Nightcore.

Ever heard of it?

If you have, then you are as hip as a third-grader.

I, of course, knew nothing about this until my daughter introduced me to the pseudo-genre. It’s basically songs (usually Tokyo-anime-pop) sped up to the pitch and frequency of chipmunks.

As an aging father, my rolling of disapproving eyes after being introduced to this nonsense unfortunately widened the parent-child social gap between my daughter and me. But seriously, why listen to your favorite song altered when you can hear it just fine the way it is?

Then, upon a long commute one morning, I had an introspective moment where I realized how much of a hypocrite I am. I had been listening to an audiobook in the car at double-speed thanks to this wonderful app: Smart Audiobook Player. Why? Because of that ‘so many books, so little time’ mantra.

Not that spoken words are like songs, but in a way they can be. Especially, if the narrator has a golden voice (how I miss thee, Frank Muller). Speeding up an audiobook can ruin a narrator’s brilliant performance, even if it means you can condense a reading of War and Peace to just under twenty hours.

But what can you do as an avid reader when you’ve little time: books already primed on your e-reader, paperbacks stashed in your bag, and hardcovers beckoning you from the coffee table.

Maybe try to live forever.

Turritopsis Nutricula

It’s basically a species of immortal jellyfish. Well, immortal in the sense that they can virtually regenerate themselves endlessly, provided their regeneration process goes undisturbed.

It’s kind of an eww process where these creatures’ dying parts convert back to a state of conceptualization, becoming a blob of sperm and egg commingling together to form infant tissue that will eventually grow.

Not exactly as exciting as watching bullet wounds heal on Wolverine’s skin. It’d be more like turning into globs of goo for a while, and then: Presto! I’m back!

Ironically, my latest work-in-progress is about immortality, although it has nothing to do with jellyfish, nor the dogma of eternal life through religious means. I’ll post an excerpt at the end of the blog for those who are interested.

In the meantime, until I can become like the jellyfish, I’ll be speed-listening to you great writers at just under Mach 1.

(oh, and to my music fans… I’ll be playing Nashville VIP Lounge at Ascend Amphitheater 6pm 7/6. Yay!)

 

Excerpt: Mortals Chapter 1

FIVE MONTHS AFTER DAY OF ETERNE

 

It looked like a prison bus.

That’s what Seb Freeman first thought as his father slowed the pickup truck to a stop in front of a soldier garbed in full black. Seb craned his neck to look through the windshield, looking past the soldier where the bus parked in the distance in front of an electrified fence laced with coils of razor-sharp concertina wire, the bus’s dull-blue color seeming to suck away the morning sunlight and canceling out the vibrant greenery that surrounded it. Seb should have been glaring with fascination at the small group of people lined up next to the bus. It had been months since he’d last seen another mortal, and he knew he would soon marvel over these kindred strangers that were like him. But all he could do at this moment was stare at the bus, disenchanted. This was his transport to possible immortality, to become like his father, his town, and practically the whole world. All of it riding on nothing more than a stripped-down prisoner bus.

Seb’s father rolled down the driver window, the whirring sound of the power-window dissolving Seb’s stupor. Hot summer air gushed into the pickup cab as Seb turned to see the soldier peer in with a dark-gloved hand spread open expectantly toward his father. The soldier wore a gleaming black metal helmet with a tinted visor and Seb wondered as he noted the strange but familiar plastic glaze of the soldier’s eyes why immortal soldiers would even need a helmet to protect their heads or a visor to shield their eyes from sunlight. Then Seb’s thoughts went cold when he saw the protruding muzzle of a black M-16 strapped behind the soldier’s back. Seb knew the war had been escalating on the borders, but guns had become obsolete since Day of Eterne, becoming an ineffectual weapon against gods fighting gods.

End of excerpt