It’s early in the morning, or late at night. You can’t tell if the sun is rising or setting from inside the drugstore. I’m way in back holding up a rectangular, silver box with a circular button on it’s side. It’s supposed to look like an external hard drive but I know it’s a weapon. It takes some time before I figure out that it’s just folded up and compressed in a few places. Some of the parts need to be twisted and turned like a Rubik’s Cube.
I’m standing there with my head down, fumbling with the gadget when I hear, rather than see, the buffer overflow. They’ve come in through the front entrance and already taken a few hostages. Looking up, I see the leader with a long black coat and sunglasses. Cute…[insert sardonic emoticon here]. The flyboys with him are Turkish squatters, leaking out into the aisles like waves of animated baggy corduroy. They move quickly but the aisles are long.
I see another like me, with a weapon like mine. He smoothly launches it in the air where the box unfolds against the air resistance, mechanically recompiling itself into a firearm. As he begins his assault, I give mine the same treatment. It doesn’t work for me the first time because I don’t throw it high enough. I have to launch it into the air a couple of times before it completely unfolds. On the final spin and catch I pull it close to my face, careful to aim at the leader. Through the circular lens in the front I can see him closely. My left hand steadies my right arm but he’s too far away. I can’t get a dead lock but I fire anyway for practice. It’s the first time I’ve used one of these contraptions. It misses, spraying a payload of half a dozen holes in the wall, several meters from my target.
The activity alerts the pack of my location and I tally ho, back and forth, unsure where to maneuver. The flyboy rats are descending quickly and I decide to make a stand. The weapon aimed, I fire right at the adrenaline infused miscreant mass. The gun does nothing. Not even a click, click, click as I frantically and insanely try again and again to riddle with holes the scurrying forces of ill intent.

“Hey man, if you get this mod, it adds a 1/4-inch jack to your computer so you can record the instrument with no prob. It also has this 1/8th-inch jack that receives bootleg radio–all the music shows going on right now in the world, man, all there for you to record with a simple turn of the dial. It’ll tear up your available storage, man, you’ll run out in no time. You’re music collection is dust compared to what you will capture with this baby!” The music shop boy laughs in a semi-maniacal technolust.
“Well,” I waver, “I don’t really need to add anything else to my music collection–that’ll just suck up my time. I’ve already got so much I haven’t listened to.”
“Get the instrument, man. For a hundred bucks you can’t pass it up. You’ll never find another like it. Say it with me man, Electric-Guitar. Nobody has seen one of these things in forever man! It’s claa-ssic, man! It’s got strings and all.”
He tempts me with the antique but I’m here looking for some new tech–something I have never seen. But this guy hasn’t got anything like that. I was syncing musical DNA before this little terminal stain was suckling his first drop of Infojuice™.
I walk out into the bright Thai sunlight and met up with my friends. “Let’s swim through this mess,” I say in the cool vernacular of my day. My friends agree, but we need a map. We’ve never been to this part but Lena knows a bookshop in the area where we can get a secret map.
“It’s hidden in the cover of The Beach. I put it there last summer. Nobody will find it.” She assures.
“What if someone bought the book?” I query.
“Don’t worry, I had some cheap labor make copies in all the versions of the book–but even if someone finds it, they won’t understand it :)” She points at the air making two dots and a swish. She doesn’t need to smile anymore, her hands can do it for her. It’s the new rave that all the kids are doing, gestures for emotions. They say it let’s you stay young by never needing to wrinkle your face. Emote with your hands and never need ironing.
When we get to the bookshop, there’s only one copy of The Beach left. I fish under the cover of the book and find it. “Is this it?” The map doesn’t look all that special. It’s like a theme park map, something you would pick up at Space World with all the attractions in big cartoon pictures.
“That’s it. Let’s run.”
We literally get lost so we can test out the map.
“OK, 3rd and Franklin, look it up.”
“There is no 3rd on this map, it’s 10 years old. We’re standing on a dirt road. This was obviously built recently.”
“Let’s walk up a block then.” She suggests. We get up another block and end up in a stream, swimming with guppies and huge schools of little round fish. I snap photos while the tide carries us downstream.
“Hey, check out the walls around the river, they look like gargoyles.” I point and click. Around the mountains, half way in the water are midget sized gargoyles with octopus tentacle hair and huge alien eyes. Their bodies are fish like but they have little arms, no bigger than the tentacles on their heads. As I photograph and float on by, they start to lift their heads and watch us. One heads over and I realize it has a humongous head. “Does it speak telepathically,” I ask, to nobody in particular.
“How did you know.” My friend answers.
“Just a lucky guess, it doesn’t have a mouth but obviously they have bigger brains than we do.”
The creature swims around me. It’s not threatening, just curious and eventually we exit it’s domain. The water carries us far.

