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NikKingCook
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Name: Nikolus
Birthday: 1/11/1985
Gender: Male
Interests: monumental guitar riffs
Expertise: kicking it
Occupation: Writer/Illustrator/Barrista/la
Industry: Art
Message: message me
AIM:  ze1ges
Member Since:
9/27/2004
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| Today we went a drive-a-drivin' to the redwood forest! Most of the ride was pretty boring actually, but Anjie's a good DJ and mom's pointing at statues and going "look it's a genuine frog!" was pretty hilarious. before you get to see any pictures though...! you have to look at what I did: once upon a time anjie gave me a toy dinosaur. so I put it in a bottle! I was thinking about filling the bottle with some slightly green or blue tinted liquid but decided against it because it would probably make poor T-Rexy decay supa'-fast.
GASP!
VOILA! now I just need a small chan so I can wear him like one would normally wear a pocket watch!
this is not the dinosaur anymore, that's a tree. we're getting into THOSE pictures now.
funky lookin' cone on top. the whole tree was shaped like a giant toothpick with branches
the only picture with Anjie in it. (mom is in no pictures because we forgot to take the camara on our first walk :'( )
three dudes.
standing up inside a tree that fell down~
the roots look like flames
Hanika, the fastest of our fleet
Paps and Elboni.
standing. under a tree, though~! the best thing ever!? probably not, but it's still kinda cool.
"I still have both my thumbs, Nik! It didn't work!"
more inside-of-a-tree action!
on the way there we saw like 4 herons, 1 crane, a few "genuine frogs" including one disco-fantastic one. there, I saw a bazillion little things that other people couldn't see... then they let me lie down for a bit and I felt better (that didn't happen). I saw crazy amounts of robins there though. on the way back, anjie somehow timed the song "now at last" by Feist and the sunset perfectly, so right when the song ended you couldn't see the sun anymore. very fitting imagery for the song too, the sun was. perfect song for the perfect moment (sad though it may be).
In other news it may take up to 3 months to get my work visa to Japan... so I'm going nuts trying to think of what to do 'til then. I have a few more craft ideas, and I guess I have a painting to finish. I need excitement, though! grr~! I'm thinking of a ton of possible "little trips", eg: visit a friend in NY, visit a friend in NC, visit a friend in CT, visit a friend in WA, break ground by visiting somewhere I've never been for maybe like a week or something, Chung Peong... possibilities, possibilities...
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| Okay so today we went a-craft-storing and I decided it was time to begin a project I've been stewing over in my mind. I have many of these little ideas for awesome-looking and sometimes rather useless artsy objects. One I made a while ago was a matchbox covered in cloth and then in a multicolor assortment of old stamps (from a $2 stamp collection I bought to help me envision a story I'm writing) and then lacquered over to make it a bit weightier (feels better in the hand) and more durable (for the artist on the move), and then I put a pressed flower inside it because it was the right thing to do. It was really pretty.
ANYWAYS today I finished another one. a bit bigger this time and now I have pictures. I've been obsessed with the mental image of bells in a honey jar for a while so... well I put bells in a honey jar...
mid tilt!
I think this one looks celestial.
three cheers for silhouettes! hip, hip, hurr- nobody, huh?
This one above needs to be photoshopped for color/contrast, but it's an awesome shot.
like a jar of gold :]
Freaking awesome... I don't know how that other diagonal line appeared... but it's good
This is one of only about four of the pictures that I took. the rest were by Anjie.
honey was too cloudy, so I used roughly 85% karo's light corn syrup
(for density) and 15% Grade A Maple syrup (for color) to make it LOOK
like honey only crystal clear :P I'm gonna make one of these my desktop picture, I just can't decide yet... I didn't adjust ANY of them for color/contrast. I might need to, some of 'em have a lot of potential I think...
Crowd: "potential?"
Nik: "potential to kick even more of your ass with it's loveliness!"
Crowd: "it's strange of you to try to use the word "loveliness" in a threatening way. Are your balls on straight?"
