Thursday, April 28, 2016

Going Home

Go big or go home.

Or, I suppose, go big and then, afterward, go home.

Either way, you should definitely eventually go home, and sooner or later you almost certainly will.

You paid a lot of money for the place, after all, and you continue paying property tax on it. You put a lot of thought and time and effort into getting the décor just right, that it would reflect you, the way you see yourself. And all for a place to hang your hat, a place where your heart is, a place to…

I don’t know, phone? I guess? A place to phone? Like if you’re hanging out with Elliott and things go late, maybe?

But I digress.

So, yes, go home. Not necessarily now, perhaps not even soon, but eventually, because you have in making that house a home created a sanctuary for yourself, and that sanctuary is of no purpose without you, it’s dweller, to take sanctuary within it, and in doing so to transform it from simply a space to a living, thriving thing with a real, meaningful purpose. Because the thing that makes a place into a home is, ultimately, you.

So go big, yes. But more importantly: Go home.


None of this is in any way relevant if you happen to be Thomas Wolfe, obviously. In that case the option to go home does not exist. Apparently…

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Prince

In the soundtrack of our lives, some artists loom naturally larger than others, tying themselves inextricably to a time and a place and a memory, such that they become a part of your life, a part of you, a part of that moment that cannot be separated from the whole.

This thought occurs to me, now, as I sit in my room, thinking back to my very first run with the dinner theatre, living in a hotel room, with no roots in the town in which I lived, inviting the cast over, night after night after night, for endless games of Doctor Mario, games that would go on until the sun came up, because we had nowhere to be until four o’clock the next afternoon and we didn’t want the night to end…

And Prince.

We would play every Prince album I owned, and I did own most of them, play them again and again, but we always came back to the Gold Experience. It’s not his best work, not one of his classics, but it was the one we wound up listening to, for reasons that years later I can’t begin to remember, and when I hear it now it still takes me back to that sense of belonging, that community, that camaraderie.

That funky-motherfucking sense of camaraderie.

I’m listening to the album now, as I type this, and I’m thinking about that period of my life, a time I’d count among my very best, and I’m thinking about the people with whom I’d spent it, people my life is infinitely richer for having known. And I’m thinking about Prince. And I’m thinking about the Gold Experience, and playing Doctor Mario, and the younger me I used to be, and I can’t help smiling as I do.

Everybody’s trying to sell what’s already been sold.

Everybody’s trying to tell what’s already been told.

What’s the use of money, if you ain’t gonna break the mold?

Even at the center of the fire, there is cold.

All that glitters, ain’t gold.


But in that case it was. It was a very golden time indeed…

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Weekly Prompt Story: 8 Prompt-Stravaganza!!!

http://oneadayuntilthedayidie.com/?p=31662

On Slow Nights
By Christopher Munroe

Sometimes a man needs to get drunk on rum and Cherry Coke whilst watching B-movies.

Whether Hammer Horror, New Line Cinema or something dumb by Nicolas Cage, I suspect you’ve had this impulse too, it’s a fun evening, though not one you can partake in every night.

Moderation, and whatnot.

I live-tweet the experience, myself, though I suspect nobody’s as amused by it as me. Hmm, now that I think about it, I ought to do that again sometime soon.


Something where 90s style computers are hacked, perhaps. Or the one where Liam Neeson fights wolves. I’ll figure something out…

Thursday, April 14, 2016

Marty

When the Libyans came for Dr. Scott, Marty had no choice but to jump in the DeLorean, open it up to 88mph and thrust himself back, into Hill Valley’s past, seeking refuge from the dangers of the present in the relative safety of history.

What he hadn’t known, in that moment, was that he wasn’t alone in the car…

Musca Domestica, one of the most common insects in the world, and not the sort of thing anyone, in the heat of the moment, running for his life from terrorists who’d inexplicably brought along a rocket launcher, would notice inside the car with him, but there it was, tagging along without his knowledge, for the ride and its horrible aftermath.

