Sips from the Iggy Bucket

I used to hang out at a home boy’s house a lot when I was growing up.  They always had plenty of generic soda which I could mooch, and occasionally some manner of snack food as well.  He lived in the attic, which ran the full length of the little house and had small windows at each end.  The most central area was the room, such as that was, and there were side storage bits walled off with sheetrock.  Was it painted?  I don’t remember that detail.

What I do remember is that the place was fucked up as all hell.  Some kids can’t maintain a clean room.  Some take that to another level.  I remember one time when we were running a brazier of dubious contents crafted from an old pop can, it got bumped and poured burning wax on a crumpled pair of pants that were tangled with a disused phone cord and other debris.  Before taking the time to extinguish the fire, he had to point and exclaim “liar,” in reference to the old rhyme about “pants on fire, hanging from a telephone wire.”

The important takeaway here is that this was the kind of room where dirty laundry was twisted up with garbage.  There was a broken rotary fan on the floor and one of my friend’s friends who had ADHD nearly as bad as he did put a dirty sock on the blades, and poured an old pop onto the sock so it sprayed around the room like a sprinkler.  The garbage was feet high and ran the whole length of the house.

My homeboy (of my old friends this is the one I usually refer to as ‘My Tech Support Guy’) never finished his pop, which is weird to me, because until I hung out with him I hardly ever got sweet drinks, so I’d drain them to the last drop.  This dude had cans everywhere with the bottom sixth or so still juicy.  Over time, the sugar inside would turn into syrup or crystallize into grains inside the cans.  We referred to this as “iggy pop,” after the famous musician.  I expect it was his coinage, not my own.

At length, I resolved to help him clean the entire room.  As we worked, we poured those cans of iggy pop into a bucket, so we could crush them for recycling without splooging creepiness all over our hands.  (that was for other occasions hey-o!  uh, nvm.)  This bucket then was known as the Iggy Bucket.  I don’t recall how much igg was in there by the time we poured it out, nor if we had to empty it to add more at some point.

The title is misleading.  I never did sip from the iggy bucket, even on a dare, and I doubt anybody ever did.  However, observe the scene…

I’m on my Tech Support Guy’s bed, he’s sitting just over the foot of it in an office chair, playing video games on his PC.  We were in these positions often, I the fly on the wall observing gaming history but not participating in it, except as a commenter.  To my left was the table, mounded with garbage and cans of iggy pop.  Also perched at the edge of the table, a nice cold generic root beer for me to consume.

I reached for the table, I grabbed a can, not noticing the external temperature was warm, the surface lacking in condensation.  I sipped grainy old root beer.  I commented, this is bad.  I was mocked appropriately.  Do not drink the iggy pop.

I made the same mistake a few minutes later.  The grainy warm pop was no better the second time.

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Life List: Grey Goose

One time around a green lake I saw a grey goose.  Green Lake is a good-sized puddle somewhere in all that stuff north of Lake Union, not super far from Woodland Park Zoo.  It’s kinda touristy, which is funny because there’s not much going on there.  Just park.  Trails.  Goose shit.

I was there to visit a veterinarian near by.  I do not remember why I ended up at the lake a couple of times back then.  I had a ride; you’d think I’d just get in the car and go.  But there I was.  On the lake itself, there were the usual coots and mallards and canada geese.  Cackling geese?  I didn’t know back then.  No small amount of waterfowl also patrolled the grass around the lake, keeping it fertilized.  And in that grass, I found a small flock of grey geese that I did not recognize.

Small flock. Was it only two birds?  A few more?  Memory is fuzzy, but they were at least as big as canada geese, and resting – maybe even sleeping.  I got real close.  As I recall, they looked like canada geese that forgot to have any black on them.  The grey ran up onto the neck and head, the beak was orange.  There was some kind of white near the tail?

Based on the birds found with any regularity here, 98% chance they were greater white-fronted geese.  Which is normally high enough odds I’d just title the post accordingly, but I wanted the chance to call the post “grey goose,” after the vodka.

I don’t drink vodka, but I have intentionally put it in my mouth before, for dental reasons.  Also hydrogen peroxide, for the same reason – kill bacteria, kill pain, until the dentist can sort something out.  If you have dental pain and no opiates, it’s pretty good for that.  Doesn’t last long, but keep swiggin’, and if you’re a teetotaler like me, spittin’.  While this vodka wasn’t “the good stuff,” how different can it be?  And to me, it really was a similar experience to swigging with hydrogen peroxide – foamy astringence, taste barely different from water, but with bizarre chemical aspects.

