Wilderness Survival Emergency

by Dan Skillhouser

Emergency Time!

So you’re stranded in the forest with nothing but your pants, shirt and shoes? No problem. Our ancestors didn’t even have clothes. Just their wits and wisdom. Nude ancestor wisdom is the wisdom I’m giving you today.

So naturally, your first move should be to get rid of those clothes. Our ancestors didn’t have Tommy Hilfiger jeans or Nike sneakers in survival situations, and neither should you. If it’s the winter, take your pants and wrap them around your head, because you lose most of your heat through your head.

Next step is to start a fire. That’s the hard part.

Once your fire is ready, go catch some food. Your best bet is to catch a bear, because it has lots of meat and useful bones. Bears are really dangerous, but they’re bad at running downhill. So your plan should be to enrage a big bear and then run downhill. The bear will stumble and fall and probably die. Once the bear is dead simply drag it back to your fire and cook it. Or eat it raw. Use the skin to make some clothes. Use the bones to make utensils and a flute to keep you from getting bored. Music is a good way to stay sane when you’re out in the crazy forest. You can use the skull as a soup-bowl in case you’ve brought some soup.

If the big bear is too difficult of an enemy then just kidnap a baby bear and eat it. They’re smaller and easier to murder.

Then use mud and rocks and sticks and bear-bones to make some kind of shelter. Now you’ve got some security and you can survive for a few days. Now you can focus on getting rescued. Your best bet is to start a huge forest fire. Everybody will notice that. Start a huge forest fire and then hang out in the river until a plane comes to rescue you. And praise Glooscap for his kindness.

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Geometry, Heroin, and the Illuminati

by Kenvinald Davidson

I started doing geometry because I thought it held clues to the metaphysical questions. I persued it as far as I could because I was obsessed. I quit only after I lost my mind and nearly died. I write about it now as a warning, and for closure.

I embarked upon my geometrical journey when I was twenty-one. I knew what everybody knows but is afraid to admit: that we are mathematical beings, matter organized into patterns that walk and feel and think. I ignored the impossible question of “what is matter?” and pursued the problem of “what is this organization?”

My many discoveries and creations are famous (or infamous) so I won’t repeat them here. Needless to say it was easy to become promiscuous and irresponsible in my personal life while my disciplined work-life made me such a reverred public figure. Despite my meandering, I formed a strong romantic relationship with the astronomer Marie Finettre.

But geometry is nearly synonymous with drug abuse, and the beauty of geometrical patterns cannot truly be appreciated without the heightened aesthetic sensibilities provided by heroin (any addict or geometer will understand). Marie and I would spend hours or even days under the multiple spells of patterns, symbols and opioids. I won’t lie: it was a lovely time, but that kind of beauty is not sustainable, as I would soon find out.

You will be surprised to know that my biggest discovery was never published. It coincided with my disappearance from the world of geometry, and the total disappearance of my beloved Marie.

In short, I discovered the Illuminati. It is not a group of people who coordinate to control global events. Instead it is a persistant pattern for a certain kind of counsciousness which can exist mainly in the theoretical plane of our minds, but is also frequently found in nature both on a large scale and on a small scale. It can process information and make decisions, and affect the physical world (the physical world being merely a plethora of patterns which are weaker and more ephemeral than the Illuminati).

I sought to discover its purpose and intentions, and to communicate with it.

The details are nightmarish, embarassing and mostly impossible to describe with language. I can only say that I did manage to make some form of contact with the pattern, but my sweet Marie had a stronger connection with it, and so her mind and body were absorbed into its being, and she was taken from me forever, and I am alone.

Of course, after the event my only goal was to reconnect with the pattern so I could join Marie within it. But instead of the old beauty and power I could only find nightmares, anguish and insanity. I was locked in my room with a chalkbaord, books on astronomy and math, paper and pencil, heroin, LSD, and amphetamines. I needed my Marie back. And I needed to communicate with the Illuminati.

