Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Short Story: EZ Dreams Part 1

~*EZ-Dreams*~

            It was a Friday afternoon and Roger Turnwell had just been paid. When the buzzer rang at five O’clock, and all the little worker bees filed out of the Rubber Sole factory, he moseyed on down the road with an honest smile on his face. The smog alerts weren’t as bad today; the sky had only the faint tinge of greens and yellows. Roger had no wife or kids, and for a man of thirty-five years it was nearly time he chooses his Assignment. He thought to himself that fatherhood would be grand, but having to move to the countryside and relocate from the bustling streets of the Metropolis brought thinly stretched wrinkles to his face. No, he would continue working and eating and sleeping and enjoying the comforts of the city.
            He pulled on his airMask, which filtered all the heavy particles in the air, and put in his Iodine-Eye-Saver Eye Drops, the bottle was getting low maybe it was time for a refill. Motorcycles and other small, motorized vehicles zipped up and down the cluttered roadway, and the chatter of a dozen angry languages filled his ears like white noise. The smell of street vendors distracted him momentarily from the grey world around him, and for a moment he remembered Old Metropolis before the Wave had hit. He remembered all of the spicy ethnic cuisine and the exotic women in their tiny skirts lighter than air. That was over twenty years ago however, and most people in Metropolis had no memories of that time.
            Roger walked another few blocks, with his hands in his pockets and his chin firmly nestled against his chest, watching each foot take a step and being sure to avoid all the cracks in the sidewalk. Last time he stepped on a crack he had watched moments later as a motorcyclist was crushed to death by a bus coming around a sharp corner. The man hadn’t even had time to let out of a yelp, but was swallowed in the undercarriage of the hulking red monstrosity.
            Roger picked his head up for a moment at the sound of a young woman shouting, “Stop! Stop!! Give that back!” and he saw as a unkempt man in a leather jacket that stretched to the ground played tug of war with a designer purse. No one else had stopped, and he considered it for a moment but remembered he was no hero just Roger Tarnwell the man that filled the rubber molds for the soles of shoes. Just a Rubber sole man, with no kids and a low bottle of Iodine Eye-Saver Eye Drops.
            He made it to the drugs store and shuffled in, taking his shoes off at the door. He went to the back where the pharmacy was located and placed his order for the eye drops. He noticed a disheveled man running to the bathroom screaming “I’m goanna shit myself I swear” and when he found that the door was locked he beat on it until his hands were red and raw howling, “Let me in there you dirty motherfucker! Let me IN!!”.
            When Roger made it to the checkout counter he saw that there were two new brands of EZ-Dreams Sleep Pills. In addition to SummerLover and TropicTrip they now had, KillerFrenzy and HeavenlyClouds. Roger really enjoyed the EZ-Dreams products, you took them like a classic sleeping pill but the dreams were preloaded into the solution, so you knew what you were going to get each time.
            SummerLover gave erotic dreams of companionship and love to even the loneliest of people, and was a product that Roger was no stranger to. TropicTrip gave one the sensations and experience of relaxing on a private tropical beach, surrounded in luxury. This one was less popular than you’d expect considering most Junior Citizens had no concept of beaches, tropics, or even luxury because most of this was made impossible after the Wave and there was certainly nothing analogous in Metropolis.
            KillerFrenzy was a darker product. There was a shockingly high murder rate in Metropolis, with nearly a third of residents living in abject poverty. KillerFrenzy is designed to let these people live out their aggressive desires and kill in their dreams. The only problem is when some of these people fight the urge to sleep and stay awake, they tend to get a bit violent in the waking world, and may require to sedation to be pacified.
            HeavenlyClouds is probably the more iconic product in the line. It brings the user to a state of heavenly bliss, usually with no corporeal form and floating in bright celestial bodies of warmth. When you live in a place like Metropolis, HeavenlyClouds is a welcomed break from the bleak realities of the world. There are no Iodine Eye-Saver Drops, and there are no airMasks, or airRaid sirens, or airAlerts or rubber soles either. It is all a swirl of pleasure and nothingness; and for what feels like a brief moment nothing really exists at all.
            Roger snatched for one bottle of each and went to the back to see if the Pharmacist was finished. She was, her wrinkly skin hung down like a Basset Hound, her face curled into a similar type frown. She was bespectacled with the frames connected to a long chain that snaked through the folds in her skin and settles somewhere behind her head.  She put everything into a plastic bag, pausing on each item to shoot him a disapproving glare.
            He put the eye drops in before leaving the building. They stung because he had missed a few doses, but he felt the solution working its way through his eye with a little searing. One more stop at the Store of Spirits and he could finally return home and call it a day. It was getting a little later in the afternoon (sunset came earlier now, as the sun dipped behind opaque dense clouds of smog), and once it started to get dark, there would be a changeover on the streets. Most respectable people of Metropolis were at home by dark, and the few that roamed the streets were generally either homeless or up to no good.
            He walked the four blocks to the store with a little more vigor now. The honking of cars rose a few decibels, getting more aggravated and violent as people got nervous about the impending darkness. When 5 O’clock hit the “Money-Monks” as they were called all hit the deck for their evening prayers. Since new Metropolis and the destructive Wave, many had converted to Monetarism a polytheistic religion devoted to personal success and consumerism. When the bell rang they would all hit the deck to prostrate and beg their God for spare change to be rained down from the heavens. It was a religion that had a basis in reality. Everyone’s health and happiness required money, and to pray for it only made sense. To reward their beliefs there was the occasional jet-black blimp that slowly hovered above Metropolis and would rain down dimes and dollars. Roger hadn’t converted yet, but he acknowledged the merits in their beliefs.