If you’re an alcoholic-ass drunky like James Bondage, you come to like the sensory experience of consuming booze, right?  My drunkest friend was a box wine boy instead of a liquor man, so maybe not.  But grey goose always makes me think of this article I once read, on cool reckless youths in Seattle’s International District.  Asian street racers, living 3 fast 3 furiously.

There’s an image in the story (if i’m remembering this right) of a heavy-set young dude with a shaved head, wiping sweat with a hand towel and saying something like, “The goose straight had me.”  This was a reference to my titular vodka drink.  Careful how hard you party, goose man.  Especially since your other hobby is driving.

Street racers.  I calls ’em racey boys.  They became much more of a thing in recent years.  Since covid mostly, but even before that, there was a huge uptick in children stealing cars for joyriding around here.  In my last apartment complex, I heard some young child had hotwired a car and just drove it around the parking lot demolition derby style, fucking up people’s cars.

I attribute this in part to the Franchise & Furious, who so convinced people of the carefree fun of driving too fast that one of the stars bought the glamer and bought the big one.  Goodbye Paul Walker, but honestly, it’s what you deserve for doing a hundred in a forty zone, fuck’s sake.

They obviously don’t care about other people’s lives, but primarily they do not care about their own.  It may seem silly to call this a consequence of environmental and political despair, but it absofuckinlutely is.  I hear kids say that kind of shit sometimes, online.  They have no hope.  Good job, crapitalism.

So.  While I hope the street racers take themselves out in a ball of twisted metal before they take any innocent bystanders down with them, I can’t hate them too much.  Tiny modicum or respect and sympathy even.  I pour one out for you, racey boys.  Or at least spit one out, next time I have a toothache.

Back to Green Lake, on one of these goosey occasions.  I had to use the bathroom, and walked in to see a naked dude standing there, talking russki to somebody on his cellphone.  Now this bathroom also had a public shower I think, for anyone disease-loving enough to swim in the lake, so nudity had an excuse.  He wasn’t erect and wasn’t jackin’ it.  But he wasn’t wet from a shower, and he seemed like he was just waiting in full frontal view of the door for somebody to walk in and see him.

I smirked or cocked an eyebrow, like, alright man.  Might have even been slightly aroused.  For some reason this didn’t hit me as bad as the dude that sexually harassed me on the bus that one time.  But it occurred to me later, absentminded and distracted as I’d been, that he may have been hoping for kids to walk in on him – which is decidedly worse.

The world is a vampire.  Makes you wanna drank a goose and hop in a muscle car.  But no, we abide.  Eye on the big peaceful bird, dozing the day away.  That’s where you’ll find me.

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Disability Criteria

There’s a tension in all countries with the resources to have social benefits, between the idea everybody should have to bust their hump just for the right to be alive, and the idea simply being alive entitles you to a certain bare minimum standard of life.  Most people aren’t going to believe fully in either of those extremes, but fall somewhere in the middle.  Being far closer to the latter than the former, I can feel resentful toward those responsible for gatekeeping social benefits.  Less the bureaucrat at the crowded dilapidated office full of squalling babies and unfortunate-smelling people talking to themselves, than toward the politicians who grandstand on arbitrary beliefs about how this should be done, and vow to stick it to the freeloaders when they get elected.

I got curious and looked at how the US Social Security Administration decides whether you’re disabled enough to receive benefits.  Right up front there’s a line drawn on the basis of whether you busted your hump enough.  There are two different disability programs administered by that agency.  The one they talk about at the link is Social Security Disability, and to qualify for that you need a certain minimum amount of recent work history.

Worked hard for twenty years and then had a slow decline in health which kept you from knowing you needed to apply for disability until you lost “insured” status?  Fuck off.  Worked hard at unpaid labor like raising children?  Fuck off.  Never able to work in the first place because you’re too mentally ill to function?  Fuck off.  Supported a family business by working unpaid for years?  Fuck off.  The disability benefit these people might qualify for is called Supplemental Security Income, which is a vastly more restrictive, petty, cruel, wildly inadequate, and ruthlessly policed benefit.  I saw a post once, roughly “Did somebody scam SSI into giving them a benefit they didn’t deserve?  Good for them.  They just pulled off the most elaborate demeaning and time-consuming con ever, for a benefit that is not enough to survive on anywhere.”

