Favored Zachery

An old story which decided it wanted to rise again. We will see if I keep at it.

The winds whipped through the mountain pass. It hit young Zachery in the face, but his gait did not falter. For months he had walked the winding paths of the central mountains of Seta, his food was running low, it had been weeks since he had seen another human face. He opened his satchel to check on his supplies, a satchel still bearing the seal of the Setan School of Magic. All too few, he thought to himself, and shut the bag.

He came over a crest of the pass and saw a valley below, it was almost as if he was flying, he had an eagle eye few of the little town. It reminded him of the school, flying in cushioned only by the flow of magic energies. He remembered the feeling all too well. Swooping down casting flames upon the buildings, watching the broken form of his master fall from the sky.

He shook his head to remove the memory, but it couldn’t help but linger. The image continued to haunt him, he wished it would fade. He brought his eyes back to the town below. It was a series of houses surrounding a larger structure, fields surrounded the rest of the houses, much of the valley had been cleared to be farmland. It was quaint, with one path into the valley and one path out. Zachery’s course would have to be through it. He set his staff across his shoulders and stretched. Well he couldn’t avoid people forever.

He set his staff to the ground and started the slow descent, the pass was made as passable as it could be by human hands but was still steep. Zachery found himself bracing himself against his staff more and more as he came to the valley floor. It was a few hours of this before he reached level ground.

He sucked in air greedily, he had gotten used to this height, but still the climb had been harder than he expected. He would have thought that the months of his walking would have helped him, but his body had not really been made for hiking. He had been spoiled by his power, using it to ascend great heights with force of will not muscle. Though in the past months he had reclaimed much of that muscle.

Walking silently alone with only his thoughts and the endless winds of the mountains had done much to quiet his mind. At first he walked with the intensity of a man leaving a burning building, closer to the truth than he’d like. After a time he let the anger, fear, and other negative feelings leave him. Only once he had reached the height and could see the world around him did he finally find a moment of peace. Glancing around the alpine forests, which surrounded the central mountain range that protected the Mage King’s mountain, he was able to see how small he was compared to the world. His failure was something he could cope with then. One drop in an ocean of broken dreams.

His Masters had placed many of their dreams into Zachery. dreams of peace and prosperity, dreams of strength and light. Zachery, however, couldn’t deliver, his failure monumental.

Jed had been right to distrust Zachery.

The sun had reached its zenith, and still no movement from the town. No one coming to the well in the middle for water, no one tending the fields. Maybe this town had been abandoned like so many others, unable to beat back the tide of corruption seizing most of the land. If that was the case Zachery had to be on his guard.

Glancing around though, he did not sense any great danger. He wondered too how he would defend himself against it even if it did appear. Without breaking his vow to never use his powers again, he had no way to fight back the creatures of the darkness. Why fight he thought, he was only one man in the face of a tide. If he did encounter a demon he would run. His mind made up he made his way to the well, a lone figure in his long brown woolen cloak. He leaned his staff on the well, shoved back his hood revealing his shaggy brown hair and a growth of a patchy beard on his face. He pulled up the bucket and dipped his hands into it bringing the water to his lips

From the Office of Sengir, Mahoney, and Ysslgoth

So I thought this up on my way to work this morning after reading an essay on H.P. Lovecraft. I think it has potential as a short story at least, we will see where this takes me.

Sengir, Mahoney, and Ysslgoth is the name of a firm specializing in the rights of naturally challenged beings. The term supernatural has been dropped since it implies superiority and that is not the case today in our modern times. Formally called Supernatural beings were believed to be monsters that lurked in the night but in our age of litigation and high tech law enforcement it was clear that these beings were simply entities with no legal rights within our system. Hence the name Naturally Challenged came into being, to more adequately describe their situation.

Sengir, Mahoney, and Ysslgoth has been working tirelessly to establish legal precedents and rights for your average zombie, vampire, werewolf, and eldritch abomination. Our very own lead shareholders are in fact members of this previously disadvantaged group.

James Sengir, is a classically trained lawyer, and by classically we mean he knows most laws from their original Latin written in the United Kingdom. He was turned by his uncle into a vampire at the age of 25. It wasn’t until several hundred years later that he sued his uncle for the contraction of Vampirism under a loop hole in the laws regarding STD litigation.

