Ninjutsu, Tears, and Inexpert Musical Guff

This should be several posts worth of material but I just don’t feel like doing that right now.  First up, it’s grocery Sunday as I compose this.  Just got back from running around getting everything.  In support of the “no ethical consumption under late stage capitalism” kick I’ve been on, I glanced at the ingredients of some shit I was buying, and saw it had the orangutan-extincting palm oil in it.

But I needed that shit so what the fuck am I going to do?  Become a citizen journalist and track down every alternative and order it from Sri Lanka and pray that I didn’t miss any fine details about the exploitation involved in that particular fucking product?  No answer required, thanks.

On lighter note, I noticed a kid flopped on the floor where carts could hit him and I said, “don’t do that, baby.”  When he noticed someone noticed him, he got up and did a naruto run to show off.  Are five year olds still familiar with Naruto at this point?  Feel free to answer that one.

Since covid my mother-in-law and i have been reducing our exposure by taking turns soloing the shopping at a given store.  I get the stuff at walmrat and winco while she chills in the car, she goes into treacherous joseph’s while I chill in that parking lot, then I go into safeyway if it’s that kind of week.

To survive sun on the windows I put up the silver windshield screen and get side windows down.  I play music, and today was raucous punk, until l overheard a young lady from a nearby car yell “shut the fuck up!  i can’t even with you right now” and start to cry.

She was arguing with her dude.  I didn’t look, but going off the sense of hearing alone, there were kids in the car, and to let her have a chance to recover, dude walked them off to some store or another.  That left me in an awkward parking lot with her.

Now Richard Hell and the Voidoids are no type of crying soundtrack, but if I switched tunes she might notice she was heard and feel worse.  On the other hand, I also no longer wanted to listen to puncous rauc.  I switched to “Crying” by Roy Orbison, which may have been a bad choice, but my greed to soothe myself won out.  I couldn’t hear her anymore anyway.  Maybe she rolled her windows up, doing the neglected dog thing as a form of self harm.

So I’m listening to Roy and I transition to Del Shannon, “Little Runaway,” you know.  That song is incredible.  When I was a kid listening to it on the oldies station I was just amused by it, but over the years, I’ve come to regard it as a total classic.  Unlike most Roy Orbison songs, I unreservedly love the instrumentation on it.

I know jack about music history but I did know that instrument on the solo was the legendary musitron, invented by the guy playing it, who co-wrote the song with Shannon.  Forgot his name tho, that was Max Crook.

You may notice the (other) kick I’ve been on about evaluating a song’s technical merit by way of covers.  The solo is so perfect on musitron, how does it hold up on other instruments?  Check ’em out…

Hope the lady is having a better day now.  Mine ain’t too shabby.

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Rain O’er Me

rain clouds will ask if you wanted your ground drowned and not wait for you to say yes.  rain clouds will wet your city like that one action movie where some guys did a heist during a flood then had to get chased by cops on jetskis.  what was that shit called?

rain clouds will be, like, “i see a brown lawn and i want it painted green.  bright-assed with the chloroplasts, and mushrooms in between.”  i wish i could stay up late and turn off the electronic white noise and listen to my roof get taken to pound town.  get down, make love.

alas, work beckons.  time to squeak in my thirty-six winks.  i’ll get the full forty when i’m dead.  rain will turn my ashes to clay.  good night, i say as if you aren’t going to be reading this when the sun is up.  good night.

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I Remember the Loving Vampyress

I don’t wanna bother anyone who doesn’t wanna be bothered, and the person I’m about to mention, when last seen, was on some “don’t bother me” business, but in this moment I cannot resist (besides they’re ungooglable so i’m probably in the clear).  Many years ago now, I was in a contentious comment section, when a young lady possibly having a manic episode got into frantic posting, which I matched.  But should I have?  Probably best to help calm people down when they get too hype.

Especially when it’s a person who makes themself too visible, gets embarrassed, and deletes their existence.  I think she changed her name like three times in the course of that conversation alone.  Somehow I ended up seeing a blog of her writing elsewhere, and it was erotic in nature – again to be disappeared, perhaps from a fit of embarrassment.  I don’t know how much of what I remember is vibes and how much was revelations, but I believe she was very poor – possibly in public housing.  I could say a bit more, but obviously she didn’t want to be known.

The Vampyress is immortal but exists at the outer limit of entropy, capturing the imaginations particularly of those who are haunted by mortality and living in the half-light of gothery.  The Vampyress drinks of the well of life until there is nothing left; in the case of her erotic fiction self-insert that wasn’t just blood.

