Broken imagery

There are seeds of madness ingrained in the hearts of humans...
Requited love is when two people exchange one of these seeds, plant them within themselves, and the seeds somehow bloom into one thing that is theirs only.
The resultant plant is rarely, if ever, perfect; it varies with each couple, but it is a special and precious thing.

Reading

My book feels like Kray Van Kirk’s music.

A weird mixture of old and new, of beauty, melancholy, and joy.

Coming together like loose strands of courage with a deep breath that precedes the first step out to face the challenge of a new day.

Intersection

The circus is pretentious and what weird state of affairs that is. The bright colors are shabby and the air forced gaiety is like the voluptuousness of plastic storefront mannequins. Litter and discarded popcorn are remarkably absent from their paths. It’s a good thing that they’re oblivious to their surroundings.

People cross paths everyday, hundreds upon hundreds, thousands upon thousands, numbers untold… but how often do people truly meet? But when they do everyone else seems to fade away.

This night these two have met and for now they are alone in the world… It started with a small thing a shared dislike of manic clowns pretending to artistry while pushing the slapstick shtick to unprecedented heights. This was perhaps not the most auspicious of beginnings, but it didn’t matter at all. A shared look of disgust and a mute agreement to leave... later they are outside the tent venting to each other, quickly moving on to sharing each other's likes and dislikes…
“What kind of music do you like? Got any names?”
“Never heard of them… but if you like that style, you may like…”
“Have you read…”
Laughter and lighthearted exchange ensues.
Everything is possible, and the relationship wheel spins.
Time slips away and they have walked through half the city, the evening, and the night…
And now the sun rises.

Tick tock.

The train pulls into to the station. People dance off and people dance off in an endless kind of intercourse. The man muses as the trains makes it slow motion getaway carrying his son off into the smog-clouded sunset. As he walks home the smog twilight turns to cold drizzly streetlight lit night. Somehow the streetlights never seem to do more than emphasize the darkness.

The door closes, and locks his various locks, bolts the various bolts, and wonders what do with himself as he faces his small one room apartment. Gazing at the drab walls and what little shabby furniture he owns, he wonders how his home became such a joyless place. He ponders if there is any chance of falling asleep tonight and sighs with the realization that this night, like the previous, holds no rest for him. No solace…

Lying on his couch he looks up into the darkness at the cracking paint on his ceiling and lets the sounds of life winding down for the night in his building wash over him. It’s the sound of people spilling sand through their fingers one day at a time. Specks of questioned significance that are lives flashing in slow motion like a firefly lighting up for eighty years and winding down into darkness again. But finally, silence comes and with it comes a deeper shade of solitude.

He counts the rhythmic beats of his bedside clock and for every beat of his heart there’s a tick in the plastic clock echoed by a tock. The beats mingle, which is which? He wonders if they are somehow related, does the tick bring on the tock, do either of those make his heart beat, or are they both echoes of his heart? The mere possibility of this proves to be too much responsibility for the frail mechanisms of a wind up clock. The tock stops but the tick carries on its own, walking its own path in its time. The rhythm is random and as such fails to be rhythm. By sunrise there is only silence there to greet the awakening world.

The Phantom of the server -prologue-

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR OF THIS SINGULAR WORK INFORMS THE READER HOW HE ACQUIRED THE CERTAINTY THAT THE SERVER GHOST REALLY EXISTED

The ghost in the server really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a system bug, a glitch, a virus, or a creature of the imagination of the artists, a superstition of the players, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the noobs, the mike-spammers, the eight year-old wannabes, the single celled leet hackers, the griefers, or the clueless boomers. Yes, he existed in the code and on the screens, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say, of a spectral shade.

When I was called in to service Blizzard’s servers, I immediately started multiple heuristic scans and I was at once struck by the surprising coincidences between the phenomena ascribed to the "ghost" and the most extraordinary and fantastic tragedy that ever excited the hearts of premium account players; and I soon conceived the idea that this tragedy might reasonably be explained by the phenomena in question. The events do not date back more than three months; and it would not be difficult in the least to find players that are still active on the message boards and forums, players upon whose word one could absolutely rely, who would remember as though they happened yesterday the mysterious and dramatic conditions that attended the hacking of Christine Dae’s account, the disappearance of person who played under the alias of Vicomte de Chagny, and the corruption of the NPC called Count Philippe, whose body was found badly pixelized one morning on the bank of the lake that exists in the lower cellars of his manor house in Ironforge. But none of those witnesses had until that day thought that there was any reason for connecting the more or less legendary figure of the server’s ghost with that terrible story.

The truth was slow to enter my mind, puzzled by an inquiry that at every moment was complicated by events which, at first sight, might be looked upon as buggy or even virus related; and more than once I was within a click of abandoning a task in which I was exhausting myself in the hopeless pursuit of a vain image. At last, I received the proof that my presentiments had not deceived me, and I was rewarded for all my efforts on the day when I acquired the certainty that the server ghost was more than a mere bug.