Renegade Literature

In researching out trip to SouthEast Asia Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and a couple of days in South Korea, I learned about the toilets.  Er… lack thereof.  I read that in these places, the bathroom might be a hole in the ground.  That’s it.  No stool, bench, or toilet.  None of that.  Just try and aim your butthole over that stop, and not shit yourself crazy in the process.  Girls know how to squat.   How about some toilet paper.

Oh, I wish you hadn’t asked that.  You aren’t going to like this at all.  And don’t you dare skip ahead.  I shat in a hole… for your sins.  All you have to do is read about it.   In place of that, you would often get a bucket of water.  No tools or spoons or brushes, just a bucket of water next to you.  With that, you dip you hand in and try your best to capture a small handful of water to wipe your butt with.  Let’s be clear, you wipe your butt with your own bare hand, and if you are lucky a bit of water.

But do you really want to use that bucket water?  All i know is that by this time of night, there have been likely 30 or 40 poo covered hands in that water.  When I read this, I was super freaked out and pre-occupied by it.  In short, my plan was ‘no way.  I’ll not poo for two weeks if that is what it takes.  How not to poo?  Hmm… don’t eat.   Ok, i had a plan that was win win.   Don’t eat. You will lose weight, save money, and not have to shit in a hole.

The problem with that plan?  Thai food is fucking amazing!  Perhaps you are saying right now “yeah, I am sure its all great.  But is it ‘shit in your hand’ great?  Yes it is!

We lucked out, and almost everywhere we went had toilets just like we know them.  Not just in the cities, but even in outskirts.  We had been there a week before I ever encountered one.  This meant I had let my guard down.  I began to think it was an urban myth.  I’ll spare you any more specifics, but want to make sure you know its real.  I had to do things in there I am not proud of.  At no point in time should you, even 100 years from now, shake my left hand.

To close this out, this is a very normal thing in many countries.  In Hindu and Islamic countries (which means just about all of India and Africa) you eat with your right hand, always.  Your left hand is strictly for poo duty.  This adds to the dislike and distrust of left handed people.  Do you know what the definition of the word ‘sinister’?  It’s Latin, for left handed.  It doesn’t mean evil.  Just left handed.

By the time I was finally in a circumstance to use one of these ‘toilets’, it was the least of my problems.  Let’s see if I can describe my predicament.  We did a motorcycle tour*** in Chang Mai, Thailand.  Can you ride a motorcycle, they ask.  I never had, but I understood the clutching and such.  They said take this around the business park, do a lap.  Did that, it was fine.  I said I’ll drive.  I didn’t know we would be out for 12 fucking hours across the city, county, woods… name it.  Glad I drove, though.  I would not have wanted to sit on the back of a bike holding on to someone for 12 hours.  On our way back, it starts raining heavily.  and its dark.  Our ride home is about 2 hours.  I have no idea where I am, mind you.  My instructions were to ‘keep up’.   I was the last in line of about 6 bikes. Because its raining heavy, my glasses have fogged.  I am blind without my glasses.  if I take my glasses off, I cannot see what i am typing right now.  Well, the fog was worse so I opted to take my glasses off.  it was simple, I HAD to keep up.  I don’t remember our hotel name, I don’t remember the name of the motorcycle tour rental place.  I don’t have a working cell phone.   If I lose these guys, i don’t know how to find my way back, or how to reach them.  

Since I was in the back, there was no one to even notice if I dropped off, or took a wrong turn, or crashed.  The guy in front of me, who is hauling ass, has a bike light on his backpack (in addition to the regular motorcycle lights.  But there were lots of motorcycles, so how I identify this guy in the dark from all the others is the red light centered on his backpack.  on top of this, we were not in a regular lane, but in a gray zone median towards the center divider.  Didn’t seem safe, but there was no time for discussion.  I am going about 60 mph on a motorcycle in the pouring rain with no glasses… in the dark.  It means I couldn’t look for, nor would I see, any potholes.  Imagine hitting a pothole at 60, in the dark, with no preparation.  With not even a half a second to brace.  Thankfully, that did not happen.  12 hours of this.   Well, about 8 hours in my back seized up.  I basically became locked in that position.  No worries, I thought, I brought some muscle relaxers and pain killers just in case this happened.  it did not occur to me that the rain would cause those meds to liquify and wash away.

