How Racist Were These Candies?

You’re a baby, then you’re a kid, then you’re a teenager.  My kid years were mostly in Seattle, especially toward the end, and there was a window of time when we started to go places without adult supervision back then.  This was unusual for us.  Our parents always told us to stay indoors when we were alone.  If my father got back to find the door unlocked, he would say the same refrain, “Well, you’re all raped and murdered.”

But his ass left town to try and sober up from the drugs and alcohol, leaving our mom alone with us, and slouching on her responsibilities as much as she could get away with.  It led to some really bad situations, but at least when we got out and started roving Beacon Hill, none of us did get raped or murdered.  I’m not sure how we had some pocket change to work with, but we had some pocket change, and used it to buy candies in the one to twenty-five cent range.  If I recall this right, individually wrapped atomic fireballs, jawbreakers, and now&laters would run one to five cents, later a dime.  Laffy taffies more like a dime, and a tiny box of candies would be a quarter.

Those boxes were cool.  Cute designs that probably remained unchanged between the 1960s and 1980s, a half-handful of candy versus those single bites you’d get for a nickel.  There were boston baked beans, cinnamon imperials, jawbreakers (smaller than the individually sold ones), lemonheads, alexander the grape, and cherry clan.

Those last three were all made on the same idea.  Sweet and sour, waxy color shell around a chewy white core.  Of course, they had artificial lemon grape and cherry flavor and the corresponding colors.  Let’s see what those cute little boxes looked like, shall we?

The fight against racism is a long and winding road, and sometimes it seems like the work will never, ever end.  The way things unfold is sometimes surprising.  As I reflect, it feels really weird this particular flavor of racism lasted so long.  A few decades ago, people were calling attention to the trope of Asian girls in cartoons always having a stripe of dyed hair, like, what’s this shit about?  Seems like small potatoes compared to things that were happening a decade before that.

Remember the big advertising push from the Dick Tracy movie in 1990?  How merch and tie-ins were omnipresent in a nearly unprecedented way?  They were aiming for a repeat of what Batman had achieved the year before, but failed big.  I don’t know if it was part of that campaign or just some local programmers trying to capitalize on that hype, but a 1960s era Dick Tracy cartoon started rerunning on my local channel 13, KCPQ.  I’m not sure what was wrong with my young brain, but I watched that shit.

By that shit, I mean this shit:

That show featured Dick Tracy sitting behind a desk calling henchcops on an anachronistic wrist video phone.  His henchcops, who did all the work for him, were racist stereotypes, like Joe Jitsu up there.  Maybe because they were good guys and always won, the fact they were racist cartoons didn’t register the same way it did when Bugs Bunny was clowning on a racist stereotype of a black person.  Maybe I was just racist?  I don’t remember being like that, but so very many people are blind to their own shit.

I was a teenager by then, fourteen!

Again, I’m just thinking about how cool and progressive we all felt about ourselves in 1990.  Jim Crow was in a history book, vanquished by saintly MLK.  And yet, here this was, on TV, in front of my young eyeballs.  It ain’t funny.  I wonder if some Rupert Murdoch affiliate is going to bring the show back for a third go now…

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Imposterous

It seems Kurt Cobain had a touch of the “Impostor Syndrome” that has been semi-popular for people to yak about on social media o’er the last few years, and it was possibly an influence on the verbiage of his suicide note.*  It probably didn’t help that a number of his famous tunes were well-known for similarity to other people’s works, but anybody who can appreciate the kind of art our late lamented fella was laying down would agree that he did it well.  No fakin’.

Something I noticed at that wikipedia link above is that impostor syndrome is not officially recognized by the authorities on psychology, tho not specifically refuted either.  They just haven’t considered it of sufficient life impact to be considered a disorder, or diagnostic enough to be considered a symptom.  Officially.  It does seem to be a real thing, at least, that many people who are smart cool successful etc. feel they are faking it and feel likely to be discovered.  At that point, they must pull a Milli Vanilli and be done with the world.  As Freddie said, don’t do that.

Now to be very clear, I do not have impostor syndrome at all.  I am quite certain that I rule ass, altho I recognize that I am prone to speaking thoughtlessly and embarrassing myself, and am not a genius of the classic conception.  I am a very cool comrade, but sometimes I do feel kinda fake.  Particularly when I’m hustling for meaning.  My day in the life posts, my bird posts both tend to include some attempt at folksy profundity, like, ain’t that just the way?, or to draw connections Connections-style, which may be entirely unjustified, specious, or frivolous.

