NOTE: This was triggered by Kerry's post. He asks how we feel about sticking to a single topic in our blogs. I can do that, if I can get my attention deficits to calm down. I'll try it with the fiction; horror genre. I can stick to a topic. I just know it. Is that a mosquito? I hate mosquitos.
The Monster Of Sacramento
It was a sweltering September night, back in 1979. We were in Old Sacramento, which had just been renovated into a wonderland of nightclubs and restaraunts, right on the river. We were young Junior Officers, out for a night on the town after a hard week of work.
(Actually, we were out for our third consecutive night on the town after a hard day of work.)
Lisa is a drama queen. She sucks the life out of a phone conversation. I need to screen those calls. So what if her hubby got a bicycle. Get a grip, Lisa.
We went to a nightclub that had a lighted dance floor and discoed into the wee hours, our young mechanical setups more than capable of processing the alcohol that we'd consumed in fairly decent quantities.
Damn, we were good looking. And sex was so free and easy that we took it for granted. You could date enlisted folk back then. But Air Force men tended to act too much as if they weren't married, so you had to check a guy out before jumping off into anything.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a creature was stirring, rising from it's fetid underground lair to feed on the sluggish and exhausted late night revelers as they exited the clubs and bars and headed home.
Back then, if you had a cell phone, it came in a case the size of a Samsonite carry on. Boy, we've come a long way. My cell phone now fits into my bra when it has to. Pretty soon, we'll just have implants, with keyboards in our sternums and screens in our corneas.
Everything has a computer in it. I want a bra with a computer in it. And hydraulics to hoist or compress the puppies as needed, depending on my activity levels. I want cleavage, but not those bullet/shelf tits.
And speaking of sterno, the old hobo had just had a dose of the stuff. He was getting ready to head over to "J" street in order to panhandle the exiting drunks when he felt something slam into the back of his head. It was the last thing that he felt on that fateful night.
Wow. There's a full moon tonight. I looks like a giant butter candy. It's not made of cheese. The moon is made of butter candy. Wow.
I LOOOOOved the ending to "Hancock", where he gets up to the moon and...well I don't want to give it away.
No, that's the Titanic movie. When that movie came out, dummies didn't know that the Titanic already sank and that it's been big news for almost a century.
The cops were fat. I wondered how they did their jobs without having heart attacks. But they were running every which way, smelling like stale sweat and Old Spice, yelling or muttering about some torn up Hobo...
Yeah...and people wanted to go to Troy, after that movie came out. Damn. No one's found "Troy". Dummies. Homer made a lot of that stuff up. It's like someone found a Tom Clancy novel and started a lesson plan about one of his whacky scenarios.
Meanwhile, we were coming out of the nightclub, heading for the car when the monster, having fed well already was bounding and leaping it's way toward Old Sacramento to get some more...
That was a good looking man in Safeway...nice, too. Maybe he'll call.
Oh heck. I saw that video of Obama. He wasn't looking at the huge junk in that girl's trunk. He would have been cool with me if he had snuck a peek at that shelf.
The hobo was an ex literary professor. Lot of ex big shots out there, doped out, drunk out, dropped out. They always get it when there are monsters. The Black guy gets it first, if he's stupid enough to go off into the basement by himself, except in the original "Night Of The Living Dead". That brother got it on.
Zombies suck. Jello, too. Ocularnervosa is rightfully griping about jello. But Jello is good with cream cheese and pineapple.
To be continued....
I hate when tv shows are to be continued. Like that "Kings" show. Just when I was getting into the characters and the intrigue, the thing went on haitus for weeks. And now NBC wants us to pay 99 cents to see it using "on demand". The nerve! No other network charges for their on demand tv show watching.
Oh...to be continued...I think I put that here somewhere. My kitchen floor is clean, but I have to vacuum...
Ow, I'm stiff as a board. Everything hurts. It's always that way on cleaning day, but I'll get some stuff shredded. You can't throw out old bills and bank slips anymore.
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“But Jello is good with cream cheese and pineapple.”
I don’t know about that, but this reminded me of one of those inside jokes at work, where all one of us has to do is bring up the word “Jello” and we burst into tearful laughter. This references a holiday party oh so many years ago, when we were under a narcissistic boss who seemed tailor-made for automobile sales. We were each supposed to bring a dish based on a family recipe representing our heritage. I brought aebleskiver with lemon sauce, a recipe passed down from my maternal great-grandparents from Denmark. So this boss—I’ll call him “Sam”—brought his own family recipe. I’m not sure what heritage it was supposed to represent. Maybe white trash? It was lime green Jello with chunks of something in it. He told one of my former colleagues, Raina—who had the misfortune of sitting next to Sam—to guess what it was. All of us were just trying desperately to contain our laughter.
