While we go about the daily grinds of living, real life happens. I was to find this out very forcefully over the past weekend. And here I am now trying to play catch-up.
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Here’s my best shot at making good on the daily installments, today I give you double. So, this post will stand in for Mon. the 14th and Tues. the 15th of January. This is from chapter three of the book: Casting Shadow on the tattoo trails. See how life happens in other spheres as we go back on the trails again. Enjoy.
Waking up there
There was nothing to it. It was as ordinary a day as any. Shadow was feeling a bit peckish, hungry he was. He had not eaten anything in weeks. He would have reached into the shoulder sack and fished out from there one of the silver nugget.
The silver nuggets and water is all that is needed for his sustenance on the journey, and if all else fails, he always has a prayer, the never-failing, dependable prayer. One can never go wrong on that.
He would have sat himself down at the base of a large oak tree just a few giant steps away from the water’s edge, as he reached in into the side-bag hanging from his shoulder, he fished out one serving of the very well-preserved meal.
He would then nibble away on the silver nugget until it was all done, or until he was full. “I must not drink water while I’m eating my nugget,” he grunted.
He has always got to verbally remind himself of that small detail. Or else, he runs the risk of forgetting and breaching that code, and if he does, he will sleep away for years in humanoid terms and time measures.
The Shadow man doesn’t have that kind of luxury no, there is a job to be done, and it has waited way too long already as it is.
Having finished feasting on the silver nugget, and yet again, after having waited until the sun had gone around in circle one dark and one light, up unto and around the same point where it was up there in the skies when he had had his meal, he can then have however much water to drink, as he may need on this Earth, the earth where the humanoid kinds lives.
So, down into the water he went from his perch up there, up there at the base of the oak tree. That giant tree standing right there, proud and boasting on the river banks. It was there that he would have sat himself down and feasted.
Shadow would have stooped himself down by the water’s edge and scooped up handful after handful of refreshingly cool, clear water, took it to his dry thirsty lips and sucked it in.
But then, at about halfway through the routine, he heard it and would have turned himself around to look and to inquire. To the right of him, he saw it. There he was. Someone was sitting there in a canoe, just sitting there and watching him.
Of course, he didn’t know what it was at the time, he hadn’t seen one before, he only knew that there it was, a being of some kind sitting there and doing something.
Some of the humanoid kinds which he had heard about perhaps. He wasn’t quite sure but he was there, the being was there, sitting on some sort of a contraption that floats on top of the water.
This humanoid-looking being was watching him, very attentively. But at the same time, he was obviously doing other things.
Shadow tried to communicate with the being in the usual and customary way, by a wave of the hand and a bow of the head. But he did not respond, at least not in like manner. He spoke though, in a strange sort of “other” language.
Shadow talked back at him, in proper Cekko language of course: the king’s own cekko language. Everybody knows and does speak it, right? But not man-ho-Manuel, he just sat there and stared at him in wonderment.
He would eventually make beckoning gestures towards Shad, which he interpreted to be a call to action, a call to join him on board the floating contraption.
“Not on your life,” said Shad to him, again in a language only known to himself in these parts it would seem. “There’s no way I’m getting in that thing with you.”
They are out in the deep waters now, the boat ride is really cool too after-all, and Shadow is even getting into the finer aspects of the fishing thing. He would have caught quite a few fish as a matter of fact.
They had enough food to feed the family now, so the road leads back home, or to the safe side on the shore. Where they would really begin to bond, man-to-man, or man to… whatever.
They would have roasted fish on a coal fire there by the water’s edge and ate their fill. Then Man-ho, or Manuel, as he would from then on become to be known to the Shadow Man.
Manuel the fisherman got the bright idea to take it all the way home, to the place where he and the rest of his clan lives, in a floating village across the deep. Across many deeps and shallow waters too. So, on home, the ship would sail.
…
Water encounter number two
He was running low on the silver nuggets again, they had done well to sustain him over the centuries, but more than all that, he wanted a change.
After all, he had been away from that place where he had called home for quite a long time and has been interacting with these other beings, trying his best to start blending in a little bit more with them, maybe.
He also wanted was to start partaking even more into some of their customs, their rituals, and traditions. He would have gone out once with the chief on the next fishing trip, it was another of the chief’s regular deep sea fishing escapades down, way down into the deep belly of the sea, this is where the big games are he was told.
Down there, just below the floating village community is where the chosen divers, the chosen community’s divers would go to collect the periodic supplies.
“Here’s the drill,” said the chief in an attempt at preparing him for the trip down under, under the village that is. He then went on to explain it, in great details, all of the dos and don’ts as the task would entail. He went about schooling the Shad.