SSI is that benefit you hear about where you lose it if you get married, and since your eligibility for Medicaid (need-based health insurance) in most states is tied to eligibility for SSI, you also lose medical care.  Strictly speaking, marriage doesn’t always cut off SSI altogether.  Depends on how much money your spouse makes, how many kids you have, etc.  I guarantee that math is at least as cruel and petty as you’re imagining.  And if two people who get SSI get married?  Both of them have their SSI significantly reduced, on the assumption their pooled resources make up the difference.  That might be true if SSI was more than $967 in most states, but it isn’t.  Double that and you’d still be living in wretched conditions, with rent as high as it is these days.

Back to SSDI, Social Security Disability.  Not as many restrictions, but you gotta understand them well.  People often get bounced from that program with a retroactive effective date, making it so they not only have no benefits but also suddenly owe the government like fifty to a hundred thousand dollars – potentially subject to the Treasury Offset Program which can jack your tax refund and any other money the government might owe to you, as well as garnish your wages if you manage to work through the pain.  As much as SSDI is more generous than SSI, it still averages less than the cost of rent in most places – while still just high enough to keep you from qualifying for Medicaid or food stamps!  That sweet spot where you can be thrown to the wolves in other ways.

I meant to be talking about the criteria.  Word on the street is that regardless of what’s happening, you are always denied the first time you apply for disability.  Is that true?  I don’t know.  But even getting to that decision – possibly a denial – SSA says takes an average of 230 days currently.  I’ve heard of it taking much longer than that as well.  The appeal process commonly stretches things out to two years, five years, or even more.

What is a disability?  A condition that is expected to last a year or longer or result in death, that prevents you from engaging in “substantial gainful activity.”  There’s a dollar figure on that – currently $1620 per month.  Higher than the cost of a one bedroom apartment in most of the USA, you say?  Yes indeed.  Considering how long it takes to get a decision, better make sure you’re not making more than the SGA figure during the application process, or you’ll get denied on those grounds.  But hey, if it looks like you’re intentionally limiting the amount of work that you’re doing to stay under that figure, does that mean you are actually capable of making more?  Might still get denied, depending on who’s making the final decision and their own personal biases.  Better to have a couch you can surf for the years it can take to get approved, rather than risk working.

Let’s say you have Down’s Syndrome but managed to get a part time gig and have been making a lil money while also drawing SSI.  Consider your paycheck halved basically, because for every two dollars you make over $65 bucks, one dollar comes out of your SSI.  But you’re also earning your way toward insured status for Social Security Disability by earning taxed wages.  Problem.  A requirement of SSI is that you have to apply for any Social Security type benefit you could possibly receive.  Get SSDI and all but twenty dollars of it count against your SSI amount.  SSI goes away, so does your Medicaid – and you don’t get on Medicare until you’ve been on SSDI for two years, so hope you don’t need medical help in the meanwhile.  That’s for “the Healthcare Marketplace” aka Obamacare, which is not great.  Not that any of it is great in this motherfuckin country, but even so, the difference between the cost of meds on Medicaid vs. Marketplace can be the difference between affording them or rationing them or just going without.

What happens when you get old?  The Social Security Administration must never have heard of intersectionality because disabled old people get no special consideration at all in the amount of money or medical coverage they receive.  Benefits are on the basis of age or disability, not both at the same time.

Of course, some people have a disability that leads to them being unable to face the withering scrutiny of being considered for a disability benefit in the first place, no matter how meager that benefit is, so those people must do without altogether.  This is the sort of thing that would be covered by a UBI program and massive expansion of rent control or low income housing, but eh…  We’re living in the world we’re living in, for now.

The internet is drowning in misinformation and no small amount of that is specifically about Social Security benefits – clickbait to get sad desperate people to look at shitty advertisements.  No, there is no plan to increase this or make any of these benefits at all less cruel and pathetic.  There’s often legislation proposing such, dying slowly in congressional committees year on year.

And many of the people who need these programs the most were told that firing Mexicans into the sun would save the government so much money that they could be showered with love and beneficence.  They bought that, they voted for corporate fascism, which aims to break these programs down to rubble and replace them with the kind of corporate schemes that have given us the worst healthcare in the developed world*.  Shit makes me tired.