So my doorbell rings while we’re watching a movie and I run down the stairs with ambivalence. It’s either someone with info about my lost cat or another newspaper salesman. I start mentally preparing my speech, which I’ve given a few times and always results in a quick end to the sales pitch. It’s simple and to the point:
“Newspapers are old technology. I read the news online, the day before it goes to print. It’s a waste of resources and it’s not as good as the free alternative.”
Although I’ve been tempted, I’ve never offered what I suspect would be a catchy and accurate new slogan for the printed press, “Yesterday’s News, Today!”
My goal is never to make enemies, just to make them go away.
Opening the door, I’m shocked to see a guy holding a black cat.
“Hey, I saw the posters up.”
“Is that…” I reach out for it, pulling the cat in for a closer look. “Oh, is that… it’s… wait…. it’s not him. He’s too small. A little young. But he looks so much like him…”
I set the cat on the ground and meet my neighbor, who’s name I instantly place wrong in my memory, later calling him Jake instead of Dave.
I thank him for bringing the cat anyway, “I wonder who’s he is, anyway…” I watch the cat as it sniffs around my porch.
After closing the door and running back upstairs, I tell Lena about the encounter.
“Are you sure it wasn’t him? Maybe he just lost a lot of weight.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t him, he was too young and different. It looked a lot like him though… Like Thor 3 or 4 years ago. I’ll go back and get him so you can see.”
I run back outside and see the cat across the street, sniffing at a tree. I pick him up and bring him inside. “You aren’t Thor. You’re too small and young. You smell different, too.”
I show Lena and she almost convinces me that it might be Thor, traumatized and different, lighter and more spry from the shock and activity of stray life for four days.
Cassiopeia hisses and the new cat is way too playful to be Thor. He smells around the house and doesn’t understand the cat door leading into the garage without my help, holding it open for him. He eats and plays, very friendly and looking comfortable but unfamiliar the whole while. It’s not him. But what do we do? He doesn’t have a collar. He might be a stray. He might be someone’s lost cat, just like our Thor. Maybe the people who lost him took our cat in by mistake. They look remarkable alike. We could take him to the shelter and tell them if nobody claims him to call us… then we could figure out what to do with him… damn, it’s Sunday and the shelter is closed. Why do they make it so difficult?
“Maybe I can take it outside and follow it around back to it’s house…”
“OK”, Lena is too tired with an ear infection.
I take the cat out and for a while he doesn’t do anything but circle a car parked in front of our house, weaving in and out of the tires and occasionally coming back to our porch to sniff around some more. Eventually, I urge him to follow me away from the car. He strolls over noncommittally to the fence across the way, exploring all the while, battering rocks and sticks, chewing on twigs and doing Parkour around the fence and telephone polls. Several times he leaps onto a phone poll, straddling it with his forepaws outstretched and jumps to get higher in little bursts of bear hug furry. He’s certainly wild. He knows how to work the outside. Darting in and out of a hole in the fence, he shows me around the area. I lose him for a while as he travels the other side of it so I run around the block. Maybe he lives in that house. I could ask them. When I get to the house, there is a man coming home.
“Do you have a black cat?” I ask.
“No, there are some posters though.”
“Yeah, that ones mine, but I saw another one that’s too small and doesn’t have a collar. I just want to make sure he has a home. Oh, there he is.” The little cat runs from the back yard of the neighboring house up to me.
“Where?” the man looks around, not seeing the cat.
“Right there.” I point to it as he runs up into my arms.
The man still doesn’t see the cat around but congratulates me on finding it and says “good luck” finding my other cat.
I thank him and take the cat back. Every few houses, he makes a curious sound and I set him down to walk alongside me. He doesn’t run away, just along. We get back to my house and he comes inside when I open the door. He plays with yarn and we wonder how we can manage taking him to the shelter since they close at 6pm. After a while, I decide to take him out again.
It’s darker so I bring a flashlight and a laser pointer.
This time, the cat heads over in the other direction. I follow him to the back parking area of the townhouses behind us. He makes a daring jump onto a high fence and I follow him with the flashlight as he goes to0 far for me to follow. After losing track of him, I get a little worried and run around the block to the other side of the fence. There’s a lot of space back there and I circle the houses around that area until I’m sure he must have gone back to where we started. Again, I run around the block, this time exhausted as I approach my house.
Out of the corner of my eye, behind a fire hydrant, next to the hole in the fence, I see him.
“puuRreow”, I call but he begins to retreat into the hole as I approach. “Hey, come on, where you goin’?”
I get closer and I notice he looks a little tense and scared. He’s different. He looks bigger, bigger eyes, different meow. I reach down and pick him up and I’m fully certain. This is Thor. The other cat is nowhere in sight and I take my cat home.

