Oy, indeed.  Drawing the curtain on unanswerable existential questions is just what the doctor ordered.  But I wouldn’t know where to fish for the monkey-faced eel and despite my former status as a hallucinogenic connoisseur, I’ve never been able to get my hands on peyote.

Tuition is paid and I’m enrolled in the Santa Fe Community College veterinary tech program.  However, the online curriculum is rather useless until I receive my textbooks in the mail, so I have another day or two of exquisite inactivity to enjoy.

Yesterday, I filled some of that time by watching a few episodes of The Sarah Silverman Program.  This is what I learned:

Aside from a deeper understanding of canine and feline anatomy, this might represent the sum total of acquired knowledge needed to see me through the rest of my life.

I’m also hoping that it may serve to compensate for my lack of substantive commentary about food in my last post.

Boysenberry,

‘Mudge

Listen, I’m going to tell this tale. But you need to understand something… Hold on, I’ve got a primitive alert system rigged across this hillside and one of my alarms is jiggling something bigger than a ground squirrel.

Denton breaks open his double-barrel and drops in a pair of blood-red #6 duck-shot, the only type of shell that remains in his collection. He pockets two more, clamps the ammo can shut and slips out the uphill door of the cabin.

This time of the season, corn fit to reach the sky, squash and beans resting while they wait for first frost, I see vandals come up the valley from that cesspit of a town. I hate to waste shot, but if I don’t, they think they can come back with a mob.

He heads across the slope avoiding the sight of anyone trekking across his fields toward his house. His gardens are below in a broad swale that stays naturally moist throughout the summer; the dry heat elsewhere burns crops to desert bones. His wide descending arc brings him to his plot, this end showing rows of peppers, deep green, crimson and gold. A woman is walking oblivious, straight through his gardens.

Would you look at that. Talk about brazen disregard for your own safety. She’s not stopping to steal or to even marvel at my work. What she going on…

… continued over here…

For whatever reason, I put considerable thought into names of characters, places and things in my stories.

When you read a name, you say it in your mind and if it’s wrong for the character, then I find myself stumbling over it every time I read it. When a name fits, you know it.

Finding a name can be challenging. Baby names from various countries have often been my go to source for characters. Scanning google maps for location names works for places. But these often feel generic. For fun, I created a Python script that combines letters in roughly random fashion to create jumble names. The script is below.

But to give you an example, I’ll print 180 names, randomly generated. Tell me if you don’t see a few names that speak to you. Remove a letter here or there and pow, there’s the name for your next villain, love interest, pet seal, seedy uncle or dying grandfather.

Script:

import random
#~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
# Main program entry point
def main():

 words1 = ["a","u","y","o","a","e","i","e","'"]
 words2 = ["d","g","h","k","n","s","p","v",""]
 words3 = ["'","c","m","j","f","q","w","t"]
 words4 = ["d","g","h","k","n","s","r","p","v","z","e","i",
          "o","u","y","a","e","b","c","m","j","f","q","w","t"]
 print ("Starting...")

 f = open('.\output.txt', 'w')

 triplet = []
 for a in xrange(0, len(words1) - 1):
  for b in xrange(0, len(words2) - 1):
   for c in xrange(0, len(words3) - 1):
    triplet.append([a,b,c])

 for x in range(1, 51): # number of names
  l = random.randint(3, 4)
  s = words4[random.randint(0, len(words4) - 1)].upper()
  for i in range (1, l):
   n = random.randint(0, len(triplet) - 1)
   a = random.randint(0, 2)
   if (a == 0):
    s += words2[triplet[n][a]]
    a = random.randint(0, 2)
   if (a == 0):
    s += words3[triplet[n][a]]
    a = random.randint(0, 2)
    s += words1[triplet[n][a]]
  print >> f, s

 f.close()
 print ("Done")

#~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
if __name__ == '__main__':
 main()

(The reason the lists are called “words” is because I first used this to create random book titles using different words.)

Here’s to LittleFears and his tenacious passion for puns and evocative art.

The sight of the beast, the woman’s partner said, provoked childhood fears the likes of which he’d suppressed — through therapy — and would care not to have them resurface.

The DI placed a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “But we need your statement.”

The fellow shook his head and narrowed his eyes at the detective. “This is going to haunt me forever. My little fears, they grow huge at night. You don’t know what I…”

“Without your help, Chastity’s death will go unpunished.”

At six am, the station had just started to buzz with activity. The smell of coffee and sweat drifted through the corridors. The heatwave continued unabated.

“Fingers like knives, blades extending from every angle of its body and a… a snout like it had descended from some primeval creature. And its eyes, lover’s eyes. Hungry lover’s eyes, that consumed me. Then it nosed down and began to… to feed.” The lad leaned forward and gripped his face, his voice muted. “Chassie’s b… blood, black in the streetlight, dripped…”

“Good,” The DI interrupted, pulled his phone out, tapped it and set it on the table. “Now again, from the top.”