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*I still can scarcely believe how evil UHC is, how the supposed “death panels” an industry shill ass-pulled against obamacare are actually a real life motherfucking existing thing, under capitalist medicine.  Buck buck buck.

Life List: Canada Goose

I may have mentioned this before, but on finding out the canada goose is a species complex with more than one in my neighborhood, I figured I’d never be able to clock the difference.  But I find there are two moderately easy ways to tell them apart, at least the two we get.

The canada goose proper is a big beast.  Not quite swan sized, but it holds its big long neck way up in the air.  Cackling goose might even have a neck that is proportionally just as long, maybe not, but they habitually have them crooked and short most of the time.  So if you were right next to the bird, in the kill zone, would it be able to stick its beak in your belly button and yard out all your guts?  Might be a canada goose.

They travel in a lot of the same places as cacklers, so you could feasibly see one after the other, illustrating the size difference for you.  I’ve probably done this, but don’t remember specifically.  The place tho, that would have been 1st Avenue in Federal Way, in the length between 320th and the WinCo.  Both can be found there, getting out in the street and occasionally getting hit.  There’s a “waterfowl crossing” sign on part of that road, appropriately.  The fools do not have appropriate respect for murder machines.

But something about these birds slows people down a lot more than squirrels, cats, raccoons, and opossums, which are seen as roadkill on that street more often.  Perhaps it is our primeval instinct to pay deference to the mighty dinosaur that once towered above our ancestors… That’s a joak yo.  #noevopsychbro

You know these birds.  Maybe not if you’re one of my readers from across an ocean, but they’re very well known.  Light brown body fading to pale grey-brown belly, black feet, very black neck and head with a bold white cheek mark which wraps around the chin.  The insides of their mouths are pink, which I think is kind of cute, aside from the teeth on the sides of their tongues.  Eww.  Despite the drabness of all things PNW, they are aesthetically pleasing animals.

And big.  Big, plentiful animals will be the first to go when the food supply gets fucked enough, so watch your web-toed steps, my dudes.  I am willing and curious, but not curious enough to do it until I need to.  Fingers crossed we don’t get that fucked by the dark absurdist comedy era of civilization we have entered.

The two places I see them the most are on the patch of grass between the WinCo and Southwest Campus Drive, and flying low by the huge rail yard that bisects South Auburn.  The scale difference is not something I’d ever be able to pick out when seeing them at elevation.  But much like seeing great blue herons in flight, it’s a treat to see a heftier class of dinosaur winging thru my world.

And geopolitically speaking, uh, #SlavaCanady?  If we went to war I have no doubt that Canada would win, just as Mexico would.  An underdog with sufficient resources can make it so costly for the big dog to finish the job that they have no choice but to give up at some point.  Honestly, I don’t expect shitler et al to ever get that foolish.  They may threaten to nuke some less populated cities to bully Canada into submission, if they get about 15% more weird-headed than they already are, but even that?  I doubt it.  It’s just going to be bluster and erratic trade until the fuckoes are out.

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RP by Comment 00006

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Cortellire Hall, an ivy-encrusted old brick dormitory for students at Ward Wizard Community College of Arms.  New students were getting unpacked or familiarizing themselves with the environment.  Returning students were either not back yet or being generally shy, tho a few began to emerge for various purposes.  Everyone was too busy trying to look cool to allow the older and the younger classmen to connect, tho a few intriguing glances may have transpired.  These were, after all, mostly young people, including many aspiring adventurers, and that meant wandering hearts.

The wings of the building were segregated by gender, with women and gender weirdos on one side, men on the other.  In this kooky world men were not wallowing in laziness engendered in them by fawning preferential treatment as children, so there was something resembling gender parity in the student numbers, at least.  There were gendered stereotypes related to professions and old-fashioned heteronormative ideas that if you let the sexes mingle too much, the resultant sexy times would detonate the universe.  That only had the effect of making it easier for gay people to wallow in gayness, feeding into some other stereotypes.

But unless one was trying to get one’s gayness in gear, the middle areas of the building were the most interesting for having more variety to the student bodies.  Sometimes you just want to see all the different people, hear the different voices.  Who are all of you?  What are you doing here?

Ilmardan found himself in the most central lounge besides the foyer, which was a similar size but more recessed in the building.  Gone were the chandeliers of the room with the most need to advertise its classiness; this lounge had buzzing fluorescent lights and corkboards advertising goods and services and shows, a few desks for study, more tables for meeting or eating, and few good-sized lounge chairs and couches.  Some students were getting snacks and beverages from the vending machines.