“Go ahead, guess,” he told her.
“Uh, I don’t know,” Raina was quick to give up.
“Cottage cheese!” Sam beamed proudly, while scooping a healthy portion onto Raina’s plate. He later pushed seconds on her. Poor Raina. Too kind for her own good.
So that’s what I always think of when I hear the word “Jello” now. (Whereas Michael thinks of Jello Biafra :-)
—Melissa (of metaness)
You rock, Zuma. And since you rock, I give you a tidbit of my great American horror novel:
"behind them a wet thing grew rapidly but silently in a murky grotto at the base of the valley hidden beneath ever-lengthening kudzu vines, its scarlet tentacles laced around the still warm skull of an animal it had killed during the night. A pair of quivering bulges rose out of the limpid green pulp that made up most of its body that was as yet the size of a baby shark. A plated tongue rose above its serrated maw and fell flat as the pulsating thing aspirated there like an iron lung floating in a fetid bog. Now and again, a jet of stringy black slime burst forth from a tiny oval valve that was situated along its rump; it flexed its tentacles around the pecan-sized skull until the bone imploded with a crack; the thing then spun in a half circle and seemed to rise like a submarine out of the swamp, an oozing green sore visible at its apex, hot yellow pus bubbling within it; the thing hissed and belched and moved toward the steep slope of the valley with orange foam like soap suds trailing along behind it.
Jeez, I can hear them still talking about MJ in the background. Ugh.
Sounds like you might have the start of a bestseller here, Zoom.
I like puppies, too. But I have cats instead.
Let me know when you write the second chapter. PLEASE?
Cats are low maintenance. I like that about them.
Anybody want some cookies?
Yellow Starlings: Oh, the cottage cheese is sooooo nasty.... unless it has pineapple in it...It has no business in jello and is a crime. I'm laughing thinking about your uncontrollable laughter that starts up again when the trigger word is used!
T. Michael: You remind me of Lovecraft! And you didn't make me wade through pages of bad writing in order to get the oozing, skull crunching monster! Skull crunchers are the best monsters.
Michael R: Second chapter is coming next week...what kind of cookies? Toll House?
cherylm: I tend to watch the stats. If I'm getting no comments or ratings on something as crazy as this, it's clear that I need to add a note. I had hoped that others would discuss Kerry's proposal to stick to a single blog topic in blogs of their own, but no such luck by midnight last night.
He does have a point, by the way. Traditional publishing has people doing work on a single topic or area.
Older/Exasperated: So you wore a bra in the Air Force and YOU were the ones who painted the green footprints? They were the first thing that freaked me out at my first assignment!!!
I mentioned to Kerry that I didn't think that one topic blogs would work here. He wanted to know what I meant by "here". Well, OS. What else would I have meant? Anyway I still don't think they'll work HERE. Very few, anyway. I like the fact that we have thousands of different directions to go with OS. I'd hate to see that change.
Saturn manages single topic because there are thousands of topics that change everyday with politics. Other subjects? Not so much.
We don't live single topic lives, unless we're pampered and obsessed bores. Even my quiet world gets bashed directly or indirectly by thousands of causes and effects that are going on in the larger world. I learned about "environmental scanning" in Grad school, and had to multitask long before that became a buzzword. It's no big deal to me to keep track of multiple problems and multiple issues.
Saturn has a gift for covering a wide variety of topics, within the field of economics and politics. She's a rare bird.
But short fiction and poetry don't get confined very well.
Maybe it's a discipline, and maybe its a tradition to do the one topic thing. I can see where a loyal audience can be built, but it would be a limited audience, devoted to car repair or gardening or Erma Bombeck styled tales from home.
But I see where many of the greats could work whatever was hot and whatever was interesting, maintaining a regular flavor without sticking to one topic. Herb Caen of San Francisco comes to mind.
I need to experiment and try out different things right now, unless someone wants to read my professional writing.
Anyone want to read about AvFuel gain/loss tolerance analysis? How about the effects of sloped tanks on inventory using the stick and fuel finding paste method?
Didn't think so.
I had a commander who would have his pockets sewn up to give him a flatter stomach....geez.