NaNo is OVER!

Whew. OK it’s done! 50228 words. There!

nanowrimo_08_winner_cert

Randomosity 2300

Random random random write. Why did I choose to log into SL before my NaNo’s over? Still so many words I’ve got to meet. So many so many words. Ugh. Ugh Ugh. Ugh. UGH…

1.5 hours left it’s close to the eleventh hour. And now, I’ve dropped into a Word War at NaNoWriMo, SL. People are typing like crazy, and some have hung themselves or put them in the chair or guillotine rack with crazy tags like “write or die” or “50k or bust” or “writing like mad”… exactly what I’m doing.

OK, here we go… word diarrhea. Write and write and write and write, we go! Go for it, go! Yippee go, yes. Think about walking through a brown-leaved street with a strange itch crawling all over your skin, not just tickling you but compelling yourself to basically scratch and scratch such that you’ve suddenly scratched away all of your skin and you’ve become nothing but a pile of no-skin stuff, a tiny little stick figure-like character… and we are back to stickworld

Elsewhere in stickworld, aside from the Messiah character and others, great turmoil was spreading through worse than potted soil in an epidemic cycle while rampaging on breathable salmonella. Politicians were worried about the growing factions of dots who threatened to thwart the stickfigure supremacy. And stick figure ninja characters were no match against the graceful bouncy and jumping dots that, devoid of real dimension, could instantly “teleport” themselves anywhere they wished. They existed in this lineworld, and yet they could go beyond so easily and without boundaries, purely because of their point-like nature.

So these point creatures whom the lineworld stickfigure creatures have subjugated for millennia is totally fighting back now, stronger than the toughest cough syrup and better than the ultimate cold meds, like DayQuil on crack, and perhaps writing faster than DQ with an automated quill.

I suddenly felt scared as, while gazing at a piece of paper, I saw not a stickfigure climb out of it, but a dot jump out of it. At first I thought it was a tick–not a flea, a tick… a tiny black bug that looked more or less like a dot… that jumped around and bit and gave you the most scratchiest of bug bite bumps. Sometimes you couldn’t tell if the tick or the dot were actually a mole, and you end up pressing down on the mole just in case it’s a tick… except if it were a tick, and you were to try squooshing it on soft skin, such as the places where a mole might be, the tick would probably only get compressed, and pushed into the expanse of soft skin… and once you stop pushing, it’d hop away and probably bite you elsewhere. That was how the tick thing went. Ticks and dots were unpredictable like that an would basically just backbite you the first chance they get.

Type and type and type and type and type and type and shout and scream and dance and joy and ugly and wonderful and wonder and happy and sad and big and small and sized up and juried by battalions of line people who want to make their peace with the dots and other creatures of lower dimensions than mere lines. Battle of the battalions and batallions and batalions to determine ewhich spelling is the official one. The wave hits hard and shakes them all up and kills them all… such that masses and masses of stick figures become a single dot, and in the end, though the stick figures tried fighting the dots and sizeless creatures below even their low dimension… they became the dots and points that they fought against. The moral of the story is that if your dead combined would turn into your enemy, you should probably not fight so hard.

This reminded me of the case of the Humans vs the Zombies. Zombies were apparently creatures that arose out of dead humans, especially humans who have been infected with the Zombie Malady, often when another zombie ingests a part of said human, or when said human is bitten. In some folklore, you have to specifically have your brain eaten, or the Zombie has to give you a Brooklyn boxing kiss on the back of your head (crunch your skull, straight to yer brain). But, generally, zombies arise out of dead humans (infected).

So basically if you have zombies vs humans, the two fighting, and each time a zombie kills a human (through their teeth), the human becomes a zombie, what are the chances for the humans? Well, the zombies are primitive brainless creatures and so they’re fighting from instinct and unable to use complicated machinery and much less weapons. So what happens if that the zombies usually get their heads and bodies and other pieces blown off by the humans with their big guns and tanks and other great beats of war such as that giant orange bird with the metal ninja feathers that whisks the ultimate dreamteam soldiers through the silence of the night straight into the middle of the PARRTY… um.. I mean the warfield.

The fight goes on with humans fallen become zombie, and zombies (ex-humans) just getting blown the heck away. If weapons could destroy the enemy fast enough, then perhaps, the enemy number would not be growing, and might even be decreasing. But, the case is that the enemy number is totally not stabilizing, but exponentially increasing.

Which brings me to the conclusion that weapons research is really futile, because the best solution in this case would be to bring down an entire global nuke on this fight to destroy both zombies and soldiers, but especially the latter since the soldiers were doomed to become zombies anyway due to how they’re basically incapable of fighting the zombies to the death and not becoming zombies in the process. Basically, when the enemy’s count depends on your fallen and your fallen keeps on falling, the battle is over, and you should resort to the bomb thing.

So, the powers that be throw a bomb on this battle and nothing happens. The zombies are apparently immune to huge explosions (yet bazooka blasts do tear them apart). All the human soldiers have been zapped, though.

So the bell in that other world sudden rang and I had to stop my wild reckless typing. But, I’m still typing, I dunno why. Round 2 of this word war there. Back to my hypothetical war of the zombie army vs the humans… and the huge problem of the fallen humans turning into zombies.

OK, so the big problem after they threw out the nuke was that all the humans died, and the zombies weren’t affected one bit (they’re zombies). But, it looks like the radioactivity stuffz from the nukes is apparently affecting the human corpses and turning them into zombies!

Not good at all! Frightening, even! Suddenly, the entire world is filled with zombies except the few powers that be who launched that megabomb without first understanding the zen of zombies.

Zombies are typically the result of genetic mutation, often sped through by radioactive anomalies. So, when they threw the bomb down… Yup, that was basically what happened. The zombies got yet another boon on their number count. Yay zombies. No humans. Literally.

So that was basically how the world as we knew it ended. The humans became zombies, and the strangest thing of all was that, world peace eventually resulted from this. The zombies didn’t care about anything but mulling around, bumping into each other and scurrying for meat (and there were still lots of animals living on earth, even after the nuclear holocaust)… and as long as there was meat, there were no fights (and the radioactivity actually helped create new species of meateous meats for the zombies, including a special species of animal whose meat kept on growing back with each bite. The zombies could gnaw and eat on them forever without ever going hungry, or for want of another animal. For, the zombies were extremely unprejudiced and viewed all animals as equal, as long as they had meat. And all animals have meat, for meat is what gives the animal mass and a characteristic and body in this worldly war after the demise of the human race.)

So, after mentioning that diversion, the few remaining stick figures who still hadn’t been converted into dots finally realized their fallacy. They should never have fought against the dots because if they won, they would kill the very substance that creates the sticks, and if they lost, they would all become dots.

The point of the story is that war is something you should not go into unless you have truly analyzed the case and understand the consequences of what might happen if you win or lose.

In the human’s case, if they won, they would have become a race of super-intelligent non-meat-eating species, the exact opposite of zombies… because after every human civilization wins a war against an enemy, they would try as hard as they could to become *not* like the enemy, as much as they could. Basically, if the enemy was tall (say Genghis Kahn), they would try to get their entire generation to grow as short as possible (Chinese people). If the enemy was British, they’ll teach their kids to speak a new accent even though half the time they wouldn’t be able to understand them… and as such, there would be a language gap between them and their kids, and as you can see, that might clearly pose to be a problem! Indeed.

So if the humans had won, they would gravitate as far as they could from the zombies, and try to turn themselves into super-smart creatures who would never eat meat. (Of course, that’s fine, since without the nuclear holocaust ,the ever-growing meat creatures would not have “evolved”… and, also, humans do have especially delicate stomachs, unlike zombies, and can’t quite process radioactive meat.. and the meat-everlasting-growing creatures are typically ridden with radioactive meat… so even if these efficient nutrient sources of animals did exist in the alternate universe where the humans won, the humans wouldn’t be able to make much of them. Got it?)

OK, so in this alternate universe, where the humans won, humanity would go through a very turmoil-stricken history full of wars and other maladys totally unpleasant. That was basically what happens again and again in human history. It’s almost as if human history were equivalent to strife or something absurd like that. Maybe! Or then again…

The thing with this conclusion is that humans and sticks are quite similar and not at all different. Maybe, at one time, humans were once sticks…

Actually, I should digress on the evolution of humans from lesser dimensional creatures.

