AfterDark

Thursday Scramble!

2012-02-09T09:30:00.003-06:00

Thursday Scramble! is when I take a post from one of my blogs and put it on all of my blogs, to show you what you're missing if you're a uniblogolist. Which is a thing. Today's random number came up with Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World!, so I decided to give you the first-ever post from that site, a good intro to the ongoing serialized sci-fi erotic story that is taking the world (well, three people) by storm:

WARNING! NSFW! (I'm not just saying that to guarantee that you'll read it, but I'm sure it had that effect.)

THIS IS PART ONE OF MY STORY:

"Lesbian zombies are taking over the world!" Reverend Tommy hollered. He was in a lather.

So was I but that's because Brigitte was sitting next to me and had her hand on my knee. Above my knee, actually. Her little, soft, pink hand was resting right where my miniskirt would end if I wore my miniskirt to the Church of Our Savior of Living People Only, but I don't wear it there because Reverend Tommy wouldn't approve.

He wouldn't approve of my thoughts, either, or of what Brigitte and I had been doing just before we left for church in our church-y clothes: We'd been having sex, which Reverend Tommy disapproved of. Reverend Tommy disapproves of any sex, and he's not one of those preachers who say they disapprove of sex but then they're fucking the girls (or the boys) behind the curtains by the chapel; he was the real deal. Reverend Tommy hated only one thing more than sex, and that was zombies. And he hated only one thing more than zombies, and that was lesbian zombies.

That's what he was tearing on about, and it made me wish that Brigitte and I had not rushed to get there because if I'd known the whole sermon was going to be about nothing but how I'm supposed to be taking over the world, I would have skipped. But I doubt Brigitte would have skipped. She's not like that. Even though she's a lesbian, she's very religious. I don't know how she got mixed up with the Church of the Savior of Living People Only. I don't know how she got mixed up with me, either. She's going to be mighty confused when she finds out. If she finds out.

And I don't want to let her find out. Not yet, anyway, because I've got plans. I may just make her like me, for one thing. But even if I don't, I can't resist her lips. That's what almost made us late for church. I took a look at her lips as she was putting lipstick on them, and couldn't resist. Without even strapping on my bra, I had to lean over behind her and turn her head to face me and started kissing her.

I pushed my tongue into her mouth, forcing her lips apart so I could feel them on either side of my tongue, soft and pliable and gently sucking on my tongue and she pushed her tongue into my mouth, so I tried to return the favor, but my lips are always a little dry, probably (I think) as a result of being me and probably because I'm not very ladylike except in public and I associate wet, soft, moist lips with ladies. We kissed like that for a while, pressing our lips more and more firmly together, and I couldn't take it anymore, I wanted those lips everywhere else on me. I moved her mouth away from mine and stared into her eyes for a few moments and then lowered her head down to my breast. She took the hint, and she took my nipple and she nuzzled it and sucked on it. God, her lips were so soft that I almost came right then and I cupped her hands in mine...

So you can see why we were almost late. And here's Reverend Tommy, who's actually not a bad guy except he says I'm going to hell and he wants to kill me, and I don't even know why, ranting and raving:

"These lesbian zombies walk among us. They dress like us, they talk like us, they look like us..." although technically, Reverend Tommy, I don't look like you, because you are a man, I wanted to say. Brigitte squeezed my thigh. I thought she did it inadvertently but she leaned over and said

"They don't look like him," in a whisper that tickled my ear and made me start to perspire. She was so much like me already! Could I make her more like me? Would she like me more if she were more like me? Word games in my mind were better than Reverend Tommy:

"And they will come out in broad daylight and mock us, and then after dark they will steal into our houses and steal your wives and your daughters, they will corrupt them and drag them down to the bowels of hell with them. They move freely between the Life and the Afterlife."

That startled me. Do I? Do I move freely between the Life and the Afterlife? I'd never thought of it. Maybe those dreams I have where I go to Hell aren't just dreams?

"And they will leave our women in the fires of Hell and return to take your souls and eat them." I looked around, furtively. We sat midway back in the Church, and the Church attendance was evenly divided between men and women and children. Most of them were attentively listening to Reverend Tommy. Some of the women looked a little flushed. I guess maybe they wouldn't mind a little corrupting.

"And Jesus doesn't want them. He wants YOU. He wants to save you, but you've got to be vigilant against the newest trick of the devil. The lesbian zombies are out there. They are after your souls, and they are taking over the world!"

I should a few things straight.

First, I am a lesbian.

Second, I am not a zombie. I don't think so, anyway. I'm not a revenant, either, because nobody controls me. I'm some kind of creation. I think that because none of my parts match. I have dark black, straight hair, but my pubic hair is brown. My left hand is larger than my right and doesn't look the same. I have one green eye and one blue eye and who ever heard of that? Plus, my right shoe is size 6 and my left shoe is size 9. I have a slight limp. At least my torso appears to be all one piece and I don't have any scars, so I'm not a Frankenstein. I don't think. I've never met anyone like me. Or at least, anyone who I knew was like me.

Third, I'm not sure why I'm here. Not here in the Church of Our Savior Of Living People Only. I'm here because Brigitte goes here and I'll do anything for those lips. Not here in this town, either. I wandered here a few months ago after living in New York City for a while and then deciding that I couldn't go on working at a diner and wondering why I didn't have parents, or didn't rememer any parents, or even a childhood, or even anything before one day I was just there, working at the diner and serving people egg platters and refilling their coffee without any idea of who I really was. People called me by my name (Rachel) and seemed to know me but nobody talked to me much and I didn't live with anyone. That first day was kind of scary -- I left work at 5 and I didn't know why I was leaving at 5 because I didn't remember being scheduled to work or even that I worked or who anyone was, and then I started walking home and got on the subway but I didn't know what a subway was, and I was riding the subway and I realized that I was going home but I didn't know where home was or if I had one at all.

I got really scared, then, and then tried to clear my mind and relax, which worked because when I stopped thinking about it I just headed home, which turned out to be a kind of crummy little studio apartment that had a view of a wall and some furniture and a TV in it. So maybe someone is controlling me because I went home, but I don't think so because why would they let me just wander away?

But fourth, I think maybe I am trying to take over the world.

Go on to part two-- Meet Doc-- by clicking this link.

Or click here if you'd like to download the entire story for free.

The Old Man And The Haunted Stuff Everywhere: A Parable.

2012-02-07T15:00:00.001-06:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Walgreens for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

Let me tell you a scary story:

In a dark old house on top of a dark old hill surrounded by musty graveyards and dismal swamps, there sits an old man whose health is failing. The man needs medicine, and he needs it fast, but he dares not go out and get it.

Is it the ghosts in the front hall that keep him from getting the help he needs? No.

Is it the slithering beasts in the yard that prevent him from running his errands? No.

Is it the zombies that live in the graveyards that hold in his place? No.

It’s… THE HORROR OF PAYING TOO MUCH FOR HIS MEDICINE!

These days, prescriptions cost a bundle, and you’ve got to be smart about how you get them. Maybe your insurance helps, but I bet you could still use a break on prices, which is why you should join the Prescription Savings Club at Walgreens.

The Walgreens Prescription Savings Club gets you discounts on prescriptions: save on over 8,000 brand-name medications and on ALL generics. Pay less for flu shots, nebulizers and diabetic supplies. Even save on pet prescriptions, and get bonuses from buying other stuff at Walgreens or using their photofinishing.

For $20 (individual) or $35 for families, you can join. And the family membership is especially a benefit, as it covers everyone in your immediate family including any dependents under 22. That’s just $3 a month to save probably a LOT more on your prescriptions.

Walgreens looks out for you, which is why I follow Walgreens on Twitter and like Walgreens on Facebook. You should do both, and check out the club. You can get more info here:

http://www.walgreens.com/pharmacy/psc/psc_overview_page.jsp

Do you want to woo hoo? (Thursday Scramble)

2012-01-26T20:15:00.000-06:00

On Thursday Scramble, I take an old post from one of my blogs -- my blogs currently make up 24.8% of the entire Internet -- and repost it to all my OTHER blogs. This post appeared in 2008 on my blog "Thinking The Lions." Thinking The Lions focuses on funny stories about me, and the things I do with my family, and the things I do when I'm supposed to be working, and the things I do when I'm supposed to be doing the things I do. Also, I post poems there on Fridays.

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Always carry the pooping toddler behind you, not in front of you.

That way, when the pooping toddler poops, it will not fall directly into your path, causing you to step in it, which will cause you to think oh my god this is possibly the grossest but most hilarious emergency I've ever been a part of, and which will also cause you to stop, take that sock off, and then continue on your way to the potty chair, which you have left upstairs, and upstairs is an awful long ways away when you are carrying a naked, pooping, and now upset toddler at arm's length.

That's what I learned last night, as I was helping to clean up the kitchen after tacos and smoothies made in the new blender using the high-end "Whole Foods" fruit we had, both of which we had because Sweetie got them for St. Nick's Day.

I'm not sure why "St. Nick's Day" exists, or even if it does exist outside of my family. I always wondered if it existed outside of my family when I was a kid, too, when we would, in the beginning of December, get candy in our stockings. Never presents or anything, just candy, which always included one of those giant, straight-up-and-down candy canes, the kind that would splinter when you bit them, so that if you sat on the brown couch eating them and watching channel 18 -- channel 18 was the only channel worth watching most of the time back then, because it was the only non-network channel, so it showed reruns of shows and cartoons in the afternoon, as opposed to showing "Phil Donahue," a show that by my memories was on at least 17 hours a day on all three networks in the late 70s and early 80s-- if you sat on the brown couch eating your candy cane and watching Channel 18, you would have parts splinter off and fall on your chest and be covered with sweater-fuzz, making them inedible. You would also get little tiny peppermint shards sprinkled down your chest and stomach, giving you a minty smell and a crackly feel the rest of the day.

No other kids ever seemed to get stuff for St. Nick's Day, which was why I thought maybe it only existed in our family, but, then again, I was the kind of kid who never really knew what was going on, either, so maybe everyone was getting St. Nick's presents, and I just didn't know it because I spent most of my time in fourth grade reading the "Emil" books and playing one-on-one football on recesses with Kevin Donnerbauer, the kid with only one thumb, and what time I didn't spend doing that I spent drawing "vipers" from Battlestar Galactica and getting beat up by Dean Larsen. None of which really lead one to conversations about whether or not the other kid celebrates "St. Nick's Day."

When I married Sweetie, I learned that she, too, celebrated St. Nick's Day, and that she celebrated it through presents, which seems odd, since Sweetie is always telling me how poor she was growing up, stories about poverty that make me feel even more guilty than I do most of the time about my relatively-privileged background. I, as a kid, generally got presents like the Millenium Falcon with Actual Cargo Bays for hiding Han Solo, or my "official" Dallas Cowboys helmet, or the Lego set that let me build an actual Lunar Landing Module (which I still remember was called the "LEM," even though I don't remember why it was called the "LEM") or any of the the 1000 other toys and junk my parents got us for Christmas, and that still wasn't enough, as most years there were plenty of junky things we didn't get. Realizing that, that I was so spoiled and privileged and didn't appreciate it, serves the valuable purpose today of making me feel guilty, guilt that I channel into areas that society desperately needs, like "working hard" and "giving to charity" and "telling my own kids how lucky they are that they have so much stuff, compared to how little stuff I had," which is only true comparatively speaking, because I had a lot of stuff, but my kids have more stuff, and they, too, do not think they have enough. Yes, The Boy has a great big TV in his room and a DVD player and a Playstation 3, but he still pines away for an Internet connection that would let him play Playstation online against other players, even though the other player he would mostly play against is his friend, who lives next door, and who would probably come over to play anyway, bringing his own TV and Playstation 3, so that they could harness the awesome power of the Internet to play a game against each other sitting two feet apart.

So the guilt I carry around lets me lay some guilt on The Boy and his sisters for having so much stuff, something that I do to relieve my own guilt and also to make sure that they have guilt when they grow up, so that they will work hard and give to charity and be good people and guilt-trip their own kids, and the Circle of Guilt will continue.

I don't guilt-trip the Babies! yet, because they're too little to feel guilty about anything, and also because they don't really want anything. We have not yet bought them that many toys -- all of their toys except the slide and their car fit into a laundry basket -- but we have bought them toys, and they generally ignore those toys and play with anything else.

Mr Bunches, for example, carries around a small red practice golf ball that Middle gave him. It's made of foam rubber and he has it with him at all times. I've never known anyone to have a "Security Golf Ball" but he does, and he gets upset if he can't find it. He got so upset the last time it was lost (we found it behind the Only Surviving Plant in the house) that Sweetie took precautions and found a second one, a Spare Emergency Golf Ball that is kept carefully hidden in the Babies!'s room. We all also make sure, at all times, that we are aware of the Red Ball: "Where's his red ball?" we ask each other, when moving Mr Bunches from one room or level of the house to the next.

He can't be fooled, either -- give him a different color practice golf ball and he'll throw it aside. Give him a different kind of red ball and he'll squeeze it to test it out, and if it doesn't give a little like The Red Ball, he'll toss that aside, too.

Losing his Red Ball is one of the few things that upsets Mr Bunches. He's pretty easygoing. The only other things I've seen upset him are when someone leaves the room he's in, and being whisked away to poop on the potty chair rather than on the living room floor, where he thought it was okay to poop because, after all, he was naked.

Mr Bunches was only naked because I felt sorry for him and also because I needed both hands free to clean up the smoothie mess that I'd created making smoothies on the blender I'd given Sweetie for St. Nick's Day, a blender that was big and expensive and more big and expensive than a St. Nick's Day present should be, but I tend to give Sweetie big and expensive presents because, like I said, I feel guilty about my privileged background and Sweetie manages to dredge up more guilt by telling me stories about her own unprivileged background.

I might tell a story, for example, of how I had all these Star Wars action figures and I used to set them up in elaborate scenarios in my room in which the dresser with its four shelves was the Death Star, because the books on the bottom shelf could be the trash compactor, and then I might say that I wished I'd kept those Star Wars figures because maybe they'd be worth money, and then Sweetie will say something like this, a story she actually told us:

"I didn't have action figures or dolls when I was a little girl. We couldn't afford them. I had marbles, though, that my grandma gave me. I used to pretend the marbles were people and play with them and make them go shopping."

Imagine hearing that on the heels of your story about having an actual Boba Fett that shot missiles. Then imagine yourself standing in the department store thinking "Should I get her that blender she asked for even though it's very expensive?" and as you think that, you remember that Sweetie, as a kid, had to have her marbles have adventures, things she couldn't even dress up or fix the hair of or whatever it is that girls do with their dolls and toys.

And then imagine standing in that department store, pushing your Babies! in their stroller, and feeling terribly guilty about having been so privileged, and deciding that yes, you will buy her the blender, and you'll also get her some other stuff because she deserves it, but then you get distracted and think How would a marble be a person? And did they have names? Were they, like "Judy The Marble?" Did she make them walk, or just roll them to the Marble Shopping Mall? And then before you can get the blender or answer those questions, Mr F leans over and starts trying to knock over the pile of Christmas dinner plates you're stuck in front of.

Mr F got to try to knock over a lot of things last week, as we finished up the shopping for Sweetie's St. Nick's Day present. Her entire present was that blender that she asked for, and a bunch of high-quality fruit from Whole Foods, and a Whole Foods $10 gift card (which I threw in to top it off, but which is useless because $10 at Whole Foods will get you one grape) and a book of smoothie recipes that had lots of recipes for smoothies made without yogurt, because Sweetie likes smoothies but hates yogurt. Or I should say, Sweetie wants to like smoothies, something she tells us all the time:

"I want to like smoothies," she'll say, "But I just don't like that yogurt."

When I ask why it's so important that she like smoothies, she answers: "Because they're cool."

Finding the blender was the easy part -- the department store had blenders, lots of them, some of them as high-priced as $159. I did not get guilt-tripped into buying that. Marble People or not, I don't buy $159 kitchen appliances. I settled on a tough-looking red blender that had an "Ice Crusher" feature. That sounded good (if not very romantic or Christmas-y) to me. Getting the fruit was also easy. It was the book that was tough, because I had Mr Bunches and Mr F with me in their stroller, and I had to go to three different bookstores to find just the right book of smoothie recipes, which meant three different nights of pushing the Babies! through bookstores, bookstores with shelves that were very close together and packed with books that were ripe for the plucking, so that as we walked down the aisles Mr F and Mr Bunches would reach out and grab books and toss them on the floor, and I would quickly scoop the books up and put them back more or less in the region they came from, hopefully also getting all of the "Teddy Graham" crumbs and smudges off of them. So if you are shopping for a book at any of those stores, the odds are that the book you want is about five feet further down the aisle, and you'll want to wipe it off a little before buying it.

I also could not stop the stroller, because they'd get really antsy then, and start arching their backs or taking off their socks and shoes and throwing them, and if there's anything that gets you judged to be a bad parent, it's having barefoot kids out in a store in December in Wisconsin. Plus, people don't think it's so cute the third time a shoe gets flung at them.

Most of the shopping, then, was done with me handing them "Teddy Grahams" and trying to calm them down and distract them by talking to them and singing Mr F's favorite song ("All I Want Is You" from the "Juno" Soundtrack) quietly as we walked through the aisles, and when that didn't work, I'd try to quickly scan the books as we walked by. When I'd see a book I thought would be good, I'd scoop it up and keep pushing the stroller, checking out the book with one hand and pushing the stroller with the other hand, eventually looping back to drop the book off more or less where I'd gotten it (I could tell by the trail of "Teddy Grahams.")

I had to do that because in public, I'll do anything to keep the Babies! happy, and also because I'm a pushover. I think I'm a tough dad, but I'm not, and I just give in to the Babies! demands no matter what the cost to me personally is. I will let them, for example, out of the cart while we're at the drugstore picking up cold medicine, even though I know that it will be physically impossible for me to hold both of their hands and get out my wallet to pay. I let them out of the cart and hold their hands and then, when it comes time to pull out my wallet, I let go of Mr Bunches' hand for just one second I hope and pull out the $20 Sweetie gave me, but it's no use: Mr Bunches has taken off towards the back of the store, laughing, and I have to scoop up Mr F and tell the lady behind the counter "put the change in the bag" and then I carry Mr F with me while I chase Mr Bunches around the rack of cold medicines in the back of the store, twice, before grabbing him and going up front carrying both boys to grab the bag, which hopefully has my change in it, and head outside.

Even then, I'm such a pushover that I feel bad for Mr F, who didn't get to run around the pharmacy, and I wonder if I should give him a chance, too. But Mr F gets his own special treatment, like when I keep playing The Tackle Game with him even though I'm afraid that he's given me a concussion.

The Tackle Game is Mr F's favorite. He invented it, and as you'd expect of a game invented by a two-year-old, it's pretty simple and also violent. In The Tackle Game, I sit cross-legged on the floor, and Mr F goes into the other room and then comes running at me while I say "No no no no no" in a scared voice (note: I'm not acting) and he then plows into me and we fall over backwards and I tell him he's very strong and how'd he get so strong? Then we do it all again, for about an hour. And I keep playing The Tackle Game under the most adverse conditions, like when Mr F the other night caught me just behind the temple with his forehead, causing him to momentarily cry until I calmed him down by tossing him in the air a few times. He was fine. I, though, was seeing stars and had a splitting headache, one that instantly set in and spread down to my jaw and my neck, and one that I still kind of have, two days later. But I kept playing The Tackle Game, and didn't let on to Mr F that I thought maybe I had a concussion.

That pushoveriness is how Mr F and Mr Bunches ended up running around buck naked on St. Nick's Eve, or the night of St. Nick's Day, or whatever. We'd eaten dinner, which was tacos and chips and non-yogurt-containing smoothies that I'd made using Sweetie's new St. Nick's blender, and I was helping clean up before taking the Babies! upstairs for their bath, and Mr F started getting into the wedding cabinet, which is the only thing in our house anymore that both contains glass and is in arm's reach. It's a curio cabinet with glass doors that's filled with wedding mementos and champagne glasses and pictures from our wedding and things like that, and we'd move it, but it's really heavy and it wouldn't be right to put it in the garage, anyway, so we guard the wedding cabinet using the high-tech method of taking the piano bench and the round table and laying them down in front of it, a giant barricade that completely fails to slow down Mr F, who likes to open and close doors, hard, to hear the bang! they make. Mr F frequently gets into the wedding cabinet doors, which make a satisfying glassy sound. He hasn't yet noticed that every single thing inside that cabinet is breakable, but it's only a matter of time.