On the way home, we stop for gas.  I am in so much pain, and so freaked out by the whole experience of driving at top speed in the dark blind with no idea where I am going. I tell the guys at the gas station that I am done.  I can’t do it anymore, I am broken,  Can someone else ride the bike (several folks were doubled up) back to the shop, and I’ll just double up with someone?  No. not possible.  I have to power through myself, which I did, like a hero.  All I told the guy in front was “please please slow down, I can’t see and don’t know where to go.  Also, please look for me once and a while, to make sure I am behind you still.”  It was clear he didn’t understand much if any English (which is not his fault.  Like I said, at this point I am physically and spiritually broken.  I have already crashed in the jungle today, did I mention that?  We were climbing a steep mountain in the mud and rain… in motorcycles… not dirt bikes.

I was, I guess, expecting something like this.  and there was plenty of this.

I was not expecting this. 

it’s fine, and it was more fun.  But this riding involves skill, balance, confidence.  This was my first time on a motorcycle!  Luckily, I am blessed with very good balance.  its ridiculous the sense of balance I have always had.   So, bikes don’t freak me out.

I start to slow down and realize I can’t lose speed.  so, I downshift.  or, is it upshift?  i was in third gear and it was bogging down, so I needed some quick torque, and I jumped to second gear.  thought I did.  Something slipped and I dropped it to first, and then punched it.  The motorcycle flew out from under me so quickly, I was left standing.  It was like a cartoon.  the bike launched off the cliff into the jungle.  Luckily, and this was surreal, the jungle was SO dense that it caught the bike.  The motorcycle never fell down the cliff, or even touched the ground.  It didn’t even tip over.  the density of the jungle was such that it was caught lovingly and in place while we retrieved it.  The motorcycle was somehow fine, not even a scratch.  and so was i!  I never even fell over or touched the ground.  I shot the bike from between my legs and remained standing.

Everyone, myself included, was wildly impressed.  However, it also made them assume I was a very advanced rider.  

I tell you that to tell you this.  On the way back to the motorcycle rental place, 12 hours in, we stopped for gas.  i had to poo so bad, and my spirits were crushed after this physical torture marathon.  its not just that being on a motorcycle for 12 hours is hard for me, its dangerous.  my back is (already) fucked up.  I have had several spinal surgeries.  When i took the offer up to do the tour, and helm the bike, my understanding was it would be a 90 minute or so trip through the suburbs.  So, before we head home for the final leg, I go to use the bathroom.  No toilet.  Just hole in the floor, a bucket of water, and a slotted cooking spoon.

It was really the best time to be introduced to this, now that I look back.  I was so tired, and so scared, and in so much pain, i didn’t care about shitting over a hole.  I was about 25% sure I was going to have a very bad accident on the way back.  Driving 60 mph in the dark and heavy rain with no glasses on a highway in Thailand… I figured it would end extremely badly.  So, shitting in a hole was the least of my problems.  I can look back now and laugh, it was a wild adventure, and we saw so much more of what I imagine the real Thailand to be.  Like, we saw people on elephants working rice patty fields.  This wasn’t an animal sanctuary, or zoo, or tourist thing.  We were way out the middle of nowhere.  If you are a Thai rice farmer, you don’t have a tractor.  If you are successful, you have an elephant and that is your tractor.

I am still a teency bit resentful that the package was wildly more different than was presented.  But, maybe that was more the wifey’s doing than the tour company.  she is the one who booked it.  On the upside, I now know how to ride a motorcycle…  and shit in a hole.

*** up top.  the before.  this is wifey and I on our motorcycles.  Look how happy we are, and excited.  Those sunglasses I am wearing are also prescription.  I think I ended up wearing those on the final couple of hours because they didn’t fog up.  

**** motorcycle tour – I think it was this company, but can’t say for sure. it was at least a decade ago. Actually, looking through the slide show, that looks about right.

ok, I have had this page reserved for years for my storytelling.  I haven’t done much with it, obviously.  I held on to it, though, and wisely.  I am going to be posting a serialized short story here.  The work will go up as I write it.  It will be edited after the fact, or maybe not at all.

In the old days, most great works were serialized.  For example, Great Expectations by Dickens was a  serial story told in a weekly magazine.  Two chapters were published every week.  Also interesting is that Dickens was paid by the word.  Knowing this explains a couple key things about the story.  One is that it is incredibly wordy… just total unncessary flourishes of the language.  That was because he was paid by the word.  It also explains why every 15 pages or so is a major cliffhanger and plot twist.  To read as a whole, it is overbearing to say the least.  When you realize it was published weekly, you see it had to be that way.  The key is to have readers dying to come back week after week to find out what happens.

everything written here is owned completely and entirely by me.  I don’t intend to publicize this site to anyone, or let anyone close to me know I am here.  I am too insecure about judgement.  Maybe, if its good I will publicize or, or publish it.  You were lucky to stumble on it.  It needs to be edited for continuity, which I have not done yet.  I am just adding content as quick as I can.   Let’s let the adventure begin!

