Charlie Winter: Not so much a continuation of the story as an extrapolation from it.

The piece of yourself, the artifact, this is important--a reminder of your death. It's what allows you to jump. I have the dry piece of tongue, like jerky; Monk has a fingernail stained with two kinds of red, from blood and from the brick of the back wall of the Galway pub where he was beaten to death. He tried to hold himself up with the wall, but his assailants were many and had steel in their boots. Nico carried her front left canine tooth in a locket around her neck. Rumor has it that Kage has his own mummified fetus on his person at all times. That's why Kage is a ghost--he died before he could live.

Most people, like 99.99999 percent, don't or can't remember when one of their other selves dies. They just dream about it. If you ever dreamed of falling, but wake up before you hit the ground, somewhere, in other world, you died. If you, in your sleep, have ever been chased by someone, but never saw his face--in another world, he caught you, and you saw who he was, and you recognized him in the second before he killed you. Your dreams are memories of your other selves. They are the particles that make up the cloud you call your life. You wake up safe from the dream, but elsewhere, your frail body hits the pavement, the knife runs you through, the hands close around your neck.

If you want to be like me, next time, try not to wake up.

posted by Gardner at 2:02 AM

For two-and-a half years, Jody Gorran faithfully followed the Atkins diet, regularly eating steaks and Caesar salads and forgoing bread, pasta, and other carb-packed foods. But his devotion to the high-protein, low-carbohydrate way of eating came to an abrupt end late last month when he underwent an emergency balloon angioplasty to open up a clogged heart artery.

Gorran says the diet gave him heart disease, and he believes he can prove it. A heart scan conducted six months before he started the diet showed no evidence of the plaque or calcification routinely seen in people with heart problems. But after two years on the Atkins diet he had developed angina and had a 99% blockage in a major artery.
posted by Gardner at 9:02 AM

A high school teacher was suspended for a classroom experiment that caused several students to vomit after drinking large amounts of milk.

Jeff Ferguson, a chemistry and physics teacher at Smithfield-Selma High School, organized the experiment last week to test the body's ability to neutralize acids in milk.

Ah, memories.
posted by Gardner at 10:14 AM

The Gardner Linn action figure is out, and it is awesome.


posted by Gardner at 9:12 PM

I've figured out why the GW Bush picture scares me (aside from the obvious, that is). He looks like he's wearing the kind of bad demon makeup you'd see on Saturday Night Live or Buffy, where the head is a lot wider than the face--his eyes and nose and mouth are all pinched together in the center, and they're surrounded by this wide expanse of flesh that extends out into ears/horns. The nose gives him kind of a birdish presence, too.
posted by Gardner at 9:04 PM

Why does this picture scare me so much?


posted by Gardner at 11:37 AM

(Continued. Go here for the first three parts.)

I bit into the apple and I tasted apple and nothing else; no blood, no steel. You had left or disappeared, and so You didn't see my disappointment. I took the apple with me and finished it on the walk home. I packed the turtleneck in the bottom drawer of my dresser, and next Halloween I went to a movie with Allison Clark instead of trick-or-treating. My mother drove us in her Buick. We sat in the back seat and didn't dare hold hands.

My name is Charles Winter, and on October 31, 1977, I died so that I might live. Monk, displaying his usual level of wit, likes to say that I'm my own personal Jesus. In his more cynical moods he draws the obvious parallels with Genesis and says that by eating the apple I cast myself out of Eden, which I don't need that incomprehensible twit to tell me that.

I had dreams about that Halloween for years afterward. When I was fifteen I woke in the night with blood in my mouth and toothmarks on my tongue--my body trying to recreate the effects of the razor blade. I've since learned those weren't dreams, but memories--memories of my other lives. I remember what dying feels like. I remember the taste of juice mingled with blood, and how the word "red" described not only what I saw, but what I smelled and tasted and felt and heard. I remember the tip of my tongue lying on the polished wooden floor like a fat pink comma.

I didn't see You again until my twentieth birthday. I was leaving the library and crossing north campus (yes, the library on my birthday, but that's another story) when I smelled leaves burning and felt the air go chill. There was You on the sidewalk, holding something that caught the orange light from the streetlamps. You held it out to me; it was a jar, with something small and dry and shriveled inside. My tongue. Charlie Winter's tongue. A piece of me, the dead boy, the hero.

Do you know what this is, Charlie?

"I do."

(To be continued? Maybe! I'm just making this up as I go along, so anything's possible.)
posted by Gardner at 11:57 PM

Thank you, Kiwi and Peaches, whoever you are.

(Note: Gardner Linn does not support the "Ethan Padgett is a little bitch" platform. He does, however, agree with the statement "I like this Gardner Linn character.")



posted by Gardner at 7:56 PM

Value of phrase "I'm disgusted by Gardner Linn" = 1866




posted by Gardner at 2:02 PM

Finally, a real fan

"I would expect the review to be by someone more qualified than a "pretentious white kid" who only listens to hiphop under two conditions. Listen to this CD as MUSIC, not hip hop just because that's where it will be at Best Buy. There is a lot of talk about The Love Below because Andre is doing something different, and it's not fucking flip flop. Just because you're sarcastic and don't like shit doesn't mean you are ahead of the game or smart. I'm disgusted by Gardner Linn. "
posted by Gardner at 2:12 AM

Continued from 10/31 & 11/1 posts!

