the bit about imprinting

Like baby birds that imprint the first thing they see as their mother, even if it's a ping pong ball, most people seem to take the imprint for their conception of reality from whatever crap they were told first. Almost every assumption of the human-created world accepted without question or introspection.

The bit about Tauriel

I imagine the conversation went something like this:

"Holy shit, we're turning The Hobbit, a 300-page book, into a NINE HOUR TRILOGY, we'll have to pad it out A FUCK OF A LOT."

"Well we already dumped all the shit from The Silmarillion in and we've still got hours of dead time to fill."

"Well, what about inventing new characters and plotlines?"

"New... characters?"

"Sure! Other adaptations do it all the time! What, you thought 'Rachel Dawes' was a real Batman character?"

"Okay, I guess.... what did you have in mind?"

"Well I was at a convention and I saw this chick in Robin Hood cosplay..."

THE END

An opening line I wrote years ago and then lost for years. Reconstructed from new memories at last.

The sound of the teakettle is pure Americana, somewhere between steam engine whistle and lonesome prairie harmonica. Take it from the stove and its squeal is strangled into silence.

The Cicadas Are

The cicadas are a bad nitrous trip, brittle vibration in a white noise loop.

The cicadas are a busted theremin or a b-movie UFO, omnipresent and just out of sight.

The cicadas are external tinnitus, the hum of ambient machinery at the base of awareness.

The cicadas are a rushing faucet in an empty house, a mass of insect acoustics with no clear center.