I spent the night looking for my cat. At one point, after I fell asleep, I found him hanging out on the street, cleaning himself, with a blue collar and a new name tag. He had been catnapped by a neighbor and given away as a gift. We found the people who took him through some clues left behind at the scene. We took it home and pieced together who they were and why they did it.
Half-way through the night, I woke up disappointed, realizing it didn’t really happen.
Later, I dreamed that I found him across the street, in a dark cave-like crevasse. I could see his green eyes light up inside it and when I meowed at him, he came running out. I woke again, several times, disappointed that the place I found him in my dream doesn’t really exist. I dreamed and awoke not realizing that I was still asleep in each waking. After dream frustration, I got up and ran out to find the area that I had dreamed about. It was just across the street from the house. I found the small cave underneath a pond and surely he was there. I woke up Lena with him in my arms and she was amazed to see him. She wanted to know where I found him so we went out to the spot, Thor still held tight.
As Lena was examining the area, the wind started blowing extremely hard.
“Is this where you found him?” Lena shouted over the wind.
“Come over here, we need to head back.” I screamed.
We were only a couple blocks away from the house and I hit the crosswalk button with my foot, clutching Thor with my hands.
“The wind is picking up, we need to get out of this hurricane! I don’t want to lose him again!” This last part felt strange, like a sappy movie quote.
The cars and trucks driving past us started to drive much faster. A massive truck went by, floating several feet off the ground. A Metro bus passed us with only one wheel remaining, floating in the middle of the undercarriage. It had lost all the others from skidding over the sidewalks at magnificent speeds and smashing it’s parts into the sides of the concrete. Pieces of vehicles started to glide by us and drift off the cars and trucks as they came by.
I pushed against the wind, holding myself on the ground with the weight of my guilt for losing Thor.
A car went by sideways, parts flying and riping off it. Lena exclaimed, “yes, you are dangerous,” to the driver, as if he was spinning out for fun–and he may have been.
Time slowed and we used it to our advantage, navigating between parts of the flying wreckage, like a giant 3D Frogger but instead of cars and logs, it was massive pieces of automotive shrapnel.
We eventually made it inside the house but then I realized I must still be asleep. Thor was home and the world outside was in windy chaos. The streets were coming up off the road and telephone polls where I had stuck the “Missing Cat” posters were being eaten by the Nothing.
I woke up for the last time, “I’m working from home today–so I can look for Thor…” I told Lena.
We’ll find him.

Everyone was speaking acitaciously in my dream last night:

a·ci·ta·cious [ah-si-tey-shuhs]
–adjective

1. characterized by supplying the suffix -acity on words that may not need it.
2. a type of suffixiousness, using -acity as the main instrument of verbal bludgeoning.

Example:

Person A: “My cleveracity is too great for you.”
Person B: “Your meageracious, acitacious suffixiousness is too weakacious for awesomeaciousness.”

acitatious words:

cleveracity, urbanacity, awesomacity, doggedacity, tenaciousacity, etc…

I’m on an unknown island with a bunch of tourists. The trees are strange, like a cross between Palms and Redwoods. Sometimes they look upside down, fruit on the bottom and roots in the high sky.

I have come to this place for treatment. I have a tree growing in my scull. It was planted there to aid in the destruction of a parasite that would have killed me. But now, I worry that the tree might do the same.

“What kind of tree is it?” asks a fellow traveler.
“You see those Redwoods? kind of like that, only thin. Really tall, but not wide enough to break my scull. Someday it will be up to 10 times my height and I don’t think I will be able to stand up any longer to carry it.” As moments transition, sometimes the tree is already partially grown out of my head and I feel it’s weight.
“Where are we anyway,” he continues.
“Isn’t this the redwood forest? That’s where they film all the movies with redwood trees. See there… wait the trees are changing. None of these are Redwoods… they look odd, like no tree I know…” I continue in baffled amazement, staring at the changing landscape. A well dressed man walks over to our group and begins to explain.
“Welcome,” he begins with a smile. “You all have many questions, I am sure, and you have all come from different places. You will find that barely anyone here speaks the same language and most find it best to speak in raw tones rather than familiar words. You will find that over time, you will understand perfectly everyone’s thoughts and intentions. Merely listen and what you have come for will be granted.”
My hopes do not increase but the landscape and buildings remain impressive. Most of the man-made structures appear Greek. Pillars and open public swimming pools with people falling into them fully clothed.