While I was cleaning up last night, Mr F got into the wedding cabinet, and I got him out and tried to distract him from that by dropping him on the couch. That's "The Treatment," a game he and Mr Bunches like. In "The Treatment," I hold them and swing them back and forth and say "1... 2... Treatment!" and then drop them on the couch.

And, yes, "The Treatment" is a lot like "Cloverfield," but there are subtle differences that experts will note. Differences like: In "Cloverfield," I'm a monster, who walks around roaring Cloverfield! and then picking them up and dropping them on the couch, while in The Treatment, I am just Daddy, or sometimes Dr Slider, and I do not roar, but I do count. Cloverfield The Monster would never count. He's a monster.

"The Treatment" did not work on Mr F, who headed back to the wedding cabinet, so I took the next most logical step, which was to strip him down to his diaper. You would have to live in our house for a while to understand why that was the next most logical step, but it was. And it worked: soon, Mr F was down to his diaper and we were hollering, as he ran by, "Woo-hoo!" which is what we do when nearly-naked two-year-olds run around our house. (We even call it "Woo-hooing." "Do you want to woo-hoo?" we'll ask the Babies!, who will answer with "guck.")

Then, Mr Bunches wanted in on the Woo-Hooing, so he came over to me and I stripped him down to his diaper, too, but that wasn't enough: he wanted the diaper off.

So I put my foot down. As he pulled at his diaper and looked up at me and made pleading noises that were kind of like words but not really, I said: "No. You've got to leave the diaper on."

He pulled at it more and pulled at my leg.

"No," I said, firmly. "The diaper stays on."

He whined a little, looked sad, and pulled at his diaper, forlornly. So I caved in and said "Fine," and stripped the diaper off, which Sweetie might have objected to but it was my day to be in charge, so she didn't say anything other than that I sure am a pushover, and I then stripped off Mr F's diaper, too, letting them run around naked while we continued cleaning. I figured, they'll get some naked woo-hooing in before their bath, and I can get this cleaned up so that we can just relax," and I went back to cleaning the blender, but within about two minutes, I heard Sweetie yelling that Mr Bunches was pooping, and I rushed out there to see Mr Bunches by the Only Surviving Plant, with Sweetie holding a magazine under his butt.

I picked up Mr Bunches, who looked surprised, and held him at arm's length as we went through the kitchen, where he dropped part of the load and I stepped in it, forcing me to stop and hold Mr Bunches in one arm while I took off the now-needed-to-be-burned sock, at which point Mr Bunches got terribly upset and started crying, so I got the sock off, and got him upstairs into his room and sitting on the potty chair.

By then, Mr Bunches was thoroughly upset and was bawling, and I didn't want him to form some kind of permanent negative pooping attitude -- what if he ended up always being constipated because he was worried that if he pooped he'd get scooped up and whisked around? What if he went crazy because he was so scared of pooping? How would that affect my plans to have him and Mr F star in their own show on Disney so that I can retire? -- so to fix that, I told him it was okay, and then when that didn't work, I cheered.

"Yay!" I said, and started clapping. He looked surprised, but stopped crying and looked at me. "Yay!" I said again, and cheered some more. "What a good boy! Yay! Hooray! Good job!" and I kept clapping while he sniffled and then cheered up and then he gave me a hug.

We cleaned him up and then, still naked, I took him back downstairs to clean up the mess. I forewarned Sweetie and Middle to cheer for him, too, so Mr Bunches walked, naked, into the kitchen, to a standing ovation of Mommy and his sister clapping and cheering, while Mr F looked a little jealous, like he was wondering if he should poop, too.

With a lot of bleach, we got the floor clean, and we got the Babies! up to their bath and got them dressed, and spent the rest of St. Nick's Night playing The Tackle Game and watching their new movies they'd gotten for St. Nick's Day, and I had learned a valuable lesson, which was this:

Next time, put more ice cream into the smoothie.

The Haunted Office! A True Story. (Not Actually A True Story, But You Could Win A Prize.)

2012-01-19T17:00:00.001-06:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Contest Factory for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

Doug The Accountant was used to working in terrible conditions: The single bare bulb in his office hardly gave enough light for him to see the TRS-80 computer his employers gave him to do the accounting on, the old thing perched on a series of cardboard boxes that has sufficed as a “temporary” desk for the past 5 years now, the boxes succumbing to the mold that grew on everything and had actually dissolved his coffee cup six months ago only to find that the coffee was toxic to the mold.

But the zombies were the last straw: upon seeing them rising from the dense piles of papers stored in every corner of the basement where his ‘office’ was located, Doug told HR that he was absolutely taking a half-day off as a personal day until they were gone.

Sound like YOUR office? If so, then you need to enter the Pimp My Cube Contest – a contest that is going to plumb the depths of pathetic, messy, disorganized, leaky, moldy, cluttered, badly-furnished, whatever work spaces, and give three of them $1,200 in prizes.

If you’ve got a bad office, crummy cubicle, wacky workspace, make it pay for you: record a video showing why your work place is terrible – the funnier the better – and upload it to contest site so the people at the Contest Factory can watch it, then tell your friends and family and coworkers to vote your office the worst ever.

That’ll get you entered into the Contest Factory Pimp My Cube Sweepstakes , and then, based on votes and points and video quality and compelling storylines, you might win one of three prize packages:

o New high end computer system
o New Desk, Chair and Decorations
o New Entertainment Package with high end stereo, espresso machine etc.

The contest goes until January 31, 2012; as I write this, nobody has yet entered, so you could be FIRSTIES! And even if you don’t make the top three can win a second-prize $200 gift card chosen by random drawing.

So before January 31, go to the PMC site, register, upload your video, and get your buddies to vote on your video.

Thursday Scramble: Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World! (NSFW)

2012-01-19T09:38:00.006-06:00

Thursday Scramble is a new thing I'm going: I will on Thursdays post the most recent entry from one of my blogs onto all the other blogs. This is the most recent entry in my ongoing serialized story

Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World!: In the future, everyone will eat squid jerky, armies of aliens, demons, monsters, and Valkyries will do battle at the bidding of corporations, and the fate of the 73 dimensions rests on the slim, sexy shoulders of Rachel, Queen of the Lesbian Zombies!

This is actually chapter 23; to begin the story at the beginning, click here. Or, to download the entire story in book form for free, click here.

WARNING: This scene is graphic!

Rachel, after awakening from her zombie state, fell in love with Bridget, who through the magic of a time warp, gave birth to their daughter Harper. Now, having been disintegrated by Harper to save her from the Bubbles, Rachel has been captured by Bridget's dad. No, that doesn't explain anything, which is why you should read the story.

"Let go of me," I said.

He pushed me back on the bed, his leering face only inches from mine. "No," he breathed. "Do you know what I've been through? I've literally been to Hell, died, had my body reconstructed into this monstrosity," and he pointed down at himself, "All to search for what is rightfully mine."

He paused.

"You."

Another pause, as he loomed over me.

"You, you are mine."

"I got that," I told him, trying to sound braver than I was feeling. He was lying on top of me and was heavier than I felt I could move.

"I created you, Rachel. Not literally. I did not myself carve up the women who would become your parts. I did not myself go and kidnap you from that concert. I did not drag your unconscious body down into the cellar where that mad idiot works doing things only he can do. I did not remove your chip and I did not pick out the limbs that would become the new you and then sew them together into this remarkably sexy package, binding them seamlessly by calling on energy from in between the dimensions."

He looked down at the stump of my left arm.

"Except for that one. I picked out that one, and that one in particular was the one that belonged to me." He stared back into my eyes and then put one of his hands, the one with the delicate nails, onto my breast, began kneading it and pulling it, roughly.

"Do you want to know why?" he asked.

"Don't touch me, please," I managed to whisper.

He took his hand and pushed harder against my breast, and I felt a cold sweat break out. Shifting his weight, he pressed his knee into my stomach, just below my ribcage.

"Don't tell me what to do, you lesbian zombie whore," he said, and my blood stopped in my veins at the threat in his voice.

With a tiny twitch of his weight, he pumped his knee into me. My breath whooofed out of me and tears sprang to my eyes and I gasped. He pinched my breast and then punched me in the face.

"Stop it!" Bridget yelled. I couldn't see her. I closed my eyes and tried to catch my breath as my legs were roughly pushed apart.

"You don't know what resources went into creating you, all to have a body that could hold on to that hand and all because that hand was the final ingredient in controlling the thousands of slaves we created," Bridget's dad said.

"Don't do this, Daddy!" Bridget yelled again.

"SHUT HER UP!" Bridget's dad roared and punched me in the face again. Before I could even catch my breath he pushed his knee into my stomach again and I gasped again, feeling emptied of air entirely. His hands were pushing in between my thighs and I wanted to fight him, I did, but I couldn't even catch my breath and my lungs were so empty it caused me actual pain inside my chest.

I heard a crack of metal on a head and Bridget screamed and The Me's voice said "Don't do that!" and there was a scuffle sound as Bridget's dad's hand pushed into me and I tried to fight and he said:

"Don't fight me. You have lost the one thing you were created to keep and since this body belonged to others before it became your demon soulless shell, you shouldn't care what I do to it." He pushed his knee down again and my body felt like it was turned inside out as I struggled to breath. He punched the side of my head and I saw stars.

"I would kill you, but I need the body alive. I must make sure you understand never to oppose me again," he said, and viciously raked his nails over my inner thigh. I would have screamed but I couldn't even suck in air, as he was keeping his knee pushed into my stomach now.

I began to black out.

I felt his hands in me, inside my thighs and on my breasts and one pushing into my mouth and the room went all spinny and then a voice crackled through an intercom:

"It's not here!"

Bridget's dad stopped staring at my pussy and turned his terrible face back to look at mine. Through blurred tunnel vision, I saw him purse his lips.

"That is very bad for you," he said. "But worse for your lovers."

He punched me again in the face, and said: "Kill them."

The Troll That Tried To Kill You: A Parable, Or Something.

2012-01-14T15:00:00.001-06:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Walgreens for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

Once upon a time, there lived a mean ol’ troll, whose sole purpose in life was to take something of value from everyone it came into contact with and never give anything back. This troll, who was as ugly as you might imagine a troll to be, constantly wanted more more more, even though he already was getting richer and fatter and uglier and meaner at double the rate of other trolls.

One day, the mean ol’ troll decided to up his game, as it were, and thought “I could get even richer if I made sure that the people who I demand money from had to give it to me in order to stay alive,” and so the troll went into health care middleman business, and changed his name from “mean ol’ troll” to Express Scripts.

That’s probably not the EXACT way that Express Scripts came into existence, but it’s close enough. Express Scripts, as you probably don’t know, is a middleman health company that contracts with health insurers and drug stores, and in so doing, adds zero to the health care industry while sucking away profits from it – profits being money you must pay.

Express Scripts gets payments from health insurers and gives them to drugstores. That’s all it does. That’s why it exists: To be a conduit for money that would be paid anyway. And it’s an amazingly profitable business, apparently, given that Express Scripts (former troll, now health care do-nothing) sees its profits rise about double the rate of other industry companies.

It does that, apparently, by strong-arming local drugstores into losing money just to get you prescription drugs, as shown by the Walgreens and Express Scripts dispute.

Walgreen’s, which has been contracting with Express Scripts, offered to help keep costs down by keeping its rates flat and charging guaranteed lowest prices to military families who get their insurance through Tricare.

Express Scripts, in turn, said “Screw you, sick people, military families, and Walgreen’s, we want more,” and demanded more control and below-industry prices. And so Express Scripts no longer has a deal with Walgreen’s, which means that military families will pay more for their medications, and you will pay more or go to a different, farther away pharmacy.

All because Express Scripts, Profit Troll, wanted more money than it already had at your expense.

You could join Walgreen’s Prescription Savings Club at Walgreens:

http://www.walgreens.com/pharmacy/psc/psc_overview_page.jsp

For January, you can do that at a discounted price of just $10 per family in ($5 for one person), getting the option of discounts on 8,000 different brand-name medications, low prices on generics, Walgreen’s discounts on flu shots, pet scripts, nebulizers and other things. Members also get bonuses for using other Walgreen’s services, like photofinishing, so you can continue to save on medications and still do one-stop shopping at your local pharmacy.

And you can show your support for the companies that are trying to do the right thing: Pick sides, like me: Stick up for Walgreen’s: Like Walgreens on Facebook and follow Walgreens on Twitter (@Walgreens), and help make things better.

what is 'the After'?

2012-01-12T09:03:00.000-06:00

the After on Prezi

the After is...

... everything you want it to be.

...a trap

...where all your friends and family wait for you

...frighteningly perfect

the After is my latest book: four years in the making, the After tells what happens to Saoirse following a plane crash that leaves her standing in her perfect kitchen with her perfect family in a perfect world that she cannot stand. Told by William Howard Taft -- yes, that William Howard Taft, who appears on her doorstep -- that she can leave, Saoirse sets off on her own travels through a world almost entirely of her making, trying to find out how to leave and to decide if she wants to.

If you ever wondered what comes next, the After is a must-read. Buy it on your Kindle for $0.99 or in paperback on Amazon.

Click here for a sneak preview of a portion of the book.

David: 3

2012-01-03T06:39:00.002-06:00

Lucy and I had argued, but can you blame us? Everyone was on edge, after all, far more than normal. It's one thing to say stupid things like "Live every day as if it was your last," but another to try to do it. When every day might really be your last the temptation is to do things differently, but what if you can't?

Those things appeared in the sky, the things that took over, and there were the usual reactions: riots and unrest and announcements that the world had ended or would end, people starting up new religions and revitalizing old ones, politicians with plans and people with ideas.

That had seemed like the end of the world and why not? Something like this doesn't happen every day, of course. Lucy and I had spent the first few days in our cabin, watching news reports -- they never blocked our transmissions, of course -- and huddling together.

"What should we do?" we asked each other more than once.

We never had answers for each other. We had food, and we had some weapons, if it came to that, and we were isolated from the unrest that was troubling everyone else, which meant that for us, the end of the world came in peaceful seclusion, all happening on a screen far away. We watched as police tried to keep people away from tall buildings, both because people were trying to communicate with the ships and because people were jumping off. We saw news reports of police pepper-spraying a throng that tried to jump the fence at the Presidential Compound, for reasons they never quite said.

And then, time went on, and the things just stayed there. The crowds settled down. The police were a constant presence but they'd really been that before, we just hadn't viewed them as saving us from ourselves. The politicians still talked and the religions still prayed but things adapted and suddenly, it was like the things, the ships, had always been there.

"And now what?" I asked Lucy one day.

"And now what, what?" she asked back. We'd stopped making the bed, only showered every few days, ate food barely prepared, sometimes without using plates, sharing out of the same pan.

"We're running low on food," I told her.

"And money," she said.

She'd been checking our accounts.

"Do we just go back to work?"

"I suppose we do," Lucy said. She was always practical that way, although not as practical as I would be, I realize now. I am the most practical person that ever lived... lived... as I understand now.

So we did.

We went back to work, deciding to stay at the cabin but going to our jobs, which suddenly had less meaning than before. We commuted from the cabin to work each morning, Lucy at her job which at the time was tech support -- back then, 47% of the population of North America worked in tech support, and even I can see the irony of Lucy's job in tech support, but it was not as ironic as my own job.

I was a programmer.

Was.

Ha, my old organic self would say.

My new self does not talk that way; my new self communicates almost never in words, as I do here, slowing it down for you and making it intelligible. My new self communicates in ways that you cannot understand, ways that I would have barely comprehended when I was organic, although I would have grasped the theory behind the means I use now to "talk" even if I would would not have fully comprehended them...

...Do I digress? I do not. I have 137,612,321 different things going on, and this story is but one of them.

We commuted to work and we hated it, but we needed to do it because even when every day might be your last you needed credit to buy food and electricity and you worked to get credit and so we commuted to work and listened to the morning news as we did so and reflected on how the important became banal and the banal became annoying and that was why I was drunk and angry and had not yet apologized when they came for me, because I was mad at the world and my life and the fact that I had to get up early in the morning and commute to work beneath the shadow of a ship that would not disgorge its secrets but taunted me every day with the promise of revelations or horrors or new or dangerous or different.

I sat up late, drinking, and Lucy came out and said:

"You've got to get up early, you know."

"I know," I mumbled. I tried to quell the anger because it wasn't her fault and I was once human but tried not to be.

"I'll go in with you," she said.

"Don't use that tone with me," I snarled, suddenly, and we both knew she didn't have a tone but I needed something to latch on. "Don't get that expression. It's not my fault I've got to go in early." It's not my fault those things won't stop being there,I didn't say. It's not my fault we are staring... death? worse? better?... in the face every day and every night and always.

"I didn't have a tone," Lucy said, quietly and sadly. She probably knew why I was like this. She was better at controlling it but how could she have not had the same rage, the same sense of futility, that I had?

"You did and I'm sick of it," I said, and with that we fought, or I did, and she fought back, perhaps helping me purge out the bile of emotion that had been building up. I accused her of thinking she was better than me. I accused her of not loving me enough. I accused her of thinking I was better than her.

She said only a few things back -- she defended herself and her attacks were parries: I don't think those things, you're crazy, or this is the alcohol talking or I don't know how you think these things you manage to come up with and I used them, judo-like, to get more angry.

"I'm crazy? I'm drunk?" I yelled. "I'll show you crazy drunk!" and I threw my glass at the wall but mis-aimed and broke the window.

Lucy shot me a stricken look and said "I'm going to bed."

I sat up, staring at the broken window, in the dark, smoking cigarettes in the house so I would have a reason to hate myself more, and finally, after several hours, I crawled into bed, still drunk, smelling of stale smoke and boiled-over, dried-up anger.

"Lucy..." I whispered.

And a red glare illuminated everything around us, a klaxon-wail deafened me and burst my eardrums instantly, holes were torn, ripped, shredded in the walls of our house, and shadows lumbered and slithered into the room grasping at me with appendages I had never imagined existed.

Lucy screamed and then all was gone.

Tickets! Getcher Tickets here! I got 'em all!

2012-01-03T06:32:00.002-06:00

Where do YOU get your tickets for acts like Natalie Cole, or Natasha Bedingfield with Matthew Morrison? Not from some guy in an alley or an online at from a list, right? Why would you do that when you could get your matthew morrison tickets, or your natalie cole seats, or your natasha bedingfield tickets from Ticketamerica.com.

It's easy, it's fast, and you can get tickets for just about everything, even City Winery.

Part 2D: The interrogation begins.

2011-12-10T15:56:00.003-06:00

With that sentence,Tom's reactions took off, momentarily, even beyond his control, although part of that might have been to blame on the inside-out man suddenly grabbing him and trying to choke him, his hands slimily wrapping around Tom's neck and pushing his inside-out thumbs into Tom's windpipe. Tom could feel the tendons pulsing with each heartbeat; he had enough time to wonder how it was the blood was being held inside when if the man was truly inside out there ought to be a fine mist of corpuscles every time his heart beat, and then he was blacking out.

In a haze, as his mind began to shut down the lesser-used parts, Tom focused his attention. He got his heartbeat under control and slowed it down. He diverted the neural impulses and shut down different areas of his brain and then opened his eyes, which focused perfectly. He saw the inside-out-face and heard it hissing something at him.

"FSSIFSFISRIRISRSR" it said, its tongue flapping wildly outside of the teeth, and Tom could not even fathom how the Escher-esque mouth was making sounds at all before two of the aliens moved in and there was a flash of light, a crackle of ozone, and the inside-out man fell below his sight.

His throat free, Tom took a deep, slow, breath, and then held it for a second before exhaling, letting his body clear as much oxygen from his lungs as it could while piling up the waste materials to be expelled in the first bad breath.

The alien that had spoken moved closer.

**so you can control yourself** it said.

Tom did not answer. He watched the two closer aliens as they slithered appendages out of hidden folds, their bodies rotating and shifting in complex ways so that there was always an eye towards the focus of their attentions. With grasping claws they pulled the inside out man off to a distant corner of this lab/infirmary/prison.

**you should cooperate with us** the spokesperson alien said.

Tom turned his gaze back to it but did not answer.

**we have ways of rewarding you as well as punishing you.**

Tom lay there.

**we are on your side**

Funny way to show it, thought Tom.

He wondered how far the strike force had gone. Were they headed to ... he might as well say it... but he couldn't: his home planet? IO17? He cursed himself for not even in his mind being able to think the real name of his planet, but was proud he'd said it at least once. He wondered if Lisa had gotten to safety.

