The bomb shelter

I got down here before they started falling. This place is set up with food, cigarettes, toilet paper and toothpaste for two hundred people; the generators and air supply systems are working. I will be safe down here for the rest of my life and have everything I could ever need. I am here alone. This transmitter is fully functional; Hello, is there anybody out there? Is anybody else alive?

Guess I might as well turn off the transmitter now. It’s not to save battery power or anything, ’cause I’ve got plenty of that. Also food, clothes, cigarettes, toilet paper, toothpaste, air, water…more than I could ever use as long as I live. When I look up through the periscopic cameras, I see that nothing Up There has been damaged, so I also have houses, roads, stores, freeways, libraries, museums…4,000+ years of civilization’s accomplishments and they all belong to me, I guess, because there’s nobody else for them to belong to. The radiation would kill me if I went Up There, but it’s nice to look at, anyway.
It’s been so long since they started dropping them that I’m starting to forget what life was like before I was down here. I vaguely remember these hokey little things that didn’t work very well and never did what you expected them to. They had a mild analgesic effect, but it wore off after awhile and you had to keep taking more and more of them and they never really made the pain go away. What did they call them again? Oh yea, words. Guess it doesn’t really matter now.
But that’s not why I’m turning off the transmitter; I’m turning it off because there’s nobody there.

Paper.
They didn’t include enough paper. How did they expect this paper to last 200 people for the rest of their lives when it’s only me down here, it’s only been 20 years, and this is the last sheet I can find?
The transmitter.
I’d forgotten all about it! Why wouldn’t I? It’s stupid! It takes up so much space that could have been used to store Paper, and it’s completely useless because there’s no one Out There. Maybe I can remember how to use it and it might possibly work as a substitute for Paper…

It’s been thirty years now. My hair is turning gray and my flesh is withering, though I was little more than a child when I came Down Here. I have forgotten my own name. The “time*” seems to pass more slowly now. Sometimes the silence and the stillness press down on me as if they were something alive, although I know there is nothing alive, and I wonder…

I like to keep it as dark as possible now; I don’t know why; it’s not as if there wasn’t plenty of power, there just doesn’t seem to be much of a point…
It seems odd to long for oblivion, as my whole “life” has been one neverending stretch of nothingness; I can barely even remember before they fell; I think it’s more like remembering a “time*” when I could remember…
And I still keep tapping away on the keys of this transmitter, which is almost more of a nervous habit than the desperate, futile gesture of screaming out into the darkness hoping that someday, somehow, somebody will hear…

Hey, I didn’t write those words; now how the bleep did they get on the transmitter screen? They aren’t even spelled the way they’re supposed to be….

…nothing but those darned HTML codes again…

*still don’t know much about it…

PBPGIFMY

Pain Begets Pain; Gee, If Forgiveness Will Mend You…

People Breed Problems; Greetings If Fantasy Will Maintain You.

Please Breathe; Praise God, I found Ways; Mellow Yet?

Procrastination Brings Power; Great, It Failed; Want My Yak?

Paul Brought Presents; Getting Incredibly Formidable; Wow, Mutual Yelping.

Peaches Beat Plums; Good Interesting Flavor; Weather Made Yellow.

Parted Bleeding Profusely; Gory In Fact; Wounded My Yule.

Postcard Blitz Proliferates; Gain In Furtive Wonders; Mutations? Yummy!!!

Previous Brothers Predatory; Got Interesting Fugitives: Wrecked, Mutilated Yesterdays

Plain Brown Paper! Get It Fast! Worth Many Yen!

Pages Became Poisonous; Gilded In Fascination; Wearisome, Morose Yarn.

Plays Baffling Percussion; Group In Fragments; Withering Mediocrity; Yuck!!

Perturbing Bread Plague; Glop Is Falling; Wanted More Yeast.

Pardon Barbara’s Parents; Geriatric Insurance Flopped; Wagered Moldy Yogurt.

Police Break Promises; Grievous Investigation Forecast; Wanna Munch Yams?