Jene Mahoney, is a recently turned sentient zombie, though the term these days tends to be Ghouls. She was an attorney who graduated from Northwestern worked in many firms all over New York until she had an unexpected run in with a Witch Doctor in a real estate case. She came to serve him on his foreclosed swamp and the Witch Doctor zombified her. She is most well known for her epic struggle to regain many of her organs that were removed after her “death” but before she rose again three days later. However she eventually lost the case, since she had agreed to be an organ donor before her death. This case Mahoney v. New Orleans Methodist Health Center, set a number of precedents in the legal world, some of which Mahoney is still trying to overturn. For example the assumption that contracts signed before death can be enforced upon the undead, assuming sentience.

Ysslgoth is an eldritch abomination from the stars that fell into the sea off the coast of San Francisco twenty years ago. He has since proven, though unschooled, to be one of the most brilliant legal minds of our age. While it is impossible for any of his clients to look upon him without losing all hope and delving into insanity, this has not slowed down his legal career. Through a network of psychically gifted and certifiably insane assistants he has worked in an advisor capacity for many firms before receiving an honorary JD from NYU. The Dean still has nightmares from the experience and he only dealt with one of Ysslgoth’s more potent assistants.

Together these three entities are attempting to change the legal world and establish new rights and laws in regards to naturally challenged beings, and bring about a new age of tolerance and understanding around the world.

-From the “About the Firm” section of the Sengir Mahoney and Ysslgoth website.

Clean Cups, Help Yourself :)

That was the innocent message placed on a piece of paper that sat on three rows of five cups. These cups were the standard coffee mugs with the company logo on them. They were sitting quietly in my company's break room. Such an innocent message and I immediately suspected that in fact these cups were not clean. That there might be some insidious plot to use these seemingly harmless mugs against me. Yes, ME! The lowly clerk who frequents the break room to gather such survival needs as peanut M&Ms and water, occasionally Green Tea.

This might be a sign that I am getting a little too paranoid, but just because I am paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't out to get me. I won't hear the black helicopters, they will be in stealth mode.

Brief Musing

Just wanted to speak a little bit about one of the issues that I have personally as a writer. I think this is also an issue with the internet as a whole but I will get to that.

I have been trained as a writer to revise, revise, revise and edit, edit, edit. Obviously this is because we want to remove all the obvious mistakes in the piece, and this in of itself is a useful skill to have. However a writer like myself can endlessly tinker with his/her words.

As a Journalism Professor of mine once said "Writers don't finish a work, they abandon them." I think there is a lot of truth to this, which is why deadlines can be very useful to a writer.

I started writing silly fiction back in gradeschool. I had this great idea for a sci-fi story about two people on opposite sides of a war overcoming their differences and saving the world or something like that. At the time I felt this was a fantastically innovative idea, and I had a great innovative title "Space Wars." I don't think I was even 10 at the time, so forgive me. Thankfully, that story has been lost due to the failure of the Macintosh IIe it was written on. That story however was the beginning of a great many stories that I never finished.

Part of me thought that I shouldn't finish those works mainly because I didn't think my skills were enough to do the stories I had in my head justice. So I kept working on my writing through Middle School, through High School, through College. Trying to learn what made good writing.

Well I am post grad now and I still have no idea what good writing is. From a lot of my writing classes in college I was led to believe there is no creative ideas anymore, and that all I could do was deconstruct existing ideas. While that idea in of itself is not bad, the whole idea of deconstructing existing tropes and ideas is becoming more and more of trope of itself. Also for every excellent deconstruction of an idea, we get dozens of other stories which are cut and paste masquerading as art. I even had a professor who encouraged outright plagarism.

So I waited all this time to get the skills to write the stories I wanted and now I am told that my ideas are cliche.

Sadly a lot of school, even in creative endeavors, is trying to figure out what your instructor wants, and while I was in College I managed to finish a great many short stories. All of them attempts at seeming like whacky post-modern writing while trying to keep to the old structures I held dear.

Now to clarify the "old structures" I refer to very much come from the heroic journey as outlined by Joseph Campbell. I didn't know this at the time and it wasn't until the middle of my college career that I realized how much I loved the ideas of heroes, and being thrown out of your element to realize a truth and bring it back to your world. Those stories, no matter how cliche resonate deeply inside me.

