Tempest Penumbra

I once met a guy in Indiana that worked at the local IGA that told me that the Aztecs didn’t disappear From history. He said that they became buried in goat poop, why? Because goats always come home to poop. It didn’t matter how far out they wandered, they always come home to poop. I myself have noticed that their poop is always the same no matter what they eat. Little black pellets. I’ve seen them eat underwear off the clothesline and still, little black pellets. Tin cans, again, little black pellets.  Here’s some more of my goat observations for the purpose of flavor text. I saw a goat once standing on a stake that was no more than 2 inches around. It had all four legs up there and was standing perfectly still with no teeter. I saw two goats standing on the side of a high wall once near the highway in a place where I could not see where there was somewhere to stand.  I once ran into a question in a trivia pursuit game that asked what animal did scientist’s claim was the most suited f

When I was thirteen years old my uncle taught me how to slowly lower the arm of a record player onto the vinyl record without scratching it. Vinyl records….a very delicate thing. This concept was quite figurative in comparison to threading a sewing machine while it is running.  The needle itself that scratched out the audio and transferred it to the speakers was made of nylon I believe and would dull over time. If you didn’t replace it regularly it would widen the grooves in the vinyl disc causing them to sound bad. The alternative though was to buy needles made of graphite commonly called diamond tips. These eventually had to be replaced too but not as often and they didn’t dull, they would just snap over time.  When compact discs (or, laser discs) came along we were led to believe that they were virtually indestructible. This was not true. They were compact but, just as delicate as a vinyl record. Through the transition of this genre there was a lot of skepticism throughout society a

The years following my drug rehabilitation were not easy. I found myself without friends because when I hung out with the friends that I had then I would wind up back on drugs. I found myself for a little while in need of a different environment which happened to be a Baptist Church.  Looking back through my drug addict years I realized that I knew along that I had a guardian angel looking over me as well as a keen instinct for knowing when to walk away from certain peril. If not for that I’m sure I would have died tragically or wound up in jail a long time ago. The unrealized dilemma in all of this was not realizing what this instinct was. Guardian angel, that’s easy, you just apply a physical manifestation to a being of which plenty of visual stimuli is already present for and you’ve got it but, applying that criteria to something that is no more than a feeling is a little harder. Words hardly describe it. Vision of it is abstract and hazy. How do you describe knowing without really

I once saw this episode of Ren and Stimpy where they found the mountain of lost left socks. I can’t really remember what all else happened in the episode that led them to the mountain of lost left socks but, it was then established that this was a universal problem among the human race that socks do indeed go missing, mysteriously even, to who knows where other than the mythical mountain of lost left socks.  A lot of times it’s in the wash. I have personally placed even numbers of socks, confirming the count multiple times to still come out with a missing sock. Static sometimes dispositions them to a endoparasitoidal existence clinging to a towel or sweater but, in most cases it just simply vanishes. As a little side note. In my personal walk in life there is no left or right sock. They are universal in placement but, I know there are people out there who designate socks as left or right so I will not judge. My grandfather was one of those. So, while packing for vacation the whole fami

I don’t exactly fancy myself to be a mechanic. I do believe that I probably know more than most people, especially considering that most people don’t even know how to change a tire or put oil in a car but, most of what I know about the subject has been from setting on the side of the road broke down.  Most things in modern vehicles though I struggle with where on older vehicles I did not. Changing an alternator for instance. Very recently I changed the alternator in my wife’s van, and utterly failed at the task even though I was standing right at the finish line but, this story isn’t about alternators or working on cars, directly. This story is about Kenny. (Names in this story will mostly not be changed to protect the guilty.) For a brief time I lived in Indiana mostly as a vagrant, job hopping, migratory type glorified couch decoration staying with friends and family. People talk about Mexicans migrating to the states to work and how they will all pile up in the same house, well, poo

Yesterday I was standing in my yard and found an empty Marlboro cigarette pack that looked like it had been chewed in half. It’s not really uncommon to find random trash in my yard but I can usually figure up a possible origin of said trash. I smoke but, I don’t smoke Marlboro. My nearest neighbor doesn’t smoke, and my next nearest neighbors are a couple of hundred feet away. It wouldn’t be outside of the range of possibilities for one of my cats to chew it in half. One of them, in particular, I’m sure would have hunted it, he’s Just creative like that. What it reminded me of was a time when I was a child that I went outside to play, I was five I think, and as I played in the yard I started to find headless kittens and their heads as well. Quite gruesome I guess for a five year old. I went to tell my mother and she cleaned them up. She told me later that someone had done it to revile her because they thought she was a witch.  I’ve heard of things where in medieval times people would bu