The Time Lord

Complimentary read of  Chapters One and Two

The Time Lord

By Mack McColl

Copyright 2021

Prologue

He stopped at the stop sign and looked both ways before turning left and accelerating the little car on the highway leading south, 250 kilometres to Campbell River. He had no time to waste. Barry looked down the long stretch of highway in front of him and sighed. He was sober, and that didn't happen often these days. Never, in fact. He made the trip alone. Tripping on a highway was part of an old modus operandi.

He drank coffee from Petro-Can and smoked a joint so the car reeked. The little dark red compact was practically invisible as dusk was upon him. He kept it slightly over the speed limit. The road was dry. It had not rained today in the temperate rainforest. Traffic was sparse, practically non-existent, at twilight. He switched on his headlights but they did nothing to light the way at this moment except allow oncoming cars to see him.

She stood like a sprite on the side of the highway under street lights at the corner of Sayward Junction an hour into his journey. She looked hyperactive bouncing on her toes when he stopped. She continued to stand on the side of the highway, arm dutifully extended, as he skidded to the shoulder and reversed to pick her up. She stood beside her little bag of shit. He flung open the passenger door. She must be the stubborn type.

At last she appeared with a huge head of rust-coloured hair. She was short and trim and healthy-looking but weathered, tired in the eyes, as she glanced at him and shoved her bag in the back seat. She climbed in, clearly suffering in the cold autumn air. She was harrassed about Sayward, she said. She was sick and tired of being abused, she said.

He didn't want to hear any sorry tales about Sayward. He wanted to talk about himself being a certified and bonifide Time Lord. It's according to his birthdate and how it fits in the Mayan Calendar. “And do you know what a Time Lord has to worry about?” “Not a fucking clue.” “D-N-A,” he said, with a snigger. They rolled toward the small mid-island city of Campbell River where he looked for the Oceanside Route, a branch of older island highway, to take them south along the Inside Passage.

She continued to share a few choice words about a recent experience in Sayward, kept calling herself a fucking jippo, whatever that is. Said jippos don't take no shit like that. Jippos move along. “And sometimes there's a trail of blood,” she said, and cackled. Barry thought about DNA again.

He planned to stop in Black Creek, “Saratoga Beach, actually,” to buy a large bag of weed. He said he's going to meet his friend Bob and have a few drinks so Barry asks politely if she would like to come along.

“Is he a Time Lord too?” she said.

He reached down between his legs and grabbed the flat side of a pipe wrench and swung in one motion heavily into her face.

RUINED

Conplimentary read of Chapters 1 and 2

 RUINED

By Mack Edward McColl

Copyright 2023

Prologue

You're not telling me anything because I'm too stupid to listen, and too young, and you're too old, and we don't speak the same language.

Under the observation of a pathologist, I would have been a John Doe, a no-account dead man in a reasonably clean shirt. I would have been an unidentified frozen corpse with multiple contusions having a set, no, a series, of previous abrasions and bruises as if I lived the life of a street fighter; Injuries and defects in this unidentified corpse include a severe concussion from the first of a total of four lethal assaults in the past six and a half weeks. The last one was designed to put me on the slab once and for all. Yet I survived. Oh yes. To tell stories like this one.

Chapter One: No good deed will go unpunished

In the beginning, God lived in my basement and I remember from when I was three years old, at most, even though someone told me once, “Aw you were too young to remember anything at that age.” This is the consensus. No. I remember because it is something you don't forget being in a house with God in the basement. People are told to look up for God and this seems to be a major deception throwing everybody off the trail.

I say from personal experience I didn’t look up, instead, I crawled down wooden steps to the basement. And there I sat across the room staring at him, in my infancy, of course. The pure infant me relates this in the face of a lot of literary directives from high-minded sources, raising the need to discuss things I have read through the years, including the Holy Bible, a book with a long history containing intense mystery. Okay, enough about that.

One of the first things we learn is we are dust. We are told so by an illiterate God, and his message in the Holy Bible is presented as so much, oh my, such an awful lot, of baffle-gab, somehow inciting people to murderous impulses in so many ways the mind boggles.

