“I think Obama’s honey-moon is over.”

The firmament arched like a vast emptiness like the emptiness between Matrimonions, the married onions that act as surrogate married couples for people in love who dont’ want to ruin that good feeling. My plan wasn’t working. banality might be insufficient, like a clown with an egg. Yet I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

The Frown-life was dissolving my ever-intelli-jaunts, the little trips you take in your mind that provide you answers as if by magic. Hypo-cognizance was creeping up on me, and yet without succumbing to this “totally meta” situation, I was likely to be destroyed by the Frown, like some invading parasite. It was exactly the type of no-win environment where those naturally occuring CEO’s on Vega Beta would relish.

Funny little guys, those CEOs. They hatch from rock niches in Armani suits, and develop mission statements preternaturally. Before they recognize the usefulness of fire, or utter their first vocables, they can browbeat an underling and defraud a press conference at over 60 universilad ™ microlengths per pleasant secondulus. That’s extremely fast! If i had one here, he would be quite the formidable ally. No doubt he’d already be ordering me to do all kinds of things that I would perceive to be in some way helping me, but ultimately, would only serve his own goals and interests. GOD i wish i had one.

Again I tried: “I think the Leafs have a shot at the cup this year.” But the abridgement of my personal universe did not abate.

I went into frantictown, and fled my hospital room, throwing off my warm blankies and racing into the hallway. No one. Each corridor a perfect replica of the 21st century world i had abandoned, all for my benefit, to keep me unsuspectingly self-reducing, but it was not my time. Could the Grand Old Frown of Frown Hall possibly have known that I was a man of centuries yet unnumbered by the ordinal impulse of man’s inner bookkeeper? If it didn’t, it was not perfect. It could make mistakes. perhaps, much later, i could tell it “You made a mistake”, and my gloat-hope composite would shear a rift out of which I might find escape. But for now, my choice was between equally unpopulated corridors to find any person at all to which i could say “cold enough for you? Brrr. You’d think they’d turn of the AC once in a while” to.

If i had been in my natural form, with all my legs and slurpsliders intact, i could have traversed all options within a matter of moments(tm). But the changes made the Suit could only be unchanged by the Suit, or at least, that is what was written on the literature given to me by the Suit, entitled “So, your body is gone…”

Without a moment to spare, I chose left. As i processed down the tunnel, pattern of tiles and lamps became a pattern of tiles and flickering lamps. Then of no lamps at all. The frowniverse had already reached whatever facility powered this building. I was doomed.

Perhaps if i ran a bit faster, i could outpace the hopelessness i felt encroaching on me. So faster I ran. A large orange door marked “Total Exit, Man” lay at the end of the hall, dimly illuminated by the infrared my body gave off. At least my luminous tasters and sniffers were still functioning, despite my body’s unsightly assemblage of bilaterally symmetrical appendages and single-head. I gripped the cold metal handle and turned. Locked.

There was a window fortunately to my left. I tried to break it, perhaps i could climb or jump down, I hoped. But it was no use, it was unbreakable by the feeble means this body possessed. The grips of panic grippled me down. Without hope, I had only one place to turn: crime. My poverty of options lead me to an inability to expect a middle class life, and all its recumbant bycicles. Instead, i felt the urge to deal drugs and rob. And as if by magic, the frown provided me with drug paraphernalia. The classic diamond tipped crack pipe was among them. But would it be enough?

Scratching a rough circle on the window i ran my hands round and round, digging ever deeper into the reenforced gazing-space. There wasn’t enough body head to tasterape into the distance, and I was out of options. I had to use my bodymass to shovel through the window’s increasingly impermanent solidness. How high up was I? how strong are contemporary bones? I was out of options. With a final pause to contemplate how much I could get for a stolen X-Box 360, i heaved with all of my strength, and with apparently a bit extra i didn’t know I had.

The sensation of falling was peculiar, given the inner ears I was cursed with. An almost giddy weightlessness, a rush of heretofore unsuspected stomach blushing, and my cardio bulb palpatitating wildly. it was, for the moment it lasted, the first time I ever felt like a lady. But like most ladies, it was not to last.

