Jumpers for goalpost

I've been re-living tour videos from the Multiply era and am currently watching jumpers for goalposts. I can't wait to see if he brings some of these iconic multiply things back for the show:
• will he wear a plaid shirt? • will the old stage set up come back with the moving screens and the boxes he would jump around on? • will we get the extended versions of take it back and photograph? • will they play the intro video of him when he was a kid before he comes on stage?
Is there anything that you're hoping will make a comeback for the show?

The Vines came almost all at once, on a warm otherwise unremarkable summer night twelve years ago. Teddy didn’t remember their coming. He was only fourteen now, which meant he was two when they came. Actually, it wasn’t exactly accurate to say he didn’t remember their coming.
There were the dreams.
In the dreams he’d be asleep, peaceful in his bed, when suddenly, with the rending sound of a thousand angry zippers the snakes would punch through the walls, yellow eyes flashing, their mouths open wide and hissing, long saber-like fangs spitting luminous green venom. They would spill into the room like waterfalls and begin to coil around him in his bed. Tighter and tighter until breathing became an impossibility and the hissing crowded out even his own panicked thoughts and the world beyond his eyes began to grow dark.
He didn’t always wake up screaming from these dreams, but he did so often enough that his parents worried about it. He could hear them talking about it in low whispers sometimes when they didn’t think he could hear them. Sound carried well in this house. But that tended to happen in structures where the walls didn’t always line up, floors sometimes leaned crazily in every direction, doors had long ago been pulled permanently free of their frames, and windows were smashed and lying on the ground in twinkling shards of glass.
The vines had done all that.
Teddy lay in his bed in the eternal twilight of Vine World, which was what everyone called ground level these days. He knew that if he looked at the wind-up clock on his nightstand he would see that it was eight o’clock in the morning, give or take fifteen minutes. His brain knew what time it was, even if there wasn’t enough sunlight down here to confirm what his brain already seemed to know.
“It’s your Shark-Alien rhythms” his Dad had once explained. Whatever that was. Teddy made a mental note to look up “Shark-Alien” on his next trip to the library, though what sharks and aliens might have to do with waking up with the sunlight, he couldn’t possibly fathom.
The “ceiling” of his bedroom was a vine. Twenty feet in diameter Teddy guessed, big for sure, but not even close to the biggest vine Teddy had ever seen. The vine’s underside bowed freakishly down into his room. On the right side of the ceiling it coiled away and upward towards the sky. On the left it traveled back through the wall it had smashed twelve years ago and down into the ground. Teddy’s Dad had nailed some boards in around the places where the vine touched the walls in an attempt to weather-proof the room, but the vines were alive. They moved constantly, breathed almost, even if it was only barely perceptible, and the seals rarely held for very long. This morning, humidity poured through the gaps between the vine and the walls and a thin sheen of sweat broke out on Teddy’s forehead and in his arm pits.
Mostly the weather stayed on the right side of the “wall”, but not always. It got particularly bad in August, which was Hurricane season here in South Louisiana. But those only hit once or twice a year, and only that often in the really bad years. When they did he would simply move in with his parents, or his brother Bob, for a couple days until the angry wind blew itself out somewhere over Arkansas or Mississippi.
Teddy stared thoughtfully up at the vine. He wasn’t sure exactly what you were supposed to call the skin of the vines… bark he supposed. The bark was scaly, like a snake or a fish, each scale the size of a frisbee and shaped like the business end of a spade. The scales were generally brown, but there was a soft iridescence to them and a subtle shifting pattern of colors constantly rippled across the bark? Scales? Skin?
“Whatever”, Teddy mumbled as he pulled himself up to a sitting position.
It was the thorns you really had to look out for. Teddy was lucky though, there were only two thorns on the vine that had been his bedroom ceiling since just before his second birthday, a day he remembered only in his dreams.
The thorns were not conical like those on the ragged patches of blackberry bush that still somehow managed to thrive in the backyard places where occasional columns of sunlight fought their way down through the alien canopy. No, these thorns were more like the arrowheads his Dad had taught him to hunt with, though much larger. They were shaped like pyramids, with a point sharp enough to stab through wood and four symmetrical ridges so hard and razor sharp they could put a score on a piece of glass.
There was poison in them too. They’d found that out the hard way, hadn’t they? But the less said about that, the better, Teddy thought.
He could hear the house coming alive below him, now. A wood fire crackled in the cast iron stove his Dad had salvaged from… somewhere, and Teddy could smell the faint odor of the smoke working its way up to his nose through the many gaps in the crazy vine-altered structure of their house. Firewood was not a problem in Vine World. The trees that hadn’t been violently uprooted by the sudden appearance of the vines had long since been choked off by the canopy on top and the strangling alien roots below. As a result, there were thousands of dead trees laying in and amongst the vines, quietly seasoning themselves for the cooking fires of Teddy’s future.