3.20.2013

Working title

People, I have come from the future to warn you.  This is how I started every introduction, and it is the truth.  Never did me any fucking good.  If you ask people if they had to chance to go back into the past, what would they do.  They invariable would say ‘go back and kill Hitler’, or ‘go back and warn President Kennedy to put the bubble on his convertible’.  See, Kennedy traveled everywhere in a special limousine with a protective bulletproof bubble.  For some reason, that day in Dallas, Kennedy didn’t use it… and the gunman knew it.  How could the gunman have known that?  Inside job, that’s how.

People forget the details of their great plan.  How, exactly, would you get access to Hitler?  He was the most powerful and dangerous man on earth.  No matter what you knew, or what your intentions are, you would not get close to him.  How about warning the President?  How do you imagine you would get anywhere near the president to share your concerns?  The President knows people are trying to kill him.  This isn’t news.  If you explain you are from the future, as I am trying to explain to you, you will be labeled as a crackpot.  If you provide specifics, you will surely be locked up as a conspirator, or at the very least locked up as nuts.

So, I am in the unenviable position of explaining to you that I am from the future, and here to warn you.  About what?  What’s the difference anymore?  No one listens.  If I could prove I was from the future, and I can, I would be locked up in a science lab.  That would be fruitless.  I can not explain to you on any level how it works.  That isn’t why I was sent here.  Those scientist and programmers, the ones who make this work, are too valuable and too smart to actually time travel.  Time travel is incredibly dangerous, and will generally fuck you up bad.  Remember how teleportation worked for Jeff Goldbum in the film ‘The Fly’?  Yeah, its about like that.

new content added 3.28.2013

You may be asking “if you are from the future, prove it.  Who is going to win the Dallas game next Sunday?  Not this Sunday, everyone knows that will be a blowout.  I want to know next Sunday.”  Yes, I know the answer, and no I am not going to tell you.  You may ask I bet on sports with all my future knowledge.  You bet your ass I do.  It’s how we pay for the program.

What  we have learned the hard way is just how to prove it to people.  My first thought was to get to the decisions makers to warn them about the reason I am here.  Bad idea.  Like I said earlier, no one believes you.  If you pick a very specific incident, you come off as the cause.  If I say “senator Bilchap will be involved in a fiery accident in Maryland this weekend” and it happens – I do not get hailed a hero or proper time traveler.  No, I get indicted for causing the accident… because how else could I know?  Also, why save Bilchap?  He is the Republican asshole who pushed the bill through… the whole reason I am down here.  Too bad that accident didn’t happen 5 months earlier.

If I do tell them the answers to all the sports scores, it just makes me look like a gambling savant.  With the correct information, that stuff is pretty predictable.  You will know more about that in about 20 years, but I am getting ahead of myself.

The reason I am here is now moot.  My great warning to society was regarding some climate legislation that already went through.  No one listened to me for the aforementioned reason.  So on that, humanity, good job fucking yourself and your kids down the line.  Hope you like your biodome, you dumbasses!

Meals in a pill and flying cars?  Nope.  Hasn’t happened, won’t happen.  You see how people drive, on level ground with painted lines telling them exactly where the car should go?  You give them the proper speed and directions to where they need to go, and they can’t handle it.  Imagine putting these people 50 feet off the ground with no lane indications or directional signs and it is chaos.  We tried it, briefly.  In fact, this was already tried in your time.  This was done covertly by several governments back in 2010.  The results were so ugly the program was canned and it was never spoken of again.  You know how you do that?  How to keep a secret?  I will give you a hint, it rhymes with killing everyone involved.

new content added 4.2.2013

Now, what I know you came here for is some dish about the future, and some insight into your current times.  I wish I could tell you I was above your tabloid culture.  The truth is, I need this book to save my sanity and bankroll me back to the *******.  Sorry, I am not going to do it.  Not going to say ‘back to the future’ even in the context of appropriate narrative.  Here is a future hint now, in fact.  The ‘studios’ get very litigious in the future.  VERY.  If you know copyright law, you know that a title can not be copy written.  Meaning, I can call a book ‘gone with the wind’ or a movie ‘star wars’.  Yes, that was the case in your time.  That is not the case in my team.  More importantly, the studios made this change retroactive.