Back to my college writing days, I finished a great many stories. I felt like I could continue with them but the all important deadline stopped me forcing me to end a piece. I wasn't always satisfied with the ending but I had a piece with a beginning, middle, and end. That in itself is a great feeling to have.

The issue now with the internet and my lack of structure in my writing is that I am back to the endless tinkering with my work. So the only response I can think of is to write and post without letting myself tinker too much. The problem with this is that sometimes my work is not what I want it to be and is often unfiltered, sometimes illegible. However it is important that I get the words out there warts and all, I can tinker later. To finish a story longer than the usual twenty page limit that a usual creative assignment implements.

However now I am just throwing my unfiltered mess into the pool that is the internet, and it is scrambling to be seen among all the others.

Every writer has to at some point get over the fact that they think their work is worthless. So throwing it up helps with that, and my compromise is that I will come back after the work is done and tinker more, simply to make it clearer.

I think an issue with the internet is the temptation not to go back and fix. The words are already out there so why bother fixing and reposting. In the end I guess that is my challenge to myself, not to let half-finished things simply fall into the mess that is the internet but use this blog as a vehicle to keep me writing and keep me improving.

Anyway I feel as though I may have rambled a bit, but sometimes unfiltered is okay, at least I have put something up for today.

Train musings

This was a bit I wrote on the train going to work. Enjoy my train musings.

I am sitting on the train. There is a strange liquid covering the upper seating area's floor. It has no apparent smell.

The train is a microcosm of our world. We sit minding our own business stuffed in with people we don't know. Right now I see around the train a few business men working on their computers, two women of asian descent talking and drinking coffee. A young man sits in front of me doing homework. I say young man but looking at him I'd guess late high school early college. The size of the textbook suggests math or science, since as an english major I never had to heft tomes of that size.

A pair of middle aged couples sit on the lower level of the train. One couple looking possibly older than the other. Possible relation? Two generations on a train to chicago to see the city. Often families do that go to distant places in order to feel as though they are together. The idea of the family road trip for example. Or rather it is a chance to experience new things as a family.

Young and old, you see the pairing often and it invokes a warm feeling. The feeling that perhaps those two people are related and the older is sharing her experience while the younger shares her energy. Perhaps the two are simply different in age, no relation of blood but they share the same exchange, wisdom for energy.

The two men at the end of the train sit next to their backpacks. I myself have placed my messenger bag in the seat facing me on the train. We have marked out our territories made it clear that strangers should not sit near us. Lord knows what could happen if someone new sat next to us. Change is a terrifying thing, it takes us out of our comfort zones. Solitude is often a very comfortable thing.

I have taken the train two times a day for the past four and a half months, only two occasions have I noticed two complete strangers talking to each other.

One was these two college students who had been forced to sit next to each other, due to the heavy traffic on the train that day. One was a young man in his late teens early 20s the other a girl of the same age. She was from abroad, or recently moved to the US, since she had a very thick Japanese accent. The two seemed to have no problem communicating. I sat across the aisle from them and saw a lady in her mid 30s turn to them and ask if they had known each other, they said no. She commented on how nice it was that they have kicked up such a conversation.

The second was between two men, one a young man probably a junior in high school, the other a young man who had just graduated and was currently working in the banking industry. This was about the time of discussion of the fannie mae bailout. He was talking to the younger man about banking and currency. He came to the idea that since currency only equals buying power that eventually currency will be gone. We will see the emergence of the Amero to combat the Euro and then maybe an asian currency and an african currency as the world economies become more and more entwined. Eventually all we have is a credit score.

The other young man was going to see his grandmother for the weekend. He stated he had to go see them every couple of months to keep the birthday money coming in. But he was very interested in economics.

This was a conversation I jumped into from time to time. However only after I made a chuckle at a comment and the older man, about my age, turned to me and said I could chime in at any time.

I corrected him about a minor historical note he was making about germany inbetween the World Wars.

This is of course only the positive I am noting. There was an instance of negative interaction between people on the train. I remember a very distinct situation in which a man was extremely agitated and yelling at everyone in the train car.

