spaintastic
Ubermensch
I am. I briefly pondered my own existence and then my train of thought was led astray by my strange surroundings. I stood alone on a thin circular black plastic platform having about the diameter of the width of my shoulders. There was nothing else at all except for breathable gas. I could see. There was white light everywhere but it had no clear origin. There was gravity.
I took a deep breath and unsteadily stepped forward with my left foot and another giant tiddlywink, a red one, materialized to counter the force of my forward weight. I paused after lowering a pair of flailing arms carefully back to my sides.
I listened and the penetrating trill of a piccolo began to weave through the blank white space off to the right. I didn't like the sound of it. The trill of the piccolo changed into a slower vibrato and then into a single steady note which held for a few moments. Now it dropped four octaves and transformed into the low droning notes of a euphonium.
A fat bumbling insect buzzed lazily past my right ear and I ducked my head to the side to avoid it. It flew off to my left making a long s-path and then turned into a potted sunflower supported by a 1 x 1 meter square blue plastic platform. It was about three meters away. The flowery head part of the sunflower began to swivel slowly around and around seeking the source where all of the ambient white light was coming from.
A short orange-yellow school bus with a big red stop sign pulled to a squeaking halt just in front of me. The name of a school was painted on the side. It was short because it was a bus for special kids who were dexterously or mentally or socially challenged. The driver hit a red button and the stop sign flipped out perpendicular to the side of the bus, the two lights above the windshield started alternately turning on and off and the air smelled like tree leaves, diesel exhaust and fresh manure. A boy in a wheelchair slowly turned his head to look at me out of one of the windows and then the driver said, "Well, come on now, we haven't got all eon. Get on the bus!" I crossed in front of the bus, randomly colored giant tiddlywinks appearing under my feet as I walked past the dried up dead bugs that stuck between the fine metal blades of the radiator.
The driver opened the door pulling on a big skinny upside-down flower vase shaped handle that made zigzagged metal bars straighten out like a striking snake. The couplings of the various levers connected to the door were well greased and didn't squeak and when the door closed it made a nice snug thunk that was familiar and very satisfying to me. I looked at the driver for a second and he said good morning. First gear ground into place followed by the lurches of a shuddering clutch. The bus started moving and I grabbed the back of a seat to steady myself. It seemed to me like it took a long time to get to the back of the bus. Peripheral vision sensed lighter skin-colored faces stuck to bodies that were clothed in hooded sweatshirts or denim jean jackets. The faces on the bodies were about the same height above the floor of the bus as the mid-section of my rib cage and everyone was wearing shoes.
I found an empty deep forest green seat with no seatbelt taking note of the smell of the same vinyl that I smelled yesterday and the day before, the elevated humidity and the kid behind me who wore the same clothes every day, never combed his hair, and ate his boogers. It was Wednesday. I looked out the window at the bald hills where hay had been recently cut by a farmer's big giant noisy mechanical things. The view out the window got broken up into tiny mental snapshots as I quickly snapped my eyes to the left then followed the hill to the right, then snapped left again, then followed right; then it just made a big blur. I'd taken a seat on the left, left if you're inside the bus looking at the emergency door on the back wall. We were moving forward.
The seat probably didn't have a seatbelt because the bus was really a regular school bus and I went to a normal school for normal kids because adults thought I was normal enough and since the bus was really big like a non-special kid bus it would probably squish whatever it hit unless what it hit was maybe like a big concrete wall supporting a bridge. Any average impact probably wouldn't have hurt us kids very much. Kids are made out of rubber, aren't they? But anyway, I think school bus transportation services are probably very well insured and if the bus were ever to roll over and bounce the kids around battering their body parts, public parts and private parts, or anything like that, at least some of them would probably get free lunch for a long time.
Still looking out the window, I noted my right hand and forearm resting on my right leg in front of me. I pressed the tips of my middle finger and thumb together and started making ticking noises with those two fingernails repeatedly pulling my thumbnail off of the edge of the nail of my middle finger. I looked down at my thumbnail and experimented with finger pressure making the blood under my thumbnail go away and come back again. I had a hangnail on my index finger and it stung. I pressed my thumb hard against the tip of my index finger and it made the stinging go numb and come back again. That was a go away and come back thing like what the blood under my thumbnail was doing before. I bit at the hangnail trying to get a grasp on it and nip it off without pulling at it. Spit glistened on my finger making a string as I pulled my hand away and I had the dull taste of skin in my mouth mixed with some other stuff that I probably touched at breakfast time while I was sitting at the dining room table.
