The Hell I Coil

I'll be upfront with you here -- writing the last update left a bad taste in my mouth.  Not because I was sleep deprived and ended up getting a fine carpet of old tobacco all over my tongue from letting the mouth-end of my cigarette unravel worse than the cohesion of the text I was laying down.  Because I wrote about being successful when I tried coming up with a way of hacking something together.  If you dare read through the entire run of this log (fat chance that I'll do that), you'll probably find that it was a landmark event.  The first post in finding a good solution, but even more than that, terror and failure were nowhere to be seen.

Today I'll be making up for that.

I will post q second update before my day is done to cover specifics and details, but first, I think we need to do some stage dressing.

Take a minute and clear your mind.  Visualize yourself in a wide, open field.  The sun shining, the wind gently blowing ripples like those on a the surface of a placid pond across the grass expanse that radiates around you.  Imagine the warmth that bathes you from the sun, tempered and complimented by the coolness from the breeze.

Now, as you are in the field, imagine a garage.  A garage packed with trash, tools, and farts.  This garage was birthed in cosmic chaos, formed in the blink of the eye of the deepest, coldest, most malevolent core of space, then was fired out at a speed far exceeding anything that should be physically possible.  It's screaming in rage as it rips through the cosmos.  You stand in the field.  Happy.  Content.

Burning past photons emitted by stars that have been dead and gone for millennia, the garage howls as it passes through emptiness and galaxies.  You see a grasshopper jump over a rabbit to land on a smooth, flat stone.

The garage sees a dot of light in the distance, distance that is made meaningless by comparison to the expanses it has traversed to arrive here. It's destination.  You lie back on the soft ground and take off your shoes, spreading your toes and sunning your soles.

The garage bellows, not in the agony it should feel from Earth's atmosphere rending the ever-regenerating exterior from the garage's inadequate and warped frame, but of bellicose bloodlust.  The moment draws near.  You are picking out animal shapes in the stretched weave of clouds spanning the entire expanse of powder blue skies.

A screaming garage lands on you.

Still unsure whether you've unwittingly drifted off sleep and are now in the middle of a dream, you make no effort to wonder how you could possibly survive being crushed under the now-silent garage that surrounds you.  You look in front of you to see what has to be a workbench under a twelve foot long, three foot thick slab of rust, tools, and empty plastic jugs that once contained black coffee.  In the center of this is a piece of cardboard with a message, deliberately marked in black ink from a blunt felt marker across the middle of the surface.

S T E P  1:  I N S T A L L  C A R B .

And so it begins.