trombone orphan secrets

This came from Richard Butner, so it must be true, and it's definitely one of the strangest things I've ever seen.

The Orphan's such an oddity, in fact, it's probably best to quote from the Transcriber's Note on the site rather than try to explain:

I recently moved into a small, sparsely furnished attic apartment in Raleigh, North Carolina--a twin bed, a rickety dresser, a dorm fridge, a hot plate, and a little round table under the one window, where I'm composing this. Under the bed I found what I thought was a suitcase, but which turned out to be a trombone case, complete with trombone.

My original idea was to pawn the thing, since I needed the money more than a horn I couldn't play. A bunch of cassette tapes were crammed into the case as well, even into the horn's bell. On most of them was a label reading, "The Orphans in the Palace," and six of these were numbered. I popped in number one and hit play. It was some guy telling me the sad, funny story of how he came to be who he came to be, and how we try to make sense of ourselves in a world we usually can't understand. And it has all those things that good stories have, like love, and death, and intrigue, and deceit, and betrayal, and romance, and sex, and drugs, and rock and roll.

So I'm transcribing all of the tapes and posting the story here, day by day. It's worth telling, and it's worth hearing. The other tapes were music. Strange and wonderful songs this guy and his friends created. I'll be posting those here too. At least one a week.

The "Transcriber" is named David Wilson, and since October 5, he's been updating every weekday. From today's entry:

Such images. Yet I forgot them all for a full week after the accident, until the details came rushing back from out of nowhere, the way dreams sometimes do when you're just tying your shoes or pouring milk on your cereal or something. So I thought that I'd foretold the future, and felt guilty about not remembering, and not finding a way to warn them.

I consoled myself with the notion that if it had been the future I'd seen, there was nothing I could have done. The wreck was their destiny, planned and executed by God.

Later I realized it could have been coincidence. I dream every night, the teachers told me. I just forget most of it. If I dream I find a sack of money, but I don't really find one, I'm never surprised, and the dream just melts away. If my parents had come home from that trip safe and sound, I wouldn't ever have given my nightmare another thought.

It occurs to me only now, after all these years, that maybe I didn't even have the dream until after the wreck. The mind, in its search for meaning, can alter even the inexorable flow of time.

Check it out for more about the bird and the bat.

worm "Mass Destruction," Faithless

name Chris "Typhoon Master" Barzak