Racist Against the Irish

Is my subconscious mind racist against the Irish?  Insert “it’s more likely than you think” meme.

So I was dreaming stuff inspired by my actual childhood (a lot of walking around with my siblings punctuated with tedious domestic strife), but mashed up with TV’s The Sopranos – a show I only have a pop culture impression of.  Dad was fully Tony, the rest of us were characters that didn’t exist.  My sister was getting a ride from one of Tony’s boys, who was trying to molest her even tho I was in the backseat.  We tussled a bit, then parted ways.  Tony beat him to death while feeling slightly bad about it.

They leave a calling card for some Asian gangsters to frame him and dump the body in a crowded police precinct lobby.  For some reason the crowd broke into song.  No dance, but they did do a light show with laser pointers.

Cut to some kind of meeting with the Irish mob, led by a modern “Ma Kelly” type.  She praises Tony’s cooking  (she was holding a calzone) and then intros her daughter with, “All rise, for ‘God Save America,’ from the musical ‘Annie’.” (nonexistent)  The girl starts lalala-ing the intro for uncomfortable minutes, until her mom interrupts with, “why don’t you sing something nice by Metallica?”  She meant to imply Metallica’s (nonexistent) patriotic song, and cut the mic when the girl guessed wrong (“Sad but True”).

This all took place in a sportball field by an underpass, with colorful fall leaves strewn about.  The mostly Irish audience were falling down drunk, like in another dream where they had to fight ninjas and were so insensate they didn’t mind getting slaughtered.

At the end of the dream I’m Junior Soprano again, waiting in a car with my sister, and I tell her, “It’s great how you don’t kill people who bother you.”  She’s dismissive but I’m like, “You and I both know that’s a real skill, c’mon.”

The End.

Racism against the Irish in the USA isn’t the same thing it used to be, of course.  Irish people were allowed to be considered white and that’s all she wrote.  Now they’re actually part of a problem like the rest of us honkies.  Aside from some very weird anticatholic throwbacks (are there any left since Jack Chick died?), nobody here is racist against them in a meaningful way.

Except me when I’m asleep.  What’s up with that?
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still atheist

if there is a god that is good, it would not condemn people for the crime of disbelieving the unbelievable.  if there is a god that condemns people for disbelieving the unbelievable, that is an evil god, and the very bravest way you can live your life is in utter defiance of such a being.  amirite ladies?  old idea, i know, but worth stating out loud from time to time.

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meet great american satan!

anybody going to be near the northeast corner of the winco parking lot in federal way washington within a half hour?  you could meet great american satan, in a pitiful state, waiting for further dental treatments.  act now while supplies last!

Dream Lover

Had a dream where a young lady janitor was trying to flirt with me because she was deformed and too eager to please anyone who was not totally rude about it.  I was trying to politely move along.  This trend in my dreams is feeling narcissistic.  Anyhow, she was green-skinned and had three eyes, tho the details of her face changed a bit from one moment to the next, and while janitorial uniforms are getting less formal these days, the black mesh shirt over black X pasties was a bit wacky.  The outdated goth style might have influenced me to wake up with “More” by Sisters of Mercy in my head.  Weird morning.

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memos to self

thinking things, not anything sensible enough to call a post, but stuff i might want to remember.  call it memos to myself.

one – being manicesque last night when i shoulda been sleeping, i was thinking again about how the raddest music is all epic bombastic, but not sustainable for a full album.  if i ever tried to make music, it might be fun to take those over the top songs from different genres and try to match their level of ruckus, make a multi-genre showcase of over-the-top musique.  could digital underground’s doowutchyalike, bonnie tyler’s i need a hero, and judas priest’s sentinel ever share an album?

two – find out if fables is anything i’d ever want to do anything with, bc hey, free IP lol.

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Pardon Me, Ma’am…

Content Warnings:  Ableist Nightmare Stuff, Unwanted Advances.

Had a dream where a man on the bus confessed his love for me.  This was nightmarish, though I wasn’t feeling the elevated fear typical of that dream state.  The man was very deformed, of course.  He had a face on the back of his head that he spoke with.  Both faces were partially skeletonized with missing noses, and one was also missing eyeballs.