You see, according to stickman genesis, in the beginning, there was the dot, and the dot felt that just a single point particle in the universe was not enough. And thus caused the evolution of a whole lot of other things… such as lines and eventually stickmen… and eventually higher dimensional creatures who sought to understand even higher dimensional reality assuming that creatures could only exist in lesser dimensions and perhaps have projections in higher dimensions but not knowing that there are higher dimensional creatures that could pose dangerous to them if they were to open up the inter-dimensional connections.

So, basically, in the beginning, there was a dot. And dot thought that the rest should be created, and so there were stickmen. Stickmen, after a while, went through their own version of egomania, where they believed stickmen to be the most superior of all and thus end up trying to wipe out all the non-stickmen, i.e., the dots. And, as mentioned, broken stickmen, especially a pile of them, basically become a giant dot. And that’s pretty simple, how that one goes!

The story becomes interesting when we tell about how the stickmen transform themselves and levitiate themselves out of their dimension and into greater dimensions to eventually evolve into humans and three dimensional beings that travel through a fourth pseudo dimension of time.

Typer run type Typerun type. It all started when an overactive overzealous typist typed too much and ended up scoring the rage and wrath of her colleagues who threw both her typewriter and herself into the flames… except as the fire ate away her words, a giant inkblot grew and grew and grew and the hole between the dimensions was open and unleashed and out came the lower dimensional beings such as the sticks and dots and they traveled to this upper dimension.

But, I’m assuming the chicken existed before the egg. Or is it the egg this time. Right, you’re still under the belief that humans evolved out of stick figures. Basically, the original typist was not human. She was a projection of human, so what happened was that there was a mirror effect, where a virtual version of humans existed before the lines converged and diverged into multidimensonal higher dimensional creatures.

Yup, basically that. The point is, the human did not actually exist then. But they exist later. But they hda to exist then in order to bridge reality and the timeline.

Sometimes you have things that you think are supposed to be chronological but they actually exist and happen simultaneously, exactly simultaneously without errors of time measurements.

You think that’s weird but that’s basically just how things work… so when the insurance companies attempt to file fraud at the apparently non-sensical reports of time… it’s not your fault or that of the offending party’s. It’s basically the inability of the insurance companies of reality from understanding the way things work.

And the thing with the colors of the rainbow are that they flutter and fly away like tiny or large critters that are prone to do such things. And that’s basically how they go and work. Yup basically that. It is all so basic. So totally basic. Yup. Hehe. Hoo…

The strong winds of the solar flairs create a glare in them middle of nowhere and that becomes the epithet of the human race and also the stick people race and the dot people race. The saga of the progeny of the dot ends with a dot.

Stories of a Spectrum

On the last day of these story spectrum series, the mysterious author finally appeared. As human as the stories seem, the author is actually a robot (or avatar-ized as a robot). He greeted me and said goodbye and farewell in a single sentence: “I hope you enjoyed the colors I sent, the stories of a spectrum. And now, you should get to writing.”

Indeed, I still have about 3000 words left till my goal of 50k! Eek.

And I’ve long ago lost my plot; not that I had much of one when I started writing. I started to write my own spectrum story.

Spectrum. It’s what you get when you shine a single beam of white glass through a prism, and that lets all of the colors out. Like a tropical bird, or like Toucan Sam, as it flies through the air, its tail feathers letting out all its colors, like some fantastic trippin’ form of excretion. Colors, colors, colors, colors, colors and colors everywhere!

Colors!

I stopped. What I wanted to do was… howl.

Violet

I thought about yesterday’s color note, and I realized … of all the ones so far, it was perhaps the weakest. I noticed the significant fluctuation in word count in these “word donation” notes. I wondered if my anonymous word donor was also running out of time and working on a somewhat short and infuriated span of consciousness. Nevertheless, found a new note again, now… Guess what it is:

Violet. The color that’s both a flower and a most delicate shade, a color that can be made through a proportional mix of red and blue paint. A color that’s often used in pastoral scenes and on other flowers and in other decorations. A color that meant more than just beauty, but also, the color violet.

It’s the one with the shortest wavelength and the greatest frequency in the spectrum so far. And its ending is, thus, also ceremoniously brief…

Well, I suppose I can donate a few more words to this color, and perhaps even a brief skitty story.

Violet is the color of the classic Victorian fainting couches (the ones that chose to be a shade other than burgendy or widow black). Violet is the color of little kids’ dresses (when they chose to be something other than pink or blue). Violet is the color of earrings that shine with special stones and metals and crystals. Violet, violet, violet is beautiful and its own outlet.

Violet is the color of so many things. Not just cosmetics and fancy eyeshadows, but also shoes and fancy engravings and hair ties and more. Violet is beyond itself, and yet exactly itself. It’s violet, and totally violet.

And I don’t know what else to say about violet. I guess it’s also on curtains and some eccentric shades of carpets. Coats and such, as well. Exactament! Violet things.

Some birds of paradisia are also violet. Some jewels, too. And the sky… the night sky in twilight is violet… and some human eyes are violet–and it is such a beautiful, beautiful, effect.

Violet is not quite blue, and not quite black, and not quite purple… and so, perhaps, you can’t quite make a story out of it…

I found the ending brief. I would have expected this anonymous word count donor to make up a story (out of nowhere) just for the color’s sake. But…

Indigo

Today’s color was Indigo… and I touched the prim to have it dispense to me the “indigo” story. Yippee!

Indigo was the color of the great jeans of the world. Not the light blue jeans, but the dark indigo jeans, nearly black, but still plenty blue–but, really, just simply indigo… the color between the light and the dark. Indigo sounded austure and not kitsch.

Indigo was an elegant color, and yet it had a dark and moody history. It’s not like aquamarine or some cheery light color, but, rather it’s indigo. Imagine a teenager who’s been riding her Harley-D for a long stretch of abandoned road, and who’s finally stopped, and the wind’s stopped playing with her long hair that’d been whipping out just moments before.

Indigo was rebellious and awe-inspiring and demanding. Indigo was not blue or violet or black, but its own color. Indigo was independent and establishing her sense of self. Indigo was indigenous to the human spirit, and yet, lost in so many.

This is the story about how the gray people turned indigo through the grace and salvation of the Indigo Messiah.

Back in the days before color, everyone was gray. But, the problem with being gray is that when the color upgrade comes, all things gray would become old and unwanted and thrown out. Thus, to prevent the entire human population from being discarded, the Messiah had to turn everyone into colors, or a single color.

It turned out that turning everyone into different colors would be too difficult and inefficient for the limited budget of the Lord, so they ended up turning everyone Indigo.

And that was when the Indigo Messiah came in. The Indigo Messiah had long flowing indigo hair, slightly curly, and the look that a gray woman’s veil would imprint on a indigo face in, that many generations later the gray people who had been converted into indigo people would all go wow at.

Indigo was the color of the era, the day when the Messiah turned everyone into its color. Gray became Indigo. Indigo was the new gray. And so when the upgrade-and-discard committee dropped by to see the people of earth and saw that everyone had turned indigo, they nodded their heads and went off to check on the next planet for deprecated gray people.

Indigo was the color that would change and save the world.. and that’s exactly what it did.

Blue

Yet another letter today! I quickly took it out of its prim envelope to read it, excited and anticipating and delighted and more-than-a-little-happy at what adventures this color would bring.

Blue is the color of icicles spray-painted a much darker hue, and what happens to the color as it melts away as the ice melts away when you take it out of its natural environment.

Blue is the color of the night when the sky decides to not turn gray or green or violet-red, but just a cool and dark night blue. Blue is the color of the oceans when it’s not too dark or too bright; blue is the color of a bright cerulean sky, and many other skies. Blue is the color of WS_FTP and Skype and Photoshop logo runes and also the Nicholez viewer. Blue is the color of Internet Explorer and iTunes and Flock. Blue is also the color of LEd, the LaTeX Editor. Blue, blue, true, blue.

Blue rocks the real and virtual world. So many digital icons take on its hue. Blue is loved by both worlds and supported by many and carried on by many and all that. Blue is better than the flu (duh), and certainly better than the clue. Blue is true. True is blue. Truth is a sleuth that would turn blue without a clue.

“Today is a day when you’re supposed to look for the color blue, and find its significance in your life.” The disembodied sound of a voice from my past tells me to take on blue as a meaning greater than what it actually is. I take a moment and look around at the world, and yes, I see the blue sky and the blue swimming pool and also the blue origami things floating on a raft in the middle of it.

