A Summer Turkey

It is one day past the american Thanksgiving as I post this.

This video, however, is from mid May of this year. A few days past, really.

We are visited by Turkeys often.

It is a source of joy for us.

This year we saw juveniles, both Tom and Hen, and mature birds, but no Turklets.

This is a concern.

The loss of habitat I keep mentioning. We wonder if the predators got to the eggs. We won’t really know until next year.

And by then it’ll be too late.

It is a hard thing, to accept The Wild as it is. The Wild serves its own, knows its own ways, suffers us but only for a little while (in the scheme of Nature’s time).

People tend to forget we’ve only been on the planet a (very) little wild. Our kind – homo sapiens – has been on the planet about a quarter as long as Neanderthals walked about.

Some say they’re gone, extinct.

I honestly don’t know. They had bigger brains than us and were better adapted to northern climates than we are or have been. That much smarter, maybe they simply hid.

Do you know you wouldn’t recognize a Neanderthal if you saw one walking down the street or in the grocery or in the mall if they wore modern clothing? Forget what you were told about how they looked, they looked much like us, only more solid, more muscular, more body hair.

Did I ever tell you I’m on record as having benched 350# ten for ten?

Or that I like the cold?

Or that Susan (wife/partner/Princess) won’t braided my back when I was asleep?

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

 

Meteor Man (finale)

This is the final installment of a relatively new piece, Meteor Man. First written in July ’94, I was never satisfied with it until my last rewrite this past September.

It’s a longish piece at 11,300 words, so I’ve broken it into five sections. I hope it’s worth it.

Enjoy.

Co-Author and higher level subscribers (10$US/month or more) can download a complete PDF version of Meteor Man for offline reading. or Join Us to continue.

Read Meteor Man (part 1).
Read Meteor Man (part 2).
Read Meteor Man (part 3).
Read Meteor Man (part 4).

Meteor Man (finale)

Ellis could not be quieted. “You lost an asherteam? How the hell can you lose an asherteam? Two men, maybe, but two men and thirty cubic meters of state-of-the-art digrig? Where’s Singer? It’s about time somebody took hold of this thing.”

“He was piloting the asher.”

She stared at him then laughed. “Let’s say he’s already taken charge. Let’s say he’s already gone after Geertz. Let’s say if you don’t hear from him in three days you call me.”

“Singer sent you a message before we lost contact.”

“Yup, and it’s shit. Something walked all over it. Can’t make a thing out of it.” Her face drew close to his. “Are you sweating, Mr. Meninquez?”


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A Healthy Young Buck Flicks His Tail

There is something wonderful about nature.

Especially when paired with some of the best jazz recordings ever.

1959.

The year that changed Jazz forever.

Giants walked in those days.

And a deer walks in our yard.

As I often state, we are blessed.

 

Meteor Man (part 4)

This is the fourth installment of a relatively new piece, Meteor Man. First written in July ’94, I was never satisfied with it until my last rewrite this past September.

It’s a longish piece at 11,300 words, so I’ve broken it into five sections. I hope it’s worth it.

Enjoy.

Co-Author and higher level subscribers (10$US/month or more) can download a complete PDF version of Meteor Man for offline reading. or Join Us to continue.

Read Meteor Man (part 1).
Read Meteor Man (part 2).
Read Meteor Man (part 3).

Meteor Man (part 4)

Geertz and Meninquez stood on opposite sides of the five man digteam. All of them were huddled around a hole in the lower right corner of The Wall barely large enough for a surgical needle to move through. Behind them Singer and La Velle’s asher held racks of floodlights in its mormons so they could see. Behind their asher sat the second asher placed for ascent.

Geertz kept his reader at The Wall, constantly checking for any anomalies in the glyphs. “Go ahead.”

A minute later the cutter had opened a probe-sized hole on the inner surface of The Wall. He glanced at the cutter’s progress on another reader. “Stop.”

Meninquez came over to the reader. “What is it?”

“I didn’t want the cutter to enter the inner world. I just wanted it to make a hole. Now we’re going to send the probe through. It’ll be more able to tell us if there’s something over there.”

