The Other Side (Canto 3)

 Start this tale from the beginning: Chapter 1
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Canto 3

A skeletal hand wrapped its long fingers around my leg. Its grip was strong. Not sure how that worked. Muscles are required for grip strength normally. Learning. Trial and error. The ground below me suddenly caved in.

I fell into the blackness.

A blinding flash of light happened. My ears rung. This is what I imagine getting hit by a flash bang was like.

The room around me slowly came into view. There were brown splotches everywhere. Lines ran through the blur. The brown splotch was a wall. My neck was killing me. I slowly craned my head down. There was a dog sitting there. No. No. It was a man kneeling down. He was a red man. No, he wore a red vest. The ringing in my ear grew louder. My brain was pounding. The man in front of me had a pair of pants that I assumed were fashionable. I could not care about small things like fashion. My head was going to explode.

I closed my eyes. The ringing was quieting. I could hear a voice. It boomed like it was being amplified by a loud speaker. Despite the amplification it still sounded nasally.

“Demon of the nether plane I beseech you liberate me from this earthly prison. I have paid the penance and have imprisoned you in the circle. You must now abide by my absolute will.”

Every big word he used made my head throb more. What the hell made today go so wrong? I took a breath. Then I took several steps forward. Cracking my eyes open I could feel the throbbing returning. My small field of vision showed the man scrambling to run away.

“The demon has breached the circle.”

I wiped my eyes with my hand. This was really start to annoy me.

“Just shut up,” I said. My eyes were wide open now. The well dressed man sat in the corner of the room. I look around. This was a jail cell. The brown walls came with a matching set of bars. “What is going on?” I asked the scared well dressed man.

“Demon! Demon!”

You could smell the fear on him. Maybe that was urine. I walk right up to him and tried to grab his vest. “Look at me.” My hands went through his vest. I could not touch him. God! Still not completely here. Nothing will go right today. Will it?

On the bright side, he was looking at me so I decided to keep talking. “I. Don't. Know. Who you are. I. Don't know. What is happening. You are going to start talking. If not I am going to strangle you with these hands the moment I am all here.” I grit my teeth and held my hands in front of my eyes. They were transparent. The light pouring in through them. I clinched my jaw tighter.

The man began tidying his clothes. “Since I am still alive, I assume you are not a demon.”

I punched him. My hand flew through his skull. It fixed nothing, but it made me feel better. “What gave you that impression?”

“You walked out of the summoning circle.” He pointed at something behind me. I followed his finger. In the center of the floor, there was a complex drawing that I guess could be called a circle.

“What's that for?”

“Summoning and containing demons.”

“Demons are real?”

“Says the ghost.”

“I still will strangle you.” He seemed a lot more confident. The well dressed man stood up. I grew tired of this. I looked down at my see through hands.

I could walk through walls. I did not have to deal with any of this.

The man walked back towards the circle he had drawn. I walk towards the wall. I did not have to deal with any of this. I am out.

My face collided with the wall. I felt like I had just walked into electric cow fence. My body went limp. The well dressed man just stared at me.

I picked myself up off the ground. The pounding in my head was back. I turned that man and said, “I say we skip the rest of this pointless conversation. Who are you and why are you here?” Judging by the bars he was in a similar trouble spot as me.

The man appeared to be raptured away by his thoughts. He spoke in a calm slow manner. “Silverstein. Alchemist. Kidnapping.”

“Now why are you talking like that?”

“Thinking.”

I just stood there. I assume he would tell me what he was thinking about.

“I assume you were taken by force also.”

I nodded.

“I can get both of us out of here. Step back into the circle.”

“Why.”

“I will explain fully later. You are going to find me a demon.”

Shot 4

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The Other Side (part 2)

 Start this tale from the beginning: Chapter 1
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Part 2

I woke up in a pitch black room to the feeling of my phone vibrating. I was part of consensus reality once more. My hands instinctively went to answer my phone. Something stopped them. I could feel cold metal against my wrists. I was handcuffed. I yanked on them hard. They were tether to something. It was a table, a fairly heavy one. I could not budge it. This was bad.

