Alexander McKinney's Blog, page 8

Good and Bad, Mostly Bad, Ways to Fill Your Empty Soul: #8 Run a Marathon

Run a Marathon

What it Entails:

You’ve decided to get fit, but were too cheap to pay for a gym membership. Well, fine, at least you’re practical, or you would be, if you weren’t trying to run a marathon.

Let’s recount the history of marathons. They are so named in memory of the sacrifice of the Greek runner, Pheidippides, who ran from Marathon to Athens, delivered a message and dropped dead.

This seems like an excellent thing for you to emulate, especially seeing as you just got off of the couch.

You’re going to need workout gear, running shoes, an iPod, sunglasses and to have your affairs in order. You have written a will right?

Pros:

1. You didn’t have to pay for gym membership.

2. People are impressed when you tell them you’re training for a marathon. They might even compliment you before you’ve done anything.

3. Rarely required to provide proof of your marathon training or participation.

Cons:

1. May occasionally have to run. It’s that activity where you move your legs quickly and you sweat a lot.

2. You’ll realize what healthy joints you used to have.

3. You’ve already bragged about this, eventually people are going to expect you to back it up. No pressure.

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Good and Bad, Mostly Bad, Ways to Fill Your Empty Soul: #7 Climb A Mountain

Climb A Mountain

What it Entails:

Step 1: The hubris to assume that a non-sentient conglomeration of rock, dirt, snow and trees cares what you do.

Step 2: A willingness to be cold and live in uncomfortable conditions.

Step 3: The ability to convince others that accompanying you is a good idea.

Step 4: Choose a mountain.

Step 5: Don’t be a pansy, choose a bigger mountain. That’s right, you’re making a statement.

Step 6: Climb the mountain.

Note: Step 6 is said to be complicated, especially if you executed Step 5 with panache.

Pros:

1. If you’re doing this in style the Sherpa will carry your things.

2. You’re on top of the world. Good job. Now climb back down.

3. Consistently terrible cell phone reception.

Cons:

1. Must either carry your own things, or associate with a Sherpa.

2. Trolls are mythical, none will appear to eat any companions who end up being annoying.

3. Utter lack of foie gras on both ascent and descent.

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Good and Bad, Mostly Bad, Ways to Fill Your Empty Soul: #6 Skydiving

Skydiving

What it Entails:

Suspending all logical judgment and jumping out of a perfectly good plane.

It’s true, some skydiving institutions have lesser quality planes… this still doesn’t excuse jumping out of them.

Past that questionable choice you may spend time watching the ground come up fast and (optionally) wetting yourself. Congratulations, you could have taken a bath and watched Google Earth. No, no, I’m sure you’re right, this is better.

Oh, and then there’s the parachute. Who packed that thing? Are you sure it’s going to open? Yeah you’re right. Why worry? It’s not like a mistake will have any serious consequences…

Pros:

1. If this is a hobby your family will thank you for it, and take out a life insurance policy on you.

2. Wonderfully alone while in the air.

3. One of the few to take the advice of The Steve Miller Band and actually flying like an eagle.

Cons:

1. Your chute might open.

2. People will want to talk to you about the experience.

3. Empty realisation that you’ve accomplished nothing beyond glorified falling.

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Good and Bad, Mostly Bad, Ways to Fill Your Empty Soul: #5 Sailing

Sailing

What it Entails:

Choosing to remove your feet from dry land and entrust yourself to a man-made vessel in the hopes that you won’t drown.

Oh, and the boat is powered by the wind. You know, that stuff hurricanes are made from. Brilliant.

Now that you’re seated in your seatbelt-free, ocean treading, hurricane powered device, sit back, kick up your feet and relax.

Pros:

1. Might fall overboard and be eaten by a shark.

2. Sun burns. They give your pictures an exciting and authentic look.

3. Piracy. I enjoy the outfits and the flag, but the swords are pretty fantastic too.

Cons:

1. Reefs. Global warming is failing to exterminate them fast enough to make navigating easy. Also, reefs have angry older brothers called rocks.

2. Salt. Free salt. Everywhere. Sure, you can sail on a lake, but where’s your sense of adventure?

3. Scurvy. Back when sailing was serious men lost their teeth. You’re not doing it right if you don’t lose yours.

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Three Parts Dead – Max Gladstone

Three Parts Dead was a novel that caught my attention and drew me in. I have a particular fondness for unapologetic worlds that refuse to hold your hands. I like trusting that some of the things that the author has written will make sense, in time, once I understand what certain terms mean in their unique world. Three Parts Dead delivers on this. It is fresh, clever and engrossing.

