Nightmare Fuel, Day the Sixth: Feeding Time

The views of characters in my stories may or may not reflect my own. I'm unpredictable that way.

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The world slowly returned to focus. He found himself in a wheelchair, held in place with wide nylon arm and ankle-cuffs.

"Ow. What's happening? Where am I? Where's Sheila?"

"We'll make  everything clear to you in good time. Fear not, your date is and will remain unharmed. She ordered the smoked salmon appetizer. Farm-raised, it's true, but still not the worst sin. Now you, on the other hand..."

"Are you kidding? This is about my choice of fucking appetizer? Are you insane?"

"Please do relax, sir. Please understand that this is not personal. You ordered the foi gras, no?"

"So what if I did? It's a special occasion. Are you one of those PETA nuts? It tastes good. And geese gorge themselves in nature, don't they?"

His captor rolled the chair into a small sitting room. A family of detailed mannikins sat on a sofa, their heads tipped back, mouths open.

"Everything is handled very safely here, very carefully. We practice administering the gavage humanely and safely. These manikins are specially made for the job. Impressive, no?"

"So this is the deal? You're going to force-feed me to show me the error of my ways, to stop me from ordering goose-liver again?"

"Something like that. Would it not be justice?"

"It's crazy. We're omnivores. We eat meat. Comeon, let me go... I won't say anything. I promise. Besides, don't real geese eat like that? I mean, wild ones? It's not as if it's torture."

Original source:
http://earlygr4ves.tumblr.com/post/63495438163
/i-walked-into-health-and-screamed-and-the-teacher

"No? Would it be torture to force-feed them to point of organ failure, to distend the abdomen until they can no longer walk, until the liver swells to many times its normal size? Does that, to you, sound like torture?"

"So you're practicing with those dummies and are going to teach me a lesson? Is that it? If I promise never to order foie gras again, do I get to leave?"

It might have been his imagination, but his captor's eyes seemed weary. "We are careful and we are humane, but this will be final. On the farms, the gavage isn't stopped until the animal nears the point of organ failure..."

The prisoner felt hands behind him grab his head, pull it backwards, lash it into place. His approached, a clear plastic tube in his hand. To the prisoner the tube looked impossibly wide, a firehose. Or a snake. Or the barrel of a gun.

"...we will stop when it is time for the slaughter."

Expert hands slid the tube down the prisoner's throat, choking off his screams.r

Nightmare Fuel, Day the Fifth.

ANother short sketch, this time opening with a bit of dialog. With a witch. 

The image is again anonymous; I'll be sure to credit them when credit is available. If you know to whom it belongs, feel free to let me know. 

Otherwise, enjoy.

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"Again? This is the fifth night in a row."

"I need to unwind, honey. It's been a bitch of a week in the office. I'll be just outside."

A long pause, "OK, but we have to talk about this."

The nights are cool,  not yet cold. Too cool by far for my wife to want to sit outside after sunset, but not that cool that I can't take a sweater and my cigar and last month's New Yorker outside, to the edge of the wood. My wife hates cigar-smoke in the house,  hates the cold. Hates lots of things. So I've taken to enjoying a brief evening sojourn by the wood.

Truth be told, it isn't much of a wood, but there are trees and moonlight here in suburbia, what would have been an enchanted forest populated with dragons, witches, highwaymen when I was a boy. They're nice, straight, tall pine trees, but not connected to the famous pine-barrens. Perhaps they were some time in the distant past, but now it's just enough to inflate the property value just a bit, and to keep us from seeing our back-fence neighbors. Like I was saying, when I was a boy there'd be dragons, witches, highwaymen. Perhaps other things. Now I'm a man. The dragons have long since flown away, the highwaymen dragged off to their just rewards.

The witches have grown up.

I carefully cut the tip of my cigar, light it and draw deep. The night-air is cool, turning to cold, but that's OK. I hold the smoke in my lungs, breathing in fire. If you hold the smoke in your lungs just right and sort of click it out a bit at a time in measured gasps with your lips tightened just right into an o you can blow a perfect smoke-ring. Nobody knows save the witches, but I practice them out here sometimes, watching them drift upward to ring the moon before they melt away into the cool night air.

The witches haven't really grown up. There's just one, sometimes two. She dances in the moonlight, of course, arms all outstretched and wild like a marionette operated by a puppeteer who hasn't yet learned how to make his charges feel natural. The rest of her looks natural.