Out of nowhere, a large blue ball drops into the pool and bounces and causes a pool-sized version of a tsunami that topples all the origami into the pool.

I feel compelled to save the origami things, so I dive into the pool, and go all the way into the depth of it, compelled to grab and save and be catcher-in-the-rye to all of them.

I emerge from the water to find that the world had changed. It had suddenly become grayscale, and as I looked at the origami creatures I had saved from the depth, I saw that their colors were slowly melting away… and my skin was soaking them up.

I rushed out of the water, even faster, as I saw that the blue of the pool had been drained away too, so that it was just my hands that were blue, and everything else gray.

I stared at my blue hands, and I stared at the origami things now more like gray mush, and I stared at the blue pool that was no longer blue and cried. Somehow, the blueness of the world had melted away when I tried saving these origami creatures, and my hands… which I’d have to wash before supper… would lose their true blue, too, soon.

When I entered the house, I found that everything was still gray. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I found that I was gray as well. I raised my hands to the mirror, and I saw that they were still blue. I looked outside the window in the bathroom to try to find colors beyond its confines. And through countless gray houses, the roofs of them, and gray trees, and the grey hills beyond, and grey streetlights and telephone poles and grey cars and grey streets and grey skies… I realized that my hands were the only color left in the whole wide world.

I turned on the faucet. I slowly lowered my hands to the wash. I stopped. I listened to the sound of running water. Gray water in a gray faucet. I decided that I couldn’t wash them. I turned off the faucet.

At supper, I hid my hands from view by eating too quickly or too slowly. When no one was looking, I’d quickly scoop food in my mouth, and when people were looking I’ll appear to be chewing. I’ll smile when people look at me strangely because that’s what you do when people take a second glance at you.

No one noticed that I hadn’t washed my hands, and the good thing is that they’re still blue. But, what could I do as the only person in the whole wide world with a bit of color left in their hands?

I didn’t know. I tried asking google, but google was all gray, too. Gone were their colors, and gone were their Google. I tried asking others, who were all gray and disbelieving of me… and when they demanded that I showed them my hands on their web cam, I grew afraid that their gray glance would turn my hands gray… I fell asleep.

When I woke up, I found that my hands were no longer blue. Instead… the whole world had become blue… All around me, it was blue. And blue and blue…

From out of a great expanse of blue, a couple of gray critters came out. They stopped before me and said, “From your belief in blue, and your determination to keep the blue secret and hidden from the eyes of the Grayturners… we shall now turn blue.”

And the gray critters turned blue. But, though the whole world was now blue, my hands still stayed gray.

And the world stayed blue. My hands gray.

And blue ends in gray.

Weird. So the author broke the pattern of ending in color.

Green

I was starting to miss the color stories, and today I got yet another one.

Green is the color of lush thriving fields of grass, endless expanses of growth that just won’t stop, sun or no sun, shine or no shine. Green that keeps on going where the other colors attempt to pull it back; it just won’t stop growing, as if it were fed and going at the decree of some psycho miracle grow solution.

Green meaning eco-friendly. Green meaning natural, evolving, and coming from the brown raw soil of the earth. Green that flows like an endless sea of organic living matter. Green, green, green.

Green was the color of my hair the day I decided I wanted to go all the way, beyond any chlorine-stained hair… all the way to a bright neon unnatural green. Green that most would find a color that can’t be fit with other clothing. Green that would stand out and make all the colors jealous, just due to how much more colorful and vibrant it is.

Green that I wore with me everywhere and took with me everywhere until the day I pair of emerald green parrots started following me and using my hair as a nest.

That was when they turned my green hair gray with a smattering of bird feces. It was like the wrong kind of shampoo that would soak away the color of my hair, later as I made the decision to go back to a natural hair color… to avoid being the target of wild animals that somehow find their way to roaming around controlled suburban streets.

Green, the color I took on for so little time before I finally decided I’d enough of it. It wasn’t worth the bird poop on my head to be green or to feel green or to express and show myself as green.

I washed off the green on my head with shampoo that reminded me of bird poop smothered all over my head. That day, I understood the complications and irksomeness of being different, and nature’s way of keeping us all neutral green, instead of a bright unnatural neon green.

I smiled, as this one reminded me of the other color stories. It had its quirkiness, and it didn’t seem as random as some of the other things I received… I guess because this was the fourth episode so far that I’ve received. The first one was Red; the second one was Orange; and the third one was Yellow. And now this.

Free Write

Freewrite… the freedom to write as freely as your thoughts come by, the idea to never let your fingers stop, always clattering away on the keyboard, going on and on and on and on… Freewrite, letting your hands take you onwards, taking your self beyond the usual, avoiding your usual adversion to randomosity, going onwards and typing and typing and typing just to reach the freewriting epiphany.

A single green leaf falls down from a tree, flutter and fly and jump and swirl and wiggle and spin and floats up quickly and then pulled down soon by the draft whoosh onto the grass and then that was all that happened to the leaf from the point of view of the tree… for after it landed on the grass, it got taken on by a rack, and then filled in a sack and taken away from the tree and away from its home and just away like a strand of hair from a mane of lion just away and away and away…

Except this leaf tends to be whisked away by the wind more so than the other leaves in the sacks and sacks of leaves being taken to the waste and incinerator to rid the world of these fallings of waste that come from the many things that make up this world. Whooosh and the leaf goes away on yet another adventure away from its brethren of leaves and its wealth of colors and things that go on and on and on and on and itself that goes on as well and continues and walks and flies. The leaf spins in the air and takes beyond and goes away in the sunlight and moonlight and lamplight and pure darkness as it finds its own illumination catches the flying star’s flame and then gets into the same fate of all the leaves that it had once left but didn’t quite leave and didn’t quite part fort it ends up just like them all burnt up and all gone and incinerated and cremated and just basically no longer a leaf… and gone…

Except its component molecules and such continue to evolve, the carbon and other stuff in its composition is recycled into other forms and taken on by other living and nonliving non-organic things that inhabit the world… So the leaf lives on though it doesn’t look like itself at all.

Freedom, the freedom to write with wild abandon just to meet a wordcount, just to meet a number, just to meet this arbitrary count… And I feel like I’m singing, and I’m actually singing my words, and there’s even a melody and lyrical stuff, except I’m too lazy to press enter all the time to make it evident that these are lyrics to a song a neverending freewriting freewheeling freespinning free whooshing sound.

Darkness suddenly, and our narrator enters.

“They say that if you subject a writer into constant freewriting, you can eventually exhaust the writer’s entire mental dictionary of words. You can literally find them using every single word that they know in attempt to make the next bout of freewriting unique.

“That’s, of course, assuming that the writer is actually conscious of what they’re writing about, and not just drooling words out as if some repugnant vomit that they’d rather totally be rid of than to keep incubated within themselves.

“But, really, I am totally relieved that there are not formal contests where writers lock themselves up in rooms and refuse to come out until they’ve reached a certain uncanny number of words in a very short interval of lastminute-time.

“published writesr with deadlines would never undergo freewrite for the purpose of meeting a word count, unless their editor were just a very single non-intelligent algorithm that merely checks their word count.

“In that case, the wise ones, at least, would counterfeit the count and perhaps pull off Stephen King-esque rounds of shouting and typing:

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NON ON ONO NO N NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NON ON ONO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NON ONO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO N ON O NONO NO NO NO

“Except, they’d be lame enough to type it out themselves so that they get the feeling of accomplishment in typing out a couple huindred words of:

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO N ONO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NOBN ONO NO NO NO ON ON NO N ONO N ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON NONO NO ON NO ON ON NO ON ON ON ON ONON NO NO NONO NO NON ONO NO NO NO NONO NO NO NON ONO NO NO N NON ONO NO NO NO NO NO NONO NO NO NO ON NO NONO NO NO NO NONO NO NON ONO NO N ON ONO N ON ONO N ONO NO ON NO ON NO ONNO NO NOO NO NO NONONO

“And you can tell by the seemingly random typos that they are basically just putting their fingers on the letters N and O and pressing space either alternating or all at the same time.

“After a while though, most writers wonder what’s the point of being stuck in this box writing words and words and words and words just to meet a word count. Could they write nonstop just to meet it – would they write nonstop just to meet it? Would they even bother to put sense and meaning and sensibility into their words? Would they bother to mastermind myriad rants and such into their words? Basically, would they care at all what the quality of their stuff is? And, if so, would they ever read it again or prescribe it others to read? Just, would they? Really, now, would they? I doubt it. I seriously doubt it. I seriously totally completely doubt it, and with the power bestowed on me as the all-powerful narrator, I hereby call that process totally doubtful and totally impossible.”

