Stray Shot » Ashfork Series

At Least I Quit Cigarettes

Dan Lee — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 03:08:49 +0000

This is for Brugh Joy, who is battling a particularly lethal form of cancer right now. I just talked to some friends who studied with him in the same group as I did. They are on their way back home today from Rex Ranch, where our groups have been meeting. Brugh is a pattern level psychologist as well as an extraordinary dream interpreter and a doctor of internal medicine. The nature of the patterns of the collective unconscious I learned from him. The ending is from a song by the Geezenslaw Brothers, “She Put a Jukebox in the Bedroom.”

At Least I Quit Cigarettes

Betty Crocker

Dan Lee — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:24:38 +0000

This is the third act of Trophy Room.

Blackberry Honey

Dan Lee — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:22:53 +0000

This is the second of three acts of Trophy Room.

Trophy Room

Dan Lee — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:02:38 +0000

I am continuing moving some of the Ash Fork segments to audio. This one is in three acts, this is the first.

Trouble in Mind

Dan Lee — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:50:12 +0000

This is from the third Ash Fork series of vignettes, and centers on the art of healing; more specifically, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who was Mary Baker Eddy’s body worker. It was from Quimby that she learned much of what she put into her book on Christian Science, which led to her being one of the richest people in the country if not the world. Of course she did not have ears to hear some of what Quimby was saying.

(Adapted as a reading from “Rough Beast” first printed in the third Ash Fork series in August 2005)

Road Kill

Dan Lee — Fri, 08 May 2009 16:59:20 +0000

Moving into Space requires adaptation to parallel processing. Time is a logical sequence, and there are lots of them. Mostly they’re all screened out except the one being followed, to protect the system. But when the injectables hit the system it blasts off into Space, and all bets are off. Like Handsome Jack jilting Marie Laveaux, Luther took the dowry and split to Space in violation of contract.

(Road Kill: Adapted for reading from an earlier Ash Fork vignette)

Native Religion

Dan Lee — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:47:23 +0000

A native religion is the soil in which native people grow. It enters through the bottoms of the feet, gradually absorbing foreign religions transplanted from foreign soil. Ash Fork is outside Oz (the Organic Zone). It’s a sentient field in Space, and the ground from which native religion grows is an instrument played with conscious intention by Count Bergamo.

(Adapted for reading from a December 2005 Ash Fork: Native Religion)

Magdalen

Dan Lee — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:23:19 +0000

Social life among the Ash Fork clones is complex, because they are a combination of human design and processes, injected with DNA computers. DNA computing as it exists would be fairly slow, but this is in a future where they have been integrated into the tissue of the Ash Fork clones in vitro. The clones are the evolution of humans into Space. Some of them are eccentrics.

(Adapted as a reading from an October, 2007, Ash Fork vignette entitled “Mary Magdalen”)

Beween the Tracks

Dan Lee — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:53:04 +0000

The first law of cybernetics is that the system with the widest parameters is the controlling system. That’s why narrow systems tend toward violence. Their only hope of establishing themselves as the containing system is to put everybody else in a prison of some sort. The Priority Chip installed in every clone sent into space is a kind of prison. But nothing has wider parameters than a sentient emptiness which remains when all programs collapse.

(Between the Tracks: adapted as a reading from a November, 2007 Ash Fork vignette)

In Formation

Dan Lee — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:19:15 +0000

Normal is as good as his name. He’s one of the crowd, and he follows along, in formation, when it’s time to lift the shadow by killing an innocent man. But he’s got a split side, too, who calls himself Normal Nuts. He only comes out when it’s time to recount the crime that sealed the story. It is in telling the story that they remember themselves, in formation.

(In Formation is adapted as a reading from an October 2006 Ash Fork installment)

Transportation

Dan Lee — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:26:18 +0000

In Ash Fork, corporations actually are individuals, cloned from selected humans. Investor capital goes along with them in a separate body. And though Bergamo, as the only human to survive injection of DNA computers into his body, is the most powerful human in the world because of it, he still needs to stay connected to useful employment once in awhile. He has no bank, and has to store his wealth in his own body.