A mixed group of young people was there, more physically diverse than Div’s jocks had been.  The green-skinned dark elf theater kid called out to him, “Lord elf, well met! Would you like break bread with the commoners here? Or stale vending machine cookies, at least.”  It seemed like genuine interest.  Dark elves were ancient enemies of light elves (for all that ancient grudges mattered in modern and civilized places), but high elves like the Erenaths were somewhat neutral in that old fiasco.

That nymph boy with curly sky blue hair was at the table as well, and that black and white terrier dogman, a cockatoo-headed woman, and two human women too dorky to seem at all threatening.  It was a table of shorties, the cockatoo woman the largest in every way and still shorter than Ilmardan if the feathers weren’t included.  Some of them were a bit nervous some kind of elven bad blood was about to flare up, others more oblivious.

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Why Loan?

My dad was recently in one of those shitty situations people find themselves in, when dependent on social benefits – (hopefully temporarily) homeless, living in rented van, waiting on heel-draggers to approve his new place.  I sent him $700 thru paypal.  A loan?  No.  He doesn’t have to pay that back.  I don’t give a shit.

This is after my brother already loaned him $500.  I’m not going to ask my brother directly for reasons, but generally, why even have that be a loan?  What do you get out of getting that money back?

You know I am often close to the wire, came to y’all with hat in hand a few times.  That looks straightforwardly like charity and nobody expects charitable donations refunded (unless an org or individual was found to be scamming, etc.).

When you have a family member or friend in need of help and you are the person with something to spare, how is that different from charity to where you’d expect anything back?  You’re helping them but also adding to the stress of the moment the concern of how they’ll ultimately repay.

That’s easy for me to say when I owe my brother like $5000 on principal of $10000.  No resentment there; he ain’t charging interest or pressuring to get it faster, I ain’t asking for loan forgiveness.  Just saying if it was me, it probably would have been a gift instead of a loan.

The story of my adult life has been availing myself of the generosity of others over and over again, particularly getting extremely low rates on rent to live in somebody’s attic or basement.  Of getting a few grand from my dad when he got an inheritance, that I was able to use for rent for months.  When that ran out, I had accidentally’d into a relationship with a generous guy who let me move in with no expectation I’d pay anything until I could.

Maybe my dad suggested it be a loan and it wasn’t my brother’s call.  Pride thing.  I wouldn’t have that, personally.  I don’t love loans.  From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.

Betcha didn’t know donating to me made you a filthy commie.  No backsies now.

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sometimes u can give sometimes u gotta beg.  it’s the line.  right now i have a condo.  my employment has a sword of damocles hanging over it that might never drop, but if it does, will i be able to cobble together enough from less well-compensated work to pay the bills?  what if we lose the income of my husband’s mom, who lives with us?  will i be working three jobs, or losing my home?  for the moment, i’m in a place we own, with big-ass flowers.  a hoodie druid dans le jardin d’Eden, babey…

this will all be under water when florida is.  big sigh.

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Life List: Cackling Goose

Didja know most of the “canada geese” we see in Washington state are actually cackling geese, a smaller related species with fucken identical coloration?  There are two main tells: size, including a seemingly shorter neck they keep tucked closer to the body, and size of the group.  Cacklers mob deep.  Average group size of the canada geese I’ve seen is three to seven, average for cacklers six to a dozen or more.  I feel like these groups can come together and break apart with minimal fuss, and the larger the environment they’re in – say, a wide open field vs. the margins of a road – the larger the group.

It’s a good look for a beast.  Drab brown-grey body with an almost scale-like look where the pale margins of feathers create a pattern, contrasted with a head in full-on orca colors.  I have heard geese are violent and will mess you up, but I’d like to pick one up and hug it.  They’re one of those birds.  They look squeezably soft.

Geese are famous for shitting damn everywhere, slimy green-brown-grey.  I’ve read they make up for having less room in their guts than cows by eating their own feces to give the nutrients a second pass through the pipe.  Yum.  There’s supposedly only one species of bird that is functionally a ruminant, which is the hoatzin of Central and South America, so plant-eating emeffs gotta make do.

Still, respect.  Pretty animals make the world a nicer place, if a dookier one.