I may have screamed a few expletives.

Well, let me pause right here. I just realized that I never told you what I look like so I will cover that now. I am of slightly taller than average height. Not enough for people to look up to me, but just enough so that I could see fairly well in crowds. I have black hair that I cannot bother to take care of. My jacket never leave my side. You pick up that habit when you run the risk of randomly shifting to a mountain top at any time. You know what they say. Frost bite will straight up murder you.

I heard the sound of jiggling keys. Someone was walking towards me. I heard what sounded like a folder hitting the table. A voice that had, had one too many cigars spoke, “We know what you are.”

This is the part of the movie where I say something sarcastic to prove how cool I am. Prepare to be amazed at my response.

I screamed. No words. Just a yell. I think I got my point across. I am a real person not an action hero. I will use my words when I feel that my life is not in danger.

There was silence in the room. I do not think my interrogator had expected that outburst.

That was when I could feel it happening.

I was shifting.

Have I talked about how that feels? Imagine having every single atom in your body being ripped through space time piece by piece. It hurts. That is the end of the story.

If you happen to be one of those people that just had to know what I did during the time I skipped before the interrogator arrived, I screamed expletives, all the expletives. If you happen to be one of those people that just had to know what I do when I shift, I screamed expletives, all the expletives.

The blackness was fading out and being replaced by a graveyard. My head began pounding the moment light I saw the life. The grass was brown and the dirt was green. There was no desk, no handcuffs, no chain smoking interrogator and the sky was blood red. I was not sure if this was an improvement or not. I looked up. Two blue suns illuminated this graveyard. Or maybe I had double vision.

I took a knee. I needed to clear my head to figure out what happened earlier. Something knocked me out, and I woke up in handcuffs. I did not think these kinds of things could happen outside of movies. You learn something new every day through trial and error.

I felt the ground underneath my feet shifting. Something was moving. A small circle of dirt churned. Like any reasonable person I decided to stand up and run away quickly.

My legs would not move. I was paralyzed. I did not think these kinds of things could happen outside of movies. You learn something new every day through trial and error. It only takes one error to kill you.

Canto 3 is here. You many begin reading.

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Old Fairy Tales vs New Fairy Tales

Remember the good old days when fairy tales actually had morals in them?  I mean the old fairy tales taught children good life lessons. For example they taught that life doesn’t have happy endings.  Disney and other new fairy tale authors have ruined the messages of the old fairy tales.  Today’s fairy tales just teach us that there is always a happy ending and that the good guy will always win.

In real life how often does the good guy win?  How often does life have a happy ending?  The answer is not often.  At least not as often as Disney wants you to believe.  Good guys don’t always win nor does everything have a happy ending.  Disney wants you to believe this in their depiction of fairy tales.  Everyone knows the Little Mermaid right?  In the Disney version she marries the man she fell in love with and lives happily ever after.  The original had a far darker ending.  Instead of marrying the mute mermaid he marries another woman.  The mermaid overcome with grief throws herself into the ocean and drowns.  This is a more realistic depiction and shows that all endings are not happy.  Now I am not saying that all the old fairy tales had bad endings.  In most though there isn’t a happy ending according to our standards of happy.  For example in the most recent Red Riding Hood stories a woodsman saves the young girl. The woodsman even saves her grandmother.  In the original work The wolf coerces our favorite girl into eating her grandmother.  Then he forced her to burn her clothes and lay naked with the wolf.  She got away by telling the wolf she had to use the restroom and ran away only almost escaping the wolf.  Is this a happy ending though?  She cannibalized her grandmother and ran naked through the woods.  In those times the fact that she survived was in itself a happy ending.  In our society today we see this ending as a tragedy.  The Shadow is the perfect example of a story where the good guy does not win.  The Shadow is about a writer and his shadow.  His shadow goes away for a while and comes back with the attitude that being nice will get you nowhere.  So the writer doing the right thing gets poorer and unhealthier as his shadow gets richer and fatter.  Long story short the writer gets executed while his shadow marries and lives a rather happy life.  The moral of the story as you can see is that evil always wins.  This is the opposite of what we want to teach our kids today.  We want our kids to do the right thing rather than to resort to the things that the shadow did. 

