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serialjune · 4 months

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The Betty Boop Continuum, ch. 1

George

Sandra twisted my mind in no way any woman ever had before. She'd torment me, hardly speaking, barely moving, her face concealing the bad news. There's only one woman like that in every man's life and possibly only one woman, period, Sandra. I suppose you can't be yourself all the time and, at one point or another, the adversary is going to capitalize on that inconsistency, making a fool of you for the ages. I always thought history had such a soft-hearted and coy way of putting social rejection: left out in the rain, beaten away with a broom, cartoon acts of glib violence and a parable featured at the end. There's nothing soft hearted about Quartown. A couple of romances here and there, the vanishing voice of a Cuban enchantress, a secret shared only by the ends of the Earth, where the Atlantic meets the Pacific. And I always have to ask, embracing the sea in this romantic mode, would I go back to that place? Where seashores yearned for inexperience, that lust for life, mythically our own, but never really. Neither ancestors, either.

I wanted to get away, by night, where I could join the descendents who might take me from this cruel place. I needed some benign fool to warm my saucer with the tender rays of mutual acceptance. If that meant deforming into a sack of skin, I wouldn't mind. Conquistadors before me would, at times, keel to their own cruelty and settle for a savage, only to learn that the savage, too, cannot digest stupidity any more than his own kin might. The priestly elder, coat of arms, no more kindly when he taps the staff of exile. I took a skinny bitch in shades, from the tanning booth, to be the hallmark of decadence both my grandpa and myself could take euphoria from: beauty for an age, eclipsed by a moment's desire. Evil, all evil, not mine, but someone else's: how it is all like a game of hot potato, taken to the bitter end, where the can goes rattling down the line.

Lately my anxiety had grown like a mazey vine of tangles, right out of my seat, a fire down under. All these girls, even before Sandra, had this remarkably cheap way of applying mascara and it somehow made them look like Goddesses. Not Greek. Polynesian, maybe. Babylonian. A cascading yellow face illuminated by the bronze emission of a city bus: unconventional, but pretty. The universal smell of wine and beer, especially where it does not belong... she'd come from the wreckage looking pure, untouched by her own environmental conditioning. Such scenes, such racoon looking smears of makeup, all tribute to the one and only lost soul, the orchid, the phony. Why did everyone love beer so much? Disarray, disorder, aesthetics of contradiction and disgusting portraiture. I know that's the ticket for me, but for everyone else, too? Just never thought the old working stiffs had it in them, maybe we weren't sharing the same drink... somehow always reminding me of her. I raced to drunkenness, raping her with the very presence of my disfigured mind. She always saw right through me like an x-ray. To lose it all in one gesture of over-confidence. I never was the type to lose my head, in love or peace time, but for her, I'd not go gently into that good night... And now bathrobes and chintzy leather, braids and robotic forms of masculinity shuffle around the corridor, as I wallow dead in my failure to organize a plan.

Sandra

So then we watched Adventure Time for four seasons straight, refusing to eat and drunk on love to the point of hangover. Hey, it's embarrassing, but it's what really happened. Oh, love, that relapse of the animalian will.

Teagan (who's name really sounded more like "Teenager") manage to save two bong rips over the course of six hours, all night. Every tiny bump startled him to the point of jumping. It looked remarkably silly, to see a man with a beard that Paul Bunyan could have only dreamed of, afraid like a little boy. The beadiness of those black eyes caused me to frantically worry about things his alter-ego might do, if suddenly enabled by a switch. As a woman, I knew to keep my panic hushed and plan for my escape later.

On a scale of 1-100 (with 100 being "party planet" and 1 being "sometimes I still see my neighbour", I'd say the present year of 202x was at about 50%). I was having good thoughts for an alarming amount of time, then my dad walked in and ruined the chill vibes immediately. He came at me, saying all this about,

"I play the fool just to build you up into playing the seer. Young people cannot see how lucky they are, if not for this one fact: parents act as step ladders for their minds,"

And my brain tried its hardest to reject that thought. It was like KFC, Skittles and Pepsi, during the Superbowl, were electrocuting my mind with their rainbow crest of intrusion. In that moment, I could have told you that I wanted it all in me. Yet how little that was to ask, Pepsi, KFC and Skittles. Corruption is a part of getting older, after all. Maybe believing that for so long led me here, amongst the beer stains and bong water debris. This living room was a temple to the devil, an unbearable chamber of death to any person not "in" on the filthiness. I'd joke around, thinking about a maid coming into this and neatly feather dusting as if she didn't see a thing. People could not believe my dad taught us to drink at 14. He had deeply Catholic suspicions.