You placed the apple on a table in the center of a room that appeared to be circular. The room was not circular. When I looked closer, I could see that there were corners--more corners than I could count, than I could even see. A room of near-infinite sides. Maybe infinite. Only You would know for sure.

The red of the apple appeared supersaturated in the dim room, the color of blood newly released to the air. You spoke:

Is this what you were looking for, Charlie?

"I don't know."

You wanted this, Charlie. You wanted to find me. You wanted to find this apple. And now that you have found us, you don't know what you've found?

The costume had given me strength, resolve, but now it was dissolving. Even then I knew the power of masks, but that power was failing me in that room with infinite corners. I knew You was in the room with me, but I could not see it; I could only smell You. The smell I don't have to remember, because I smell it all the time: You smelled like fall, like smoke in cold air.

I don't have to remember this, because I am always living it. It's always five o'clock somewhere, my dad used to say; it's always October 31, 1977 somewhere too. And no matter what the calendar says, Halloween is the last day of fall. It is when winter begins.

There are two apples on the table, Charlie, though you see only one. One of the apples has a razor blade inside. The other does not. But until someone bites the apple, both possibilities exist.

You want to be a hero, don't you, Charlie? You want to expose this evil?

I should reach for my capgun, I thought. Fire a few shots. Maybe You wouldn't know the difference. I could escape.

There is only one way to be the hero, Charlie. Someone has to take a bite.

I did not reach for my capgun. I reached for the apple instead. It was the size of my dad's fist, as hard and cold as a fist.

I took a bite.

The juice flooded my mouth, mixing with something else, something metallic and warm, and I felt something so beyond pain I had to believe it was pleasure. There was something odd in my mouth, something that didn't feel like fruit. I spit it out. It landed on the floor, slicked with blood and quivering.

After a moment I recognized it as most of my tongue.

Something thin and bright sliced through the roof of my mouth into my sinuses. I felt it behind my eyes, cold and sharp. I dropped the apple. I fell. You said:

You found it, Charlie.

I died.

(To be continued yet further! Watch this space!)



posted by Gardner at 11:48 PM

Everything that has a beginning doesn't really end

Just got back from a late-night viewing of The Matrix Revolutions. More fully-formed thoughts will have to wait until later, when it's not 2:45 in the morning on a Wednesday, but on the whole this was a mighty disappointing movie. Which is not to say it's a bad movie; as an independent entity, it's much tighter and more involving than Reloaded. There is one pretty astondingly great long battle scene involving those awesome Robotech battlesuits from the posters, and the climactic fight between Neo and Smith is about as good as you could want it to be. But Revolutions completely ignores all the interesting questions raised by Reloaded--Who is the Merovingian? Is the "real world" a second Matrix? Is Neo a program? Were there really five previous Matrices?--in favor of a much more conventional epic sci-fi structure. In fact, when Neo asks the Oracle about the Architect's revelations to him, the Oracle basically dismisses it as "Oh, that old coot'll say anything when he's on the sauce." I have to wonder how much of this approach was the result of the lukewarm reception to Reloaded--if the Wachowskis decided (or were persuaded to decide) to make Revolutions simpler and more action-oriented because everybody complained Reloaded was too talky. Because if you were hoping for it to make sense of Reloaded, keep hoping.
posted by Gardner at 2:56 AM

Continued. Read the October 31 post first!

The borders are thin tonight, Charlie. You see a mask, and you see my face. They are the same, tonight, in this place. Your friend in the black mask swordfighting with a flashlight, tonight he is Dustin and Darth Vader. The children in sheets are their own ghosts, tonight; they are already dead. Look under the sheets sometime, Charlie. See if those white things crawling out of their eyes are maggots or just rice. See if that red is coagulated blood or dried makeup. See if it is both.

I found the house. The windows weren't boarded up. The porch wasn't creaking; there was no porch. I'm not sure if it actually was or not, but I remember the house being perfectly octagonal. And the person who answered the door--I say person because I can't remember if it was a man or a woman, old or young--was wearing a black turtleneck just like mine. And a mask, or possibly not a mask. Maybe just a face. It said its name was You. You asked me to come inside.

Tonight we are either dead or alive. And if you are alive, then it is at the expense of another; if you are alive tonight, you have killed. But sometimes people are both. I've seen you, Charlie. I know you. You are your own murderer. You will kill yourself. You have killed yourself.

What I have to ask you now is: Do you want to know why?

I was Bullitt. I did what Bullitt would do. I went inside.

(Yes! To be continued even further! Possibly tomorrow, if I find the time!)
posted by Gardner at 10:43 PM