Along comes a writer who sits down right in from of this so-called omniscient narrator and prepares to unwrite him.

“No… no!!! No… You can’t unwrite me. You can’t. You just can’t. I forbid it. I’m omniscient.

“But you aint’ omnipotent. Haha.”

And so the writer un-writes the omniscient narrator… and is left without a narrator or personal entity to sing the overture. So now it’s just the words themselves.

The words themselves supposedly came from a lower dimension, where they corroborated with some other lower dimensional creatures while cheating some upper dimension creations in order to inhabit the minds of said upper dimensional characters. Or, so, the upper dimensional characters were made to believe. What actually happened was that the words invaded said consciousness of these upper dimensional beings and totally warped their worldview into that of words, reconstructing their imagination and reboiling their vision such that straight things became curved and bubbles became boxes and other similar lines of oddly created yet truly made havok.

So, that’s the story of the freewrite. Right now, it’s 2:40:35 am according to WordPress, and I’m at 1246 words. GO Go GO!

Nonstop, so the world starts from a single grain of thought. A thick yet strippy and scrwanny and salamander-like modicum of musical idea, a phrase, a cadence… except sound particles and beings to hear didn’t quite exist yet, so basically the idea had to listen to itself as well as worry about its existence. Such was the way of early things; it was basically ubiquitous DIY’s… and all who made it past these antediluvian frontier days were basically the kind of people who could skin a bear while shooting a mountainlion and waging war against the stormclouds that would stay retreated forever to never wet a dryness-infested field that needs much wetness. That’s basically the way things are. Yup. exactly. Exactament, as they’d say in another language, where the words interesting and exact are more interessant and exactament.

But, wait, back to the dilemma of having an object be both its observer and its existence-creator. So, before the days when we had the medium to convey the communication that we now find everyday necessities, how did the very first things both declare their existence as well as their observance of their existence? How did they know that they were themselves; and that they are, were, you know… that they exist?

To understand such phenomema, you must go back to the story of the single dot that generated everything anything and all. It was a single black dot in a great expanse of total whiteness, and what it did was expand and take over the great expanse of all that, to become totally and completely black and not white and all, to take over the entire white plane with black, making it a gigantic black dot, so basically it was beyond itself, as well as the world, because it turned everything into its own black dot monopoly, and that was how things went for that one black dot that created itself as well as a generation of dots and lines and other things… but basically the way that you can both be your own creator and observer is to basically saturate the universe with way too much of yourself; throw your seeds everywhere and let them thrive all around and beyond, not just as you or in you or as yourself, but as everything and all things, just to let it infect like some crazy epidemic, the ultimate virus, propagate ubiquitously by design and by will… a conscious virus that infects the entire universe to create DOTWORLD.

Dotworld started with that single enterprising dot who believed that it could turn the entire white sheet of the world into a gigantic black thing. And it succeeded. Except, of course, with black, comes white, and with white comes black. SO, after the black dot succeeded in its regime, it got tired of everything being black all the time, and it was not challenges and it was just very very bored and lonely… so from the depths of all its blackness, it conjured a single white dot which it bestowed the power that it once had to grow and take over the great white paper of this paper and dot universe of pen and inkblots and roscharch tests and such… so this one white dot bestowed with this power would expand and take over this totally black universe created by the blackdot and thus create its own regime. Muah ha ha ha ha ha. That’s the story of how existence started out as these alternating reigns of black and white and black and white. The original bipartisan fight had not to do with dark or light or whatever force, but just simple colors–black and white.

Of course, black and white can also stand for existence and non-existence. Black can stand for non-existence, and white for existence. So, originally, the universe existed as this great blank and white expanse of pure whiteness.. and black dot.. this black hole.. this non existence-favoring thing decided to expand and take over and convert all whiteness into blackness just to see if it could do it and to just basically turn everything into itself since that was all there was to do back then. You either exist bountifully or exist smally, wherein, the ample whiteness might wipe you out… so, in a way, gaining that huge black monopoly was kinda like fighting for survival, basically the fittest color, the fittest existence, rules them all. Right, so that was how things went. Simple and that’s basically it.

So nowadays, these two regimes are on and off and basically there or here and many other dichotomies that can be either one or the other, but not both at once or multiple at once. 50-50 or 2 by 2 things basically that you can have one of or the other and you can’t bake both at once because the oven has to be on for you to bake things in. If you find this enlightening, then I”m sure you understand my predicament. I’m supposed to be keeping this great writing machine of my fingers hitting some hard and crunchy keyboard keys going and goin and going and goin in hopes of meeting these numbers by the time that I have to meet them. My fingers are just starting to hurt like I’ve been playing piano or violin or something for too long after having not have had the practice to become as good and to keep them hard and in shape and callouses all citadelic.

OK, so 2162 words at 2:52:36 am wordpress time. I can keep on going at this. I have not yet resorted to Stephen King’s chapter of No’s yet, and I’m still going and going and going and going. Wheeeellsshiiiicfffff and I’m also creating new words that might not be easy to pronounce! Taking a very quick break now.

OK, I think I can pretty much average a thousand words per ten minute intervals or so, so let’s go at it, continue at 2241 words at 2:54:36 am… go go go and go. Go and go with a yoyo and gogurt and the type of things that kids like that would eat. Whoosh like a tennis ball hitting against the heated black and shiny pavement that’s been watered down so quickly and so cruelly and not at all delicately or carefully after a tennis tourney… the poor ground that was once dry is now all so wet and the heat greedily boils the water and turns the ground even hotter such that the one kid who jumps out of the pool with his shoes off and towels all gone had to basically dance so nimbly on his feet such that he ended up creating a black hole in the fury of his dance.

So all these things got sucked into this black hole of this kid’s dance and that was basically how the world ended. It really starts with simple things and simple things cause the beginning of the end and that’s basically the way things work. The catastrophe-prone people would always say that prophecy and all sorts of complicated prediction and even preventatory mechanisms were behind it to save things and to make sure that we don’t come to such an end but actually you know it just kind of happens like fate whirling about and you can’t even see it as it snatches you and sets you in its predetermined path… like whoosh and that’s basically how things go. Exactament… or if you’re French… interressant. Exactly. THat’s basically how things go.

So like while that kid was creating this black hole that would end the universe by dancing that superquick dance (see he’s probably like superman’s brother or something and totally hyped up by sugar he should not have digested or ingested) and you know catastrophes happen when little kids eat the wrong things… So while that was happening, on the other side of the universe, these people who were also camper type people were sitting around a bonfire eating potatoes and signing nursery rhymes. We have more kids who are part of the beginning of the end. And they’re basically just entertaining themselves the way kids are prone to do – that’s what they do, you know? They sit around and they tell stories and tales and they joke around about how they were just born and suddenly now by some creative fate or collosal accident they would suddenly effect the end of the universe and more and beyond and you know. That’s basically the curiosity of these little kids, that they would basically kill all cats and end themselves.

But don’t tell them that just yet. They’re still roasting potatoes and popping sunflower seeds into their mouths and the fire and other things that come in their path. Sunflower seeds when burnt and heated up can become some rather intense and lethal weapons, believe it or not. They’re sharp and hard little things that you can throw around or have thrown at you or have fired by a fire and thrown by the blast of heat the red and orange and yellow heat pushing them off and away wheeel.

Basically, they are just things that fly about if you throw them or if you leave them at the bottom of a popcorn machine – they’ll bounce away like crazy. Yeup that’s the way they work. Simple little mechanisms can cause entire packs of seeds to go totally crazy and scary. So, anyway I am still typing and whooshing and flying away as if I were some celestial bird that could coast through the universal skies and hit stars like 18-course golf courses and beyond, actually. As if. Well, yeah, as if. That’s what I am, and that’s what I”m doing. Wheeelsh Wheelsh Wheeeelsh. Right.