Because the time machine, you see, had only been built for one, and Doc Brown had had no idea what, if anything, would happen if two living creatures were shunted back in time simultaneously, if he’d known he’d have taken some provision, that such a thing might be prevented ever happening.

Of course, at that point Marty would only have been shot by a Libyan terrorist with a rocket launcher, so there’s every chance that even if he had been warned of what was to come he’d still have made the choice he did, assuming that with life comes hope, however slim, and as such assuming that more life, even a little bit, would be the preferable option.

And, at first, that seemed to be the case.

Although he had changed, had been changed, by what had happen to him, at first the results of this change were universally positive. He found himself stronger, faster, his senses heightened by what he’d been through, in ways he couldn’t begin, even with the assistance of a much younger Doc Brown, to explain. He’d become a superman and, stretching his now much more powerful legs in a version of Hill Valley 30 years previous to the one he’d known, he reveled in the power he’d been granted.

Biff something, the bully who’d so tormented his father in their time together at school, was found dead, his arm broken in two places, his neck snapped similarly. And you don’t even WANT to know what he got up to with his then high school aged future mother…

But things inevitably went wrong, horribly wrong, as they had always had to do. Primate and inectoid DNA, after all, are not designed to blend, and by the time Marty dragged his tumored, bloated, disfigured wreck of what once had been a body, now completely unrecognizable as what it once had been, toward his unknowing mother, pulled the barrel of her shotgun into where his mouth had been and gargled “Please” up at her, it never even crossed her mind that what she was shooting was human anymore, let alone her son.

Not that she’d known who he was; it was Calvin she would mourn. Marty died alone and afraid, killed by a mother who never even knew her son, much as Doc Brown would die alone and afraid, thirty years later, at the hands of Libyan terrorists, unwarned. A shame, that such a tiny thing could cause matters to go so horribly wrong, but the moment Marty and the insect travelled through time together his fate was set, the mutation had already begun, and there was nothing he could do, no step he could take, to save himself.

And, by the end, he knew it.


By the end, he had truly become: The McFly.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Weekly Prompt Story: Debate

http://oneadayuntilthedayidie.com/?p=31656

On Slacktivism
By Christopher Munroe

A public service announcement: Nobody’s mind has ever been changed about any issue based on a political meme they saw on Facebook.

Everyone, on some level, understands this, yet we keep posting and reposting the damn things as though they helped illustrate any sort of point.

Actual news articles are okay.

And people who I DO agree with politically? This is directed at you too.

You think you’re making a difference, with your cartoons and re-captioned screen-grabs. You think you’re contributing to the debate.

I understand that, it’s just that you’re not.

You’re not contributing to anything.


You’re just Mass-debating.

Thursday, April 7, 2016

...thoughts whilst at work.

Waiter’s Journal: Friday, 6:47pm

There’s food up in alley, but no one has time to walk it.

This restaurant’s afraid of me, I’ve seen its true face. The front of house is an extended gutter and the gutter’s full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown.

The accumulated filth of their demands for extra cheese biscuits and hot water with lemon will foam up about their waists and all the guests and their screaming children will look up at me and shout "Is this gluten free?"


..and I'll stare down and whisper "no." 

Sunday, April 3, 2016

Weekly Prompt Story: Library

http://oneadayuntilthedayidie.com/?p=31579

Bookmobile
By Christopher Munroe

My town’s library system is bringing back the bookmobile!

I mean, they’re calling it “The Book Truck” now, rather than Bookmobile, which is NOT a good name, but that’s fine. It’s not FOR me, it’s for children in neighborhoods lacking easy library access, and I totally get that they don’t have to run the name by me for approval.

And anyway: Bookmobile! For the first time since 1991! Fun times, and a very useful service to the communities it will serve.

Mayor Nenshi is, once again, crushing it.

No punchline this week, gang, I’m just excited that it’s back.


Bookmobile!