She sometimes moves close enough to the edge of the wood for me to see her, dancing that awkward dance. Skyclad. That's a lovely word, isn't it? and a lovely sight, her pale flesh illuminated by clear silver moonlight and the halogen glare of backyard floods jostled to life by a raccoon or stray cat running past the motion sensors. This is, after all, suburbia.

There is no darkness.

Image Shared Without Attribution

She's not quite naked; over her face is a bone-white masque, paler even than the milk-white flesh of firm high breasts, of tightly muscled buttocks never touched by the sun. I've watched her since midsummer, her with her dance and me with my smokerings. The Dragon and the Witch, together in the enchanted wood.

I'm sure that she knows I watch, I'm sure that she dances here because I'm here, the dragon to her witch, a ring of smoke to the fairy ring in which she dances. I'm sure that I've seen her in the neighborhood without her masque, perhaps at the bus-stop, perhaps the grocery store. I'm sure I've seen her because the world is a small one, but at night she wears the  masque always. I'd not recognize her wearing her true face.

A brief moment or hour or eternity later she dons a white gown and vanishes into the wood, not to be seen until the next night. My fingers lazily circle the stub of my cigar, bringing it to my lips for one more deep draw of dragonsmoke and magic before I stub it out, letting the chill soak into my lungs before I turn and walk inside.

Perhaps someday I'll go to her, follow her, dance with her. Until then I'll douse the flame at the end of each night.

Until then, the dragon sleeps. 

Nightmare Fuel, Day the Fourth. Are they all the same?

Here's a weekend Nightmare Fuel entry; a few quick lines of poetry, as I don't have my usual commute. Enjoy!

Image Credited to Volpak, inc.
http://drkaae.com/MedicalEntomology/Chapter5Lice.htm

Are they all the same?
I can't tell.
The buggers all glisten
like oil on pavement.
all look
wrong


If I kill one, do the others care?
Do they
 have a bug funeral?
Is the bug colony
different or just
smaller?
Are they all the same?
Does losing one cost them
a thing?

Are they all the same?
Can they tell that we
are all
different?

Nightmare Fuel, Day the Third

A quick nightmare sketch, using the image somewhat literally.

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Another corridor, just like the last. Vinyl tiles, painted cinderblock walls, cheap fluorescent lights fastened to the naked concrete deck above. He had to face the fact; he was lost. Not just a little lost, hopelessly lost beyond recovery. It had started off irritating, but fine. Despite his years of experience, he was the new guy here, and the new guy gets to run all the errands. Get coffee. Get toner the printer. Run down to the sub-basement for patch-cords.

He was the new guy. "Room SB-101" sounded easy enough. Just take the elevator to the sub-basement, look around for the room number. Down to where the floors are vinyl tiles and the lightfixtures bare, the soft carpeting and faux-natural lighting something from another world, the world above.

Down to where the doors aren't labelled, where "Room 101" is just nonsense speak. Just babble.

Down to where he's walked for what feels like hours and has turned himself around and can't find the storage room and can't even find the elevator anymore and there's nobody down here there's no doors here just empty corridor after empty corridor.

Did he collapse against a wall and cry? Did he  stop walking and start running until the pounding of his heart drowned out the pounding of his feet, determined to go the wrong way faster if he couldn't go the right way? Did he scream for someone, anyone to tell him the way? That this wasn't funny? Did he check his phone again and again and again, finding again no signal, not even wifi, stone-cold nothing?

Did he silently pray this was a nightmare, and that he'd wake up in a cold sweat?

We'll never know.

Eventually, after hours or days or years, he found the doors. Brown painted metal double-doors with round portal-windows. The cheap kind of shatterproof glass with the wires between it. Through the windows... another pair of identical doors, painted white on this side. Between, two gurneys.

Atop the gurneys were white blankets, beneath which could only be a body.

That was crazy. This wasn't a place for bodies. IT was a respectful office, in a respectful glass tower in respectful downtown.. His face flushed, now with anger. This.was.wrong.

He grabbed the blanket from one gurney, yanked it off and it was a body it was him, his face with a grimace of horror his hand at his chest, clutching a handful of patchcords.

Image presented without
attribution

He (alive) grabbed them, from him (dead), jerking them free  from a tightclosed fist and ran.