            When he got to the store their was a long line snaking out the front door and around the corner. He got in at the end and looked around. The people waiting in line stretched several socio-economic brackets and races. There were a few men in trench coats smoking cigarettes talking to each other in hushed tones, and there were a few women pretending to be busy with their cell phones to avoid accepting that they too must wait in a line despite being pretty and single in Metropolis. There were a few older men, who were hunched with age and supporting themselves with rickety little canes, just waiting to give out under their hulking wrinkled bodies. They were black and white and Asian; liquor still held sway over anyone and everyone that wanted to drown their sorrows away one night at a time.

Personal Essays and Short Stories #2

The Reflecting Pool 

The vast, isolated, body of water sits in silence like it's own universe. A microcosm of all this is or ever was. The water stretches like a static black void, but look closely and you will find the surface waivers ever so slightly. Faint waves in the water, always there however imperceptible, are the lingering traces of events past. 

A stone plops in, and ripples emanate radially outward. Eventually they fade into nothingness (which is the ever-present vibration to small to see);patterns of standing waves that stretch the length of the reservoir. The faint vibrations are like the Cosmic Microwave Background, remnants of old events. Smaller events like a stone skimming the surface are like particles. Imagine a stone the size of an electron thrown across the surface at nearly the speed of light and it will skim the surface and create little ripples as it's energy dissipates as waves on the surface. 
As the stone glides in the air above the water it has a superposition of many states, and exists theoretically in a probability of locations from the perspective of the water. The position is only known once energy is deposited as a wave on the surface. In this sense it is both a wave and a particle. It is a wave above the surface because it's position is unknown and has a probability of being in several locations. When it hits the surface it suddenly becomes a particle because it collides with the surface. The ripples that emanate outward can indicate things like mass of the particle. For example and enormous stone would have quite a large wave, and small particles would have really small little ripples. So in this sense something of a particle nature, can impart a wave in a medium that can indicate information about the particle. In someways this shows a system of a simultaneous wave-particle nature. Just a thought a experiment here. 

                                  

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Personal Essays and Short Stories #1