**you don't have any reason to trust me. but you would trust me if you knew the full story** the alien said, then, it's several speaking mouths getting easier for Tom to understand.

Still Tom lay silently. Give an interrogator nothing, he knew. He'd been trained -- not even against human interrogators, although that was ostensibly what the classes had been for. If you don't talk, they can't get clues easily.

Others of the aliens moved in, until they were all Tom could see, in the hazy pink light of the lab. Eyes blinked at him, some of them staring straight at him, some seeming to look at him peripherally.

**it's the first one we're sure of** said one.

**are we sure of it** asked another, its mouths moving in complicated patterns to create the sounds.

Tom wondered why they were speaking in his language. It must be for my benefit, he decided. They're trying to get me to trust them, maybe, or to want to ask them a question.

The first one spoke again:

**what do you know about David** it said.

Tom did not answer at first, but finally, the silence grew too long and he said:

"David is a myth."

I bet those suckers in the left lane would let me in if I wore this!

2011-12-10T15:44:00.003-06:00

The thing about the Geek Alert website that I go to all the time is that almost every time I go there, I see something that I didn't even know I wanted until I was made aware that it existed, and then suddenly I both know this new thing exists AND I want it more than anything.

Like today: I go there to see what the updates are, as Geek Alerts puts new stuff every day on the site, and I see that they have a "Moving Inkblot Rorschach Mask" from The Watchmen:
And all I can think is I would wear that and it would be awesome. Especially during my morning commute.

Geek Alerts is one of my favorite sites, not just to look at cool stuff like that and Sith Letter Jackets and awesome electronic puzzles and stuff, but to shop for people. You can almost always find a cool present for almost anyone on there -- from your Aunt Emma, who's got all those cats and thus would like the DJ Turntable cat scratch pad to your boss, who you would like to think is intelligent and so would be intrigued by a wordgame puzzle -- and you can save a lot of money whether you're buying stuff for yourself or someone else, because in addition to constantly telling you what's the coolest stuff out there, Geek Alerts gives you savings through stuff like Think Geek coupons, and discounts on computers and equipment like with the Dell coupon they're offering now, and you can save with online purchasing, too, using the ThinkGeek promo code and other online savings they've got.

So it's a one-stop cool shopping center, with presents and ideas galore, and it's a fascinating website. I can't stop going there. And I can't stop wanting the stuff they've got.

Chapter 2: Inside Out, Part 2C: Tom's First Alien

2011-11-27T07:09:00.006-06:00

Tom focused, bringing his heart rate down.

The inside-out man reached the side of his table. Tom watched with barely-controlled revulsion as a hand reached out, towards his face.

His heart was now down to about 40 beats per minute. Conserve adrenaline, he thought to himself, and focused on doing so as the slimy, oozing hand touched his face.

The thing was talking. Tom looked at its face and saw it had no teeth. His eyes, adjusting to the lighting, flicked around the room and he saw some uniforms, uniforms just like his, held up and pinned to the wall and otherwise displayed for apparent study.

"You're one of my crew," he whispered.

The shuffling, dripping man paused, tilted his head, and appeared to struggle to talk. His tongue, somehow inside-out, too, did not work right and eventually the skull surrounded by a topographical map of a brain, with backwards eyeballs embedded deep within it, nodded.

**that is right**

Tom heard off to his left.

He turned slowly, deliberately, and looked, keeping as calm as he could. He would need the reserves of energy that random bursts of fear used up foolishly, and he could not do anything now filling his tied-up body with acids from useless bursts of activity.

He saw his first alien.

It nodded at him, and then nodded off to its left. Tiny wires embedded in the ceiling, the walls, the floors, and all the equipment pulsed and began to glow a pinkish-purple color, lighting the room with hues Tom found hard to see in. He could make out other shapes of other aliens beyond the one that had spoken to him in that crackly voice.

The aliens were not birdlike at all.

**does it frighten you** the alien asked Tom, with a gesture towards the inside-out crew member that stood next to him. Tom ignored him-- it-- for a moment while he tried to study the aliens, absorb everything he could learn about them as quickly as possible.

They appeared to be large shambling balls, almost. And he wasn't sure about the shambling. The aliens were almost perfectly round and Tom attributed the lack of perfect roundness to the gravity he could feel pulling him down, too. The one that had spoken to him had an eye in its center, staring at him, and a clawlike appendage not far from that eye, folded up, he could see, the claw attached to what was obviously an arm-like mechanism. He could not see the mouth and regretted that he had missed it when the thing spoke, but then it spoke again and he could see that it did not use a mouth at all to speak.

**does it frighten you** the thing asked again and Tom saw that several tiny little holes round its globelike body moved when it spoke, each producing a different part of the sound so that the words actually came out all at once, jumbled, almost: his brain was sorting them out quickly and assembling them into words, and he wondered if the alien knew that.

The thing moved forward, and it did so by rolling, edging forward and spinning so that the eye which had been centered on him pointed now down to his left towards the floor. Tom watched that eye close and the thing spin slightly so that a new eye was able to focus on him and the inside-out man at the same time. There were three appendages on this side but fewer of the speaking-holes. The voice sounded different - -more muted, whispery.

**we need to know** the alien said to Tom.

The inside-out man had, meanwhile, been ignored by Tom as he'd touched Tom's face and shoulder and arm, getting blood and various juices on him as his skeletal-muscular appendages had gripped and reached for Tom, the inside-out man being ignored by the aliens, who now moved even closer in the pinkish glow their light-tubes had created.

**are you consciously controlling your reactions** the alien asked him. It was unable to make any inflections in its voice. Tom had to work to sort out that this was a question, the more complicated sentence being harder to work out.

**we need to know** his interrogator said again. **so we don't have to do that to you**

And after I identify the zucchini, I'll write a song about it on the piano. Multitasking!

2011-11-27T06:58:00.003-06:00

I am a man of many talents. For example, I can play the piano. I can fix a sink. And I can without fail tell the difference between a cucumber and a zucchini... by sound.

So I'm what you'd call a Renaissance Man. Me and Leonardo Da Vinci are intellectual cousins. But there are limits to even my genius. For example, Make Up. I know nothing about make up.

Which, considering I'm a guy, is about right, but still, the point is, you don't want to come to me for advice on how to look good. The last time I weighed in on any makeup suggestions, Sweetie had gotten a makeover from some girl at a mall.

"What do you think?" she asked.

"I like it," I told her.

"I look trashy," she responded. And that was it for me and makeup.

But if I can't actually advise you on makeup, I can tell you where to get Cosmetics Tips that'll be really helpful: CosmoHut. Over at CosmoHut, which I know about 'cause I know about things, they've got Make Up Tutorials and tips of all kinds, like what to do about puffy eyes. (My suggestion: wear really big sunglasses, like the Olsen Twins do, even inside, even in the dark. Their suggestion: put two teaspoons in the freezer when you go to bed. In the morning, when you get up, take the frozen teaspoons and hold them on the places you want to de-pufferize.)

(De-pufferize is TM me.)

So you can see where they'll be really helpful to you if you use makeup and don't want to look trashy, or if you just need some tips on dealing with everyday beauty problems. I don't mind saying: if you want some beauty, skin care and makeup advice, head over to CosmoHut.

But if you need to know whether that sound was a zucchini, or a cucumber, I'm your man.

Chapter 2: Inside Out, Part 2B: Tom's background

2011-11-02T05:45:00.004-05:00

Io17 is a serialized story; if you're new to it, you might want to begin at the beginning by clicking here to get to the table of contents.

Tom did not scream, and felt proud about that. But he wanted to. The moment the lights came on, the moment he realized that the thing in front of him was a human but a human inverted, ripped open and curled back on itself, he felt bile rise in his throat and his eyes widen. It was something that he knew would be stored in the primitive part of his brain to give him involuntary shivers in the future, when he least expected it.

If he had a future.

The thing -- the human? but barely -- shuffled forward, and Tom watched it. He did not pull on his restraints or try to get away; he already knew that he could not and so he forced his muscles to be calm, intentionally controlling them the way he and others could, sometimes. Tom had learned early on in his life that he could do that, that he was maybe more advanced than some people in that most people think they can control their muscles but they can't, really -- they do things they think to do but they drop things, small things and big things, they bump into things and they stub their toes and they burn their fingers.

Tom had never done those things. Tom had never dropped anything accidentally. He had not ever tripped. He had not ever burnt his finger or hand.

One of his earliest memories, in fact, was of his mother in the kitchen, cooking soup. He had been helping her, standing up on a stool to mix in ingredients on the stove. While the stove top did not get hot because of magnetic induction, the soup was heating up and had just begun boiling and he had told his mother that.

She had said "I'm sure it's not boiling yet," but Tom had been sure because he could see the soup and she could not. But he was young and wanted to believe his mom, so he stuck his finger into the soup just as his mom turned around and saw the bubbling broth.

Tom remembered what happened next: His mom had yelled, raised her voice, one of the rare times she had done so, telling him don't do that but before she even got the words out, Tom was aware of several other things: His finger was in the soup, and he felt tiny little jolts, back and forth. His mind almost seemed to light up in several different areas and Tom thought lift the finger and he did, pulling it out of the soup before his mom had even said don't. Tom could hear the individual sounds that made up the word landing on his ear drop:

ent

but his finger was already out of the soup, and he licked the broth off of it and looked at her as the rest of her words landed

aaaa

"Why?" he asked, and she took his hand, looked at the finger, at the pot boiling ferociously on the stove now, and back at his finger.

"That's going to blister," she said, but looked doubtful. "You shouldn't touch hot things, Tommy!" she scolded, but her heart wasn't in it, he could tell, even then, even as little as he was, and then, for some reason, she looked again at the finger and then around, fearfully, at the walls and the floors and then the ceiling. Her eyes lingered a long time up on the ceiling and she bent down to hug him. "It's going to blister and you should be more careful, Tommy!" she picked him up and put her mouth right by his ear as she spoke and carried him to the faucet and said "Let's rinse that don't you ever tell anyone about this ever at the faucet and put some cream on it."

And he hadn't told.

He'd gotten the message with only a few more repetitions, and only one real warning. Once, at about age 7, he'd been playing baseball with the other kids, and he'd been up to bat. The pitcher had begun to wind up, and someone on the bench, one of the other kids on the team, had said "It's a sinker, Tommy!" as the pitcher had started. Tom heard that the way he heard everything when he wanted to concentrate, broken down and slower and giving him time to think through every impulse, and he'd even had time to dart his eyes at the bench and see the kid who'd spoken, he couldn't remember his name now, but he also saw the coach, and every other adult he could see, staring at the kid who'd spoken, and the Coach, as the ball approached Tom, had said

"Lucky guess!" to the kid, and Tom had been so befuddled by their behavior that he'd not swung at the pitch, which he easily could have hit. He'd struck out, and the remainder of the game had the same feeling as his mom the day of the soup: The kids kept going, but the grown-ups had seemed to be play-acting at rooting them on, and the next day that kid was gone. And now Tom couldn't remember his name.

Only 1 or 2 more times in his life had his mom or dad had to whisper to him don't show it and he learned to hide, as best he could, the superfast reaction times that let him realize his finger was in danger of being burnt and pull it out before the scalding water could actually hurt his finger, and other amazing feats.

And he was never disappeared and had managed to get shipped off to Mars, where he now had been kidnapped and was staring at a human being who could scarcely be described as such.

My Generically-Titled Autism Post: Today, sleep disturbances, and why maybe melatonin isn't right for your kids.

2011-10-11T07:25:00.000-05:00

I used to call this "Autism Works," but then I found out there's a group called that already. (Find them here; I'll talk more about them in the future.) So while I think up a new title, I'll just go with the generic title. Click here for more posts like this with information about businesses, apps, people, and other aspects of raising a child with autism.)

It's 5:53 a.m., and I'm awake and working on my blogs instead of sleeping until... well, I'd usually only sleep until 6 a.m., so it's not that bad that I'm up, but still, I don't like losing that last 15 minutes of sleep on days like today, which began with Mr F and Mr Bunches both waking up at about 5:45 a.m.

Or, at least, that's when they woke me up. Mr Bunches woke me up by yelling "Dad!" and getting me in there to restart the movie he's currently watching ad infinitum ("Lilo & Stitch"), while Mr F had likely been awake for a lot longer, given that he was wide awake and tapping a stick against a wall to kill the time.

Mr F doesn't sleep. Or at least, not like we sleep. Sweetie and I joke that Mr F only sleeps every fourth day, and that's about right: Most nights, we can hear him in his room (which we keep locked to avoid him wandering around or getting out of the house at night) until well after we fall asleep, and many nights we can hear him around 2 or 3 a.m. wake up and begin his day. Then, about every fourth day, that catches up with him and he can't be woken up, as happened this past Sunday when he fell asleep on the couch from 4 to 5, then, after I gave him a bath to wake him up, he fell asleep again and then fell asleep in the car while we were driving around until finally we let him go to bed at 7 p.m.

So sleep is on my mind this week: Sleep and autism.

This study, "Sleep Problems In Autism: Prevalence, Cause, and Intervention", looked at just that problem. It noted that as many as 89% of autistic children exhibit some form of sleep disorder at one point, and summarized the types of problems:

Studies of sleep in children with autism have generally reported severe problems associated with sleep onset and maintenance. Irregular sleep–wake patterns, problems with sleep onset, poor sleep, early waking, and poor sleep routines have been found at all developmental levels, with increasing severity at lower developmental levels.

Additionally, shortened night sleep, alterations in sleep onset and wake times, night waking and irregular sleep patterns (with the presence of a free-running rhythm in one case) have been reported.

That's Mr F right there: all of them. The study concluded that autistic kids are more likely than any other group of children to have sleep problems and also concluded that it's likely due to something specific in the kids.

And it doesn't just cause dads to be awake before 6 a.m.; it also leads to problematic behavior during the daytime, including communications delays. Or, perhaps, the study notes, communications delays lead to sleep disturbances:

A relation between social and communication difﬁculties and sleep problems is possible. The sleep–wake cycle is a circadian rhythm and there is evidence to suggest that, as well as the light–dark cycle, humans use social cues to
entrain circadian rhythms.

Routine and social cues are thought to help young infants develop stable sleep–wake patterns with the longest sleep occurring during the night hours. Children with a primary social-communication deﬁcit may therefore ﬁnd it difﬁcult to use such cues to entrain their rhythms, resulting in problems with their sleep–wake schedule.

See? You didn't know that you know when to go to sleep because society tells you, did you? And autistic kids may not pick up on that.

The study also noted that melatonin deficits may be a problem, about which more in a minute. Another possible cause of sleep disturbance was increased anxiety, which makes me sad -- I don't like to think of Mr F and Mr Bunches being too nervous to sleep, but it seems to fit at least Mr F's personality. And, finally, there was some stuff about EEG's in sleep and REM sleep patterns.

Bottom line: We don't know why autistic people don't sleep well, which makes it kind of silly to recommend cures or interventions, but, then, we do lots of silly things, and the paper goes on to recommend some cures and interventions for something that we don't know the cause of.

To editorialize for a moment: Suggesting a solution for a problem without knowing the root cause of the problem is stabbing in the dark, or treating only a symptom, and either one may or may not be better than doing nothing. Consider an old joke:

Man: Doctor, my arm hurts when I go like this.

Doctor: Don't go like that.

That solves the problem, right? But it's not medical care. Or suppose a person shows up at the ER with a gunshot wound, and the doctor removes the bullet fragments and sews up the wound and sends the person on his way. Would you consider that an effective treatment? Or should the doctor have inquired how the bullet got there?

Just some thought experiments. Now, on to the solutions for the unknowable problem!

The study begins by noting that medications were the most common form of help for autistic kids with sleep problems -- but that about half of the parents questioned thought behavioral interventions worked just as well as medications. In our house, we've talked about medications at times for Mr F, and I downloaded the Autism Speaks Medication Decision Kit, a helpful packet that helps provide information and questions to guide you in a decision on whether or not to medicate your child-- for whatever problem. (Get it here.)

Using it, I decided (with Sweetie's help) that we wouldn't medicate Mr F, at least not yet -- because most of the medications listed don't have any clearcut effects on Mr F's conditions and some of them can have severe side effects. It seemed wrong to me to put a 5-year-old on strong antipsychotic medicines when he's not that much trouble.

If your child is on medication, or you've considered it, you should definitely get the kit and read it through. It raises a bunch of issues that I hadn't considered at all, and has helpful questions to ask your doctor, and yourself, about the medications.

Another attempted treatment was faded bedtimes, or moving bedtimes gradually to get the kids to sleep at the appropriate times. This was found to have little effect on the autistic children in the study, something I could've told them. (Currently, our routine is to begin bedtime at about 7:15, with the boys getting medicine, then a story read to them, then a bath, then bedtime with a movie on their TV. The movie on their TV is imperative: they will not sleep without a movie on, and we've learned to put movies in that have a continuous play feature, because the movie ending will frequently wake Mr Bunches up, and you haven't lived until you've been woken up every 87 minutes to restart a movie.)

Then there was parent training: Teach parents how to properly encourage good behavior (sleep) and discourage bad (not sleep.) Although only one family completed the 6-week program, that family reported reduced stress and slightly better sleep routines; I suspect the reduced stress came from parents being more able to cope with the stress through the training, but that's the cynic in me.

Then there's the one I might try: Light intervention:

Two additional treatments for sleep disorders which involve adjustment of the circadian sleep–wake cycle, are light therapy and chronotherapy. Light therapy may be used to treat a variety of rhythm problems, including sleep problems. Bright light suppresses the secretion of melatonin.

Additionally, it has been shown that periods of bright light treatment in the morning will advance the melatonin and sleep–wake rhythms, while bright light treatment in the evening has a delaying effect.

That is, show kids a light box in the morning to get them to sleep better at night, which might work for kids (like ours) who routinely wake up at 3 or 4 a.m., when it's dark out and then have trouble getting to sleep at night.

Finally, melatonin, which almost everyone we talk to treats as a panacea for this problem. At the boys' 5-year-checkup, Sweetie asked the doctor whether it was okay to take melatonin for their sleep, and he approved it: 1 mg each night, he said.

The first melatonin we were able to find was tablets, which is a problem, because the boys won't take pills -- they won't even take medicine from a spoon or those little plastic cups; we have to put it in a syringe and squirt it into their mouths.

We addressed that by pounding the pills into a powder -- literally, I hammer them into a powder, because I'm not a 15th century chemist and don't have a mortar-and-pestle -- and then mix them in with some other liquid, ordinarily some ibuprofen or water; it works better with ibuprofen because they (oddly?) like the flavor of that. (Lately, they've had a cold, so they get the melatonin mixed in with their nighttime cold medicine.)

That worked okay until Mr Bunches saw me scraping the pills into the medicine and then didn't want to take the medicine, at all -- because he now knew it had pills in it and it grossed him out. So for a week we had to wrestle him into the medicine and risk him spitting it back out, until he cut his foot one day and I began telling him the medicine was to make his foot feel better, after which he took it.

(So at night, Mr Bunches will say "Medicine!" and when I say "Yes," he still sometimes says "My foot!" even though his foot is long since healed.)

We also got some of the Natrol liquid melatonin, which we thought would be easier to use than the crushed-powder pills, but the boys hated the flavor of it -- spitting it back out each time, so we've foregone that and every night I get out my hammer, medicine, tablets, and syringe and go to it.

But here's the thing:

I don't think it's working.

Mr F has been on melatonin for a month now, and so has Mr Bunches, and I've seen no real changes in their sleep patterns, at all. I'm not ready to call it quits yet, but I suspect that the melatonin is like the gluten-free diet and other fad remedies: Not exactly the catalyst for change, but it gets the credit for change when it happens, like an ineffective quarterback who wins the Super Bowl in spite of himself.

And here's the other thing: I'm not sure melatonin is a good thing, because I took it for a week or two; I've also suffered from insomnia most of my life and have had sleep problems off and on for the last few months, and so I took the same dose that the boys took for a few weeks, and I didn't like it: My sleep felt less restful, and I had more realistic dreams that left me feeling tired -- it was like I never slept, at all, even though Sweetie would swear I did.

So after two weeks, I stopped taking it entirely, and I won't go back.

Which makes me wonder about why I'm giving it to the boys, if it doesn't seem to work and I didn't like it. But I'm not ready to declare it a failure yet, because a month seems too short to really test it out... for the boys? I don't know what effect it's having on them; Mr F can't tell me "It gives me vivid waking dreams that make it feel like I never sleep," so I have to guess whether it's doing good, or bad, or nothing. 2 out of 3 of those say don't give it to them...