I struggle to categorise it as any one particular genre beyond fantasy. It is laced through with what I would call anachronisms in any other world, and yet here they work. There’s an almost steampunk, but not quite element to it, and the magic is fascinating. This is a must-read for any fantasy enthusiast.

Buy Three Parts Dead on Amazon

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Boarding School on Alpha Centauri – Chapter 2

Bob I called him. You would too. He doesn’t look like a Bob, doesn’t sound like a Bob, doesn’t act like a Bob. But dear lord I needed something to hold on to.

The headmaster pushed open the door using one of his prehensile tongues. I shuddered at the thought of putting my tongue against that red and black furry surface. Then again I wouldn’t want to have to use my tongue like a hand like he does. Still, it was gross.

Then came our room.

I had been expecting something, well, advanced from the school. They had put me in stasis and taught me an alien language for the trip over. But no no, it wouldn’t do to keep throwing that sort of technological superiority in student’s faces.

The room had an advanced environmental control feature. I later learned that other students had specific requirements while sleeping, amoebic nutrient baths, specific types of light, electrical currents, magnetics fields, temperature changes, esoteric noises. All of these things were possible. What I’m getting at is that some of my classmates and dorm mates have specialized needs. Bob is one of them.

Bob’s special need is that he carpets our entire living space in this fur that is a symbiotic extension of his skin. He respires through it. It’s very thin, lets him shed heat quickly, evacuate toxins, he can even change its color and texture. Quite cool, so long as you aren’t living in it.

Then there’s Bob himself. It should come as no surprise that Bob is large. It’s only big creatures that need to go to great lengths to cool down. Small creatures have that surface area to volume thing under control. When I say small I’m generally referring to anything smaller than say a Rhino.

Bob isn’t as big as a Rhino, he’s more gorilla sized. Covered in more of that hair. Don’t let the size comparison throw you off, he’s not a gorilla, doesn’t resemble a gorilla, definitely doesn’t eat like a gorilla. He’s from a semi-aquatic species with seven genders. I’m calling him a he because we don’t have the right gender pronouns in English.

Sorry, I misspoke; Bob isn’t usually the size of a Rhino. Except during mating season. Which was when we met. He’d been given a pass to skip class as he was incapable of acting appropriately and kept trying to mate with the students and the teachers… and the furniture.

He explained all of this after the headmaster left in what seemed like quite a hurry.

Did I say explained?

What happened was that Bob lunged at me and grabbed me with two of his four arms. They were long, this probably made up for the fact that at the moment he looked like an immobile blob. His legs (four again) were little stumps that poked out from yellow and orange fur, kind of like a grossly obese tabby cat.

Bob wrenched me off of my feet and dragged me over to him and smushed me against what I’m going to call his torso. Somewhere at this point I realized I should have been screaming.

Yeah.

Sedatives are a fantastic thing. At least I’m pretty sure I was sedated. Otherwise I was in shock. One of the two. Anywho.

Right, so smushed me against his torso. There I was sinking into his ‘chest’ and thinking of Lenny from ‘Of Mice & Men’. Then it got weird.

The carpet of our floor lifted up and pressed against me like a blanket. On one side I was crushed against Bob and on the other his carpet-skin. It smelled divine.

I can’t quite explain it, but the first time it happened it was like showering in the scent of fresh baked chocolate chip cookies.

How much time passed like that I wasn’t sure. I came to standing a few feet away from Bob with about ten centimeters of clear floor stretching out in ever direction from my feet. I was swaying a little.

Bob was staring at me with three of his five eyes. That sounds like it should be harder to be sure of; but isn’t. Bob’s species has motile eyes. An usual trait for a species with a fixed skeleton. He has five eyes, but many eye sockets. Due to the nature of his skin the underlying musculature was able to raise an eye from any given socket and move it to another. At the present moment three of them faced me, while two of them were drifting to other parts of his head, closer to where you’d expect to find the ears.

“Sorry.” He said to me (Okay, yes, it was high pitched screeches that tore at the brain and made my eye sockets want to bleed a little, but what it meant was ‘sorry’).

I collected my thoughts, which was a bit like unscrambling an egg. It took me a good minute to straighten my eyes out and feel coherent.

“Sorry?” I asked.

“I can’t help it. The urges are so strong right now. That’s why they let me stay out of class.”

“Right.” I ran my fingers over my skin, my clothes were intact, and other than the pervasive scent of baked goods there was no trace of our ‘cookie-hug’. “How often is this going to happen?” I was way too calm about it, I’m certain there were sedatives involved.

