What is August...

...but the Sunday of summer?

Here's a photo of me walking on stilts.
Kidding. It's just a shadow picture representing the long dog days of summer and the fact that I have been neglecting the blog:

And here is a nice portrait of a crab that is on clearance now that the sun has moved into Leo:

So long summatime.

Single Things of Late Spring

An Easy Extraction

Reposted from Medium - where I have been putting most of my stories, be sure to check it out and submit your short, super short non-fic stories to our collection.

The waiting area was set-dressed in normcore office furniture to avoid suspicion. I read Time magazine until a woman named Jessica called me back. She asked if I “needed to use the restroom” and I knew this was code. I was being tested, to see if I was “ready” for the great initiation. I went into the bathroom and found the mirror. I bent over the sink and opened wide to take another look. Tooth 13. The unluckiest part of a earthlings body. The last holdover preventing final, total, and complete evolution.

I first noticed my face hurting every time I made small talk. And then it became unbearable to leave voice mail messages or order sandwiches. I passed out one day after reading a power point slide at work meeting. “It’s tooth number thirteen” a shrunken phlebotomist had whispered to me when I woke up in the hospital, “It’s blocking your potential.” She handed me a powder blue card and said, “They won’t take it out here. You have to go to a Galactic Specialist,” she looked around and ran out the door. The card said,Removal of Unlucky Teeth. Intergalactic Services. And had a phone number with a Delaware area code.

I leaned in closer to the mirror. The gum above 13 was swollen with my evolutionary potential, my galactic energy, all plugged up by a mid-molar. “As long as you have that tooth, you will be unlucky,” the galactic dentist told me, ”But you have to be ready to get it out. No surgery is without risk. There’s no telling what’s behind it. You could experience a flooding of intergalactic knowledge. You could disintegrate. You could wind up on another planet. You could experience strange, specific, and sustained food cravings. You may have regrets about the time you wasted living with an unlucky tooth. You may occasionally have to interact with other earthlings who still have their tooth 13. Some find this intolerable, but we have group counseling. And, also, you have to pay four thousand dollars upfront because you may not believe in money after.”

The wastepaper basket had a red light sensor that opened and closed the top. A distant cousin of R2D2. I ripped off a long sheet of paper towel, wrote a farewell message to my family and my former life, wadded it up, fed it to the trashcan, and left. Jessica was waiting in the hall. She led me through a narrow pathway of equipment to a sparkling white and chrome room. She pointed to a reclining chair made of unluck-resistant (probably) Saturn leather and told me “to sit back, the others would be there in a moment” she put blue saucers over my eyes and a mask over my nose. I would not need oxygen anymore. I programed my earphones to play fake pan flutes and the Galactic Specialist came in, clanked his instruments and called for his assistant. All of the thousands of people who had tooth 13 removed followed, slowly filed in, gathering around to witness and support another earthling making the transition to the other side.

I felt metal in my mouth and heard a whirring, then chanting — a call and response, The Galactic Specialist asked “Tooth 13?” and the crowd answered “Tooth 13” and and swayed forward and back, back and forward. I could see their pulsing shadows through the blue saucers.

“Annnnnnnd” The Galactic Specialist said as I felt a bend and a pull and then he said, “That will not bother you anymore. It’s done.”

The witnesses were gone when they took the saucers off my eyes and the mask away from my nose. “You won’t really need oxygen anymore,” Jessica told me, “but you don’t have to tell anyone.”

Bird Crew

I'm pretty excited about how my recent time lapse turned out.

I'll post a sneak preview soon.

Where Everyone is At

You should read, follow, and submit to Short People, Places, and Things - a micro-nonfiction collection some pals and I are trying out on the new blogging (or just writing) platform Medium.

Medium claims to be a place for everyone's stories and ideas, so I figured I'd go where everyone else is going. Also it's an easy collaboration platform and it's connected to your twitter account which means you don't have to make up a whole new password, which sometimes can be the one stressful thing that pushes you over the edge to madness and despair.  I know I hate thinking of new passwords and I can't use my favorite food because I can't spell spaghetti if I can't see the letters.

If you have seen the tv show Sherlock you might be dazzled at how quickly he figures out people's passwords, I know I am. He just looks around at their surroundings, taps into his mind palace and is like "I know! It's Madeline1964!" And he's always right. So I'm thinking the new thing would be to forget coming up with something you'd remember and instead take on a password persona and then pick passwords that that your character would pick. Say you take on the persona of an 84 year old woman, you'd pick a password totally different than what people are expecting - like, say, the botanical name of ladies finger flowers. That is an extra layer of security. No one, not even Sherlock, could crack it.  As long as you never hint to this persona, like on a blog.

In summary, you can find more accounts of interesting interactions over at the collection on Medium. I will still post pictures of moss, trees, and museums here when I can and I hope to have an update for The Keepers very soon.

Pre-Spring Things

We've been really busy with post-production. Not much blogging happening here, but I have been able to make daily treks out to the Old Forest where I've been finding great set pieces for True Detective season two.

I Was Here

Trees Please

Unwelcome Inspiration

My heartbeat is rather faint. I don't want the last thing I see before I die of this severe cold to be a note from Halls that says, "Tough is your middle name" - because it's not.

New Year, Less Posts?

You know 2014 is going to be good.