So, type and type and type and type and type and type and type and type and type and type and yell N O NO NO NON ON N ONO NON ON ONON ON ON ONO NO NO NOON NO NO ON ONNO NO NO ON NO NONO NONO NO NO NONO NO NON ONO NONO NO NO NONO NO NO NONO NONO NO NO NO NO NO NO ONNO ON NONO NO NO NOON NO NO NONO NO NNO NO NONO NO NO NONO NO ONNO NO ONNO NOON NO NO ONNO NO NONO NO NONO ON NONO NO NO ONNO NO NO

And suddenly there was a light that bloomed in the middle of nowhere and blossomed and spread and went beyond the view of the little kids to the view of the great kids and the greater kids and even the big big big kids, so big, that they’re not really kids anymore. Yup, beyond them. Totally beyond. It totally grew like the world’s biggest beanstalk… and it’s not that I’m running out of ideas, it’s just that I’m vainly trying to make this freewrite make sense by connecting it to earlier themes and motifs and that sort of thing. GO and No and that’s basically to go! OK, so almost done… just so many more words until I can put an end to this session and perhaps try a few more such sessions to cathcup on the word count and then perhaps put in some segment of story that would make at least partial sense not to me but perhaps to others or some future me but not my current self since I’m stuck in this ultimate trip of words that can’t be stopped that I try to catch in words these thoughts that go so fast and so randomly and just so crazily as if they’re swirly things that just go wild and beyond and whoosh and there they go. Whoa bye there whoosh green red blue orange blue bule blue blue blue orange red dark blue white black green aquamarine white field green grass green grows white silver blue ocean blue and bubble blue gray black brown and golden seal sepia white gray silver grey and multicoloured things that basically won’t stop even if you wanted it to stop.

Draft Saved at 3:04:46 am. Word count: 3246 (whew! So, roughly 1000 words in about 10 minutes.)

Blossoms

Here we go… another freewriting session to word-up for NaNo…

Start with something random and amazing and totally cool and nonstop and going and running and sprinting and jogging and jumping and climbing and ascending the cliffs of the Grand Canyons and suddenly jumping to Mount Everest like a sci fi jumper but with kleenex on his nose and a doggy bone on his buns and eyes as green as meadows and tails as long as willowburns and fires as great as bonfires and even bigger conflagrations that cremate entire cities and char all that it touches including the water and fire that even burns on floating oil in the middle of the ocean all the way down to the coral reefs to the tiny fish the octopi and the jellyfish which become not quite so jelly and inflated and bloated and totally flying away as the fingers of the ice cold fire reaches and tickles and turns them into smellyfish that dred up the sea.

Imagine a single flower blossom blooming and spreading and going further than the tall green beanstalk of Jack’s and then some little bitty stick figure kid climbing it, anticipating what’s on top at the end of the long trek and yet knowing that on top there would be giants and higher dimension creatures that would eat at its soft stick figure core. It knows it’s not safe but it keeps on climbing just to reach the top of this stalk because it knows that the story must go on and that if it has enough wits it can beat the higher dimensional creatures. But, what else does it know? That at the end of its path, it’d get devoured by other stick figures envious of its success, and thrown all the way down back into the land of stick lines. Alas, poor stick figure!

Slowly, the ocean waves crest around a single singularity in the middle of the ocean, spinning and drilling deeper into the earth’s core, as if trying to poke a hole straight through to the other side. The little child staring at this anomaly, just a few furlongs away on the nearby cruise ship wonders if the waters of the world would drain out the other way through the other side if the hole got deep enough. Nothing much happens except suddenly a gremlin jumps out and winks at the kid. He jumps back and runs away.

The stick figures continue beating up the one stick figure guy who made it all the way up to the top of the linestalk. Eventually, when that brave entrepreneur had been beaten to a pulp of broken sticks and a mess of jagged lines, they got bored and left. Stick figures are amazingly versatile and can quite easily fix themselves, since their vital organs can simply be drawn by will of sticks, so that’s what this beat up stick guy does to himself; he re-draws himself and rises from the stick grave. The bunches of stick figures who witnessed this who didn’t know it was possible to revitalize stick figures, once fallen, praise him as the messiah who had risen from the stickwars, and crowned him Sticking.

Stickers can be used to glue the world together only if you know how to use them right and to maintain their adhesivity. Otherwise, they’ll just peel off like broken marshmellows dried on old sticks leftover from random bonfires from random events that everyone’s already forgotten about (assuming that the ants and other critters haven’t had a chance at devouring all that sugary substances yet). But, anyway, if red and blue makes purple, then if you combine different colored stickers, such as red and blue stickers, would you get a purple sticker? Apparently that works only if your sticker isn’t opaque and is perhaps semi-transparent, or if you put them in water so that they become automatically transparent after a while, and after some of its opaque stuff has melted off… but only if the sticker is made of paper that you can dunk into water and have slowly fleck off in layers and pieces and all that paper is prone to do when submerged in water.

If you type all day at a certain rate just writing down the things that come to mind whether random or sensical or nonsensical or black or blue or bruised and broken or umbrella-flying like Mary Poppins off into the great unknown of a large and deep and unknown expanse of cerulean sky, perhaps even beyond that into space… and since it’s a fantasy story, you don’t have to worry much about biological incompatibility in airtight and high-radioactivity regions… just assume that your Poppins-like character has some magic that protects her from things most regular things and situations and people and types would find hazardous.

If you type forever, would your fingers every get tired, or would you ever run out of random thoughts, or would random thoughts just stop making sense all of a sudden such that you can’t quite put them into words–or worse, or more?

If everyone acted nice to each other, would the entire world blow up… as in the celestial balance between all things good and bad–would that break up and thus disrupt the whole flow of the whole entire existence and being of all things good and bad and mediocre? Or, would some calculation machine that’s inherent in the unseen parts of reality blow up and require more inputs to make a nonpartisan decision. Why is it that political parties must be two or more; why can’t there be a single party, and people who worked for a single cause; why can’t we all agree to be good and nice and beneficent to each other?

If a flower were to blossom at the top of that linestalk, and all the line people had left that place–either having already discovered and slain their linegiant or off to praise the new messiah that rose out of the linedeathgrave thing or to just go about their own way.. .would the flower still have blossomed? Does something exist without something else to notice its existence? Can a single entity exist by itself?

The lineguy who tried climbing the linestalk started thinking about linear modes of existence. Such as Genesis coming from a single dot, and that dot somehow finding it in himself to draw more dots to create lines eventually that would evolve into higher dimensional entities.

If nothing made sense and only shoelaces made the best of maces and the case of reality weren’t so fuzzy and wide-ranging, would everyone go for rubber boots and mystery novels instead of trying to sleuth it out in some celestial duel with the megapuppy. Sometimes i feel like I’m writing ad libs filling in all the blanks with random thoughts while trying to guide and smack things all together.

Take a deep breath and plunge back down into linesea and think of line jellyfish and line tuna and line dolphins and line octopi and line mermaids and line salmon and line whales and line sharks and line things and line seaweed and dried line seaweed that can be made into tuna and line obi and line ebi and line shrimp and wildshrimp that taste not soft and rubbery but with a tangy flavor and texture but still looking like a semi-orderly pattern of white and pale orange.

Whewwwww… so if line people were to suddenly jump out of our tourguide manuals and then suddenly take us on huge treks across the entire world such that we could windowshop on the dreams of other line people and discover the whole line saga from the comfort of our tourguide windows instead of having to compress and condense ourselves to a lesser dimension to attempt to observe the ethnography of indigenous linepeople then the problem of doing line research would totally be solved and calculators and fancy buttons and whirrly things would not longer be required.

To write forever and to diarrhea words that do not belong in the written realm was once considered a carnal sin. But when you’re low on time and your goal is only to meet a word count, you should try to put in all the word you can into this infernal exercise just to make it even if there’s no prize or payload at the end or anything at all other than just your personal satisfaction that you’ve met this yearly challenge yet again despite with grace – despite fire.

Blossoms of the flowers typically evolve and go and go and go, and some flowers actually find themselves branching off like fractals, especially line flowers, which would divide from a single line and then divide again from the two lines that come from the single line, and then again each time from the two lines each, and then again each time for the four lines each and on and on and on and on and on and on until an entire legion of flowers have been made through the blossoming of just a single flower.

That is how raising your wordcount works. Imagine fractal-ic things and force yourself to travel through these worlds that are self-similar, and try to catch just a bit of that and put them into words. That should hike up your word count by a day in less than ten or twenty minutes, easily, even if you’re not typing at your max and you’ve actually got physical diarrhea in real life and have to go off to the loo now to break. Hoooooo!

Yep. Hooooo! Blossoms!