Teddy’s short brown Cajun hair sat bolt upright on top of his head. In a simpler time, a time before the vines, his first order of business in the morning might have been a shower. But fresh water was much harder to come by now that you couldn’t get an unlimited supply simply by spinning a tap. His Dad had built rainwater catchment in all the places where the vines funneled water reliably down to ground level. But while rainfall remained as unpredictable as ever, the human need for fresh water did not. And so what fresh water they did have was reserved mainly for drinking and cooking.
He walked through his bedroom “door” which was more like a concept of a door than an actual one. The door frame leaned crazily to one side like something out of the Esher paintings that hung on the walls of the Library in town. He walked out into the hall and scrabbled down the floor which fell away from his room at a loopy downward angle before hitting a bottom of sorts, and then curving back up towards the stairs that would take him down to the bottom floor.
Teddy looked up and saw that Bob was just pulling himself up the last three feet of the incline and onto the landing at the top of the stairs. Always “Bob”, never “Bobby”. His parents had tried “Bobby” for a while but from the very moment Bob had learned to speak he’d begun to correct them. “Is Bobby a good boy?” they’d ask, and little Bob’s face would scrunch down into an expression of deep thought and consternation and he would bellow “—OB!”
And so Bob he had become, and Bob he would forever be.
He was six now and he turned to see his older brother negotiating the crazy rolling hills of their upstairs hallway and smiled. “HI TEDDY!” Bob almost always shouted everything. It was kind of his thing. But he loved his brother, and Teddy loved him right back.
“Hey Bob”, Teddy said as he lost his grip on the hard wood floor and slid back a couple feet. It occurred to him that it probably wasn’t very safe for a six-year-old boy to climb around on a crazy structure like this, but then again almost everything in Vine World was dangerous. You had to pick your battles.
“RACE YA!”, Bob shouted and took off down the stairs, which had somehow remained improbably intact. In addition to the shouting thing, Bob was always “racin’ ya!” everywhere.
Laughing and hip checking each other in a good-natured way, Teddy and Bob bounded down the stairs, their footsteps pounding a syncopated rhythm on the old wood of the staircase. As they neared the bottom they could hear Mom in the kitchen shouting “Hey, hey, HEY! Come on guys, slow it down!” She was worried about thorns, of course, they were everywhere. But after twelve years, six for Bob, the brothers knew exactly where they all were. As they ran, they ducked, bobbed, and weaved like running backs in a sport they would never watch or play, one that had died a quick and violent death on that awful day twelve years ago, like so many other things.
The boys skidded to a stop on the old linoleum floor of the kitchen, still giggling and elbowing each other in the ribs. A vine the width of an elephant’s trunk stood in the very center of the kitchen. It had erupted up through the floor like a demonic volcano and now occupied the room like a support strut holding up the ceiling. It was covered with razor sharp thorns, and Mom and Dad had done the best they could to wrap the lowest and most dangerous of them in old towels, ragged bits of clothing, and a few salvaged traffic cones so that there would not be a repeat of the “accident” that had killed Carthage.
Carthage had been the family dog. He was sweet and friendly and a mutt. “like God threw a beagle, a terrier, and a chihuahua in a barrel and rolled it down a hill”, Dad had often said. Carthage had been a great dog, but a hyper one. It was in his genes. And aren’t we all, ultimately, doomed by our own genetics?
It was his hyperactivity that had killed him.
Carthage was a jumper. All you had to do was look in his direction and even before his name had a chance to fall off your tongue he was up on his hind legs and jumping straight up in the air. Sproing, sproing, sometimes he’d clear three feet straight up, his little head wiggling back-and-forth at the apex of his leap like he was trying to squeeze an extra few inches out of it.
They’d been in the yard when it happened. If they’d been in the house there was a decent chance, Teddy thought, that Carthage might have remembered about the thorns and not jumped so enthusiastically. But they hadn’t been in the house, and Carthage had put everything he had into that final leap.
The thorn caught him just behind his right shoulder and Carthage yelped in surprise and pain, immediately thrusting his tail between his legs and cowering at Teddy’s feet, whimpering with fear and unanswerable questions.
Dad had come running at the sound of Carthage’s distress and at first the injury hadn’t seemed that bad… well not that bad for a severe puncture wound anyway. The thorn had slid into the dog’s flesh like a hot blade through soft butter. But it was not deep, and barring infection it certainly did not seem life-threatening. But something about the drop of green liquid that hung from the tip of the thorn like thick luminous dew had made Teddy’s skin crawl. And within an hour it was clear that Carthage was a very sick doggie.
He’d lasted the night, curled in Teddy’s lap, whimpering and looking up at his boy with big watery eyes that were full of confusion, pain and fear. And little Teddy had cried right along with him, not able to do anything for his dog except to be there for him. To let him know that if nothing else, he was loved. To bear witness.
Carthage’s end had come before the real end, and that, at least, had been a mercy.
