ode to how greecians earned

I remember , long ago, sitting in a marble hall next to a pool under the shade of many palm trees listening to wise men in toga’s talk about the future.

“Mankind will own the earth, there will be no need for gods!” said one.

“Blasphemer!” shouted another, “ The gods of men will be more powerful than they are now and will hold court only in the presence of deserving and virtuous men!”

“I believe that men and the gods will share the earth and will be akin to brothers.” A third said.

“Perhaps it will be a time of great leisure, with all of our deeds being done by creations of men, and through men thusly the creations of the gods…” this was mused by a fatter that usual philosopher as he waited for a slave to peel him a grape. The was much serious nodding.

“With the blessings of the gods that we have now, and the incredible rate we are evolving~ we must all agree that the average man will be able of feats that are rarely heard of now, More so ~ we shall of course live longer , as we now live longer than the men who fathered our father’s father’s fathers.” It should be noted that this speaker was killed before he had children, it wasn’t that he was young, he was just a tad infertile and liked other men’s wives. And sheep.

“We must agree, as civilised men, that there could be great wars. Epic battles fought by great Heroes and Horrible Monsters, and that much of our land may be destroyed, as the great oasis were destroyed far to the east.” This was spoken by a young man, who liked, for unknown reason, to be the latest of risers waking near dusk and always wearing black, he grew his hair over his eyes and dyed his nails black. He was very pale of skin. He thought it would get him virgins.

“Surely, the gods only make monsters as a test for Heroes! The virtuous man will be un harmed by these monsters as the gods protect the virtuous!” Again the second speaker.

This is when I spoke up “ Shut it you git!”

My contribution was also nodded to in a serious way. They continued to speak of how the world would be a better place as long as the world took heed of the lessons they would be willing to offer, for a modest amount of wealth and power.

I wonder what they would think of the world now. Heroes exist but are in far fewer numbers ( per capita) than they were then. There are few truly amazing Heroes or Monsters, most of the Enhanced Humans are just a little faster, a little stronger, a little smarter than the average man. True there are a few who could fly, some with amazing mind reading powers, a few hideous creatures, and yes, Werewolves, Vampires, and Ghosts. There was an example of every myth from every culture. If you look in Libraries and book depositories you can find proof. Clipping services release new Almanacks every year cataloguing the monsters and myths from the past.

There are few humans with amazing powers, I find this a comfort. There are more ‘Heroes’ and ‘Villains’ though, making due with what every they have. And some have nothing at all.

You know what I miss the most? There is not one person in this whole damn city who knows how to peel a grape.

Herstory.

Here’s the basic truth.

Every Hero I have ever gotten to know is entirely insane.

And I have gotten to know quite a few in my years.

For some reason they end up coming to me, sometimes by accident, mainly they hunt me down. Actually now if I get to know a hero it’s because they have made the effort to find me and have just kept pestering me until I let them in. I guess instead of having born again Christians coming to my door with pamphlets I get Heroes. If you look at it that way I guess I kind of have the better end of the deal. Although I still get the odd missionary knocking on my door. And I am currently living in a sub sewer. They are more tenacious than rats. And I mean that. I have three guard dogs. They are really vicious. I don’t have any rats near where I live.

There was a time when I went out looking for Heroes. I would befriend them, help them teach them, once I was a butler for one. But he was really crazy, and have you ever tried to deal with an alter ego. Let’s call a spade a shovel shall we, an alter ego is just a split personality with a mask on it.

But yeah… Nuts, crazy, not all there, a little off, koo koo banana leaves. You would have to be. To wear a mask, to fight crime, to come up with those comic book names.

Something inside them is switched and it only switches because of a “bad event” and that bad event makes them want to …. Well I guess it makes them want to run around in really tight clothes and use terms like “ evil doers!” that’s just not right. A doer of evil! By using absolute definitions all humans are evil doers but I guess the evil does that heroes chase down are doing dire evil. Scrape any Hero and you will find a traumatic event. There are one or two exceptions of course , but you get my point.

Case in point. And I’ll choose a Hero from the fifties who is probably dead and certainly retired.

When she was 13 her mother chocked to death on a button. This happened while the mother was sewing a costume for a stripper. Should I say exotic dancer? Anyway, little girl comes home from school, mom is dead in the kitchen. The strippers costume is pretty much finished it just needs one button to complete it. In my opinion that is a rather good costume for a stripper. Just one button and BAM nekkid. A little lazy but still good. Where was I?

Or right so the little girl in a state of shock takes the costume and buries it. I don’t ask why at this point. I stopped asking why right around the time what’s his name had all the corners cut off his table and let his best friend sleep with his wife. Y’know the guy who thought he would come back when the world needs him . Maybe he hit the snooze button…

Years later, the same girl is eating junior mints but one is too old and she’s laughing at a radio play and she almost chokes to death. I mean it’s really close to the pearly gates. But she falls out of her chair when she blacks out and good luck slips in an dislodges the junior mint.