I’m probably being the most honest on those when I am being the most frivolous.  When I’m hinting around something deep, or spelling that out more bluntly, how legit is that?  My husband is more of a real artist about this stuff (probably no coincidence he has similar health problems to Cobain), gravitating to subjects he cannot express directly, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.  Art as a struggle.  I just get an idea, or work up an idea, and spit it out.  Blop.  Soup’s on.

I have said many many times that words are bullshit, that everything in our lives and in existence itself has a reality that words can’t even begin to approximate.  As Depeche Mode said, “feelings are intense; words are trivial.”  But where does that leave me, as a person who devotes an inordinate amount of their time to writing?

I once had a teenager tell me that the cool kids “don’t care,” specifically about learning or social order in the school environment, but I believe her ass was very mistaken.  The genuinely cool kids are the ones who know everything is bullshit, so they don’t bother talking about it, because what’s the point?  Not in a thought-terminating cliché or cruel way, just that life isn’t about whatever words we want to layer on it, and none of this is necessarily going anywhere.  That kinda stuff.  I’ve known people like this, loved a few of them.

So by this metric, where yakkin’ about stuff inherently makes you less real, more of an uptight square than the cool guy what doesn’t talk much, is everyone who writes inherently uncool?  No, cool people can make words happen in a conversation or in writing, but the approach to the words is different.  They would effortlessly say only what needs to be said, and if you understand it, that’s the extent to which you are cool, and if you didn’t, not their problem.  That’s them and here’s me, making words for the sake of words.  Writers are not inherently uncool, but I surely am.

OK, that’s me talking out my ass on a sultry summer night.  Did I not say earlier in this post that I am very cool?  I am.  Very cool.  Like, I read some of the shit Cat Valente blogs on a bottle of wine, and I win.  Take that, nerds.  RIP to impostor syndrome sufferers but I’m different.  Most of the time.  I’m good.  I’m good.

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*As I researched the points of this first paragraph I became convinced it doesn’t hold up.  Not quite true; his death and that letter had more to do with anhedonia and old school depression.  I leave it in because it shows my line of thought as I was composing.  Wild that his note mentioned Freddie Mercury and I randomly mentioned him in the article before I went back and did the reading.  Ah, what a dismal thing to be pondering.

Selection Selection

You can still join the RP by comment, open for two more players.  Catch up from the beginning here, just look at the most recent post, or whatever.

we know natural selection and sexual selection.  it’s pretty clear complex species have a kind of sociological selection, even if it isn’t the darwinism some would imagine.  what other kinds of selection could be happening?  all that’s needed for selection is a variable thing and another variable thing that filters the variety of the first.  what if there’s a kind of selection we haven’t identified yet that drives the cycle of mass extinctions?  people point to certain astronomical and geographical cycles but i’m thinking something more abstract.  i once wondered why diseases hurt and kill, when they could proliferate more if they did not do those things.  maybe what selects for them to cause harm is something we haven’t thought of yet (tho there were other explanations from commenters which seem more likely).

might be that sociological selection is understudied.  i could be using the wrong term and i don’t know the literature, don’t even know for sure that sociology is the field in which study would happen.  the way unregulated capitalism guts itself and ruins the world is actively selected for in some way.  superficially you can look at specific actions like the repeal of glass-steagall, but it’s part of a larger phenomenon which is out of control and strangling democracy.  i guess that one would be studied by radical economists, even tho it shouldn’t be radical because it’s blue-sky obvious from outside the schools that spawn alan greenspan clones.

i dimly recall some scientists believing that sexual selection was just one aspect of fitness selection and didn’t deserve equal footing.  people fond of the fascist version of natural selection would apply it very broadly, but i’m sure there are non-nazi justifications for doing so.  then again, that could just be humans trying to cram the natural world into neat little boxes for ease of understanding, when complexity and chaos are the true way of things.  If sexual selection is just natural selection junior, then natural selection (as fitness to the environment changing rates of mutant gene expression in populations) could itself be a concept nested within a larger framework, and in company with myriad categories of related phenomena.