Nik: "wha... I don't..." *meets the crowds' quizical gander with a horrified gaze*
Crowd: "It's a figure of speech"
Nik: "it's a figure of my genitalia! get away, pervies*!"
(pervies: humorous because being called a pervert would normally be very offensive, but having such a cute pet-name for them makes it okay somehow. Also, remember to eat your pasta in reverse alphabetical order. Zitti first)
Anyways Thank you anjie for being a photographer of sorts.
There was something else I was going to say, too....
oh yeah, Japan. I wanna go. I think it'll be a fun change of scenery, and frankly I've grown up most of my life in places where 1) I can't understand the natives 2) the natives can't understand me and 3) I get stared down for being white.
ALSO: we've been hiking like mad... seen a lot of wild-life lately... yup even got a red hawk's tail feather for my straw hat. yup yup. "Things" are looking up, and I'm picking their pockets while they're distracted....heh, heh, heh.
(psst, isn't the honey jar awesome? awesome to the max?)
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| well yosemite was awesome (pics on moms site and I'm sure hani and anjie will post more soon enough)
rafting was frustrating but fun as hell, our cabin was a pimp-palace, and the stars were incredible.
one thing that sticks out in my memory the most is the shooting star we saw last night before we crashed in our pimp-palace. We had stopped on the sde of the road to get a good look at the milky way and all the billions of stars you normally can't see in the sky these days, but I was frustrated that I didn't see a shooting star. In Bridgeport I virtually lived at seaside park and I saw shooting stars all the time, it was like the beach's greeting for me or some junk.
Nik: sup beach
beach: "kablamo! wamo!"
Nik: huh, interesting, i didn't know they made noise
so I guess I was a bit spoiled. anyways we get back to our cabin and I take one last look up and a GIANT shooting star was just like "shwing!" and left a rosey-colored streak running almost exactly north-to-south. in olden times they used to think big meteors like that meant something big was about to happen. as illustrated in Herman Melville's poem "the portent":
Hanging from the beam,
Slowly swaying (such the law),
Gaunt the shadow on the green,
Shenandoah!
The cut is on the crown
(Lo, John Brown),
And the stabs shall heal no more.
Hidden in the cap
Is the anguish none can draw;
So your future veils its face,
Shenandoah!
But the streaming beard is shown
(Weird John Brown),
The meteor of the war.
"the meteor of the war". my poetry professor got so worked up about how awesome that line is, how in five words he perfectly expressed John Brown's impact and how mystical the occurrences of such characters are throughout history. anyways...
So I see this shooting star and I'm like "what question is that the answer for?" As much as I try not to be superstitious about "signs" and "directions", I am a bit - mainly because they've led me to very good answers before (I wont go into that now). I had been asking questions to whoever's receiving them all day that day, and I don't know if the shooting star was a confirmation/answer/reassurance of/to/for what I was asking or if I should be asking a completely different list of questions and that the shooting star would have been a perfectly understandable and eye-opening answer to the question I SHOULD have been asking. i had similar frustrations with the Seaside stars. usually they'd shoot around when I was playing with my wooden ring, or biting my nails or just exhausted and they'd almost NEVER blast around when I was asking a very serious question.
I dunno.
anyways the ride home was pretty weird, too. for the last year I keep hearing the name Jenny Lind in books and random other places and finding strange coincidences concerning Jenny Lind. eg: she was an opera singer who only came to the states to perform because P.T. Barnum (basically founded Bridgeport, CT) risked his fortune on her and her talents (and made a bazillion more dollars back). I mean shes famous and everything but I shouldn't have seen her name around as much as I did. turns out there is a town called Jenny Lind in CA (including Hedgepeth street. Hedgepeth being the surname of the ancestor of ours who fought in Gettysburg and Antietam. also not a common name) so we went there on our drive home. middle of nowhere. We drive up close, there's a sign that says "jenny lind <-" so we take a left onto a tiny little street... about 5 or 6 houses down we come to a dead end with some family sitting out on their front porch. We decide to ask them where Hedgepeth street was and they go "Oh, well you turn around, drive out of town and there will be a street called supm-supm, take a right on that and keep going". so we drove "out of town" to the street they told us to take which was barely over a block away. the whole area was pretty weird in small but plentiful ways (street adresses written on bricks that were just sitting on the lawns of the houses) and the cemetery there was interesting, a lot of blank pieces of wood used as head-stones, sometimes the mounds of dirt weren't labeled, some had stone benches next to the headstones as if you were gonna sit there and have a chat with whatever nameless citizen of the underworld you happened to be sitting over.