And then there was George. He'd walk in the door at about 11, or so, and his onlookers would hysterically ask of his present state, worrying to no end that he might be in trouble. I believe this challenged his patience to some degree. Sometimes he'd arrive at 2am and no one would bat an eye. He'd take off his blue Northface, take a bath, and the calm he felt was enviable. No one knew why he rented a room here, but that's like so many autistic adults. My theory is that "the machine" mistakes them for pot smoking, metaphysical detective burnouts. The truth couldn't be any more ambiguous.

I used this moment to make my escape. I could not stop thinking about the country life and how much I missed and adored that old world. All countries are the same country anyways, and I miss mine as much as Wordsworth's (a "friend" of my dad.) The return to the country, that would solve everything. All this would end. No more thought, no more worry. Those trees could do the heavy thinking for me, absorbing it all. I missed the countryside so much, so much. Friendly aliens and untouched night crystals, so unlike human terrain. It made me cry to imagine. Slyvia Plath was an idiot for sticking her head in the oven and not the lilacs.

Teegan

I remember thinking how extremely hot Sandra looked with that wire frame. She could have been a mommy from the start, all right. I bought chocolates that looked like seashells and left them out for her. I was going to show her, tonight, how to catch a firefly, then sneak in for the perfect kiss. Instead, George and I got stoned and he seemed instantly freaked out. I put mushrooms in our joints, but mostly his. I didn't think that it was wrong, or anything. He clearly was a bit of a badass. His lack of concern made it so. Blowing his mind one more time wouldn't hurt. Five minutes in, he said it tasted like dirt and that the dirt in the ground was making him accept the dirtiness of all things around him. It's these kinds of things that made me think this guy was the best, the kind of guy you have to take to a party. He yelled at me like Patton when he was angry and I respected that. We watched Blade, with Wesley Snipes, and one of our sparks flew so far that no one could see where it ended up. Dave Holster (Sandra's dad) would have believed me if I told him that the spark travelled to a different dimension. Dave watched drone footage of UFOs and recorded the videos to his iMac, where he'd show the equipment to a church home group. I never went or anything, I just borrowed his microphone from time to time. Our new band, "Eeyore's Sorry", was about to make a tribute album to our friend who's mom was raped by her dad to make her into an embryo. Dave told me that God makes solid on his promises, sooner or later, and that his daughter playing PS5, without bitching, was an example of a modern miracle, as well.

So George left, I think stoned off the mushroom surprise. Feeling good, he'd gone to get soda from the 50 cent machines outside Safeway. The dude was told to go get pickles and I think it was a fool's errand, put on by the girls. The same girls couldn't wait for Giorgio Armani to release their new line of eyelash extensions (at midnight) and I wonder if any of them, except for the two Chloes really, truly cared. I left a note, expressing this, under their door and snuck off like a vampire. When George came back, they told him he needed to get Cumberland's pickles. I don't know what gives them such a hard-on for "Cumberland's Pickles". They were going to subject him to this errand, with no explanation! Those two girls I mentioned a moment ago insisted. Stuff like this makes me want to pour gasoline and light a fire... I wouldn't even try and do it for the insurance.

George looked like Wittgenstein, wearing his cuffed up blazer. His frazzled moustache made him out to be the most straggely, poetic stoner possible. The guy huffed and puffed traffic fumes and dreamed of living in the mall's scaffolds. His room had knife marks all over the walls and the door, I think he couldn't find a dart board online that he felt like spending money on. While he was out to get pickles, the guy left his phone on dead and, unable to tell the time, made it to the store late. I think he DoorDashed the pickles from a gas station, right to the store, and then came home late with Grandma's Fresh (not Cumberland). He told me that he had impulsively bought a whole tray of pre-cooked chicken and left 3/4ths of it at somebody's apartment complex, murmuring something about,

"A waste of $15..."

Natya

I was living with my boyfriend for what felt like several months by now. He was the barfly and I was his bartender. We'd put on this charade of two people, cordial as hell, taking up the world stage. There was no temptation. It was wonderful in a completely unsustainable way. Minestrone soup sat on the counter top with a bone hemmed into the skin. The epic orchestration from, "The Fox and the Hound," seeped into the kitchen stench and the sogginess of this bun reminded me of the work sponsored luncheons of the past. I hated work with the force of flaming arrows and only ever wanted it to exist in relation to when my parents got home from their jobs.