His fur rippled through a few colors and patterns. At the time I didn’t know what it meant, but again later learned that it meant that he was momentarily confused. “How do you measure time?”

Of course, I’d forgotten that he wouldn’t be used to minutes, days and hours.

When I didn’t answer he said. “Every two class cycles.”

A class cycle is equivalent to one of our school weeks back on earth. Sort of. Their ‘weeks’ are longer as are their days. We’re expected to standardize our days to match. Lots of fun that.

“Oh, okay.” I plucked at my clothes. They and the floor I was on were the only non-furry parts of the room. “Can I see my bed?”

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Boarding School on Alpha Centauri – Chapter 1

Being the President’s son is supposed to be a privilege. All but guaranteed admission to the best schools, interesting trips, growing up in the White House.

I got sent to Alpha Centauri.

No that’s not a cool night club, which by the way would have been okay.

No no, I mean Alpha Centauri the star. Actually it’s two stars, most people don’t know that. Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B.

I was sent to the boarding school that floats in the atmosphere of the gas giant that orbits Alpha Centauri A. We, and by we I mean humans, call it Ludus. Latin for school. Ha freakin’ ha.

My entire school is like one big hostage takeover. Every involved sentient species has their head of state send their children to Ludus. We are symbols of co-operation, of brotherhood of intense crushing boredom.

That’s not to say that the moments of boredom aren’t interspersed with mind numbing terror. I’d hate to leave that out.

The problem with living with aliens is they aren’t human. Yeah I know, a surprise right? But no, really, they aren’t human. They don’t think at all like us.

It’s easier if I just tell you from the beginning.

I never would have agreed to it if they’d told me it was a one-way trip. I like to believe that mom and dad thought they were telling me the truth. It makes it easier. You never know, maybe they didn’t know what was going to happen.

Waking from hibernation was confusing. They’d told me that I’d be kept asleep for the entire journey and that it would take a month. They didn’t tell me that the entire time I was asleep my unconscious mind would be bombarded with lingual training.

When I woke there was a raised metallic surface that looked like a movie special effect (later I christened it and models like it Quasi, they’re all one big linked interface) asking me questions over and over in a weird language. It took me a few minutes to realize that I understood what was being said. Something to do with my subconscious mind integrating with my conscious mind. It’s not exactly like knowing another language, it’s somehow deeper and yet at the same time more superficial. Every now and again it causes a serious problem.

I take comfort in the fact that it screws everyone up and not just me.

Anyhow, I’m getting side tracked again. You would too if you had to speak to yourself anytime you wanted semi-sane conversation.

So I woke up with Quasi asking me questions over and over. Once I realized what Quasi wanted I tried to answer. My voice didn’t come out in English. High-pitched screeches like nails over chalkboards burst out of my throat.

I freaked out a bit at that point. There may have been some clutching of the throat, and some leaping away from the creepy liquid-metal thing. Quasi stopped being creepy after I learned what that word really meant, but I hadn’t met the weirder students yet and my threshold was lower. I’m not saying that’s what happened, but if it did, my reacting like that would have been totally understandable. Cause it was terrifying.

I mean really terrifying. Like having a stroke and not being able to speak anymore.

Of course what made it worse was that the screeches meant something to me and something to it.

That’s when I knew just how far away from home I was. It’s one thing to see it on a map, another to have it explained to you, but to have alien noises come out of your throat and for you to understand them? You realize that you are a long long long way from home.

It’s the little flashes of normal that make things harder, but we’ll get to those.

Quasi led me off the ship. There was a welcoming party that included video of my parents telling me how proud they were of me. That made it worse. The video was so realistic that for a second I thought they were real. Sometimes I hate technology.

Then the headmaster explained what was really going on. It’s standard to greet a student with a video/hologram/sense projection of their parents greeting them to the school. It’s supposed to help us acclimate. Yeah, that doesn’t work so much with human psychology.

Of course I’m glossing over an important detail. The headmaster. He was a twelve-foot tall quintuple-legged carapaced creature that oozed slime from pores on his shell. In place of arms he had three prehensile tongues that flicked out of his mouth and could manipulate things like hands. There were little symbiotic creatures that followed him around and cleaned up his slime trail. They were efficient, but they didn’t do much for the smell.

“Good news!” Those were his first ‘words’ to me. Of course I say words, they were noises that scraped over my inner ear like a medieval surgeon scraping at a bone. It’s never gotten any better. “We have a roommate for you from a similar species!”

