The Wrong Moves

I dreamt I knew Rachael Harris and that we shared some kind of dark spot in our pasts, possibly a crime we committed, that took place on a red bullet train. But the dream was taking place in some kind of subterranean world where the fourth Doctor and I were fleeing from an entire civilisation of cosplayers who wanted us dead. The Doctor and I were in some kind of dim, grey concrete subway station where there was a single mine cart on the track, covered with red Christmas lights.

Among the slowly approaching cosplayer horde, I spotted Rachael dressed as Raggedy Ann. When she recognised me, she seemed surprised and immediately changed sides to join with myself and the Doctor.

"We need to get out of here," I said to her.

"I know," she said, eyeing her former comrades.

"No--not them." I nodded at the tracks. "A train's coming."

The three of us made our way to a torch lit dungeon, where we realised the cosplayers had stopped following us.

"I wonder why," I said.

"They're afraid of something in here," said the Doctor.

Eventually, a tall, muscular man with a shaved head and leather armour joined us.

"Hello." The Doctor grinned as he asked, "And who might you be?"

"I'm the former lord of this place," he said. "They've sent me in here to die with you."

"Oh?" said the Doctor. "By some doom of your own making?"

"Why, yes," said the man in a far off, troubled tone.

It turned out he had created a centaur through genetic engineering. We were able to watch the centaur through a rectangular observation window. It was quite different from the classical concept of a centaur--it consisted of an entire, starved looking horse with a man's torso attached to its rear, sort of flailing around half conscious and urinating on the horse's neck.

The dream ended when we found an escape route via a roller coaster car on a track that led out into a green, sunlit world. I remember the Doctor sitting at the front, telling us all some pleasant story as we rode.



The dream may have been partially influenced by the fact that I watched the last episode of the "Sunmakers" serial yesterday. It was a good serial, though as lampoons of bureaucratic dystopia go I've certainly seen better and I'm getting a little tired of the Doctor saving entire civilisations. But mostly I was disappointed by the chess game the Doctor plays with K-9, which bookends the serial. I took a number of screenshots to analyse the game, and was sorry to find it wasn't a real game. It sort of works, if one goes by medieval rules and assumes the Queen can only move one square diagonally. But then the Doctor moves his King halfway across the board. Oh, well. It's still not as bad as the chess games in Code Geass' second season. Though considering Lelouch's philosophy was that one should always attack with the King, maybe it was exactly as bad as the games in the second season of Code Geass.

I miss CC and her endless Pizza Hut deliveries.

Twitter Sonnet #220

Half a lemon peel drags in the other.
Cinnamon spears a shot of burnt whiskey.
Slime obscures moons in a nasal gutter.
Damp clove planets in the sky that's rusty.
Over lolling tongues of turtle lava.
Honey burns the obsidian surface.
Giant's coffee translates into Java.
Books of face code slam into a trellis.
Happy stems hold Chutes and Ladders to heart.
Green arms spiral around an old white boot.
Patterned sinus scraping is a new art.
Smoker owls make Q rings with each hoot.
Grey Poupon seas besiege Andromeda.
Hard Hitchcock slides into a pink pita.

I was working with a sort of leap frog of metaphors there, so I guess that's how a sonnet that started out being about my hot toddies ended up being about sex. The inevitable destination of poetry, maybe.

With breakfast to-day I read most of the new Sirenia Digest. "--30--", a story inspired by a comment on Caitlin's blog by Robyn Massachusetts, is a fun piece of dark humour about the lengths a writer goes to find an ending to a story. I rather have to sympathise with the fairy store owner of the Endings Shop--this economy's bad enough without customers having to trade memories and sex just to find your shop's location.

The digest also contained a very brief flash fiction by Sonya Taaffe, where she adopts the point of view of the Minotaur to paint a rather flattering portrait of Ariadne. In its short span it manages to heap quite a majesty onto Ariadne, while making the Minotaur seem kind of pathetically caught in a one-sided lust for his sister. It's kind of an interesting take on the story. One gets the impression Sonya isn't exactly a big fan of the Minotaur.

Following this story, Caitlin included a number of anonymously made comments to her blog in response to a prompt that asked readers to describe what they'd do to Caitlin if they had her alone, in a room, tied up for twenty four hours. Caitlin asked them not to hold back, saying that they couldn't hope to get close to disturbing her.

I only managed to read the first few before I got too bored. I imagine they're a lot more interesting when they're directed at you, but I'm not usually very excited by someone else's fan mail. Caitlin refers to her fan mail a lot, which I suppose is smart for someone trying to grow their own brand. Maybe I should mention it here every time I get fan mail, but as much as I can see the practical use of building one's own legend or whatever as an artist, I just can't psychologically handle broadcasting such flattering things about myself. I do like the way Howard Stern does it. I love when he complained about how people in the media were calling Michael Jackson the King of Pop only because Jackson called himself that, and then Stern decided to call himself the King of All Media to see if it was picked up by that same PR world. And it worked. I'm certain there are a number of people out there who assume there's something to Howard Stern solely because they've heard him referred to as the King of All Media. Maybe I just like it because it also contains a self-deprecating element wrapped up in a media satire.