Inspired Notions vs. Pathological Thoughts

Lately I’ve been on a kick.  People get on kicks.  Shallow thinkers like myself, haha.  We start to view everything through a certain lens and over-apply the notion.  I’ve seen pundits do this, back when I read news.  Anyway, my kick is “alive people energy.”  I’ve been thinking all creative endeavors are improved by investing them with the sense of an active continuous idea within.  Like a given scene, a given chapter, a given illustration or piece of music, at different steps within your process it’s good to step back and hold the whole idea in your head at once, run through it, ask yourself if it feels alive.  Like you conceived the whole idea like a deep breath and let it out in a harmonious flow as a single exhalation.  If that makes sense.  You could do this on your first draft, but editing can break that energy, make stuff feel choppy and lethargic, so during editing you want to stop from time to time and make sure your art is still alive.  Bring the alive people energy.

On the other hand, I have been considering recently if I might be mildly bipolar, and this feels like the kind of bullshit an art teacher would say to a class while standing on his desk, before going home and contemplating suicide, string music filling his studio apartment, his cats unfed and too weary to complain.  But worry not, my Hecubus will be fed and I don’t know from classical music.  Also didn’t some tech billionaire creep make an erotic message to a mistress calling her “alive girl”?  This feels like a related disease.

The most important thing to come of this post, I think, will be that it takes the Thursday meme post off the top of my feed before it becomes Friday.  Think on that.

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Haven’t been very active lately on here.  Or have I?  Maybe the fact I’m not reading other blogs, not up on what my FThBlggies are up to, that makes it feel like I’m out of touch.  &/or out of time.  But I’m out of my head when you’re not around, oh oh oh, oh oh OH.  By the way, that Hall & Oates track is part of an anime-inspired Thursday meme.  There is another Thursday meme inspired by another anime, with Asuka Evangelion wishing you a Feliz Jueves.  It’s only Tuesday though, no time for that.  I’m OUT of TIME.

There’s a song by the Dead Milkmen called Dean’s Dream, from their album Big Lizard in My Backyard.  I think it’s about the way a dream feels significant and you want to tell somebody about it, but that sense of importance cannot be communicated, and ultimately dreams are silly garbage.  The climax of the dream in that song is, “We argue and fight and one pulls a knife;  He hits me in the back but I’m alright.”  I had a dream my boyfriend was in one of the crushed floors of a partially collapsed building and I ignored the warnings to go in and save him.  He was just standing there, alright, in his purple flannel shirt.  He’s alright.

On an unrelated thing, I think it’s very possible my dying words will be, “I don’t feel so good Mistew Stawk.”  After that moment in Marvel’s TV’s Revengers: The Semi-Finals, I quickly came to feel profoundly amused by that supposedly serious moment in the movie.  Even the idea that for some other people the drama landed, genuinely choked them up for a moment, felt real … it just adds to the hilarity somehow.

Now, however many years later, whenever I have low blood sugar or am otherwise wobblin’ or wimpy, that’s the first thing that springs to my lips.  Ergo, if I’m having a heart attack and it’s one of those stealthy boys where you just feel out of sorts until it’s Die Time, I’ll probably say the line right before my entire life is rendered a joke.  Correct and appropriate, I suppose.

I’m starting to think I’m mildly bipolar, which is funny I never realized that before, given my brother is medicated for that and our father is a straight cartoon character off that diagnosis.  But it’s OK.  I just get delusions of grandeur sometimes.  They’re probably a good thing, when they don’t keep me up nights.

This is pretty much the epitome of Random Thoughts from Satan posts.  I hope it wasn’t a waste of your time.  Have a sweet day.

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Beaten but Possibly Not Unbowed

Somebody beat me to the publication of a translation of the demonology in the Fasciculus rerum Geomanticarum, which readers may recall I was playing at in 2020.  That does take some of the already pathetic wind out of my sails on that backburnered project, but I don’t think my work will be without merit as an alternative look at the same material.  There are judgement calls to be made in translation, you see, and I don’t agree with all of this translator’s choices.  Plus I intend to illustrate my book.

I don’t know.  Maybe I do it, maybe I don’t.  I’m not saying I’m giving up just yet.  We’ll see.

A highlight of that translator’s introductory section, for me, was the suggestion differences in the descriptions of the same demons from various grimoires could be the result of actual experience of communion with those creatures.  I thought that was charming.  My take on the same issues cannot help but be less generous to the possibility supernatural phenomena.  Philosophical materialism is in my bones.

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Dreamposting – Learning to Fly

Had a dream lately where I, once again, remembered I can fly.  Some people asked me how and I showed them.  We flew around grubby slightly apocalyptic version of downtown Seattle a while.  In my flight dreams, I basically jump hard and follow it up by pushing my center of gravity in my preferred direction.  It has stops and starts like the swimming of jellyfish.  When you can fly, what’s it like?

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Dreamposting – Institutional Violence

Content Warnings:  Unreality, Starvation, Violence, Torture, Animal Suffering, Animal Death.

I have access to sensitive information at work and Saturday morning I had a dream that I went to prison for accidentally disclosing some of that information improperly.  This prison wasn’t a very secure structure but it was a given that if we tried to escape we’d die, so we didn’t.  I didn’t know anybody and everything felt very dangerous.

They gave us food that was amazingly vile.  There were hard boiled eggs made from some kind of reconstituted matter, the whites breaking up into irregular chunks, the yolks green and slimy – possibly rotten.  The bread was basically cardboard with some tiny amount of food like substance in the press to make it easier to swallow.