This was not good news. When I’d agreed to this there had been no mention of a roommate. Who wants to live with an alien?

“I’m sure you’ll get on famously! He’s had a hard time adjusting without evolutionarily similar friends, but I’m sure that with you here that’s the end of that!”

I was being presented as the solution to a problem. I knew this was a bad sign, but I’d been to enough political events with dad to know what to do. “I look forward to meeting him sir.” Okay, what I said was scream, yelp, snort, gnahhhhh, but you get the idea.

The headmaster put a tongue across my shoulder and walked me to my room. Apparently that’s a friendly gesture amongst most species. If it had been an arm it might have translated better. I felt like he was going to eat me at any time.

Classes were in, so the halls were empty for our walk, probably a good thing, I might have run screaming otherwise.

The one thing I will say for the school was that it had been clean. Up until we reached my room. The entire door was covered in a matt of hair. Not like a hairy animal, or clippings from a haircut, no, the thing was bumpy and looked like the abdomen of a tarantula. The hair ran in red and black stripes as wide as my fist.

Then the door opened.

That’s how I met Bob.

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Good and Bad, Mostly Bad, Ways to Fill Your Empty Soul: #4 Painting!

Painting!

What it Entails:

Dig deep within your soul and find a hitherto unsuspected love of paint fumes. Learn to love how they life you up and carry you to far away places with pink bunny rabbits. Paint every day hunting for lift from the fumes. Discard the silly concept of painting on canvas. These things are not for you, no! You needed a large mural, a wall. Discover the joy of painting graffiti. Spend hours creating complex love letters to your spray cans. Get caught, resist arrest, go to jail.

During your incarceration rise to the top of the social pyramid of your prison. Develop a network of people both inside and outside who can use to acquire more spray paint. Continue working on your art in your cell. Should your cellmate complain stare him down until you’ve mastered “Crazy eyes.”

Upon your release take advantage of your newfound criminal empire to ignore any need for a day job and instead return to graffiti. Should you be hassled again, use your underworld ties to manipulate the system.

Pros:

1. Learn to paint.

2. Create criminal network.

3. Lower cost of utilities while incarcerated.

Cons:

1. Must go to jail.

2. Spray paint can be expensive.

3. You may not look good in orange.

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Good and Bad (Mostly Bad) Ways to Fill Your Empty Soul: #4 Painting!

Painting!

What it Entails:

Dig deep within your soul and find a hitherto unsuspected love of paint fumes. Learn to love how they life you up and carry you to far away places with pink bunny rabbits. Paint every day hunting for lift from the fumes. Discard the silly concept of painting on canvas. These things are not for you, no! You needed a large mural, a wall. Discover the joy of painting graffiti. Spend hours creating complex love letters to your spray cans. Get caught, resist arrest, go to jail.

During your incarceration rise to the top of the social pyramid of your prison. Develop a network of people both inside and outside who can use to acquire more spray paint. Continue working on your art in your cell. Should your cellmate complain stare him down until you’ve mastered ‘crazy eyes.’

Upon your release take advantage of your newfound criminal empire to ignore any need for a day job and instead return to graffiti. Should you be hassled again, use your underworld ties to manipulate the system.

Pros:

1. Learn to paint.

2. Create criminal network.

3. Lower cost of utilities while incarcerated.

Cons:

1. Must go to jail.

2. Spray paint can be expensive.

3. You may not look good in orange.

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Good and Bad, Mostly Bad, Ways to Fill Your Empty Soul: #3 Teach Your Friends How to Cook!

Teach Your Friends How to Cook!

What it Entails:

By this point in time you’ve learned how to cook and mastered the art of acquiring the kitchen tools you need from those around you. It is essential that you have several good recipes that make use of esoteric cooking items. I recommend an industrial raclette grill, a wood-fired pizza oven and a candy thermometer. These are all items that will not be found in your average friend’s kitchen.

Teach your friends how to make exquisite dishes with them. Raclette, pizza, and candies or deep fried goodness. Lace these dishes with intense quantities of caffeine to get them addicted. Stop making them.

Let the agony build in your friends until they need these dishes again. Let them come over and cook them for you. Every fifth dish or so secretly spike it with that caffeine that they so crave.

Pros:

1. Now you have kitchen minions!

2. More time to go back to theft and skulking, darks hobbies that you are now addicted to from your time left learning how to cook.

3. No more grocery bills as your friends bring over ingredients.

Cons:

1. Must teach friends how to cook.

2. Must spend time with people.

3. Criminal enterprises at risk of discovery due to extra human contact.

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