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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
The Jaguar, the Panther, and the Fox
Saturday. 8.11.07 5:15 pm
Today

I slept until 11:30. Most of the last part of this sleep was a nightmare. It was a really complicated nightmare-- there was this band of animals, a jaguar, a black panther and a red fox that was terrorizing the neighborhood. They were eating everyone's dogs and cats right out of their backyards. They ate our Bernese Mountain Dog (that we don't actually have). I ran outside and called in our [real] dog Maggie so that she wouldn't get eaten either. But it was impossible to live all the time in fear. Eventually we had to let Maggie out to go to the bathroom. We took turns escorting her down the stairs from the deck to the grass. She was nervous and wouldn't always go right away, looking at us with her flat almond eyes. None of the neighbors would leave the house for fear of the animals. We heard that someone's dog had been attacked by the band and while the people ran outside and screamed at the animals to get away and watched their dog be torn to pieces, a gang of brutish men broke into their house from the other side and robbed them blind.

My dad is a city council man for our city, and we expected him to be calling people and organizing to have these creatures taken care of, but he was unusually silent and thoughtful. While we were fussing over Maggie and combing the house to make sure all of the doors to the outside were locked, he was staring out the door of the laundry room, seeming like he was somewhere very far away.

I was nervous as hell and I was checking the doors over and over and over again. How was it that my house has SO many doors? There is usually always one that is unlocked. From time to time I would hear or see the jaguar or the panther or the fox through the window and I would double my speed.

Finally, after I woke up for several minutes [7:35am, a relic of my work week wake up time] we confronted my dad. "Aren't you going to do something? Aren't you going to try to save the neighborhood? We can't live like this forever!" Outside the night was getting stormy and dark.

He sighed very heavily. "I can't do that." he said. "I know them. I know the three of them." We were shocked. "You know them?" He tried to explain. "They used to be my friends, you know, back in Wisconsin, when I was a kid. They discovered this terrible power of transformation. They asked me if I wanted to join them.... I said no. I always wondered if that was the right choice. They won't hurt our Maggie, not if they realize that this house belongs to me. I need to talk to them, but in their animal state it is possible that they wouldn't recognize me until after they attacked. I've put up signs on the windows, telling them who I am. As they circle our house, they will read them. Then... they will come to me."

"But... these are evil men!" we said. "If you knew who they were, why didn't you ever turn them in!"

"They weren't evil men back then... and they were always my friends... I couldn't turn them in, not the way they were... not with what they had become. What kind of life would that be? Back then they had formed a squad, just the three of them... they did a kind of vigilante justice. They attacked people, or scared people, but only evil people who needed to be taught a lesson. They were standing up for the community where our law enforcement was failing. I just couldn't reconcile myself with some of their methods... that's why I didn't join them. I have to figure out what has gone wrong. I need to talk to them, I can't just let them be shot."

We were all shocked. At that point the back of the house started shaking as the doors were being battered by the big cats. We could hear them growling out there in the rain. At the front of the house the doors started to rattle as well... this time the large, troll-like men were slamming the doors with their huge bodies, trying to break them down. Finally one of the doors gave and the hordes of men came flooding into the house. I heard my dog give a yelp from the living room and I ran to get her just as at the back of the house the kitchen window gave way and the jaguar and the fox came pouring in, sliding on the island in the kitchen. I grabbed the dog bodily from where she cowered next to the piano and took her back into the kitchen. The jaguar and the fox had disappeared. There was a mud soaked man of my dad's age sitting at the counter. He breathed heavily in and out. He was talking to my dad. My dad saw me coming in through the door and said, "This is The Jaguar." I nodded to him and he looked up at me through his dripping brows. I saw another mud soaked man standing towards the kitchen table. "You must be The Fox," I said. He nodded a bit sheepishly. I got the impression that he didn't find his moniker to be as fearsome as the others in the group. I guessed that you didn't actually get to choose which kind of animal you changed into. "What a hell of a way to have a reunion," said the Jaguar wearily. For the first time my dad's expression had gone from worried to angry. He asked the Jaguar what the hell had happened to them. The Jaguar didn't want to answer in the presence of his men. He looked like a man who had been under a terrible spell and was only just now realizing all the things that he had done.