What if I told you that you are being arrested for wearing a hat?  You would say “but it isn’t illegal to wear a hat”. And then I would say “not yet, but it will be.  And when it is (let’s just say on or around April 23^rd 2026-ish) it will be set to be 100 years retroactive.  That is all the rage in business law now since precedent was set.  Basically, it is about royalties.  There was a BIG hit show called ‘Cheers’ in about 5 years from now.  Made millions.  So, the studio lawyers went in and once they got the copyright laws changed, and then made retroactive, they then sued the living producers and trusts of the hit 80’s sitcom ‘cheers’ for copyright infringement.

See, this isn’t water law.  The rule of water law is simply ‘first come, first served’.  Water law is not about ‘the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’.  A perfect example of that is how Denver, Colorado is still buying city water from Coors.  See, Adolph Coors got to Clear Creek in the Rockies just West of Denver before Denver was a city.  Dude owns it.  First come, first served.  I have no delicious dish about Coors, either.  You might want to hear something Michael Bay-ish like ‘it was deserted and turned into a itinerant homeless encampment for zombies and aliens’.  Sorry.  Still no zombies or aliens in the future.  If there were, wouldn’t I have mentioned that?

So, what does happen in the futute?  I can give you this good news; they streamlined Congress.  They did not get rid of them, yet.  But, we are close.  Someone around the era that you are in now, some think tank commissioned a study on partisan-ship.  Specifically, how loyal people were to their political parties, versus actually voting on the issues.  It is bad news.  Really really bad news.  It was found that virtually no one in Congress had actually voted on an issue since the late 60’s.  It was found people in Congress (meaning both the Senate and the House) were voting with their political parties 98% of the time.  In effect, they were not even reading bills.  You could have a bill called the ‘I sure like puppies bill’ with no riders or budget impacts.   This bill would be simply to declare that puppies are cute.  Congress folk would vote on that strictly along party lines.  Every single one of them.  You may think the premise is absurd, and an irrational summery of a complex issue.

Sadly, I wish that were the case.  This happened.  There was a sting set up in, well I don’t want to give the dates, but in your time it has already happened very recently.  It was just that, a bill put through Congress to see if representative are reading the bills, debating them, augmenting them, or vetoing them.  Turns out, none of the above.  The ‘Puppies are Cute’ bill (HB Resolution 1033) was passed by the exact majority Democrats held in Congress.  No one ever read it.  Not a single word.  It was simply put to the floor as ‘HB 1033’ for a vote.  No one abstained from the vote, or asked what HB 1033 was.  The vote took only 23 minutes, and fell on party lines.  I won’t tell you which party fell on which side of the argument, because that isn’t the point.

After a long ugly mean battle, we just got rid of the Congresspeople.  Every fucking one of them.  We still have a system to maintain, and laws that need to be passed.  So, what has been done in their place is that your district simply votes for a party.  If you live in Congressional District 113, you used to vote for Republican Representative Dillwich to be your representative in Congress.  Since we learned that the Dillwiches of the world were going to vote entirely and completely along the Republican party lines.  So, why pay Dillwich $120,000 a year to be a robot.  So, instead, in the future you vote for your ‘party proxy’ and that party’s ideology and leaders have automated the voting process.

In order to do this, we really only needed one very big change.  We eliminated Gerrymandering.  I can’t explain.  Google it, it is really important stuff, and every decade it complete erodes the principles of Democracy after the census is published.

Added 4.10.2013

There is still presidential intervention and some checks and balances, but we have pretty much eliminated congress.  Why?  Well, you people are dumb.  We had to step in.  In your time, which is right now, your congress has an approval rating of 11%.  This means that 89% of Americans think Congress sucks.  Your Congress, to be fair, does suck.  They pass no legislation, and the environmental damage sustained by their lack of action and constant infighting has already destroyed several continents.  So, if congress is useless, and everyone knows it, why don’t we get rid of them?  That is the problem your generation couldn’t muster… voting.

See, members of Congress are re-elected at a rate of 92%.  Do you see the problem?  Everyone hates their Congressfolk, and still everyone re-elects them.  Basically, we had to take away the power to vote because people in your time are so dangerously inept that for a period of time in late 2014, you had a house of representatives that failed to pass a single bill.  THEN… you re-elected every one of them 4 months later.

