2005-01-13 - 1:07 p.m.

>Genre-Bending with Rufus

I don't remember why I started the following exercise. Just a way to pass the time until my cinnamon buns finished baking, I guess.

Mystery
"It's cold this morning," I said, "cold like this does something to the light and the air. It makes everything look different."
Huygens' face screwed up a little when I said that, a tiny passing expression, but more than enough of a tell for me. I pounced.
"Everything looked different that morning, too, didn't it, Huygens? The morning after you killed that little girl and left her body on the median of the 101?"

Beware the Hog.

Science Fiction
"It's cold this morning," I said, "cold like this does something to the light and the air. It makes everything look different."
Enid's voice was undistorted in my ear as she responded, clearly the voice of of my insuit AI and not the halting speech of Sigfried and Marie over the common band.
"You are quite correct, madre Rose," Enid replied emotionlessly, "as air temperature decreases, rising warm air carries a great deal of pollutants, particulate matter, and water vapour with it. This can result in unusually clear views, especially noticeable over long distances."
My job would be impossible without them, but I often think that the constant drone of AI-recited statistics in my ear tends to rob the universe of its magic.

This is how you sing into your own ears.

Horror
"It's cold this morning," I said, "cold like this does something to the light and the air. It makes everything look different."
Different. That was exactly right. Things looked different. It was not just the menacing jaws formed by icicles along the eaves of the ancient mansion, nor the memory of the unexplained noises of the previous night, the calling and caterwauling that emanated from the attic and the basement and the walls themselves. No, there was something more. Some ominous scent carried to my nose in the crisp winter air.

Found art: Blues + utensils = Blutensils (tm)

Literary
"It's cold this morning," I said, "cold like this does something to the light and the air. It makes everything look different."
That's what I said, no denying what's written there in ink and ivory. But the fact was that the morning did not look different to me at all. It was instead a morning precisely like the morning before in every finely etched detail, and that morning was a facsimile of the morning before it. The cold, the frosty steam of breath, the utterly crushing weight of another day beginning. All the same. Always the same all the way back through time, the same for me as it was for my father as he drove the big rig from Juno to Baja and back again, his own unending migratory cycle, interrupted only for brief pilgrimages to tousle the identical stringy brown mops of myself and my brothers and to wake us up at ungodly early hours with the sound of our mother being beaten up again. The same for my grandfather as he rode tramp steamers to Asia and came back with malaria and money and then returned again, first class this time, to skip through Laos, Taiwan, Cambodia, also cycling back and forth, always returning to my grandmother with a new disease and a new spool of silk or a wooden box full of delicate glass jewelry. Then always returning to his submissive mistresses in the orient and the ruthless new businessman that he and his partners were forming out of the postwar dust. Always the same, all the way back, back to the common ancestor of all of us, always the same cold morning with light and air that is in no way different than any other.

This is me and Bee (and deseptagon on the left) circa 1994. I think this was taken in the concession kitchen during sound check for a dance at which my band was playing.

Fan-fiction
"It's cold this morning," I said, "cold like this does something to the light and the air. It makes everything look different." I was about to return to my lair to sleep and wait out the sun when I heard a voice behind me. It was a young woman, emerging from the dusky shadows of the not-quite-dawn, brushing a lock of blonde hair from her forehead.
"If you really want to see what the morning is like, why don't you stick around for sunrise? It'll save me some trouble," Buffy said, plucking a wooden stake from her belt and spinning it in her right hand
Just my luck. The slayer was back.

Mission accomplished! Hot from the oven!

Blog
"It's cold this morning," I said, "cold like this does something to the light and the air. It makes everything look different."
Okay, I didn't actually say that out loud, but something like that occurred to me this morning as I walked to the store to get a tube of Pillsbury cinnamon bun batter. I love cinnamon buns, as long as they are moist and fresh. Really, I love pretty much anything with cinnamon. That's my kind of spice.

(Two entries in two days? What's going on here?)