...These are the kinds of decisions you never even suspect you'll have to make. I'll let you know what I decide.

An alien invasion, you say? Well, THAT has never been done before! (RE: What You Said)

2011-10-07T09:57:00.000-05:00

Time again for comment roundup-- now featuring a Dane Cook joke, some great music, and, at the very end, my WHO TO FOLLOW ON TWITTER -- picking out the best comments on all my blogs and responding to them.

Before I go on, though, have you checked out:

IO17: humans have been overtaken by them, a race of aliens who came to what used to be Earth with two demands. Now, a century later, a second race of invaders has arrived to battle over what humanity has been, and what it will be. A horror/sci-fi classic in the making!

Click here to read it.

Now, on to your comments:

On my post "... (The I Should Have A Catchy Title For Posts Like This Post)" where I compared the Chargers' new brand of wine to the ultra-classy gnome bank San Diego offers on their website, Rogue Mutt pointed out that the Chargers don't just steal hope from their fans, they also take other teams' ideas:

Every year the Red Wings have a charity wine tasting party and one of their former players even has his own brand of wine. So the Chargers stole that idea from us! Not sure who stole the gnome from whom though.

I figure they stole the gnome from Travelocity, or from King Of The Hill:

My Off The Top Of My Head List of sci-fi stories that aren't Star Wars or Star Trek also caused Rogue to point out that I missed V and something called Silent Running

The top of my list would have been "V" (the original not the reboot I never watched) followed by Robotech (or Macross in Japan) and "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman. And Transformers if that counts--there was a TV series, several actually.

What was "The Black Hole"? There was a "Robot Chicken" skit about a new Special Edition of The Black Hole and they just keep showing one of the stupid little robots like in the poster going down this corridor. "Action!!!" the announcer says, trying to make it sound exciting, which I take it it's not. Though when I think of that I think of that "Silent Running" movie where some guy was on board a spaceship with some plants and a couple of robots. Why hasn't anyone rebooted that yet? Oh right because we only care about rebooting stupid '80s movies, not stupid '70s movies. Then after I think of "Silent Running" the movie I think of the song "Silent Running" by Mike and the Mechanics that has nothing to do with the movie and actually sounds more like it should have been the theme song for "Red Dawn," the remake of which was made in Michigan and is due out at some point, or maybe it already came out and flopped. I have no idea.

When I get really bored at work I launch into these stream of consciousness comments.

I'm not sure how you get from V to Mike + The Mechanics, but I did think, when V was originally on TV, that the alien girl who turned out to be a lizard was hot, which then caused me to be rather confused because I was attracted to an alien lizard. Being a teen is hard!

Also, I researched it, because that's what I do, and she wasn't actually an alien at all; she was a teenager who sympathized with the aliens and got pregnant by one, which really makes her kind of a 1983 version of Bristol Palin, if you think about it. Her name was Blair Tefkin:

What's weird is that when I began writing this post, I didn't actually think it would be primarily about aliens invading the Earth, but let's role with that idea and move on to why Stephen Hayes thinks monkeys are better than people:

I never put much stock in the notion of monkeys randomly typing and eventually ending up penning Hamlet. It's like speculating on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Quite silly, but there's another issue to be addressed. Its quite possible that we humans need to create works of art because we're inferior to animals, who exist contentedly without the need for such things. In a perfect world there probably wouldn't be a need for art--it pains me to say. Monkeys, and all other animals, live in a perfect world provided we leave them alone. An argument can be made that this makes them superior to humans. If a monkey ever did peck out Shakespeare, I hope it would have the good sense to hit the delete button.

That was left on my post ranting about how a blogger claimed to have finally proven a thought experiment involving an infinite number of monkeys, and I never thought that my blogging, which is art, after all, proves that I'm inferior to monkeys, who don't feel the need to create art but will, at times, throw their poop at people.

Which is no reason to not own one, if you'll spare the double negative:

Anyway, hope you weren't thrown off by the fact that I didn't label that as NSFW, and also that it didn't really talk about owning a monkey at all. If there's one problem that plagues society, it's people mislabeling their pirated Dane Cook Youtube videos and making it hard for me to copy them here in a way that makes sense. That and Republicans.

Rogue Mutt commented on that same post by noting that Dark Matter is more than an ice cream flavor I'm inventing, it's also an Andrew Bird song:

So now you've got that going for you.

Author Michael Offutt made clear, in response to my post about going to Apple Fantasy Camp (SPOILER ALERT! It has nothing to do with Steve Jobs and instead has a lot to do with Macintoshes) that while Mr Rose was in the knife business, he was in the Understanding Allusions To John Irving Business:

I love aquariums. I had no idea you needed advanced tickets. It sounds like you learned a lot about apples...kinda like Homer Wells learned about Apples in the Cider House Rules. And yes...that's where Rogue's quote comes from in case you are wondering :)

See? Read my blogs and you will be fully-equipped to take part in society, provided that all you want to do in society is go to aquariums and read John Irving. Not at the same time. Well, you could, if you wanted to. I don't see why you couldn't, in fact.

That should be a thing: People Reading John Irving In Aquariums. That will be some more art I'll invent, since nobody has yet offered me a jillion dollars for the last art I invented.

Where were we? Oh, yeah: Alien invasions, and how Stephen Hayes managed to take my clever references to the Ship of Theseus philosophical question and make it all about seeing Dale Arden in skimpy clothing:

Aren't both of them derivative of Flash Gordon? If I had to pick between Star Trek and Star Wars, I'd pick Star Trek. I like the political ramifications of Star Trek while Star Wars is more of a comic book. But Star Wars has always had the better special effects.

That was in response to the way I managed to take Star Wars and Star Trek and deconstruct them down to "Jennifer Aniston as Slave Leia."

But I posted Slave Leia there, so here's Dale Arden:

In what really looks a lot like Slave Leia getup, doesn't it? You may be on to something, Stephen, but I have to point out that monkeys, for all their perfection, never thought to dress hot women up in metal bikinis, which proves that evolution works.

While I've been writing this, I went on to listen to Andrew Bird's Cataracts, because that's what I do, and I thought it worth sharing:

I like the whistle part. I once wrote a song, called If I Was Paul McCartney, that had a "Whistle Part Reprise" in it.

I'm not even kidding about that. You can hear the song here. And two other songs I wrote and played, because once I was going to be a rock star along with a famous writer. You could also get Big Mouth Frog t-shirts. I recommend listening to my song "The Big Mouth Frog Blues," too. It's awesome. Seriously. It is.

I'd also completely forgotten I put those online.

I should note that the line "What if I was Tom Brady/And I'd just won the Super Bowl" was written before VideoGate, and also that the point of the song was that it would change and always be the last person to win the Super Bowl. When it was first written, the line was "What if I was Brett Favre/and I'd just won the Super Bowl."

I should also note that I am correct, in that song, that the Pope is not allowed to date. I went to Catholic school for three years, after all.

On to more alien invasions, only not so much, as this is more of a "Kids Playing With Lockers" type of thing; my photo essay of Mr Bunches and Mr F messing around in the locker room at the health club turned out to be a glass-half-full moment for Anna:

your boys give me hope that having kids of my own someday won't be totally terrible ( :

Anna, having kids is supereasy. Provided that you also have a Sweetie to take care of them for you, leaving you free to do stuff like "take them to the park where they'll accidentally fall into a lake but it totally wasn't your fault".

Keep the comments coming! In closing, let's look at Rogue Mutt's unique insight into Colts football:

I bet that cheerleader could throw for more yards than Curtis Painter.

I'm guessing Rogue wasn't looking at her quarterback rating, if you know what I mean.*

*I actually don't know what I mean, there. But it sounded good.

Why don't you try reading, and commenting on...

The Best Of Everything: Our opinions are righter than yours: Everything you never thought you wanted to know about pop culture!

Nonsportsmanlike Conduct! The sports blog for people who hate sports and hate blogs.

AfterDark: Your home for great horror stories, now featuring "IO17," a sci-fi/horror story about what humanity might be.

Thinking The Lions: Make Life More Interesting! By reading how I live MY life!

Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World! In the future, everyone will eat squid jerky, and the fate of the 73 dimensions will rest on the slim sexy shoulders of Rachel, who once was a pop singer but now just might be the queen of the lesbian zombies.

You might also want to read:

SLCKismet: Author Michael Offut's blog features amazing gifs, excellent reviews of books, movies, and TV shows, and also lots of thoughts on writing and culture.

Every Other Writer Has A Blog, Why Can't I? Rogue Mutt blogs about writing and how you're doing it wrong, reviewing and how you're doing it wrong, movies and how they're wrong. He's grumpy, but he's also right.

[i like that]: Anna's blog recently featured brownies that may or may not have pop rocks, and also every day has an amazing sense of wonder and optimism. You can't read her blog without smiling the rest of the day.

The Chubby Chatterbox: Stephen Hayes is an award-winning illustrator who has written a paranormal romance, among other things, and whose blog makes you think about the details of things.

PERSON I RECOMMEND FOLLOWING ON TWITTER!

@forwardwithkurt:

The name of the #SarahPalin documentary was "The Undefeated". Well, I guess you can't be defeated if you don't run. Clever strategy.

Kurt Baron's a local (Madison) talk show host at WTDY. His couple of hours on the air each day bring a fresh spin to business, politics, and local life. Sure, he's wrong on the gun issue, but don't hold that against him.

Chapter 2: Inside Out

2011-10-06T16:27:00.003-05:00

They had come at him so fast.

And they didn't, in the end, look much like birds. They looked... like nothing he'd ever seen, but Tom could tell why Lisa had thought of them as birds, because the way their suits and ships operated made them look like wings flapping and mechanical feathers spanning out, but those were only the suits and ships they used.

And so many of them. That second wave had overwhelmed him, had depleted all of the rockets and the plasma flare that he'd had charged up fully, and he'd maybe destroyed two of them as they came at him, overwhelming him with their numbers.

The last thing he'd seen before waking up here was the space station tumbling into pieces, falling towards the surface of Mars. He wondered how many pieces of it would hit, whether it would disrupt the tiny ecosystem that had been put into place, the amoebas and one-celled animals that had been carefully cultivated there, hopefully without them noticing, so that the world could eventually be terraformed into something that humans could live on without help, and maybe not have to live on... IO17 ... anymore.

He wondered if that would continue.

Tom finally began wondering how long he had been lying here in the dark, seeing the onslaught of bird-things that weren't birds over and over in his mind, seeing the station tumbling, wondering if they knew about the terraforming, or if the attackers knew about and that's why they wanted it ended. The whole thing -- using Mars' core to transform heat into photons to beam to ... IO17... for energy using tech that Tom secretly suspected had been given, or stolen from, them -- mostly a ruse so that humans could try to create an escape route, now that humans had learned to think long term.

Tom knew he would never have lived on Mars. But maybe his children would have. Or his grandchildren. Maybe.

Now, would they?

He knew his hands were held down. His legs, too. He couldn't move anything but his eyes, and his mouth a little. It felt like there was a strap holding his chin mostly shut. He blinked his eyes several times, squinched them up, then opened them wide. No change. The blackness was absolute. No change either way.

He wondered if he should say something, let someone know he was awake. He tried to remember when the ships had finally overcome him, how they had captured him. There had been a flash, a blow, and he'd felt his suit puncture. They must have sealed it, or gotten him into a ship quickly.

What was it Lisa had said?

They were behind the meltings.

And they didn't want humans.

They wanted...them.

That was what the Angels had told Lisa.

Had Lisa ever gotten it wrong?

Not that he knew of.

The Angels were always right and Lisa always got their information correct.

So these things were not here for him.

He didn't want to draw attention to himself, despite all that. They had invaded. They'd cut up the station, dooming anyone who hadn't gotten to the LifeRaft, and probably nobody had, given the numbers he'd seen swarming around.

How could he believe they were friendly, even if they didn't want humans?

Plus, they were behind the meltings.

He laid there, in the dark, not wanting to make a sound, not wanting to let them know that he was alive and thinking and feeling. If they were friendly, this wouldn't matter in the long run and they'd come get him. But if they were unfriendly, this interlude might be the last thing he ever had before they killed him... or worse.

He wondered what Lisa was doing right now. Whether the bird-things, whatever they really were, had moved on to... IO17...

Damn it, he thought to himself. It's so ingrained that even here, in the dark, captive on an alien spaceship, I can't bring myself to even think of our planet by the name we gave it.

Thinking of his planet... his home ... as anything but... IO17 was like poking a decaying tooth: He couldn't get too near it. All his life, he'd heard what all children are told:

We must call it IO17. Nothing else, ever. That's one of the two rules they gave us.

And he'd said what all children, he imagined, said, what his own child would probably say one day:

Why? And what did it used to be called?

His parents had not answered. It wasn't until he'd gotten to the station that he'd actually heard the name, already 32 years old and only learning what his home was called.

"Earth..." Francis had whispered one night, as they stared at their computer monitors, watching readouts on oxygen levels near the Installation.

He'd never said the word himself.

He'd never even thought it, really.

Now, in the dark, fastened down, he thought about his unborn child, son or daughter, that he might never see, and wondered if that little life in Lisa would one day be free to name his planet himself, or if he would instead walk on soil that used to be red and dry and lifeless but had been transformed by his dad, long before.

He felt tears rolling down his cheek, realizing that the odds were that he would never meet his son or daughter, never hold her hand as they waited for the tube, never show him how to lightboard, never open presents on her birthday and help her put together the dollhouse. He hadn't wanted to think it, but he couldn't help it and he focused on it now:

Nobody who lasers apart a space station and ties you down in the dark means you good.

He wished he could talk to Lisa and say he loved her.

His throat felt tight.

Into the dark, he whispered a single word:

"Earth."

And as he said it, lights went on all around him and he saw disemboweled corpses, skinned beings, heads dangling from wires, arms severed from their torsos, jars with hearts still beating in them, and, directly in front of him, an inside-out human.

David: 2.

2011-09-28T06:40:00.004-05:00

Table of contents for this story here.

I was actually one of the first they came for.

I don't know how they found me.

I know that they did, and I have regretted it and missed Lucy for nearly a century now, while I have watched as they reshaped our world, our lives, us for reasons I cannot fathom.

I know that they found me, and I know that I never got to say I'm sorry to Lucy, who had gone to bed earlier, after arguing with me, and I had stayed up later, out on the porch, smoking, angry, worried, tense.

You might think: What was there to argue about, with those things hovering over the Earth, as yet (so we thought) silent, unopened, although there were rumors of shadow-shapes stealing down from them, of night-stalking beasts of prey coming for humans, rumors that everyone dismissed and nobody dismissed and everyone talked about and nobody really knew anything about.

What wasn't there to argue about? The end of the world had come, and it had not yet occurred: for weeks, no it was months at that point, these ships had been hanging over our planet, but doing nothing. Our entire universe had been upended and turned inside out and then...

nothing.

Imagine, if you will, lying in your bed at night and waking because you heard a scream: but then you get only silence.

That was what we had, after the ships came: Silence and rumors and nights without sleep and then they came for me, just moments after I'd finally crawled into bed next to Lisa, slightly drunk, smelling of tobacco, still angry.

They took me away without letting me apologize.

Go to the next part by clicking here.

Chapter One: Lisa Talks To Angels (1C)

2011-09-26T12:54:00.006-05:00

Tom knew when Lisa was joking, and when she wasn't, and, when, consequently, he should not. He could see on her face today and hear in her voice now that this was one of those latter occasions.

His pulse jumped and a red light on his arm monitor lit up to let him know he was in the danger zone. He thumbed the override in his glove to avoid sedatives being injected automatically. Bad enough to be on spacewalk and get news like this without being doped up, even a little.

"How?" he asked, after a moment spent deciding what question he should ask, and rejecting the more prosaic what do you mean or you're kidding, right?

"Attack," Lisa said.

"From?" Tom asked. He involuntarily looked around, twisting his head inside his helmet and realizing that did nothing but turn his face towards the biometric readouts that could be used to do anything from monitor his health to download a novel. He did the hip-shifting that caused the jets to turn his suit around, so he could scan the space around the station as he talked, and kept one eye looking out the visor of his helmet while he was peripherally aware of Lisa on his comm.

"I don't know who they are. But they're coming here. They're behind the meltings."

"The angels told you?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"Any moment now." Lisa's face tensed up on screen. "I really thought you'd get to come home today."

"Me, too."

Lisa's eyes were wet. Oh, don't do that, he thought, but didn't wreck the moment. "I haven't seen you in two months," she said.

"I know."

"And now..."

"It's not a guarantee, right?"

He was still twisting in space, the tiny particle beams that directed his suit pushing him. Emptiness, all around. As his suit turned him towards the sun, so distant from him, the visor dimmed automatically so he wasn't blinded. The glare from the sun was no brighter than the glare from the red dusty surface of Mars down below.

"From space?" he asked. He noted that she had not answered his question about the guarantee.

"Here's what I know," she said. Tears were streaming down her face. "They come at you in three waves. The first is just in two smaller ships. The second is in a series of personal attacks, people or things or something in suits. They kind of looked like..." she searched her mind for a comparable image "... birds. Remember those? And in wave three, there are literally hundreds of them including in bigger ships."

"They want...humans?"

Lisa shook her head, choking a little as she tried to stop crying.

"They want... them."

David nodded. She could see that. He was still looking, facing now back towards the station where 14 others, people lucky enough to have gotten away from ... I017... lived with him, for brief times.

"How are you doing?"

Lisa nodded, tried to smile.

"I'm okay. I worry about what all this is doing to... to the baby."

Lisa could not bring herself to name the baby. Or to call it anything but the baby. She had not wanted to be pregnant, worried what all the dying did to the baby, worried about Tom's job and the fact that she was left alone on IO17 and that at any time, maybe something weird would happen to her or maybe those ships would finally open up.

That had, after all, been everyone's great fear and curiosity: would the ships open? When they did, what would people see? When would humanity's overlords, hidden nearly a century, show themselves?

And now, it turned out they might be forced into it. Another reason, Lisa decided, not to ever give the baby a name.

"I'm going to be fine," Tom said.

"No, you're not," Lisa said. "None of us are."

She didn't tell him what else the angels had shown her. Instead, she leaned in closer to her comm unit and made her eyes as wide as she could.

"Tom, I love you," she said.

"I love you, too," Tom said back, suddenly a little frightened by her manner. What else did she know? "More than anything. We're..." he stopped. He had been going to say we're going to be okay but he felt that would simply draw another protest.

"I love you," he said again.

Then he saw the ones she had spoken of, coming out of the corner of his eye. "I LOVE YOU!" he yelled as static interrupted the comm display, and he turned his suit again as the two smaller ships that Lisa had spoken of appeared from around the other edge of the Mars Orbiting Station. In what sense they were smaller he could not tell; both of them were about 1/2 the size of the Orbiting Station, which itself would have been a 12-story building had it sat on... IO17... instead of circling around Mars in geosynchronous orbit with the thermal power laser reception base, the power laser drilling into the core of Mars to release the energy stored there in Higgs Photonic form for shipment back to Earth. The ships were not small by any stretch of his imagination.

They were sleek, though -- black-and-silver darts with reddish highlights, easily camouflaged against both the Mars backdrop and the night sky of space. Tom instantly would have suspected they were not friendly simply because they looked unfriendly, but what they were doing would have tipped him off, as well: They were, with piercing beams of reddish light, slicing through the Mars Orbiting Station, beginning at the greenhouse end of it and moving upwards, quickly, the two beams criss-crossing as they cut through what had been his home for two months and would have been his home in another year when he returned from his leave of absence, the leave that had been going to begin today in just 30 more minutes, local time.

The two ships moved quickly and wreckage disbursed behind them. Tom did not even take time to think; he pulled on a strap on his shoulder, the small-arms he carried with him at all times sliding forward. He locked it into place and checked. Five missiles loaded and ready. Four more in the pack on his leg.

The two ships were halfway up the Orbiting Station, which would never house any people again. Tom sighted down the bazooka-like weapon, aiming for where the nearer ship would be in just a few seconds, and pulled the trigger. The first of the small rockets launched out, and as it did, he hit the propulsor buttons on his heels. It was a slim chance, but he would have enough fuel to rendezvous with the Liferaft and perhaps could ride things out there for a time.

The rocket hit the invader ship and exploded, sending the ship tumbling off to its port side, a hole in its side spewing out contents now into the silent space around it. Tom watched as the ship smashed into the Orbiting Station, blasting it further into smithereens, and his his propulsors again as the second ship turned towards him; its laser still cutting into the Orbiting Station as it avoided its companion, the ship oriented on him and headed towards him, picking up speed.

