The Mating Rituals of Planet X4

Last night my comrades and I observed a peculiar ritual among the organisms of the planet X4.  These creatures seem to be essentially nocturnal, being only somewhat active by day and emerging at night together inside one of any number of enclosures crowded together across the land.

 

They appear in brightly colored suits of skins, feathers, and all manner of gaudy materials that shone or glimmered, in a clumsy attempt no doubt to attract the opposite sex.  They then proceed to engage in a bizarre mating ritual, a frenzy of awkward movements around one another whilst a strange, blaring cacophony of noises is emitted in the background.

 

This they do for several hours each night, stopping only briefly to sip liquids for sustenance or to answer nature's call, in hopes of attracting a mate.  I think, however, that this is one of the odder mannerisms of these creatures, as any two that end up as a pair at the end of the night do not necessarily remain a pair of mates, and more often than not these encounters do not produce offspring.

 

Therefore, all aforementioned efforts are useless and a waste of valuable energy and it remains a conundrum why this practice still exists; after all, they have managed to thrive for hundreds of thousands of years despite this superfluous behaviour.  Nonetheless, the anomaly remains, and the creatures plod on.

 

-- From the journals of J. L. Stanley, Professor of Foreign Biological Sciences, Planet X23

    9.16.3085

Walls

Walls

If these walls could talk.

If only these walls could talk.

Walls hear everything; they record it and it is constantly played back, long after there is anyone to listen. Ancient stones hold ancient wisdom, be it how to sow crops on an autumn day or the secret of the universe.

If you stand close enough you can still hear the sounds, echoes of echoes, that's what they've become.

We should all be listening now.

- 8/9/2006

New World/Old World

New World/Old World

The new world is in many ways quite similar to the old world. Its vast oceans hold island orbs that float lazily along, illuminated by jellyfish-like things of every size and color that traverse the great space between.

Everything is propelled by an invisible current that likes to align the orbs into archipelagos and swirl the jellyfish things into pretty patterns.

Occasionally, white, pearl-like objects can be found in suspension just off the floating island orbs. They are beautiful, just like the pearls of the old world, but they are not valued as much, as most travelers passed them by without giving much thought of the iridescent spheres.

A pity, for they did not realize that it was the pearls' luminescence that lit the islands at night when the jellyfish things went to sleep.

No traveler had yet stopped at any of the islands, having only knowledge of their own orb back in the old world. They will keep on traveling, until they reach the orb that is most like their own.

There, it will be the start of a new life, new world meets old world, and the travelers will finally put down their hats and lay down their heads.

It will be home.

Every Man Is an Island

Every Man Is an Island

Somebody once said that no man is an island. But aren't we all islands, really? I mean, we get up and go to work in the morning and we talk to the people around us, saying hello as we all crowd around the coffee maker. That coffee maker is the causeway that connects us to each other like an island that is connected to the mainland. But once you cross a causeway, you usually stay on the mainland for a while. At the office, we reach out on that causeway of a coffee maker, or maybe it's a Xerox machine, but we don't stay on the mainland. Instead, we retread to our desks and computers, going back across that causeway to become islands once more. Each cubicle stands alone in the midst of the archipelago of skyscrapers that is the working world.

As a matter of fact, nearly everything in this modern world promotes a solitary life, or dare I say, even hermitage. Human contact is no longer necessary for even the most social of modern day practices – one can order food without a waiter, buy clothes without a salesperson, and even date without meeting face to face. So, in this day and age, it truly can be said that every man is an island.

The Most Powerful Nation On Earth

The Most Powerful Nation on Earth

There is no way of telling how many years have passed since the war ended. It feels like an eternity. The entire face of the world changed on the day the freedom fighters fell to the opposition. We thought we were smarter, stronger than our enemies. We were wrong. Like vultures upon weak prey, they descended at the first falter, in a moment of --

No, that's not how it really happened. The freedom fighters - if you could call them that - were arrogant. Ignorant, too. There was no such thing as freedom, even then. The fighting began in retaliation to a blow from one of our enemies during a lethargic administration. We had become decadent - in an age of rising prices and declining money, we squandered what we had on anything we could.

Clothes, cars, and gadgets galore - we were the richest poor nation in the world. Knowing this, our leaders went the extra step to ensure our appearance as omniscient and omnipotent by sticking their noses into everyone else's business. That's how we got ourselves into trouble. When we were good and busy with other people's problems, that's when they attacked us. We were so drunk with power and immersed in our own decadence that we never even saw it coming.

And when the attacks came, we were a nation too stunned to react. Who would dare confront The Most Powerful Nation On Earth? After the shock wore off, anger set in, and our leaders retaliated. Only they got it wrong. Well, not exactly. They may have invaded the wrong country, but they knew exactly what they were doing.

After a while, the anger subsided and was replaced with avarice and self-righteousness. We continued to invade country after country, deposing leader after leader, until we had succeeded in alienating ourselves from everyone else in the entire universe. And then, finally, the world imploded.

That was seventy years ago, by our best approximation - there is no longer any such thing as precise time. For that short amount of time, we had enjoyed having control of the universe - after all, we seemed to be the only ones out there in the middle of space, so logically, he who controls the planet controls the universe.

Unfortunately, our leaders didn't take into account the weight of all this new power. Like children on a seesaw, the balance had gone up and down, repeated highs and lows for centuries, until our leaders came along. They carried weights on their side of the seesaw, just plopped right down and threw off the child at the other end, and the balance of all the cosmic forces went with it. Karma's a bitch.

Stars exploded, the moon cracked in half, and the earth fell out of orbit. Like a helium balloon a set "free" at a carnival, our planet now floats aimlessly, silently along in outer space. It's become the ultimate example of chaos theory. Unfortunately for us, for everyone really, no one had really perfected space travel up to this point - most of our funding had gone to creating armories for endless wars. They are useless to us now.

I suppose you could say that we're all on one giant space ship, floating on one giant raft throughout the sea of the universe, but this is really of no use to us now. During the war, even though (and especially because) we lacked the money for better space ships and hadn't even explored our alternative living possibilities, there was a lot of talk about transplant communities.

Well, we've certainly moved, but we're still more like foreign invaders than anything else, maybe more so now than ever, intruding into unknown corners of space. That's all there is left to intrude, anyhow. Everything else has exploded or imploded or simply burned up, and we are left a sad, wandering nomad, the last cosmic Bedouin.

And that's how it really happened. I don't know if anyone will ever hear this, considering there seems to be nothing and no one left now, but I talk nonetheless. It's the only way to break the suffocating silence.

Brave New World

Brave New World

Brave New World
You are lush and green.

Brave New World
You are full and ripe.

Brave New World
You held such hope.

Brave New World
We took everything.

Brave New World
We left you with nothing.

brave new world
now we too are left with nothing.

Rain

Rain

It had been months since the world had seen even a single drop of rain. The rivers had begun to dry up and any life from within had since perished and floated to the top, clogging what little water remained and contaminating it so that it could not be drunk by any creature that remained alive on land.

After a few weeks, people had begun digging large, deep wells anywhere and everywhere they could, trying to find pure water. What little water they could find was quickly used up, and all the damage to the surface of the earth had destroyed all grasslands and other vegetation (but all of that had dried up long ago anyway).

The earth was covered with a peculiar set of craters, not unlike its moon, another desolate environment. Someday there would be two moons, lonely even though they were together. Those who had survived prayed for rain; they did not want to live on the moon but preferred to remain at a distance from it.

And finally the rains came. The few who remained rejoiced, and they praised the heavens, and drank themselves full.