Hi! I decided it was time to pop in for a bit! I had no tale, so I improvised one. (From notes, etc.) It's crazy, but hey. A little crazy is ok when times are difficult... I'm gonna leave comments this weekend: I've missed you all! And, in the face of people passing, I thought it was time to share, and post something playful. Thanks so much for stopping by, as always. I wish you all peace, health and fulfillment. I hope you're all well. Love and peace from the windy city Mark (the image is AI. It was originally made for Barb/bakapo, for her birthday ((part of a set))...it fit the end of this tale, so I wanted to use it. Forgive me, Barb, but now other people can see it too!) ------------------ AN IMPROVISED TALE It was 2025 inside. But, for some reason, it was the year 1200 outside. Something was wrong. "Excuse me," I asked a passerby---he wore a frock, a hood and sandals: "What year is it?" "1200," he said. "1200??? Something's wrong! Would you wait here for a second?" "Awright." he said. I ran inside and looked: The lights were on. The refrigerator was on. My computer was on: It couldn't be 1200... I ran outside: "What year is it now?" I asked. "1200!" said the man. "You were only gone 2 minutes!" "Right, right," I said. "What're you doing here?" I asked. "Waiting for the Renaissance." "The Renaissance?" I said: "That won't be for another 250 years!" "I packed a lunch," he said. I bid him goodbye, sauntered to the nearest Inn---where it was the year 1860. Charles Dickens was there, signing copies of Oliver Twist. I said, "wow, Oliver Twist: I gotta be honest: I hated that novel in high school." "High school?" he said: "What's high school?" "It's---never mind," I said. He continued signing. "I'm a writer too!" I said. "I've seen some of your tales," he said. "Crazy shit. No plots. No storylines." "Can't argue that," I said, "though I'm caught in this tale and I can't get out: And I had nothing to do with it!" I said: "Everytime I open a door, another century appears." He smiled: "Centuries'll do that," he said. "I once got stuck in a 14th Century epic---in Medieval French!---and wound up fighting in the Hundred Years War! Just keep moving, sir: You'll find your way..." "Oh thank you," I said. "Can I touch your Oliver Twist? That's not a snotty remark: I really want to touch your novel. I'd do anything to touch something you actually held." "If it'll give you closure," he said. He handed me the novel. Whoosh! Suddenly I was inside it: "Hey!" I said: "This wasn't supposed to happen!" Tons of readers suddenly screamed: "Get him outa there! He's from the wrong century! Remove him! Who the fuck is he???" So DIckens---now positively peeved, and wanting me the hell away from him at any cost---leaned into the novel, knocked over a few small characters, got bit by a dog who wasn't in his novel but snuck in when I jumped in (he was from a painting by Breughal, and hated it), grabbed me by the collar, and pulled: Whoosh! I was out of Oliver Twist for good. Phew! I straightened up, apologized, and left. On the way out, I met Hamlet (!)---who was pondering life. (Ie: "To be, or not to be, that is the question..."). I asked if he'd found the answer. "There's no answer, nitwit!" he said. "It's an eternal question. God, read much?" "Are all you literary-characters so snotty?" I said. "Yeah well, when you speak in iambic pentameter for several centuries---and Shakespeare's on top of it---you get testy. "Sorry," I said. I moved on... * * * * * * * * * By now I'd walked through 3200 centuries, and each one was in black and white. "Don't you guys have color back here?" I shouted. "We don't have the chemicals," they said. "Right, right," I said. "Processing and all that: tough gig..." And I moved on. In one village, the sun rose in the west. In another, I was in one huuuuuge painting, and we all moved and talked on a 2 dimensional plane. (It must've been an "art" village.) In one village, I was in a Poser image, and I was being rendered. (This was painful.) In another, I was in a fractal, and I grew multiple arms. In another, I was at the Biblical Creation (get this:) It was dark and some voice hovered over the face of the deep and shouted, "Let there be light!" (Impressive!) Someone turned on a flashlight. After a long pause: "That's not what I had in mind!" said the voice: "Let's try it again..." This went on for some time... Later, I