You know how, on Star Trek, every now and then some unfortunate crewman would get mangled in a freak transporter accident, and the Scottish engineering guy would have to retrieve an undamaged copy of the person from the machine's memory bank by sliding the dimmer switch thingy just so? (I always wondered, why couldn't they just make weekly back-up copies of everyone, especially those high-risk redshirt guys, so nobody would ever die? Plus, that way if you ever made a really big mistake in your life, I mean a really, really big mistake, you could revert to an earlier save-point of yourself, who could then make a better choice.)
Well, making fresh copies of mangled old poems was a lot like that. The crewman-saving part, I mean. Although lucky for Scotty, he never had to pay ten cents per crewman regenerated.
Like brave starship crewmen, my poems were entered into one of the library computers, and then like Scotty I fiddled with some buttons and turned them into pure electricity, and they were stuck in suspended animation until I beamed them onto a strange new planet, otherwise known as a clean sheet of paper.
On my way out of the library I checked out a couple of books, including a glossy, rhapsodic one called Those Astounding Arachnids! It didn't seem like my little housemate was moving out anytime soon, so I might as well figure out what made him tick.
Or rather, what made him spider.
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The Myth of Wile E
HumorHighest Ranking: #1 in Humor [FEATURED, SEPT-OCT] An idealistic poet refuses to budge from the last parcel of land a developer needs to acquire in order to build a shopping mall. (Literary satire with pop culture references and environmental theme...