Script: Nami

Today I got a script donation. It’s titled “Nami.” The note also said, “feel free to use this for NaPlWriMo”

ACT I

It’s a normal day. A young or middle-aged MAN sits in the middle of a living room with a large window betraying a perfectly sunny day outside. There’s a door to the side, with a mail-slot. A bit above that on the door, there’s a note signed in big letters with “Love Nami;” it looks stained, like it’s been hanging there for a while. MAN, with a watch, calmly reads a newspaper with headlines about liquid inflation or something along the lines of an unnatural but fluid economic crisis. His cell phone rings. He picks it up.

MAN

Hwello.

There’s the sound of a man’s heavy breathing, and perhaps the sound of waywards storm winds. (The CELLPHONE man, whose face we never see, is perhaps sitting behind the audience, and the storm sounds are projected from behind or around as well. His voice could also be transmitted through a loudspeaker system with some evident static.)

Cellphone

Dear god!

MAN

(holds the phone a distance away)

Sorry, it looks like I have speakerphone on.

(He clicks a button.)

CELLPHONE

Please! Don’t–

MAN

Who is this? (Though speakerphone is off, he holds the phone a distance away from his ear anyway.)

MAN

Don’t worry, I won’t hang up–not yet anyway. But, who is this?

He gets up to look out the window, casually.

MAN

What do you mean you don’t know. You called me, didn’t you?

MAN

Uh, yeah right. It’s a sunny day outside, man. There’s not even a stormcloud in sight.

MAN

What do you mean where am I? I’m right here at home.

man

Listen, I’m not the one calling someone up on their cellphone with their caller ID off saying you probably won’t remember me anyway.

MAN

Low batts, my arse.

MAN

Listen, bud. I am about–

A small but notice-able piece of plaster falls down from the ceiling (or wall).

man

(He holds out his fingers, approximating the size of a piece of plaster that fell.)

I am about this close to hanging up on you.

MAN sets his cellphone to speakerphone on the couch. He goes and examines the area of the breaking wall. There’s the constant sound of a storm in the background.

CELLPHONE

I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m stuck in the middle of what appears to be a colossal storm or tsunami.

MAN

Right. You’ve got to be thousands of miles away. And that’s assuming your cell phone service can pick up in the middle of a storm like this.

CELLPHONE

It can. I mean–it has. Unless I’m hallucinating. Which… I… I could be.

man

You are. Now go back to sleep. When you wake up, it’d all be over.

He goes back to the phone, about to hang up.

CELLPHONE

Wait! Wait! Please… wait.

MAN

What.

CELLPHONE

Just… wait, please. I mean… you hear that don’t you?

The sound of the storm crests.

MAN

What?

CELLPHONE

That. The storm! Its menacing sounds… Oh my god–

MAN

What?

CELLPHONE

There’s my laptop. Oh my god… it’s floating like this titanium-gray raft… and there are little bitty rats on it.

MAN

That’s it. I’m hanging up.

CELLPHONE

No, wait… please don’t! Let me tell you about where I am. I’m sorry I don’t remember the name of the actual place. I’m somewhere in southeast Asia. I was working on some journal pieces. I woke up like I was about to suffocate, and there was water everywhere.

MAN

Uh huh.

cellphone

I was in some hostel or something with five floors. I was on the top floor, and there was water everywhere. Outside my window…

cellphone

The building was buckling and I had to jump out. And I eventually swam to a very tall tree.

man

Uh huh. (whispers) What the fuck kind of tree is this. Monkey man.

CELLPHONE

Please. You’ve got to help me. I don’t know who you are since my cell is low on batts and I can’t afford to have it display its screen. I called someone, some random person in my address book. My hotkeys weren’t working. Your name came up.

man

Right-e-o. So, do you mind telling me your name?

CELLPHONE

I told you, you probably don’t know me. I have all these people I barely met stored in my cell phone address book. And I just called you by accident.

man

So you’re saying this is a wrong number?

CELLPHONE

No! No… I mean… I reached you. The service somehow connected me to you!

MAN

Yes, but why do I care about you?

CELLPHONE

Because I’m stuck in the middle of a fuckin’ tsunami and you’re the only person who can hear me cry for help!

MAN

Oh jeez. How do I know this isn’t a prank call.

CELLPHONE

(his gurgling sound breaks up the speech intermittently)

Because, I’m surrounded by water, up to my neck, and I’m clinging onto a tree that’s giving me splinters for my dear life, and there are things floating in the water and my arm’s hurting from holding up this cellphone–and

MAN looks at the mail that’s slid through his door. One of them is evidently a donation request.

man

Right. Save the children, right? Tele-infomercial. You know what? I just got one of your spam ads by snail mail just now.

CELLPHONE

What?

MAN

Yeah, let me read it to you: “The Spiritual Children of Salvation… Donate to us to save your soul.”

CELLPHONE

What are you talking about? Do you realize what’s happening to me? My cell phone’s on low batts. I’m stuck in the middle of a tsunami. I can’t call anyone else–would you just–

MAN

Listen, I don’t know who you are or where you are. Now, how can I call for help for you?

CELLPHONE

I don’t know. Please… just do something.

man

Well, I guess I am. I’m wasting my time listening to you. So are you going to break into your pitch now?

cellphone

My what?

man

Your pitch. You know every telemarketer has one.

cellphone

What the heckjubah are you talking about?

MAN

(looks at watch)

You should start selling your product to me by now.

CELLPHONE

No. I mean…

MAN

(gently)

You might lose your job if you don’t sell enough you know. And I’m one of those kind people who will hear out your spiel and give you constructive criticism, so that you might be able to sell your stuff to the next person you call.

CELLPHONE

There isn’t going to be a next person I call–not on this cell phone at least. I mean it’s already got enough water logged in it from the spray and drizzle.

man

Oh yeah, you’re trying to sell something relating to cleaning up after some tsunami that isn’t actually happening.

CELLPHONE

What the fuck are you talking about? It IS HAPPENING! I’m surrounded by water.

man

Right… so you might want to clean up after yourself.

CELLPHONE

What?

MAN

Well, you’ve evidently wet your pants.

CELLPHONE

No kidding!

Silence for a long moment, as MAN disappears stage left, and comes back with a small foldable step-ladder. He climbs it and examines at the piece of roof or wall.

CELLPHONE

Listen, please help me.

man

I told you I can’t help you if I don’t know who you are or where you are. I mean, what am I going to do? Send a rescue team to the middle of nowhere looking for some guy with a cell phone?

CELLPHONE

(meekly)

Yes?

MAN

You have really got to work on your sales pitch.

CELLPHONE

I told you I’m not kidding. I’m really stuck in a tsunami or flood or major episode of water damage.

MAN

Right.

CELLPHONE

I’m not trying to sell you anything. I’m trying to ask you for your goddamn help!

MAN

And like I said earlier, I can’t help you until I know how and whom to send help to.

CELLPHONE

Holy shit.

MAN

What.

CELLPHONE

There’s… there’s a huge fire floating towards me.

man

Um, ok, so if you’re stuck in a huge flood, just put it out with the flood water.

CELLPHONE

That’s what I’m saying… There’s a fire coming towards me, and it’s not just following the currents, but it looks like the water is feeding it.

man

Right.

CELLPHONE

The water is shiny and multi-chromatic.

man

So you are selling detergent.

Cellphone

What? No… I mean, I guess it kind of looks like detergent. But, it’s oil. I think it’s an oil spill. It’s feeding off the oil spill.

MAN

Okay, so let me get this straight. You’re stuck on a tree in the middle of a great flood, which might be a tsunami, but you’re not sure what it is, or how you got there.

CELLphone

I know how I got there. I’m on assignment. I’m supposed to report on the indigenous culture of several southeast Asian cities. But, I’ve been on the road too long, and they’re all starting to blend on me.

MAN

I’m not done yet. So, as I was saying. You’re some guy stuck on a tree whose cell phone magically works in the middle of this huge tempest, and somehow calls me. And there’s a fire floating towards you. And, it’s floating on water.

cellphone

Yes!!! Oh my god–

man

What?

CEllphone

The tree’s on fire.

MAN

Okaay…

cellphone

Listen, man.

MAN

What?

cellphone

I’m sorry.

MAN

You’re sorry?

cellphone

I think this is the end.

MAN

Yeah, okay. Um, goodbye.

The cellphone’s usual static and wind is now overpowered by the sound of a crackling fire burning in the background.