There had been a few final labored breaths and Carthage’s nose, which had been resting on Teddy’s leg, rapidly moving up and down with his ragged breathing, suddenly began to weigh down on Teddy with the weight of something no longer in control of its muscles. And then a final breath came out as a whimper, and Teddy knew Carthage was gone.
But that wasn’t the end. Oh no, it wasn’t the end at all.
Teddy had been holding Carthage in a towel and that had probably saved his life. Carthage’s skin had begun to ripple and undulate like his body had filled up with giant hungry maggots. Despite his love for the dog that had been his only pet, Teddy pushed the corpse off his lap with revulsion just as the dog began to literally dissolve in front of his eyes. Here and there, Carthage’s skin burst open with steaming jets of glowing green goop. The skin melted away revealing the jagged curvature of the animal’s ribcage and then even the ribs began to run in gloopy white rivulets. Teddy had just enough time to think “those were his bones” and then, finally, nothing at all remained of the dog except for a putrid greyish-green puddle of bubbling slime slowly eating its corrosive way into the Earth.
And Teddy’s tears, of course.
It was hard, even now, for Teddy to see a thorn and not flash back to that difficult day. To the awful danger of the thorns.
The towels his parents had tried to wrap them in didn’t really offer much in the way of protection, either. The thorns were simply too sharp. If you were to forget yourself and stumble into one, it wouldn’t take much pressure for the tip to stab straight through like the pike thrust of an angry Spartan Hoplite. And from there, a slowly gurgling puddle of alien slime would be your ultimate destination.
You stepped carefully in Vine World. Very carefully.
But the wrappings did serve as a reminder of what was there. The incongruous pastel colors of the towels and the neon orange of the cones caught your eye and alerted you to the danger in a way that simply trusting yourself to notice the same damned thorns in the same damned places day-after-day could not.
Towels had not been their first idea, nor even their second. The towels were more of a last resort. Dad’s first idea, coming right on the heels of Carthage’s untimely and unlovely death, was to saw the damned things right off.
“Come with me”, he’d said to Teddy, who was only eight at the time. And Teddy had gone. Dad had been a contractor before the vines came and his workshop, really just a shed filled with his tools, had survived the coming of the vines mostly intact. Pulled along towards the shed by his father’s rough hand, they walked into the shop together and Dad pulled a two-foot wood saw off the wall.
They’d walked back to the offending vine with its offending thorn still dripping poison in an obscene parody of Teddy’s tears and Dad had lain the saw on the thorn at its base. With a roar of anger, he’d pulled the teeth of the blade across the thorn. Teddy heard a sound like a rifle being fired on full automatic as each of the metal teeth snapped off clean at the edge of the blade. Dad threw the ruined saw on the ground and stomped angrily back to the shed, shaking his head and cursing under his breath… something about “those Christing thorns!” Teddy thought. He’d come back with a fifteen-pound sledge and was swinging it before he even stopped walking. The head of the sledge came down perfectly on the sharpened tip of the thorn and…
PING!!!!
The sound of two heavy metal pipes being smacked together reverberated between the living canyon walls created by the vines, and the sledge bounced off the thorn like a kid jumping on a trampoline. The momentum of the bouncing sledge knocked Dad right on his ass. He pulled himself up off the soft ground and walked over to the thorn. He leaned toward it until his nose was almost touching its smooth surface, almost like he was trying to see it at the molecular level.
“Didn’t even dent the goddamned thing…”, he’d said angrily. And that had been their last attempt to destroy a thorn.
Mom pointed at Bob, “you, sit at the table, I’ll have your breakfast ready in a minute.” Bob happily ran off towards the kitchen table, his hands swinging back and forth above his head. Teddy thought the kid looked like a crazed chimpanzee when he ran.
Bob pulled himself up onto the bench seat at the kitchen table and Mom pointed at Teddy, “And you, put your gear on, I need some veggies from the garden.” She tried to sound like a drill instructor, but there was a nervousness on her face that gave the game away. For his part, Teddy hid his excitement as best he could. He didn’t want his parents to know how much he loved going to the garden. You weren’t supposed to enjoy climbing the vines.
You were supposed to fear it.
Teddy headed back to the “gettin’ ready room”, as in, “we’re gettin’ ready to go outside.” It was a room just off the back porch, the only room in the house where there were no thorns. The one totally safe room in the house. You could do The Macarena in here if the mood caught you right.
On the dozens of hooks Dad had installed on the walls hung gear that he’d scavenged from a demolished sporting goods store on the other side of town. Teddy shrugged into a suit of armor made of mis-matched gear from a half-dozen sports he would never get a chance to play. Football shoulder pads, a baseball catcher’s chest plate and leg guards, thick hockey gloves and a helmet. None of this would stop a serious thrust from a thorn of course, but it would protect against most everything this side of a glancing blow.
Looking like a rejected extra from a Mad Max movie (they had DVDs in the Library too) he pushed the screen door open past shrieking rusted hinges. Mom heard the door opening, hell the whole world could hear this door when it opened, Teddy thought.