Wet grass broke my fall, but ineffectively. It was the ground that finally finished the job the lazy grass had started. In the cool night air, I was now both nearly incapacitated by numerous insurmountable pains, and by a total lack of light with which to spray or gleanfuck a direction. Ever the optimist, I squeeled out a squeal.

“Halp! Halp!”

But it was no use. I was utterly alone in a collapsing tinyverse created to drain my individuality and then digest my fibrous organs. And yet, there must have been people at one point, or I would not have been able to banalify myself. Against what grinding averageness was i meant to bore my soul out, if not more people? Think! Think!

I could now hear the collapsing of buildings as their structures destabilized at the cusp of the frowniverse. It was only moments away. What did it want from me? What did it expect me to do? It was then that I smelled a faint glint of light, under my badly shatter legs. Without thought to pain, i reached for it, and felt a smooth plastic surface. With a touch it was illuminated, prompting my with a simple graphic to slide a slider to unlock it. Aquiescing to the domineering electronic, I used my thumb to slide the slider. At once, I was presented numerous genial icons in colors unnumbered and bright. Randomly, I depressed on, and the screen provided a small space and the words “140 characters left”. A keyboard interface was simulated at the bottom of the screen. I didn’t know wht to do. I could feel a hot wind as the cusp of the universe, now only meters away, digested the atmosphere. Panicked, I entered the first thing that seemed boring enough. I wrote exactly what I was doing right then.

“Lying on grass outside hospital” and hit send.

Something called a “twitter” occurred and my “status” was updated. The breeze blew hot and fast now, and a deafening roar of digestion was imbibed by my earthroats. The screen displayed a picture of me but with a funny 2d cartoony quality, and the words “Lying on grass outside hostpital” and in smaller text “less than 1 minute ago, from mobile.”

The tips of my hairs were vanishing, I curled my body into a ball, but all around me I felt blasts of streaming hotness, my flesh in pain and my bones diverted in strange ways they were not meant to be. I just sniffed that screen. Over and over. “Lying on grass outside hospital.” I couldn’t look away. I appreciated it. I wanted others to appreciate it. I fired off another.

“Appreciating own message, on grass.”

Twunt.

Then silence…

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…

The ZZZZOERP took us totally by surprise, and while its significance was not known to us yet, it’s significance wake washed over us with such force that we were momentarily caught in a meaningfulness eddy. Currents of import authoritatively washed great consequence riiples over us. My ally in our temporal-sojourn remarked that his suit was registering a non-triviality factor of over 50 Brubecks, a unit named for Dave Brubeck, the gold standard in significance, even 90 million years after his being eaten by Jacky Chang, noted action comedy star from Changland.

Momentousness rocked us back to our senses. At my feet lay the galgravolt whose origins were as yet unverified. Yet all information available to us by sensory input as well as by over 100 digital HD satellite chanels pointed toward the unlikely, impossible, indeed, terrifyingly significant possibility that I, (name deleted), had reverted to a maker, and reduced the police officer to this lowly state.

We hadn’t much time to consider it, as without his fatalistic exo-skeleton, my recently acquired ally became quite skittish and demanded we vacate the domicile before the galgravolt regained consciousness. If it imprinted on us while still in its post-natal clambitude, it would “oyster” us, considering us delicious oysters, and thus, its parents. You see, at their origin, Galgravolts were intensely stupid beasts. Sure, they were fearsome, beasts when assembled, but they were the type of thing that was so stupid, that despite being dead, dissected, disassembled, and reassembled into the shape of a Cryo-sedan (the coldest hybrids yet invented), they refused to acknowledge their own mortality, and gradually, through force of ignorance, transmuted their body into a sleek rapacious predator, who thought it was a delicious clam. Now, ordinarily, a predator that believed it was a shelled mollusk was not to be feared. Never mind that in my own time, mollusks had lost their hard shells, and become softer, dumber, slower, and had the evolutionarily dangerous habit of intentionally climbing intot he mouths of hungry people. Suffice it to say, their vastly increased flavor does not bode well for their survival chances as a species.

