Synaptic Misfires

This is my last week at this job. With great effort - and because I don't want to cause my current employer too much stress or complications with my departure - I'm getting to work early and doing my best to give a damn about all the little requests and frantic pushes to get jobs complete before my last day.

I'm a creative. My last job I was a CD (creative director) for a film company. I wrote. I conceptualized. I animated. I designed. I executed. I wore many hats, and not all of them had holders for beers and tubes running down. Just over half, I think. Somewhere in there, I designed and programmed a little Flash, too.

This job? I became their "Flash guy." It's good work if you can get it. But due to various circumstances, I'm moving on. I need a bigger creative playing field and the world seems to be falling out of love with Flash because of Steve Job's stupid, sorry ass.

But mustering up the strength to care about the work this company does is really wearing my shit out. I don't really give a damn about this job anymore.

I'm faking it, phoning it in. But every morning for the last seven days, I put on my big boy pants and do what I gotta do.

Come Friday?

It's their problem.

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John Rector informed me that in my new profile pic I look like Tom Green.

I'm the gorgeous motherfucker on the left. You know, the one with the eyes that look straight into your soul and get your panties wet.

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I have an essay brewing. It's a good one, but won't make me any friends. Steve Weddle says he wants it for the Do Some Damage blog. But what if it's fan-fucking-tastic?

Ha ha. Sorry. Cracked myself up. Of course it will be.

So, what's up with all this Tom Sawyering of bloggers? People asking other folks to write their blogs for them. And folks do it?

The other day a nice chap asked me to be part of an interview series where the author answers the questions he or she really wished interviewers would ask. See, the interviewee is also the interviewer. Then this other guy just posts it to his blog. I didn't decline, per se, but I have done exactly one (1) interview in my life and so I haven't become jaded with the typical questions yet. So I'm fine with them asking me the questions they want to ask me and not making me come up with both the questions AND the answers.

No, I'm cool with you asking me the standard questions. I can find any reason in the world to bend the question to my own ends and start talking about what I want to talk about.

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Okay, I'm down on Steve Jobs and Apple. The whole Flash thing put my job in jeopardy and devalued what I did for a living. One of the reasons, maybe, my current job didn't give me my salary back after the 13% cut I received a YEAR AGO. Maybe they thought I wasn't the total creative bad-ass that I am. I'm just their Flash guy, and Steve Jobs says Flash sucks, and so, by dint of my association with that technology, I suck.

By god, Steve Jobs can suck a dick.

So, when I put in my two weeks, it became pretty obvious I was gonna need a new computer to continue to do all the stuff I need to do to design and layout NEEDLE Mag and my self promotional stuff.

For a long time I convinced myself I was gonna buy a PC, drop 6 or 7 hundred bucks and get a lightning fast Windows based computer. But then the magnitude of the last decade I've spent in the Mac world became apparent, and I started thinking about all the Mac-based assets I have, the gigantic font library. All the working files created on a Mac and would indubitably have issues when opened by a PC. All the software I'd bought for the Mac. All the time spent learning Apple based programs like Final Cut Pro Studio and all its related programs.

I realized I had to buy another Mac.

To the tune of $2400.

That was the first time I've ever been pissed off opening up an Apple branded box with a gadget or gizmo inside. And I was furious.

Fuck Steve Jobs.

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I'm gonna leave you with a little snippet of THE INCORRUPTIBLES, just because I'm really starting to get into the story.

Adios, muchachas y muchachos.

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"I hear tell they've got a vaettir whore at Pauline's in New Damnation." We didn't see him come back and now the pup's voice was loud and eager. "Heard she's got the sweetest pussy known to man, but they gotta keep her bound."

Cimbri snorted. But he didn't send the boy away.

Fisk lit his smoke from the fire and drank more whiskey. I hated it when the man went dissolute, but I imagine his leg hurt something fierce. I stood, went to my saddlebags, and took the satchel of meat I'd harvested from the aurochs. I returned to the fire, opened the scorched piece of leather - my outrider's kitchen - and began prepping the livers and tongues to roast. I had some salt I won in a card game, a small onion. Sweetgrass and winterfat grew thick in these parts, too. I crushed the sweetgrass, sliced the onion, and then flayed open a couple of livers and stuffed them with the spice and herbs.

"Just what I heard," Banty said. "The senator himself was smitten with her."

Cimbri raised a hand as if to cuff him, stopped and then lowered his hand. "Mr. Bantam." His whiskers quivered with outrage. "You don't talk about our charge in that manner."

I felt a tad sorry for the boy, so ungainly and over-eager. A damned deadly puppy with a Hellfire pistol. I said, "I heard the same thing too, but that's just camp talk. If there was someone they were touting as stretcher pussy, must've been a tall whore they tricked out to look vaettir, but she weren't no vaettir."

"How could you know that?"

"Don't argue with him, boy, green as you are," Cimbri said.

"Just want to know how he could know that."

Fisk shifted and stirred the fire with a branch, his leg sticking out at an angle. "They don't age, the stretchers. They don't change. Ain't no vaettir woman gonna allow herself to be touched, not to mention fucked, by some Ruman. Highborn or not."

"How you know this?"

"Look around you, pup." He took a long pull on the whiskey, then shoved it at the boy and waited until he'd taken a swallow. "This is a big land. But it ain't big enough for man and stretcher to live side by side and never conflict." He spat. "They're proud. They'll skin you alive. They'll fuck their own sister, or mother, or brother. They ain't got no laws nor decency, as far as I can tell. When you're never gonna die except through violence, why worry about salvation or morality or whatnot? Huh? They'd spill your blood for pleasure, and slaughter your Ia-damned children..."

He stopped there, swallowed, and passed a hand over his eyes, shook his head. I didn't have to guess what he was thinking.

Finally, Fisk said, "No. No vaettir woman would ever let you stick your dick in her and make a half-breed. She'd kill you first."

"She might try." Banty chuckled.

"She would. Stretcher women are as fearsome as the men. More, if you count their terrible beauty. You've never seen how they move. It's like light, or daemon fire. Wouldn't be no trying."

Banty closed his mouth then.

I had the livers on spits and crackling in the fire. Cimbri stood.

"You said it was a message."

Fisk nodded, his face devoid of pain or drunkeness as he stared into the flames.

"What is it?"

"Pretty simple, really." He took a last drag of his smoke and flicked it away, making a little red falling star cutting through the night. "You harvest these aurochs, we'll harvest you. But it ain't because they give a shit about the animals. Because they like games. They're bored."

Cimbri blinked, then stood there for a while, thinking.

Finally, he snapped his fingers, and the lascar went to the johnboat.

"Might need you to talk to Cornelius. He's got a good drunk going right now and who knows what mischief he's up to. They spotted a mama bear on the western shore this afternoon and now he's a tad excited about his hunt tomorrow. Rest and we'll send a relief in the morning. Sharbo and Horehound, most like."

Cimbri strode to the boat, hopped in, and the lascarille shoved them into the waters of the Big Rill. In the distance, lanterns lit the galleries of the Cornelian. The air had begun to mist and close in tight around us, but we could hear the sounds of revelry and the clatter and crash of bottles, the high pitched laughter of women. And below it, the thrum of daemon fired engines.