She wakes up and goes to her old house in the middle of the night and digs up the Stripper costume. She very carefully sews a button on it and proceeds to go out and fight crime wearing this darned thing. An interesting factoid. The original stripper the costume was designed for was a size 2 with a 34 b chest , Our aforementioned Hero is a size 8 with a 36 DD chest. I don’t need to tell you that there were some very innocent and law abiding citizens who considered a life of crime just to get arrested by her. Or would have been if she didn’t kill almost every one she went after.

Why did she do it? She said the Ghost of her mother told her to. She was enhanced, errr I mean she did have a few powers. One of them seemed to be the ability to run in spiked heels the other was the ability to distract almost anyone. Those and limited telekinesis. She brought down a lot of bad guys and I’m sure of one good guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And she was revered by many people as opening the gates for scantily clad heroes.

But still , her elevator didn’t go to the penthouse.

And don’t get me started on Villains….

What are your peers like?

You know what really pisses me off???

I have the gift of Longevity. I may live forever. I certainly feel like I have lived for forever ( usually because the night before I have been drinking pints of slightly off beer in some sewer tunnel bar and woken up with some distant cousin growing on my tongue … or very possibly a small mouse living in my mouth. )

And since I have been gifted with Longevity I am a member of “The Club” as in “if you need to know what it takes to be in The Club then you are certainly not in THE CLUB!!!” and we meet every 84 years for a bit of a fry up and drinks. There are short term-ers expected to last no more than two meetings and of course there is the Old Guard who were at the first official meeting ( the games in 796 BC in Greece back when they let anyone in , ) Point of reference. Our charter was ratified on our 22nd supper and we each got a perfect copy thanks to Bi Sheng and his movable type machine ( yuh, 400 years before Gutenberg.. But when J.G. was popular we were shopping around for another version anyway because reading old Chinese is hard after too much good wine… oh and good wine is like the Egyptian wine aged properly .. You know how hard it is to find wine from 4000 bc? Can’t just pop into a local and get it, but I know a guy.)

But I was sitting and looking at my scrap book and there was daguerreotype ( in a very nice silk wallet ) and standing next to me ( I think at the time I was on an American Revolutionary named Cricket, or so? ) Was Swindle to my left and Perseus to my right.. It always seemed like I was next to them or someone like them.

And this then is what pisses me off.

Hang out with any so called “immortal” and you will hear stories like “ I was there when the American war of independence was ended just three months after the upstarts dumped tea into the Boston harbour” or “ How; in 1810 I convinced head of the British Empire to give the colonies their limited independence and thus ended potential war!” or “I was there when the Greek Gods closed the borders !” or “ I remember being at the signing of the ratification of the Constitution for ( fill in with one of these Cascadia/California/Texas/New Brighton)” or “ I served tea when the Circle met with the Dragon Empire and the National Workers and plotted the fall of the British Empire”.

But get them all in the same room and by the time they are done one upping each other you realise that if everyone had been in the damned stable in Bethlehem as said there was then some would have to have been standing on top of the quietly lowing donkey!

Worse part was when they turned to me I’d have very little to say. I always managed to be on entirely the wrong continent when most of the earth shattering events had happened. When the Armistice ending the Great War was signed in 1974 I was in a brothel in New Brighton dealing with a rather embarrassing situation as I had forgotten momentarily what sex I was and technically insulted the madam’s favourite houseboy in a most personal manner. I was there when the city was given all the rights of a nation and I certainly was there when the explosion effectively crippled the Empires Jewel. ( in a panic I had infested 5 separate individuals and it took me almost 30 years to get myself together. ) Where was I when Tesla won the Nobel prize? I was playing poker with a bunch of telepathics ( I learned later ). Where was I during The last coronation? I was trapped on a train in a tunnel because goats were on the track. Where was I when Prime Minister Kennedy was shot? I was hanging out with some guys shooting craps. Where was I when slavery was absolved? Sea sick just off a port somewhere near the horn. That thing in Bethlehem . I was there. Well not really, I got there early and I got a room. Taxes are the only thing that is constant in my life. Well taxes and death but taxes happen to everyone, death to me is a spectator sport.

I was there when the middle level Enhanced Hero “Haphazard” was born from the ashes. But in retrospect that might not be something to bring up… the best part is that as of this writing it will be another 69 years before the next meeting and thankfully I can either tell lies or say nothing and blame it on the fact that I will have just infested a new host so my memories are not what they used to be.

We could meet on thursdays?