I hope she’s alive and well in this World of Darkness, and the same for all my long-absent commenters – especially the few who I have reasonable cause to suspect are no longer alive.  Let that reasoning be wrong.  If you see this and know who you are, drop an anonymous comment, or too many comments by various names until you run away blushing and deleted once again.  I won’t forget you.

(EDIT TO ADD … don’t read too much into the lyrics of this song, just a feelin is all …)

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Everything’s Comin’ Up Poison

The foxgloves are big in my yard.  Not as big or numerous as last year, but bigger than they’re supposed to be.  They really love the soil in that corner for some reason.  Digitalis babeyyy.  Meanwhile my husband has acquired a datura plant, also known as the jimsonweed, thornapple, devil’s trumpet – a nightshade cousin dripping with psychoactive and deadly scopolamine.

Anyone remember “Back in the Saddle Again”?  No, not that one.  We’re not ridin’ into town tonight lord by the light of the moon, lookin’ for suki jo at crazy horse saloon.  I mean the one out where a friend is a friend.  Anyway, old Gene said the longhorn cattle feed on the lowly jimsonweed, and I say he’s a very bad cowboy if he’s letting that happen.  Song is supposed to be happy, it should be like “longhorn cattle feed, keep ’em off the jimsonweed.”

My husband regaled me with funny and/or spooky passages from a subreddit about datura.  Probably ended up there because I was questioning his estimation of risk vs aesthetics, like, you really want that back there?  Go ahead and creep yourself out with the drug stories.  High school fun.

As for the plant’s plantliness, it has allelopathic properties and likes to spread so he’s keeping it in a pot.  No flowers yet, but we shall see.  On the subject of the foxgloves, they’re fun to look at, but wildly productive with the seeds, and they take up a lot of space.  I’d say it’s less like he’s gardening them and more like he’s allowing them to exist, for now.  I’ve seen them running wild by the 320th / I-5 overpass into Federal Way.  Maybe it’s an invasive plant’s world these days, and we’re just living in it.

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Brainjackin: Sad Endings

This one’s a little bit of a journey so bear with me.  There was a window in my twenties when I lived with my dad and his girlfriend and her two kids.  I don’t remember if this was before my brother went into the army and left the state, or after he got back to finish his last tour here, but he was around.  Hang on, was I twenty yet?  Whatever.  Throw in Bad-Moustache-Having Guy and My Tech Support Guy to round out the picture.  That lady -the girlfriend aforementioned- had a species of BPD that allowed her to run a very clean household – the kind of clean that facilitated parties.

So we arranged a movie night with big snacks and a lot of DVDs in the queue.  Or were they VHS?  Shit, I think they were VHS tapes.  Way back.  In the most memorable moment of the evening, some guy was being burned alive in Braveheart and two of the attendees said in unison, “and it stays crunchy, even in milk!”  How did they think of the same rude application of pop culture reference for that image?  We partook of all the same media, so not impossible, but it was unlikely enough to amuse.

The most consequential moment of the night came later.  I had the most staying power and after everyone else had left or gone to sleep, I feel like it was after two AM?, I popped in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.  I felt big feelings, beginning to end.  I’m mostly incapable of crying, but I cried a little.  I recognize now that you should not trust how you felt about a movie if you were watching it before dawn, but the damage was done.  I got a tattoo of the movie’s logo on my wrist.  At least it wasn’t Sister Act 2.

I still have that tattoo, but it’s gone through a few changes over the years.  First up, it was originally laid down in red ink, over the warnings of the tattoo artist.  Red is very prone to fading and fade it did.  Probably didn’t help that the heavy-handed ex-con put a lot of scar tissue into the cut, and some pigment came off with scabs.  But the symbol, where it appeared in the movie, was usually spattered and smeary.  Illegibility suited it, but years of fading later, an art school acquaintance of my husband was apprenticed to be a tattoo artist and needed victims for practice, so it seemed like time to get it touched up.

This was the friend who valiantly defended my husband and others from an art school clown attack, and she used to wear a t-shirt with JESUS IS A CUNT in giant lettering, so genial to us.  However, I cannot trust her taste in music since that occasion, because her mix at the tattoo parlor included post-Danzig Misfits – that is to say, christian Misfits, and they genuinely did sound christian.  I might be nearly tone deaf, but I can tell the difference between Creed and Nickelback.  They both suck, but the christianity of the former has a certain quality to it, better identifiable to musicians, but detectable to a discerning lay person, and I detected the shit out of it.

Anyway, the work was a little dubious and the tattoo is still a mess.  But the important thing, to my husband’s reckoning, is that it doesn’t look like a stamp from the club that I’d neglected to wash off the next day.

