Terrible Analogies

Some days at work are better than others.

This week I’ve been stuck writing emergency code and configuring SQL databases. Each day being a solid eight hours of staring at a computer screen with almost no breaks (I’m just thankful for the stockpile of Big Red I keep in my desk drawer).

This is how I felt during my drive home last night:

I much prefer the weeks at work when I feel like this:

But hey, we all have our professional ups and downs. No biggie. It all evens out in the end…

Having intimate first hand experience with the handicapped in both my personal and military life, this video put a smile on my face.

Very cool…

Tyler is big into Thomas the Train.

I’m not sure how this obsession came into being, but one day he started saying “Choo Choo!  Choo Choo!” and hasn’t stopped since.  And what do we do?  Only the stupidest thing ever…we bought him a Thomas & Friends DVD.

When he first laid eyes on that DVD his entire body seized up, then he went into a disturbing set of shivering convulsions as he held the DVD stiff-armed in front of his wide-eyed face.  After a couple of minutes he calmed down, took a deep breath, then proceeded to shout “CHOO CHOO!!” over and over again, clutching the DVD close to his chest in a death grip (but it was the cutest lil’ death grip I ever saw) until we left the store.

And now Thomas & Friends is all he ever wants to see.

After the 100th viewing of Thomas & Friends I began to deeply regret buying that DVD  

And what is Thomas and his friends, anyway?  Are they alive?  Robots?  Sickening Mengelesque medical experiments gone horribly awry?  They seem to be sentient beings, albeit in train form.  They can converse with each other and blindly take orders from a squat man in a tall hat.  Are these trains capable of independent action, or do they require that an engineer be on board?  They obviously have a primitive social hierarchy, and are continuously in a competitive struggle with each other employing increasingly bizarre and twisted mind games.

If they are, indeed, living creatures, do they possess souls?  Are they immortal?  Do they die like all other living beings eventually do?  If so, what happens whey they die?  Are funerals held?  Do they bury their dead, or instead recycle them?

So many questions.  But I guess I’ll have time enough to contemplate them as I watch Thomas & Friends for the 300th time with Tyler.

Thanks, Thomas…

Five Minute Fiction is an ongoing experiment. The goal: To write as much as I can in five minutes.  Don’t think.  Let the fingers do the work.  Once done walk away then come back later to clean it up.

Enjoy?

Benefit Street

I want you to take a deep breath.

Hold it.

Now, exhale and open your eyes.  This should help you remain calm as I tell you about our forsaken and cursed corner of the city.

For it’s on nights, such as this, that all good men fear.

If I told you to look up and concentrate on the waning pock-scared moon as it casts a bleak grey light on the slick cobblestone street of Benefit Street, would you?  If I asked you to make note of the locked weatherworn shutters that seal every window and cast iron bars which guard the dense oak doors that line both sides of this quiet, forgotten corner of the world, would you?

I would hope for your sake that you would deny my requests, for if you dared stray from your fireplace and stepped outside, you would hear an unholy noise; the sound of a foot stepping down in a wet sock fast approaching, the tapping of nails on hard leather, and a blur, which you might see, but most probably wouldn’t.  It’s then that your body simply…vanishes.  Sometimes a foot is left behind.  Or a hand.  Or a head.  The flesh turned purple, ragged and stretched where it was rendered from the body from a terrible force.

If you were curious and sat hunched over with your back against the dense grain of your front door and concentrated on the still, reticent night, you might hear that retching sound of a sloshing foot pause at your doorstep, the rapping vibration of teeth on stone, with only an inch of hardwood separating you from that taunting, unseen horror.  It might hover about for a few minutes, or perhaps a few hours, seeping an unnerving chitin commotion at your bolted entrance before finally sloshing off into the dark like a sickening wave.

And if you dared open your door to investigate the clamor, it would be the end of you.

Nobody goes out after dark on Benefit Street.  Not for many, many years.  And what was once a bustling community is now nothing more than a dilapidated shadow housing but a few occupants who have come to live with the nightly eldritch terror.

I want you to take a deep breath.

Hold it.

Now, exhale slowly and, would you please, close the shutters and bolt the door?  The sun is nearly set, and night drops down fast on our city.

I’m going to be taking the next two days off, so for all of my North American friends:  Happy Thanksgiving!

For everybody else:  Happy Thursday!

Tonight Karin and I are going to make a dessert (Chocolate Turtle Cheesecake) to take over to the parents for Thanksgiving dinner Thursday eve, where I hope to avoid my sister who now considers herself an “artist” and can’t stop going on about her run down apartment-turned-studio where the next door neighbor hasn’t bothered to take down the crime scene tape from last month’s “incident”. Oh, she’s a pip, that one.

Regardless, on Thursday night I plan to do much of the following after stuffing my face:

Will be back to posting Monday morning after the tryptophan wears off.

Hope everyone is able to ease into the holidays unscathed. See you next week!