Tom aimed the bazooka again, sighting down at the ship, and pulled the trigger just one more time. He then hit his propulsors a third time and muttering Liferaft nav turned his eyes slightly inside his helmet to see if he was on course. His suit made the necessary adjustments to ensure that he would in fact intersect the Liferaft's course.

This time, though, the rocket bounced off the ship; his aim was fine, but as the rocket hit the invader ship a reddish crackle glowed and the rocket floated away, not exploded.

Tom swore and wondered if he should try it again.

His helmet comm crackled again and through the static -- probably brought on, he realized, by the comm-relay tower having been hit by the invaders -- he heard Francis' voice.

"Tom, you there?" Francis came through.

"Yes," he said. "Report?"

"The station's breaking up. We're going to try go get out, head to surface."

"Not the raft?"

"We'll never make it."

"That's where I'm heading."

"You'll never make it."

"Why?" Tom was watching the ship speeding up after him, its laser no longer centered on the Orbiting Station.

"They're between you and it."

Tom couldn't turn his suit using rockets without messing up his planned course. "View," he said. "Dorsal." The screen to his left lit up with the camera view behind him, and he saw the second wave Lisa had spoken of.

Go on to the next part by clicking here.

Everytime you retweet a joke from Wonderella, an angel gets its wings. (RE: What You Said)

2011-09-24T07:25:00.000-05:00

RE: What You Said is my across-my-blog response to comments from the week before.

What a week it was! Eating Twinkies, taking on Senators... that was prett
y much it. Here we go with the best of the comments from the past week:

My Post in the Is This Art? category on The Best Of Everything about the new vid

eogame I

'm strangely addicted to, The Artist Is Present, drew two comments:

Stephen Hayes, writer/illustrator, thought perhaps I might not make it quite all the way to a jillion dollars with my plan to let you smash the things I make:

Yours is an interesting idea, but it might be hard to convert it into a jillion bucks. I remember another great idea, a seventeen hour film by Andy Warhol that, if memory serves, was called "The Fly." In the film, the fly lands on the forehead of a nude woman lying on her back. We watch for hours as the fly inches over her body, which becomes a gigantic landscape through the fly's perspective. The problem with this and many POP Art ideas is that the idea is more interesting than the result. But keep the ideas coming. I have faith that your jillion dollar idea is right around the corner. By the way, I walked out of the theater showing the Warhol film after only two hours.

Stephen despite the fact that you admittedly walked out of a movie featuring a

naked woman and therefore lose 1/2 your credibility hit points, I think you'

re onto something there: What if you and I collaborate on an art project where we sit in a museum and tell people our POP art ideas for money? We'll make a jillion dollars!

Also: Stephen, you really don't own a cell phone? I hope you at least keep a sharp stick near the mouth of the cave to stick in that T. Rex's mouth when it comes around. And

say hi to Will and Holly for me.

Rogue Mutt, meanwhile, ought to be in charge of designing video games, as he gets it

To be a successful video game the object should be to kill everyone in line and then destroy all the paintings.

I tried doing that, but I lost my place in line, and then had to go to Milwaukee for a court hearing and ended the game for the day.

I also drew comments on the culmination of what might be the greatest thing I've ever done in my life*

*Twinkie category only

when I ate a Twinkie that I'd unwrapped and set on a paper plate on my desk at work 100 days ago, and touched the face of God:

Writer Michael Offutt, who did his best to warn me away from this, said:

That's gross. I'm glad you didn't get sick. I like how in the video you described it as having the consistency of a vanilla wafer. Dropping it all those times though was unnecessary. We already knew it was as hard as a brick.
I had to drop it, though, Michael, so that nobody would think I'd switched out the Twinkie; there are people out there who I'm sure would love to manufacture a scandal and bring me down from the heady pinnacle of fame I've achieved as someone who gets upwards of three comments a week sometimes just by blogging pictures of his sons playing with lockers. I know I've got a target on my back. That's why I always sit facing the door.

Except now, I realized; my desk at home has my back to the door. I've been in peril all these years!

Reporter Anna, on the other hand, not only didn't appear to take offense at my calling shenanigans on a Taco Bell robbery story this week (I wasn't blaming WKOW, Anna, but the lying victim), she also supported my decision to give my taste buds, and perhaps my entire consciousness, for SCIENCE:

that was pretty great. glad you didn't die. another victory in the name of science!

I agree, Anna. In the annals of science, it is, so far as I can tell:

1. The guy who invented fire. (Prometheus, I believe.)

2. Marie Curie, who is the only woman scientist ever.

3. Isaac Newton, for inventing the catflap.

4. Me.

5. A bunch of other people including my 11th grade science teacher Mr Hassemer, who taught us, in chemistry class, that the greatest invention mankind ever came up with was the "blood groove" in an arrowhead.

Finally for this week,

Rogue Mutt, blogger/author, commented on my post So You Were Once Third In Line For The Presidency? Here's $4.5 million detailing how former House speakers get $900,000 (or more?) per year to run an office that does nothing by saying

The problem is there's no way to stop them since we're expecting them to police themselves. The same reason there aren't term limits or campaign finance reform.

I disagree, though: there is a way to stop them. We police them, only people get all up in arms over Netflix changing the name for one service it provides while not caring that $1,000,000 per year to a former speaker is about an equivalent tax to what Netflix did when they raised their rates. According to the last Census, there are 112,000,000 households in the U.S. Denny Hastert cost each household $1.

Netflix's rate increase was $4 for my service. A service I choose voluntarily. This week, I used Netflix to watch a past episode of Better Off Ted and my boys watched Follow That Bird and Yo Gabba Gabba. I got something for the $4 I chose to voluntarily continue paying.

I got nothing out of the $1 I paid Dennis Hastert to drive his SUV to look at a painting of himself. And I couldn't opt out of that one.

I'm not talking about policing politicians by voting, either; you only get to vote every so often. But in the last two weeks, I've called Senators and Congressmen and tweeted to their followers and talked to my coworkers and mentioned on my blogs issues ranging from the Autism Funding bill to gay marriage. (I have. It was subtle, but it was there.)

Part of why I hate people -- you'll want this answer, Michael Offutt - -is because so little attention is paid to important stuff. I spent time the past two weeks repeatedly tweeting links to stories which show four Senators apparently trying to allow scientific research grants to be more easily directed to their campaign contributors. And you know what got retweeted the most of all the things I said?

A couple of jokes about the Facebook update.

And the point of my story wasn't just autism research -- it was (as Rogue got) equally about Why are Senators allowed to stop a bill that is wanted and needed just to benefit the Koch Brothers, and why don't people care?

I get it: Things are funny, you pass them on. But it takes a second to retweet an important message, too, and precious few people do that, making me wonder how many clicked the links to even read the story itself. (And, no, I don't read every link in Twitter, either.)

The point is, people have to pay attention to the real stuff. It's okay to be upset about Ewoks blinking, I suppose -- but not until after you've gotten upset that House Republicans are playing games with disaster relief funding and tying up the government again, and that they did it quickly in hopes of messing up our economy more... and then taking a vacation.

I have a rule regarding what I think of as frivolous spending: if I spend money on something dumb or unnecessary, like the time we took our cat to the hospital, I give an equal amount to a charity or someone needy.

I think the same thing should apply to tweets, blog posts, and life: Every time you retweet a joke from Wonderella, retweet a link to a story you consider important, too.

And, thanks to all those people who DID retweet my stuff about the important things; I hope you've downloaded your Smilin' Mr F Badge:

Also, by all means, retweet Wonderella's jokes. She's hilarious.

The future could be only half as expensive as it is now...

2011-09-23T09:01:00.002-05:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Straight Talk for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

The future doesn’t have to be as grim as it is on IO17 – not if you do what I suggest you do, and that’s switch to Straight Talk for your cell phone.

I mentioned Straight Talk:

A few weeks ago, and pointed out that as a no-contract, no surprise-bill, no credit check cell phone provider that gets great phones (from people like Nokia and LG) and great plans (like nationwide talk/text/data for only $45 a month, or $499 a year) and free 411 calls with no activation or termination fees, it only made SENSE to switch.

And it still does. Consider what you’re paying for your cell phone plan. How’s it make you feel? Pretty bad, right? Pretty poor?

How’d you like to feel like THIS guy?

I would, too – that’s the feeling that switching to Straight Talk gets you. $45 a month, for touch-screen, full-keyboard, full net/text/data/talk access? Who WOULDN’T dance?

Free 411 calls? Ability to switch plans? Flexible, prepaid long distance? Android on Straight Talk? Check, check, check! And check!

Here’s the scoop:

With Straight Talk, you’ll cut your phone bill in half. That’s almost guaranteed. And you’ll still get everything you want: all the surfing, all the talking, all the Everything you need, for that low price.

I’m not the only person who thinks this: everyone’s buying it, Hook, line and sinker…

So go get your Straight Talk phone, Call a friend, and then start thinking about how you’ll be dancing with all that extra money. What’ll you do, now that your rich? Build your own rocket ship? Make a sculpture of yourself out of cheese? I might do that latter one.

Chapter One: Lisa Talks To Angels (1B)

2011-09-19T09:32:00.003-05:00

...

"People have been melted" she said. Then, after a pause, she asked "Who's doing that?"

The angels all paused in their buzzing guttural talk and looked at her. A dozen hundred piercing glowing redlight eyes stared unblinking and the silence -- the first time she ever heard silence when visiting the angels -- made her almost cry out in pain.

The angel closest to her muttered something. It sounded like this:

GRturgh KqTKTKTK.

She never understood them, but knew that this one was addressing her in particular; never before had she had that feeling. Usually, these meetings felt like her listening in on a boardroom conference she'd not been invited to.

She wondered if, when she woke up, she would recall what that angel had said, specifically.

Then she felt the burning and knew that she was coming out of it.

"Did you answer my question?" she called out, but her cells were full of heat and liquid, warming up from death as the resuscitating chemicals automatically flooded into her just before permanent brain-cell death would start, and she felt her here-body shaking and trembling as her mind woke back up, destroying the deathly-dream image of herself she had and restoring her back to life.

... And her eyes popped open and she heard the binging sound that indicated that all signs were registering green, that her heart and brain and all the other organs were back online, that electrical impulses showed less than 1% cell death in her body and less than 0.001% cell death in her brain, a figure that always worried her. Each time she woke up, she did what she did now, which was muse:

If I have a million cells in my brain, and I lose 0.001% of them, that's 10 cells each time. I've been doing this for over three years now. One time per week, each year, that's 222 times... so I've lost 2,220 cells.

She wondered what those 2,220 cells were supposed to do but didn't ponder it long because as usual, as her brain awoke she was recalling things and she suddenly knew that she had no time to lose.

She picked up the comm unit: It beeped as her hand warmed it and came online. "Call Tom" she said and the screen lit bluish-green: he was busy with someone else. "Interrupt" she said and Tom's face appeared. He looked at her, about to speak but she said:

"Tom, you're going to die."

Go on to the next part by clicking here.

Autism Works: A (Phone) Call To Action

2011-09-15T06:59:00.000-05:00

Autism Works is a post I put on all my blogs, updating you on the latest information affecting people who are autistic or who know someone who is.

I would like you to make a phone call, and to keep making that phone call until you get through. But the phone call is not for me, it's for Mr F and Mr Bunches.

If you follow me on Twitter, you've already heard the gist of this, but it bears examination and repeating. At the bottom of this post, you'll find contact information to email Eric Cantor or call him, so if you know you already want to do this, go there and get that info. If you don't know why you should want to make a simple phone call, read on:

Here is my son, Mr. F. He was four years old when this video was shot:

Mr. F currently gets therapy 20-25 hours a week, in our house. So does his brother, Mr Bunches. They each have teachers and therapists come in every morning at 8:00, and stay until 11:20, when the boys each get on separate busses to go to their 4K classes for three hours. Two days a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, the therapists come back from 3:00-5:30 p.m. There are two to four extra people in our house for 25 hours a week. At school, each of the boys has an aide that helps him in school. Mr Bunches' is part-time. Mr F's is full-time, by his side every second he's at school. They also have speech and occupational therapy, and used to get out-of-home occupational therapy until our insurance benefits ran out for the year.

The cost of just the in-home therapy per year is $50,000 per child. That doesn't count the school support services or the busses that take the boys to school or the ankle bracelet Mr F wears in case he wanders away or the sheriff's deputy who comes to our house once a month to check that the bracelet works.

All that effort is helping the boys learn to do things like talk. Many autistic people are nonverbal.

Mr F, for example, will say maybe 10 or 15 words. He understands what you say, but has trouble talking. When he wants something, he will use sign language and gestures, tapping his chest to say "I want" and taking your hand and pointing it to where he wants things. He, this summer, began being able to say I want but he can't pronounce the words yet. He says "Bo bo," which we know means I want.

He said a sentence the other day: He said "Bo bo GO." Which meant he wanted to go for a ride. It was the first sentence he'd ever said to me... after nearly 2,000 hours of intensive therapy and work. (It's not just teachers. We do it all the time, too. As I was typing this, Mr F wanted his breakfast, which is usually cheese puffs. Autistic kids are even pickier than other kids, in part because they are so sensitive to sensory issues we barely register, so they have to work at expanding their food groups. Before Mr F was allowed his cheese puffs, as part of his education, I had to make him choose between two alternatives [forcing him to communicate], then make him get the bowl out, and then tell me "I want cheese puffs," which he said as "bo bo" and pointing. To ensure that Mr F can someday take part in society, I have to make him work for his cheese puffs.)

Now on to what you can do:

Back in 2006, Congress passed the "Combating Autism Act." That bill -- passed by a pre-Tea Party Republican Congress and signed into law by the Republican Worst President ever -- set aside $924 million over 5 years to develop a strategic plan to expand and better coordinate the nation’s support for persons with autism and their families. It led to important research being started and promising new interventions.

Autism, as you may know, affects 1 in 70 boys, and the costs of supporting autistic individuals in society are $35,000,000,000 ($35 BILLION) per year. Interventions and cures allow autistic individuals to live fuller lives, with less costly supports (if any at all.)

The Combating Autism Act was the most comprehensive health measure ever passed. And it will now expire at the end of September, 2011, unless reauthorized.

That reauthorization is pending in the "Combating Autism Reauthorization Act," or CARA. CARA is almost halfway to becoming law: The Senate committee considering it just passed it unanimously and sent it to the full Senate.

But it has not yet been put up for a House vote, because of Eric Cantor.

Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, co-sponsored the bill in 2006. He is one of 113 House members of the Coalition for Autism Research and Education. He has taken part in "Walk Now for Autism Speaks" events.

But he won't even let this bill go to the floor for a vote.

Eric Cantor won't let America decide if autistic children should have a shot at a fuller life.

You can email Eric Cantor very easily by going to this site and filling out the form. It's a pre-written email that takes about a minute to fill out and send, and you won't get junked or spammed.

Or you can call Eric Cantor at 202-225-4000. I've got that number programmed into my cell phone, and called it 20+ times yesterday. It was busy during working hours, and after hours I was told I could not leave a message.

But I'm going to keep trying. Because if Mr F can work his way through counting to ten, I can certainly make a phone call, and so can you.

Call or email Eric Cantor and tell him to let the Combating Autism Reauthorization Act go to the House Floor for a vote!

Chapter One: Lisa Talks To Angels... (1A)

2011-09-11T09:46:00.004-05:00

There have been found dogs with human DNA in Kenya, on more than one occasion.

People in England are, on average, 5" taller than everyone else on Earth.

Nobody really sleeps more than 5 hours a night anymore. Unless they sleep for 72 hours or more straight, almost a mini-coma.

Once, Lisa would have reported on these things but there were no reporters around anymore, so she just talked about them in a variety of contexts and she got paid to do that.

Paid by the angels.

She suspected that some of the many changes, including some of the more frightening things she knew about but which the angels would not let her talk about, were the result of technology somehow obtained from those who had come here.

She suspected, at other times, that the angels were those who had come here, the visitors, the others... humans (if they were humans anymore and maybe they all weren't, she mused) had never really hit on a name for these newcomers in all the time they'd been here.

But that might be because of everything else that had happened, distracting them, humans, from talking about what to call their... overlords?

Were they overlords? They never acted directly against us.

All these thoughts ran through Lisa's mind as she prepared to talk to the angels.

By dying.

The taser was almost warmed up, and she tried to relax herself. It was always worse if she was tense, the dying. But it was the only way she could meet the angels to discuss what she must discuss with them, to get information, to learn what information she could share with others on her vidcast, to learn what information must not be revealed ever to anyone.

There were dogs with human DNA found in Kenya.

That made her more tense, and she knew this one was going to hurt. A lot.

She lay back on the chair, its sensors padding her, slowly kneading her muscles, the arms of the chair molding upward to hold her tightly against the seizures that would wrack her body for perhaps minutes while she stopped her heart and waited for her brain to die, all so that she coul commune with the angels for a few precious minutes.

It's a hell of a way to make a living, she thought and stared directly at the taser that hung over the chair. She never looked away. She was brave. She stared at death directly at least once a week. Sometimes two or three times if she had to, if it was a big news week or a ratings sweeps week or if the Hordes were causing troubles and she had to get public information.

The taser crackled and spit blue fire at her heart and she shrieked in spite of her bravery and felt her chest clench up, a fist of jolting pain grabbing her from the inside, the crushing blow of her veins and arteries collapsing on themselves as the blood ceased to pulse through them, and, finally, the head-pounding ache that came from the blood in her brain ceasing to circulate, the cells of her gray matter starved for oxygen and shutting down.

She was drooling as she stood up and looked at the angels.

"Angels," she said, greeting them as she always did.

They stood before her, dozens of them, wearing gray and silver robes, red circular eyes glowing, no other features visible. They were black silhouettes with red dots for eyes and berobed, with bulky shifting shapes under the back of their robes that she hoped were wings.

Angels was her word for them. Not their word for themselves.

They buzzed and talked among themselves and it was that -- their failure to notice her right away, sometimes -- that convinced her again this was not some kind of hallucination brought on by repeatedly committing suicide. Either way -- if they were simply some figment of her dying-and-regenerated mind, or if they were actually some sort of otherworldly beings -- she was terrified of them and wouldn't have ever come to visit except it was her job.

One of them nearest her finally noticed her as she stood up, staggering a little. Her body felt both too heavy and too insubstantial, here.

In death.

It spoke to her in a language she did not understand until she woke up. They always did that, and the language seemed different each time, too. Always guttural, always harsh, but always a little different. The nearest one lectured her and she nodded, listening, watching it for some sign that it had a mouth, that it had substance. That it was alive. Not for the first time she wondered whether they were robots. Or whether something in her, when she died, hooked into some network or other -- there were dozens of them active, after all, and not all of the neural networks and cloud networks and satellite-ethernets were registered or even known -- and she was being fed information by some group or another.

Or maybe they were those who had come here. She pondered that as other angels crowded closer, began lecturing her, too. She didn't need to listen, she knew from past experience and her training. Her mind, dead as it was, was getting this all, and would, upon awakening, remember it -- probably crowding out other memories in the process, but she was used to that, too, once, she had woken from a talk with the angels and had not remembered her name for three days. (Now, she kept a pre-recorded vidcast recording she'd made privately near her chair, with a yellow smiley-face note that said "Hey, Play Me!" in case that happened again.

Finally, the harsh, barking, angry sounding words ended. They had told her what she was to o, and now it was her turn to talk. What to ask about first? The dogs? The sleeping?

Something popped into her mind:

"People have been melted" she said. Then, after a pause, she asked "Who's doing that?"

Go on to the next part here.

2011-09-11T09:45:00.005-05:00

So it's come to this: Pain meds have to be gotten through the Internet?

2011-09-11T09:35:00.002-05:00

If you've been prescribed tramadol -- a generic form of "Ultram," an analgesic pain medication that's frequently prescribed for conditions ranging from arthritis to cancer, you should know that you can get it online at a discount-- maybe for less even than your insurance would charge you, or, if you've got no insurance, for as little as $0.77 a pill.

Remember, tramadol is a prescription medication so you have to have a doctor prescribe it, but there are sites that will allow you to have it prescribed by a physician (in a totally legitimate and confidential way) and get the pain relief you need at a cost that you can afford.

It's a shame that our country has to do things like this -- make people go through hoops to order necessary medication online, but that's the way things are, and if you need tramadol that means that you're in a lot of pain -- so the options may be to live in pain or order it online.