The important thing about all that is to say that 12 Monkeys had a sad ending and may have been the first sad ending I was ever able to appreciate.  I don’t think that speaks well to Terry Gilliam’s talents, because I was the kind of basic bitch that was not at all ready for genuinely sad endings.  He communicated this sense that Cole’s life in a time loop was a kind of immortality.  He had struggles and died young, but in the course of that life, he experienced love – and that somehow vindicated -or at least mitigated- the tragedy.  Basically, it was a fake sad ending.

Flash forward to the earliest days of going out with my husband, when he introduced me to the works of Kiyoshi Kurosawa – particularly the movies Cure and Sakebi.  Those movies show horrible events ending horribly, but still work as art, because they’re the sad mask in that ancient symbol of drama.  Tragedy is a legitimate art form that I never appreciated.  Even when first introduced to Kurosawa, I wasn’t ready for it.  I told him as much – “I recognize the artistic power of this work, but it feels like it isn’t for me.”  I wanted to see stories about heroes overcoming hardship, lovers getting to love.  Happy Endings, basically.  One of those drama masks was The Grim and Grimy One, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

But the movies stayed with me, in my mind.  I couldn’t forget them because they had that power, and from the memories of them alone, I came to appreciate tragedy in a way that I never had before.  The culmination of this came a few years ago, the first time that I ever wrote a tragic ending.  Did it work?  Was it as good as the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa?

Surely not, but it made more sense for the piece than a happy ending would have.  I served the story at the expense of the happiness of my little babies.  That’s artistic growth, and I owe it to my husband, which makes this another instance of Brainjackin’™.  Thanks man!

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Five Holidays in a Row?

if u go obscure enough u can have a holiday every day of the year, but at the moment a few notable &/or trendy ones are clustering in a fun way.

Friday the 13th

Pi Day 3.14etc

The Ides of March

? no notables

St. Patrick’s Day

to fill the gap tomorrow, you can take your pick.  panda day looks like a good time.  curl crush day, when u appreciate the beauty of a curly haired person, that’s coo.  here’s lookin’ at you colm meaney.

but personally?  i think i’ll pour one out for ebony magazine on black press day.  three cheers.

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didn’t go to work today

i didn’t stumble out of bed to the alarm at six fifty in the morning today.  my husband goes to sleep much later than i do and to minimize his disturbances when i go, i try to lay out everything i’m taking with me the night before.  today, i forgot a few items which put a crimp in my morning – my underwear and my glasses, which i would’ve had to creep into the bedroom like the cookie crook for – if i had gone to work today.

i immediately began regretting going to work, wondering if i should or shouldn’t, which is why, as i took my shower, i decided i shouldn’t, and didn’t.  i mused that i’d rather be an anchorite monk living in a box and pondering jeezis all day than going to work.

also conceived of a notion to chronicle this day on which i’m not working, in this fashion.  due to the mangled order of operations from forgetting my underwear i would’ve had to put them on downstairs, and discovering my ride / mother-in-law waiting in the living room, have to awkwardly change into them in the kitchen.

one could say my forgetting things began before the week did.  i normally buy a block of mozzarella on grocery run and slice it for a few weeks worth of snacks, but this week thought i still had some – i hadn’t.

with these inconveniences i would have ended up leaving eight minutes late, which meant the school zone by my house would be more active, which would add another minute of lateness to my commute.

as i’d be typing this on the road, my lower digestive system would’ve started to fuss, reminding me i have at least two legitimate health reasons to not want to go to work today.  i’d also be wondering how much autocorrect could fuck up my post as i type all this.

so it’s a good thing i didn’t go and am not on my way, close to the place, as the sun continues its rise and cars rip by and seagulls cry and crows crow.  i swear crows have doubled or tripled in population within the last few years.  something fucked up is probably happening, bit it’s nice to see some kind of life proliferating.  anyway, lately there have been a huge mass of them on the roof of the building i work in, at dawn all huddled on the edge of the building, absorbing the early light, getting their will up to start hustling.  today i wouldn’t have noticed them, not being at work, also the days getting slightly longer might mean they left that ledge before i didn’t arrive.

as i didn’t approach the building, i didn’t check my blog comments and find an orgy of spambots feasting on my most recent blog post.  gross.