the ride home also reminded me of the butterfly migration in Costa Rica... but I'm tired and I wont go into detail yet.
goodnight.
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| California....on fire?
not close to us, but apparently there are many close enough to make our days hazy and drab!
Here's a picture of the view outside of mom and dad's window:
notice anything missing?
WHERE THE F#$% ARE THE HILLS?
it's been hazy the past few days, but this is the worst it's gotten. still, the fires are supposed to be as far away as Napa...with some near Fairfield and some other places but still.... the first day of summer was like a week ago? I'm starting to appreciate the fact that we don't OWN property here.
Another thing I appreciate is free stuff. Especially if it has my name in it!
okay it doesn't LOOK as fancy as the 8th edition did (which also featured me), but the paper quality is better.
Not a lot of you have read my story, so here it is, edited and in precisely the way it appears in Issue 10 of RAW:
Infiltrated
No
matter what you do, how clean you keep the floors, how contained you
keep the food, a mouse will find his way in. Thankfully, Twisted Cafe
was not busy these days, or else we might have had a bit of a scene.
I strode into the basement-level coffee shop late for my shift and moist
from the dog-breath Connecticut air. Hernandez and his Chinese friend,
Jen, were reaching under the fridge and probing the gap with broom sticks,
rattling the debris that grew fat with dust. "A mouse!"
Jen shouted at me. Today was not boring. Jen told me so in her tone.
"Cool,"
I said, "what kind?"
Hernandez
stood up and threw his arms around. "What do you mean what kind?
It's a mouse! Little gray mouse, eats food... The kind that's bad for
business." I shrugged my book-bag onto the couches by the counter
and walked by the fridge. I kicked the side of it but nothing scurried,
scampered or scuttled away.
"Are you sure it's still there?" I said. Hernandez shrugged.
Jen told me how gross it was that a mouse was in our cafe. I poured
myself some coffee and sat down next to my bag. Drinking the coffee
was making me sweat even more than I had been outside, but I needed
the caffeine.
"Well...
Your problem now," Hernandez said as he gathered his things. After
he left, Jen stood around for a little while to fidget with the wrappers
of a couple chocolates she had eaten.
"So
gross," she said to herself.
"I
like mice, actually."
"What?"
"I said I like mice."
She
glanced at me and shook her head. "Well you can't have pets here,"
and with that last gift of wisdom, she left too.
I
moved onto a shimmery, golden love-seat and propped my laptop open.
I had time to look for jobs, scour blogs and research Mayan carvings
before the first customer arrived. One coffee. I checked my email again.
I looked up Ezra Pound online, then tribal masks, and continued to set
fire to the long hours, knowing I'd only go home after work to keep
my search engine running well into tomorrow morning. Another customer.
Two hot cocoa. More milk. Okay.
Half
an hour left. I let the love seat get a good hold of me. Did I fall
asleep? I wasn't sure, but it was time to start shutting down. I was
folding my computer when my brain shook in electric excitement. The
mouse. It was sitting next to me and, by his squat way of sitting, I'd
guess he had been there a while. I leapt to the counter, grabbed an
empty cup and scooped him in. He was a little nervous about the cup,
but he didn't put up much of a chase. I sealed the lid and put it on
the counter where the mouse inspected the walls of his new confinement.
Unsure about what to do, I looked around the cafe for bits of food.
Chocolate? I knew it was bad for dogs, but I wasn't sure about mice.