But the emotional trauma made me unable to persue it. And the drugs made me mentally incapable of articulating formulae.

It should be noted here that the Illuminati is conscious, but not self-conscious. Neither are we. I discovered that there cannot ever be a pattern for true self-consciousness because in order for a pattern to refer to itself it must have a version of itself to refer to within itself. And the version-of-itself within itself would naturally have to have another full version of itself within itself. Itself within itself within itself ad infinitum. Which is impossible. You can only be conscious of other pieces of pattern. Sometimes you can be conscious of a reflection of a part of yourself and then you believe that you have found yourself.

I believe that when I became conscious of the Illuminati and the Illuminati became conscious of me, that I brought a small piece of self-reflective terror to that being. It took Marie because it was obsessed and curious regarding the thing that had terrified it. I obviously cannot blame it for its curious obsessions. But now I am speculating about details that I cannot understand.

Anyway, I have been blocked out and my mind has been stripped clean. I can barely stand to do my taxes, nevermind exploring deeper geometrical problems. Marie is gone, and now so am I.

I do not understand the Illuminati. And though for a while I understood something of symbols and patterns I do not know what is this matter which is somehow arranged into conscious patterns.

Instead I just sit back and watch the world go by, with all its patterns and selfless consciousness. And I dream of Marie and our time together, when we were in our prime.

I cannot say more about geometry. I know that my warning won’t deter those who are dedicated to it. It is too pawerful to avoid. Too beautiful to ignore. But to dangerous to play safely with.

And to tell the truth there is a part of me that envies those who are about to embark on a geometrical journey. Be brave, my friends. Or turn back now!

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Geometry is Dying

(Letter to the Editor with a response afterwards)

Dear Sick Blog of Lies.

While your twice-daily posts are an intellectual stimulation and a bastion of complex thoughtfulness in the demented world of today’s media, I have noticed one glaring oversight in your pursuit of knowledge and truth. The problem is a growing lack of posts about geometry, and a general lack of geometry in your posts. You are not alone in this crime. Hollywood and top-40 radio stations are also cutting their geometry-related pieces, and cutting geometry out of their scripts. But I expect that from money-grubbing entertainment-pimps. I expect better from the Sick Blog of Lies.

To your credit, you did publish Kenvinald Davidson’s 2007 essay, A Re-evaluation of Proto-Euclidian Pseudo-Squarizoids and their Impact on Pre-natal Development (much to my delight!), but it was your last geometry-specific post and it was followed by a general decline of any inclusion of geometry in your regular posts.

Geometry is arguably the most important topic that can occupy the human mind, and yet you’ve been neglecting it so much that I’ve begun to feel that you’re intentionally trying to avoid it. Like you’re scared of it. Or perhaps you’re scared of the controversy that follows geometric discussions.

I won’t blather on at length about the many obvious instances where a geometric analogy would have helped to explain the ideas in your blog, or all the geometric events which you totally ignored. Instead I’ll just send you this general reminder that you are neglecting your duty to that part of all of our minds, which I call the Internal Geometer which comprehends and appreciates shapes, distances, points and space.

I’ll close by saying that geometry is the only thing that exists, since all matter and energy might be made of the same stuff and the only reason we can separate one “thing” from another “thing” is because of a different structure to each of them (including our brains and minds), and that structure can only be interpreted and understood by geometry. So do you really want your blog to ignore the only thing that exists?

Much regards.

The Infernal Geometer
_____________________________________

Response by Dr. Jacob Krink

Dear Infernal Geometer.

I understand and appreciate your frustration at our lack of discussion about geometry. You are right in saying that we are neglecting our duties. I will hereby offer an explanation, along with a promise to do better in the future.

As you know, geometry is rife with controversy. I personally had a friend stoned to death in his own home by angry mathematicians after he lent a copy of Christopher Priest’s The Inverted World to a church-going friend of his. While we aren’t afraid of controversy, we need to be sure that we’re posting things with geometric relevance before we start flaunting mathematical norms.