***

actually inside the place of work, which i was not, i would have realized i’d need to do this liveblobbing thing in shorthand notes to be expanded later, so little breathing time as is actually scheduled into any given work day.  this would have resulted in the day’s events switching to past tense.  is this past perfect?  i’m so tired.

i would have gotten into an elevator which insists on showing news stories on its little screen.  there’s one at the building where my storage unit is warehoused, which shows nothing but fluff about sports and cute animals and weather, thank fuck.  this one unfortunately would have been showing some news of the type i prefer to avoid, and in this case totally did because i wasn’t there.  i didn’t see articles about the cow-like italian bovino getting shitcanned, or the magnificently cruel and corrupt dude from fifa acting morally superior to cruel and corrupt amurrica, or whatever whatever.

there are pictures of shitler and couchfucker and some other worthless shit in the security vestibule of my office, which i normally avoid by walking past, careful not to use my peripheral vision, taking a ridiculously long way around, and coming in the back entrance.  this is not optional.  except today, when i opted to not be there.

we used to have our own cubicles where we could have personal decor and our own customizations, but now we’re permanently “hotelling,” taking cubes on the first come first serve, entering our gubmint names in a spreadsheet on a laptop to show where we are.  i would have “crytyped” my name with a few sloppy misspellings.  the keyboard’s clitoris would have fallen off again.

the big boss of the facility who once fatphobia’d me at the last office party i ever willingly attended would have felt the need to say good morning at me.  he knows my first name.  i would have tried to say some shit like “it is in fact before noon” but the mumble surely would not have been fully audible.

in the men’s room would have been putting on my makeup.  morning is the time for a few coworkers to empty their bowels in the last easy-going style moment they’re going to have, and the scent would have been unlovely, but hey, i wasn’t there.

the lost time would have meant horking down breakfast and hopping on the phones as quick as possible, straight into a frenzy of activity.  sometimes emotionally charged, sometimes intellectually challenging, always 2 fast 2 furious, unless i’m not there, which i wasn’t.  not getting my mozzarella with breakfast would have meant starting to tap out near lunchtime and chucking some other kind of snack into my gullet in some transient moment i’d stolen for myself, which i didn’t have to do because i wasn’t there.

***

lunch would have been fortunate to not be as funky in the low end as the morning portended and therefore not lost any precious time to needing to use the bathroom.  the break is still too short and i would have speedwalked everywhere to get my food eaten and get back to my desk timely.

lately they’ve been on us to never ever go over on break time even by a minute, my response to which is giving my reasons for any overage, in the preferred format for documenting off-phone time, with an email to boss.  would have been one minute late back from both 15s and lunch, so an email explaining that tossed together in the last moment of my shift would have been in order if i was there.  but the few minutes they give us to check email and do training videos at the end of the day is cancelled on the busiest days which it was, so it was good i wasn’t there, would have totally forgot to document it taking slightly longer than anticipated to wipe my ass.

***

after the last fifteen minute break, a few calls in, i would have started to get this wiggly feeling, 15:52 hours military time, hard to focus, feeling emotional, like manically sad maybe, very hard to describe.  would have set myself in a mode so that no call drops in when the current one ends.  big sigh of relief when that call ends in a relatively short amount of time, then racing around to go to the bathroom or eat a snack or any other number of things i would have had to do if i had been there and feeling like that which i wasn’t.  passing each other in the hall another coworker whose name i don’t even know would have called me by the short version of my gubmint first name, making for “right back atcha chief” styled awkward moment.  didn’t happen.

would have managed to manipulate the course of last call to end with several minutes to spare, much nicer than the shifts like the day before when i went into three minutes of overtime which is not long enough to get paid for.  my lunch bag much smaller after having consumed all the pop i’d brought with me, i could stuff it in the laptop bag and minimize what i carried on the way out, if i had been there.

same elevator same news stories same aunt-in-law giving a ride home so graciously i can’t mention how horrible the pop music on her car radio is to me, drag the recycling bin in from the curb, and it would have been evening time, but i wouldn’t have had to hear that radio and i  was able to take in the recycling bin earlier in the day at my leisure because i didn’t go and was grazing on food and napping at my own pace throughout the day, like some kind of animal who has never heard of clocks.

***

good thing i didn’t spend any time at work blogging because that’s strictly not allowed.  but not having gone there, or having stayed home as i very much did, i would have ended up in the same place, making a small few meals for my husband and doing some bare minimum chores, the last of which are still ahead of me.

and here i am.  good night.

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Juggalo Reprezentation

I feel I should come out of the closet on this, because visibility is important.  Now I don’t routinely bang Insane Clown Posse or Twiztid, but a juggalo once told me that I am a juggalo, and by his decree, so I am.  I, Bébé Mélange, am a juggalo.

If you are a juggalo and feel the need to talk about it with someone, let my comment section be a safe space for you.  Also, if you just want to ask a juggalo a question, you can put it to me.  Just be kind, you know, ask in good faith. Thank you…

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…ok, apologies to real jugheads; this was obviously a bit facetious.  no offense intended, do consider me an ally at least?  i’ll pour a faygo out for you in contrition.  i really was granted juggalo status by one of that tribe, but it’s more of an honorary title.  rezpekt.

