Birds'n berries

Beach lights

Monster truck by moonlight

I'm in Virginia Beach this week for work, staying in an oceanfront hotel with a view, as oceanfront implies, of the beach and a wide expanse of ocean. But the very special thing about the view from the balcony is the Monster Truck made of Christmas lights set up on the beach. I see my friend, Mr. Monster Truck, every time I look out the window.

I see him out of the corner of my eye, Mr. Monster Truck! He's out there, waiting for me. Monster in the morning. Monster in the moonlight. Monster is my constant companion this week in my hotel room.

Most Monster Trucks have names like Bigfoot, King Kong, Cyclops, King Krunch, Grave Digger. But I think I'll just call my companion Fred.

Biopunk. Who knew?

I am currently reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. I thought it was science fiction, but come to find out, it's not, it's speculative fiction, meaning that it's not woo-woo out there, it's all entirely plausible. But further, come to find out that it's BIOPUNK!

I'd heard of CYBERPUNK - high tech/low life combos like Neuromancer by William Gibson, and movies like Blade Runner and The Matrix - but BIOPUNK?

Sure! Biopunk is an offshoot of cyberpunk; keep the misfit, maladjusted characters, and just insert biotechnology in the information technology slot. Think Jurassic Park and The Fly, both considered biopunk, where genetic engineering gets out of the lab and out of control. It's not so far-fetched, really. It's about genetic modifications, or transgenics. We've been eating genetically modified food for years. Carrots were originally white.

In Oryx and Crake, species have been mixed by adding genes of one to another, resulting in chimeras: pigoons - pigs with human organs, bred to be harvested; rakunks, hybrids of raccoons mixed with skunks; and wolvogs, hybrids of wolves and dogs - which isn't much of a stretch of imagination, considering the fluffy's ancestors were once probably wolves.

But this sort of mutency happens all the time. Think GloFish. Think Dolly, the cute little cloned sheep. Think Alba, the fluorescent green hop and glow bunny (top). Alba is very biopunk. She was an albino bunny with pink eyes. Under normal light, she was white and pink, but under ultraviolet light, she glowed fluorescent green. She was created as a biopunk artistic endeavor by Eduardo Kac, who has now moved on to mixing his own human genes with a petunia, which he named Edunia - get it? EDuardo + petUNIA?

But back to Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake - here is an illustration by Jason Courtney of a scene from the biopunk novel, in which the protagonist, Snowman (originally named Jimmy before some great cataclysm happens) walks through the future dystopian woods by the light of a glowing green bunny rabbit. It's so pretty, it's almost fairy-like.

Writing the Apocalypse

Okay, so they say that cockroaches will survive the apocalypse. Hopefully, my laptop and I will too, so that we can write it all down, my laptop and I. Just in case anyone ever wants to read all about it, once we come out the other side of dystopia and into some new rebirth of the world.

I hope that birds survive an apocalypse. I like birds. But I do not like this rank, rats-ass old fellow that sits with his smelly buzzard pals on top of the building where I work, regurgitating fetidities.

There is a balcony up there that was originally intended for employee lunching, but there is no lunching taking place in the buzzard fecal zone. It is kind of apocalyptic up there - all gray and gloomy, covered with dripped and crusted gray buzzard feces, fallen gray feathers tumbling about in the wind. And you can look out at the gray skyline of Washington, DC and wonder if buzzards shit over there, too.

The wretched old buzzards swoop around outside my window at work. Seriously. Their big, dark shadows cross my desk when they fly by. They circle the building and fly above the parking lot, circling... circling... and they line up on top of the building, watching... waiting...

Maybe buzzards will survive an apocalypse. After all, someone needs to clean up all the devastation, along with the cockroaches.

On Thanksgiving day, my son and I are going to go and see the new movie, The Road, in which a father and son walk across a ravaged, post-apocalyptic landscape searching for civilization. I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's book last night, and I am looking forward to some apocalyptic gloom and doom right before a cheery family Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe makes you all the more grateful for what you got, eh?

"If trouble comes when you least expect it, then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it." ~ Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Under a Mackerel Sky

Sometimes, like this morning, driving around the Beltway on the way to work, I look up and see a mackerel sky spread out above in the blue heavens. That is to say, the cloud patterns resemble the scales of a mackerel, with rows of white, and blue sky showing through.

And sometime vertebratus - a form of cloud, usually in combination with cirrus, in which the cloud elements have a skeletal arrangement, resembling vertebrae.

And I am glad to see it, because it is fall, and lately all the leaves have been dying and falling from the trees, and I've been reading books of an apocalyptic nature - dystopian themes - the collapse of civilization - The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, The Last Man by Mary Shelley - and with all the doom and gloom and gray and ashen worlds within these novels, a skeletal white mackerel sky set in the bright blue beyond is a welcome sight.

Even if mackerel skies do foretell stormy weather.

"What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world."

~Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Dream or Reality? You decide.

Dream: Down on a beach, in the water. Standing on a crevasse in a rock, water swirling below in rosy tones. Fantastic creatures in the water, like the tiled floors of Pompeii with pink jellyfish and blue and yellow fish, some with long swords on their snouts, some in flashy schools, and ray, there were rays with stinging tails, and sharks and eels and all manner of oceanic life.
The water started to rise. Scary. Pink jellyfish flocks so large and tentacles so long; sharks’ teeth so big; water creeping up the bare toes. Suddenly, the water began to recede. And the creatures with it. Enough so that I could step off the rock and down onto the wet sand, which began to extend out into the ocean, with glistening rocks and shells and seaweed and whatever creatures hadn't kept up with the receding flow.
I walked on the wet sand toward the shore. Lots of other people were there, including my children.

“It looks like it might be the beginning of a tsunami,” I shouted.

“No, it’s not,” said someone.

“The water’s going out too fast, too far!” I shouted. “Look!”

“It’s just the tide,” they said.

“We need to get everyone to high ground!” I shouted, pointing inland. "Get the children! Hurry!"

When I woke up this morning, I thought about the dream for awhile - the outflow of ocean, the wet sand, the glistening rocks and seaweed exposed as the water receded. And when I logged on to facebook, what was there, but photos that my son, Sandy, posted last night. From the other side of the country: the Pacific Ocean. Outflow of water. Wet sandy. Glistening rocks and seaweed exposed.