Keep in mind that you shouldn't use the Internet as a substitute for a real relationship with your local physician -- no internet consultation can ever match what a live doctor can tell by looking at you and measuring your vital signs, and given that Tramadol is a prescription drug, you should make sure to consult a doctor before ever taking it (a doctor that's familiar with you and your history, of course). Because while legitimate sites that will sell you Tramadol will have a physician around, they may not know of past conditions (like alcholism or drug addiction) that would mean Tramadol is not for you -- and if you're taking other medications, like for depression, you have to be careful, too. And pregnant women shouldn't take it, either -- the list goes on and on, which is why it's better to talk to a doctor, first.

But if a doctor HAS prescribed Tramadol for you, there's no reason you have to suffer in pain because you can't afford it -- so try ordering it online from a reputable site.

Prologue/Introduction:

2011-09-09T09:34:00.002-05:00

I had been reaching for a cigarette when the first ship flew over.

Nobody knew it was a ship. It didn't look like a ship, and we had no warning that they were coming. No radar picked them up, no attack heralded their presence. Even the space station we had back then didn't see them, so as advanced as we thought we were back then (and we know now that we were not very advanced at all, as the technology that has trickled down to humanity from their ships and hideouts has shown us how little we know)(I help some of that technology trickle down, because what can they do to me if they catch me? Very little, I guess, although I don't know. They've taken everything from me but my consciousness.)

I miss cigarettes.

And Lucy.

But everyone misses something, I suppose, and I have other things that I maybe take for granted, like the fact that I am immortal and cannot die unless they shut me off.

My name is David.

I once was a person, a person who was married to Lucy and who was out on his patio, reaching for a cigarette even though he had sworn to Lucy that he would quit smoking, and who, before he could get that cigarette lit, heard, live, what many people heard eventually: the whooooooooooooooooooooosssh of the ships arriving.

It flew over my head. More or less right over my head, although the nearness of it is in my memory, so long ago (time doesn't matter much to me, now!) probably so near because it was so large. So fast. So unexpected.

So many things about them that we did not expect, beginning with their sudden arrival.

I saw it fly overhead, approaching suddenly, large, like a skyscraper with all the angles wrong and improbably flying through the atmosphere, at times blotting out the stars Lucy and I could see from our country house, and in other places so brightly lit it glowed, and it did not make any sound other than the sound of air being pushed aside and then pulled back in behind it, as it flew just north of us and then stopped.

With trembling hands, for I had hands then, I put the cigarette in my mouth and lit it.

"Lucy," I called, quietly although I don't know why I bothered to say it so softly; the thing that had flown into our atmosphere was far away anyway, I could tell, even as large as it was. "Lucy, you should see this."

Lucy heard me, just inside. She came outside into the cool night. It was August.

It was the new moon -- no moon in the sky, which was why we could see so many stars. That was, in fact, that last time any human being walked the face of our planet, which back then was called Earth, on the night of the new moon.

I pointed. She, Lucy, stopped looking at me disapprovingly as I smoked, and instead looked to where she would have looked eventually because who could ignore an Escherian nightmare building hovering in the sky?

"What is it?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said, because I didn't.

I know more now than I did then -- because of what they did to me.

Of our people, our species, of humans, they demanded only two things, two things that every person must agree to. Of individuals, they sometimes demanded more, without bothering to see if we agreed to it, or not.

So of our planet, they demanded these:

First, they said, we must never again refer to our planet by any nomenclature other than the name they now gave it: I017.

Second, they said, humans were free to do what they liked, with that exception, and this: We must never walk the face of our planet, I017, again, on the night of the new moon.

As I said, of individuals, they demanded more, whether or not we agreed.

Me, for example.

With me, they demanded my consciousness. Which they took from my body, and put into a mainframe computer where I now live as what I've come to realize is a sort of singularity. I am a human mind in a machine frame. You can think of me as David, because I still think of myself that way, and when I think of myself that way, it makes me what I remember as being sad.

Turns out that you can take away a body, but you cannot take away emotions.

Go on to Chapter 1: Lisa Talks To Angels, by clicking here.

GoDaddy!

2011-09-09T09:20:00.004-05:00

So do you LIKE those GoDaddy commercials on the TeeVee? Do you go to the web and check out how they end? I've watched them a lot and I'm always tempted to watch football games with my laptop there so I can go find out how they end right away, instead of having to wait.

GoDaddy is good for more than just awesome commercials, you know -- they're the spot to go to get your domain names for your websites. So don't mess around with other, lesser, places: go to the place that gives you great domain names and even better commercials.

And go now, because you can use this Godaddy Promo Code or this Godaddy Coupon to get a deal on what you need -- my little gift to you!

And now, a word from... ME.

2011-08-29T09:15:00.001-05:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Net10 for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

I write horror stories on here, as you know if you’re reading this site. (You didn’t think this was one of those LOLcatz sites, did you? I mean, there’s pictures of witches and skeletons and such. You couldn’t really be misreading that, right?)

But I bet you have your own horror story, one that’s equally scary but happens to everyone. In fact, I bet EVERYONE has a version of this story, which I call the “I CAN’T STAND MY CELL PHONE PLAN’ horror story.

There’s some common elements to it: Paying hundreds of dollars for a phone and hundreds of dollars per month. Hooked into the same deal for years. Expensive charges, crummy phones, contracts, credit checks, waiting at the store for two hours while they activate your phone.

That’s you, and that’s me, and that’s everyone else.

You know how in horror movies, the audience always says “Why don’t they just leave the house?” Well, here’s your happy ending: Why don’t you just switch to Net10?

Net10 – the company with that Cute NET10 commercial you’ve probably seen – has the cure for Scary Sell Phone plans: Switch to Net10.

Net10 offers no contract, no credit check cell phone plans. Easy to activate, easy to use, the Net10 option helps avoid all the things you hate about cell phones while keeping all the things you love.

Don’t like paying a lot for the phone? Net10 has phones as low as $15, with smart phones and full Qwerty-keyboard sliders for under $60.

Don’t like paying for minutes? Net10 plans start at $15 for 200 minutes, and they’ve got unlimited talk/text/data for $50 a month.

Don’t like being stuck with one plan? Just switch, each and every month if you want.

Net10 phones are easy to activate: you buy the phone, you go to : http://www.net10.com/ and click a few times and you’re done. They’re easy to reload, because you buy airtime online. They’re easy to USE.

And they’re easy to find out more information about. You can go to the Net10 Facebook or Twitter pages:.

• http://twitter.com/#!/Net10_Wi…
• https://www.facebook.com/NET10…

Or you can listen to people like this Real NET10 customer:

Or you can find out more in commercials like this:

So why stick around in the haunted house of your cell phone plan? Switch over to Net10 and make the only scary thing in your life my stories here.

(And, seriously, if you STILL think this is LOLCatz, there’s something wrong with you.)

Not sure how I got from corn dogs to Star Wars and back? You don't know much about western culture, then.

2011-08-26T19:01:00.001-05:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of ampm for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

Can you have too much good stuff?

That’s like asking if you can have too many corn dogs, which is a ridiculous question, because everybody knows that there’s no way you can have too many corn dogs. If you had an entire spaceship full of corn dogs, and that spaceship was the size of an interplanetary cruiser, say, some sort of Imperial Destroyer that, instead of destroying things in the name of the Empire, was shipping corn dogs along the Kessel Run, you still would not have enough corn dogs, although you would probably have a great new sequel to the Star Wars movies.

My point is this: I won a corn dog in the ampm "Too Much Good Stuff Giveaway" over on Facebook, and it was supersimple.

Here’s what I did – and you can do it, too: I went to the ampm Facebook page, where I hit “Like” on the page, because I “like” ampm. (Get it?)

Then, I registered in their “Too Much Good Stuff Giveaway,” which qualified me to win super prizes. Seriously super prizes. I know when people say “super prizes” they mean “buy one get one free packs of white milk” or something lame, but these are cool prizes.

iPods. IPads. MacBook Airs! Cool prizes, right? That’s what you can win by registering in the ampm Too Much Good Stuff Giveaway.

And once your register, you get to spin the SUPER SLOT MACHINE OF FORTUNE, which is, technically, only my name for it; ampm just calls it a slot machine, because they need a sense of the dramatic.

Spinning the (virtual) slots may net you an instant win prize like mine:

A corn dog!

Which is where I began this post!

They’re giving away, at ampm, 10,000 corn dogs as part of this promotion. Ten thousand! And 15,000 bottles of Pepsi Max, all instantly. They’re awesome that way – and in lots of other ways. Not just corn dog-ish ways, but in ways like the “Thirst Oasis,” with its 24 different fountain drinks to mix and match -- you could, I suppose, combine 24 different sodas into a super soda, which I am definitely going to try when I go there.

Temporary Anne: Famished (Complete Story)

2011-08-24T08:53:00.002-05:00

While I ready my next book, I'm reposting stories that previously appeared here, in their complete (nonserialized) form. You can read the whole story here, or download it on Scribd for free.

In part 1, "Temporary Anne," Anne, a woman who lived to do evil, nearly died and went to Hell -- but found that she could avoid the demons trying to capture her and take her there by eating the living flesh of those around her, confusing the demons. Famished finds her still clinging grimly to that existence, years after the first part...

Famished

(Click here to download this on Scribd for free.)

__________________

I am afraid.

I cannot believe the size of the fangs.

The claws, likewise, are outsized, immensely outsized. They are as long as scythes and dripping with ... fluid. I cannot say that it is blood. I don't want it to be anything but blood but then again I do not want it to be blood, either.

I know it is not my blood because I cannot feel a pulse in my veins except on those ever-more-rare occasions when I can eat. I crave, more and more, the flesh that has protected me and sustained me these many years but it is harder and harder to get it because the more time that passes the more people can see me.

The more, too, the minions can see me, like this one that is moving down the alley now towards me, all fangs and claws. You would not see it if you looked, would not see it if it did not want you to see it, because you are not almost in Hell.

I am.

I am almost there and I am struggling now every second of every day to not go there. It is harder and harder because the minions are now searching for me actively, I am sure of it.

This thing before me has 7 legs.

What kind of creature has 7 legs?

Click here to go on to the rest of the story on this site...

Or click here to go to Scribd and download it, free!

RoomLender: Get some space when you're on the road.

2011-08-24T08:48:00.001-05:00

Aspiring authors, illustrators, filmmakers, even bloggers hoping to make it big, should be going to conventions -- not just Comic Con but all the Cons, setting up a booth and showing off what they've got to fans and industry insiders that go to those things.

But Cons are expensive -- I know, I looked into them -- and if the convention isn't in your city, you've got to stay there for a few days, which adds to the expense and inconvenience, because now you're paying for a hotel and being cramped into a tiny room for days, having to eat all your meals out (or cook them in a microwave.) What kind of life is that?

With RoomLender, you can avoid that. They help you find apartments and homes to rent for short-term or longer-term stays. Vacations, corporate travel, writers going to conventions -- stay in a larger space, probably for a cheaper price, and have a full house or apartment, with a bedroom, a kitchen, a full bathroom -- all the luxuries of home, probably for less than most hotels.

With their vacation rentals Chicago and other places, RoomLender can help even a budget-minded author like me start spreading the news about the great stuff I'm doing.

Don't Eat My Face! (Complete Story)

2011-08-23T06:34:00.005-05:00

While I get my next book ready, I'm reprinting stories here in their entirety -- for FREE! Here's a story that first appeared in the Harvest Hill anthology, available from Graveside Tales.

(You can get my first collection of short horror stories, The Scariest Things, You CAN'T Imagine on the Kindle or in hard copy through Lulu.)

Don't want to read online? Download it here for free off Scribd & take it with you!

Don’t

Eat

My face…

A short story by Briane f. pagel, jr.

It would have been nice to have an excuse for how he ended up there.

It would have been better, he felt, as he hung there upside down, to be able to curse himself. To say Why was I going so fast? Or Why did I have that last drink? Or even Maybe I should have just pulled over and napped for a while.

Any of those would have helped him deal with this, he felt, because he could have placed some blame for this, or felt that what was going on was punishment for his stupidity or cruelty.

Maybe it would have been enough if he had been coming from someplace wrong, or going to someplace wrong. Why didn’t I end the affair earlier, he could have berated himself, as his head felt like it would explode from the blood slowly pooling in it. Why was I going off to buy drugs he could moan silently, quietly, while he tried to swallow and wet his throat but could not do so because as it turns out, gravity plays quite an important role in swallowing, or plays an important role in preventing one from swallowing when one is hanging upside down in a twisted car wreck, held in place and pinned back by a seatbelt that has locked, with one’s right arm pinned awkwardly and probably broken, certainly numb, and long past the part of numbness or injury where it hurt, having gone through the flaring searing bolts-of-agony-shooting through one’s mind hours (days? Certainly not days? Days?) earlier.

Was it days?

He squinted in the dark. He watched where he knew the cellphone was, on the ceiling of the car, to his right. If his right arm was free, had movement and was free, he could have picked up the cellphone and called. It was laying on its side, in the dark, and unless someone called and caused the panel to light up, he would not see the time and date display that would tell him whether it was hours or days that he’d hung here.

If it was days, they probably would have eaten him by now.

But he had not been at fault. He was not coming from a whorehouse, or even a night so late at work that his wife and children would be honestly and justifiably irate. He was not heading to or from any place where he’d used illicit drugs. He was not engaged in any pursuit more dangerous or unwholesome than his trip to the grocery store to get some milk, and, as it turned out, some doughnuts. They’d been out of milk, and it had been just past seven, and Jana had asked if he would mind going to get some milk, and he’d said of course not, and he’d driven to the store to get the milk, and had decided to get some doughnuts as well, a treat for the girls when they woke up in the morning. He’d even picked out a selection so that no matter what their tastes had become – 11 and 13 year-olds who overnight could develop an aversion to powdered sugar or jelly or to a doughnut without both – they could have gotten a doughnut they liked in the morning.

That was it, of course! It wasn’t days after all, it wasn’t even hours, it was probably not long at all because Jana would have missed him and notified someone and they were looking for him and they’d find him on this road because even though not many people lived down it, this road was the most likely way to take to the most likely grocery store to go to and so they’d find him because they’d see the wreck, he must be hallucinating or disoriented from the blood in his head, maybe he hit his head in the accident, maybe it was all just some sort of nightmare.

The cellphone buzzed. It was on vibrate, he always left it on vibrate so that it did not annoy people if he were to forget to turn it off in movies or restaurants. The cellphone buzzed and he spun his head to look at it, winced and his vision blurred. Hanging upside down meant that blood was not getting to the rest of his body, it was slowly filling up the inside of his head, draining from his feet and legs and hands and chest down to his head where his heart could not muster enough pressure to push it back out. His head was filling with blood that had no oxygen in it, and the new blood joining it with oxygen was quickly depleted and made the situation worse. When he turned his head so rapidly, it hurt. It more than hurt. It pummeled his mind. But he turned to look at the cellphone, which had rung – buzzed – at least four times before. It was buzzing and slowly turning on its axis.

As his vision cleared he realized that he could see the panel that would show time and date, but it showed now the number that was calling. Home. Jana was calling him.

“Jana,” he croaked. It was all he could do. The cellphone buzzed more, its panel slowly turning. The light it cast was bright, a miniature spotlight aiming out from the silver flipphone. As it buzzed again, it spun a little more, and the light silhouetted something.

He turned his head to see what was outlined in the light, but too quickly and his vision blurred again. All he saw was all he’d seen so far. It looked like a foot-tall silhouette of a manlike creature, standing there. It was pitchblack, had arms and legs and a body and a head but he could not make out detail, could never make out detail. It stood on the ceiling of the car that rested on the ground.

And it smiled at him and he saw sharp pointy white teeth as his vision cleared. Then the light from the cellphone shut off and he could not see the thing or the teeth or whether it had friends and he clenched his eyes shut.

With his eyes clenched shut, he sat there, willing the phone to ring again. He wrenched his body back and forth, back and forth, trying to wriggle free of the seatbelt that trapped him, trying to pull his dead right arm out of the restraint, to reach the cellphone. He pulled his left arm up lugubriously, slowly, because it felt like it was asleep. He put his hand over his face.

His hand was not, of course, big enough to cover his face. He spread his fingers out, splayed them, kept his eyes shut. He knew what it would do.

Then he felt it. On his right eyelid. Hot breath, something panting in front of his right eye.

It had been doing that for hours. Days? Hours, at least, maybe days. He suddenly realized that had he not been distracted by the thing in the light of the phone, then he would have just before the light went off seen the date and time and known how long he had been hanging here, but was drawn back to this moment by the hot breath on his eyelid.

“Don’t touch me,” he said. “Please.”

No answer. It had not yet answered. But it went away again. Maybe it could not answer.

What had gone wrong, if he had not been on an illicit errand, or acting recklessly, or being moronic? He’d been driving along, he’d had his seatbelt on, he had the radio off and was not even distracted by that. The headlights worked. The tires were relatively new. He drove out along the road that led from their relatively new subdivision out in the farms outside the city, had gone to the little urban-center mall that had a grocery store there, the grocery store that was somewhat more expensive than the big warehouse store 10 minutes further, but 10 minutes one way meant 20 extra total for the trip, and the savings on milk was minimal, so 20 minutes to save thirty cents? And he’d told himself that the newer, more upscale grocery store had the in-store bakery and he could get doughnuts as a surprise for the girls. They really were not even for him. He didn’t like doughnuts. He preferred muffins, had thought about buying some, had decided not to do so because he already was getting milk and doughnuts and did not want to spend too much, maybe feeling guilty about spending the extra money at the upscale store instead of driving twenty minutes more to spend less, was that the sin that had landed him in this predicament, greed, or conspicuous consumption?

The milk had been put in the back seat, on the floor, behind the driver’s seat. He did not know where it was now. The doughnuts had been on the passenger seat next to him, in the bakery box, and he could guess what had happened to them because there was jelly and sugar on the dashboard and he thought, when he craned his neck, that he could see them on the ceiling of the car off and behind to his right.

He didn’t like doughnuts, but he would have eaten the whole box now. He also wanted something to drink. He did not know how he’d drink it, upside down, but he wished he could have something to drink. He was terribly thirsty. Hours-later thirsty or days-later thirsty he wondered and then tried to put that thought out of his mind, it was not helpful, not now, but maybe it was because if he knew if it was hours or days then he would know whether he should expect help soon or whether there was no help coming.

Because if it was days, there was no help coming.

Take inventory. That might help him. He could catalog things that helped mark the passage of time. He thought for a second.

Was it lighter out? No. He had seen no evidence that it was darker or lighter out. It was late fall, so the sun had been down and it had been night when he left. What were the odds that he had blacked out or slept through an entire night and day or more, so that he’d woken again only at night? Not much chance of that, he thought.

And he felt that he had not been there long because his head had only recently begun pounding. If he’d been there a day, or two, or more – how had two or more days become an option he wondered—wouldn’t all the blood have already rushed to his head? He thought he’d read, once, that you couldn’t hang upside down for an entire day because your leg muscles can pump blood back up to your heart but your arms and shoulders and head can’t, so the blood doesn’t circulate when you’re upside down…

He moved on.

He was thirsty, but not dehydrated yet, right? A person dies of thirst in two or three or four days…

He moved on.

He did not have to urinate. He’d eaten and drank a regular amount of food and water the day of the accident. Surely if it had been more than a few hours, he would have a full bladder, at least. Would hanging upside down help that? He suddenly panicked and wondered if he was paralyzed, and wiggled his feet. He could not see them, up above his head, but he felt his foot tap the floor of the car putt putt putt that faced the ceiling, felt that, he was sure.

How many times had it come? He wasn’t sure. He had only become aware of it gradually, a scurrying at the edge of his vision, a flitter here and a poke there. Then it had touched his head, and he hadn’t been sure what that had been, had turned towards it and not seen anything at first. It had become more bold as time passed, coming closer, letting him see it, just barely, against the ambient light that seeped in the car, some of which he thought was reflecting from a headlight of the car.

At first, he’d thought it was a squirrel or bird or mouse. Then he’d worried that it was a rat or raccoon, but it did not sound large enough. Then he’d felt it poking him. Then he’d seen it.

A few times it had approached him, and he thought he was hallucinating, and it had breathed on him while he tried to focus his eyes, which grew swimmy and runny when he tried to move to quickly.

Thinking about it scared him. He did not know what it was, but knew that the thing had not tried to help him.

He looked at the phone again. Had it vibrated closer?