He was an older man, with a long grey beard and long grey hair, all of it sitcking out in wild directions. He wore a hat indicated that he was a veteran. He had a walker, and this was what began his agitation. His walker was in the middle of the aisle during the afternoon rush. I was walking up the aisle looking for a place to sit. Now I saw just beyond the walker a row of seats perpendicular to the old veteran.

The man in front of me pushed the walker aside, he was in a hurry it seemed. I began walking past the man and saw the walker swing back at me. The handle of the walker hit at crotch level. Nothing more than a light tap but I felt my progeny wince for a second. The man began yelling. Saying how could you fuckers kick my walker. I slipped by the walker since I am a skinny guy and sat in one of the free seats. Sure he was agitated but I figured he'd be over it after that outburst.

I sat down. There was a bald middle aged man to my left. He wore large circular rimmed glasses and had a distinct look of apprehension. I soon understood why.

The old vet started yelling about how everyone in the train car were a bunch of pussies. How he was a special ops and he could fight anyone in the train and kill them with his bare hands. He challenged anyone to fight him.

At this point there was a line of people stopped behind the walker which no one was willing to move now. A man thin man in a grey pinstripe suit, with gray hair and a worried smile, asked the man if he could walk by. The vet said, sure you can squeeze by if you got no balls. The man squeezed by pushing the walker only slightly. The old vet said yeah you got no balls there do ya.

People quietly moved past as the man kept yelling. He made a comment about how all his friends had died defending us pussies and not one of us had the courage to fight him.

At this point I heard a message over the intercom telling all the conductors to come to the car I was sitting in.

Three of them came in, and the first moved the man's walker aside and told him he was getting off. The old man asked what stop it was and the conductor replied it didn't matter it was his. He asked for his walker, said he couldn't walk without it. The conductors gave it to him and as the old man walked out he flicked off the whole car. The conductor behind him swatted the hand out of the air. That was that, he was left at the Clybourn stop some ten miles out of the city.

I guess this is why we defend our space so fervently. We know that if we claim a spot people will be less likely to sit there and it reduces the chance of having someone sit next to us who will disturb our solitude.

Ogilvie Transportation Center is the next stop, time to go to work.

Identity

I should probably start by informing you, my (many/few) readers that this is actually my third attempt at making a blog. I have written two other openings to it at different times in my life. The first I was an idealistic high schooler; the second I was a calmer college student; and these days I am simply a post-grad trying to figure out my place in the world.

So before I tell you what I think now let me show you what I thought then. Process is, after all, a major part of the creative process.

Quick note, I am posting these older versions somewhat unedited as to get the true feel of previous pieces, warts and all.

Last Modified November 18, 2003

Daedalus is what I choose to call myself today. I choose that name because I can think of no better man in any of literature who knew better how to stay the course. He had to fly to escape and knew that the wings he had made would not be able to stay together if he flew too high and the water would way them down if he flew too low. He and his son had to stay the course on a thin line between high and low. In the Greek Myths this was an example of Arete, or balance, something I seek now.

I have recently spoken to a few people about my beliefs on various topics such as Religion and Politics, and I decided I should write my ideas down, because, and don’t think me vain about it, I had some pretty good ideas. I know that I am far from unbiased as I have been raised a Roman Catholic and have grown up in an upper middle class house, but I have sought a balance without bias or any pre-conceived notions. I strive for this because I believe that as a species man has to become better than what it is, otherwise we are doomed. We live in a Democracy however this Democracy cannot function effectively unless we have a public who is enlightened enough to see past our own selves.

It is my hope that some will read my words, and pass them on. That by somehow opening peoples minds to new ideas that I can spread those same ideas then. Too often have I spoken about my beliefs and had someone else say, “That’s a nice idea, but it will never work,” and my thought is if it is a good idea why shouldn’t it work. The answer to that is that the world we live in does not like change, and will blindly follow the masses to whatever end they may be stumbling towards. I don’t like the end I see approaching. Left as we are in another thirty or forty years we will destroy ourselves. There are too little resources and our weapons have become far too powerful. Sooner or later there will be a war over the last remaining bits of resources and that will be the last one. We already see wars motivated by resources. How long till it becomes global? How long before we turn to our most powerful weapon? I know that nobody wants that, but at the same time no one is willing to think about it. However, we need to think about it. We need to take control, and the only way to do that is to have an enlightened public, to have a people that can truly work for a better way. We as a species are capable of so much more than we are, and it is my hope that we can figure this out before it’s too late.