More importantly, we’ve been churning through editors like butter and not all of them have shared an appreciation for geometry. In fact, our insistence on geometry-related topics is part of the reason that many of them leave (also financial constraints, drug abuse, insanity, temporal displacement, satanism, dyslexia and agoraphobia).

We’ll try to get Kenvinald Davidson to write something for us soon, but I know that he writes with a heavy hand and has been battling his own personal demons. So we can’t promise anything from him. But I can definitely promise more geometry-related posts in the future.

Take care. Keep warm.

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Splinter Removal Software

by Paul Langford

I got a really big splinter while I was sanding down my antique bedpost. It got stuck right in the corner between two fingers, a very awkward place. I tried to pry it out with my fingernails but it just got stuck deeper.

I used tweezers to try to pluck it out but I just ended up gouging out little chunks of skin, and my hand started bleeding. Now I couldn’t even see where the splinter had gone in.

I got a sewing needle and tried to tease it out but the needle broke off in my skin and I started bleeding more. It was very frustrating and painful.

“Screw this!” I said. I decided to cut the entire piece of skin off with a pair of scissors. I clumsily fumbled them in my injured hand and somehow I poked out my eye with the sharp point of the scissors.

I chased after my eyeball, desperate not to lose it as it rolled across my clean floor. But I slipped on the blood from my bleeding hand and fell down hard on the floor. I landed right on my elbow, smashing it to painful pieces. Shards of bone poked through my skin and blood oozed out onto the floor as I gasped and closed my eyes in shock from the compound fracture.

Then a bat landed on my face and started eating at my empty eye-socket. I screamed and thrashed with rage and I threw it across the room. It smacked against the wall and fell on the floor, twitching.

That’s when my room-mate got home. My room-mate is a surgeon, and he had his medical bag in his hand. He looked at my ruined body: shattered elbow, bleeding eye, injured hand, eyeball on the floor, growing pool of blood, twitching bat. His jaw dropped is surprise and a compassionate tear fell from his eye.

“Oh my God,” he said, shaking his head. “Look at the size of that splinter.”

Shaking, I lifted my hand. “Can you help me?”

He nodded solemnly and knelt down to rummage through his black bag, pulling out a scalpel, a syringe and a stethoscope. I cringed at the sight of the sharp instruments.

He stood up and said, “Hold still.” Then he walked around me in a circle three times and started stomping on my ensplintered hand with his boot-heel. The pain was excruciating and I screamed and I writhed as he pulverized my hand. But I didn’t move it because I trust his medical expertise.

When my hand was just a bloody pulp he stopped stomping and said, “There, that should do it.”

Then he set the dead bat on fire and cooked a can of beans in the flames, and we shared a healthy meal.

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How to Escape from a Surreal Dimension where Nothing Makes Sense

By Dan Skillhauser

Emergency Time!

So you’re locked in a different universe or a strange dimension, where nothing makes sense and you don’t know how you got there or how to get home. Unbelievable and indescribable visuals, sounds, and phenomena from a dozen extra senses bombard and confuse your transfigured mind. You can’t navigate this world and you can’t cope. You can’t get a grip and you don’t know which way is up.

What do you do?

It’s easy.

First draw a circle with a diameter of two metric inches. Then crawl through the circle, doing a roll so that you land comfortable on the thick white grass. Eat the grass for its nourishment and say a prayer to the god of mathematics. Numbers will pour out from the throbbing centre of your mind. Look for patterns in these numbers because they will be the key to your escape and salvation.

As the white grassy world starts spinning beneath the pulsating colours of the sky you should start walking away from the feelings of vertigo as the numbers pour like a physical reality out of your brain.

Then you’ll see that the spinning world is happening in the fifth dimension, and the perception of spin is actually created by your multi-mind’s ability to see all the eigenstates spreading out from that moment of mathematical prayer. You’ve drawn a circle around all your potential futures in this strange land and climbed into the whole of them all.