The bus isn’t a good place to holler at a stranger, I think.  My brains were taking that lesson and dialing it up to a million.  I’m just taking note of this in case I want to incorporate elements of it into horror writing someday.

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Am I a Homeowner?

Am I a homeowner?  Or does the home own me?  Still got like $65,000 in student debt, to which now is added $280,000 more in mortgage on a weenie little condo.  My household has a zany scheme to pay the condo off in eleven years, but you know how zany schemes go.  Any given thing goes wrong and that never gets paid off at all, just ends up being a permanent interest treadmill for the last owner standing.

One of these days, I’ll sell the screenplay to Gun Lemurs for a half million and knock out all my debts at once.  ONE. OF. THESE. DAAAAAAYS.

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Hierarchical Perspective

There’s this concept in art history called hierarchical perspective.  As I recall, before the rules of realistic perspective were worked out from observation of reality, artists would draw character’s and object’s size relationships based on how important they were.  Jesus lookin’ fifty feet tall next to a king who in turn dwarfs the peasantry, that sorta shit.

I wish I had a higher quality version of this music video.  I like it a lot.  The tiny mans always make me feel some type of way about art history.  Or maybe I’m just a giantess fetishist.

 

Day-in-a-Life -Posting

Life’s so real, bro.  Life’s so real.

Some of what I regard as the best content on my bloge is just talking about a random day I had, with bits of how it connects to larger themes of life for all of us.  It’s “deep” and probably a skosh pretentious, but these posts do reflect how I genuinely think and feel about the days in question.

I’m curious, what do you think about those kind of posts, broadly?  Not about one of them in particular, just in general.

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Floating Away on a Strange Day

Content Warnings: Homicidal Ideation, Capitalism, The Housing Market

So I’m looking to buy a house for the first time.  A butterfly just fluttered by.  What was I saying?  Oh yes.  I’m looking to buy a house for the first time or, rather, a condo – because it’s the only thing in our price range that isn’t a dilapidated pile of weirdness or vacant lot.  This search has brought me back to my hometown – not the place I was born, but the place that I spent most of my formative years, from junior high through high school, to fast food and living in attics and basements in my twenties.

I have an appointment today for viewing a place at 4:00.  It’s on a street where I used to live, a street I walked many many times.  I can remember losing some drawings there on a snowy night, retracing my steps, and finding them in a puddle with half the water soluble ink washed away.  This was the street I lived on when my oldest nieces were taken from the family by CPS and went through very bad times.

But I might live here again, in a condo this time.  I say here, because as I compose this, I am in that neighborhood.  But I want to start this story earlier in the day.  I work from home three days a week and go to the office on Tuesdays.  We’re required to come to the office on a different specific day of the week for an in-person meetingcovid spreader event once every three months, and that happened yesterday.  So my laptop was packed up in a bag this morning and I didn’t feel like unpacking it just to do a half day – I also have Monday off because of a doctor’s appointment – so I took the whole day off from work.

To save a little dosh I took the bus instead of an uber.  The first step of that trek was a fifteen minute walk along a busy thoroughfare in my grey smear of a suburb, no sidewalks.  Across the street is the chamber of commerce building, which is in the bottom of a paved ravine for some reason.  The sign looks like it’s falling, because it’s on the ramp down to that pit.  It just struck me as a fun metaphor for capitalism, especially contrasted with the side of the street I was on.  There is a vacant patch of land that is, for the moment, overgrown with trees and high bushes.  There are trails there, not unlike the trails deer create as they push their bodies through the woods, but these were created by homeless humans, of the losers in our shitty game.