On the other side of the far door was, of course, the elevator. Did a discrete plaque above the double doors say "Room 101"? He never knew. The elevator arrived almost instantly and he dashed in, never again to return to the sub-basement.

He came back to the office the next day like a condemned man to the gallows, resignation letter in his pocket. In his pocket it stayed; just past nine he was introduced to the new guy. He knew that the next time something needed fetching from the sub-basement, he'd have someone else to send.

Nightmare Fuel Day the Second

Day Two of the Nightmare Fuel project. And yes, I lag by a day. I always do. Some quick notes on the story afterward. I'll just start by saying that I love both magic shops and inexplicable magical items. I'm not so much a fan of the everfull-coinpurse or magic sword, but of quirky strange things which act in impossible but thematically interesting ways. For one example of such a curio, read on!

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In the end, it doesn't matter where I got it, does it? Just know that it wasn't the usual way to buy a meat-grinder. A tiny shop between two buildings which were neighbors the day before and the day after, found in a trunk beneath the stair at the estate of a deceased eccentric uncle, bartered with an old gypsy woman for a night's sleep out of the rain (they keep telling me that "gypsy" isn't politically correct, that she's an old Roma woman if she's not just a random drifter. That doesn't matter either).

Photo by Andrea Trask

It doesn't matter that it's cleaner, shinier, more beautiful than it should be. The metal free of rust or scratches, the screws on its clamps shiny lightly with oil, the crank turning freely at the lightest touch to the smooth-worn wooden handle. If you know how to look at it, it feels special.

Oh, I started the obvious way. A pound of sirloin. Rough cut into cubes, not too small, and into the hopper.

I wiped my hands before turning the crank. Again, it's beautiful, is it not? It would be a pity to stain it, even a little. It turned freely at first, then with a bit of resistance as the meat ground. As I turned I felt

                                                                                                                        in the shade of a cork tree, cool grass under my body, my legs folded beneath me. Far off in the distance thumpcrashing of my brothers playfighting, but here I felt at peace, just smelling the flowers
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          something else. Something peaceful, something pleasant. There was surprisingly little meat, but the feeling of peace stayed with me.

Next was some pork shoulder. I'd planned on a meatloaf, you see, and like more than one kind of meat in it. I suppose that isn't important either. I was eager to see what came next, if grinding the pig would be as exquisite a pleasure as grinding a cow (although where DID the meat go?), but remember, the thing is special. A man has to take care of his tools, wouldn't you agree? To do otherwise would be barbaric.

Pork cubes in the hopper, the handle meeting just enough resistance to know its working, first just a grind  and then 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   late afternoon, lying in a bed of straw in a high wooden building. The space smelled of clean hay and a hint of damp earth. High overhead in the rafters a beam of sunlight illuminated the complicated patterns of a spiderweb. The sight of it gave me a deep feeling of peace
                                                                                                                                                                                                                        and, of course, the image faded.

Again, not enough meat comes out. So yes, it's magic.  The meat is ground into some kind of magical essence and then is gone. I never read all that many magic stories, but I can't imagine that they're all like this, with a magic trinket that, as lovely as it is, doesn't accomplish much more than the waste of what could have been a perfectly good meal. Even Jack's magic beans got him a trip to the clouds and a magic golden-egg laying goose. Where's my magic goose?

Maybe the problem is that I was wasting food. Perhaps this particular grinder is not meant for food. I did clean it again, but took a chance on the inner workings being tough than they seemed by throwing in a half-pencil, first breaking off the eraser end. I wouldn't want that little metal collar to dull the blades any more than the wood. The crank turned with surprising difficulty and
                                                                                                                                                                                            tall, impossibly tall, stretching limbs skyward. I drank the sunlight, grew full. In the blink the an eye or seventy years I felt my body diminished, dismembered, but with each loss I felt a sense of peace and gratitude until nothing remained save a joyous marker where a giant once stood.

I stood back for a long time after that, contemplating the machine and what it might be.

I lied when I said I hadn't read many magic-shop stories. I have, from Jacobs' Monkey Paw through Link's Fairy Handbag. I know that there's promise, but I know that there's more likely disaster.

I know better to carve the stray neighborhood cat or the old woman living alone into the grinder.

I know I've taken from it, but given nothing.

So I cleaned it carefully, thoroughly, gently. Clamped it tightly to the table.