Planned Bus Peregrinations; Gone In Fact; Will Meet You.

Prententious Bitch! Procured Guns–Intense Firearms Will Murder Young’uns!

“Phreeze Bastids! Phire Guns!” (Insert Frantic, Whining, Monosyllabic Yiddish)

Pour Beer! Party Goes Into First Week Monday! Yay!

Pull Bratty Pranks! Get Infantile Fanatics Whipped! Maybe Yesteryear….

Please Be Present; Go In Force With Malicious Yammering.

Painfully Boring Procedure; Gonna Increase Flatulence Which Means Yelling.

Peanut Butter Pastries: Get Instantly Fat! We’ll Make You!

Permeate Bedlam Properly: Gabble Imbecilic French With Mad Yolanda!

Pride Blunders Promptly; Got Intestinal Fortitude? Watch Me Yawn!

Plagiarism Begins Prematurely; Graphically Infintessimal Factors Will Mangle Yahoos.

Paperback Book Pride: Grimy Index Filled With Maloderous Yokels.

Profound Brains Produce Grovelling Idiocy For Warped Monologues Yearly

USDA Government Food

Unbelievably
Sickening
Dinner
Association

Unidentifiable
Something
Dreadful;
Alas!

Unscrupulously
Senseless
Delays
Await

Unwittingly
Serving
Daily
Apocalypses

Ungodly
Salivation
Despite
Awareness

Understand
Something:
Disgust
Awaits

Unlimited
Sacrificially
Damaged
Adults

Unavailable
Seasonings
Delay
Adjustment

Unpleasant
System
Disgraces
America

Unfair
Supper
Defeats
Appreciation

Underworld
Servants’
Delicacy
Annihilation

Unsympathetic
Service’s
Deadly
Apathy

Unthinkable
Starvation
Deplorably
Acceptable

Unsalvageable
Slime–
Dubiously
Available

Uncaring
Society
Delivers
Atrocities

Unspeakable
Stew
Decimates
Aged

Unconditional
Suffering
Doubtful
Attraction

Undeniable
Strategies
Defend
Anorexia

Unendurable
Soup
Defies
Attrition

Unfortunate
Substance
Demands
Action

Unflavored
Specialty
Disasterous
Addition

Unpleasant
Smells–
Daily
Aggravation

Upchuck
Something
Day
Afterday

Unruly
Statistics
Deny
Application

Legal Disclaimer

My Many Thanks,
\|/
O
/|\
(I have never entirely approved of names; therefore I will no longer allow myself to be referred to by one.)
Apalling, Wolverines, & Donkey Hotey
LLP
(Lost Leonard’s Pliers)
1400 Paid Kill Road
Failed Attitude, CA

Indirect: 555-5555
Sex: sux
E-mail: doesn’t

This message contains irritating information intended only to confuse the addressee(s) named above and may contain information that is legally underprivileged. If you are not the addressee, or the person who irresponsibly considered delivering it to the addressee, you are hereby notified that treading on, inseminating, attributing to, or complying with this message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message by some unbelievably tragic and horrendously unfair mistake, please immediately notify us by crying about the message and complete the original message immediately or in the hereafter. Thank you.

My Many Stinks,
\|/
O
/|\
Opprobrious, Woebegone & Domineering
LLP
1400 Enraged Hill Toad
Palpably Alterable, CA

Connect: 555-5555
Tax: 7.25%
E-mail: is noncarcinogenic

This message contains influential information untended only to amuse the addressee(s) blamed above and may contain information that is illegally sniveling. If you are not the addressee or the person irresponsible for slivering it to the addressee, you are hereby notified that needing, incriminating, tribulating to or sloppying this message is trickily prohibited. If you have retrieved this message on purpose, please immediately horrify us by trying the message and secrete the original message irretrievably all over the hereafter. Thank you.