 In most fairy tales today it shows the good guy prevailing over people like the shadow.  The Shadow teaches children the harsh reality of the world where there is no such thing as a good guy. It teaches that there is no such thing as a knight in shining white armor. We all wear dingy gray armor.

Disney and some of the newer authors of fairy tales have ruined the morals and teachings of the old ones.  They attempted to teach us that the good guy always wins and that there are always happy endings.  The old fairy tales gave us harsh life lessons. They told us that good guys don’t always win and that sometimes you won’t have the happiest ending if any at all.  So you should all remember this. You have to work hard to maintain your happy ending. The old teachings fairy tales taught are better compared to the new distorted ones.  

Reruns are Bad for You

Why do people like reruns?  Seems like a silly question right? It's most likely just me but I don’t understand why they like the same thing over and over again.  Some people can sit and watch the same episode every night of their life.  To be honest people like reruns because they are complacent and love media as it is in their reruns.

Human beings are stubborn creatures.  We like things the way they are and take a long time to change our ways.  It took years before people to get fed up with the British and their taxes.  It took years before man wished to make new inventions.  It took years before man started to settle down.  The same thing goes for entertainment and other media.  I mean People can watch the same TV show, movie, or YouTube video a million times and still love it.  They are complacent.  They are happy watching the same media or playing the same video games. Hollywood is banking off of this taking our money for the same thing every time.  As people we should never be complacent especially with media.  Instead of being happy with the same media we should wish for greater things.  We should take a risk and support new movies and not just let Hollywood take our money.  We should transcend and aspire for new things.  Now I am not saying that reminiscing on old videos is bad.  Matter of fact some remakes are good.  Remakes are only bad when Hollywood uses them as a quick means to make cash. They do this by fooling the consumer into buying it.  Hollywood will even try to convince you its a new movie and they can do this because consumers buy it.  They do this time and time again because of the complacent consumers. The complacent consumers either can’t tell the difference or just don’t care.

Complacency is bad.  Complacency in media is even worse.  I mean we pay these people to entertain us and give us new things.  As consumers we shouldn’t be happy with the same thing every time.  After reading this will you go back to your life of complacent media? or live wanting more from your entertainment.   

The Other Side (chapter 1)

Chapter 1

A young man walked through a crowded hallway. To all of the mindless masses walking through the hall this young man began to disappear. That young man was me.

I walked through the thick crowd of people. Literally, I walked through individuals in the crowd. I was shifting.

This word “shifting” may make no sense to you, but imagine you and every other human being on this planet was a radio. A radio can only listen to one station at a time. Everyone is tuned into the same station, normally. This creates what fancy hippies called consensus reality. For you normal folks consensus reality call it the world as everyone agrees on it.

I wish I was everyone. Ever since I was a kid I would shift in and out of this world. I never could control it. One second I am here. The next second I am there on The Other Side (That is what I call that world). Let me tell you something. There is some pretty scary stuff man on The Other Side. Let me take a moment to describe it for you. The hallway I was walking through had become translucent. It was always like this. I haven't switched stations completely. There was always some interference.

Outside the ghost hallways I could see a desert. Everything look to overexposed like a bad photo. I took a breath. There was nothing I could do. I had to bide my time here to a was rocketed back to my reality.

This day I was feeling adventurous and stepped through the ghostly hallway walls. I normally try not to stray to far from the area where I shifted. Distance does not work the same way in this world. I once took three steps and ended up on the ocean floor when I shifted back. You learn a lot by trial and error, when you assume the error does not get you killed. I only takes one. That is what I always say.