The truth is, with or without my boyfriend, my life had been going on like this, well, since it started. The harsh winds and unforgiving tundra of reality was bogging me down and my mood had gone downhill since I was a baby. It says, once, in the Book of Mark, that Jesus cursed a fig tree after it refused to make figs for him, and that says it all. My job was to play old reels of Loreal shampoo commercials for new shareholders. I would typically light a cigarette and babysit and wait as they watched the same old films. If a setting or a nob needed fixing, the eyebrows on the old geezers' faces would tarnish and convey sudden outrage. I hated my life and I began to spend every cent of my savings on makeup and accessories I didn't deserve. I was hastening to become just like my mother and my habits were just as peculiar-seeming. I found a master tape for the "waiting in line" music, shared by all Sanderson & Son corporation sub-companies. This became my driving music almost every day. My soul felt exhumed and stretched beyond the corners, diving so far and so fast into the months that passed like hours. My kids were once very happy just to watch TV. They'd watch so much TV and I'd grow so old. If I died of a fever, they'd still be watching TV. I just wanted to skip it all. Skipping and skipping and skipping.

I saw the ideal life as a sterilized and tidied space. My boyfriend saw it more as a tangled outgrowth of spontaneous elixirs. My father saw it as fathoming the insignificance of it all so that one could be truly free. Last New Year's, I stayed at a YA hostel and watched all the couples come together (just to break apart again). Soon, everything would be the "same as ever", and all the "goodness" that Christmas wasn't would leave out the door, just as the couples had. My only friends, now, are the tracings of the lost souls I encountered over the years. My only solace: the vastness of my mouth and how I could live inside it, like a shellfish. Tomorrow was supposed to be one degree warmer out. Was my life a curse or was this really the last stop?

My boyfriend watched with eyes like needle nose plyers. He would think, similarly, about the glacial melting of grand father figures, things slowly breaking up. Knowing everyone would leave him in the end, he'd oscillate between pure kindness and the positive desire to shoot everyone, like a proud Leninist. If everyone was dead, the memories he had of everyone would live. There was always Teegan's place, but I felt above group homes, trap houses, whatever you wanted to call them. I was invited one night to hang out for the Armani sales event, because the one sister, who was probably into crack, decided ovular sunglasses would be her salvation. I guess, maybe, I wasn't so different, in allowing myself to sharply dive into fate, like this.

George, March 13 [in real time]

You know that floorboard in old houses that feels like mulch? That texture was the scene around here: fibrously connected, damp and simple. Anyone could come in and be anyone. I once listened to this guy, Jason, talk about driving major sized HEMIs off three storey ramps set on the highway. At the same time, Jason's brother would be strung out, not even listening, as Jason lied about him in the story. This band called Chrome played and a sales agent named Tracey kept trying to knock on the door. Just to fuck with her, I told her I was the land lady and she'd have to undo my bathrobe to confirm the sex. I'd never seen anyone so persistent to sell a house, she completely ignored my joke and continued trying to ram her services through the door. I guess the landlord had been trying to sell the place, this group home where all sorts of randoms and fandoms coalesced. If there was ever a sudden eviction notice, nobody cared or paid much attention. It made sense that our Chinese landlord, Ching, wouldn't consult everyone beforehand. I guess this meant we'd need to be packing our stuff. Teegan had his clothes and furniture in garbage bags, at the curb already. That dude was like a Ho Chi Minh of moving between places. Nevermind you, the garbage bags were protruded with sharp edges and panelling, metal from the TV stand to the pipes he installed in the rooftop (he'd be taking them, as they were, "technically his"). The kid came from one of those small lake towns, outrageous hillbilly. I could hear him, right now, recording snaps of himself, saying,

"Don't touch my ass when you come over baby?!"

And it was unreal enough for my great grandmother to have a laugh. My great grandmother lived in Okinawa for many years and was a transient in the Garden Scene for twenty years. After she left, her slogan became, "Love is All You Need," and a dilapidated shelving unit, with the words inscribed, proved it. Truth is, she was an influence on my neo-Catholic identity. I rejected sex, love and all the rest and found truth in becoming a zealot behind the scenes. The more I smoked, the more I became the cigarette and it turns out no one outsmarts the cigarette.