I thought about the varnish getting old on the back of my chair at the dining room table and the varnish being sticky on hot days when my back was sweaty and sometimes scratching at varnish on the backs of chairs with my finger nails when nobody looks at me. I'm aware of the things that I'm doing and I'm quite alive. I doubt that most other people consciously think about the things they do, at least not so deeply and they probably don't reflect on the cool little details. I never thought to ask anyone about it because they'd probably think I was extra weird and tell their friends about me being extra weird and then I'd get extra picked on for a week or so instead of just getting regular picked on.
I'm pretty sure that most people think about what they saw on television last night or about what they're going to talk about with their friends at lunch time or about their favorite music, or maybe sports. I like role playing games. I think about how much I enjoy filling the impressions of the numbers on the polyhedron dice with the wax of a white crayon and how the crayon is really useless for drawing purposes and about the satisfaction of wiping away the excess wax to reveal the number impressions on the dice with a kleenex. I think about how well some people can draw monsters with an HB pencil or a Pilot ink pen and if they're right-handed or left-handed and how they hold their pencils or pens and their handwriting and whether or not they make a lot of mistakes when they spell words. I think about why there is so much rolling of the 20-sided die and very little use the 12-sided die for anything except sometimes randomly selecting something from a list of possibilities. I think about my friend cheating sometimes when he rolls two ten-sided percentile dice saying, "shut up elf tits, I told you before I rolled that this time the orange one is the 10's and the blue one is the 1's." I think about a stain left on a page of my monster manual that has the statistics of the sucubus creature and about how many different kinds of dragons, slimes and puddings there are whose names unoriginally differ only in color prefix; red dragon, green dragon, white dragon, silver dragon, green slime, black pudding. Stuff like that might sound interesting or funny to some people if it's written in a book but it's really hard to base any conversations on it, especially with cute girls who smell good.
When I was a kid, I used to write down numbers in long columns on large sheets of paper, starting at 1. I'd write as small as I could so I could fit as many numbers on the page as possible. I'd get frustrated if I ran out of space for not writing small enough. When I'd fill a sheet it gave me a sense of accomplishment and I was proud because it was something I did for me and it made me feel good. It didn't matter if no one else understood.
I took a deep breath and unsteadily stepped forward with my left foot and another giant tiddlywink, a red one, materialized to counter the force of my forward weight. I paused after lowering a pair of flailing arms carefully back to my sides.
I listened and the penetrating trill of a piccolo began to weave through the blank white space off to the right. I didn't like the sound of it. The trill of the piccolo changed into a slower vibrato and then into a single steady note which held for a few moments. Now it dropped four octaves and transformed into the low droning notes of a euphonium.
A fat bumbling insect buzzed lazily past my right ear and I ducked my head to the side to avoid it. It flew off to my left making a long s-path and then turned into a potted sunflower supported by a 1 x 1 meter square blue plastic platform. It was about three meters away. The flowery head part of the sunflower began to swivel slowly around and around seeking the source where all of the ambient white light was coming from.
A short orange-yellow school bus with a big red stop sign pulled to a squeaking halt just in front of me. The name of a school was painted on the side. It was short because it was a bus for special kids who were dexterously or mentally or socially challenged. The driver hit a red button and the stop sign flipped out perpendicular to the side of the bus, the two lights above the windshield started alternately turning on and off and the air smelled like tree leaves, diesel exhaust and fresh manure. A boy in a wheelchair slowly turned his head to look at me out of one of the windows and then the driver said, "Well, come on now, we haven't got all eon. Get on the bus!" I crossed in front of the bus, randomly colored giant tiddlywinks appearing under my feet as I walked past the dried up dead bugs that stuck between the fine metal blades of the radiator.
The driver opened the door pulling on a big skinny upside-down flower vase shaped handle that made zigzagged metal bars straighten out like a striking snake. The couplings of the various levers connected to the door were well greased and didn't squeak and when the door closed it made a nice snug thunk that was familiar and very satisfying to me. I looked at the driver for a second and he said good morning. First gear ground into place followed by the lurches of a shuddering clutch. The bus started moving and I grabbed the back of a seat to steady myself. It seemed to me like it took a long time to get to the back of the bus. Peripheral vision sensed lighter skin-colored faces stuck to bodies that were clothed in hooded sweatshirts or denim jean jackets. The faces on the bodies were about the same height above the floor of the bus as the mid-section of my rib cage and everyone was wearing shoes.
