Spelling Dog Backwards

Before this starts, please go here.
It wont  hurt a bit, or cost you a nickle... What the hell, right? It's worth a try!...


     I've had so much pinging around my brain lately that my thoughts have had a hard time coalescing into any really coherent or at least long lived product.  I was going through a drawer the other day and came across a manuscript of mine for a novel of which I had written around a hundred pages and stalled out. It, like two other cobwebbed novels of mine both (vaguely) revolved around interstellar war and intrigue; anchored by the concept of "Heim-Droescher" space. I wont bore you with any physics but suffice to say that this has been the best bet (that show's its math and does not require magical tech) for FTL that I have seen in my long sci-fi-amateur-physics career. Enough so that I was finally compelled to write some Space Navy stories... albeit unfinished ones.

 So with that in mind I began a tangential web-goose chase. To bring the context of this search into focus I have to take you back to the wee infancy of the internet. Granted I am a web geek in disguise (I know what a baud is and I helped a friend meet a girl from a BBS on a computer with a 5 and 1/4 floppy drive; yeah, I'm old.) In the early days of the internet, circa 1997, I was living in Guam while serving in the military. I was standing sentry at the entrance to the Submarine Base where I was stationed and listening to Coast to Coast AM With Art Bell on a little 9v radio. The topic was Bob Lazar and Area 51. Earlier that night I had been down at the Lagoon at Polaris Point writing and listening to the new "Escape from L.A." soundtrack that I had bought (alternative music was hard to come by in those days on Guam, you took what you could get.). I had been hooked on a song called "Escape from the Prison Planet" by Clutch for about a week. I had never heard anything quite like it. It was hardcore and yet it was really rap but add to that it was about aliens, ufo's etc and well... this geek was hooked.

Now the thing about it was, I had no idea who Bob Lazar was. As the program went on I had one of those pre-internet moments where someone realized "Hey! I've heard of that! It's that thing!" An actual connection between memory and reality without instant gratification. I didn't sleep that night. I hung out by the beach after my watch and listened to the rest of the show. Around dawn I took a shower, changed and finished the rest of my work day. I had made a couple of notes in my journal and went home via the store, picking up a couple of bottles of Merlot (I was a wine whore even then, but then the word was not vintage or vintner, but "kind"). I got back to my barracks room, put on tool, took out my easel and began to paint. Swigging from the bottle, smoking reds and trying to find that place... that place where genius occasionally visited...

And Murphy walked in the room... I had not closed the door all the way. Murphy told me that he had "The Internet" and since I knew more about computers than he did, would I help him?

In that I night I realized that all those people like me who had questions, who had theories, wonders and a plethora of "What ifs" had learned HTML. I quickly followed suit. I wrote my first code that night. I did my first web search. I ended up having a key made to his room and paying the bill for the dial up internet connection he had. I used it more than he. I would spend my time between the WBS Goth Cathedral (Where I eventually re-met my best friend and best man) and all of the counter-culture conspiracy theorist websites that cropped up faster than porn.

In the end, I opened a wound that has never closed. It is three-fold;

1. I need to know.
2. I need to know now.
3. I need to know everything...

Tonight's minor exercise in typing has not lead anywhere where I may have promised in the beginning. It was free form and slightly chaotic. I don't care. If you clicked a couple links then who knows where you ended up tonight. I ended up smiling and listening to good music and reliving fond memories...

"The universe is hostile
So impersonal
Devour to survive
So it is, so it's always been ... "

I will return to this thread... it is a story after all...