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Ages Of Irony
The New World
Table of Contents: A D D I I I Q CBA
The story starts here.
The old man sat at the tip-top of the large teardrop-shaped circle of friends. He looked out across the fire at his tribe. Their children ran between the curving corners of the cob houses. The kids shrieked in glee. Screaming and laughing, they played games without care. Skeletons of skyscrapers on the horizon stood silently opposing the sunset of the short solstice.
The old man still wondered why he was so lucky.
He tasted the sweet, earthy flavor rolling off of the bundles of drying winter flowers. He smelled the fresh coffee brewing by the fire. An aroma of onion drifted in from the other direction. Not the cold-hardy wild leeks that the first men had found here, but a newly-wild variety. They had no familiar name like the ancient warriors had given this place.
“Tell us the crissmaws story, Papa.” A little girl said to him. She had walked from behind him and now smiled brightly as she looked at his snow-white hair.
“Crissmoss?” the old man grinned when he said it. He tried to parrot her accent but failed.
“I am not sure I remember that one.” He winked this time so she knew that he was teasing.
The old man wasn’t sure if this one was family. “No matter,” he thought. He loved them all the same.
The old man brought himself to his feet slowly and deliberately. When he walked, it was paced gracefully and smooth. He glided toward the fire.
The old man bent down when he was halfway there. He pulled a strawberry from a stem. “These have taken over our lawn,” he smiled. “This one almost got stepped on.”
“I’ll save it,” he said, as he threw the berry up and caught it in his mouth.
The old man walked over and sat on a log near the fire. The kids gathered. The smallest boy in the group pushed and elbowed his way into the front. The little boy sat down quickly when he found a place.
“Loooong, looooong agoooo,” the old man bellowed for dramatic effect.
The little boy in the front interrupted, “hundreds of years?”
The old man smiled. “Who taught this one how to talk?” he looked towards the adults. They chuckled
“Almost a millennium now, little brother,” he said to the boy.
The little boy’s eyes widened in surprise.
“Long ago.” the old man started again. “I was born on the other side of the great forest. On a cliff of the valley of the river of miles. Twoscore and ten-years before the warming and 49 before the year it was cold.”
He paused his script, staring off in the distance as the memories crashed in.
“Back then you could talk to anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world. But nobody listened.” The old man’s voice always wavered when he said this part.
“What? Were they wonko?” The little one interrupted again. The other children laughed and nodded.
“Wonko fo shosho,” The man uttered the expression without a smile.
To be continued.
A Brief History of Innovation
Sticks and stones
they broke our bones,
The named men, royal, ruled us.
The metal worse, gold came first.
Then melted copper and tin,
to bronze more strong and thin.
The filling chalice of sin,
spilled blood the wars poured in.
The iron strongest, walled we men.
We fought for thousands then.
The steel revealed,
more greed was kneeled.
The smoke and work, the shield.
The sparks, they came
aluminum, the data game.
We slave, ignore the flame.
Warning! Meta:
Reboot sequence:beginningnowohfuckthisshitisbrokenlookatallthoseerrorsletmegrabanewmachine and enter through the… There we go I think I have this now. You should be able to read this, I caught the little mouse.
Read on!