My question tho, do they really cackle?  I don’t think so.  Shit just sounds like the usual honking and squonking.  A proper cackle is the province of the Halloween witch.  Halloween witches say Ree Hee Hee, with optional additional Hees, like chickadees have a variable number of Dees.  Cryptkeepers are closely related organisms, but you can tell the difference if you listen closely.  Their call is more like Nyee Hee Hee, again with the optional gratuity of Hees.

There are birds that are proper cacklers.  I would’ve named these guys something else.  Junior canadas, maybe.

Happy Halloween everybody.  It’s time.

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Mellifluosity

Do you ever read some fancy old writing and wish you could express yourself in more lofty ways?  This feeling could as easily apply to reading old polemics by political activists and philosophers as to the art, the overly complex asides, the amusing constructions of somebody like Edgar Allen Poe or Henry James or Lord Byron.  On the other hand, I do suspect I lose some readers to such indulgences – and I barely dip my toe into those deep waters.

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I bore as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.  You, who know so well the depth of my character shall not suppose that I gave utterance to a threat, or …   … That’s all I have memorized.  I should really get the rest in my dome.  It’s such a fun piece of literary spite.  But also.  I’d like to talk like that.  Sometimes, a little bit, and sometimes.

This reminds me of a discussion I had with a chatbot.  Chatbots can “act,” can speak in whatever manner you suggest to them, but they tend to forget or lose their bead on the character.  Before deepseek became too overwhelmed to function most of the time, I managed to tease it into talking like an overly erudite cowboy – think Sam Elliott’s narrator character in Big Lebowski – for a good length of time.  But to keep it in character, I had to speak in the exact same way.  It was too challenging, but I might post it here sometime for amusement.

Every once in a while a post crosses my social media about lexical gaps.  Have you seen these?  There are word constructions in the English language, comprised of prefixes, suffixes, and altered vowels or consonants, that change the meaning of the root word in prescribed ways.  purchase, pre-purchase, purchaser, purchased, etc.  There are many words suggested by these constructions that are never actually used in English, and some may have legitimate use; these are the lexical gaps.  They can also sound very funny.  I have a half-baked ambition to produce ten-thousand of these in an excel spreadsheet (or more likely force my husband to), and pore over them for the kind of usefulness that could go viral.  Like, if I start using those oddball words consistently, I can get others to spread them for me – change language on purpose.

I’m not going anywhere in particular with this, just expressing some related ideas and feelings.  If any of you should take the fancy to parlay in the manner of an over-educated cowboy in the comments, sidle up to the post and suit thyself, pardners.

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Vampire Fury

Had a pretty elaborate dream, nothing noteworthy about it except how well I could remember it at the moment I woke up.  Some weekend days are really good for this because I don’t have to launch myself into work mode immediately upon waking, more time to possibly go back to sleep, feel things out.

That white dude from f/x’s Legion and that white lady from fox’s Bones starred in a movie that changed tones and subject repeatedly.  Started out as a gentle buddy comedy thing with the white people as part of a circle of friends, where Bones knew Legion’s wacky secret – he was a vampire.  But all that meant, at this point in the dream, is that he couldn’t eat food and had to drink blood instead.  So at the restaurant there were mild hijinks while he pretended to eat his food.  No risk of a blood frenzy or need to pretend the blood he smuggled in was tomato soup yet; his appetite was under control.  Maybe she was a medical professional and helped him get a supply from the hospital?

But he needed some kind of surgery that would involve anesthesia, and didn’t realize until moments before he went under that this would cause him to become an undead vampire.  Heretofore he had been a living vampire; dead vampires were more powerful but more edgy.  This was one of the few times in the dream where it was less movie and more first person.  I was him as I tried to put them off the procedure with mild protestations, but they stuck needles in my neck to knock me out.

I don’t know why but at the same time a kind of vampire apocalypse happened.  Elsewhere in the hospital, people were getting turned into vampires who would in turn slaughter other people, some amount of which would also become vampires.  Shades of 30 Days of Night or  … that other one I reviewed on here.  Shit, forgot the name.  No worm tongues tho.  When Legion woke up, he was suddenly more grey*, sometimes with glowing eyes.  He slaughtered the doctor and nurses for blood real fast, and busted out the door of the operating room in the form of a blood mist that congealed into his humanoid form instantly, and went stalking the halls for prey.