I also thought coffee grounds would be a bad idea. The idea of rodents
on caffeine didn't seem right.
A
while later, I carried the mouse to an area around a couple abandoned
houses, a school cafeteria and an over-flowing dumpster. The broken
pieces of granola bar rattled when I spilled them and the mouse onto
the grass. I stepped back. The mouse waited a little while, smelling
the honey-fossilized oat grains I thought he'd enjoy. His pink hands
held the fibres of grain still as his nose and whiskers buzzed over
them. I stepped closer and bent over him. He ran away pretty quickly.
He ran towards the old houses. I was thinking that he had made the best
decision when it occurred to me that he must not know how lucky he is. (copyright Nikolus Cook, June 2008)
they're email isn't working though, so I can't order more right now... well I guess I could if I just went to their site and forfeited my right to cheaper copies.
VA-VA-VA-VOOM! *and the master of disguise is gone!*
EDIT!!!!!!
I knew it before but then I forgot and now I know again! and it's flattery up the yin-yang! on UB's website, mine is the story they use as an example from their literary magazine! (maybe I DID post about this once...I dunno, but I just remembered it again)
http://www2.bridgeport.edu/pages/5053.asp
you can read the whole thing if you download the pdf file of the whole magazine. do it or don't, I still gots the street cred.
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| Sup fools!
Well I got an exciting email this morning, it seems like the Random Acts of Writing team in Beauly, Scotland has finally come out with their 10th issue featuring ME! you can check out the site and buy a copy (if you have 3 pounds to spare) here www.randomactsofwriting.co.uk
A short little Bio of me is on the site, too. In case you're wondering why I decided to mention that I'm a year of the rat in the bio, it's because the story is about a mouse. I wanted to add a bit of that "whoa, coincedences!" factor. you know. I know you know. you know I know you know.
you know?
still trying to muscle out a few short stories.... here's what's in the works:
another cloth-monster story about a slightly retarded vagabond who only has a hammer and a saw (I think I posted about this one before), who makes a very slight living off of putting things together (hammer and nails) and makes two things out of one thing (saw).
Then there's Lazy Bones, a rhyming prose american-fable piece... I gotta work on that one.
one about a dead guy trying to find his dead wife in a very crowded afterlife.
I've also thought it would be interesting to try to get in the mind of whoever cooks the last meal for a guy on death row.
also, also I have a pretty good ghost character that I could use for another fairytale-esque piece.
also also also, I was thinking of writing a series of stories that got really really complicated and then ended with three masked strangers busting down a wall, destroying everything, causing utter chaos, but leaving the people alive (for the most part...maybe just beaten-up or tied down), and....yeah. I came up with this idea when I was in school, very frustrated at the relatively small number of possible structures a story can have. the whole point was for these three weirdo's to be the complete antithesis of a Deus Ex Machina.
quick lesson in literature! Deus Ex Machina (literally "god out of a machine") refers to extremely improbably events that just resolve every problem in a story. examples: in comic books, if a character dies and they find out that that super hero was the only one who could have defeated some new giant fiend, they can travel back in time and just make him not die. Or in ancient Greek plays, the Gods would just come down and use magic to fix everything. it's just injecting a device that had nothing to do with the rest of the story into the end to make everything hunky-dory. In case you didn't already know...
I was also thinking of a story exploring grocery-store cashier's judgment. they must assume weird things about people based on what they buy, right? if someone goes up to a counter with a bottle of wine and band-aids, what would you think about them? do-it-yourself surgery? or say they bought a lot of bananas and then a lot of string and bubble gum. (you see first you throw the bananas down the sewer to get the monkeys into view, and then you lower your gum on a string to snatch 'em up....) I dunno, I got the idea in CR because of the odd collection of items they had at the grocery store check-out shelves. Jo you remember... batteries, condoms, razors, and children's DVDs. you remember standing there thinking "WHAT THE F-????" cuz I do.
now I should quit procrastinating and get back to cleaning my room.
I guess this wasn't so quick afterall.
Over and out.
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