The Narcofod

Excerpt:
He negotiated a contortionist’s nightmare of rubber bands, setting off several, and stepped into what proved to be the kitchen. The woman stood over a hot stove, ladle in hand, preparing a spaghetti and meatball dish more puzzling than the house. “Uh, hi,” he whispered. “I’m looking for the lady of the house.”

She glanced around at him, a woman as nondescript as they come: middle-aged, plain-featured, raggedy-dressed. Yet there was something tantalizingly beautiful in her domestic pose, the frizzy penumbra of rebelliousness in her drawn-back hair, the way her calf muscles bunched one after the other as she shifted foot to foot. Her face was flushed with the heat of the stove, her brow and neck glistened, and her nose ran as she sniffled and sneezed. All the while her temples throbbed with concentration, for the spaghetti-and-meatball dish was growing ever more complex with each application of the ladle, such that Kato began to sense about it not so much a culinary masterpiece as some arcane mathematical construct, perhaps a topological exploration of the human digestive tract as written in the algebra of hunger.

The adventure continues…
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:49 — 29.1MB)

Excerpt:

“Be quiet,” Kato Whip whispered, realizing how easy it would be to bring everything down. An ominous buzzing came from deeper in the cavern. Motioning for the earthquake to follow, he tiptoed forward to where pale egg cases and mummified remains hung from monstrous webs tenting the walls. The buzzing arose from countless gigantic flies ensnared in the webs. Then he saw it, a large crystal ball suspended above a luminous pool. Clinging to the underside of the crystal, and nearly engulfing it with its long thick legs, was a giant spider.

The tarantula? Of “serpent and tarantula” infamy? The tarantula that, along with the serpent, had laid siege to Lady Dusk’s castle? The tarantula that, according to all, was sinister to a turn?

Whatever, it seemed a pathetic creature. Its integument was devoid of hairs and worn down to the barest luminous yellow membrane, a shadow-play screen upon which the internal organs squirmed and pulsed. Kato squinted hard, glimpsing something else in there, a small figure disturbingly human in form that ran back and forth, back and forth, inside the stomach.

The adventure continues…
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:11 — 32.2MB)

A pair of 21-inch monitors dwarf my desk — old monsters, boat anchors. I had to build extra supports into the desk to support them. Both monitors are hooked up to my tower. I’m running XP. Here’s what I have open right now:

• Windows Explorer (4 instances — one window shows a folder named Wells Fargo Sucks)

• Microsoft Word (showing 4 files)

• Microsoft Excel (showing 3 spreadsheets)

• Firefox (two instances, one on each monitor)

• Sony Vegas Pro 8.0 (for audio/video editing)

• Adobe Acrobat Pro (showing a pdf on shading techniques in Photoshop)

• Photoshop (showing a sketch I’m trying to paint)

• Calculator (to help with payroll)

• Internet Explorer (to invoice — the company I work for won’t allow Firefox)

• Notepad (showing a small datafile of passwords/usernames)

In the two instances of Firefox, I have 15 tabs open: Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Tech-CU (a credit union I’m switching to), a tutorial on Photoshop Advanced Concepts, a Google search on “Do I need a business savings account?”, a website on Best Health Plans for Individuals & Families, a website on Free Instant Healthcare Quotes, a Tech-CU subpage on health insurance plans, Netflix (Don’t Look Down is coming next), Health Savings Calculator, BBC News, and Paycycle (to run payroll). Actually, this is only one of my Firefox instances. The other one seems to have crashed.
I wonder why.

P.S. At my side is a laptop running Quickbooks.

The adventure continues…
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Excerpt:
“Now, Kato, tell me what I have drawn.”
“A circle and a triangle,” Kato said quickly. For that was indeed all that Sargasson had drawn.
“No quarrel there.” Sargasson tapped the circle. “Point out to me the circle’s corner.”
“Corner?” Kato looked from Sargasson to the circle, wondering if he heard right. “A circle doesn’t have a corner.”
“It did yesterday.”
Kato stared at Sargasson, then at the circle. “No,” he said, disbelieving. After a quick glance up and down the street, Kato knelt and looked closely at the circle. He wanted to say, “No!” more vehemently, but he did not.
Sargasson pointed to the triangle. “What about this?”
“The triangle?” Kato checked the road again, then said with panicky defiance, “Three corners. There, there, and there.” He pointed them out emphatically, then looked anxiously up at Sargasson.
Sargasson gave a comforting nod. “The triangle is fine. That is something we can hold onto.” He brought the hoe down at a point between circle and triangle. “But what of the figure that belongs here — the one with two corners? Draw it for me, Kato.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:58 — 35.7MB)

Well, I just submitted a paper to the Journal of Numerical Analysis and Computational Mathematics. It involves my new calculation for zero to a record 4.3 trillion digits. The algorithm is breathtakingly complicated and took me nearly 5 years to perfect, and I had to add a five-terabyte hard drive to my PC just to hold the number. Not that I did the calculation on my PC. For that, I “borrowed” time on several supercomputers over the course of nine months, and probably the less said about that the better.

Anyway, right now I’m euphoric, enjoying a tremendous sense of accomplishment, tempered by a cautious awareness that these journals can be notoriously cliquish, enforcing their own obscure and arcane requisites for publication. Anyway, hoping you’ll wish me luck getting this revolutionary work into the public and scientific eye.

The adventure continues…
Subscribe to Gary W Shockley Audiobooks in iTunes, or go to garywshockley.com to see more options.

Excerpt:
“Name’s Samantha. Yours?”
Deep in the shadowy booth sat a woman. She was middle-aged, with a weathered, hawkish face. Her leathery hands moved deftly, braiding the handle of a new whip.
“Kato,” he said. “Kato Whip.”
“Oh?” She stood up and came forward to rest her well-formed hands on the countertop. “Where’s your whip?”
He watched the sinews jumping in her arms. “I don’t have one.”
Her hawkish eyes narrowed. “With a name like that, you ought to.” She nodded at her merchandise. “Got all kinds. Horse, bull, riding, cat ‘o nine tails, chain, monofilament. You name it, I got it.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:58 — 35.7MB)