1st post. Smoothies and Fantasies

Half baked recipe of the moment: Hmm... 1st post. Lets start with my daily smoothie which is continually being refined. 1 banana 2 handfuls frozen strawberries (or black, blue, etc) roughly a 1/2 cup vanilla yogurt about an ounce of liquid minerals about 1/2 cup whole milk (spare not the fat when thou doest swing thy hammer daily (uh... that means I do construction work, so I don't worry about the extra fat)) maybe 1 cup juice (usually 1/2 orange and 1/2 something really different like guava nectar) maybe some honey sometimes some cinnamon, cocoa, cloves, nutmeg, vanilla extract, etc. sometimes some hot water Put the liquids in 1st (except hot water), then banana, then berries. Mix it. If it is not mixing well and/or it is too thick, add some hot water. Most recent problem: Engine trouble. My engine is currently outside my truck in parts, but I hope to get it back together by the end of this weekend. Most recent blessing: My good friend Joshua lending me his truck the same day I find out my truck shouldn't be driven anymore. current status of art work: Ahhh poop... haven't done much recently. I did by a calligraphy pin, ink, and a roll of brown paper from the hardware store. I'm experimenting with writing out verses of scripture, crumpling the paper, then painting around and over the words. The pieces look a little like partchment as they develop. And I feel: Oh, tired. Numb. But not necessarily bad. ______________________________________________________ Oh... lets seeeeee heeeere. My good friend Jess had a link to her blog in her e-mail and I though "by golly gumbo, I think I might just do that tooooooooo." Ok, I promise I'll stop the repetitive elongating of wooooordddsss... Eventually. I was thinking of moving in with my buddy Joshua. It would have been a pretty sweet deal since he has bookoo tools, including an air compressor, plus I wouldn't be coming home to an empty house all the time. However, he's informed me that he's decided to go ahead and marry his honey. Soo... there went that. Big jerk. Uh, here, this is interesting (I hope). I've been wanting to write a kind of Alice in Wonderland type story for quite a while now, and recently fragments of a story began to flow like water. It's very preliminary, but I would like to see what people think. I'll probably post some of this stuff later as well. Maybe on a regular bases... we'll see. And hopefully it will lead up to a book. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Air is warm, heavy, not uncomfortable though. A yellow gold light pervades, a bright twighlight. A breeze stirs, moving air without cooling it. Your standing amongst buildings. Concrete you think, but smooth and very much like natural stone. Their colors seem to stay in the realms of white and light gray, though their are many colorful plants growing in various planters and small grassy patches. These planted areas are unkept and wild looking, but still somehow ordered, as if not long abandoned. The construction is strange somehow, like the proportions are just a little off, and lines and angles occur in unusual places. Nothing big, just a collection of small nuances making the place seem very alien. Water dances silently in a pool nearby, an occasional plop drips down from an old and strange fountain sculpture, half bronze and half stone it seems, with rocks in a tree like form. Everything is old. That's the other thing. Ancient. Cracks in stone, weathered smooth here and there, plants sprouting in cracks and glass heavily stained with dust and corrosion. Yet these constructions seem like they should be brand new, with their futuristic construction. Instead, the amount of erosion seems unthinkable, as if these buildings had stood as they are, undisturbed, for a few hundred years or more. So sturdily built that the encroaching forest could not overtake them, but still aged by the relentless force of time. Water, one of the strongest solvents on earth, has made some of these structures so rounded at the edges they seem almost to have melted to your eyes. As you walk, you think the place looks almost like an open air mall, with shops to the left and right and an open air garden like causeway in the middle. But there are no advertisements or signs. You don't recall seeing any writing at all in fact. Strange designs here and there which meld with the lines and joints of the concrete, but nothing that could be called writing. Shops are what your first impressions told you of the facades spaced far apart and unevenly along the walls of this open aired hallway, but as you investigate, this impression doesn't hold true. The places which appear similar to store fronts don't seem to be entrances at all. That is, while they look very much like entrances, you can't seem to find any actual doors. You think you catch site of a door ahead, but in a few steps you see that while the clear doors you saw seem to be openable, they don't lead anywhere but a shallow cubicle. You see windows too, but there is a pitch blackness behind them. You investigate further and find the glass to be very thick, but somehow without distortions of light. It may not be glass you think. The darkness beyond the glass is hard to interpret. Their could be large rooms within, but it is just as easy to believe that you are simply looking into a very dark cubicle, perhaps lined with some very dark, light absorbing substance. You do see a few variations on this, like a set of windows which look in on an extraodinary garden like area. Overgrown and indoors, but with a single skylight casting a brilliant glow within, you see a small pedestal in the middle of the garden room, surrounded by small stepping stones buried in a rich but short grass. Another window affords you a look into a pool of dark blue water. In fact, there are a few rivulets running down the wall above and to the left and right of the window. You can't make out the size of the pool; all you see is a rich dark blue with small traces of sunlight shimmering through here and there, as if there where some kind of covering over the pool that only allows small amounts of light through. You come across a small aqueduct of clear, slow moving water. You think back to the many pools you've seen along the way which seemed to be flowing very slightly. Though you didn't remember seeing any tunnels for the water to flow out of these pools, you suspect that they might all be connected with this aqueduct. It widens in places to create small pools. These pools look to be the product of a mad architect. Trenches, islands, pillars, and quick shifts in depth appear in any number of shape and variation. There a pool with an L shape protruding out of the water at a slight angle, there one with 4 hexagon shaped islands and an underwater trench twice as deep as the 2 foot pool, and there one with a smooth, undulating floor that drops and rises in odd, organic contours. Strangely, some seem almost for swimming, as they have stairs leading down into the water. After a long while you come to a place where the walls open out to a good 100 yards. A great pool fills this space which has a tremendous depth of water, maybe 80 feet. The water is like blue green crystal, breathtakingly clear and bright. Somehow the water hasn't been infested with algae. There are patches of it here and there, clinging in cracks, but none on any smooth surface. Thick pillars climb up to or just below the surface. And you seem to make out more of the store front like facades located at various heights along the sides of the pool as well as white, bridge like structures with gates and high walls. It's incredibly eerie to look into the pool because of how calm and clear it is. Yet their is a since of slow, unyielding movement though the water, like a gentle breeze that never the less effects everything in a slight way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I ended up rewriting about 1/3 of that as I reviewed it. It's very description driven because I'm trying to describe a very alien place. The whole story would be very focused on such experiences. I might even keep the 1st person perspective, I don't know... What do you all think?