A Quest for Truth

            Everyone wants to make sense of this crazy world. We pour all of our energy into creating something that reflects our experience of the universe, or we strive to ask questions that will unlock the mysteries of the cosmos. I have always juggled these juxtaposed worldviews, trying to cover all the bases; finding satisfaction down various avenues. Don’t put you’re eggs in one basket they say to me.
            I have resided in a fragile schizophrenic superposition of two existences for too long now: of the dream world and the real world. The dream being to spend my life travelling and creating art, of following the bright lights of inspiration and riding the wind till it ends somewhere at the edge of time. Then reality hits me like painful, hung-over, Monday morning rays of sunshine and I go to my day job sitting at a desk in a windowless room analyzing grids of numbers till my eyes water.
            How do we avoid getting lost in the shuffle? How does one strike the balance between passion and profitability?
            I felt the ocean of doubt and angst rising in my psyche over the course of my 9 Week research astronomy job. And as the tide pulled back and the crest rose high, I was atop the frothing water and saw my life spread out on the shore ahead in every direction and for a moment it was all clear, but clarity is fleeting and as the wave came crashing down I was lost in a torrent of black (opaque) water. The salinity stinging my eyes and drying my skin, and when I awoke at 6am on a vomit stained carpet the phantom pain from my dream carried over into the real world. I looked around, realizing I was half naked next to a beautiful girl I had met the night before.
            I could feel my delicate superposition of existence jittering as I shook up the grand scheme by exercising my free will in a rare moment of impulsivity. I gathered my clothes and shoes and made the long walk home, with my right eye closed tightly in pain the whole time (left eye clear as day).  Hours later it was still closed and burning from the inside and my friend brought me to the ER where they told me I had an ulcer, and could have permanently lost my sight (but I could only laugh because if felt like I was just beginning to see for the first time). They gave me a Vicodin to numb the pain, and I was again lost in opaque waters, that were a little warmer than before but nonetheless swallowed me whole.  
            It was then that I decided to pick up and leave: to hit the road, and neglect my obligations on a quest to find golden music at the end of a glorious rainbow stretching over 200 miles. We drove for hours, and I watched through one eye as the rolling green hills of upstate New York gave way to the gritty streets and smog blurred skyline of NYC. I could already feel my eye being relieved of pain, more effectively than any medicated drops prescribed by a PhD and deep pockets ever could. We arrived in the Americana glazed land that is Long Island just as the sun was disappearing under the Harbor (littered with little bobbing boats and fancy waterfront homes).
            Our guitarist and front man was deeply ill from an infected cut during a night of being blackout drunk in NYC. He lay on the couch sweating, eyes glossy with a hint of green, speaking nonsense in a state of fever and desperation. We carried on without him, getting to the little dive bar in Amityville just in time for sound check. We enter and are greeted by burly men, with a dizzying multitude of tattoos, piercings and dark manly beards. We hopelessly try and arrange an alternate set-list to no avail, and play an awful sound check that makes the punk rock pixie chicks in the back giggle and cry (their hair dyed each shade of the rainbow, bobbing and jumping with every beat of their laughing bodies).
            Then with ten minutes to spare our “fearless leader” arrives, with two-dozen friends and family in tow. We take the stage and finally I stand there, with blazing purple lights swirling and shining down on the stage, and both eyes are wide open and I truly see with full depth in the darkness of the bar. No drums but I hold down the groove with a tapping foot and lips pursed tightly. The ecstasy and excitement of performance wash over me through out the set, and the harmonies of my friends give me shivers that I convert into rhythmic pulses and melodic landscapes. We function as a single organism in that moment, and for a while everything is perfect.
            It’s beautiful that the right kind of groove can get both a wide-eyed tie-died hippy and the somber punk chic person bobbing their heads and smiling a stupid grin that usually only happens in moments of solitary contemplation. At this point in time we are all united by the desire to create and the satisfaction of hearing words and sounds that capture a moment so perfectly that everything at that moments makes sense, and that the clarity we all feel can be sustained and shared for a few minutes and beats at a time.
            Truth is everywhere. It is in the flowers that grow towards the sun, it is in the chemical compounds we ingest to alter our brain chemistry just enough to evoke an honest laugh. Truth is in the hum of tires on the road, or the giggle of a child riding a bike for the first time. Truth is in the furnace of distant stars that churn out the elements that compose our planet, and it is in the semiconductors that emit and receive electrons to match my frantic keystrokes at this very moment. Truth can be obscured by our frivolous duties and selfish frustration.
            Science is a scripture written by devout men that wish to encapsulate truth in the immortal and universal language of mathematics, to be coveted and used to guide the understanding of all mankind for eons to come. We stand “on the shoulders of giants” to look forward and backward at all of human history, trying to guide ourselves toward truth. I will never turn my back on such an honorable, selfless pursuit. As my vision has returned I have learned that truth sneaks up on you when you least expect it. It doesn’t emerge from a lab slide after hours of scrutiny, but rather it exists around us at all times dancing and vibrating and waiting to be seen by the right set of eyes. The world does not follow our equations, but rather equations are written to express that which already exists.
            The superposition of realities has collapsed to an existence of the here and now, of this singular point in the timeline of my life and my eyes are finally clear. I will create and destroy and understand, and as I see a new expanse of joy unfolding behind my eyelids it transforms the world before my eyes, making things sparkle and jump with the rhythm of life and music and love.

            

Poem #8: Transcribing Scribbles

Woke up again,
and looked around.
I Guess there was another day.
To live like kings in paradise
and trouble is so far away.
The Sunshine burns,
on distant lands
of warfare and of tragedy.
But I can only concentrate
On happiness in front of me.

Walk a mile in my shoes,
and travel far to play the blues.
Humans share a single bond,
that they wont tell you on the news.
Freedom can't be locked away
Hidden from the light of day.
Borders break and kingdoms fall,
when Common People Stand Up Tall. 

Poem #6: Transcribing Scribbles

The Smallest things that blow my mind.
The Way that things unfold with time.
Ordered shapes till chaos strikes.
Changing forms as nature likes.

Exchange of light and energy,
that forms the bulk of all we see.
Enigmas right in front of me.
Perplexed by what it means to be.