I found an empty deep forest green seat with no seatbelt taking note of the smell of the same vinyl that I smelled yesterday and the day before, the elevated humidity and the kid behind me who wore the same clothes every day, never combed his hair, and ate his boogers. It was Wednesday. I looked out the window at the bald hills where hay had been recently cut by a farmer's big giant noisy mechanical things. The view out the window got broken up into tiny mental snapshots as I quickly snapped my eyes to the left then followed the hill to the right, then snapped left again, then followed right; then it just made a big blur. I'd taken a seat on the left, left if you're inside the bus looking at the emergency door on the back wall. We were moving forward.
The seat probably didn't have a seatbelt because the bus was really a regular school bus and I went to a normal school for normal kids because adults thought I was normal enough and since the bus was really big like a non-special kid bus it would probably squish whatever it hit unless what it hit was maybe like a big concrete wall supporting a bridge. Any average impact probably wouldn't have hurt us kids very much. Kids are made out of rubber, aren't they? But anyway, I think school bus transportation services are probably very well insured and if the bus were ever to roll over and bounce the kids around battering their body parts, public parts and private parts, or anything like that, at least some of them would probably get free lunch for a long time.
Still looking out the window, I noted my right hand and forearm resting on my right leg in front of me. I pressed the tips of my middle finger and thumb together and started making ticking noises with those two fingernails repeatedly pulling my thumbnail off of the edge of the nail of my middle finger. I looked down at my thumbnail and experimented with finger pressure making the blood under my thumbnail go away and come back again. I had a hangnail on my index finger and it stung. I pressed my thumb hard against the tip of my index finger and it made the stinging go numb and come back again. That was a go away and come back thing like what the blood under my thumbnail was doing before. I bit at the hangnail trying to get a grasp on it and nip it off without pulling at it. Spit glistened on my finger making a string as I pulled my hand away and I had the dull taste of skin in my mouth mixed with some other stuff that I probably touched at breakfast time while I was sitting at the dining room table.
I thought about the varnish getting old on the back of my chair at the dining room table and the varnish being sticky on hot days when my back was sweaty and sometimes scratching at varnish on the backs of chairs with my finger nails when nobody looks at me. I'm aware of the things that I'm doing and I'm quite alive. I doubt that most other people consciously think about the things they do, at least not so deeply and they probably don't reflect on the cool little details. I never thought to ask anyone about it because they'd probably think I was extra weird and tell their friends about me being extra weird and then I'd get extra picked on for a week or so instead of just getting regular picked on.
I'm pretty sure that most people think about what they saw on television last night or about what they're going to talk about with their friends at lunch time or about their favorite music, or maybe sports. I like role playing games. I think about how much I enjoy filling the impressions of the numbers on the polyhedron dice with the wax of a white crayon and how the crayon is really useless for drawing purposes and about the satisfaction of wiping away the excess wax to reveal the number impressions on the dice with a kleenex. I think about how well some people can draw monsters with an HB pencil or a Pilot ink pen and if they're right-handed or left-handed and how they hold their pencils or pens and their handwriting and whether or not they make a lot of mistakes when they spell words. I think about why there is so much rolling of the 20-sided die and very little use the 12-sided die for anything except sometimes randomly selecting something from a list of possibilities. I think about my friend cheating sometimes when he rolls two ten-sided percentile dice saying, "shut up elf tits, I told you before I rolled that this time the orange one is the 10's and the blue one is the 1's." I think about a stain left on a page of my monster manual that has the statistics of the sucubus creature and about how many different kinds of dragons, slimes and puddings there are whose names unoriginally differ only in color prefix; red dragon, green dragon, white dragon, silver dragon, green slime, black pudding. Stuff like that might sound interesting or funny to some people if it's written in a book but it's really hard to base any conversations on it, especially with cute girls who smell good.
When I was a kid, I used to write down numbers in long columns on large sheets of paper, starting at 1. I'd write as small as I could so I could fit as many numbers on the page as possible. I'd get frustrated if I ran out of space for not writing small enough. When I'd fill a sheet it gave me a sense of accomplishment and I was proud because it was something I did for me and it made me feel good. It didn't matter if no one else understood.
right? This excerpt was just a daydream I'd written down to document how one day can be seen from a very different perspective, like taking the mind for a ride. And no, I don't sit around the house playing with blue and red tiddlywinks all day long.