One of the team members opened his pack and placed a surgical-sized, gray missile on the ground. Where there should have been a warhead was a black diamond structure. Each third of the missile’s length was demarcated by a ruby ring. The man handed the guidebox to Geertz who fitted it to his reader.

He tapped the reader’s plate and a deep red aura surrounded the needle, lifting it in its own repeller matrix as it crawled along the ground to The Wall. There it rose vertically until the black diamond and the rest of the needle behind it were even with the hole.

Geertz guided it as everyone watched its progress on the reader. The needle had moved through The Wall. The black diamond, ever so slowly, poked its head through to see what was inside.

Meninquez came up beside him. “Turn on the viewer. Let’s see what’s in there.”

Geertz tabbed the viewer on.

The Wall dissolved without a trace. Before the team could pull back, before Meninquez could order them out or to cover or throw down a guard, before Geertz could summon his surrogate eyes back through The Wall, the entire structure gone in a burst of silence, as if it had never been.

Only the glyphs remained.

They hung in space in the position they had while buried within. The needle, not having any commands coming in, automatically turned to inspect the energy source which were the glyphs themselves and showed them still there, now blazing inside a small black sun.

Only Geertz moved. Meninquez and his team were frozen, holding their hands over their faceplates, guarding against an avenging angel.

There was a pull which Geertz sensed more than felt and the light from Singer and La Velle’s asher bent until it became a funnel feeding into the glyphs in the center of that sun. One by one the asher’s floods winked out and the cavern was in darkness.

Meninquez commed, “What just happened?”

Geertz’s reader illuminated his face. “Whatever’s inside is powered by an energy selective gravity source. It pulled in non-living EM, but not us, not living EM.”

Meninquez nodded. “Advanced.”

“Or it knows we’re here.” Geertz moved through. “Rolfson?”

She appeared beside him and became the only light in there, her human face smiling in the mask of the virtual suit she wore. “I’m here, Donald.”

“Can you determine which wavelength this was designed for?”

“The creatures who built this,” she paused. Her hands lifted from her sides and she circled the black glyphic sun, a moth in a universe of flame. “They had only one sense and used it for all things.” She paused and spun as the glyphic sun engulfed her. Her image dissolved then reconstituted as the sun melted away. “That which attracts, that which keeps away.”

“What?”

She said nothing.

“I don’t understand what you mean, ‘that which attracts, that which keeps away.’”

Again she dissolved. The sun reappeared between him and the rest of the team. Her voice came into his helmet. “This one can exist only so long as somewhere the other exists.” She reconstituted but further in.

He shrugged, attributing her behavior to interference, perhaps from The Wall itself. “Magnetism? Monopoles?”

She nodded.

“Then how can you stay here?”

“I can’t.” She lifted her right arm and pointed to her left. He hadn’t noticed, but her left side slowly dissolved. In the complete blackness of the glyphic sun he could see individual photons of her image pull away and, like meteors in a dense atmosphere, blaze bright then fade away.

“What is this place?”

“A remembrance, I think.”

“Of what? I can’t see.”

“Come.” Without waiting for a reply, her image swirled as if sucked into some vortex and fled down a rhombic passageway.


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Peter the Pileated Woodpecker Loves Stevie Wonder

I’ve written about Heathcliff, the Pileated Woodpecker and how no one else heard him but me for quite a long time.

(one gets use to that in my line of work; hearing, and seeing, and feeling, and smelling, and tasting, and sensing what others are oblivious to. I take it as a gift. Helps me learn patience)

I didn’t know Heathcliff had a buddy.

Who favors Stevie Wonder.

Not that I blame him.

I favor Stevie Wonder, too.

My favoring started early and received a major boost my first time through college. A friend got Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life and Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (both and others which I immortalize in a work-in-progress, The Shaman (it’s okay, i asked them if i could (do remember, i’m a fiction author))) and I was hooked.

All were impressive, but Wonder…

Not just the variety on the double-album (this was back in ’76. Nineteen-76) but the joy in his voice. If not joy, the pathos, the emotion, the soul, the energy.

No wonder Peter the Pileated Woodpecker loves him.