Then there came a deafening growl from outside. The men rushed to the windows. The black panther, barely visible in the darkness, was strutting defiantly up and down the backyard, flicking its tail back and forth. It looked injured. The men like hungry animals rushed out the back door and down the stairs from the deck. It was our turn to run to the windows. We didn't know what kind of words were being exchanged between the haggard, evil-faced men and the injured panther, but they had formed a circle around it and it was pacing, growling. Suddenly the men attacked. The panther mauled the first man and turned on the others, tearing each successive man to pieces. But the circle closed and they grabbed the panther by the neck and started beating it to death with their fists.

The Fox made a start as if to run out of the house and intervene, but The Jaguar put his hand on his shoulder. "No." he said. "You know he's doing what is right." The Fox agitatedly turned from the window. "We should be out there with him, dying for what we have done."
"We must remain, to insure that what we did is put right, and that those monsters out there no longer terrorize or use anyone like they did to us and this town."
The men, more like trolls now, had finished with the panther, who lay shiny and black and still in the long grass out by the river in our backyard. The ones who had survived the encounter went off in different directions and disappeared into the darkness.

"He was our leader," The Jaguar explained. "In a sense. Those men... they tricked us... they ensnared us in their horrible spells... they turned us slowly into something we never wanted to be. When we saw your signs outside, Dave, we realized in one instant what we had become! We couldn't take it! It was agony realizing all the things we had done, the crimes we had committed... all of those innocent pets we had eaten as our thirst for blood had increased. The longer we stayed in the bodies of those animals, the worse it became... the more like hounds we were for those men. But The Panther was our leader. He knew that if one of us died, the men would go on, still using whomever was left. But if he died, they would disband their horrible operation. The Panther was the strongest and most fearsome of us all. That is why he called them out to him just now. He wasn't really injured, except in his heart. He knew they would try to attack him if he was weak, because they were greedy for power. But he also knew if they succeeded in killing him, the spell would be broken."

"Can you still change?" asked my father.

"I don't know," answered The Fox, "but I am never again going to try." The Jaguar nodded. The three old friends looked as if they would embrace, but instead looked stonily at one another, all too aware of the absence of one of them, the one who still lay in our backyard, his blood flowing out and intermixing with the rain.

When I woke up again it was about 11:30.

Then I ate some cinnamon toast and packed my things until about 1:30. Then I fell asleep again until 5:30. Really, I could probably go back to sleep right after dinner. We'll see. It's been a strange [non]day.
Recommended by 1 Member
jinyu
6 Comments.


That almost sounds like a plot for a book! It has the right pacing, for sure. Cool entry.
» jinyu on 2007-08-11 07:11:14

puppies
i have uploaded the photos of the puppies in my gallery. i wasn't sure if it can be view, but do tell me if it's nice or if it can't be viewed.thanks
» c-s-y on 2007-08-11 10:28:44

I don't really update(neither do you). The whole "today, i went to the mall lawlz and then i saw michelle and omg she's so..." updates aren't my thing, which is why I hardly ever post. I try to only post something I've written when I feel inspired? I dunno

AAAAND.. You used personificataion in yoru short story.
» Dilated on 2007-08-12 01:10:17

Well if I want it to show up vividly, I would probably have to lighten it a bit. I'm not too keen on lightening my hair, because then I'd have to redarken it when the purple washed out or something.

I'm going for the "is it black? No, it looks purple" thing
» ikimashokie on 2007-08-12 09:37:41

It's awesome that you can remember your dreams so vividly and accurately! Even if it was a nightmare.

I need to start a dream journal or something.
» Sarah on 2007-08-12 11:15:46

R:C
The thing that always bothered me about that was that if they are truly suspended in time and space, how can they decay? The molecular and biochemical processes that govern life, death, and ultimately decay are frozen in time and space as well. Nothing would happen. Decaying bacteria would have no opportunity to replicate and grow to an extent that they would begin to feed off the organic material. So I guess what I'm trying to get at is that, based on the biochemical evidence, there is no way that those bodies were actually completely frozen in time and space.

Sometimes, science ruins EVERYTHING.
» ranor on 2007-08-13 12:54:55

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