Its also a holiday tomorrow, so they're not going to be working in the morning either.

So today's piece is about Tom and his broken robotic arm. And since my entire knowledge of prosthetics comes from the final scene of The Empire Strikes Back, it is super unrealistic. Also, he turns the lights off with his TV remote at one point. I think it is safe to assume that Tom is in the FUTURE, where crap like this is possible. Good luck with this one.

Tom sat down in his favorite chair. He looked down at his left arm, still holding the rigid pose it had taken right before he left the bar. Cautiously, he moved his right index finger over the small green button at the pit of his elbow. His fingers came alive, dancing to some crazy music. His hand began to spin at the wrist counter clockwise, going faster and faster. He pressed the button again and his lively arm went still again.

"Damn," he said. He picked up a Phillips head screwdriver from a small TV tray to his left. He moved further up his arm, above the elbow. He nudged aside a flap of rubbery flesh and inserted the tool into a small hole. He twisted for a good twenty seconds, eventually producing a screw that was half an inch long. He moved around his arm, repeating the process three more times. He was about to place the fourth screw on the table, when it slid out of his fingers and fell to the floor, rolling under the chair. He decided to get it later.

He moved the small table from his side to in front of him, and rested his left arm on top of it. With the screws removed, all that remained was to give the arm a twist and to disconnect the main cord. He turned and pulled, revealing the plastic inner workings of his prosthesis. It was white with a black rubber trim. The part on his upper arm formed a perfectly rounded stub, with indentations all around the side where the fake skin covered the screws. From the top of the dome, a thick segmented cord connected what was left of his real arm to his fake one. it was fat in the middle, and with a quick yank, the plug was disconnected at the center.

Now came the hard part. Tom put the screwdriver down and pressed firmly against his forearm. With a deep thunk, the fleshy panel sunk into his arm. Tom removed his hand, and the panel slowly folded out and to the right, revealing the wires and servos underneath. Tom pushed the glasses sliding off his nose back up, and looked over the small maze of connections. Nothing seemed to be obviously broken.

With a sigh, Tom slid the table forward and got up, leaving his arm behind. He went into the kitchen and began looking through his drawers. He eventually came across the small leather pouch he was looking for. It was tucked into the back of a drawer that was almost completely stuck closed. he pulled the zipper on the case open, checking that everything he required was inside. An assortment of smaller screwdrivers and a pair of tweezers. Lengths of replacement wires and five skinny metal rods of varying length. There was also a small folded instruction booklet, with the words written simultaneously in three languages. He zipped the case closed, and returned to the chair.

Tom sat down and picked up the remote. He hit a button, and all the lights in his living room came on at full strength. He opened the tool case and pulled the instructions out. Tom unfolded the document completely, turning it into a sixty four squared blanket of technical drawings. He flipped it over twice and rotated it once, trying to position the words just right. He found the troubleshooting section, checking each suggested problem. Was the device dirty? No. Was it moving the pinkie finger instead of the thumb? No. Was the indicator light blinking in a semi-rapid manner? No.

"What the hell do you do if the damn thing is possessed?" Tom asked himself. The instructions didn't answer him. Tom realized that he would have to call tech support. But he also realized that no decent human being was awake now if they could help it. He tried halfheartedly to fold the instructions back up again, but found it too difficult to do with only one hand. He pushed the table away from him with his foot, and picked up the remote again to turn on the television.

Tom found a documentary about the indigenous peoples of Australia. He pushed another button on the remote and the lights int he room began to fade. As he slumped in his chair watching people chant and dance around a fire, Tom wished that he still had the will to get that screw from underneath the chair. He knew he would never find it in the morning.

We know times are tough Tom, but you got to keep it positive, man! Chin up!

The bear's name is Boo-Boo.

Here's another short little story. Wrote half this morning and half this evening. I think things might have gone differently for Jack if I hadn't taken that break. Oh well!

"How the hell do I get into these situations?" Jack asked himself. He knew the answer was something about a gambling debt and about ten years too many as a semi-professional prize fighter. But he didn't have time to answer his rhetorical query as the bear hit him hard across the face. They had wrapped the claws in some sort of foam padding, so that Jack wouldn't be instantly mauled. Still, getting hit with a cinder block wrapped in a pillow still feels like getting hit with a cinder block.

Jack rolled with the hit, managing to miss the follow-up swipe from the bear's other arm. The bear roared at Jack through it's muzzle. Gobs of bear spit hung on the thin metal bars that prevented Jack from becoming a meal. Jack knew that all the bear really had to do was fall on top of him , pin Jack down under his massive frame and crush his lungs. But the bear was trained against that. The bear was trained to stand and to put on a show.

Jack had of course known that the Don would ask something crazy of him to repay the debt. It was the third time that Jack hadn't been able to cover what he owed. Not even the Don's mother got a forth chance. Jack thought it was funny that a lifetime criminal such as the Don would be a fan of the Three Strikes rule.

Back when he was younger, Jack could have solved this differently. He could have thrown a title fight or something. He enjoyed that. Not the final fight, of course. he liked the setup leading to the title match. A few weeks of fighting chumps dumber than he was. Some knew when the fix was in, some Jack even beat honestly. But a few had the rug pulled out from under him. A bribed trainer who cuts when he should stitch. A waiter that adds an extra ingredient to the fighter's meal before the fight. A sexy call girl who gives them a kiss for good luck.

Jack loved it when he could pummel those poor idiots. He liked to see the looks on their faces as they were going down. They knew it wasn't right, it wasn't fair. But there wasn't a damn thing they could do about it.