Yes, that is depressing, and you don’t want to know the details.  It’s sad.  Plus, I can’t tell you the details for your own good… and for my own good.

Oh, this is awesome, and not a surprise at all.  The South is still SUPER racist.  You know how schools have ‘magnet’ programs… so you go to a certain high school that specializes in dance?  That is how the south has become for angry white people.  South Carolina took the bull by the horns and announced ‘whites only!’ in 2030

Of course that isn’t legal, but it is understood by everyone.  If you are white, please vacation or move here.  If you aren’t… don’t.

Here is some good news, though. Your TVs, as you understand them, will have smell-o-vision… for lack of a better term.  It is, in every sense, totally awesome.  Allow to me to explain it without giving away anything too proprietary info or messing with the space time continuum.  As with everything, this will be explained by analogies.  That isn’t because your feeble prehistoric mind can’t comprehend the technology.  It is quite the opposite.  The wal mart-ization of the gene pool has brought the average IQ down 50 years from your time down a stunning 20 points.

So, the tv.  It works sorta like colors.  As you may know, there are three primary colors.  Yellow, Red, and Blue.  Every other color comes from a combination of that.  You may know that the toungue only tastes a handful of tastes.  Like, there is sweet, salty, sour… etc.  We have found that by placing tiny bladders of very powerful scents behind the screen.  The computers mix the key scents to create a combination that easily tricks the human nose.  You have no idea the impact this had.  Smell is far and away the strongest sense we have.  This is more than an awesome food channel experience.

In war movies, you literally get the smell of gunpowder.  In a courtroom drama, you get the smell of must.  It goes on and on.  I just wanted you to know the future isn’t all gloom and sadness.  It is still pretty great.

6.19.2013

Oh, transportation.  Dig this.  When the US Govt stopped subsizing gasoline, driving began to taper off.  They said “Americans will never get rid of their cars”.  Well, at $9 a gallon, they did.  Upside is pollution is considerably cut.  So, how does everyone travel?  PCS – Personal Cable System.  It is a pulley system that runs building to building, like in caper movies.  You can get across town – say 20 miles – in about 20 minutes.  It’s awesome, safe, zero environmental impact, and decently weather proof.  So, how does this miracle system work?  Well, there are two choices, and they are often combined.  There is a powered motor pulley.  It is  a small electric (and incredibly expensive) motor that fits in your backpack.  It drives the pulley along the cable.  Also, there is the piston system.  Catchy, I know.  Lets say you are at your port and want to get downtown.  Your best bet is gravity, right?  What if if your destination is higher than your current location?  A piston atop your pole rises up up to 50 feet.  Now, you are higher than your destination.  Zing Zing and you are there.  Rad, I know.

Man, you said to yourself, they did all that in just 20 years?  Seems like an awful lot of infrastructure to be built in such a short time.  Is it privatized?  Or, public?  Do the rich get better service?  Do they get heated cable cars, while the working class just have backpacks and are out in the open air running into each other?  Well, probably.  See, here is the thing.  Full disclosure; this was my idea and I am trying to get you all onto it now.  It doesn’t exist in the future…. YET.  You may be thinking that could mess with the space time contimum… me coming back and changing the future.  I get that a lot, and you all are way off on that ‘space time continuum stuff.  You are reading too much science fiction.  if I can get your generation started on this now, then it will be there in the future when I go back.  This isn’t that heavy a concept.  That is how we got yellow M&Ms.  Simple.  Chaz went back 30 years and got himself into a developers board meeting.  He explained to them the awesomeness of a yellow M&M potential.  He even had the leg work done on the dye and composition.  Net result, when he got back to his time…. everything was the same except M&Ms had a new color.  See?  Nothing imploded.  That just would have happened.

Sadly, Chaz didn’t make it back to see his impact… but it happened.  What hasn’t happened yet, you see, is anyone returning safely to the future.  Everyone, like me, makes it back in time just fine.  Getting back to the future, though. well… no one has made it.  Hence my memoirs here.  I want everything documented in case 1)I get stuck here 2) die getting back.

I am back.  I know it has been a while since I wrote.  I will explain, but can’t right now.  Am in prison, still.  Other news, another traveler is in here with me.  I swear I will explain this when I can.  At present time, he is missing.  Not sure if he jumped back to his era, or was simply transferred to another prison.  They are not forthcoming with that information here.