Deprived of my descendant and his torpidscraller, I am resorting to the old means of storing information. I held in my hand several 8 inch floppy disks which I magnetized variously to retain what words I could think of to describe my situation, or sitch, as I called it. You could basically do that to any word. Or, you cou bas d th t an wo. This is the method used by the Chadfolk in their Fratlands.

The sun was beginning to spread it’s funny yellow stuff all over the face of Toronto, back here in 2009. The health clerics had scrambled all night trying to find my buddy, (name deleted), but they failed and failed and failed in heaps. Despite all their cool recon, they couldn’t ferret out any clues. My damn suit was low on power and that meant that I had to find a source of shame, and soon. Perhaps if I could just find some catholic, I would be able to probe the suit’s apparently endless fact modules for some explanation of (name deleted)’s disappearance.

What was most unusual about it was that he didn’t vanish all at once. The clerics and their servile ones kept checking up on him throughout the night. At first, one of them noticed that his foot had been missing, and described a very frown-like sensation in the room. The doctors seemed puzzled, but not overly concerned. However, once a leg had vanished they began to change their tunes to much lower pitched and whispered ones. After a brief conclave, they assured me that he was just doing a little disappearing, which was to be expected after a traumatic bullet party of the bodymass he was made from, and that I shouldn’t be too concerned. Despite knowing that his was in no way typical, and that I could easily prevent it from continuing by shaming someone and using the sharms to erect a glinting crystal hug of safety around my buddy, somehow te fact that the doctor was wearing a white coat prevented me from doing that. Later that night, when the doublelegs of the man and his unibody were all vanished, the doctors reiterated that a bit of total vanishing was to be expected in situations like these. When I asked what situations these were like, I was told that they were like individual non-comparable situations in which nothing was predictable and anything could potentially take place. Those kinds of situations. And again, white coat, I complied. Later, all that was left was an anus shadow, seeping out grave concern in the form of muted jazz trumpet solos. It was only when the hot sounds of Louis Armstrong ceased that the medicos became theoreticos and began a mad postulation frenzy, the like of which had not been seen since Postulon and his Cogni-sharks had first encountered Conundrus the Baffler and his three conflicting truths, Destinarius, Volitius, and The 5 sided Octagon.

There were guesstimations of every shape and size. Some belived it was somehow related to over-prescripton of antibiotics, while others still believed that too. Some suggested that he wasn’t actually gone, but infact, was simply resting more efficiently than anyone in history. He was a prodigy at not being there while resting. According to this theory, he was “mad resting, mega in bed, but his bod was hella unnecessary for such killer restage. So his bod just vanished to scope new vistas while his resting progressed sans supervision, dudes.” This theory gained many adherents throughout the decades to come, but none during that first meeting.

An entire wing of the hospital was closed as doctors exhausted all the sodas in dispensers, and chirped out fascinating and quaint means by which a body might vanish. Some kind of trick, I heard one say. Yeah right, like the Vanishing Act of 55939 CZM was somehow not in force anymore. Give me a break.
When it became clear that my buddy was not returning, I did the only sensible thing. I gathered my thoughts and found a healing space where I could center myself, and then absolved myself of all responsibility, both orally and through infusions of tea tree oil, which naturally was self defeating as my own shame might have powered my suit enough to locate my buddy. Still, it wasn’t my problem any more, I had shouted at anyone who was wearing red or who had bad glasses. “Bad old glasses!” I also sometimes yelled, but not recently. It was just something I tried as a teenager, one assumed. Not that I was ever a teenager, but I feel like had I been one, it would have been inevitable, and thus, despite being created a full grown man, the inevitability of my existence as a shouty teen was fact.

If only I had one of those white coats, I extracted from my surmiser. Then I could command anyone to be ashamed, just by telling them simple facts about things. But where could I get one? Where in this hospital might a man such as myself, free of obligation, find a white coat, free of clams? Where do you go to get away from the clams who always claimed ownership of anything you liked before you could get your hands on it. I feel like its just to stop you from having anything you like; the clams don’t even do anything with all those things!

I’m going to stop writing now, and spread my fledgling wings and attempt to grab hold of a white coat somewhere in this building. If I’m successful, you’ll hear from me again shortly.

A long time later, i still have not returned. What the hell happened to me? WHy am i not writing any more?

To be continued…

“Oh, he’s awake!” observed a glasses man standing in clothes at the foot of my bed. “You’ve had a troubling night, mister Fox.”

“Water,” i sang.

“Yes, water indeed. As i was saying, you’ve had a pretty tricky night last night. I’m not sure how to tell you this, so i’ll just come right out and say it.”

“Water,” i urged.

“THank you. And water to you too, mister Fox. Water and thine. Now, last night, you were placed within the bounds of what we in the medical profession refer to as an altercation. There was some shooting, and there were some bullets. Are you with me so far?

“Water.”

“Now mister Fox, I really must insist that you stop playing ‘Good old water talker’. THis is serious business. There are these bullets, you see? And they are somewhere. That’s what i’m reaching towards here. These bullets are somewhere. TOTALLY somewhere, in a major way. THis should be of interest to you, Mister Fox, as you are intimately acquainted with where they are. Now i’ll give you a few guesses, but after two or three, if you haven’t gotten it, then i really must insist that you allow me to ruin the surprise and just tell you. You may guess now.”

He was a true ancient man, down to his rigid endo-skeleton from which he suspended his fibrous organs and muscles. A true man of the age, in that regard. I stared into his peepers using my staring trumpet, hooked as it was, invisibly now, to my auralon duct. Visionscreaming into his eye, i had been lead to believe by numerous examples of classical music that I would be able to see his soul. This man had a soul of modified skin that abosrbed light and converted it into neurological impulses. He had a soul of retina. A true visionary.