I’m in London, infiltrating a Scientology community. They’ve taken over the city, claiming all of London’s precious history as their own. I ride the free Scientology train across the city, pretending to be one of them.
A big English man stops me as I exit the tubes.
“Where you headed boy?”
“Oh, I’m just seeing the sites, taking it in… you know. Hey, how do we prevent people from using this free tube service if they aren’t involved?”
“We don’t have to worry about that. Nobody has yet taken advantage of our system without soon entering the ranks.”
“Oh,” I raise my eyebrows, “good then, I’ll just be on my way.”
I have a feeling he’s on to me so I take off running up a broken marble staircase. The whole city is in ruins. Every attraction looks like the Colosseum, broken and disheveled.
“What happened here,” I ask myself. A passerby stops, looks right into my eyes and speaks in a slow drone.
“We are building the new mecca. It’ll be like Disneyland, only better. We just had to tear down some old things that were in our way. We might use some of the parts for the rides.”

I woke up this morning with a new word floating around from my dreams. After searching google and the Urban Dictionary, I have verified that nobody has defined or used this word yet on the interweb.

Once it’s approved on Urban Dictionary, it will be there. For now, it’s here:

suffixiousness
–noun

1. excessive suffixes
2. the practice of using extra suffixes on words
words that have suffixiousness:

* awesomeacious
* fantasticaliciousness
* anonymousnessity

1. “The fatasticaliciousness nature of this situation is awesomacious”

2. “Your suffixiousness is killing me”
Source: Adam Eivy, Seattle

When I switched to Clearwire last summer, I canceled my Comcast broadband. When i called, they were amicable.
“Can we do anything to keep you? We can cut your monthly bill in half…”
I said, “tempting, but I’m switching to Clearwire. The modem is already in the mail.”
I knew that I was going to take a performance hit by going to Clearwire, moving down fron 9Mb/3Mb to 1.5Mb/768Kb. That was a sacrifice I could make to be a part of the wireless broadband revolution.
I lowered my standards of broadband because Clearwire was a cool company and I was proud to tell people about it.
Several months went by and Clearwire worked fine. A few minor outages for a short period were the only setbacks–something I expected from a new, growing broadband provider.

Having just moved 3 miles closer to downtown Seattle, I was sad to find that my new house does not get Clearwire service. I was so disappointed. I wanted to keep my Clearwire modem. Sure it’s much slower than cable but they will have Wi-Max soon (One reason I wanted to joined in the first place). I didn’t want to leave but I had no choice. Clearwire can’t service me.

I called Support and explained my situation.
“You will have to have someone take over your contract to avoid paying the early termination fee of $195. I can give you the number of someone in your local market who has a list of people you could transfer it to.”
I get transferred. I talk to Sean. Sean has no idea what the support rep in Florida is talking about. He says he’ll get back to me after he researches it. Several days later I get a voice mail that he doesn’t know what she’s talking about and if he can be of any other assistance to let him know–meanwhile explaining that his department didn’t handle that kind of thing and I would be better off talking to someone else.

Well, damn. I don’t have time to be a Clearwire salesman. I’ve already told my friends and family about Clearwire and I work at a Web startup company–all my friends and co-workers already have internet with higher speeds and better uptime (and after mentioning my predicament to my co-workers, I found that Clearwire didn’t have the good reputation I expected amongst my peers). So, I was stuck. I can’t find someone to take my contract–and I don’t want to shove it on someone else’s plate if they are going to get this kind of treatment. So I call back.

Many times, I talk to them and get thrown back and forth, called back, disconnected, etc…

Finally, after a long negotiation, someone says I can schedule a technician to come to my house and verify that I don’t have a signal. If the tech finds no signal, I won’t have to pay the fee. Ok, great, let’s do it.

I get the guy to come over on Friday evening. I leave work a half hour early to meet the guy. He doesn’t show up until half an hour past the appointment time. He wanders through the house, up and down all three floors and finally concludes that, indeed, I have no service. Great, I did that myself on day 1. Thanks.

