An Inhuman Condition

The lights dimmed again. They were always blinking in and out or wearing down like an abandoned campfire. He always thought his life would be more glamorous than this. Even a few years ago he still thought there was something important ahead of him. They never told him that everything extraordinary he wanted would fade into the background and wilt into something like the petty nagging of poor lighting. It wasn’t just the lighting though, their electrical systems were all in a state of decay. On any given day, it was a crapshoot what would work correctly. One day it’s the computers that glitch and go down while he has to sit and wait for the automatic repairs to finish. Another he might find the refrigerator has already thawed out his frozen breakfast and have to go through it all checking to see if anything spoiled. The microwave was the worst part of the kitchen, blowing the fuse at least once a day. He was so used to things not working that it was remarkable when a day passed without beating on an appliance or turning a breaker. But even on these rare days, he would still see the dimming of the lights.
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Mental Note: NEED TO KEEP WORKING ON THIS!
Sketch art and characters are from my bittery dick of a pal at http://ugisart.com/. He also has these really funny comics for sale at http://futurelandfillpress.bigcartel.com

VII – Patientia

While the Curia Nocte sit gathered at the Apostolic See of St. Simon, Mother Death is escorted by Lord Hat through the catacombs to the chamber. Lord Hat has slowed his pace to match her frail speed. Neither the shadow man nor the Mother require a torch, and instead make their way through the darkness in near silence. It’s rare that the Curia requests her formal presence at their chamber, and the messenger was very vague about the purpose of their meeting. Whispers of the pope’s illness had already reached them, but it was clear the Camerlengo was concealing the true nature of events. Lord Hat was the first to step from the shadows and appear before the council. In the dim torchlight, he was nothing but the silhouette of a form as he addressed the Curia Nocte.

“Presenting Mother Death.”

She moved slowly into the light, first appearing as nothing but rags and shadows like her Lord escort. As the light filled under her shroud, the cracks and crevices of her exposed skull could be seen. Her hands withered down to the bone and grit of cartilage like the rest of her shrunken figure, but much larger than the rest of her frame. The deep sockets that used to hold eyes and nose stayed a shadowy void as if the light dared not enter. Her jaw remained, but had stretched unnaturally wide filled in with the rotting ivory stubbs of what were once full teeth. To the few cardinals among them seeing her for the first time, the shivering feel of decay seemed to emanate from those dark gaps staring forward at them like the void of death itself.

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Adam is speeding down interstate 114 in his two-tone Dodge Dart, and his shoulder is killing him. The car’s powder-blue paintjob gives way a little more to the encroaching rust every year. The hood and roof look like a copper penny shoved through the center of a robin’s egg as it shakes it’s way down the road. The sun is setting, and he can barely make out the Lakeview exit for the glare. His normally slick and slightly curled hair is matte and dirty with the same dried blood covering his cheek and neck. His bed-head hairstyle is much more literal, resting on his face like James Dean wearing a mophead as a hat. His eyes are burning sapphire on the road as he snorts, taps the brake and forces the wheel to the right with his lip curling from the pain of the gunshot wound. As he squints to check for traffic, he sees Jenny’s ring on a chain around the mirror. He wishes he’d never gotten her involved in all this again, and he hopes he can get her out this time. His right foot hits the floor, and pain be damned, he spins out around the corner racing down the street.

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In the hopes that I continue working on this soon, I’m posting a raw section of Synod Horrenda. Sketch art and characters are from my bittery dick of a pal at http://ugisart.com/. He also has these really funny comics for sale at http://futurelandfillpress.bigcartel.com

II – Fidgit

“Life is messy and people stink. Like diarrhea stains on the grundle of the world, we’re all just waiting to be wiped out. I think that’s why the end of days is such a popular trope. It’s comforting to think that all the pain, struggle and obligations will burn away, but I’m not so sure. I’ve dipped my dick in death, and for whatever reason I’m still here. I’m a walking example of all the ways a person shouldn’t act, and despite everything I’ve done, the sleep won’t come. I can’t help but laugh whenever I hear about tragedy: a happy family killed by a drunk driver, a fitness instructor getting an embolism at 45. And for all the suffering in the world, miserable cocks like us are free to run around unfettered sticking needles into our arms and our pricks into anything that wiggles and won’t say ‘no.’”

Fidgit moves his jacket aside and sticks the needle between a couple dirty bandages rust stained with dried blood. Wrapped around his chest and next to his heart, his ‘skin’ is a decomposing mess. The dirty wrappings covering his body contain the decay. The few cracks in the coverings let his spiked hair, rotting jaw and a single strained eye socket poke through.  He squeezes the plunger and, for a few moments, finds a hypodermic heaven.

“And if you don’t like me, that’s fine, but you’d be blind to think we’re any different. If you even have eyes, I guess.” Read the rest of this entry �

“This is my doing. It’s me, and I accept that. Sartre said our actions and decisions make us, and this war is mine. It’s inside me now, and I own that. The world, my isolation – it’s my fault. I’m not saying I caused the political bullshit, but it’s like the pieces of a puzzle. You start with these odd, disconnected bits and assemble the corners, work along the border and fill in the middle from there. At some point you should start to see what the photo is, but I didn’t. There was no box; it was all blurred. I never even finished the damn thing, but they saw the entire picture first. Envisioned and given life through my work, there was no way to unsee it, and then they remade whole, damn planet in my image.

Looking back I feel like a naïve child. When they started using DNA to manufacture microprocessors, I should have made the leap. When we tagged ourselves with radio-frequency chips in the name of healthcare, people should have filled the streets in anger, but instead it was all a convenience. We were coddled at every step with the cushy blanket of progress. We dumped ourselves to the Internet, gave it our thoughts, wants, emotions – we became it. We reinvented ourselves as pixels communicating at unprecedented speeds. From the server room to the home then the coffee shop and the pocket, the next logical step was under the skin.

With rampant dematerialization and convergence giving us smaller computers, the lines blurred between our devices. The desktop was a TV, the laptop made phone calls, the cellular phone checked email and our TVs browsed the Internet. People carried a record store’s worth of music on something the size of a cigarette pack – a library of books the size of just one. We could buy any novel, song or movie in the world and have it on a gadget in our pocket within minutes. It was the fastest and most effortless form of consumption our species invented – the Internet. Once the ones and zeros made their way into every home in the country, there was no coming back. The ease of consumption consumed us all.”

Cras Populus Ero Machina
Attenuator Zero

I’ve finished the script to Bear and Bear, P.I. finally. Artist and I have it in a state we’re happy with, and if all is going well he should have some thumbnails for my perusal soon. Whenever I get some pixels from the project, I will finally do something with our website BearPI.com beyond displaying the number pi. I’m sure anyone reading this is aware of the poster on CockTracy.com, but in the event some unknown stranger makes it here, I want that stranger to see Artist’s cock in all it’s colored splendor.

I’m about 3,500 words into a new short story that will require much editing before I put it here. I need more time or less distraction to get writing, webstuffs and maybe even some submitting to publishers finished.

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