The Next Wave

or After the 'Cane.

Just a couple of hockey fans and their pile of candy.

As You Like It, Blow, blow, thou winter wind

by William Shakespeare

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
  Thou art not so unkind
    As man's ingratitude;
  Thy tooth is not so keen,
  Because thou art not seen,
      Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
  Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
      This life is most jolly.

  Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
  That dost not bite so nigh
      As benefits forgot:
  Though thou the waters warp,
  Thy sting is not so sharp
      As friend remembered not.
Heigh-ho! sing . . .

The Last Spell

As part of the NYCMidnight Flash Fiction writing competition, I managed to scrawl down an entry for the second round between packing for our three month foray into Czechia and our screaming child (it is 1:11am – he has been crying for an hour – trust that we have both comforted and cuddled him). Stress levels are running at seasonal peaks, and of course this is the moment that Declan has stopped sleeping through the night. We are all tired, and we are both working hard towards a united goal. Business class travel to Europe. I’ve been warned by a colleague about flying with a toddler who has just learned to walk. He wants to walk. He mentioned buying him his own seat. Not a terrible idea. The thought of economy class with Declan on our laps for ten hours is not generally appealing.

The Last Spell shall be available in The Short Version in September. I enjoyed writing a fantasy story, though I would have liked a little more personal time to edit it. Hopefully the judges enjoy the work.

The genre, fantasy. The location, a soup kitchen. The item, a bag of coins. Here’s the opener:

The Last Spell

Outside the shelter, a ceaseless winter wind blew under a bitter, white-blanketed sky. Beneath Alaric’s torn and tattered cloak, his thin, frail fingers clutched at a battered metal spoon, his body hunched over a bowl of steaming greyish lumps with a consistency that was not quite gruel. Between slurps, he scanned the bustling, candlelit, low-ceilinged dining room of the Serendipitous Soup Kitchen, a community centre serving food to the town of Eldora’s hungry and homeless. He kept his head down, his collar turned up. A wizard, even a retired one as old as he could befall violence in a place such as this.

I was naked, sucking on a soother, riding a giant rose-coloured swan in a backyard swimming pool when the Children’s Tylenol began to take hold. (Name that novel!)

This Life is Most Jolly (Updates)

Last week, I snuck in a Cancun turn just as the backside of hurricane Beryl passed through, followed by a layover in CUN a week after. Back in Montreal, an unstable approach (First Officer flown) lead to a non-standard go-around in a low-energy state with a resultant main wheel touchdown as the thrust came up. The second attempt was successful.

Laser strikes from atop a Montreal downtown high-rise (I reported them while we were on final approach, hopefully the police caught the loser – a laser strike to the eyes of a pilot can cause flash blindness during a critical phase of flight).

I’ve had renewed interest in The Sequence (requests for restock at Armchair Books in Whistler) following energy directed towards the novel. And that’s just the interesting stuff. Never mind the:

• packing of our lives into bins for the move to Prague.

• the deployment paperwork shuffle.

• prepping our rental property for nightly rentals.

• AirBnB.

• Cleaning company interviews.

• Swimming lessons for Declan.

• Hikes into the alpine.

• The snow walls.

• The broken things;

  • air conditioning (in 33C)

  • patio doors

  • cleaners (they’ve been fired – hence the interviews)

  • winter tires (they’ve been changed to summers)

  • babysitters (they’ve redeemed themselves)

  • lack of car insurance (rectified)

The list continues, but I don’t want to bore anyone.

My-first-chocolate face.

And then a president much like my fictional president Cook survives an assassination attempt! Arrgh! The future is catching up to my fiction, and I’d hate to be writing a history book from the future versus a prescient fiction from the now. I continue to work on False Ignition in the hopes that I can have it published before the year is out, before The America retreats behind a completed wall.

This is the Probe.

This is the Tusk.

This Is Us.

H5N1 Update.

From the CDC. “People should NOT drink raw milk. Pasteurization kills avian influenza A (H5N1) viruses, and pasteurized milk is safe to drink.”

The unfolding H5N1 situation is following a very similar pattern to SARS 2.0. A slow buildup as the virus mutates its way through increasingly more complex lifeforms, where it finally settles in on mammals. From there it mutates until it can develop human to human transmission, the holy grail of viral spread. The problem, if you recall, is that in birds it has a kill rate of around 50%. And it is named bird flu for a reason. Yes that’s right, because it kills a fuckton of birds. Like there are ‘depopulation farms’ running right now at full speed. Check out this graphic from the CDC.

Ongoing multi-state outbreak in Dairy Cattle.

Widespread in wild birds.

Sporadic infections in mammals (yes that’s us!)

So are you still eating dairy?

So are you still eating chicken? Drinking milk? I’m no reporter, nor am I a data-scientist, but I like to think that like most human beings, I excel at pattern recognition, and I see something familiar in all these reports. Read deep. Depopulation Farms. Let those two words sink in. Consider what they could mean for the human population. Just because thou art not seen, does not mean thy breath cannot be rude. The truth is out there.

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
  Thou art not so unkind
   As man's ingratitude;
  Thy tooth is not so keen,
  Because thou art not seen,
      Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
  Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
      This life is most jolly.

  Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
  That dost not bite so nigh
      As benefits forgot:
  Though thou the waters warp,
  Thy sting is not so sharp
      As friend remembered not.
Heigh-ho! sing . . .

Have Disney, will travel.

Next report will be from Praha. The future is coming, its relentless charge. We three Telfords, as has become the norm, are outta here.