Monday, I call Clearwire again. This time, they say that it doesn’t matter. I still have to pay the fee because I’m under contract at my old address. I tell them to have someone call me back who can influence this policy. This is, I say, the one reason I will not go back to Clearwire in the future. I’m on a 2 year moving plan. I expect to sometimes not get service and I will have to change over–but I’m not going back to Clearwire if this is what I can expect from them. It’s not worth my time or energy.

Today, I get a call back from Matt at Level 2 support.

Since I wasted (and was charged for) a month with no service, trying to get my plan canceled at a reasonable cost, Matt from Level 2 was able to refund this last month of service fees. yay. It’s great that they don’t charge customers for a month of service they didn’t give, but I still wasted many hours on the phone with Clearwire and left work early to meet a guy at my house. In the end, they still want me to pay the early termination fee to kill my contract that extends until July of 2009.

So, I’ve already wasted $200 worth of my time and I’m paying another $195 to get the Clearwire monkey off my back. Needless to say, however excited about Wi-Max I may be, I’m not going back to Clearwire anytime soon–and although I recommended Clearwire to friends and family before, I am now on a mission to rant to everyone about how bad this customer service situation was for me. Maybe Clearwire will be better in the future but they are going to have to extend more than a welcome handshake and a bill for service if they want me to join them again.

In the shallow ocean, I’m lifting mussels and sea-snails from the bed. Multicolored, shiny, they swim away, extending thin pneumatocyst filled anemone strands, like little Cthulu tentacles reaching for freedom. They roll in and out of the shells, extending with great length and gracefulness, gliding around the water.
“Look at that.” I point to a bright orange one I just picked up.
“When do we get to dive into the water?” Says a member of the group. I’m teaching a diving course and for some reason everyone thinks I mean Olympic diving rather than scuba diving. I give in and drag a tall diving platform out into the water and everyone climbs up to the top. It’s just floating on the water, somehow buoyant, unanchored. I check the water level and note that we are still too shallow to have someone dive off the platform. They would certainly see some great shellfish but too quickly and with an abrupt end.
I push the platform further out into the ocean and then realize that we aren’t tied to anything on shore. We could float away with the tide. There is no tide. That is the strange part about this ocean. Perfectly calm, it has no waves, like a vast and open salt-water swimming pool. I tie the platform up to something on the shore, but only a little bit. The divers are so eager, I don’t have time to do it properly.

In a restaurant above the water, it’s valentine’s day and a couple celebrates. Their food is terrible and their service is worse. I am waiting tables there.
We are playing a board game and I put all the pieces in the wrong place. “It’s a game like Roborally but with bots”. Nobody is very excited because they don’t like Roborally.

At my grandmother’s house, a band wakes up early to jam. They are playing Beatles songs with a punk overtone and I wish I brought my accordion because I could certainly jam with them. They record on Protools and sing like demons. I worry that they will wake my grandparents but then I figure they have already left for the day.

I’m killing time in a book store. The shop keeper has several old and valuable books for quite reasonable prices but I cannot get them because I am moving. I’ll get them later, I promise myself. The back half of the book store is a comic shop. I step in to kill a few minutes but it’s closed. As I open the door a short punk girl comes over and asks if she can help me.
“I was just seeing if the comic store is open.”
“Oh, no it’s closed today, didn’t you know?”
“Oh, right, it’s Sunday,” I mumble, “or, no, it’s Monday but it’s a holiday, right…”
As I’m leaving a guy is pointing to some comics on a shelf in the bookstore. It’s Elfquest and he says he has digital copies of the series on his iPhone, but he says it in a French accent so I expect his comics were in French too.

Taking the bus home, I get off later than usual. I want to head further north. I take my shirt off in the summer heat and I grab up at a Thai style tree branch. There are countless birds in the trees and they swarm away from me from tree to tree.
Soon, I realize that they are not running away but leading me. They fly closer to my head and I reach out. They land on my shoulder, my hands. They try to teach me the best way to approach them but I’m slower than they are. Suddenly, I’m looking down at someone else. He’s acting very slow, some might say moronic. He doesn’t get the birds perspective–the birds-eye-view. They try to communicate but he doesn’t understand. They show him a calendar they made and he reads it wrong, looking at the French instead of the English side. He doesn’t know any french and thinks they must have invented a new language. He reads it horribly aloud. He becomes their protectorate knight. He recruits a half dozen followers, some of which think he is insane. He stays with the birds until the great bird Armageddon, wearing a knight suit and carrying a great sword.