I stopped walking for a moment. I took a second to pause in front of a … basically it was a cactus with large yellow flowers and blue … ooze covering it. Not pretty. That was not the important part.

I heard a noise.

The Other Side is always silent.

I looked around. The ghostly wall were looking more solid. I was shifting closer to the our world. I pulled my phone out of my pocket. It had no bars. AT&T had yet to expand their coverage zone to dimension X. I should not be hearing anything.

I stepped back through translucent hallway. The noise was getting louder. A parade of ghosts rushed by me. These were people engaging in their everyday life. We were into two separate worlds.

I could barely see them.

I could not smell them.

I could not feel them.

I could hear footsteps getting closer.

Where was that noise coming from?

They was right on top of me. I could hear it. Something smashed into my chin.

My body dropped like a marionette after its strings were cut.

I could feel it.

In another moment down went Alice after it never once considering how in the world she would get out.

Take that Mom I made an allusion. I didn't need to finish school to learn how to write.

Next installment

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More Dead Than Living on Social media?

Does anyone out there use Facebook?  How about Twitter?  I bet everyone reading this has used these or some other type of social media.  To be honest in a few years the dead people on them will outnumber the living. 

I can see all the people now glued to their device saying what proof do you have.  The Huffington Post wrote an article about how many people are living today.  Out of all the people who have lived at one time only about 6.5 percent are alive right now.  Yes, out of all the people who lived me and you only make up a small percentage.  That is until we join the majority when we die.   We living people are already outnumbered by the dead.   This percentage may or may not get bigger over the years.  Either way the dead will still outnumber the living.  Using this you can see that social media sites, pretty soon, will have more dead then living.  One of the reasons for this is that social media sites don’t delete the accounts of deceased people.  Also after a while the social media industry will die out.  Social media as we know it will die out at least.  Because of the industry dying out, the whole of all social media sites will be dead people.  No new members will sign up and the old accounts of the deceased will just sit there for centuries.  Some people may argue that social media will never die out.  Even if social media doesn’t go out of style the majority will still be dead people.  The number of dead have not been able to overlap the living yet on social media.  This is because social media like Facebook and Twitter are somewhat new.

Don’t worry I’m not saying that there will be a zombie uprising on Facebook and twitter.  Well not that I know of at least.  In a few years there will be more dead people then there are living on your favorite social media site.  Nothing to worry about though.  So if you message someone you haven't talked to in years and they don't reply they aren't ignoring you.  They just may have joined the majority.
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Terrible Hollywood Trends:lying

Welcome back all my loved viewers this is the third edition of annoying Hollywood trends.  To all the new viewers this is pretty much where I pick apart things that Hollywood does.  In today’s edition I’m going to discuss the myth around lying that Hollywood has made up.Have to lie about not doing something or having did something you don’t want someone to know.  According to movies and television you’ll become a bumbling idiot.  Matter of fact you’ll be so bad at it you will keep slipping up and telling the truth in the middle of the lie. Then you would have to go back and fix it.  Some even are so bad when they mess up they will say they’re from a country that they don’t even know the language for.  They’re like oh I’m from Spain wait oh no now I have speak their language.  In all actuality lying is easy.  Where was I? Oh I was just at home playing video games.  See I just lied without slipping up and telling you where I actually was.Has anyone out there ever had to prove that they are married by kissing?  It seems to occur in every movie or television show where two people have to lie about being together. The couple gets forced to show their love through a kiss or worse.   Like that one skeptical person is over there like nope I don’t believe it you two kiss then I will.  I know it’s for either comedic effect or to create a problem for the protagonist but that’d be weird.   In real life people don’t just up and ask two people to kiss. That would get the person who asked exiled from society marking them forever as a weirdo.  This makes it easy to fake a marriage since there won’t be any weird people demanding the couples to lock lips.If lying were like in movies and television it would be terrible.  People would be fumbling making the truth clear.  Luckily though in real life it is so simple we can do it on a day to day basis.  Also it’s a good thing there aren’t weird people asking for fake and real couples to kiss in front of them.