“Are you going to guess?” he probed.

I was uncertain how to proceed. in situations such as this, situations where someone is talking to me, my normal solution is to drop harp-combs and really square around. Just angle it down to 90 for a little while, and let the harp get the tangles out. In a major way. BUt then again, who was I? merely the great harp-comber of the squaredown, eight years in a row. A memmory?! I had a memory. I was a harpcomber! I exherted myself in five dimensions, trying to pry my thoughbox open just enough to glimpse the hams inside, but nay, good friend. Nay, shan’t be.

“If you’re not going to guess, its going to make it very difficult to tell you what is happening.”

“Are the bullets in me?”

“Well that’s exactly the question i was going to ask. Yo usee, we just dont’ know. We do know that the bullets went into you, and never came out. We have very strong logical reasons to suport the conclusion that they are still within you, but we were hoping you might double check our reasoning before we proceded, lest we proceed on an irrational basis.”

I adored this man. He was the floor version of a wall-friend. A real land-touching wallclimber.

“Have you attempted to take them out? Or to have numerous universes formed inside them that might have, dare i say, jazz bullets, to negate the bullets in my box?”

“Jazz bullets?”

“Heavily improvised bullets. Very cool stuff.”

“Well, no. Here’s the thing. We didn’t operate on you because, well. We don’t want to get sued. YOu’re michael J Fox, and we couldnt’ really risk getting sued. And of course, the bullets appear to have completely cured your parkinson’s disease, and even your maddington’s disorder. You’re fremantle’s discression is still there though. If we removed the bullets, you may have parkinson’s disease again. We really, i mean this, don’t want to get sued.”

sued? What dull modern problems were these for a time travel story full of absurd and creative invention? What plausible explanation was there for bogging the story down in these feeble shades of modern commentary… unless… unless i was within the Panclasmic Albino, He Whitey, Yon Whitebrale, the Pale Frown itself.

Since frowning was first outlawed by the Allegiance of Mums after the deoderant purge of the age of hampers, the frowns were excommunicated from the temple of everyone’s face. Now, everyone knows that once banished, a frown, or even a fawn, will emigrate to any of the vast faces that float about in the tractless expanses between the estrellations, grinning at things, and otherwise commenting on the goings on of the cosmos in a self-satisfied but un-ignorable voice. Not only did the voice comment, and the face from whence it emerged like a clay egg, winked and smirked, but the whole apparatus constantly ejaculated stipulations. Stipulations as far as the face could ejaculate! Even on St. Stipulati’s day, and St. Ejaculus’ feast! In the history of the cosmost (the cosmos that has most things, but not all things), only one civilizatoin darred to disregard any of the stipulations thus ejaculated. I saw darred, because the punishment for having disregarded the stipulation was to forever have a 2nd R inserted into the word “dare” when used to refer to that civilization’s attempt to disregard said stipulation. The stipulation, it is said, was that should anyone ignore the stipulation being stipulated, they would have an extra R inserted in their dare. Right in front of women and semi-boys and their interminglings of fine tendrils!

One time, the Panclastic Albino destroyed the Osadi of the Osadi sector (coincidental name, the people “the osadi” are named for the Dohati Regis of Alcamon’s house, eventual unifiers of the Dovarian Peninsula, and the Osadi sector is named for Brad Osadi, the Regis’ cousin) after trasngressing one of its stipulations. IT rained down billions upon billions of flammable stipulations from orbit. Various animate stipulations scrabbled around and started whispering to people in their sleep that they should go extinct. Which stipulaation ultimately killed them? i don’t know. Probably it was the stipulation that, should they be attacked by the Frowning WInter, they go extinct. That was likely it, but then again, who is to say? The Stipulation Council’s indpendant Ombudsman, that’s who.

It was on such a ruthless grinning cosmic face that the collective frowns of over 50 anthrogygoli-colonids (each colonid comprised of 540 colonies, each comprised of at least 50,000 individual human bodies, held together by a sense of community, and a sense of ropes) made their homes.

Wink no more, ye faces of space, wink no more…

That face, itself an abnormal accretion of pale matter, a form of matter so pale that, until my lifetime, it was considered to be snow, or ghosts, was an outcast all its existence. it drifted like a grim sail through tractless expanses, treading its measure in isolation. But now, afflicted with rigor, and frowns cobbled together from smaller frowns, themselves cobbled together from yams, the pale face lost pace with its failed race, quail ace lace rail trace. And it’s basially this kind of thing that i’m talking about. This is the kindo f thing tha tmakes space so weird and nuts all the time. LIterally, if i had my way, or a druthers or two, i’d probably get some of the other dads in the neighbourhood together to just get this kind of thing out of here.

THe pale face meandered through everywhere, clasming things. Clastically clasming everything. Iconos? Clasted. Pryos? Clasted. Whitey-grim-face was a chilly pain and a spooky nuissance! His tight white lips didn’t just frown, they also kissed out white pucks that you couldn’t see on the ice. WHITE PUCKS! there’s no more frustrating variant of hockey, except “unrealistic hopes and goals” hockey. Or honkey.

Now, the face jsut eats people up and frowns them down. People who get frowned down into the face tend to start living boring existences. They live the frown equivalent of a life, inside the frowning face. THis life, this earth, this verdant isle, this plains rambling tear of Gaia, populated by these banal normals, and their insufferable chatter, must be, MUST, be a fownlife. What frowns are these?! BY MINE OWN!

But as frowns often do, things were about to go from frowns syndrome, to downs syndrome.

to be continued…