My Many Pranks,
\|/
O
/|\
Oratorily Challenged, Wishyouwerehere & Homilies
LLP (remember what that means?)
1400 Road Kill Page
Perilous Altitude, CA

Directions: Get off the bus; walk against traffic; turn left at the corner; look for the peach stucco at the end of the seedy looking alley; ring doorbell.

Fat: Yea, a bit, but who cares?

E-mail: is not usually considered fatal.

This mess overflows with instigation pretended only for the use of the addressee shamed above, and may remain inclination that is legally depraved. If you are not the addressee or the person responding to deliverance of the addressee, you are hereby clarified that dreading, disembowelling, distilling, or dropping this mess is strict prohibition. If you have deceived this mess by misplacing it, please rectify us immodestly whereafter. Thank you.

My Many Trips,
\|/
O
/|\
Uproarious, World-Weary, & Desperateandneedy
1400 Paid In Full Road
Paleolithic Altosaurus, CA

Evasive:555-5555
Wisecrax: constant
E-mail: I’ll never get it.

This message entertains confrontational information suspended only for the juice of the addressee(s) named above and may complain of information that is legally privileged. If you are snotty to the addressee, you are whereby notorious for conceding, recriminating, obliterating, or propping up this message is slightly prohibitive. If you have relieved this message by hacking onto our system, please eventually notify us by applying to the message and retreat into the original message meatily therebefore. Thank you.

My Many Tranks,
\|/
O
/|\
Gesundheit, Fluff, & Simile
Pages and Pages Still Road
Pals Always, CA

Direct: me to the park; I’ve forgotten how to get there.

Sox: PEEEEEEYEEEEEW!!!! I should probably wash these things!

E-mail: You’ll never catch me using that fool thing.

This message complains of information suspended only by the addressee(s) named “Above” and may contain insulation that is legalese. If you are not the addressee or the person reprehensible for delivering it to the addressee, you are barely notified that pleading, decimating, fabricating, or copycopycopycopycopycopycopycopycopying this message is strictly prohibited. If you have believed this message by earthquake, please clarify us by intermittantly denying that this message ever existed and retreat into the original message immediately thereafter. Thank you.

My Many Replies,
\|/
O
/|\
Oracular, Unwarranted, & Depraved
LLP
1400 Page Spill Road
Palliative Ambitions, CA

Effect: The result of a cause
Thanx: for writing
E-mail: really doesn’t have to be this perilous, does it?

This message pertains to consignment info-mercials upended only for the truce of the addressee(s) named above and may contain an infintessimal grain of truth. That is legally privileged. If you ate not the addressee or the person reprimanded for delivering this message to the addressee, you are hereby notified that pleading, disregarding, deserting, or copiously hemmorhaging from wounds inflicted by this message are strictly prohibited. If you have received this message by jumping out of a cake, please horrify us by spying on this message and throw concrete on the original message immediately or see me in the hereafter. Thank you.

My Many Thanks,
\|/
O
/|\
Opulant, Worthy, & Demanding
How much can you really Limit Liability in a Partnership, anyway?

Direct: I’m not really much into phones these days; they make funny noises when you leave them plugged into the wall too long, and when you try to make them stop, this stranger’s voice makes you jump out of your skin and there you are, minding your own business in the privacy of your own home when suddenly some creep’s trying to sell you something you couldn’t afford even if you wanted it which you don’t, or else they’re demanding to speak to some tacky person you’ve never heard of before in your “life”.

Crap: Me and all my lovely little friends are having a lovely little “time*” playing volleyball on the beach here in lovely little Los Angeles.

E-mail: me next “time*” you get a chance.

This message contains no information whatsoever. No it doesn’t! Not even any that is legally privileged! For that matter, it is intended only for the use of anybody and everybody in the entire universe, or maybe even for anybody and everybody outside the entire universe who somehow went to all the trouble it takes to hack on to it! Read, disseminate, distribute, and copy to your heart’s content! See if I give a flying (expletive denoting copulation deleted)! If you have received this message, it is not a mistake. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to; just sit there with a big smile on your face because you know that there are other human beings Out There who Are.

