|| -------- -- -----  A E R I E   O B L I V I A N A . singular book of text wandertainment by Frank Edward Nora ------------------- ----------- A ROAD MAP OF ARCTICA--CUP 5--"GET REAL DAPTIN" <-------  ||  Severe Repair  ||  A Road Map of Arctica  ||  -------> (Cup SRrm005, Created v2 (6/7/99), Copyright 1999) = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Am I Daptin Gone? Stupid, what a pointless train of thought, what a waste of time. Here in my Warhome, alone, alone, wanting Spanking New Sarah, wanting her, losing my mind... I created a world! I have that much power! Fox even thought I might have been THE ultimate creator of the universe! Yet I'm miserable... I just want a LIFE! I don't want to travel between alternate worlds and dimensions. I don't want to cavort with monsters and goddesses and superheroes. This sort of superlife is deadening, I don't feel human, I don't feel much at all. I just want to LIVE! A normal life... in a normal place... stuck on one world... no superstrength... having to fear being hit by a car or a passing bullet... fear for my life... I feel such power within me. Surely I can do this. Surely I can have a normal life. Surely it makes sense. I feel it. I feel it. I'm going to do it. It's going to happen. I will eventually come back to my Warhome, back to saving the universe from Sleap Drassy, but I have to experience a LIFE. I need to be REAL. I need to get REAL. Here goes. I concentrated and felt the same sort of energy well up inside me as I felt when I created my Land. Then came a moment of unbelievable lucidity, and I thought a billion thoughts in the blink of an eye. I smiled, somehow, and then I made everything go dark. I woke up and I was in my apartment. Wow, it worked. It all worked. A bank of newly-minted memories flooded into my head. Cool. It worked perfectly. I was in the middle of a real life. My name is still Daptin Gone... my hair is still green, but that's cuz I dyed it... I live in an apartment in Jersey City, near the Newport Center Mall, a few minutes walk to the Pavonia/Newport PATH station. If I lived on the other side of my building I could see Manhattan from my balcony, but unfortunately I don't, so I get to see the mall. I was pissed, cuz I figured a view of Manhattan, especially at night, would be great to impress girls. Girls... yeah, I have a girlfriend... Bonnie Pollard... but it's not too serious... yet... I work for this guy Comma. He had his name changed, legally, to "Comma", I swear! He's been into this creative stuff all his life, like publishing minicomics, putting out his music on little cassette tapes, making movies with cheap camcorders, all that. I met him in college and he kept me on his mailing list (and more recently, E-mailing list), and when he said he was starting this company "Hull" and was looking for computer people, I gave him a call and he hired me right away. I had been working in a desktop output bureau and it was miserable work. When I got the latest (and very delayed) issue of his E-mail newsletter "Comma's Coma", I was at my wit's end with that job on 14th Street in New York. But it all fell together, and he offered me about the same as I was making at Union Imaging, in the mid-30's. Comma won about $100,000 in the Connecticut Lottery, and then the next month won another $200,000 playing blackjack at the Luxor in Las Vegas. And THEN he somehow a few months later he bought a bunch of stock in this crazy IPO for this Internet company, Spacedust Sources, and sold it two days later for god-knows how much, and started Hull New Media right then and there. I've been working at Hull for two months now... and things are going pretty well. There's a cool gang of Generation Xers there, so I'm always steeped in talk of Star Wars, breakfast cereals, Brady Bunch, memories of Letterman, Led Zeppelin, eighties music, all that good stuff. I smiled and I was still in bed... here I am... it worked... I'm no longer in that Warhome... no longer part of all that interdimensional intrigue... I'm HERE. -------> ------------------- ----------- -------- -- -----