But now, things were different. He was too damn old, even for the fights to be fixed. So, the Don gave him a choice. Either fight the bear, or go for one last ride through the country with Saul and Eddie. At least this way, Jack had half a chance of walking away.

The event was staged at some big family party. A birthday or something. Jack wasn't exactly part of that. After a few hours of drinking and dancing with their families, the men at the party were ushered down into the basement where Jack was waiting in his corner of the ring, and the bear was sitting in its cage.

Some of the men recognized Jack. They came down the stairs loaded from the party, and seeing the strange combination of boxing ring and zoo cage, they began to cheer for Jack. They rooted him on and began to drunkenly take bets on who would win. Jack normally fed off all of this attention and hero worship. He would drive the crowd wild and posture and pose. And then he would look over his shoulder at his opponent, as if to say "They know I'm going to win. I know I'm going to win. Why didn't anyone tell you?" It didn't really work today. The bear couldn't be psyched out. He just sat in his cage, occasionally trying to lick his way out of his muzzle.

Jack had tried to even the playing field. Brass knuckles instead of his gloves. But as big as his arms were, they weren't anything like the bear's arms. When the bell rang, Jack had hammered the bear's torso with hits that would have felled any human opponent. It just made the bear mad. That was when the bear had first hit him.

The room, the ring, hell, Jack's whole world was spinning. The bear's padded paw had hit Jack's head in a sweet spot. His brain had rattled inside his skull, bumping back and forth against the bone walls. The entire right side of his face felt like a flat tire that was slowly and painfully re-inflating.

Jack had only dodged the bear's second swipe thanks to his years of training and well developed reflexes. It was not enough to protect him from the third hit. The fourth brought Jack down. He fell hard against the canvas, and the world began to drift in and out of focus.

The crowd watching fell silent as the Don entered the ring. Jack didn't know exactly what he was saying. Something about this being he price of betrayal, some twisted reasoning that appealed to the Don's warped moral code. It was when the muzzle clattered against the canvas that Jack could no longer deny the inevitable.

In his youth, the idea of a glorious warrior's death had appealed to Jack. But as the bear's teeth sank into Jack's soft flesh, all he could think was how he should have taken the ride in the country with Saul and Eddie.

Oh Jack, you poor dumb moron. But he gave the bear indigestion, so really who had the last laugh here folks?

Alternatively, he could also have been a librarian.

Aside from the occasional paragraph explaining just how wrong someone is on the Internet, I have not written anything this year. This is not a good thing for someone who claims to be a writer. So I decided to try just writing everyday for 30 minutes at a time, as a kind of warm up exercise. No planning ahead of time, no stopping to correct my atrocious grammar and spelling. Just me, a leaky pen, and a pad of paper. And since I have this blog, I've decided to type up these little exercises and let you all have a look at them. Ready? Great!

This piece is about John and his bad morning. Written in more or less than thirty minutes while I listened to random songs while trying to drown out a rerun of The Mentalist.

John stumbled out of his car and into the street. The sky was a light gray, like it had been for the last few weeks. He reached up and felt the wound on his head. How fast had he been going? Who had put that building so close to the corner? He looked up and saw that his Crown Vic was lodged into the shop window of a brick building that was in the dead center of the block.

“Damn, I wasn't even close...” John said to himself. He began to laugh, but a sharp pain in his ribs put an end to that. He did a quick inventory of all the damage he had done. The head wound was bleeding pretty bad, but they always did. His skull felt more or less in one piece. He looked down at his extremities. No obviously broken arms or legs. He wasn't bleeding from anywhere else. But he was sure he had at least broken a rib or two.

The Crown Vic was worse off. The front end was destroyed as it had plowed through the brick store front. The engine was still running, but not with its usual healthy and steady humming. It was making a high pitched whining, and the scent of the car's well lubricated entrails leaking all over the sidewalk was in the air.

He looked into the dangling driver's side mirror, and saw his own face. When he saw the black eye and the large gash across his forehead, he decided that not shaving this morning had been a good call after all.

John put his hand down on the sidewalk to steady himself, and regretted it. He pulled his left hand in front of him, and began to pick the larger pieces of glass out of his palm.

“Safety glass my white Irish ass,” he said. He always knew that was a big scam, or at least he had for the last thirty seconds. But he took a second look at the glass, and noticed the black paper that was glued onto the shards.

“Oh fffffuck.” The bottle. The one damn thing that he really wanted to survive the crash. He looked where he had rested his hand, and saw the neck of the bottle sitting in a puddle of brown and red liquid. The mixture of his blood and the jack was filling in all the cracks in the sidewalk, trying to spread itself across the entire surface of the pavement.

A man called out to John. John looked him over. A short little fat man, more wide than tall. Spouting off in Italian or Greek or hell, maybe even Hebrew. John didn't speak any of those languages. John did not like this man, but he did find his excited gestures and anger amusing. Takes a special something to yell at a bleeding man that just rolled out of a car wreck.

John stood up, after a couple of tries, and brushed himself off. All the while, this old geezer from another country was yelling at him. He really wished he hadn't broken that bottle. John held his hands up to get the fat man to quiet down. After a few more nonsensical words, which John was convinced were curses and insults to his various ancestors, the fat man shut his fat mouth. John reached into his back pocket and whipped out his I.D.

“Relax man,” John said. “I'm with the Health Department.”

Wow! That was both short and terrible! And a wonderful combination of run on sentences and schizophrenic tense changes. Yay! Maybe it'll get better tomorrow!

oh god he's doing this stupid blog again

Yes, yes he is. Hopefully it will suck less this time around.

No promises though.