Calypsoidal1's profile

The platform hovered above the dizzying heights of the restored city of Machu Picchu, well clear of the city limits of Orinoco. Below them, the Urubamba Valley was alive with a glowing dance of colored floodlights moving in a grand kaleidoscope across the steep mountains and lush jungles. The terraced hillside beneath the city gushed out a floral waterfall, an explosion of colored petals waving slowly in the evening breeze. Gold trim glistened like a conquistador's fantasy on restored limesto...

Perhaps that's too pessimistic. Perhaps I should open with "If." _If_ Barack is assassinated, what will you do? If he is shot by a crazed loner who once considered joining the Aryan Nation, perhaps someone who just got back from two tours in Iraq, perhaps someone who doesn't want to have the first "black" President be someone who didn't come from slave stock...Maybe even a Kenyan from a rival ethnic group. As unlikely as I think it is, go ahead and imagine it, for just a moment. _If_ Barack O...

BROOKSIDE Charles looked at the stack of paperwork on his desk as he played Kenda’s message again. “I’m in trouble. I need your help. Please come to the restaurant. Hurry.” The stack of paperwork seemed to pout like a jilted middle child: employee reviews, phone logs, third-round calibrations statistics from the new Marchwell-Hammarschach steel buff press, a folder of cc’ed emails from the Hamburg offices that may or may not contain the initial specs for the new Schampfer high precision osteo...

CHAPTER 2 LEAVING LOS ANGELES There I was in the chain link cage of an LAPD satellite precinct with thirty of the most annoying women I’d ever met. _Who wears lime green hot pants with a red tube top and a magenta weave?_ Their loud, needy voices pummeled my aching eardrums with a hard-beat “fuck-shit” language: _“Don’t be talkin’ that shit about me, you nasty-ass chicken-head bitch. I’ll fuck you up.”_ Beyond this painful dissonance and the eyesore fashions, the worst thing was the smell: th...

CHAPTER 1 THE INTERVIEW So there I was, shaking my rubber-wrapped ass on the dance floor at Sane in the provincial hippie sanctuary of Holy Cross, California. I did my best thinking with my hips in motion, and the funky bass riff of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground” was just what the doctor ordered. I was working out a plan to seduce a chemist. The solution was just tickling my pelvis when someone tapped me on the shoulder. “Total!” I spun around and crashed into the white block letters of a SA...