The run-on sentence

To Whom It May Concern,

One of the more irritating examples of the brutalization of the English Language by the uneducated, evil, idle, and untrained inhabitants of the period of “time*” commonly known as the twenty-first century is that slothful habit of allowing one’s writing to lapse into the ungrammatical and incomprehensible structure of what is often refered to as the run-on sentence, and, in my opinion, too often allowed to perpetrate its foolish tendency to wander incoherantly from thought to thought, as if triskadekaphobia in a utopian society was in some way related to, or in some way connected to, the overuse of electronic information transfer devices in a post-modern civilization, this digression being merely an example of the evils inflicted on society at large by this seemingly innocuous although unquestionably annoying lack of ability to express onesself within the confines of a clearly understandable and coherant pattern of subject/verb, or subject/verb/object, which has been tested and proven over a period of many centuries to be the most effective means of transmitting information, thoughts, ideas, hopes, dreams, fantasies, memories, impressions, sensations, or merely declaring one’s existence to an essentially disinterested world through the medium commonly known as the printed word, the word itsself being (contrary to the assertion made in John 1:1) an inaccurate, at best, device for the transmission of human experience from one person to another, seeing as how the connotative meaning of any and all words, individually and collectively, in the English language, or for that matter in Latin, Greek, Francais, Espanol, or any other modern or ancient tongue commonly in use today or at any “time*” in the recorded or unrecorded past, cannot be duplicated in the life experiences of any two members of the human species and therefore leaves itsself open to all manner of misinterpretation, either deliberate or unintentional, on the part of either of two parties who engage in this manner of social intercourse, whether the abovementioned unit of meaning we recognize as a word is encountered in its printed form (being merely a black mark formed by the application of ink, graphite, or some other colored substance on to paper, papyrus, slate, electronic computer monitor, shifting sand, or some other means of storing such marks) or in the more basic and easily acquired form of sounds transmitted by the combined effort of the organism’s larynx, tongue, and teeth, known as the spoken word, which is often augmented by various facial expressions and gestures of the bracchial limbs and their attached digits, as well as the physical proximity of the individuals engaged in discourse, among many other factors, tangible and intangible, which can drastically alter the meanings expressed in this form of communication and can be captured imperfectly at best upon a sheet of fibers gleaned from the corporeal bodies of various arboreal species and processed into a flat, portable sheet of writing material or, as is more common in this age of poor taste and rapidly spreading consumerism, stored by some incomprehensible method in a flat piece of plastic encasing mysterious digital processing material manufactured in an area formerly known as the San Jose valley, a name which has been obliterated from all maps and memories in recent years, due to the inflitration of the computer industry and its hoardes of overpaid and overworked young punks who have more money than they know what to do with, or, in fact, than anyone of such tender age has any business being responsible for, and which, in fact, these beings commonly known to long-“time*” residents of the San Francisco Bay Area as “yuppies”, rarely have the “time*”, ambition, or inclination to spend, which causes further stagnation in an economy already beset by a widening gap between those who have and those who have not, which will, as we have learned in the past, ultimately result in an uprising of the lower classes of society against their opressors, and the decline of humanity’s finer achievements in art, literature, mathematics, medicine, music, and other forms of higher learning which separate us from the beasts, as the underclass is notorious for its lack of appreciation for these things and its tendency to revert to the lowest common denominator of the human condition, resulting in prolonged periods of “time*” known as “dark ages”, followed by many centuries of growth necessary to regain all that has been lost in the annals of “time*”, none of which is even peripherally related to the topic at hand, the run-on sentence, which I personally believe is responsible for many of the woes of our society, in fact any society which has existed previously or could exist in the future, providing mankind does not destroy itsself and the innocent forms of life which share our habitation on this lovely third planet from the sun, an assumption which is shaky at best, given the trends toward overpopulation, overconsumption, hostility between nations, increasingly advanced technology, whether it be in the form of the splitting of the atom or the storage of information in silicon chips, decline in the per capita consumption of squash from the previous generation’s norm, which mark the decline of civilization as we know it, and which I believe are greatly influenced by the insidious nature of the underlying problem, a proliferation of unnecessary clauses, prepositional phrases, parenthetical statements, and other verbal clutter resulting in sentences that are neither concise nor coherant, and the organization of which leaves much to the interpretation of the reader, if the reader is, in fact, able to make any interpretation whatsoever of this jumble of varying ideas, impressions, and opinions which masquerades as a unit of thought expressed in a language originally indigenous to the island of Great Britain, than venomous vehicle of vapidity, the run-on sentence.