CELLPHONE

Would you… would you do me a favor?

MAN

What?

CELLPHONE

Tell Nami I’m sorry.

MAN

Okay, Nami who?

CELLPHONE

Nami Jones

MAN

Ah…

CELLPHONE

Tell Nami Jones I love her, and… that I’m sorry. Her phone number is 555-45–

MAN

That’s my number.

CELLPHONE

What?

MAN

Nami is my wife.

CELLPHONE

Oh… Mr. Jones!

man

No…

CELLPHONE

I’m so sorry..

man

You…

CELLPHONE

I’m so very sorry…

man

You… of all people.

CELLPHONE

I–

MAN

Where is she?

CELLPhone

I… I don’t know. I left her to take on this assignment.

MAN

You left her?!

CELLPHONE

Yes… this would have made my career!

man

(yelling, but facing the window, thus with back to audience)

You left Nami Jones?!

CELLPHONE

Yes.

man

Well, here’s news for you–Nami Jones left me! And you left her!

CELLPHONE

Yes…

man

I could never do that…

CELLPHONE

You can’t?

MAN

I… I could never leave Nami Jones….

The sound of the crackling fire surges in the silence.

CELLPHONE

Um… good… I think… But, listen, I really have to split. The fire’s really burning up this tree. I don’t think my cellphone can stand much more water damage.

There’s the sound of a sudden fizzing, and the cellphone turns to a blank dialtone.

MAN

(faces the audience, slumps down with painful expression)

Nami. Nami… You… Him? Ugh…

MAN

Ugh.

Blackout.

Act II

MAN stands staring at the red phone on the wall for several long moments. Then he finally goes over and calls. NAMI’s voice emanates from the same places where CELLPHONE man’s voice once came from.

MAN

(verbalizes his dialing on phone)

555-4–

NAMI

Hwello.

MAN

Nami!

nami

Yes?

MAN

Thank god you’re all right!

NAMI

Yes… and who is this?

man

It’s Fred.

NAMI

Fred who…?

MAN

Fred… Fred Jones… Your husband.

NAMI

(with faked emotion)

Oh, Fred… Freddy…

man

(genuine relief)

Nami. I… I didn’t know if–

nami

Shit.

There’s the sound of a huge force on the other end, a wind or a giant current?

MAN

Shit?

NAMI

Tsunami!

MAN

Nami?

nami

Tsunami!!!

MAN

Okay… okay, Nami, honey, take it easy. You’re… you’re… there are trees outside?

nami

Yes.

man

Get out. Get on a tree.

NAMI

Why the hell would I do that?

man

You want to stay above the water.

nami

I’m 100 stories above ground.

MAN

Shit.

NAMI

I don’t think the water will reach me, honey. But, shit, it’s really messing things down below.

MAN

Shit. Is… is your building made out of steel?

nami

I’d think so. It’s a luxury apartment in a skyscraper.

MAN

Good. Okay, so remain calm.

NAMI

I am calm.

man

Okay, well, stay there.

nami

Not like I’ve got much choice. I a’int jumping out into the water. Oh shit…

man

What?

There’s the sound of a collision, shaking.

NAMI

That was huge. My windows are wet.

MAN

Nami, are you all right?

NAMI

It hit me.

man

It what?!

NAMI

I fell, that was how hard it hit the building.

MAN

Nami…

nami

What?

MAN

I…

NAMI

What?!

man

I love you, Nami…

NAMI

This ain’t no time to go soft and dickless. Man, we are at war.

MAN

We are?

NAMI

Hell, yeah. It’s war against Mother Nature.

MAN

(groans)

Nami…

NAMI

I am diving out there to save the people.

The sound of glass shattering. Wind. Silence.

MAN

Nami, nami.. no. don’t!

Wind.

MAN

Nami?

More wind.

MAN

(meekly)

Nami?

The sound of wind and spray.

MAN

Nami?!! NAMI!!!

MAN slumps into an emotional mess. MAN’s cellphone rings. CELLPHONE has a different accent, but has the same cellphone voice as CELLPHONE from Act 1.

CELLPHONE

Hey man.

man

(chokes through sobs)

Hi.

CELLPHONE

You wanna subscribe to The Mercury News?

MAN

No.

CELLPHONE

Okay. Bye.

MAN

Bye.

CELLPHONE

Hey wait, you sound sad.

MAN

Yes.

CELLPHONE

Anything I can do to help?

MAN

(sobs)

No.

CELLPHONE

Hey, well, there’s gotta be something I can do.

MAN

No.

cellphone

Well, how about this. Let me try to cheer you up.

man

(emphasis)

No.

CELLPHONE

Here, let me sing for you.

MAN

No. Please–

Cellphone

(offkey voice)

“I’m a little tea pot short and stout. Here is my handle and here is my–

man

Stop!

cellphone

Okay.

MAN

Go away.

CELLPHONE

Sorry, man, just trying to help. My momma always tells me my singing that song cheers her up.

MAN

Go AWAY!

cellphone

Hey, how about this, I’ll sing a song to make the bad weather go away, “Rain, rain, go away, come–”

man

(screams)

No!!! Go the FUCK away.

CELLPHONE

Hey man, no need to use dirty words in a perfectly core-dee-isle conversation.

MAN

Go away, please.

cellphone

But, I want to help.

MAN

Why?

cellphone

Because you need help.

man

(moans)

Why me?

cellphone

Because I’ve never called up on someone who needed help.

MAN

(kneels and looks to the sky)

Why now?

cellphone

Because you’re the number my telemarketing software auto-dailed?

MAN

Ugh!!!

cellphone

Hey man, chance put us together. I think I’m supposed to help you out, even if you won’t buy a subscription to The Mercury Newspaper.

man

(epiphany)

Oh my god…

CELLPHONE

What?

man

You..

CELLPHONE

Me?

man

You were trained to do this.

cellphone

Well, yes.

MAN

You were trained to… Oh my gawd… is this what they do now?

CELLPHONE

What?

MAN

They stage fictional natural disasters just to sell newspapers now. Huh.

CELLPHone

What?!

MAN

(hangs up on his cell and throws it across the room and laughs)

She’s okay. That burning tree guy who called me is okay. They’re all okay.

Blackout.

Act III

CELLPHONE rings. Man ignores it. It keeps ringing. He finally picks it up, and he’s about to lung it across the room to shatter it, but, CELLPHONE speaks before he gets to do that:

cellphone

Sir, it’s not okay.

man

What?

CELLPHONE

Oh, sorry. Hello, is this Mr. Jones

MAN

Yes, and things ARE okay. Now, if you telemarketers will stop it with this faking of real life drama, we could all just–

CELLPHONE

Sir, I’m afraid it’s not fake. What I’ve got to tell you is sad news.

MAN

Yeah, right. Well, I am not subscribing to The Mercury News… because I am already subscribing to it!

He bends down and picks up an imaginary newspaper

cellphone

No, sir, it’s not that. It’s just that I’m calling to tell you that your brother–your stepbrother–is dead.

MAN

Right!

CELLPHONE

I’m calling from Santa Monica, California. He apparently perished in a fire on a tree in the middle of the tsunami attack.

man

Wait, I thought he was in Southeast Asia.

CELLPHONE

No, sir, he’s been living in his trailer.

MAN

He said he was on top of a five story apartment. Wait, he’s my stepbrother? What… he and… Nami…

CELLPHONE

Well, you’re apparently the last number he called. He still had his cellphone clasped tight in his hand when we found him. And wonders of all wonders, the phone still works.

man

My step-brother. Jake. Nami…

CELLPHONE

I understand you may need some time to yourself. I’m just doing my duty to the deceased, trying to close and mend what broken things I can.

MAN

(sobs)

I can’t believe that…

CELLPHONE

It’s all right, sir. I’ll leave you to yourself now.

man

No, wait!

CELLPHONE

Yes, sir?

man

No, don’t leave me alone, please.

CELLPHONE

Sir, I think…

man

I… I can’t believe that…

CEllphone

Sir, you need to take some time off from work or what you’re doing to reflect on the events that transpired, and to heal yourself. But, that’s something you have to do yourself.

man

No!

CELLPHONE

Sir, please–

MAN

I can’t believe my step-brother ran off with my wife! That backstabbing two-bit–

CELLPHone

Sir, if that’s the case, they’re both beyond this world now. You should make amends with what wrongs they may have done to you, and leave it at that.

man

Make amends?