“Watch out for the vents!” she yelled from a room away.
Teddy’s shoulders slumped and he sighed with obvious frustration. “Watch out for the vents” was the unofficial motto of Vine World. People said it to each other the way they might have said “have a nice day” or “Merry Christmas!” before the vines came. But Vine World left no room for such trivialities. There was too much danger, too much fear, and too much at stake.
“The goddamned vents…” Teddy said to himself. He tried not to curse in front of his parents, but sometimes, well… sometimes the right word was the right word. “Le mot juste!” he said, much louder than when he’d cursed. And in some weird way, he thought his parents might have been even more surprised to hear him say that than they would have been if they’d heard him say “goddamned.” But when your kid spent every waking hour in a library, that was the kind of thing your kid was apt to say.
Teddy stepped out into what had once been their back yard.
If you could forget about the danger for one moment, it was almost beautiful.
Above his head the vines twisted and coiled around one another in a vast Gordian Knot of alien bark and thorns. Iridescent color shimmered along their lengths and what ground cover had survived the sudden plunge into darkness all those years ago reflected the light as if the aurora borealis blazed overhead. Here in the eternal twilight of Vine World, lightning bugs didn’t know what time it was either, and their belly lights twinkled and shone in the darker corners of what was a living organic cathedral.
From the safety of the back door the scene looked like a magical glade from a Tolkien novel. If a Hobbit, a Dwarf, and an Elvin Archer suddenly appeared walking behind a grey-haired old wizard lighting their way with a magic wooden staff, Teddy thought he wouldn’t bat an eye. “Might not even be the strangest thing out here today”, he thought to himself, and smiled.
Across the glade, an asterisk drawn in bright orange spray paint beckoned. Teddy scanned the yard, looking for vents mostly, but also for the… Things… that came out of them. There were none, and that was something, at least.
He glanced back at the wall of the “gettin’ ready room” and saw his own compound bow hanging next to an empty space where a larger bow should have been. “Dad must already be out hunting”, he thought. Teddy grimaced. “Anything but a Scorch, Dad” he muttered under his breath. He was getting pretty tired of eating Scorch.
Welp, there was always the vegetable garden.
He made his way slowly across the… Teddy continued to think of it as The Glade, even though twelve years ago nobody would have ever thought to call it anything other than somebody’s plain ole backyard. He moved slowly because things could change in a catastrophic instant in Vine World, and things that changed here almost never changed in your favor.
His head spun as if on a swivel and he walked in a strange crouch, ready to run at a moment’s notice in whatever direction might lead to safety. Twenty steps, then thirty, then fifty…. He counted as he went knowing that it was exactly sixty-seven steps to the orange asterisk. Somewhere behind him, he knew his Mom was trying to keep one eye on him as she took care of Bob and got the house ready to face the day. He could feel her worry across the space between them but there was nothing she could do except hold her breath and hope for the best. Vine World was about surviving one day at a time and everyone had to do their part.
The vines had forced Teddy to grow up fast.
“Four thousand, three hundred eighty days…” he said out loud. That was how many days they had survived by taking survival one day at a time. You never thought about tomorrow or next week in Vine World. That kind of optimism could get you killed. The distant terrified shrieks that sometimes carried to Teddy’s ears when the wind was blowing just right in the darkest most silent graveyard moments of the night were an awful reminder of that fundamental fact of their existence.
Teddy reached the asterisk and put a sweaty palm on it (tag, you’re it!). Above him a dozen pieces of two-by-four marked the upward trajectory of a large vine in three-foot intervals. In another time, there might have been a treehouse at the top of those two-by-fours, a sign out front boldly proclaiming, “no girls allowed!!!!” But not here. Not in Vine World.
The ladder steps went up about thirty feet and then disappeared into the tangled canopy overhead. He began to climb.
A minute later he had reached the underside of the canopy and paused to take a deep centering breath. It only got hairier from here. He pulled himself up into the disorienting alien tangle and below him the Glade disappeared from view, lost in waves of shimmering brown scales.
Somewhere below, their visual connection broken, Teddy’s mom stifled a worried sob and tried to focus on Bob.
A few seconds later and Teddy was standing on a broad flat expanse of vine. Here and there thorns gleamed malevolently in the gloom. Dad had helpfully circled each one in orange paint, not that Teddy needed a warning to steer clear. He looked up and saw the route winding its way up through the tangles, marked with more fluorescent orange paint. Courageous beams of sunlight stabbed down through the canopy here and there and it almost seemed to Teddy that the vines shied away from them, like they were more comfortable in the gloom. In the dark. Where the monsters roamed free and ate their fill.
Teddy had no idea exactly how high the vines went. He’d asked his Dad once and he’d said “dunno Kid, more than a hundred feet, less than five?” It was six hundred thirty-seven steps to the top of the canopy, Teddy knew that much, but the twisting path his Dad had marked meandered all over and around the complex tangle of vines. Sometimes you even had to go down a ways before you could go back up again. Teddy guessed it was about two hundred and fifty feet from the top of the vines to the ground.
