A new currency.

[Reginald Ret]

Oh wow, that is going somewhere.

[Eater of Clowns]

It was easy it seemed so easy. The guy spoke English, great English. I felt like I hadn't spoken in years. I can't remember what was in the shop. I bought something. I bought something and I understood what it was, and what it cost, and I paid for it. I forked over a few ten thousand peso notes and the man shook his head. He started talking and I understood him, understood perfectly, felt like a fucking economist at the end of the exchange.

I woke up in Cali. A week ago, a ten hour drive ago, a tricky few hundred kilometers ago. I was on the pull out bed in our hosts' fine apartment. Across the cold marble floor the huge sliding doors were open to the balcony and the curtains, great sweeping translucent white things billowed lazily inward. My father was in his favorite spot, leaning on the balcony railing overlooking the twisting city sprawling out onto the mountainsides.

He was young again, the huge man, young like I remember him before the trip. I knew it from a dozen paces away that he was young, his legs less worn from carrying out the giant frame for sixty long, long years. I knew without seeing his hands that all ten fingers were curled around the railing, that last digit I've never known him to have, recovered from his Air Force days, recovered from the roadside in Germany after the truck rollover. He was well rested and slept like he used to before the barracks fire and the charred men made him a light sleeper. Dad.

And with one step closer to the balcony the hallway and the living room and the dining room and the balcony sped past, a blur of speed. Cali shone in the sun and then sparkled with the million lights of a city night and then I was in the finca again.

The finca, that little sliver of classic Antioquia carved into the mountains above Medellin. The dozen photos of Christ and the Virgin Mary adorning every room and passage were turned around backwards, brown and grey and white canvases displayed in the frames with two holes just where the eyes of the portrait would be and nothing behind them. In the back room Maria and Josefina, our hosts, were each peering into holes oblivious to my presence. Their bodies were slack, as though every muscle limp, like they were hooked to the backwards portraits by their eyes, hanging as fish on a line. In the little garden by the bathroom that read Caballeros the statue of the Virgin was gone but her shape was there in nothing. The sky held a brilliant, huge, white hot sun that hung in blackness and shed no light. I walked up to the next portrait of Jesus and I peered through the nothing eyes and I saw a place I've never seen.

It was a spotless and meticulously decorated tenth floor apartment on the north side of Bogota. I was on one of the sofas, fine printed floral pattern rising out of dark wood trimming. My step mother was there and talking to her sister that I briefly met in the States years ago and a man I never met. When the opened their mouths to speak, their jaws and lips and tongues merely hung loose a moment forming no words. The sound coming out sounded like radio stations just missing their frequency. I still do not understand their Spanish.

I pulled my head away from the portrait eye window and the head of my Bogota self moved back. I tried to push myself away from the wall and I could see my arms rising. I was my own puppet. I could picture myself hanging like the other two, a fish dead and drying and staring.

This is what death is. One day I stopped controlling myself directly and became the puppet of a previous me that hung against two eye windows who had himself one day lost control to a previous him hanging from a portrait without eyes.

When I screamed I watched myself in Bogota open wide and wail the only real sound, so much louder and so much clearer than my company. It hurt my ears in Medellin and it burned my throat in Bogota.
My wail subsided and it turned to a painful cough. I checked my pockets. They were empty, but my hand still came out with a Necronomicoin.

It shivered and stretched and I gripped it harder, hard enough to shred the flesh of my palm. I lost control of it and it burst, spilling a dozen more Necronomicoins from my hand, then a dozen more and a hundred and a flood. They clanged to the floor and they never made the same sound twice. They piled up to our knees and they melted through the floor and they rolled ten floors down to the streets of Bogota, more money in this little world of money.

What was it I bought in that shop.

[Pæs]

A message from the deceased, intended recipient unknown, recovered from postal service in blank envelope:

There's never enough time, there's never enough time. I thought I was applying metrics to the market and all the while it was applying metrics to me, to us, sizing us up. I had a breakthrough.

Ha! A breakdown if you ask the boss, but nobody's asking him anything for reasons that are likely known by now.

A breakthrough. None of our predictions were correct. More than that, some were reporting that the market would, with regularity, do the exact opposite of what it did in their m̧͕͚̩̮o̩̼̪d̟̫͕͓̻͍e̵̞̗l͡l̫̭̖̳̼̭̀i͎͇n͎̦͘g̱͈͖͉͡. I Every time. That caught my attention.

I'm aging rapidly now, though. There's never enough time. I took a sample of market activity and recorded but did not observe the following periods. I don't know who you are, so I'm simplifying, the details are attached. I made predictions based on the dataset and time and time again found them defied by what the market really did. Then I went back and made new predictions on the same data and *it still didn't fit*. Do you understand? The historical data was changing based on my predictions in the present.

But there's never enough time, which is why I went to see the Day Trader. And now I'm out of time.

[Junkenstein]

This thread is a thing of beauty.

[Eater of Clowns]

This thread is a thing of beauty.

I'm having a blast. 

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I'm about halfway through a thing, in Word.  But HORRORBAG, so it's going to have to wait for tomorrow.

[LMNO]

That's what you get when you pay for your calamari dinner with necronomicoin.

[Eater of Clowns]

To Jeremy and Rosa,
Colombia is fine, very fine. I'm sure you saw on facebook but I am the proud owner of a fancy new hat. It looked pretty normal in Salento and Medellin but I could feel the ire on my back wearing it around Bogota. I managed to find the only shop that sells postcards in the country. Apparently it simply isn't done here. When I get back we'll have to get some drinks.
Your friend,
J.