Last Modified April 13, 2005

I have the odd responsibility to welcome you to my little corner of the web and introduce you to my modest addition to the massive world of writing that exists in this grand world. I can’t say to you that my writing is greater than anyone else’s because I can never know what the reader will bring to the table. I can do my best to present what I think in the form of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, or creative non-fiction but in the end you will take my words and make your own story.
So in the end if you didn’t like the story the fault may be yours. I jest of course, but not entirely.

The second responsibility I have is to provide some kind of introduction to my works, which is tricky. Once again I deal with the problem of your thoughts changing the idea and if I say anything to preface I can ruin the story you have in your mind about my work and who am I to say my interpretation is any more valid than yours. So as the writer I get to sit back and watch you speculate as to what I was really getting at anyway. That’s the odd thing about writing. You go into a piece thinking one thing and the actual process of writing changes the meaning it has to the point when I am not really sure what I am getting at and I become just another speculator.

What I can say is that I write about a lot of things. I tend to enjoy the escapism of fantasy genre writing as well as writing flash fiction of a moment in real life, often though I have found that there is a bit of fantasy in my realism and some realism in my fantasy. So don’t confine me to a category, just read. Don’t judge until you finish. If perchance you stumble upon a typo or grammatical error I do apologize but in the end I am just as lazy as you and I make mistakes. If I notice, I’ll fix it.

So in conclusion of my long winded explication of nothing I give you my words, just as they are, words. I entreat you to bring them to life. I entreat you to interact with the characters and see what they see. I entreat you to like or dislike the characters. I entreat you to live their lives and try for a moment to see something new that you may have never seen before even if it is something ever so minor. Just imagine with me and if I so happen to drop a political or moral idea in there that you may not agree with or like then forgive me because I am only human and have my vices, opinions, and virtues.

With that I welcome you to my words.

Today

So you’ve seen where I was five and three years ago, and now I have to try and tell you where I am today, who I am today.

When I was in high school I felt my words were full of resolute truths, in college I accepted that readers brought their meaning, but what do I think now?

I think words are tools. Words enter through your eyes circulate in your brain and are spoken out eventually, though often not in the same order. Words are fluid, often changing meaning as time goes by, just as I have changed and how my use of the words has changed.

Our world is fluid, ever-changing, and we try to find patterns to it. I saw that this is a rock, and then I turn around throw up the horns and saw “you rock.” Am I calling my friend a rock? Perhaps, my friends often are rocks, dumb as a rock, steady as a rock, sleeping like a rock.

So if all things change, if the world is fluid then who am I? Can I say I am something without calling myself a liar five minutes from now? Am I very different from the person who wrote in 2003 and am I somewhat different from the person who wrote in 2005? Now in 2008 I look back at those words and see elements of myself. At the young idealist, I see fire and passion which I have always respected, and in the slightly older college kid, I see the openness to others which I have incorporated into myself.

I have grown and I have changed. If changing is growing than is the world growing? Are we turning into something better or are we simply changing without purpose.

I can say one thing about myself. I am an optimist. I believe we aren’t hurtling through space ever changing with no purpose. I believe we continue to grow and change so that we can grow and change. We experience the new everyday, and we continue to change so that we can continue to change. The man I will be five years from now will be different from the man I am today, but I will be the stepping stone for that man. I will be an ever-growing, ever-changing being. Everyday will be new and an adventure, every problem simply a chance to improve.

Words have a type of immortality and stasis that I never will. A word written in the sand will change when the tide rolls in, but the word will remain in the mind. A word written on paper will survive as long as the paper. A word written in a book will survive as long as people wish to reprint it. This can be a very long time as some words have made it through many generations and many languages. But since we are always changing, our view of words is always changing.

Take interpretations of any classic work and see how it has changed over the years.

Since I am always changing, and words remain the same, I change how I arrange them; I change how I think of them. One day I will look back and see the words I wrote in the past and see their arrangement as a footprint of the ever-growing foot of my language. What is in the past is not false and who I am now is not true.

This is who I am, at least today, and these are my words.