Is it objectionable to blame God for taking apart people limb from limb through the millenia based on the instructions from the scribes? Thou Shalt Not Kill (in hordes of less than 5,000 per day in sub-tropical zones with rivers nearby and industrial-grade transportation facilities).

Laying on my back in a snow bank awaiting a slightly less cold slab, I wondered what would land me in my position. Is it possible not all of us arrive in a world accompanied by months of close confinement with the Almighty? It was the end of my innocence, I can assure you.

We are innocent in the eyes of virtually everything and everyone, except God. He's forgiving, not forgetful, yah, forgiving is what he is and does, but innocence doesn't enter the picture as far as I can tell.

God was in the basement during an infancy of twists and turns setting the archtypes of a peculiar bent entirely beyond my control. My older sister would not visit God in the basement, and she was perfectly aware he was there. She refused to hang around him. She didn't like him. He took up space she was accustomed to playing in, with me, of course, and her own friends, so she was angry at him. It is incorrect to suggest God wanted me in the basement either; in my experience he didn't. I remember him barely tolerant of my tiny presence. But God had no friends. None. So I visited.

At some later date in life, I came to view this friendless God in my basement is a perpetual refugee. Heaven remains a wonderful place to be, no question, and very much around and of the earth. I met God in His ongoing exile from the best parts.

Meanwhile the thieves, typical of those with sociopathic tendencies, expend extraordinary energy spoiling the stolen possession, intending to run it into the ground. They won’t be stopped until they are done abusing everything, being especially hard on a predestined few who invite God out of exile and loneliness, which must surely be misery. These few become guilty of aiding and abetting Public Enemy Number One. These are the worthy and the result is important. “You get to live with me. We live 10 feet under and eat a lot of worms. And eventually it shall come to pass during your waking hours we rebuild the completely destroyed world stolen from me and ruined while out of my possession. Thanks for your support. You're going be living like God, with me, working hard till the job is done.” He doesn't use a lot of words because he's not verbose (his son is) but everybody gets the message. Eat worms, fix burned-out paradise.

Being with him is going to have an impact. One assumes it is designed to. Why did he live in a chilly concrete basement? Surely he was up to something. God is a high achiever obviously. Granted, he declared low expectations of his achievements (man), informed as he is (by Satan) that man is a source of continuous disappointment and torment to God, Satan says, Jesus supporting the argument by being half-a-man.

In later years I came to understand, in the face of a terrible ego problem all my own, which, according to Dick G. of the Coastal Health Authority Urgent Response Team in the Alcohol and Drug Abuse department of the Pier Health Resource Centre, in the D.E.S. of Vancouver, B.C., Canada, prevents any real understanding, except of the obvious: God prefers it below the surface when he's hanging around because on the surface the world is a perfectly horrible place to him.

The world is filled with difficult chores and God showed me a few years later how it's a mean, miserable, contrary place (for him) to exist; perhaps more so for him to exist. None of us respect God for who he is while he roams and rambles like damaged goods picking up shattered pieces of his second favourite creation (his first being a 'Tree' possessed of an invaluable fruit). Being exiled means this invaluable fruit is beyond his reach, he exiled from knowledge, which belongs to him, was stolen and is yet to be returned, withheld even by those who feel sorry for him.

Hell, it's no tea party for me either, damaged goods that I am and occasionally picked up and delivered to a form of succour, but, for God, the best thing to do is hunker down ten feet beneath the surface and let it unravel up here (it could not be unfolding, does anybody think it's unfolding?).

I am saying God seems to be a people-person. Unlike the pretenders who shall remain nameless, who play aloof, God tries to make friends with the few-and-far-between who accept him for exactly what he is, a large, rank, really big loser. What I know, is, for whatever the reason God prefers to minimize his exposure to the world on the surface.

What is he? Is he homeless is he dumb? The dumbness is silence. He is smart enough to create the world and stolen paradise, but something went wrong and it got away from him. He lacks retention skills, including the loss of eternally valuable knowledge from a tree that others are exploiting under false pretenses.