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and readied himself. Then he did what he’d tried a few times before.

First, he reached with his left hand, as far as he could, towards the cell phone. Why hadn’t he kept it in his pants pocket? He wondered. He took it out in the car because it was always on vibrate, and he missed calls by leaving it in his pocket in the car. It didn’t rest against his leg in the pocket while he sat. So he set it on the console between seats. And now it was two inches away from his left hand. Just two inches… just two inches.

He reached and stretched, squinting and gasping as he strained against the seatbelt. He reached further, trying to figure out how to brace himself or twist to give himself the extra two inches, the phone just out of his reach.

He almost had it when he saw the thing. Standing just on the other side of the phone. It stood on two legs. It was silhouetted in the dark, of course, just like each time. He wondered if it was pitchblack like that or if it was the lighting. How could a thing have no features? It was like a human-shaped inkblot. Its arms hung down to where its knees would be, almost, and its legs appeared to be made of one long limb, no knee. It had a head that was too small and weirdly shaped. He reached for the phone, and thrust his chest forward frantically as he realized why it was standing there.

It smiled.

It smiled its white-tooth smile, and his two smallest fingers splayed apart, leaving the other two pointing towards the phone, as though by spreading his hand farther apart he could lengthen the reach of those two. He leaned more, and his right arm pinched harder and he gasped with pain, but he almost had it and then the thing pulled the phone an inch further away.

He stopped and stared in shock. It had pulled the phone – but just far enough that he could conceivably still reach it. It was taunting him.

It still smiled.

He lunged forward again, trying to grasp the phone, arm across his body, and at his farthest reach, felt something thin and white-hot touch him and pulled his hand back and saw that his index finger and middle finger were missing the portion beyond the last joint and were bleeding profusely. He screamed then, as the pain hit him. It had bitten him so fast and so cleanly that his hand had pulled back before the agony hit his brain. He watched the blood spurt out of them, and jammed the severed finger tips against his shirt to try to staunch the blood flow. His howl died down hoarsely.

Through eyes gummed with tears and pain, he saw the thing step over the phone and over the two fingertips it had bitten off onto the ceiling of the car, and walk closer. He closed his eyes. He felt its breath on his face but he could not move his left hand because he did not want to bleed to death.

Its breath stopped and he opened his eyes. It was gone. His hand hurt. He pressed the fingers harder into his chest and thought. He could still see the phone. He thought about what he was wearing.

His left sleeve. It was slightly torn. He was wearing an old Bears sweatshirt, with a frayed cuff on the left sleeve. He pulled his hand away, felt the blood flow, and pushed it back against his chest again. Slowly, he dragged his hand up his chest until it passed his shoulders and he was pressing his pulled-up sweatshirt against his neck, still feeling the blood seep into the fabric but slowly. He bent his wrist, caught the cuff in his mouth, and worked it until he could grip the cuff firmly in his teeth. When he had it as tightly as he could, he yanked his hand back, quickly, and heard a tearing sound. The cuff came free, a shred of sweatshirt pulling off and hanging from his mouth. His hand felt like it was filled with fire, and he could feel his pulse coursing through his forearm and shooting blood out the two fingertips. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he brought his hand up, blood pumping onto his face briefly, and grasped the end of the torn cuff in between his two middle fingers. He wound it around the two fingers as tightly as he could. Lacking any way to tie a knot, he just clenched the fingers together to hold the fabric twist that way, and was relieved to see the blood stop pumping out. His fingers began to numb almost instantly. But he was not losing blood anymore.

He looked at the phone again.

If Jana was still calling, it could not have been too long, right? Just long enough to worry her.

“Jana,” he mumbled.

He tried to swallow and could not and looked at the phone.

It buzzed and began to vibrate again. He watched it. The first buzz. It would ring 4 times before going to voice mail. When the thing had pulled it, it had turned the phone so he could not see the screen that showed time and date or the phone number. Instead, the phone was pointed away from him and sent a flare of blue light out and in that blue light he saw the thing standing on the ceiling of the car back by the windshield.

The phone buzzed a second time. The thing watched it, he thought, but he could not see eyes or features. Just smooth black skin or hide. It was a three-dimensional shadows.

The phone buzzed a third time. He kept his hand pressed against his chest, clutching the fabric that kept his blood in, and tried to gauge his move, watch the thing. As the third buzz ended, without even taking a breath, he shot his wounded hand out and twisted his body, pain arcing through his right side and a flaring spot of red incendiary pain blooming behind his eyes, but he tried to ignore that and threw himself as well as he could towards the phone and grabbed it, he grabbed it and flipped it open and yelled “JANA!”

And it was on him, it rushed at him and was biting his hand and grabbing the phone and pulling it away and he screamed as the feeling of the bite sunk in, and he felt new bleeding start, plus his hand opened up and the sweatshirt cuff fell away and his fingers throbbed into horrifying feeling as blood pumped through them.

The phone lay between him and it, then, the thing backing off, the phone still flipped open, his hand bleeding and torn and blood flowing out, and he stopped screaming as he realized that it was still open. In the light the phone cast, he saw the thing, standing back on the other side of the phone.

He stared at it, standing stock still, and he would have thought it was staring at him but it did not have eyes he could see.

In the light of the phone, in that second, he saw its head move or rotate, and the thought chewing fluttered into his mind. Chewing me.

In that second or two, he also realized that it did not know what the phone was or how it worked. He realized that because it jumped back when a voice, Jana’s voice came through the phone.

“Steven?” she asked. “Steve?”

It was another heartbeat while he looked at it and then the phone and it looked at the phone and then it rushed forward towards him and he yelled as fast as he could and as loud as he could “Jana I’ve been in an accident and they’re after me and help Jana God I love you” and that last part seemed important to say because it had grabbed the phone and ran, and he lunged for the phone again, tried to grab it or the phone because Jana was talking on the phone and he yelled and screamed nothing coherent and thrashed, his right arm still twistingly pinned on his side and firing bolts of pain through him and he heard the phone clatter against the glass of the window and heard again:

“Steven? What’s going on?” and when Jana said that he howled again and said

“Help me send help” and then thought he’d heard Jana say are you okay but it was all quiet and dark and it was gone again and had taken the phone.

He sat there, upside down, panting, and feeling blood spurt from his hand, the pain of the bites and missing fingertips. He wondered where it had gone, and whether the phone was gone out of the car or just out of his sight. He wondered if it would know to close it.

“Jana! Jana if you can hear me I was coming from the grocery store and there was an accident and I need help! Send help!” He yelled that several times until his voice gave out and he had to rest.

In the silence, he heard his pulse and his breathing and nothing else. He thought the phone was gone.

But she’d heard him. He didn’t know what she’d heard, but he knew she’d heard him. An accident, and them, and help, he was sure he’d gotten those points across and she’d be calling 911 right now, telling them where he’d been headed and they’d send people out looking for him.

His whole right side felt like it was being torn apart. He could feel the blood flowing freely from his hand, but he was happy now, as happy as he could be. Someone was coming. Someone would be coming. All he had to do was hang in a little longer, ignore his spinning aching head and the numbness and pain and someone would come and the thing would be scared and not come back.

He suddenly jerked and looked around. It was too dark. He could not see anything. Had the headlight he thought was still burning gone out? Was it getting darker outside? The moon setting?

He just had to wait until someone came. What would it be, 20 minutes, tops?

Twenty minutes, tops. That’s all he had to wait.

He kept trying to look around, see if the thing was coming back, as he tried to figure out how to count down the time. Twenty minutes was 1,200 seconds. Count to 1,200, slowly. That would keep his mind off of things.

He began.

One… two… three… four…

Something bit him on the left shoulder. He turned his head that way, stopped counting and turned and felt a jolt through his neck and shoulder as he did so and thought he felt movement or saw movement but it was so dark. There was no doubt, though, the thing had bitten him, through the sweatshirt, and gouged out a piece of flesh. He heard the blood drip just above his head, falling onto the ceiling of the car.

Twenty minutes. He could hold on until then.

Five… six… seven…and he heard something. He opened his eyes as wide as he could. What did he hear? He could not see anything.

He felt warmth near his cheek and did not dare turn his head, both because it hurt to do so and because he did not want to touch the thing.

He listened.

It was sniffing.

It was sniffing him.

He sat still. In his mind he picked up again. Eight… nine… ten…The sniffing continued but it moved a little. Then he felt a poke on his right shoulder, felt the pain claw through the dull dense numbness that had set in there. Eleven… twelve… thirteen… and it bit him. It sunk its teeth into him and pulled and tore the sweatshirt and flesh off and then having done that, he could feel the skin torn, it lapped at the bloody pulp underneath.

It lapped at his blood and skin and then tore off the rest of the skin and he could not hear it anymore.

He tried to swallow. He couldn’t. He started up his count. Fourteen… fifteen… sixteen.

He heard movement. He heard steps, little skittering steps. They were going back and forth in front of him. Steps to the right. Then back to the left, then to the right. Never going as far as they could.

He thought it sounded like someone pacing. Then he saw. There was light coming in, and he saw. There was the thing, in front of him, about a foot in front of him. It stood in front of him, silhouetted by the light, and beckoned to its side. It waved its arm. In its other arm, it held something. He watched as it carried its bundle a little to his right, and held it up. Then it moved back left. That was the sound he’d heard, this lone figure pacing with its parcel.

The light grew closer, and he realized that there was light and wanted to see where it was coming from but as it grew closer he saw the thing open its mouth, those white white teeth all pointy, and saw it hold its bundle up and realized it was holding his skin, and saw it tear off a piece and eat it, and then beckon again.

He looked to his right, then, not to see the light but to see what it was calling to. He did see the light, though, it was his cellphone, still open, and he heard Jana’s voice.

“… if you can hear me, I’ve called someone on my cellphone, I don’t want to hang up, listen to me Steven just keep listening, someone’s on their way I’ve called 911…”

and Jana kept talking but Steven did not hear her for a moment because the phone was set down and more things began walking past it, one two three ten twenty more and more and more until they almost completely blocked out the light from the phone and he was facing a crowd of them, dozens, maybe, budging in and jostling and elbowing each other and the one that had beckoned them in was in front of them. He still could not make out any detail, but he saw the one beckoning hold up the piece of his skin again and tear off another piece and gesture with it.

Gesturing towards him with it. It waved the skin at him, at them, at him again, and then ate another bite.

In the background, he heard Jana talking still, trying to keep it going somehow, to maintain contact with him from home:

“… just try to take deep breaths they said that they’d send a bunch of people looking for you so it won’t be very long now and I love you Steven and the girls love you and it’ll all be fine…”

He watched as the front thing took a final bite and waved the piece of his flesh over its head. Jana’s voice went on but his throat went dry before he could try to respond to her. He was glad, then, that he’d said earlier that he loved her because as Jana’s voice continued coming from the phone, he saw mouth after mouth after mouth open up, smile, all those white white teeth opened up and pointed at him and moved forward as they understood what the beckoning one had shown them.

The scariest thing in the world is waiting in your mailbox right now.

2011-08-20T20:20:00.001-05:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Straight Talk for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

It's not some kind of mailbox monster, either. It's your cell phone bill.

You want to know what's REALLY scary? Not the stories on this site. Sure, they're a little frightening and all, but they just deal with demons and monsters and ghosts and probably some kind of bug thing, I don't know, I don't really pay attention to what I write.

But while those things are a LITTLE bothersome, what's REALLY scary is how much you're paying for your cell phone -- double what you SHOULD be.

DOUBLE.

I can say that for sure because unless you're using Straight Talk for your cell plan, you're paying double what you should be. Straight Talk plans -- no contract, no activation or deactivation fee, no credit checks, no surprise bills -- on average are about one-half of everyone else's bill.

"Sure," you say, forgetting that you're reading this on a computer screen and I can't hear you, "But what do you GET for that one-half the charges?"

"Well, I'll tell you," I reply, forgetting that you're reading this on a computer screen long after I write it and probably some sort of time travel or quantum loop would be required to have this conversation (and quantum loop is a thing I just made up, so don't count on that being "discovered" by "science" until next week) and I will:

For that one-half-what-everyone else charges, you get UNLIMITED talk, text, data -- everything you need. Just $45 a month for EVERYTHING you could ever want on a cell phone, and you can get smart phones from recognized manufacturers like Nokia and Kyocera and all the other big names to use that unlimited everything on.

All for $45 a month, and that $45 a month includes free 411 calls, which is great, because nobody uses phone books anymore but I hate paying $1.75 everytime I need to find a number, and they've got long distance deals and more -- all great stuff.

I know about this stuff because my mom always taught me to make sure I was getting the best deal on things, and so I look for great deals, because mom knows best. But you could have found out about it from other people, like this commercial:

So get on the Straight Talk plan today, and call a friend to get them on it, too -- and then come on back next week, when I write a story about a bug caught in a quantum loop. Or that mailbox monster. I like that.

I'll just say it: The video made me cry (Autism Works)

2011-08-20T07:06:00.005-05:00

This time around:

-- Project Lifesaver may be having problems,

-- the Autism Society of Greater Madison golfs,

-- college for people on the spectrum,

-- and a review of a semi-autism-friendly business,

but first this:

That's from "Lou's Land," and I had to stop watching it halfway through and then watch it in pieces because it hit home, especially the part about "discovering a new normal." I won't take away from Lou's story by telling my own here; I'll just say that I understand exactly what he means and I've bookmarked his blog. You should, too. You can't help someone unless you try to understand what they've going through, and blogs like Lou's can assist you in knowing what it's like to live with autism.

On to happier, more hopeful things, like college for autistic people. The Autism Speaks official blog has a post on helping students on the spectrum achieve in college, pointing out something that I didn't know -- Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act requires that colleges make reasonable accommodations to people with learning disabilities, including (but not limited t0) autism spectrum disorders. The protections and services aren't as aggressive as those for kids in high school and lower (provided under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act [IDEA]) but they're there and may help kids on the spectrum get into and through college. Autism Speaks has some pointers and links for more information, but the school counselors can provide information, as well.

Update on Project Lifesaver: On August 7, I mentioned elopement and wandering and recommended "Project Lifesaver," a program that fits wanderers with GPS-enabled bracelets.

On August 16, we got a letter from the Dane County Sheriff's Office that raised concerns about this program. The letter says the office "has been experiencing significant equipment failures with many of our Project Lifesaver clients" including the "lack of any transmitted signal," which, of course is the whole point of the bracelet. The letter concluded that:

Without reliable and operating equipment in addition to the lack of support from Project Lifesaver International, the program does not meet the standards of the Dane County Sheriff's Office... the Dane County Sheriff's Office will not longer implement the program.

The Dane County Sheriff's Office will try to find a substitute program; if you have a friend or relative on Project Lifesaver, please pass this on to him or her, and don't trust the equipment. (We haven't; Mr F still doesn't get to go outside alone and we keep all our windows and doors double-locked.)

Business Review: We took our kids to get their annual photos -- Sweetie starts planning her Christmas cards around June, and the annual Christmas card photo is usually taken in August. We don't go anywhere fancy -- just to the Sears Photo Studio at the West Towne Mall in Madison, Wisconsin, and they're generally pretty good there.

It's hard to get some kids on the spectrum to sit still for anything, let alone pictures taken by a strange person. When we took the twins for haircuts last spring, for a week before their teachers played "hair cut" with them, telling them social stories about getting hair cut (social stories are stories designed to teach autistic kids social skills) and pretending to cut their hair, and it worked great; the boys sat still during their hair cuts and Mr Bunches actually enjoyed it. (Mr F still cried, but quietly and sitting, instead of hollering and trying to escape like he used to.)

We tried the same thing with pictures -- for two weeks before, each therapy session ended with the therapists posing the boys and taking their picture with our camera, just like a photo studio, and those sessions went well. The actual day of the photos, we had a bit more trouble.

We arrived about 10 minutes early, and had to wait about 15 minutes later than our appointment, which was problematic. While no business can entirely control their schedule, waiting with autistic kids is trouble, because we'd taken the time to have the boys tired out a bit by playing (another strategy the therapists had recommended), but that doesn't work so well if they then rest up.

Mr F was also upset because -- something you never think about until you're with an autistic kid -- we'd walked through the store to get to the studio, and the store was full of clothing hangers, which Mr F likes. I try to discourage him from simply taking a hanger as we walk through the store, so by the time we reached the pictures, he was disgruntled and getting upset.

(The worker didn't mind that we then borrowed a hanger from a nearby department, which helped calm him down.)

Once we actually got the pictures going, the photographer was great -- she followed our instructions on what order to take the pictures in (get the little ones done first) and followed our instructions to just start snapping pictures, not worrying about whether kids were sitting correctly or facing the camera or smiling.

About 10 minutes of photos later, we had some of the best ones yet. So other than making us wait (even though we'd reminded the woman when we made the appointment that the boys were autistic) the trip went reasonably well.

Golf Outing: If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I began volunteering with the Autism Society of Greater Madison (ASGM) last night; my first volunteer effort was helping out at their annual golf outing, "Golf FORE Autism" at the George Vitense Golfland:

I was there from 6-8:30 p.m., helping people navigate the mini-golf course and then helping move tables around. Several area businesses including NBC 15 sent teams out to play in the par-3 midnight golf outing, and while I had to leave before the night was over, it seemed like everyone was having a great time.

ASGM is the oldest autism chapter in the country, and chaired by David George of NBC 15; if you are interested in the many events they sponsor or are looking for help beginning to navigate the world of autism, go to their site.

Autism Works is an across-all-my-blogs post that attempts to spread information about resources, businesses, apps, and other things of interest to people who have autism or have a relative who is autistic. If you have information to share, leave a comment or Email me ; please put "autism works" in the subject line.

Just walking around, looking around? (Autism Works)

2011-08-08T06:52:00.000-05:00

Autism Works is a post I put at the same time on all my blogs to help people learn about places, people, and things that help special-needs individuals.

A study this week examined "elopement and wandering" in autistic people, which sounds a lot more fun and/or romantic than it is, since "elopement and wandering" is running away, something we actually are quite familiar with, as Mr F is a wanderer.

Mr F has always run away -- from when he was able to walk, he'd take off if you let him. We'd go to the park and one or the other of us had to constantly be taking off after Mr F to bring him back to where he's supposed to be.

Wandering was described in the study as the tendency to bolt, or to simply leave a safe place without being told or allowed to do so. While all kids tend to wander away now and then (I got lost at the State Fair when I was about 5 or 6), kids on the autism spectrum do so at a rate of 4-8 times their unaffected peers:

What makes wandering so problematic is that in the case of kids like Mr F and many others with autism, they have only limited communications skills -- so when found, they can't tell people who they are or where they're from. Add to that the fact that many autistic kids don't appreciate fear the way other people do -- neither Mr F nor Mr Bunches are particularly afraid of traffic, for example -- and you've got a recipe for disaster -- like the 4-year-old autistic boy whose body was found in a pond.

There's a program called Project Lifesaver International that can help with this. Project Lifesaver, working with local law enforcement agencies, fits a bracelet on the child's ankle or wrist. That bracelet has a tracking unit in it that can be quickly located if the child wanders away, providing some peace of mind for the parents. It's not a replacement for precuations -- we've got all our windows locked securely shut, and put extra locks up out of reach on doors that lead to the outside -- but it's a nice backup.

Each day, the parents have to check the battery in the bracelet to make sure it's working (there's a little tester) and record the results. The bracelet is removable, but it's tough to do and eventually the kids seem to get used to it. (Mr F got it off just once, and hasn't really tried since then.) It's also fairly unobtrusive; Mr F's is on his ankle, and sometimes kids notice it, but mostly they don't seem to see it. (He's wearing one in that picture above. Obviously, it's more hidden during pants season.)

I wasn't able to find much information about charges. Around us (Dane County, Wisconsin) we haven't been asked to pay anything; the local PD administers the program. The website says that Project Lifesaver has no agency membership fees. It may be that other local law enforcement agencies charge fees; I don't know. If your local law enforcement agency isn't enrolled in Project Lifesaver, they can get information here to sign up.

And now for something a little more fun:

That's Mr F, enjoying his "therapy swing." The swing-as-therapy was something that the occupational therapists the twins go to used quite a bit; their "therapy" rooms looked a lot like playgrounds. The boys used to go to OT every Tuesday before the insurance coverage lapsed and we had to stop for the year (that's why single-payer health care is so important: nobody should be forced to choose between groceries and necessary health care) and Mr F was making great strides there, so we purchased our own swing for use in our house.