Teddy was relatively safe up here. The things that came from the vents couldn’t get at him up here. “As far as you know” he reminded himself. Every now and then something new did come out of the vents, and it would be dangerous to assume that the vents would never vomit out a creature that could pursue him into the canopy. A shiver worked its way down his spine despite the heat of the day.
Ten minutes later he had almost made it to the top and he quietly thanked his Dad for the orange trail markings. It had taken almost a year for his Dad to find, map, and mark this route, and even though he’d climbed it hundreds of times, Teddy knew that without the markings he would soon be hopelessly lost up here. And if you got lost in Vine World, the best you could hope for was that you’d die of starvation or thirst before the Things got you.
It was much brighter now. What had been tiny little beams of sunlight down on the ground had become great gushing waterfalls of gleaming warmth up here. Teddy followed one last looping path around a super vine, this one easily fifty feet across, and saw the final stretch of orange painted ladder steps at the end of a short, narrow tunnel.
Teddy laid on his back and began to push himself along this horribly claustrophobic space where a dozen smaller vines coiled tightly around one another. It was so narrow that if there were even a single thorn in this space it would be impassible. As he crawled, he thought of his dream… and the snakes. Were the vines sentient? Might they one day wake up, realize that a boy was crawling through this passageway and suddenly clench themselves into a crushing final embrace?
In the shadows, Teddy shivered uncontrollably.
A few more yards and Teddy pulled himself into the last chamber at the base of the final ladder. His face was bathed in pure white sunlight that forced him to close his eyes so tightly it hurt. Brilliant sun spots danced on the blood red insides of his eyelids and the complex networks of his capillaries stood out in stark relief.
Doc Hebert, the town doctor by virtue of the fact that he was the only doctor to have survived the coming of the vines, had once told Teddy that he guessed Human eyesight would adapt completely to the gloom of Vine World eventually, and that within a thousand years or so, it might be impossible for Humans to venture out in direct sunlight at all.
Teddy thought that sounded like a damned shame and he laid here a minute longer, letting the sun warm his face for a while in honor of his sun-blind descendants, whom he would never meet and who might never get this chance.
But there was a job to do. He opened his eyes to the sunlight again, pulled himself to his feet, and climbed the last few feet to the roof of Vine World.
He rose up out of the gap in the vines like a submarine Captain climbing out onto the conning tower of his ship and looked around. The view never ceased to overwhelm him. All around, in every direction of the compass, was the terrible evidence of what had happened that day.
Vines. Vines by the millions, by the tens of millions… blended and woven as if they’d burst forth from the loom of the fates. They covered, buried, choked off everything he had ever known. If he squinted, it almost looked like a vast shag carpet of brown and green stretching in rolling hills and valleys to the horizon. Up close, you couldn’t see an individual vine move, or breathe, or whatever it was that they did, but across the miles and miles, the subtle combined movement of all the vines together made this alien roof ripple with motion.
A thick mountain of vines rose, alarmingly, to the north. Dad said he figured that must be Baton Rouge, since there were no actual mountains here in the flat Earth of Louisiana.
The idea that this “mountain” might have once been the second largest city in the state was, well, thought-provoking. It suggested that the vines grew as high as they needed to in order to overwhelm whatever might be in their way. Like the Kudzu that had once threatened to choke off all the vegetation in the American South before the Vines had provided the final say in the matter.
Did the Eiffel Tower itself lie dead and rotting underneath a city-sized pile of vines like Tiger Stadium just a couple hundred miles to the north? What about The Freedom Tower in New York? The Burj Khalifa? The London Pickle? The Taj Mahal? the Pyramids of Giza?
Teddy didn’t believe that. Couldn’t believe it.
He just couldn’t believe that everything that had ever been, everyone that ever was, all that had ever been known, could really be buried under the vines. He thought that the day he did start to believe that, would be the day he gave up and let the vines have him.
Up here, the vines sprouted leaves. Massive, lime green and waxy, they were big enough that a married couple could use one as a blanket if they were brave enough to try. As far as anyone knew, the leaves were not dangerous by themselves. But the way Teddy looked at it, you couldn’t be too careful when it came to the vines. The leaves hung like massive organic solar panels, collecting the sun here on the roof and delivering its energy to the real bulk of the vines deep down in the darkness below Teddy’s feet.
Spread out before him were a dozen raised garden beds made of salvaged four-by-fours, anchored into the woody scales of the vines and bristling with summer vegetables.
“Vict’ry Gardens” his Dad called them.
“Victory over what, Dad?” Teddy had asked him once.
“Over starvin’ to death, Bub”, had been the reply, and they’d both laughed so hard their bellies hurt, even though there really wasn’t anything funny about it at all.