The inside of the hopper feels smooth against my left fingers, the burrs still sharp.

There's nothing more to do but turn
                                                                          the
                                                                                        crank.

I hope it doesn't hurt.

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I was initially planning on going a slightly different rout, with the protagonist speaking to a captive whom he was going to feed into the grinder. That didn't feel right to me, and clashed with the children's book imagery throughout. I trust you DID recognize the children's book imagery, didn't you?

More, perhaps, tomorrow. 

So You Want to Live Forever

Happy October! Each year around this time we have a ritual on the Google+ social network (and twitter, and likely tumblr). Bliss Morgan invites us all to write horrible things with her as we try to sequester our nightmares on the printed page. Each day there is an image prompt to which anyone, if the spirit moves them, is free to write something. A story. A poem. A fragment of a novel. We'll have one of these each day over the month; I'll perhaps write all of them, perhaps just a few.

In any event, here's the opening. Enjoy.

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You're smart and you're clever. You pay attention to things - important things that other people miss. Little things like the dangers of GMOs and vaccines, big things about how the mind works. It's all there, sometimes out in public. Everyone sees it, some even pass it around, but not everyone is smart, not everyone is clever. So few of them think about what it all means.

You do. Of course you do. You're smart and you're clever. And you're careful.

You can live forever.

You started easy, saying hello to raw milk, goodbye to carbs. Goodbye gluten (but didn't that come with carbs anyway?) So what if your coworkers shied away from you in the break room, so what if you keeping hearing mutters about breath and body odor? Some of your diet choices are ... unusual. So what if they are, so what if they change how you smell?

It's a small price for immortality.

Not just immortality, but happiness. You're smart and you're clever. You pay attention, you know where to look, you don't miss much. For the past year you've performed compassionate meditation eight minutes a day before your glass-and-a-half of red wine. In your mind's eye the face from a never-forgotten (to tend your memory is important) face from a Save The Children television ad from decades ago, pouring eight minutes of love through his too-big eyes into his too-big head.

You're smart and you're clever. You make connections, you make the next leap. Lots of people read that speaking affirmations makes people feel worse - that telling the face in the mirror that it is smart and clever actually makes people feel dumb and slow. You took the next step.  Twelve minutes before the mirror every day, speaking reverse affirmations.

"I'm stupid. 
I'm dim. 
I'm a failure. 
I'm nothing."

Image offered with no attribution

Staring into your own stupid, dim, nothing of a failure eyes until the room fades behind you until there is nothing but you but a stupid white beacon in the dimness,  the walls are gone, the room, you are alone
(failure)
focus on your eyes until the room spins. Keep focusing (nothing).

You're clever and you're smart. Also focused, also determined.

You found the secret in the mirror, behind your anti-affirmations. You were brave enough to stare until your face was gone, your nose and lips fading to white nothingness, just the eyes and what was left of the mouth. The eyes wide with laughter. Your mouth open in a grin, lips pulling back from the teeth. 

You're clever and you're smart. You know that beneath each living face lives a deathless skull.

As your body fades, you know that what's left will live forever, here in the mirror. Your eyes.

So what if the part of you that returns to the office tomorrow and sits alone in the breakroom in its miasma of halitosis is but an empty shell? You'll live forever, here in the mirror.

The next person to look into it will see your clever mad eyes.

Dishwashers, Refrigerators, Kitchen Tables, and the Evolving Role of the AV Consultant

As some of you know, I've recently moved (which is why I'm not here quite as much) and am trying to take my kitchen to the modern era. When told about the kitchen project, people are invariably off all manner of advice and requests. I've been asked often if I'll be putting a microwave above the stove (I won't) or if I want a table near the one blank wall (I don't). The interesting question for today's discussion is about the new appliances - would I be getting a single-manufacturer suite, or buy each on its own.

Old appliances. No interconnectivity.

The answer to the appliance question was, for the kitchen, an easy one; there's no synergy at all between a refrigerator, a stove, and a dishwasher. A single-source would perhaps give a slightly more consistent look, but that's it. Instead I'd look at each item on its own and choose the best fit for our use profile and budget.