CELLphone

Yes, sir.

man

Make amends at a cheating and lying and worthless piece of crap of a stepbrother who’d lie about his career of ‘journalism’ in southeast Asia.

cellphone

Sir, I realize you have a lot of anger harbored against your… your step-brother. But, that’s something you have to reflect on your own and come to your own terms with.

man

I… My own terms….

CELLPHONE

(gently, with relief, getting ready to hang up)

Yes, sir.

man

Burn him.

CELLPHone

Excuse me?

man

Burn him!

CELLPHONE

I’m sorry, sir. I don’t follow.

MAN

BURN HIM! Burn my step-brother.

CELLPHONE

Cremation isn’t a service that volunteers like me provide for, sir.

man

I don’t care. BURN him. That’s the only way to find out if it’s just faking it.

cellphone

Excuse me?

MAN

I said BURN HIM!

CELLPHONE

Sir, you don’t seem to realize the situation. Your step-brother is one of the deceased victims we have recovered from the recent tragedy that fell on the coast of Santa Monica and surrounding regions. He’s dead, sir. And he’s dead with his hand frozen and clasped around a cell phone. And the last number he called was yours. And all I did wascall you back to tell you what happened. You obviously meant a lot to him.

man

He called me by accident.

cellphone

Well, he had your number stored in his phone, then.

man

He told me he had thousands of numbers stored in his phone. And he just called me by accident because his hot keys don’t seem to work.

cellphone

Nope, looking through his phone list. Looks like you’re one of the only people on the list.

man

Who else is on the list?

CELLPHone

Just you, Mom, and Nami.

MAN

You sound like him? Who are you?

CELLPHone

A volunteer. My name is Sam.

man

Bullshit.

cellphone

(attitude)

Excuse me?

man

I said: bullshit!

cellphone

Do you have a problem with my name?

MAN

Yes, yes I do! Because, that’s NOT your name. Your name is Jake, and you’re faking your death, you–

CELLPHONE

My name is Sam, and that will be all.

Dialtone. MAN throws his phone across the room. It shatters.

MAN

Good riddance.

Blackout.

Act IV

MAN calls Nami on his landline phone.

man

Nami?

NAMI

Hwello.

man

You aren’t dead?

NAMI

Dead?

MAN

You… didn’t you jump out the window to save everyone?

NAMI

Yeah. But, I’m back now.

MAN

You…

NAMI

Yes?

MAN

(laughs happily)

You… you’re alive.

NAMI

Yes. Should I not be?

MAN

You’re alive!

NAMI

Yes…

MAN

Hey, listen, do you have Jake’s number?

NAMI

(hesitant voice)

No…

man

It’s all right. I know all about it.

NAMI

Do… do you want a divorce now?

man

No, no, I’m cool. Just… do you have Jake’s number?

nami

No… what are you going to do to him?

man

Nothing. I just want his number

nami

No… you… you’re going to do something.

MAN

Nothing, like I said. I just want his number. His cellphone number.

nami

No, you are going to tell me what you’re going to do with it.

MAN

I just want to call him to see if he’s okay.

NAMI

Oh my god… Jake…

man

What?

NAMI

He’s… he was at the bungalow

MAN

Wait a minute… you mean you saw him recently? I thought you were in Bangkok… Oh, wait, yeah, you ran off with him in your extramarital affair.

NAMI

It’s not that… Well, yes, it’s that. I’m not in Bangkok. I’m just down in Santa Monica. But, it’s just that…

MAN

Yeah?

NAMI

Well, while I was out there saving people, I saw what happened to the trailer park. The whole place got squashed. Literally.

MAN

(dawning expression)

Oh…

nami

He’s dead, Johnny. Your half-brother, Jake Jones, is dead.

MAN

Oh my god…

NAMI

Yeah.

MAN

I’m sorry… I need a moment.

NAMI

It’s okay. Me too.

NAMI and MAN both hang up.

MAN

(head to knees, falls)

Oh my god…

Blackout.

Act V

MAN sits cross legged facing the window. Though it’s still daytime outside, it’s grown dark.

MAN

Nami… Jake… Nami… Jake.

He gets up and reaches for the PHONE.

MAN

Hi, I’d like to speak to the volunteer who found Jake Jones’ body and cellphone?

phone

Um, I’m gonna need more than that.

man

Well, he called me a couple of hours ago. It was… still bright and sunny outside.

PHONE

Well, it ain’t been bright and sunny here for some time now.

MAN

Yes–but I’m halfway across the state, inland.

phone

Right, so you’re lookin for?

MAN

Jake Jones’ rescuer. I mean.. he didn’t rescue Jake, but he found his body and he called me on his cell phone.

phone

Well, that’s got to be one heck of a cell phone.

MAN

Yeah, Jake always had a thing for expensive weather-proof toys.

phone

Uh huh. Well, I’m gonna need a name.

MAN

I don’t know. They didn’t tell me their name. He–Jake’s rescuer–did mention something about trying to help make amends.

PHONE

Sounds like an overeager volunteer.

man

Well, the situation is kind of complicated. Jake was holding onto his cellphone when he died.

PHONE

Must have been one heck of a call.

MAN

Yeah, he was calling me…

phone

Well, I’m glad you got to say goodbye to him.

man

Well, that’s the thing, I didn’t actually get to say goodbye.

phone

No… the man calls you with his last breath and you don’t even have the decency to wish him bye?

man

No, well, I did say goodbye, it’s just I didn’t know who he was–is–whatever–until after… much after.

PHONE

Well, you have got to start using caller ID, Mr. Jones–and maybe even train your ears. I ain’t seen a man who can’t tell the voice of his family member.

man

Well, he’s not really family. I mean, he is, but–he’s my step brother, and we haven’t spoken for over ten years. And… and…

phone

(not impressed)

Yeah?

man

My… my wife ran off with him.

phone

Divorced?

MAN

No…

phone

Need your money?

MAN

No…

PHONE

You’re too boring…

MAN

(sobs)

Maybe…

PHONE

Hey, it’s all right.

man

No. No it’s not!

PHONE

Okay then, no it’s not.

man

That’s right! My stepbrother is dead!

PHONE

There, there…

There’s the evident sound of some whispering, but the words are blurred in the slurs of wind.

phone

Now, listen, I’m going to patch you over to a volunteer, who’ll talk to you, and maybe help make you feel less bad.

man

(mumbles)

Okay…

The person on the PHONE now sounds distinctly like the volunteer rescuer.

phone

Hi, there, Mr. Jones. How are you?

MAN

(sobs)

Sfiweo

phone

What’s that?

MAN

(sobs)

I feel like I’ve drowned.

PHONE

(sad)

Yes, many have, today. Who did you lose?

MAN

(sobs)

My stepbrother. And I didn’t even know it was him…

PHONE

There, there…

MAN

And he wasted his last dying breaths calling him on his cell phone.

phone

Whoa.. You’re that Jones?

man

Yes… yes… you–you’re the rescuer!

phone

Sir, I’m glad you’ve finally come to terms with your loss.

man

Jake!!!

PHONE

No, sir, I’m sam.

man

(moans)

Jake!!!

PHONE

Sir, while I don’t reckon it’s safe for you to board transportation to the vicinity, but maybe if you come down here, things would all make sense.The situation is very simple. I am not Jake. I am Sam.

MAN

But, you sound just like Jake!

phone

I think it’s the broken patch cable, sir. It might make me sound like someone on a dying cell phone line.

man

No…

PHONE

Sir, it’s all right. Many have lost loved ones today. You’re not alone.

MAN

That’s the thing. You don’t understand. I never loved Jake. Jake was always the brother who got EVERYTHING. In fact, he even… he got Nami, too. Ugh… I hate Jake!

phone

Sir, now is no time to act childish. You really ought to just sit down and calm yourself.

Gets up and goes to the window.

man

I am sitting!

PHONE

Uh huh.

MAN

Oh my…

phone

Yes?

MAN

You see that?

phone

See what?

MAN

That thing.

A great shadow covers the sky outside.

phone

What?

NAMI is right outside, but she gets sucked up.

MAN

Dammit. Nami!

It becomes evident that the world outside has now been taken over by a huge tornado.

PHONE

What?

MAN

Twister.

phone

Oh man… You really–

MAN

(in tears)

Nami… Jake… Nami. Oh, Nami…

Twister nears, but a heavy burst of water hits the window. Blackout.