It had been hell getting all the wood and dirt up here, but Doc Hebert had told Teddy he thought the “Vic’try Garden” idea, which had been his Dad’s, had probably saved the town. Once Teddy’s Dad had proven the concept, other gardens had begun to spring up all over the “roof”, and Teddy could see other townsfolk tending to their own gardens in the distance. He waved to a distant figure he thought was probably Mrs. Hebert, it was hard to tell this far away, and she waved back. He tried to judge the distance and guessed it at about two hundred yards. “Length a two football fields, Bub”, his Dad might have said, even though Teddy had never seen a football field and probably never would. There was one in town, about two miles east of here at the city high school. But like everything else it was buried under the choking mass of the vines. The goalposts, once shining and white on Friday nights, now forever twisted and rusting in the dark.
Teddy wandered between the rows picking tomatoes, lettuce, and peppers and pushing them into the carry bag at his hip. He loved it up here. Despite the alien view, you could almost feel normal with the sun on your face and a warm gulf breeze tossing your hair around.
Was the Gulf of Mexico still there? Or was it just a memory, buried under the vines like everything else? He didn’t know, and in any case, it didn’t matter. Any place you couldn’t walk to in the hours between dawn and dusk might as well be on the moon.
Which reminded him. He checked the watch on his wrist. He knew it was still early in the morning, but he checked anyway, out of habit. You always needed to be aware of the time in Vine World. You could run into a… Thing, at any time of course, but at night… that was when they hunted.
His carry bag was full now and so he looked once more into the sun, letting it toast his face one last time. He closed his eyes and mentally prepared himself for the long walk down to the ground and the short dangerous sprint across the glade and back into the house. The summer sun was still hot, but Teddy knew that in a few weeks they’d be up here planting the fall vegetables… pumpkins and squash mostly. Over the years, a brisk trade in heirloom seeds had sprung up alongside the damaged church that had been turned into something of a Town Hall by what remained of their little community.
It's always easier to go down than to go up and Teddy got back to the final stretch of ladder steps almost before he realized it. He looked down through the hole in the canopy, down on the warm lights of his house so close and yet so far away. And again, he had that sense that he was looking in on an Elvish Glade. The way the vines had incorporated the house into their infrastructure, the lighting bugs flitting here and there like fairies, the preternatural silence, it was as if this house existed on the outskirts of Rivendell, rather than Southern Louisiana.
He climbed slowly down the last stretch of steps. His suit of armor felt heavy and cloying now that he was so close to safety, and he just wanted it off. His right foot touched the mossy ground and a sound like Armageddon drove a bolt of ice into his spine and nearly stopped his heart. A terrible ripping sound, like the skin was being torn off the world.
He turned slowly… very… slowly and saw it. A jagged crack had appeared on the ground halfway between himself and the house. It started as a single point and slowly grew, right to left, until it was nearly four feet long. The ripping became an ear popping whoosh and the crack broke open like a lanced boil, spilling a sickly green light into the glade.
A Vent. A goddamned vent.
For one crazy moment he thought about running for it, leaping over the vent and through that poisonous light like a horse leaping over a hedge in an equestrian event. His legs actually tensed up, ready to begin pumping themselves across the space between himself and the vent. And then he froze, all thoughts of a heroic escape suddenly and irrevocably banished from his mind.
Because now there was something in the light. Movement. A shadow. Something was coming out of the vent. Teddy leaned back against the vine and waited to see if he would die immediately, or if the vines would decide to give him a fighting chance today.
What came out of the vent was a nightmare mash-up of a scorpion, a lobster, and a spider roughly the size of a large pit bull. Its dinner plate-sized claws clicked together curiously as if searching the air for something to cleave in two. The six legs behind the claws were much longer than a scorpion’s legs, more like a spider’s legs, long, spindly, arching, and multi-segmented. Each leg ended in a needle-sharp point that dug into the soft earth as the Thing struggled to pull itself free of whatever Hell had spawned it.
It was a Scorch.
Plenty lethal of course, but there were much worse Things lurking in the depths of the Vents, and he’d dealt with Scorches before. There was still a pretty good chance he’d die right here at the base of this vine, but with a Scorch there were always… possibilities.
Sixty-Seven Teddy steps away, his Mom stood in the open back door, both hands over her mouth which was open in a terrified “Oh.” There was nothing she could do to help her son now, and she knew it. Whatever was going to happen in the next thirty seconds would happen whether she intervened or not.
Bob stood behind her, peering out between her legs. “WATCH OUT BRUDDER!”, he shouted, and Teddy almost rolled his eyes. “Yeah no kidding, Bob”, he thought uselessly.
The Scorch’s claws were moving ceaselessly, and their SNAP SNAP caused Teddy to flinch each time they closed on one another. But it was the stinger that commanded his attention. It was like a dagger at the end of a long retractable tail and it too moved this way and that, looking for something fleshy to plunge its length into. But Teddy knew that the stinger itself, and the poison it contained, were not the worst part of what that tail could do. At the base of the stinger would be two small holes…
POP POP… the sound of twin firecrackers and Teddy thought “here it comes!”