Dear Liz,
Thank you for letting me borrow the book. It's been an English language companion with me these last few weeks when I find myself so badly needing one. I can't seem to get a grasp on Spanish. Whenever I think I hear a word I recognize, it hurts, hurts deeply. My mouth is fleshy and cannot form the words and my ears were not made for the sounds that bounce and weave around each other in tapestries of huge knowledge. I look forward to seeing you when I'm home.
Yours,
J.

Dear Mom,
I am enjoying my vacation in Colombia. On the front of the postcard you'll see a typical home in the countryside (we stayed in a place very similar) as well as the national flower. It is a purple orchid. The roots are deep in infinity and it smells like the dust of the cosmos, the remnants of a planet full of life trod over and devoured by massive uncaring things. I'll be home soon and will see you then.
Sincerely,
J.

Dear Rob,
I am sorry to hear about your grandmother. As you can see, she is on the front of this postcard, holding you up as a baby. I purchased it in a craft bazaar. You will want to make your peace with her as soon as you read this, as international mail in Colombia is uncertain, and she will not be much longer than the postmark. I know, it seems so sudden. The Colombians assure you that Jesus will have her and that is a perfectly acceptable way to not think any further on the matter.
Always,
J.

Dear J,
By now the stack of postcards on your desk is ten thousand high. You do not know that many people, J, who are you writing to? Your fingernails are dragging across lines as you scrawl them and they shatter over and over. Your pen ran out of ink a long time ago. Every card you write is the private psychic world of a trapped mind, and in creating them you are their frail and helpless husk god and you will not stop.
XOXO
J.

Lex,
The mountains are beautiful here. They are everywhere. There is nothing behind them and if you try to look the rivers stop. Their shepherds through the valleys grow angry and they stop their singing and the absence is a physical thing like the blood in your veins or the breath in your lungs. You really ought to consider a visit – it is a great country for horses.
J.

To Don and Kit and Jen and Jerry and Chris and Eva and John,
I am sorry. It goes on forever.
From, J. Yours, J. Always, J.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

 

GO, EoC, GO!

[Pæs]

SHITFUCKDAMN.

[LMNO]

YEAHYEAHYEAH!

[LMNO]

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

This thread is awesome. 

[Eater of Clowns]

I was greedy and you are in danger because I was greedy. If only I knew what I was greedy for but everything is fragmented, my memory and thoughts a thousand little coins in the pocket.

The rapid tour of the country went on. I gave up my attempt at even minor communication in Spanish. The coin for butterfly rolled away from me, the coin for lightning spent. Words were more a part of me than I ever realized.

We were in a swanky little establishment called 1492. It's at the T in Bogota, a night life spot where the elite of the city walk around in clothes worth more than my car. It was Friday. The beautiful people would be out all night. I would not. I wanted to shove away the agua con gas and the guava barbecue chicken wings and the grilled meat skewer stuffed plantain and run, and keep running, this drawn figure shoving through the immaculately tailored suits and stunning dresses and the perfect caramel skin beneath them, past the mall with its shops so exclusive I did't even recognize them. I wondered if they accepted Necronomicoin.

But I couldn't abandon my hosts, my family, not now. I was in no condition to fight whatever was coming. I had no idea what was coming. But I knew something was, and that was more than they did. If I could warn them, maybe my stupid mistake wouldn't get them, what? Killed? Devoured? Torn within and out by small bleating horrors?

Whatever I got out of that shop, it hadn't done anything to assuage my writhing intestines. I was making my way to the bano through a sea of blazers and little black dresses. I wasn't even safe on the toilet.

Sleep was the worst, since the shop. However I wound up in Bogota, it wasn't a dream. This was the first place since we got here that I had a private room. We were ten floors up, not far from the top of the building, with a view of the city stretching out from our perch on the North side. The US Embassy was a few blocks away and I thought about going, that maybe this dissociation with reality would abate once I was on home soil. Past that, the mountains. The cursed mountains.

Before Medellin, before the shop, before the self puppetry – yes, that was how I came to Bogota. I was already there. Before that, there were the mountains. I'd been drinking glass after glass of aguardiente when our host in Cali invited me to his morning bike ride. Four in the morning, up a mountain. He was coaching me, keeping me going the whole way, but I kept finding myself veering off to the side of the road. The side of the road was a sheer drop with a flimsy barrier that I would certainly sail over. I focused on the pedaling and the water, on talking to Arturo and I still inched closer to that precipice. Something was off with the mountains before anything even went truly wrong.

Rather than sleep I'd been staring out the big window and seeing the stars for what they were. Enormous things burning away and they were painted on the belly of a vast, sleeping beast, all of it an illusion of depth so perfect that humanity couldn't see the difference. I would keep trying to bend my eye to see the trick of dimension but we aren't built to understand it; we are too small. Still I tried rather than sleep.

With this and with whatever illness I'd contracted here I stumbled past the glittering tables in 1492. A few people couldn't help but stare and I couldn't blame them. Here I was with the gall to ruin their dinner.

I sat down on the tiny bowl and buried my face in my hands. I drew them slowly down, pulling my features across my fingertips and stretching my eyelids and looking up across from me for the first time. There was writing scrawled in huge letters on the wall, such big messy words.

Befriend The Thief

Pity The Ledgerman

Beware The Debt Collector

[The Good Reverend Roger]

You work in an environment envisioned by Hunter Thompson, but none of you are on LSD.

As far as you know.

It's like something out of a dystopian English television program (yes, I know, redundant term).  Pile more and more stress on, while wages more or less freeze while food prices go up 6% per month, and just watch as our zany cast of characters become even whackier!

Steve called in sick.  We didn't believe him, so when he came back, we made him shoot free throws to prove that he was a man.  He didn't even hit the hoop, so we terminated him for cause and made sure he couldn't collect unemployment.  He'll be under a bridge in a month.  Lazy fucker!  We get 5 paid holidays a year!