passed several cave people planting prayers in the ground: They planted them, watered them, and the prayers sprouted. Suddenly bison appeared; huge rains appeared; a guy selling animal skins appeared: "Where'd they come from?" I asked. "Prayers," they said. I moved on. Then I found a pond where the sun had gotten caught in a tree, bounced around several times---this was according to the locals---fell into the pond and went out. "Sun, Sun!" I yelled: "Come out! Come back, you're needed!" It shot out of the water and rasped: "What!" "Are you ok?" "Do I look ok?" "Just come out: The solar system's waiting!" It sighed. "Yeah, yeah: The solar system...right." It grabbed me: "Damn solar system doesn't pay a dime, it wants rent, the planets are these little whining brats who want more light, more gravitational pull, larger orbitals: What'm I, Houdini? But give 'm one tiny little sunstorm: Oooooooh! They whimper like little puppies! Humbug!" he grumbled. Suddenly he started rubbing. "What're you doing?" I asked. "Sunspots! Damned sunspots: I hate these things!" "You're embarrassed by sunspots?" "Oh spare me the indignance!" he sniped: "If your specie had these, you'd be putting ointments on for the next 3 millennia!" He rubbed more: "You need steel wool to get this stuff off!" He rubbed and rubbed, swore like a trooper, then finally rubbed off the spots---ta da! He stood at attention: "There!" he said: "2 hours and they're gone!" I looked closely: "You got a rash, Sun. Sorry..." "A rash?" "A huuuuuge rash," I said. He looked in a mirror. (Mind you, he didn't own a mirror, so I wrote one. Writer's prerogative.) Shit!" he cried: "It's from all that rubbing! I rubbed my face bright red!" He looked again. Then, "never mind!" he sniped. And he flew back into the sky where he took his former place, shone on the earth, and there were cheers across the solar system. "You did it!" I said. And I walked on... * * * * * * * * * I reached 1784. A man ran up to me and said: "Here: Take this!" "What is it?" I said. "A sud." "A sud?" I said. "Just one?" "Yeah, one sud. Most people have lotsa suds. But me? I carry one. (Whispering:) For me, one's enough. But hey, that's just me..." So he gave me his sud: It was huge, the size of a beachball, with paisley patterns all over it while it spun madly. "What do I do with it?" I shouted. "Ask it! It'll get you out of this tale and all these centuries---you want that, right?" "Yeah." "Then rub it! It's magic. Byyyyyyeeeee!" So I rubbed it: Whoa! Snow White appeared. Rumplestilskin. Rapunzel...fairy tale figures from Northern Europe. Then fairy tale igures from ancient Africa, then Asia, then Native America: a pageant of all the fairy tale figures from human history. I rubbed more, and characters from literature appeared, then people from history---Genghis Kahn, King Henry VIIIth, Charles DeGaulle---then continents before there were humans, and amino acids: and so on. (I met an amino acid named "Kip". We played Poker: He won. Wasn't too gracious about it either.) I rubbed until I finally landed back home in 2025! Phew! Outside---on my lawn---a voice still cried: "Let there be light!" And this time, a kitchen light went on. "You gotta work on this!" I shouted. And again: "Let there be light!": 3 LED sun lamps went on. "Damn!" it shouted. I closed the door. In the distance, a woman was knitting a quilt---each patch was a nation from every century on earth. (See my image: It's a photo of her quilt.) "How big will it be when it's done?" I shouted. "You're standing on it!" she shouted. And I looked down: Shit. I was standing on it. "So you're knitting all of history!" I shouted. "Yep." "And we're all in it," I shouted. "Yep." "Wow," I said, "that's gonna be a big quilt!" "And 100% cashmere!" she said. And she knitted the words, "THE END," and said, "take them!" "What'll I do with them?" I said. "You look like you're waiting for an ending! Just drop these at the bottom, and you can go home." I took a deep breath, straightened myself out---you wanna look good for an Ending---and dropped the words on the bottom: They bounced around a bit, then fell in place, and--- THE END Perfect! (I asked the knitter if she thought I succeeded. "Well it wasn't Shakespeare," she said, "but it'll do. Next time get a plot." "Yeah, that's not likely," I said. And I walked off the edge of the page and disappeared...) ------------------