0102 once wasn't enough

Everywhere you looked there was the obvious proliferation of frogs. Not so obvious was the subtle movement of fashion toward 1980's style sensibilities.  Hair became slightly bigger, leg warmers began showing up, chandelier-earrings spiked in sales, androgynousness started looking  more attractive on both sides. 

Chon pulled out a fat Cuban, lit up, and bellowed smoke out into the evening air like a freight train signalling its oncoming course. He grinned a gorilla faced, or possibly chimpanzee faced grin. Turns out someone noticed the old trend recycling itself.

"Let's t(d)o it." he said, tramping down mystery mountain on the way to Aspiere. Everything was going according to plan.

092

Melanie bent over and threw up. That was possibly the best ride she'd ever been on. Erhard crossed his arms and sneered. It wasn't clear if he was still upset about being drowned out by the buzz of Davis' arrival or if he was disgusted by Melanie's latest outburst. Davis looked quietly pleased irrespective of the root cause of his new comrades melancholy (not that their disparate dispositions were necessarily related). And Koopa/Daly continued to wail his/her indefetigable groan.

"What was that you just did?" said Melanie, after she'd recovered.

Davis knelt in starter block postition beside her "A valid question. We needed to get to safety. There's no telling how many agents of the eighties have already crossed over. So, I warped us here to this previously prepared secure way station, where I will brief you on what exactly the hell is going on."

"Good, but can you make it quick, I need to get back to the future, present, past or where ever we were to take care of some urgent, business." said Erhard

"Lets hear it, I suppose." said Melanie, when she really meant to say this is insane.

"OUAGHGHAO" said Koopa/Daly

"Excellent, lets begin then."

the closely examined life.

Tomorrow week, less nine days, we had our annual Christmas company pump up day. I was profoundly moved. I kid you not. You go to enough of these and you can come away with the feeling that nothing significant will ever happen. However, during this iteration an anomaly of noteworthy proportions occurred.

The devil is in the details, and often the boredom is too. I'll spare you the 'i' dotting and 't' crossing and instead bore you with the results. Actually, they're still under construction. Whenever I'm stuck for a solution, my first port of call is the internet. The internet knows pretty much everything. So there I am right, innocently surfing cyberspace (does anyone even call it that anymore, seriously) and I stumble across Daytum, a site where you can record in excruciating detail any compartmentalized life unit of your choosing. I felt this would be useful even before I needed it. Call it manly intuition or something. Then I go to this work do thing, and they tell me to write down my goals, like that's news or something. Except this time I do it on you guessed it: the internet (well not all of them, but if you're still reading this, that means you didn't click on the link, go have a look, the absurdity of the things you could record there are endless, and if your lucky you may even manage to extract some utility from your anal retentive stat keeping, I know I will).

My evolution from sloth to healthy contributing member of society is bound to be fraught with mighty perils, endless back sliding, and explosive diarrhea, of the mouth, of the mouth. Everyone take a deep breath. Ahh, was that the cheapest non-funny joke of all time? I can't even tell anymore. According to sources mastery of any skill takes 10,000 hours. That's a long time, but every journey starts with movement. The count down is on, very, very slowly, but it's on. Like a wise young Jordan once said "take one step at a time, there's no need to rush it's like learning to fly or falling in love." Another older Jordan, also had words of wisdom: "Desire makes the difference." *read in 80's struggling cartoon character voice* Steps increasing. Desire growing. Must. Soldier. On.

83.

ribit, ribit

"If you don't mind I was here first, and as you can see the situation is dire. Now you've said your piece about the 80's, horrible decade, but we've got our own problems to deal with." said Erhard

"With all due respect sir, with a wardrobe like that, you look to be the least qualified to make any comments on what was or wasn't, is or isn't fashionable. The 80's had its short comings to be sure, but it's ready to make a comeback." said Davis

"OAUGHUEHHE" said Daly and Koopa.

Erhard snuck a glance at his outfit, it was bright yellow and red, of course he knew that already, but he wasn't used to being insulted by strangers that materialised in brilliant flashes of light, he found it to be rather rude; All the more so, because his reclamation of the proverbial talking stick was so short lived, he'd been disarmed by the cocky guest almost immediately. He tried again" "Who said anything about fashion?" was all he could come up with. After that he thought of a million other things that would have been a hundred times wittier.

Melanie was about to make a psychological breakthrough and disencumber a portion of her inner child before these two strange men appeared on the scene, although they were no less strange than the man she was already dealing with, perhaps they leaned a little closer to normality than this ever-groaning zombie guy and for that she was resentfully grateful. Here she was getting bailed out again, same old Mel. Between these freaks, the redundant, overly abundant frogs; and the worst date of her life (the only date), she couldn't see how an invasion from the eighties could make things any worse.

"Authors with bad ideas, the return of the 80's, I don't understand." she said.

It looked like Erhard's attempts at heroism were marginally interesting at best to these people. They obviously couldn't be bothered with anything he had to say. Sometimes he didn't know what the point was in trying.

"All will be explained, friends." pronounced Davis, which was a rather forward relational label given that none of the group knew anyone else's name.

A ball of light surrounded them and shrank in on itself until they all disappeared. That's when Brandon showed up (and died).

77.

John Ramboa narrowly escaped being blown to death by artillery fire power thick enough to level a reasonably sized city. After disposing of his well armed but incompetently trained (and deadly inaccurate) enemies he made his way through a generic forest. It's not clear exactly how a forest of this sort reveals itself in the real world except to say that it has no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever. Kind of like that girl you know who looks like every other girl you've met, yet whose features remain distinctly unremarkable.

When he emerged he found himself amidst several frogs that he promptly decided to use for target practice...

After out running a spontaneous nuclear explosion, Chon (possibly a synthesis of several Arnie movie characters) dove in spectacular fashion in what amounted to a physical manifestation of a declarative sentence. Science and nature defeated in one foul swoop, the laws of physics had been broken in at least seventeen different ways with this single act. Chon dusted himself off, then stood triumphant, he had arrived...

68.

Davis arrived with a real live flash, the kind that reminds you of lightning striking within death's distance and knocks you on your posterior disavowing you of the gratitude of being spared due to your being really quite sore. Yes, exactly like that. The dead feel no pain. Getting there though that's the hard part.

He walked out of his crater, strutting like he'd just got the digits of the hottest girl on earth. There was definitely some overtly audacious pizazz in that chipper prance of his, the kind that made you sit up and say damn that boy can walk. Some where between the transition from crawling to walking there's an art form under appreciated by society at large, Davis was a walking Rembrandt. Even the frogs weren't an impediment, he simply squashed any that lay in his way.

He saw a mini assembly of fellow humans and moseyed on over.

"Greetings beings of planet of earth. I'm here to save you from the eighties."

Melanie looked him up and down. "You're too late."