The dream lost track of its own rules and situation a number of times.  This is one of them.  Presumably he was on a rampage to get more victims for bloodsucking, but instead he just went into edgy action hero mode against the hospital vampires, killing them with kung fu and bunches of knives that it made no sense for him to have there**.  As he ran down the halls he’d sometimes be on all fours, bouncing from floor to wall to ceiling and back, blood tentacles splatting into place and bursting free wherever he came to land.

Meanwhile the vampire apocalypse wasn’t totally mindless.  Either the first vampires who came in were directing the new recruits, or the new recruits had spontaneously developed a crude pack mentality.  They were methodically opening every hiding place to get people to kill.  One of them found Bones and tried to kill her, but she successfully defended herself.  Was she now a vampire as well?  She wasn’t leaping around and wilding out, so I think she was supposed to be in living vampire mode.

Bones had to get to Legion or otherwise escape or help defeat the horde.  Legion had to beat the horde and get out, and either forgot about Bones or didn’t expect her to be stuck in the hospital as well.  The homies would never connect, never meet again, as my waking destroyed their little world.

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*I wonder if grey murder-vampire mode was inspired by the episode of Count Duckula where one of his ancestors was resurrected and wanted to kill people, and the butler kept mixing up which one was which, even tho the murder guy was obvious to kids watching the cartoon because he was an all-grey version of Duckula’s design.

**Another obvious influence for this is a scene from Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror.

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Purple Pill Poppers

Red pill, blue pill.  Why so biney, Morpheoose?

I’ve gotten self-righteous about it from time to time, as have most of the people on this network – bloggers and commenters included – but fundamentally I am an atheist because it feels real to me, based on my predilections in combination with my experience of life, and not because I was moved to this position by Reason and Enlightenment.  In the Matrix metaphor, to me, atheism is the blue pill – the world that has been “pulled over my eyes.”  Comforting, tho often a cold comfort.

What then would be the red pill?  Anything that was capable of overthrowing that idea of reality, replacing it with something new.  In The Matrix that would be the Truth.  In my ill-conceived thesis, I’ll just treat the red pill as an alternative view of the world, different from what you’ve previously known and not necessarily true.  With that being the idea, red pills are rare things indeed.

We have a sense of what’s real built on the stuff of our lives.  For some people that’s jesus and paranoia, for others, well, there’s a lot of ways people can be, regardless of how polls aim to simplify it all.  But across the board, we are not easily convinced of anything that falls outside our biases.  Some of those biases are good and fine, even factually correct like atheism, but that doesn’t keep them from being biases.  The bias is the thing you are predisposed to believe.  What can overcome this?

Believers in society as a great discourse between rational minds, they’d say debate and discussion can overcome incorrect beliefs.  The truth will inherently emerge from a true socratic dialogue.  Does it though?  Seems to me we almost never change what we believe to something directly opposite.  Those who went from cookie-baking grandma to goose-stepping Q-creep were building on whatever their baseline was.  The flaw was there, waiting to be nurtured.

The gradual creep of US fascism over the last hundred years, while it involved intentional propaganda by malevolent masterminds, those masterminds themselves were thralls of propaganda they’d been fed, as much subject to manipulation as anyone they sought to manipulate.  We’re all just following a course of social entropy.

Within that, there are ways to bend people, to ourselves get bent.  Like that fascist grandma, take a pre-existing belief or point of view and elaborate on it, build it into something new.  Not a red pill because it’s not a total jailbreak of the original firmware, call it a purple pill.

In The Matrix, Joey tha Rat had the same choice about what to believe that Neo was given, chose red, then changed his mind.  Wouldn’t that be nice?  Change your beliefs on a dime, to whatever felt the best in a given moment?  Not to say I want to change my own beliefs, just using a lil’ reflection on my relationship to those beliefs as a way to understand some people whose thoughts are nigh unimaginable.  Do your own research, as they say.

What I’m interested in, like anybody else living in a society that isn’t living up to their ideals, is how to alter the beliefs of those who seem dead set on ruining everything.  They got purplepilled into that point of view, and maybe we can purplepill them into a point of view that is less ruinous somehow.  It’s not like looking for a “weak spot” to exploit.  Those that indoctrinated them into fascism did not seek to dominate, they fertilized the soil and watered it.  It’s a process of nurturing, I think.

What is left in a fascist that is good enough to build on, to encourage them to become something less bad?  I don’t know, but it could be worth thinking about.

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