Sandra had moved out years ago, Jason started a new life running a pumpkin patch (but I may have missed the sarcasm when he originally said that.) The more and more my greatest and truest and realist friends fled from the scene, the more this house became a sty. I read House of Leaves and couldn't get through 100 pages before realizing that this wasn't about me. I looked out the window of Natya's "second room" (she claimed a second, after Dylan moved) and thought I saw a turkey sandwich outside, out there. A few moments passed and I decided to retrieve it.

I couldn't stop overthinking about the contents of my pockets. I shuffled, readjusted and gained control, before finally leaving the door, secure and one person. In the wild, twisted twilight, I knew that the war was over. I went over to the sandwich and a giant dog zoomed at me. I couldn't believe what was happening (maybe because of my ADD), but I thought he just wanted the sandwich. When I came to my senses, after many moments I would rather forget, hitting and kicking, I had a painful scar on my head and could feel an angel looking after me, like I was a small babe in the world. All this was easy to rub off. What wasn't was the inevitability of losing control like that in a serious situation. I could go off like a gun, join the infantry, and yet all this fiery dispassion never made sense in the context of my very tepid grasp on life.

Inside, everyone was watching old Japanese commercials and wearing overblown lounge wear, one of the newer roomies even in a golf polo. These guys would one day be my best friends, but that's another story for another time.

Natya, same day

My mother had bought Christmas presents for three of her friends the year before and I had somehow wound up with all three of them. Actually, I took them for myself rather thoughtlessly. One was a "rocket notebook" and I had this romantic vision that I'd become an accounting assistant overnight with it. I felt embarrassed, now, seeing all the entries about, "butt still tight after workout" (who'd I think I was, Anne Charlotte Robertson?). I had a tab left open asking me if I wanted to continue applying for the role of "Cake Decorator".

(The night I wrote down my workout at the reception area at the Hyatt, a man approached me and asked if I knew who Chantel Ackerman was. As I hesitated to recite just one of her films, y'know, the famous one, he screamed an inch from my face and said I had to be on it. I thought that was a ridiculous gesture, but I took it seriously by pretending he was a Maltese who'd been through it all).

Anyhow, dispensable as it were, nothing could change last night and how I got married and basically saw my entire future in one molly excursion. While I fumbled around the haphazardly named "Broadway St.," it was like I could have actually been in New York. I had no sense of whether I would miss my job and I didn't care either. I was growing up way too fast and the little pinion of my heart had to make it slow down. I did not fear missing out, I did not even fear turning into a late-Cookie Mueller. My impulsive decision to get married was part of a project to let go and play with the elements of my life like a fingerprinting. Somehow I felt too embarrassed to really preach it, but my shiny shoes, buckling together, knew the secret, all too well.

This little village of houses on Emerald Grove sang out, and I could hear the patchwork of people, now living, in that choir. I remember fiddling around, for the first two hours of the trip, with a ballerina in a music box and, oh, how it spoke to me... The bijou fragility, the possibility that I could be on top of the silver globe like that. The neighbours' screaming baby was the reminder that all this would end and there was nowhere to go anyway. I was rolling by myself and George was playing something on the Wii, where the Miis would clap and spectators would slowly drop out. I felt so stupid watching him with the biggest, twisted smile on my face. Yet, I felt cute, knowing I was cute. He could have been my bigger brother, my first crush, the president and all he had to do was swing that Wiimote that he, truly, wanted nothing to do with. All was an object of my attraction, written in an arcane universe, just for me.

When I called home, to see if my dad would notice me, they were watching Ed Sullivan re-runs and I could hear through the tube,

"Tonight... We have a very special announcement. Now, I want everyone to hear this and I want no one backing out. It's extremely important that everybody in America year this message...,"

And I could hear my mom whispering,

"Yessss," at the end of Ed's sentences. I didn't even understand what they were watching, quite, but I knew her hands were raised up and all of them, in there, would be shooting at the red scare, soon enough.

I asked my dad for one inspirational quote that would summarize his life's teachings and, with his old farmer's face, he spoke,

"Eat your peas," shaking. And I thought,

"Oh dad, how could you give into whatever that is..."