There’s not much to that story.  I went to a diploma mill type commercial art school, which lured in radical bros by saying “you could make animays or vidya games.”  This wasn’t me; I was lured by lies about how much money I could make with the job skills.  But this juggalo, he was a radical son of a bitch, as they say.  He had a ball bearing necklace and his life drawings looked like lofi dragon ballz.

We rode the same bus south from Seattle into poor people lands, where he was the kind of guy to drop acid and shoot fireballs in his back yard, and I was the kind of binch to work in fast food and come up with house rules for ttrpgs I’d never get to use.  One night he told me that I met his criteria for being considered a juggalo.  Fantastic.  I’ll accept that.

I hope he’s having a juggalish good time out there somewhere, perhaps with a juggalette and two point five juggajuniors.  He was a handsome lad, but life has many traps.

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More Bad Ideas

Maybe because life has been rather hard lately in some respects, I’m just full of escapist compulsions.  Being a creative type, these tend toward the creative – write this, write that.  Sometimes I even have an urge to draw and I am sooo out of practice on that shit.  What I need to be doing is keep that new year resolution to sort out our shit and empty the storage unit.  If Florida is going to start having bouts of underwaterness within fifteen years, my condo is as well.  If I get that shit squared away, it will be much easier to move.  Just to live in general.

Let me interrupt the explanation of my bad ideas to talk about a good idea that isn’t getting discussion.  Any place that could salvage real estate with a system of dikes needs to get on that shit right fuckin’ now.  If Washington state does that with this river valley I live in, some pretty useful land can be kept.  And maybe we won’t have to throw all the work we did here in the trash.  All the suffering we went through just to get this far in life.  Ho hum.  File that next to Marcus Ranum’s big proposal for humanity to unfuck itself.

Anyway, thinkin’ about ttrpg fun times I’ve had in the past got me yearning to fuck around with that in the present.  Run a Vampire: The Masquerade game with myself just to see where the random rolls lead me.  But if I’m going to waste time writing, it should be writing something at least quasi-original.  One approach people like to take, to get the creative juice of a rpg while still having a possibility of selling it as their own writing, is filing the serial numbers off – like the Fifty Shades lady done with her fanfic.  I’m not in that state of creative desperation.

Then again, why focus on original content?  The notion I should make any of my writing legal to sell?  That’s laughable.  But then, making art that uses other people’s content just seems kind of pathetic.  I’ve made no secret of my disdain for fanfic.  Writing a story in somebody else’s world is a close cousin to that.  Why think of the content of a game as writing?  It’s really hard for me to not do that, for reasons.

Other random wild hares – Read all the books you’re supposed to read, to be an intellectual.  Finish Josefina y Blasfemia.  Serialize a completely unrelated novel on here, like I did with Centennial Hills.  Get back into drawing by way of doing a comic strip.  Get back into drawing by way of doing all of the exercises in the How to Draw Manga book series.  Start a book club.  Start practicing singing.  Make music.  Make concept albums.

I am tired, I am weary, I could sleep for a thousand years…

Those dudes from U2 ripped this song off pretty hard for “Goldeneye,” I think.  Whatever.

Anything is anything.

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Twenty Year Date-iversary

Been with this guy for 20 years as o’ NYE midnight-ish, been married only a year and a few months.  It’d be nice to do something cool for the two decade date-iversary, but we’re too gay to know how to drive, and got health issues limiting the options further.  No need for suggestions, stuff be what it be.  But congratulate us if yer so inclined, that’s cool.

New Year’s Eve 2005, we started hanging out earlier in the day, in his apartment.  I think we ate out, that I don’t recall, but I do remember we showed each other movies we like.  He showed this anime called Dead Leaves I’ve never heard of anywhere else or since (how odd), I fast-forwarded to the highlights of Hard Boiled.  I’m more of a basic bitch in the obscurity game.

One of our mutual friends came over to hang out for a bit.  I remember coming out of the bathroom and both of them looking at me like I’d lost my mind.  Took a second to realize it was because I was doing a shaky leg dance to straighten the long johns inside my jeans.  Hey, maybe I like to twerk.  Don’t judge.

He kissed me when I was on the way out the door a lil after midnight.  Or before?  I don’t remember.  Then I took a bus back to Everett.  The end.

I invited myself to live with him and sorta ruined his life possibly.  I was telling him “I love you” a year before he said that to me.  His ILUs are hard-earned.

It’s good tho.  We abide

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