Like I said on the title page of this here blog, a blivet is ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag, or an impossible thing, which that would be I guess. But there is more to the story, and that story would best be worked backwards from the now to the before now. Before now all the way back to the time of humankind standing up on our legs and walking. The first instance of a blivet comes from that time, maybe a million years ago or so.
I know this because Random House Dictionary, while it does define the word, did not define the actual object the word derives from. That's right! The blivet is an object, or, really it is one of three objects all the same and all called blivets. I have one of those three objects, and as far as I can determine I have the only one to be found. My dad found this one.
Because the blivet is so obscure and it's existence is widely unknown, I don't live in fear that I will be conked over the head so that someone else may possess it and learn it's vast secrets. And I have learned a lot from it already, at least enough to know I will continue to derive knowledge from it even if it should again become lost to me and even to humankind. In the million or so years of the blivet's existence on Earth only a handful of people have actually held this remarkable object, and my family has been it's keeper for the last forty years.
What I know of the blivet I have learned from the object itself. Now, the blivet is remarkably only a wood-like cylinder, that is actually two cylinders stuck together, one atop the other, one smaller in circumference and one fatter but shorter. And it looks like wood, but has a perpetual shine, is eerily translucent, and is so hard it has weathered volcanic explosions, nuclear detonations, and burial in the ocean for millenia at a time. It is not of this world.
I have first-hand information of the blivet's existence for the last forty years, and in this particular chapter of the blivet story I will tell that, the chapters that come later will be told from the insights I have learned from the blivet itself. Now as strange as it may seem, this object is truly an impossible thing as the definition describes, but the definition leaves much to the imagination, and your imagination would not comprehend it all, as mine doesn't. This object has told me a story and has imparted knowledge to me from other worlds. I have been reluctant to offer it to the world before for obvious reasons. You might question my sanity, but here in the midst of my life I have decided I can no longer keep this to myself, and I must share what I know and what I am still learning from the blivet. Suffice to say, the creatures who built the blivet were light years ahead of we humans, the technology employed with this object unknown to humans, and far beyond our capabilities even now, and the blivet has been in existence for at least one million years.
On to the first chapter.
My dad was a career NCO in the US Air Force, and as such made my childhood diverse to say the least. We moved a lot. Japan when I was four, five, and six, Denver CO for the next few years, Taiwan in my early teens, then to Mississippi to graduate High School. And we also had yearly or bi-yearly visits to uncles, aunts, and cousins in Central Valley California. The uncles were Jim, Bill, and Bob, and they and my dad, when we visited, would engage in debate on a nightly basis. Theses debates were fueled by the bottle, Jim Beam, I believe, and were and still are the talk of the family. They solved nearly every earthly problem ever identified and even some that were not of Earth.
I could never stay up late enough to listen to the whole thing, and couldn't properly assist with their work anyway, (they wouldn't let me drink). But I have heard this tale of the blivet for years told and re-told, over and over. No one seems to remember who first brought up the blivet in conversation, and only two of the participants in those Earth-shaking debates are still living, but my dad, though his views on blivets were regarded by the others as suspect, did at that time commence a search for proof of what he knew tro be true. Blivets are real, impossible, but real.
And he found it! In Taiwan. Across the sea, in a forest while he was out taking pictures of the countryside. That's where we wound up for a two year stay toward the end of my dad's Air Force career. He had not been actively searching for the blivet when he found it, but the debate had stayed in his head, and he was always on the lookout for it. What is curious, and maybe even a little bit scary is the way he found it.
He told me he was traipsing through the Central Taiwan mountains while on a three day trip he had taken to another Air Base on the island. His work took him to many places all over the world, but he said he felt drawn to the mountains just outside of CCK Air Force Base. As he was wont to do often, he took a day to go take photos of the beautiful country one day while he was on temporary duty there.
While walking along a narrow path through dense forest, (he said the hill was steep and the trail made switchbacks quite often, and he had to bend over frequently to dodge errant tree limbs), he slipped and fell. He started sliding down the path opn his butt, holding his camera in one hand with his camera bag hooked over his head and shoulder on the other arm. He reached out with his loose hand trying to get purchase of something to stop his glide, grasping and missing, and finally grabbing tree branch that held and stopped his descent. He had been moving pretty fast, and when he grabbed the tree limb it swung him around off the trail and into the dense brush alongside.
As he sat there inspecting his scrapes and taking inventory of his camera equipment, he felt a sharp edge slicing slicing into his butt. Now, he was pretty far off the beaten path, this was a small trail that surely didn't get much human traffic, more a game trail than anything, so it seemed an odd site as he looked at what was paining him, and saw an obviously unnatural object half buried in the ground that was the object of his posterior pain. The object looked like a turned piece of wood, but was polished to a very high sheen, and was so translucent he could see through it almost. And it had a glow, he called it a rose tint glow, which was not strong but very visible in the dark jungle floor where he was sitting.
He knew almost at once what the object was. This was the blivet. He had heard, like a lot of people have heard over the years, of the blivet, but my dad, unlike most people, had over the course of his life, developed a quite remarkable amount of knowledge about what most people through the ages had thought was old wives tales and legend. He said it called to him in an almost unheard whisper, "blivet."
He dug the blivet out of the ground and brought it home. It has been in my family since that time almost forty years ago. The next year we were in California on our way to Mississippi to finish out my dad's last station, and he presented the blivet at the first nightly uncle's debate of our visit. He had composed a speech that he asked for everyone's complete undivided attention. He explained what he had learned of the blivet before finding it, which over-all was not much, then imparted the hints he said came from the blivet itself. What he knew, and others couldn't really believe, was the blivet is an object sent here by an ancient other-worldly civilization from a far distant planet. It, along with two other identical objects, were programmed with all the knowledge this far-flung civilization had acquired in its vast history.
My dad was known for his glib tongue, and weird sense of humor, so the story he told was taken as a Billy Burnett Spoof. They all had a great drunken time talking of the blivet. A family tradition was born that night and it was decided that each family in our fairly sizable brood would be allowed to keep the blivet for one year at a time, the intention to glean whatever wisdom it had to impart. At the end of the year it was to be sent or given to another of our family, along with a story, or essay, or something to marks its visit with that family.
It made the rounds for many years, and some of the stories and projects form those individuals that did write with the experience of the blivet are quite remarkable. But, my father was the only one who truly believed this was actually an alien attemt to help humans survive this universe and spread the ancient knowledge it contains. He finally retired from his hoboing, world-traveling days in the early eighties, and eventually told me of all the wonders the blivet had introduced to him. When he died, the family passed the blivet to me for safekeeping until I too cross that shining ocean.
That's how the blivet came to me. How it has passed its knowledge to me, I don't really know. but I know what I am certain are facts about its existence, its long trip to earth, and the history it has recorded since it first landed in a fiery volcano in what would be roughly Northern Europe over one million years ago. Now that's a long story, but it has some parts and parcels that need to be told, and before I do get on my one-way-ship across the sea, I will do my best to relay that story.
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