts and nuts. It was attached to a greasy nylon line that ran up to a pulley and secured the staircase.
Edward hopped over to the old coffee can and, upon investigation, found it superbly balancing the weight of the stairs. A quick nudge and it slowly moved toward the roof, and the foot of the staircase travelled down with an equally smooth motion.
At the top of the staircase, Edward found himself in a room that had been empty and undisturbed for a lot longer than a few months. Layers of thick dust coated everything, and mouse dropping and bird feces could be found pretty much everywhere. It was as different from the room below as could be, and Edward strongly suspected that there was a good reason the farmer had avoided this space. Which, knowing the beaver as he did, made it a pretty good place to start looking for clues.