In my time, the Galgravolt is the deadliest predator. Potentially. It never kills anything, but should it ever happen to realize that it is infact a deadly predator, it’s assumed that it would be unstoppable. As a result, everyone alive after the creation of the first galgravolt, during the phase of human evolution dubbed both “the phase of the makers” and “super-Saturday 2000″, has attempted to avoid any conversation with the galgravolts, lest they accidentally let it slip that they are, infarct, the most deadly creatures ever to come into existence. This has worked, so far. (foreshadowing).

The two of us inspected our surroundings. Well, he inspected, i inscented and to some extend, excreted and reimbibed certain gnosis inducing phlegms. What we determined was that we were in a vast rectangular prism, made of clay compacts and slats of wood. The Suit informed us that it was called an “artist’s studio apartment”, and it was essentially a place in which someone could avoid meaningfulness indefinitely, through some mysterious and long abandoned power source about which modern people can only speculate (or scentulate, or indeed, exocogitate (in our drag-noggins (yes, the little balls we drag behind us are brains (yes, we use those brains for abstract contemplation to allow the chestbrains to focus mainly on quantum sudoku and kissing lamps… beautiful.. beautiful lamps)))). We scrabbled around for any implements or instruments that might aid us in the barely historic time, at the dawn of civilization. We found numerous lutes, though of a different design, and large electric devices which, after a brief and unhappy experiment, turned out to amplify the lute’s sound. There were pigments applied to stretched fabric surfaces hung on the walls. Most of them appeared to depict the mating of the color-shapes of Infantilix Prime, the world created by the lowest and most basic level of thought in the universe. ALso known as the abstract art planet, for obvious reasons. Also known, separately, and by people who are more fashionable and thus unwilling to talk to those first people, as self delusion prime, and never-gonna-be prime.

In a hurry, we barely noticed that the Galgravolt was already beginning to lose his sedan shape, and was reverting to the sleek, quadrupedal, shimmering black, almost feline tautness of the great beast he would become. We had but little time. The suit demonstrated the sorts of things we might need. We found a leather flap in which were stored rectangles of plastic and longer rectangles of paper with pictures of sailors on them. Or monarchs. We couldn’t tell without consulting ourselves. Those in hand, and in limb, and in flap and tentacle, we ran and slithered out of the room, into a grimly lit hallway, towards a conveyance meant to dis-elevate us to a level commensurate with the ground’s lowly stature.

“We’re no clams!” we celebrated, but before we raggled into the outside zone, the suit itself devolved upon us various administrative duties we had shirked. Apparently, my appearance was such that, like a friend without caps, i would scare everyone. Without the energy to protest, i submitted to a brief and painful procedure whereby i was scanned with a dildonic probe, repeatedly, and though quite brutally, somewhat pleasurably. My bodyfacts quantized, it was then to find a model by which i could be reformed.

“What of my senses? These men have no sensory organs, just a little hole to smell and barely any anuses.” i inquired.

‘And indeed, the anuses of this age dont’ even possess precognition, or toothed feelers.” my companion added.

“No feelers? No precognition? How do you know what your poo will feel like when running across toothed feelers before it runs across toothed feelers/ how can you plan your days?”

“You’ll ahve to get used to it.”

“what about the rest of my stuff. The smellers ad feelers and blurters and eaters and lickers and things?”

“The Suit says that they can be disguised. You’ll still possess them, but they wont’ be visible to the average human of the era.”

All that remained, again, was to find a model, an example of what i should look like. As if delivered by fate, an image of an ordinary man appeared on some flickering image box hanging in the lobby of the building.

The rays struck me, the metal dehyperincoagulators, the vonts, and the post-Cambrian devices. Over and over i was shattered and reassembled, my consciousness careening from the sheer sense of pure existence to the non sense of the bodiless incorporeal vapor to which i was reduced, over and over, through each phase of my transformation. Finally, when it should seem i could take no more, I was released. My … legs.. below me wobbled. My head elevated almost a full five feet in the air contained, i felt by… hands? two wet orbs, eyes! eyes! yet i could not use them. I could not see. Fortunately, a quick instinctual out-gassing of observaton particles demonstrated that my usual arsenal of obscure and ever shifting sensory organs was functioning to their fullest extent. I was, clothed in what i can only describe as jeans and a shirt, fully and utterly the image of one Michael J Fox. Yet who was this Michael? Would it matter?

Would it matter?

to be continued….