I couldn’t eat the food for two days and began starving to death, which is silly because how does two days pass in a dream and also that’s not long enough to starve to death.  I expressed my suffering and a prison guard attended to me.

She led me outside.  For some reason she forgot that my problem was hunger and led me to a highway underpass where feral cats lived.  She wanted to give me a cat for companionship and dug out a large but bony cat, long-haired grey tabby and dirty.  The cat was amenable but I thought it would for sure be hurt or killed in the prison, or even by the guard that was with me.  She was brutish and seemed to bristle with barely restrained violence, even with words of kindness in her mouth.

I declined the cat and she started picking up others from the same stretch of dirty highway grass.  I knew she was going to hurt them and discouraged her with each in turn.  I knew she wasn’t going to leave until she had killed one of the kittens.  At last she came to a kitten that had been born conjoined at the head to a dead twin.  I nodded consent and she used some kind of implement to split the heads apart.  I woke shortly after.

 

Sunday (today) I had a much better dream.  I was working in a generic open office space, no cubes.  Funny it’s never my actual office but then, I’ve been telecommuting half the years I’ve worked there.

I overheard somebody dealing with a supervisor, where they needed to get something signed off by a specific person.  That person was unconscious or incapacitated, but still sitting at a desk there.  The supervisor cheesed the letter of the policy by holding a pen in the unconscious guy’s hand and writing his signature with it.

I grew suspicious.  Somehow I figured out that sus sup was actually a Russian spy, along with one accomplice.  They had a small external hard drive they could use to defraud millions of americans and we had to get it back.  I yelled for help and everyone in the office scrambled to catch the spies or at least get the hard drive back.  Or so I thought.  They were acting like dream people, where you ask them to do one thing and they can’t comprehend it or manifest the agency to do it.

Frustrated, I took off in pursuit.  The supervisor spy’s accomplice got away, but I ended up in a tense upstairs downstairs elevators and parking garages pursuit with her.  By that point in the dream I was a woman, I think, so it’s not too weird I got into a big fist fight with her.  She was a skinny little blonde lady over thirty, TV actor energy, but she could rumble in tha jungle.

The whole time we were having some kind of philosophical debate about how it’s wrong to do crimes, with moments of “if only you knew the power of the dark side.”  It was perversely romantic.  By the time the alarm woke me up, I was feeling some affection for my foe.  Enemies to lovers trope, haha.  I like action dreams.
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Got No Memes

I want to do something for International Down With Cis Day, but ideas fail me.  Every year since I started at FtB has gotten materially worse for trans rights and the well-being and safety of trans lives.  I hold the shitbird governor of Texas as especially emblematic of the whole situation – blatantly using open bigotry to score political points, bible bashing while using rhetoric generously provided by terfs, pushing for the worst anti-LGBT policies this side of China or Iran.

So I think, meme his ass.  Political cartoon like this was 1922.  But nothing comes to mind except depictions of him on the receiving end of terrible violence – you know, madame guillotine putting in an appearance, somebody setting him on fire and kicking him off a cliff, etc.  Not funny, not a good look.

Hm…

https://www.google.com/search?q=respect+existence+or+expect+resistance+trans

Not bad, but still feels wildly inadequate to the struggle right now.  We’ll see what we’ll see.

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Freedom So Dear

Americans know what’s best for themselves.  I don’t know why I have
Particularly contrary epiphanies around this time of year with such
Regularity, but bear with me yet again.  All this time I’d been thinking
I was among the wise ones, getting vaccines, using a mask, all that
Loser kinda shit.  But who was I to stand in the way of nature, and to
Frustrate God’s designs?  We’ve been proven wrong by this plague
Of COVID-19.  Nobody predicted the disease would be able to persist
Over the long term like this, nobody had any wisdom that could have
Left us COVID free.  This was always going to be the outcome and
Satan sez protecting yourself, your country, and your loved ones
— should always be optional.  We can’t do any better than
—— nature and should live like beasts.  Beasts 4 Jesus.
——— Amen.
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I Stopped Reading FtB

Nobody in my immediate life is affected in any way by abortion bans.  We don’t have the equipment for pregnancy or it doesn’t work – not a functional uterus in sight.  And yet somehow reading about the “kill the doctors and the patients” anti-abortion bill from Texas was the final straw for me being able to follow news.  I just can’t handle it anymore.  The most cogent response I have to that is bargling death threats.

“What can men do against such reckless hate?” asked King Theo in nerdwad movie.  To the people capable of engaging with these fights, I say “Long live the fighters” (from different nerdwad movie).  Good job, people.  You’ll always have my votes and other support as possible.  Right now, I can’t handle reading about that or anything else wrong with the world.  It’s gotten too stressful again.

I don’t follow political tumblrs though I catch dribs and drabs of politics on there.  On FtB there’s always a blog on top of the newest fuckshit, and as long as I have a sidebar of “Recent Articles on FtB” I’m going to compulsively read all of them until blood shoots out of my ears.  I blocked that element in my browser, and I likewise I left the FtB discord for the same reason.

That also means I’m missing any non-stressful news or cheeky posts.  If anyone sees anything fun elsewhere on FtB don’t link me to it, but give me the short version in the comments here, if you’ve got a moment.  I don’t want to look directly at the articles and see the titles of the “Previous” and “Next” ones.  And thanks.

As for my own posts, I’ll continue the little random things I’ve been doing, though without news input, it will be less topical.  Also less despairing and angry!  So that’s something to look forward to.

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