From those two holes jetted two completely different but complimentary chemicals. And as they mixed in the air they ignited a three-foot jet of blue flame, and any newcomer to Vine World would have known instantly how the Scorch got its name.
Teddy remained rooted to the spot just in front of the orange asterisk his Dad had painted, frozen in place. The Scorch’s alien red eyes, seated on top of long stalks that could rotate in three hundred sixty degrees searched for him, but Scorches couldn’t see very well, and as long as he stood perfectly still, there was a good chance it wouldn’t see him.
But just then a breeze rustled the hair at the back of his head and Teddy knew that he had a bigger problem. The breeze was blowing his scent directly at the Scorch, and a Scorch could target you by your smell as easily as a hunter with a rifle and a scope.
And sure enough, after only a few seconds, the time it would have taken the breeze to travel from Teddy to the Scorch, it suddenly spun on him. Teddy had been spotted.
The Scorch came at him.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl, seconds drawing out into hours, as every weapon in the creature’s considerable arsenal pointed right at Teddy’s most vulnerable spots. Its arachnid legs were a blur. The stinger came up and coiled back like a compressed spring, ready to strike. The claws opened wide and Teddy knew that whatever part of his body they targeted would soon be lying on the ground, detached and spilling great gouts of blood.
He put his arms up in front of his face. Maybe the hockey gloves would hold against the blade-like claws… maybe the umpire’s chest plate would deflect the stinger.
Maybe…
Maybe.
Across the glade his Mom screamed and for a moment it was the only sound in Teddy’s ears, except for the rushing sound of his own terrified blood. And then another sound cut off his Mom’s scream.
THWIP!!!
Followed by a shriek from the Scorch that was so brain-piercingly awful it was almost a weapon unto itself.
Teddy opened one tentative eye and saw a long shaft sticking out of what passed for a head on a Scorch. Both stalked eyes were bending inward, eyes rolling madly in their alien sockets, desperately trying to see what was causing it so much pain.
It was an arrow.
And now the high-pitched keening of the Scorch was joined by the THUMP THUMP THUMP of footsteps running towards the glade, and Teddy looked up and saw his Dad leaping over a low hanging vine, one hand reaching into the quiver on his back as he did. Without breaking stride, Dad nocked the arrow, drew back the string, and fired a second time.
This time the arrow thumped straight into the Thing’s cerebral cortex, or whatever it was that Scorches had rattling around in their skulls. The arrow had the desired effect. The Scorch dropped flat with a meaty thud. Dead before it hit the ground, its lights turned off as if by a switch.
Breathing heavily, Dad looked at his son, lost under a pile of second-hand sports equipment.
“You OK, Bub?”
Teddy looked back at him. “I guess it’s Scorch for dinner after all.”

It’s probably the best live show in the world atm, and I would love a big live album for us to listen back to for years to come, especially before Play comes out. Also think a DVD would be good considering the last DVD was the Jumpers for Goalposts Wembley show iirc. Just something to help this amazing tour live on in our memories before the next era begins!

So I’ve known of Destiny for a while but about a week ago I decide to join the dgg discord, I appreciate the way destiny approaches discussions and was looking to interact with more like minded people. For the most part this has been the case, I’ve met some really cool people, even those I’m about to be more critical of are generally pretty cool. There is a toxic culture that is rampant throughout the larger destinyverse though that needs to be addressed. As someone who is Autistic I find the constant use of slurs such as retard incredibly offensive. Ableism is seen throughout his content and in turn audience. I’ve watched some of destiny’s videos on the topic but his responses were unsatisfying to say the least.
The first justification (from the no jumper podcast) that being a retard is bad, so it’s an appropriate insult is just a poor surface reading of the situation. Being of “lower intelligence” isn’t bad firstly and secondly the word retard has moved far beyond just targeting those originally categorised as such. It’s now a very common insult for autistic people and others with mental differences. It has moved far beyond its original usage. Regardless I don’t see people trying to appeal to the “original meaning” of words like negro so why do that here? If I’m being honest though I’m being more charitable than I should, we all know people aren’t using this word in its original fashion so I don’t know why destiny made this appeal.
The other video (on Lex Friedman’s podcast) had even worse arguments such as the slippery slope fallacy. This honestly had me question if this is even good faith or not, obviously refraining from some words is a good idea, it’s not going to lead to every word being banned. The goalpost isn’t going to keep moving to another word because the R word won’t disappear, it will still be the go to insult for bigots. But let’s humour this and play along, if a word did become that offensive, why not stop using it as well? People constantly morph and come up with new words that we remove from rotation, it’s hardly a good justification for using slurs.
In fact I know this is another disingenuous argument because everyone will say as much about the n word and f word. No one is arguing to use those because it’s a slippery slope. But that leads me to my biggest complaint, the fact that the r word is treated differently is what really hurts. We can recognise words have power and hurt, but disabled people, the most vulnerable, those who can’t advocate and defend themselves, those are the ones we decide it’s fine to hurt, them and them alone we don’t care about.