"Therapy swings" are available at a variety of locations -- but be careful and shop around. There's what I think of as a gray market for autistic-friendly products out there: things that autistic kids use that are higher-priced simply because the word "autism" is slapped around their website.

The swing we have looks a lot like a regular hammock -- it's mostly netting with a bunch of strong cords and silver rings. It beats a lot of other swings because not only can the kids swing in it, but also they can spin or just sit.

We got ours for $99.95 at Sensory Edge, and didn't bother getting the almost-as-expensive hangers. Instead, we went to the hardware store and got two lengths of rubber-covered chain and some sturdy hook-and-eye loops. My brother-in-law drilled two holes into the support beam, and we had a swing that hung up just fine.

Mr F spends about 70% of his time on the swing -- and it works for him by settling him down and letting him focus. Since installing the swing, he's learned to count to 12, and can say his ABCs with help. Plus, it helps him relax when others are around, so if relatives come to visit, Mr F's more likely to remain in the room.

__________________________________________________________

Update: I reviewed My Autism Team last time around, and have continued to check in there from time to time. Mary Ray, from that site, emailed me to say this:

Thanks so much for checking out MyAutismTeam. I just read your post about the site. Thank you very much for checking out the site. Besides adding providers/organizations/sports leagues that may not yet be in our database, parents can review those providers. Right now we have over 1200 parents on the site nationwide (in just a few weeks since launch) and 30,000 providers/businesses in our database. Our goal is to get 100,000 parents using the free site by next year. Definitely the more parents participate and contribute the more valuable the information exchange.

Not sure if you knew this, but you can actually write a review about a business. If you go to a business's profile page, click "review."

We have the All Updates stream, where parents can connect with each other. Soon, we'll refine our search in the Browse Parents tab so it's easier to find local parents near you in case you want to exchange inside tips about coverage, businesses that wouldn't normally be thought of as autism-friendly, and more.

I hope you are able to continue using the site and providing us feedback. We rely on parents feedback and our partner relationships with Autism Speaks and Easter Seals to be a value contributor to the community. We have more features to come and announce them on our blog/facebook/twitter.

As part of this post, I attempted to add the "Project Lifesaver" business to the site, but was unable to do so; three times, when I clicked to enter, it told me to fix errors on the page without telling me what errors were occurring. There were blank spots on the page that I didn't have information to enter (such as a name associated with the business.)

But, I also used My Autism Team to post that people should provide links to information and businesses, and Eric, from San Francisco, suggested The Thinking Person's Guide To Autism, which says about its mission that:

The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism (the website and the book) exists to help people with autism and their families make sense of the bewildering array of available autism treatments and options, and determine which are worth their time, money, and energy. We also want to encourage respectful attitudes towards autistics and people with autism.

The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism (TPGA) is the book and website we wish had been available when our loved ones with autism were first diagnosed.

Autism misinformation clouds and is perpetuated by the Internet. We want to make accurate information about autism causation and therapies visible, accessible, and centralized.

I've now bookmarked that site and will include it in my future reviews and information; I don't know yet anything else about it.

Got information that would be helpful to parents of special-needs kids? Know a business that is special-needs friendly, or someone with special needs doing something interesting? Email me with the words "autism works" in the subject line

The Window (Complete Story)

2011-08-05T08:34:00.004-05:00

A rock thrown through a window in an abandoned shed let something out... something that's beyond the ability of one young boy to cope with.

Click here to read

The Window

(complete story) for free.

Here's an excerpt:
______________________________________________

The shed was not even used anymore. Dan and Jared were not sure when it had ever been used.

They weren't supposed to go near it.

"Rusty, rotten thing," Jared's mom called it. "Hunk of crap," Jared's dad called it.
Dan's parents did not talk about it much ever since Dan a year or two ago had
reported to Jared that his parents had suggested getting a petition to get Jared's
parents to get rid of it and Jared's parents had stopped talking to Dan's for two
years.

The shed stood near the back of Jared's yard and had been there for as long as he
could remember, which at 12 was not that much in reality but was an infinite
amount of time as far as Jared was concerned. Jared's parents had not built the
shed, which was locked shut and had been for a long time because teenagers had
snuck in there, long ago, and used it to drink and do drugs, and Jared's parents
had been worried about that. Jared remembered that. It was about his earliest
memory of the shed.

He wondered then, and later, why his parents had locked the door but not
removed the shed.

__________________________________________________________

Click here to read The Window for free.

Gold! There's gold in them thar... investment portfolios?

2011-08-05T08:26:00.002-05:00

The average person probably doesn't spend too much time thinking about his or her retirement -- especially not in their 20s and 30s, when thinking about retirement is the easiest thing to do.

But with Republicans promising to pull the plug on Medicare and Social Security, maybe people need to start reconsidering how they plan for life after 65 -- and if you're a young person, that planning is particularly easy, because you can do little things right now that will have big effects later on.

Little things like investing in a gold bullion IRA. An IRA makes a lot of sense for a young person -- you can put small amounts in during your 20s and 30s and that money will grow over 30 or 40 years, compounding interest and growing increasingly fast -- tax free to you, so you won't pay taxes on the growth until way, way later.

And with gold for your IRA, you might just benefit even more. Remember that any investment can go DOWN as well as up, and always get qualified investment advice from someone who knows what they're talking about (not me! I'm a lawyer, not an investment adviser. I'm just passing along what I hear) and make sure as part of that investment advice, you find out whether gold IRA investments might be right for you.

Because those commercials that say gold is always valuable? They're right -- gold's been valued for hundreds of years, and I don't see that changing soon. So while the price of gold will likely go up and down while you hold your investment, it seems like gold will not go out of style, doesn't it?

Which means that your investment will be diversified -- not just stocks and bonds, but precious metals -- and has some history to it to help you determine what it's worth.

There's more information about investing in gold here:

And if you DON'T have an IRA, you'd really be well-advised to get looking into one.

Ghosts. There Are Ghosts. (Complete Story)

2011-08-04T09:15:00.004-05:00

Father Wentley is surrounded by ghosts. They've come to his church, and they're trying to tell him something. What is it they want from him?

Here's the introduction: Click here to download this entire story on Scribd.

____________________________________________________________

That’s what I said,” Father Albert Wentley said into the phone. “There are ghosts.”

There was a pause while he listened to the voice on the other end of the line. He looked at the door to his office. He looked at the window, shades drawn. He looked at the desk.

“Don’t tell me it sounds crazy. First of all, I know it sounds crazy. Second of all,why does it sound crazy? It shouldn’t. We believe in spirits, after all. We believe in souls. We believe in an afterlife, and ghosts are part of what comes… after… life.” He deliberately slowed down his words for the last part, emphasizing what comes next.

Another pause.

He looked at the pen that he tapped in his hand. He looked at the door again. He didn’t turn his eyes forward to look in front of his desk. “I know that it’s not traditional doctrine. But they are here.”

Pause. Looking around.

Then he spoke again: “I won’t go to a doctor.”

________________________________________________________

Read this and more on Scribd.

Check out other things I've written.

Get the boot!

2011-08-04T09:06:00.002-05:00

The number of times in my life that I NEED boots, expressed as a ratio with the number of times in my life that I actually HAVE boots, is this:

1,000,000 : 0

People like me never think we need boots. That's because I don't like to go outside when it's bad weather (which it is about 9 months of the year in Wisconsin) and because I work in an office where I have to wear office clothes, and boots aren't office clothes.

Which means I don't actually OWN a pair of boots -- but then comes fall and winter and spring, and I end up having to shovel the driveway, or take the twins sledding, or go muck out the back steps when the french drain overflows, or dig up the yard to plant some trees, or go for a hike in the woods -- and my Crocs and dress shoes just don't cut it.

Copshoes.com sells boots for cops and other law enforcement, tough types -- but their Oakley Boots don't have to be just used for real men. Guys like me can wear them, too -- and probably SHOULD, because it'd be less wear and tear on my feet, and my other shoes, to simply have the right footgear.

If you're in law enforcement or the military or emergency response, you know you need the right boots, and you probably already get them from Copshoes.com. But if you're in some other line of work -- carpentry? landscaping? Lawyering? -- you still need boots from time to time, so why not get them where the pros get them, the leader in online boot sales?

Claudius hadn't started out alone... (FREE FULL NOVEL, "ECLIPSE")

2011-07-30T09:24:00.005-05:00

READERS: For ONE DAY ONLY, I am making the entire novel Eclipse available in full for a free download through Scribd.

ECLIPSE has been called "a psychological sci-fi mystery in the tradition of the old Twilight Zone, 2001, or Solaris... [it] keeps you guessing and will have you looking at it more than once.

ECLIPSE's plot:

Claudius wanted to be the first man to reach the stars. . . and maybe he was. Drifting through space, or trapped in his own mind, or looking ahead as a child, Claudius ponders the strange events that led him to run away from home, become an astronaut, and commit murder.

Or did none of that happen, after all?

You'll love ECLIPSE: so read the first chapter below, or

go here to download the entire book off Scribd for free, for 24 hours only

(offer ends at 10 a.m. July 31, 2011).

Don't want a Scribd version? Buy Eclipse on your Kindle for just $0.99, or order a hard copy online here.

Want to see what you're getting? Here's the first chapter, free:
_______________________________________________________________________
Eclipse:
Part 1: Speck.

How long had it been since he had seen another human being?

How long since he had talked to anyone but his own reflection?

How long since he’d seen the speck of reflected light in front of him, directly in front of him, and waved his arm ineffectively against the ether to see the speck blink in and out and realized that the star was behind him, and he was casting a shadow on the speck, which was reflecting the star’s light back when he was not interfering by waving his arm.

How big was it?

How far away was it?

Very far and large? Or very small and near?

Were there people?

He was moving, he estimated, at several thousand miles per hour. A pace that was unimaginable for most of human history, and yet he had achieved that velocity and it was still an infinitesimally slow crawl across the universe while he waited for God.

Maybe the speck was God.

Very far away and large, it could be God.

His journey had not begun so unprotected, so alone, so vulnerable. He had not started out shielded from the vast empty universe by only a thin layer of polymers and plastic. He had sat nestled in a seat that cradled him, that increased its softness as he pressed against it, that cupped him like a loving hand while gravity seemed to increase around him as his rocket had taken off, a seat that had arm rests to which his arms had been strapped to avoid them being flung down helplessly at his sides, armrests that were motorized to help him reach the controls that he must operate during the takeoff, must work during the 17 minutes that he would be subjected to five six seven times the usual gravity so that he could leave the atmosphere of the only world he had ever known and sling himself around that world and generate enough speed to zoom across the solar system until he was farther away from that planet than any human being had ever been before, to tilt towards the sun that he had spent his life circling around at a safe distance, this time to lean towards it and use it to pull him faster faster hotter hotter towards it and when he hit the maximum speed and got as close as he dared, he would then peel away and go faster yet, across the solar system and to new planets and stars that humans had never touched before. He would touch them.

Claudius had not started out alone and scared.

But he was ending that way.

__________________________________________________________

Click here to go download the entire book for free, ONE DAY ONLY!

Stupid laws against trespassing!

2011-07-30T09:10:00.002-05:00

We have got a LOT of stuff. A LOT A LOT of stuff. And now that I'm doing my spring cleaning -- which I do in the summer and do only one room at a time, 'cause it's easier that way and who says spring cleaning can only be done in the spring, anyway? - -I'm realizing just how much stuff we have and how little place we have to put it.

Especially things like the Babies!' toys, things that I don't necessarily want to throw out, but which they don't really use anymore. And things like that desk that we're not using right now and need to do something other than take up space with, and there's all The Boy's furniture that he left behind because he doesn't have space for it in HIS apartment, so we have to put it somewhere...

... it all makes me wish we had something like the Storage London areas at Safe Store Self Storage. They'll let you go on line and get a personal storage quote, or help you with moving, or sell you packing materials, and set you up with a clean, dry storage room that's just for your stuff. Short-term or long-term, they don't care, and they've got different sizes available, so you don't have to rent more than you need. Plus, you can get at your stuff 7 days a week, so anytime you can cajole The Boy into coming and picking up his stuff, it's ready.

You don't suppose they'd let me ship my stuff THERE, do you? Because right now, plan a (sneaking into the neighbor's house and putting it under their couch) isn't working too well.

Autism Works: Hacking Autism

2011-07-26T07:02:00.001-05:00

Autism Works is an across-the-board post I'm doing to help keep people informed of recent events affecting those who have autism and their families. The goal of Autism Works is to raise awareness of, and collect information for, people on the autism spectrum by providing news and information about autism-friendly businesses and developments in treatments and identification of this condition.

Michael Offutt, who writes the blog SLC Kismet, pointed out a while back that there are a great many autism-related apps on the iPad, and it looks like there might be more, so I'll take a look at those today:

First, autism apps. I have a Droid smart phone, one I got in part because Mr F's and Mr Bunches' teachers suggested an iPad last year as something to help the boys learn to communicate. Rather than invest $800 plus right off the bat on something that may not work, I went cheap by getting the touch-screen phone and trying that out.

Finding apps hasn't been difficult. Finding apps suited for autistic kids has -- there is, so far as I can tell, no "keyword" or "tag" type of search for the Droid store.

On the one hand, any app that lets the boys use the phone is a good one, and the smart phone (or touch screen pad) works great for that: Mr Bunches, who particularly likes the computer, had a lot of trouble originally learning how to use the mouse and keyboard, and still has trouble clicking, so a touch screen was great in getting them to play games and use the screen.

That let them play games -- they liked Angry Birds, in particular -- and watch videos all by touching, rather than clicking, and Mr Bunches in particular learned to get around Youtube pretty successfully on my phone, which was also portable enough for him to carry around.

Specific games that I found worked particularly well on the small touch screen included Fisher Price's online learning games: they have counting and ABC games that work well on a touch screen, and some "learning about opposites" and "animal sounds" games that even on a 3-by-1 inch screen look good and are easy to work. They're free and easy to access.

Another game Mr Bunches particularly enjoys, and which can be played on a small or large screen for free, is the "Jumping Box" game, where a person has to click-and-drag on a box to make it slide and jump through obstacles. (I like that one, too.)

"Talking Tom" was an app suggested by the teachers -- it's a cat that repeats everything you say in a slightly higher voice, and reacts to certain touches and other input. It's available for free and for $0.99, but don't bother paying; there's no difference between the two.

This site was suggested by the school teachers to find apps for an iPad. I'd give you the name, but it doesn't seem to have one. I haven't checked it out at all yet, but I'll try to download and review some of the apps in the future.

Then there's "Hacking Autism." This is a project I just learned about yesterday, an attempt to help "give people with autism a voice." They're going to have a Hackathon to get volunteer software developers in touch with autism specialists to develop new touch-enabled apps for the autism community.

You don't have to be a programmer or expert to participate: the site is seeking comments on existing ideas, and suggestions for apps to be developed, so if you have autism or are related to someone who does, weigh in and let them know.

You might even get some inspiration from the Hacking Autism's "Stories Of Hope," which includes a touching story written by an autistic boy who had never spoken until he was given a "Lightwriter," after which he was able to have a conversation with his older brother -- a conversation that was so special, they videotaped it for his parents and made it their Christmas present.

Autism Works: My Autism Team, and "mismatched socks."

2011-07-20T07:14:00.001-05:00

Autism Works is an across-the-board post I'm doing to help keep people informed of recent events affecting those who have autism and their families. The goal of Autism Works is to raise awareness of, and collect information for, people on the autism spectrum by providing news and information about autism-friendly businesses and developments in treatments and identification of this condition.

Today's business is My Autism Team, a website that promises to help with what these posts are intended to do, to: help people find autism-friendly businesses and identify service providers and other tips.

Signing up for My Autism Team is simple: a little bit of detail to set up a profile (and a chance to upload a picture) and you're ready to go, with an email verification that was simple. The profile didn't offer me a chance to enter information about more than one child, and the categories of information about the children were pretty limited (just four options about his or her behavior, rather than entering, say, a sentence or two), but it only took about 5 minutes to sign up.

Once signed up and verified, you can enter information in a format similar to Gather or Twitter -- blog posts with a button to click about whether you're having a "good" or "bad" day, and the chance to enter additional information. (I, for example, entered my first post as having a "good" day, and noted in the explanation that it was "like most days.")

That leads to a screen that looks like this:

Elsewhere, you can enter information about service providers and others -- the information is quick to enter and offers suggested tags. I put in Integrated Development Services, the people who provide the therapists for the boys 5 days a week. The information you're allowed to provide is supposed to be limited to 1 sentence about the provider; I question whether that's truly helpful.

I then went looking for other services to see what was there. The boys recently had to stop occupational therapy because we can't afford the co-pay (thanks, Republicans!) each week, so I went to see if there were occupational therapists in our area that I could contact who might have a lower (or no) co-pay.

The search itself is simple: type occupational therapy and your location and get a list of providers listed there -- but the six providers suggested for me had no information about them at all, beyond their office address. There wasn't even a way to click to contact them by email, on or off the site, making it somewhat less than useful.

I also looked for "sports leagues," as I've been trying to find a league that is autism-friendly so I could get the boys involved in soccer (I'm not a big fan of soccer, but it seems like it would be the easiest sport for them to play.) Under sports leagues I got these results within 20 miles of Middleton:

Again, there was almost no useful information under those tabs. I clicked on "Middleton Sport Bowl", which is only a few minutes from our house, because I thought an autism-friendly bowling league might be just as good as soccer, but found only an address and this review, from 18 months ago:

1/31/10 Middleton Sport Bowl is a classic neighborhood bar and bowling alley. They updated the Bowl a few years ago and it's a nice bowling alley. You can always run into a familiar face, having fun, and eating good bar food.

Frankly, that looks like it was posted on the Middleton Sports Bowl fan page, and isn't in any way helpful to someone with autism or a child with autism; what I was looking for was whether they have leagues, or "sensory friendly" days or times that it's less crowded (and therefore less noisy and easier to police children.)

I've only just found the site, so I'll keep checking in -- it's obvious to me that it works better as more people use it and provide information; that's how crowdsourcing helps, after all. But the fact that it's been around for over 18 months and hasn't developed a lot of information isn't encouraging for me.

Also discouraging: why aren't there sports leagues for kids with autism? Or mixed-leagues for spectrum- and non-spectrum kids? I can't do everything, here.

Today's Site is: "The World Of Mismatched Socks." Written by a woman with autism about her and her also-autistic brother's lives, this blog is a fascinating look at what life is like for someone on the spectrum. It's funny, interesting, at times a bit sad, and well-written.

The latest post begins like this:

What come to your mind when you think about Hell?? Most people think of fire, brimstone, gnashing of teeth, A Justin Bieber concert, algebra, etc...

Click here to read more.

If you have information you think would be helpful for this feature, please
Click here to Email me;
include "autism works" in the subject line.

You Know What Happens After Dark (Complete Story)

2011-07-13T08:44:00.002-05:00

Freddy was a little to close to her friend when she died... and now that friend has to help Freddy fight off a fate worse than death. The complete story is available to read on this site (page down or click here) or you can download it on Scribd by clicking here.

IO17: Table of Contents

2011-07-13T08:32:00.013-05:00

Prologue.

Chapter 1: Lisa Talks To Angels
Part 1A
Part 1B

Part 1C

David: 2

Chapter 2: Inside Out
Part 2A: Tom is captured.

Part 2B: Tom's background.
2c: Tom's First Alien
2d: The interrogation begins.

David: 3

Uberhumor.com has funny pictures to cheer you up after my site scares you.

2011-07-13T08:22:00.003-05:00

I have a confession to make: while I love horror stories, they sometimes really freak me out, like the time I watched Jeepers Creepers alone after midnight and then had to walk through my dark house to get to bed, and got the willies so bad that I had to watch Disney's Hercules just to clear my mind and fall asleep.

That's why I was glad to find Uberhumor.com. You think it's easy, or pleasant, sitting around imagining up the adventures of a guy who moves into a house owned by a homonculus that tries to kill his whole family and trap their souls in the basement?

Well, it's easy, but not always pleasant.

Uberhumor.com's mission in life is to find really funny pictures and share them with you, updating on a daily basis. Shocking, sexy, outrageous, but always funny, uberhumor.com is the yin to the yang of my site. Photo galleries of sexy women are balanced with things like "What Really Happened:"

And they've got other fun stuff, like their list of "35 fun things to do while driving," a list that includes "wear snorkel, and hang fish from the ceiling of the car."

I've bookmarked this on my work and home computers, and whenever I need a little break from suing people or dreaming up scary stories, I go check in and page around their galleries.