Now you’re spinning, spreading out across all the possibilities and as you compare these multiple realities you can learn from each one and they all start to make sense together. Your mind has returned.

Your mind has returned but the world is still strange. But the world has always been strange and you have always been alone in your attempt to understand it. You’re out here on the frontiers of time and reality, more aware of your metaphysical self than ever before.

You can’t go back home to your job and family and stuff, but at least you can traverse the multiverse with the wandering legs of a blessed mathematical being. Bob Dylan said, “You can always come back but you can’t come back all the way.” Well now you can go forward wherever you want.

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How to Land an Airplane

by Dan Skillhauser

Emergency Time!

So your plane is going to crash and you need to land it, but you’ve never flown a plane before! Easy. Just follow this guide.

First, kill the pilot. He’ll only get in the way.

The next thing you’re going to have to do is to EXPERIMENT. Plane-controls are really complex, and each one is different. Pick a button, press it, see what happens. If something bad happens, don’t press that button again. If something good happens, you can think about doing it again later.

Get a pen and a piece of paper and draw a diagram of the control-board. Write down what happens each time you press a button, pull a lever, or whatever. Sometimes the effects might be contingent on the state of another button. For example, “button X” might do “action A” if “lever C” is in the “neutral position,” but “button X” might do “action B” if the lever is in the “active position.” You understand. Write it all down so you can refer to it later.

You might get hungry but you don’t really have time to eat.

Next survey the ground beneath you. Are you above the ocean? Are you above the mountains?

If you’re above the ocean then it’s your lucky day. Water is soft, and you can splash safely right into any body of water. No problem.

If you’re above the mountains then it will take a bit more skill. Using your button-map, angle the plane so it matches the slope of the nearest mountainside. Try to slow it down a little so you don’t slam into the mountain and die.

Next drop the landing gear, and slide to a stop against the side of a mountain.

If you’re on a commercial jet they’ll have refreshments like cognac and wine. Time to celebrate your safety, skill and sucess!

Posted in Emergency Primers, Murder, Self-Help | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Buying a Gingerbread Home

by Stetson Harvacraft

My wife and I decided to buy a new house. We didn’t need a new house, but we love the excitement of moving.

We wanted something new and different, and since we’re filthy rich we were able to indulge our craziest fantasies. We looked at a converted barn, an abandoned church, a haunted mansion, an ice-house, and an underwater glass-house. But our favourite by far was the gingerbread house.

The realtor was a scraggly-haired old woman with a black robe, warts on her nose and a big hat. She looked just like a Halloween witch!

The interior was all deep brown gingerbread. It smelled so savoury and delicious. My wife closed her eyes and took a big smell of the living room. “I would never get sick of this smell!”

“Come to the kitchen!” cackled the realtor. We skipped and hopped to the kitchen and saw that the counter-tops and even the ceiling-fan were all made of fresh gingerbread.

“Delightful!” Said my wife.

I looked at the gingerbread floor and frowned. “It would be hard to mop the floor, I think.”

The realtor raised an eyebrow slyly. “That’s the most delightful part! If anything gets dirty or damaged, you can just cook more gingerbread! Don’t clean your floor, just cook a new gingerbread floor!”

As a rich and educated man, I like disposable stuff. It’s easier and classier than maintaining old stuff.

The realtor gestured towards the oven. “The house obviously comes with the perfect oven for baking gingerbread! Take a look!”

The oven was the only thing in the house that wasn’t made of gingerbread. It was old blackened iron, with hinges that creaked as the realtor opened the door. “Look inside!” She licked her fingers. “This is where I baked the gingerbread man! Ahahahaaa!”

“Has the gingerbread man found a new gingerbread home?” I asked.

The realtor rubbed her belly. “Oh, I found him a new home! I’m a very good realtor! Ahahahahahaaa! Now climb in the oven so you can see the high quality of the oven-racks!”

We climbed inside and my wife said, “Yes! These oven-racks are delightful!”

Then the realtor turned on the oven, cooked us and ate us.

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