There is more to be said here, more personal experiences I could get into but I think I’ll leave it here for now and hope we get a good convo going.

Being as the WhatsApp group that was set up back in May didn't really take off. Just wanted to test the water and see if anyone fancies some friendly soccer in the park.
Jumpers for goalposts, any skill level, any fitness level.
Doing it for the fun and exercise
I was thinking of [Kernahan park](kernahan park https://maps.app.goo.gl/YRUwdU51ea2dCyiA7) as the venue, but open to suggestions.

### Race Information
* **Name:** Solo 1 Mile Time Trial
* **Date:** August 27, 2022
* **Distance:** 1 mile
* **Location:** Thiells, NY
* **Strava:**
* **Time:** 5:09
​
### Goals
Goal Description Completed?
-------------------------------
A Sub 5 *No*
B Sub 5:10 *Yes*
C Beat Most Recent PB (5:29) *Yes*
​
### Splits
0.25 Mile Time
------------
0.25 71.3
0.25 74.6
0.25 80.6
0.25 82.5
​
### Background/Training
About 19 years ago, I was "forced" to stop running due to chronic injuries (20+ stress fractures in 6 years) and a diagnosis of osteoporosis in my lumbar spine and osteopenia in my hips and long bones. At the time, I was a relatively competitive D3 runner (1:56 800m, 4:03.03 1500m). Fast forward 19 years or so, tests indicated I no longer had osteoporosis / osteopenia, and my son decided he wanted to start running. Naturally, I decided to start running with him and got bit by the training bug. I'm still quite fit (5'8, 138-139 lbs) at 41 years old. Over the last year, my training has been relatively cautious and, at times, inconsistent. From June to November 2021, I was running about 10-15 miles/week max. I ran our local 5-mile Turkey Trot in a time of 32:38 to place 3rd in the M40-44 age group.
​
I got COVID at the end of December and took 2 weeks off. Since then, my training continued to be inconsistent... usually running 3-4 times/week with mileage hovering between 7 and 29 miles/week. In June, I ran an 18:56 5k to win my age group. In July, I started doing some speed development work with my son (8x40m, 3 mins rest) to help him improve his top-end speed. Following each of these sessions, I'd do a 200m time trial to gauge my speed, with my fastest time coming in at 26.7s. After spending 2 weeks in the mountains in the Dominican Republic at the end of July (and running sparingly), I've averaged between 25 and 35 miles/week with 1 workout/week and 1 9-10 mile run/week. The week prior to this 1 mile time trial, I had done 12x200 with 200m jog rest at 36-37s pretty comfortably.
​
Admittedly, my training has been haphazard...largely due to work and family priorities and my failure to find a program, pick a target distance, and find local races. I had set a goal to break 5 minutes in the mile before turning 41, which I failed to do... so I've moved the goalposts to doing so before I turn 42.
​
### Pre-race
Since I was running a solo time trial, I really didn't have to be at the track at a specific time. I just really wanted to avoid the heat and a crowded track. I woke up at 8:00am, ate 2 fig bars and drank some water. I got to the high school at 9:45ish and jogged a 2 mile warmup. It was already hotter than I wanted it to be, and I was a little stressed out because the parking lot was full and I feared the track might be a bit busy. After warming up, I got to the track and saw that it was relatively empty aside from the HS jumpers doing drills. I stretched, used the bathroom and did some warmup drills and strides, and changed into my Endorphin Pro 2s. My heartrate was higher than I wanted and I started to doubt that a solo time trial was a good idea. Towards the end of my warmup, the JV football team came down from the bleachers for team photos on the field. I now had an audience.
​
### Race
My goal for the race was to try to run as evenly as possible, focusing on just getting to the .75 mile mark at my target pace (4:56) while being as relaxed as possible. I had set my watch's autolap to .25 miles to give me a better idea of pacing during the time trial.
​
Unfortunately, I went out a little quicker than I wanted, coming through the first quarter mile in 71.3. The heat was a bit overbearing but I felt really smooth. I came through the half-mile in 2:26. At that point, my heart rate was much higher than desired, nearing 190. I began to question wtf I was doing, but I didn't want to look like a quitter with the HS athletes on the field. I told myself to stay true to the goal and push through to the 0.75 mile mark, and just bring it home. I split 80.6 for the third quarter-mile and knew at that point that sub 5 was out of reach. I didn't have it in my legs to kick in that final quarter-mile, and my heart rate was in the high 190s. Nevertheless, I finished the last quarter-mile in 82.5 to finish with a time of 5:09 for the full mile.
​
### Post-race
Not much to say here. I drank some Gatorade and changed into my Triumphs. I walked a lap around the track, and then ran a 1.5 mile cooldown. The heart rate monitor on my watch said I peaked at 199bpm, though I'm not sure how accurate that is. I probably won't run another mile until October, as I have a 7.8-mile race and a 5k race over the next 3 weeks.