This is the tough part, it’s like the first day at a twelve step meeting where you have to stand up and say “Hi, my name is Mac and I’m a slime mold.” only to be greeted by the gurgling of all the other slime molds sitting in folding chairs waiting their turn. I mean if it wasn’t for the oatmeal cookies and free coffee would anyone else be there? And nothing is as lame as listening to someone try to turn a negative into a positive with that strained, and in my opinion fake, cheerful attitude! Actually I would go… if there was one… but there isn’t because aside from myself I have never encountered anyone such as myself. Oh ! Wait! there was that time after the Horde invasion of Rome when I was accidentally split into two and found two hosts and then bumped into myself during the Spring festival near Cambridge. That was a bit awkward, I would assume it would be like finding out that you had accidentally been making out with a cousin. Or a second cousin… maybe not. My point is that once we re-connected and then jointly infested another host we were one again and aside from periodically screwing up pronouns and having two sets of memories for the same thousand or so years not a bad thing to say about it.

As far as I can tell I have been around since the primordial ooze oozed from where ever ooze oozes from. I may be the base building block of all humanity. Wouldn’t that be the thing. Imagine the tower of gifts I would get at Christmas! But the thank you cards would be tedious, and in any case I doubt that is the case. Hmmm I could use a case to keep all these notes in .

So my earliest memories, just fragments of moments, are of Mesopotamia. It’s hard to describe how my memory works. I mean every forty or fifty years I need to find a new host and infest it. Some memories come along on a cellular level . But even then they need space to stretch out so for the first few years until I have grown on my host I only have the basic memories that are important to my survival; like oatmeal is good, stay away from any automat that has more grease on the window than a city truck, and never ever insult a nine fingered pianist with a straight razor in his shirt sleeve. But after a while my memories come back and by the time I have to infest a new host I can tell you the color of the toga that Jules wore the day he married Cifany. ( no! neither of them are important in the history of the world but they had a really nice wine at the ceremony and the orgy afterwards was unforgettable.)

Oh yes, my hosts. For the most part they have been human , but there is a stretch of time where I remember doing nothing but eating , sleeping, and scratching hands that fed me .. So maybe I infested a cat out of necessity. So…. mostly Human, and recently they have been mostly voluntary. But voluntary or not for the Macedonian to survive I need hosts to carry me about , do my bidding, and generally keep me active or I get bored and dormant. Sadly though something about my infestation makes for a slightly shortened host-life. Well maybe they are alive after but it’s hard to tell. A side effect of being worn by me is calcification of their organic components. It’s actually quite pretty. And I try my best to put them in interesting positions before I leave them completely. Go to a museum and look at some of the best marble statues. That’s my work that is! Of course in the event of untimely death I need to leapfrog onto whatever is warm-blooded and close at hand. Let me tell you that a running speed of 5 cm an hour is not optimal for stalking anything other than a sloth or a slug or a snail. But I have managed to survive for eons so there you go . The calcification process often allows for my hosts to perform just as the Enhanced. And some of the Great Heroes of the past ( all of who died young ) are actually my work also. So , You are welcome civilisation.

But yes, we are slime mold, I mean, I am slime mold . I like dark cool places, I avoid sunlight, and I love oatmeal. Please do not confuse me for a Vampire who shares some of my traits. Not that you would; I rarely wear dark velvet , I have a sense of humour, I do not pretend to be tragic, I have never written bad poetry, and most importantly I would never hit on underage girls in coffee houses just to get a quick bite in before tea. Don’t get me wrong I have had friends in the past who had to suck blood, and if my memory is not playing tricks I took one as a host for a while … about 150 years… but then I got confused and tried to drain a bag of “Granny McGullies” raisin and walnut cookies and we parted ways. Its just they tend to be a bit elitist and touchy.

What's in a name?

Firstly Mesopotamia is not Macedonia, not even close. I mean look on a map … if you can find a map that has one of those things that is transparent and goes over a paper map to show you different things. A good library would have one. A good library !Not that any library “now” is a “good” library ~ now the Library of Alexander the Great was a good library. It was a bit smoky , and of course then it burned to the ground and was a lot smoky and burny. ~ But, back then when you asked for a map of Mesopotamia they had one! Well actually they wouldn’t have . What with time being linear and all that and the way people remember things. They also wouldn’t have a map of Macedonia. But my point is. And this is important. My point is that Macedonia is not Mesopotamia so calling me the “Macedonian” is completely wrong. For a while I tried to get people to call me “So-PO”, but it never caught on. So like the kid after one bad day I am stuck with a bad nickname. At least they don’t call me Stinky! Okay they did call me “stinky” for about three generations but then I infested a general and wiped out their villages. Heh! That showed them! They never called me “stinky” again. Most of them never called anyone anything and leave a body in the sun for a few weeks and then who’s stinky, not me, not me at all! So for convenience sake I am the Macedonian. Currently I am called “buddy”… but to the club members I am the “Macedonian” or “Mac”.