I’m a different tier of loser in that shitty game.  The cost of rent here is jumping so quickly that the only way to have any hope for the future is to buy a home fucking immediately.  High as interest rates on home loans are, it will be the equivalent of taking a two hundred dollar rent hike one year in exchange for not having a hundred-plus hike annually forever.  I’m finally in a position to make this happen.  Five years ago I wasn’t, and prices then were half what they are now.  It’s kind of miserable to see what I missed out on.  Anyway,

I got on the bus, took it down to my hometown, got off at the transit station.  A little old lady – probably not ten years older than me – was trembling on the platform, in the bright sunlight.  I smiled at her through my n95, hoping in a moment that my eyes had been smiling.  Then again, maybe I shouldn’t have done that, because she had some words for me.  I can’t tell if she was begging for change or telling me I’m gross, because her language was a mysterious babble, inaudible above the noise of train tracks and freeway nearby.  Even though there was plenty of room for her to sit somewhere else or move away from where I was sitting, she just stood there, trembling away, a few feet in front of me.  I got uncomfortable of that awkwardness and moved myself to another bench.

The bus from the transit center to my old neighborhood runs half hourly.  Could be worse.  There were just a few people on it, cute-looking gay &/or polynesian mans, and they got off before I did.  Then I was there, on the street of my grody late childhood.

There are a lot of mobile home parks down here – more than I remembered.  The tree where our siamese cat got stuck has been cut down, and the fence hole we used for a shortcut to the 7-eleven had been sealed up, and covered with bushes.  I got to the place too early, and so I set out to time how long it takes to get from the condo we are considering to the nearest grocery store and park.  Spoiler, twenty-five and twelve minutes respectively.

Along the way to the grocery store, there’s a spot where you can turn left or right.  Right keeps you going towards the grocery store, left now leads to a private freight road that wasn’t there when I was young.  But also in that direction, there was once a way you could walk down to the river over some rough rocks and thorny bushes, and I wanted to see if you could still do that.

That was a mistake.  It’s private property, but you can tell it’s never attended by anybody.  The sign says the police are contracted to enforce against trespassers, but where were the cops?  Hell if I know.  The fence was smashed down around some mossy boulders.  I went inside.

The way down to the river was just clear enough that I could tell people still used it regularly, but it was grown over.  Based on the vines I suspect nobody had used it for at least a few days.  It’s a twisty hike through blackberry bushes, bamboo, spider webs, fallen logs, abandoned mattresses, emptied beer kegs and cans, used condoms, syringes…  All the good things in life.  When I reached the water I could see that it was white for some reason.

The last time I went down there I was probably seventeen?  There was a lot less overgrowth back then, and you can see garter snakes slipping in and out of the boulders on the hillside.  Around that time my sister got pregnant, and I knew she was going to destroy the life of any child that she gave birth to.  For years after she proved that to be true, I used to (creepily) tell people that I should have brought her down to that piece of river and put a knife in her heart.  Prebortion.  I never did that, so several lives were ruined, and my own was spared.  I used to regret that more.  Note: If your siblings have counted not murdering you as one of their life’s regrets, you done fucked up.

I crawled out of that disgusting patch of land, all my preparations to look presentable gone to waste.  The spider webs glued all sorts of strange things to my new black pants and they won’t come off.

I walked on this hot shitty day to the local grocery store.  It had changed from albertson’s to safeway, and the AC was not adequate to cool me down after all that exercise.  Sticking my head in every cooler and getting it misted in the produce section, also totally useless.  I went looking for a restaurant with adequate AC, hit up the mcdonald’s and the subway, before I settled on a Mexican bar & grill that was one of the last businesses standing from my youth.

The counter was sticky but you could get cold beverages and it was on the shadowy side of the strip mall, so cooler than the franchises in the front lot.  I watched a rebroadcast ladies soccer game from several years ago and consumed a few non-alcoholic margaritas before I set out again.  Now I’ve timed the trip from the condo to the nearest park, and I’m laying on a metal bench in a large gazebo…

Coming back to this post after having toured the condo and come home, and having put in our bid.  It’s got central AC and the price is as right as possible given the circumstances.  If anyone outbids us though, we have to keep looking.  No wiggle room in our budget.  I feel partially cooked, even without significant sunburn, like I’m on a grade to the status ailment “sweet juicy meat falling off the bone.”

Eager for this journey to reach an end.
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