So, the deal, as it turned out was for him to prepare both his mind as well as his body, lungs and all, prepare for the long trip down into the belly of the deep.
Get the fish up from down there and bring them up unto the surface where the family is waiting for dinner. All that has got to be done on just one breath of fresh air. “No problem man.”
Shad was confident and buoyed, after all, this is the shadow, -this is Shadow Needleman whom you are talking to here. I’ve done some real out-of-this-world kinds of things in my time, things which will make your skull pop –kaboom just like that, just to think of it.
This swimming, diving, and fishing bit of which you speak, this will be just another notch on my pistol. How wrong could the Shadow man have been? But then again, how could he even have known?
Two sleeps later, two sleeps for the rest of them, the “others” of that village that is, not Shad though, since he hardly ever do, he hardly ever sleeps. So, they went out on the deck, briefly rework the routines, and then they took the plunge down, down, down.
The tightness inside of his chest was getting stiff, and stiffer yet. Cliffy the chief, like Manuel in another world, another place and time, the chief would have beckoned him onward, forward, deeper down. “You will then hit the transition point,” the chief had said.
But the only transition that Shad could see coming for him was his chest bursting open and sucking salty sea water a-rushing in, and grating at the inner walls of his lungs where fresh air, so longed to be.
It must have happened just like that, at that very moment even, because that’s the last thing he ever remembered of that fishing expedition.
And furthermore, that was and still is the only other black spot in the many lives of the Shadow man which he cannot quite get clarity on, from anyone, nor is he able to figure it out on his own, as to what might have happened there and then, after that fateful moment.
And the questions are piling up as to what really happened? Did he die there, as is the custom with those of the humanoid kinds?
And if so, if he had died, did he forfeit another of his many lives there? The humanoid inserts of what he was given as “life,” to equip him for the humanoid world?
Was he rescued from that situation? And if so, by whom? How long was he out of it? On and on the question keeps piling up and gnawing at him.
They were just supposed to go out for a swim. And then some more, he had sold Shad on the idea. And swimming he went with him.
That was the last he ever saw or heard of the chief, or man-ho-Manuel again, he thinks. What had happened? He may never know for sure, but he was quite sure that he woke up in jail, surrounded by a battalion of soldiers and guards and life as he knew it, was never the same again.
And then there came the innate fear of everything to do with the world of water and fishing, since then. In the realms of the great kings in Cekkoland where Shadow came from, its two strikes and you are out, unlike it seems to be the custom here in the humanoid realms where it takes all of three.
Shad is not going to risk a third. Even if he was to be given another chance at doing so, and even if it is in the humanoid world that he happened to be living in at the time. He is not going to risk it. Not on yet another of the many chances at losing his life.
So now the Shadow man has got one more thing to worry about, one more thing to fear here in the humanoid world as he goes about seeking to find and return the lost genodes home.
To add to his fear of sleep, the fear of water is now an additional worry constantly gnawing at the Shadow man’s psyche.
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Today’s extras.
Monday
2005 - A probe, from the Cassini-Huygens mission, sent back pictures during and after landing on Saturn's moon Titan. The mission was launched on October 15, 1997.
1973 - The Miami Dolphins defeated the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl VII and became the first NFL team to go undefeated in a season.
1954 - Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio were married. The marriage only lasted nine months. Ole boy Joe did get a piece of it, -the pie maybe.
1943 - U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first U.S. President to fly in an airplane while in office. He flew from Miami, FL, to French Morocco where he met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to discuss World War II.
1907 - An earthquake killed over 1,000 people in Kingston, Jamaica. This
1878 - Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone for Britain's Queen Victoria.
Tuesday
2006 - NASA's Stardust space probe mission was completed when it's sample return capsule returned to Earth with comet dust from comet Wild 2.
1986 - President Reagan signed legislation making Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a national holiday to be celebrated on the third Monday of January.
1955 - The first solar-heated, radiation-cooled house was built by Raymond Bliss in Tucson, AZ.
1908 - Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority became America's first Greek-letter organization established by African-American college women.
1899 - Edwin Markham's poem, "The Man With a Hoe," was published for the first time.
1892 - "Triangle" magazine in Springfield, MA, published the rules for a brand new game. The original rules involved attaching a peach basket to a suspended board. It is now known as basketball.
1863 - "The Boston Morning Journal" became the first paper in the U.S. to be published on wood pulp paper.
1624 - Many riots occurred in Mexico when it was announced that all churches were to be closed.
1559 - England's Queen Elizabeth I (Elizabeth Tudor) was crowned in Westminster Abbey.
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