What it Is

I have proven myself a failure at being consistent. Methinks this should be a place for me. Maybe not the collected me that makes sense. More like the me that likes to be. To wonder, to plan, to think, to understand. I want to write everyday. It is my hope that this is the blog that will facilitate that goal.

I dont make any promises. You could still call this my creative blog. But I'd like to think of it more as the debris that is left behind after all the normal thoughts blow through my consciousness.

Don't expect it to always make sense or be worth your time. I think the main goal if for it to be my sanity.

Mottled Light

Mottled Light
the way my mind feels sometimes, waiting for a breakthrough.

Friday, March 4, 2011

Entry One-Hundred & One

I miss the roundness of the number 100. But 101 has such a nice symmetry that I find it an acceptable change.

It's the number 102 that you gotta worry about. Maybe I will stop posting entries after this.

...


...


Naaaaaaaah.

So I know it would make sense to write more on the Bear Brook Massacre and post that here. Honestly I am working on the next little bit. I am also searching for the pages that held an account of how I was going to kill everyone. Until then, I will simply have to tide you over with something that I wrote while at the laundromat.

I feel like my random little writing entries are sometimes like my doodles. When I doodle, I start off with a shape. A box, a circle, a figure 8, a cloud shape, etc. From there I just start going. I'll draw another shape and based on what my doodle starts to look like I move on and create something. With no idea of what it was going to be in the first place.

And so with some of my writing, I start off with s sentence and all of a sudden my brain wants to go somewhere different with it. I don't want to write a square or a cloud or a bubble letter A. I want to write an abstract version of meiosis or an angry owl. That kind of thing.

I was at the laundromat and I was just going to write about how bored I was. I started with "I am stationed at the Park Street Laundromat" and all of a sudden it sounded like someone in the army talking about where they were stationed. From there, I wondered why someone would be stationed at a laundromat. And from there it turned into the following two front and back pages of writing.

It's not polished so don't judge too harshly.


Written 3-5-11 at the Park Street Laundromat in Rockland, Maine

I am stationed at the Park Street Laundromat. Sounds innocent enough, right?

Wrong.

It's located a couple of blocks from downtown Rockland in what USED to be the state of Maine. Rockland being a coastal town, they have a tendency to swarm there. So short of being in the town itself on the wharf, I happen to be holed up in one of the most dangerous locations in Mid-coast Maine.

On the outside, this particular laundromat may not look like much. It's an old, large colonial house. Inside it looks like even less. Dormant hulls of washers a and dryers, long since rendered useless, clog the space. All the metal rolling laundry baskets have been stolen and the change machines, detergent dispensers, and vending machines broken open. Their contents emptied. It's actually a relatively clean place. Since the military took it for themselves we rid the building of all squatters, excrement, trash, moldy mattresses, and rotting bodies. Of course we never could get rid f the smell. You could see the remnants of the rainbow wallpaper peeling form the strength of it.

And tonight? Along with the remnant stink of wormy flesh, feces, vomit, urine, and garbage, there's the smell of monster carcass. We've noticed that they are drawn to the dead of their own. Our hoity toity scientist says they learned that where there is a dead corpse of their kind, it means WE killed it and are likely to be nearby. Plus, they're cannibals and would never let a good corpse go to waste. So we usually burn the bodies, save a few. For this. For baited traps.

And that's what this is. A crazy suicide mission. An attempt to draw out their numbers and possibly even stretch our boarders a little bit.

Here's what we know (it's very little, mind you). Their skin is a semi-permeable membrane. Saline dependent. We figure they lived deep in the oceans before they ventured onto land. They need salt water to survive and fresh water is deadly to them. That's why the coasts are so dangerous. They've evolved from aquatic creatures to semi-aquatic. Like huge amphibians. You know how they said that the first land organisms were once fish, all that Evolution bull? I guess that's what THIS is. Only it didn't happen over hundreds of thousands of years. It happened so quickly, in fact, that we could hardly make a move before every island was overrun and every coastal community dominated. At least that's what we keep telling ourselves. That we had no time. Not according to our hoity toity scientist that I mentioned earlier. He's one of the few who realized that the signs were there and tried to warn everyone. Now he's one of the only leading experts on the monsters. And we have him constantly breathing down our military necks. As if he would know strategy if it bit him in the arm pit.

They venture out of their water colonies mostly at night, when the sun isn't there to evaporate moisture. They built these strange sand and mud hives just off the beaches. Where the water isn't too deep but they are able to stay moist even at low tide. They never come out when it rains. Like I said, they are saline dependent. If they get too much fresh water in their system, they die.

What do they look like? Picture an abnormally large Komodo Dragon except all gross and mucousy. Like a huge grotesque salamander even. They have long slimy bodies. Usually about 7 feel long but the big ones reach about 10 feet. They have 4 legs with webbed and clawed feet. No real heads. No eyes, ears, or noses either. Just these huge gaping sucker mouths at the end of a very short neck. Inside those suckers are these hooked teeth. Picture a lamprey's mouth but huge. It's enough to make the toughest solider squeamish. Mr. Science Guy says they sense smell and taste through chemical reactions in their skin. Like how our noses and tongues work only along their whole bodies. And they have these what he calls "lateral lines". He says fish have them and can sense movement in the water through changes in the waves against their bodies. I guess these monsters feel changes in vibrations in the air.

How they managed to adapt out of water so quickly, we have no idea. But they are wicked fast.

They secrete this liquid out of their skin. It's highly toxic. Direct exposure to the skin will kill you. Slowly and painfully. Chemical fumes are fatal from 15 feet away. At 30 feet it causes severe and debilitating pain. At 60 feet you're safe, but not for very long. And like I said, they move quick so you can imagine it's pretty tough to get close enough to one to get a good killing shot.

Well, I'll tell you. Tough don't begin to scratch the tip of the iceberg.

Impossible would be a better word to describe how difficult it is to kill them. They have three cerebral areas, or "brains". They're tiny and connected to a simple nerve system the runs horizontally through their body. Like an insect. They hardly feel anything and regenerate extremely fast. A bullet will go through them and their "membrane" just repairs itself. So shooting them anywhere on their bodies only pisses them off. Making sure all three "brains" are destroyed is the only way to kill them for good. Hitting just one will knock them out long enough for them to stop secreting their deadly goo and for you to go up in a hazmat suite and torch them. That's easier said than done. Two brains are located at the intersection of each front leg and the body. Their "armpits" if you will. Impossible to hit at close range so you can forget about it at any kind of distance. The third is halfway between the tip of their tail and where the tail meets the bod. This one is only marginally easier to hit than the others.

*****

That's all I got down before it was time to get my laundry out of the dryer and head home. I hope you enjoyed it because I don't think I will really go anywhere with this. It's just a little doodle of words from my brain.

1 comment:

Jeanne, the mom and grandmom said...

Fascinating! I am sure you describe a creature that has attributes of actual animals. What a nightmare it would be if what you wrote about was real??