Love had long passed me by and was now whirring around the subway system at supersonic intervals, turning 'round Giza and passing through Bombay, and again. As these very thoughts gargled around in my head a while, I felt like an old lady, knitting away. The way it was: the way it had been. Out of time, out of sight. I was going to be very late for work. Think they'd fire me? I asked the boy sitting next to me and he looked sternly in his ill-fitting headphones. People I loved kept messaging me on Facebook messenger and I rudely swiped away the notifications. Love was all around, the jittery and empty city meant nothing. Everything was yoga and I always had myself to do a twirl, if ever in doubt that anyone would be around. Alison by Slowdive kept scrobbling on my phone despite the fact I was listening to Nephilim.

#short story #creative writing #alt lit

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serialjune · 2 years

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What started out as a project, one late summer, by the eager developers, Matthew Impey and J. Richards, became more than a nightmare to follow. Never meaning to be publicly released, Asteroid Sculptor relishes in its obscurity, jarring game play and occasionally hard to read text. With an unrelenting esoteric humor, the full manuscript was written only a week after the game had started. There was only one problem.

It would take five years to get to this point, some of those with no work at all, others with in-fighting, dispute and demoralized fatigue. The initial excitement was enough for the creators to believe they’d have something complete by 2018. In fact, it hadn’t even been until 2019 that an official engine was chosen. Drafts, sketches and conversational lines filled the void. It was going along like just about every other game development story.

The inability to wipe the smear that was Asteroid Sculptor's enduring presence in both creators lives proved to motivate the young authors to eventually start again. Impey had picked up the slack and J. Richards had just left it behind entirely. Admittedly, both creators had not pursued game development outside early childhood immersion experiences in a depth equivocal with what modern game developers might consider “hobbyist”. The official engine chosen, RPG Maker MV, was sectarian and fan devoted, kids, coders and dads ran their races with it. And not one game from the official library looked a thing like Asteroid Sculptor. Matthew Impey’s exposure to gaming had largely been absorbed by the PS1 console and early PC gaming itself. The possibility for ‘the game’ to mark their next great creative exposé was a turning point from their more original passion for music. Indeed, in years past, the two had founded 'Metro Product', alongside third and pivotal member, Ethan Toews. With its unabashedly sardonic choice in name, Metro Product was ready to launch “Metro Record”, a child-label, equally imaginary, scooped for the purpose of music profitability and collecting. All activities, including Asteroid Sculptor, came to be loosely branched under the Metro Product banner. That is, ‘the ideology that I shall do as I say”. This ideology proved to be influential.

The very name for Metro Product began in the same way as did the original title for Asteroid Sculptor. that is, under working title “5D Age of Aquarius”. This early moniker was begrudgingly scrapped due to its associations with the band "Fifth Dimension" and their track titled, "Age of Aquarius". What remained, albeit with title change, were the endlessly expansive possibilities of the present day being sifted through the fictionalized satire both developers found themselves in increasingly. Asteroid Sculptor is very much a realist take on the 21st century and living it. It was tainted with doom and gloom, a memoir of what both authors had lived and experienced, tying together those memories with the broader identity of a one man/citizen of the future within the game's made-up eschatology.

Stories of time travel, alien hijacking, demonic possession, with a general sense of abandonment and despair were the bread and butter. Furthermore, impossibility in the way of modern society, social aggravation and the satirically large egos of the every day. In the frame of Asteroid Sculptor’s entirety, the design ranges from 3D maximalism to staunch, NES-style minimalism.

In early 2022, the game's building blocks had doubled and it had became, quite literally, a new game for the two, with realistic challenges and breakthroughs ensuing. Prior to early demo release (Demo 1.0 August 3rd, 2022), the game's pre-release had absorbed criticism for its 1D "Simpson's esque" satire. The game had been all about despair, abjection, confusion and the inability to combat enemies or even solve puzzles essential to the plot and gameplay. What seemed to be coming to fruition came to a dead-end due to the one-sided focus of all that a game is. It had seemed more like a dream diary than a playable "game". There was one cause and one solution.

This relates back to the first sentence, way back when the game started five years ago. Only now, both developers had grown up quite a lot. As both came equipped with a new arsenal of skills and experience set, so did protagonist, “Jack-off/Clutch”. Rather than acting as a hopeless NPC, the game we provide to you today showcases the original fervor of development combined with the ability to engage in actual problems. Weapons, tools, solutions and means for the player to fight back in the various dream realms of the game became a feature for the first time ever, reflecting a crucial difference from what had all began as learned hopelessness and ‘unusurpable genius’. And, now, just another indie game:

https://asteroidsculptor.itch.io/asteroid-sculptor-demo

#2022 #indie games #yume nikki #space funeral #asteroid sculptor #rpg maker

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