"Single source" versus "best in breed" is a question which frequently arises around technology, and one which not many years ago I'd have approached the same way I approach appliances today. I especially remember analog systems which might use video switchers, video conference appliances, and control systems all from different manufacturers. In a large build gear might not even be consistent from room to room; I've seen, for example, one manufacturer's touchscreens in specialty spaces and another's keypad controller in a simpler rooms. With purely standalone systems, it made sense to choose best in breed rather than a single source. As a consultant, I'd need (amongst other knowledge) broad familiarity with the product offerings of many vendors and and understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.

Is this still the case? I find it telling that when I told one of my colleagues at SMW that single-source didn't make sense for my kitchen because the appliances don't talk to eachother he corrected me: they don't talk to eachother YET, but they almost certainly will. It's easy to imagine a home full of smart appliances coordinating, for example, energy and water usage so as not to overload the infrastructure at peak times. It's quite likely that my next set of kitchen appliances (a long time from now, I'm hoping) will be a single-manufacturer ecosystem. 

Newer appliances. Shinier, but still not interconnected.
And yes, my countertop is a half-sheet of OSB.

In the AV world, of course, we're already most of the way there. For a very simple example, nearly every manufacturer who manufactures control systems also has some kind of remote asset-management software to provide remote monitoring and control. Suddenly mixing in less costly keypad controllers from an alternate vendor no longer makes sense; you might still be able to save a few dollars and get a slightly nicer device, but at the cost of cutting one space out of the larger ecosystem you're building. "Ecosystem" is a word (and a concept) which I find myself using with increasing frequency these days. That, after all, is what many vendors are selling. I spoke about AV transport over standard IP networks a few times, focusing mainly on functionality. Another interesting development is that many vendors of such systems aren't selling standalone products but broad suites including options such as recording appliances, windowing processors, control, and monitoring. It's an approach which saves the AV contractor headaches in getting disparate systems to work together, saves finger-pointing between manufacturers when two products won't work together, and somewhat simplifies the design process by taking advantage of the R&D manufacturers have put into creating an ecosystem of interoperable products.

Does this mean that the AV designers role is fading? After all, if one is going to deploy a single-source solution it's quite easy to get a master quote from one or more vendors listing all of the pieces and parts it would take to make the solution work. I'd say that this can't be farther from the truth, and the consultant is every bit as important. First,  we still need to do the same work in evaluating client needs, in project programming, and in coordinating all of the moving parts it takes to get  from the idea of needing AV solutions to the actuality of having working solutions. That part can't be sources to a vendor if one wants independent, unbiased analysis.

Another thing to remember is the value of form as well as function and communicating with clients about how people work and how they want things to look. This goes to the kitchen table which at least three people have suggested to me. We generally don't eat in the kitchen, but do quite a bit of cooking. As you can see, it isn't all that large a space. While adding a table would increase workspace, it would do so at the expense of cluttering the area and cutting travel between, say, the microwave and the sink. It's a bad tradeoff for the same reason a gooseneck mic on a conference table is often a bad tradeoff. In both cases, there might be a narrow functional improvement which, to the user, is not worth as much as the tradeoff in aesthetics or workflow that will come with it.

As a designer, it's great to start with a blank canvas.
Even if you need a sledgehammer to get there.

Finally there is, in addition to the obvious need to evaluate entire ecosystems as opposed to single products, a requirement for much more attention to connectivity with other infrastructures. Data networks. Scheduling systems. Security systems. Building management systems. As important as it can be for some types of spaces, audiovisual almost never occupies a central place in the design process; nobody is going to design their entire network infrastructure around the AV system needs. Working with choices made by those in unrelated disciplines remains one of the big tasks and challenges of the AV design consultant.

The work we save by using single vendors - if  we save anything - is what I'd argue is the least important in terms of design. It's the detailed bits and pieces which make the vision work after it's been conceived. While this is absolutely vital, it doesn't speak to our core purpose in the design realm. In my years in the industry, I've seen clients having various levels of satisfaction with the end results of AV projects.  THose who were less than fully satisfied almost never had functionality complaints; AV contractors are very good at delivering systems which, at the end of the day, work. The user hits the button, the projector lights up, an image appears on the screen. The bigger problems are almost always ones of expectations; the projects which fail have often failed when someone didn't ask the right question, months or even years before anyone has chosen the  nuts and bolts needed to execute what would eventually be a flawed vision.

The role of the AV consultant (and designers as a whole) might be evolving even farther from a focus on "nuts and bolts", but the core of what we do - helping clients find a vision and marrying that vision to available technology - hasn't changed.