Sincerely,
~~Image Ownership Problem~~

What are these things?

I wanted to give you these things I found. I’m not quite sure what they are. I see them all over the place, so I guess they’re not that uncommon. They are available by bulk, in large economy-sized packages, and individually. Perhaps you have seen them before. They have a certain strange, unearthly, translucent beauty to them. They are ephemeral and hard to pin down, because they are never quite what they seem to be. At the same “time*”, they have a permanence that is terrifying, and once you give them away they seem to take on a life of their own and do things that you never intended for them to do. I should warn you that they are extremely dangerous, as well as being volatile. They have been known to cause wars, destroy civilizations, and annihilate lives to the point where they can never be repaired. Once you let them loose, you can never tell what they’re going to do, and there isn’t much hope of catching them again and containing them. When I have laughed in the face of death, stared down all the evil that the world has to hold, and think that nothing can ever scare me again, I see one of these things and start to tremble and look for a place to hide.
And yet they are vulnerable. They like to crawl into small, enclosed, underground spaces where they will not be trampled underfoot by an uncaring world. They are easy prey for those who seek to destroy them
Still, they are irridescent, and when the dew sparkles on them at sunrise they are so beautiful that it makes me want to cry, and I can’t help wishing for someone to share them with because it seems wrong and selfish to lock them up in a cage and not let others enjoy them. They can change lives for the better, as well as for the worse. They can bring people together, they remind you of things you can’t remember, they can help you reach your destination, and ultimately they are the only weapon we have against the darkness that threatens to engulf us.
I tried the dictionary, but it really didn’t seem to be much help in finding out what these things are. It kept breaking all the rules of definition by defining something as itsself. Kinda made me loose my faith in dictionaries for awhile, which is a scary place to be.
These things aren’t like anything else I’ve ever encountered before. I just can’t seem to figure them out no matter how much “time*” I spend playing with them, watching them, and trying to understand what they can do. They get away from me, and then I have to deal with consequences that I could never have imagined happening, which are nothing at all like the consequences which I was fearing. They scare the hell out of me, but they are too compelling to ignore.

They’re called words.

Lost, lost, and by the moon grieved

But that’s just their nature; the only function a noun (and that could be a person or a place, as well as a Thing) can serve in a sentence (and that could be a “life” sentence) is to happen, have something happen to it, or merely to be. Sometimes just being takes every ounce of strength you have to take one more breath, make one more mouthful of tasteless food you don’t want go down that little hole you know must be somewhere in the back of your throat, remember what day of the week it is so you can take the garbage out to the curb at the proper time, floss your teeth every night even though your whole world has falled apart and you just don’t care, walk past those open windows instead of jumping out like you want to do, look at something else in the K-Mart besides the guns in the hunting department that you could buy to blow your brains out all over your nice clean carpets…it just takes all there is.

There’s really not a whole lot you can do about Things, either, and I don’t care if we’re talking about the melting of the polar ice caps or an all-out nuclear holocaust or a custody battle or even something as small as a postcard; they just are, and no matter how much you wish that you could go back and change some tiny, insignificant-seeming detail so that they never happened, you can’t because they did.

And the worst thing about “life” is that when it shatters so completely that it can’t go on, it does. The only common denominator in aftermath is zero; there is no limit to how much nothing something can be divided by…

I think you know the script from here as well as I do; I’d rather watch this on T.V.

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