word mining central
Day 265:
I’m not hungry, at all, but I’m forcing myself to eat. I know things like proteins and fats and vegetables are required to heal.
But I’m also a bit low on ducken, having gotten down (finally!) to the last of the smoked ducken I had stored up from the last time I made a mattress.
I’m thinking maybe a few days of fishing are in order.
Day 264:
I fell off an edge and hit my head on the floor below. Then a giraffe-corgi walked up and exploded.
I don’t know how I lived, and I don’t want to know to be honest. I probably should’ve died. But here I am. I can only hope it’s the helmet that saved me.
So I’m staying at home and sleeping off the worst headache of my life (since the last one) and hoping that if I do have something like a fractured skull I’m able to sleep it off.
Day 263:
I’m still mad at this ore for going on seemingly forever, especially since it’s led me into that deep chasm I talked about earlier. (Yes, apparently I’ve dug down far enough it’s no longer a giant deadly hole from my current position.)
The chasm has, by my count, three waterfalls and two lava falls in the immediate area. So there’s just death sources everywhere, and that’s not even counting the zombies and scary purple-dressed people and the exploding giraffe corgis that are trying to scale the walls of the cavern to get to me.
By the way? Climbing down my stairs to explode on my head while I’m hiding my mack under the stairs is NOT COOL.
Anyway, I’m also mad at the bats.
It’s not a shock that we have bats in caverns this size. (It is a shock that I’m not hip-deep in bat guano but I think I already discussed the fact that nothing here appears to poop except me.)
The bats look (from a distance) like Earth bats, but they act like Earth moths. They gather around light sources and fly near them…. so when there’s a lava fall glowing the full length of the 80 or so meters from its outlet point in the chasm wall to the chasm floor, bats come from all around to fly around it and circle it, and then accidentally catch fire and die.
Now, I’m not sure if they’re actually mammals, if for no other reason than the “lack of poop” thing, but because Earth bats are mammals, I’ve always had a bit of a fondness for them. I mean, you don’t see many mammals deep in caves unless they got lost.
So it’s heartbreaking to watch these stupid bats fly into the stupid lava fall over and over and over.
And it’s also a little dangerous when they fly around on fire, I have to say.
But the most heartbreaking part of all is that they send out this loud squeaking sound while they die, as if they were Earth bats or very loud mice or something… and it hurts every time I hear it.
So now I stand in chasms and yell at bats to stay away from the lava while scary people in purple outfits hone in on the sound of my outrage and throw poisonous liquids at me from the walls of tall chasms.
Which is why I think today must be a Monday.
Superman: Secret Identity by Kurt Busiek and Stuart Immonen (Illustrator) book is about an Earth where Superman is a comic book hero, and Clark Kent is a boy who grew up in Kansas hating Superman — because of the name, obviously.
I get it. I was born a Kent too. (According to one site I checked, Kent is the 778th most popular surname in the United States, so there are quite a lot of us.) I didn’t get nearly as much teasing as my brother (who is not named Clark), and certainly not as much as Clark Kent in this book gets — because his family all thought it was hilarious.
But just like every kid, I wondered if I was a superhero, or a mutant, or any of those things (It was a little too early to wonder if I was a wizard.) And I wish I’d had this book at 13 or 15 or even 25 to remind me that superheroes lives aren’t any easier, nor are they any harder, they’re just different. And ultimately, that somehow makes it all okay.
Update: It’s hard to capture in one post how much this story meant to me. Six months later, just thinking about it still makes my heart ache in a good way. Hopefully you’ll get as much out of it as I did.
Day 262:
Still following this vein of ore. Still digging down.
Have you ever been irrationally angry at rock? Like just furiously, axe-breakingly angry? All I want is for this vein to finish so I can go back to the top and start digging up again, but no… no we’re going to just keep going down until there is no down any more and I come out the other side of this forsaken ball of dirt.
I. am. so. angry!