i’m gonna start with the types of fitness i’ve discussed so far and list any others i can imagine off the top of my head.  feel free to add more in comments, or whatever you please.

type of selection — variable A — variable B / the filter
natural selection — mutation — environmental fitness
sexual selection — costly displays — weird fetishes
sociological selection — cultural behavior — success of the culture
invisible hand shit — supply — demand (lol fake)
political corruption — personal ethics — lobbyist money
sexy water droplet on laura dern’s wrist — goin different directions — chaos

i never did get at what i was feeling, something bigger… but that’s all i got for now.  waking up for work in six hours…

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Surreal Profundity and Philosophical Materialism

I didn’t really get the fact that recognition is a feeling and that feeling can be utterly mistaken, until I witnessed a guy having auras all day, ahead of his first grand mal seizure.  He kept “remembering a dream” in drowsy moments, followed by a rising sense of nausea.  It felt like he was remembering a dream, but he clearly was not.  One of them referred to a piece of media we had consumed together after the last time he had been asleep.

So déjà vu.  Being reflexively materialist, believing in nothing supernatural, I presumed there was an explanation for it that nobody bothered to mention, and this was it.  You can feel like you’re remembering or recognizing something that you have no prior experience with, very easily.  This can be associated with epilepsy, so get yer brain scanned if you have that feeling a lot.

That brings me to the point of the post.  There are other feelings that can be misled, can be a trick of the light.  The sense of the profound, of deep emotional meaning, that one can feel in a dream or in a piece of surreal art – that feeling can be total bullshit.  Yet it moves.  In fact, I’m kind of a junkie for it.  I love surreal art.  Touch the dreamsauce, feel some type of way.  It feels deep, but it almost certainly is not.

Does recognition of this diminish its power?  Perhaps.  Then I have to move onto the hard stuff.  David Lynch not enough, gotta pound Andalusian Dog into my weary veins.  That’s just consumption of the stuff; what about production?  I’d like to make art that feels important the way returning Excalibur to Betty Boop can feel important when you’re asleep.

How can I do that if I don’t genuinely believe it is important?  It’s like writing romance when you feel unromantic, writing comedy when you have cancer.  All I have for this right now is a question.  No answer.  If you have any ideas, hit me up.

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Diminishing America

Saw another random grandma with some bullshit-ass “USA love it or leave it” t-shirt, but punchier than usual.  She has to feel surrounded and backed up against a wall by libs, here in a very blue state.  Good.  But it got me reflecting on the ways tvfkp is Making America Tiny Again – and that nazis like this lady actually want to see this happen.  Weirdly, we are somewhat in agreement about that?  Allow me to explain…

Her vision of this is in the Try That in a Small Town song, and similar sentiments.  The USA would be better off if no big cities existed, if it was an endless string of farms and little white houses with small-minded white people in them.  All the messicans and faggots and queers and hindus and mooslims and jews and natives and chinamen and darkies can be forcibly relocated to canada or mexico or hell ASAP.  This will by definition be a country with less power in the world, a place defined by smallness, surrounded by machinegun turrets and razorwire.  Speak English or die.  This vision is of course impossible, and maybe she recognizes that, viewing it as aspirational.  Any atrocities committed in pursuit of the dream are noble.

My vision is of a place where conservative beliefs are shamed for the nazism they are, back into the muttered shit-talk of the worst white people you know instead of the broad coalition of screaming freaks you see in charge of everything now, mainstream society as some kinda blando liberal mush that isn’t good enough but at least isn’t actively smoking the biosphere like a cigarette and ensuring we are all as miserable, hateful, and petty as possible on the way down.  I know, I dream small.  Like to keep my hopes in the dimension of what feels possible, so I am not too disappointed.  This doesn’t feel super likely, but does feel at least sorta remotely like.. maybe?  In my vision, one aspect of the damage caused by shitler persists – we are no longer the economy on which the world depends, because they learned we are not dependable.  The USA is forced by this humbling to play ball, to negotiate on equal footing with other nations and power blocs – to become less belligerent than it has ever been in its existence.

From this inferior place, the second rate status we so clearly deserve, we can’t help but acknowledge the reality that we are only one nation out of many, that we are part of the world and that part isn’t the axis.  (deathlol)  And this would open the door to other places coming into their own – the so-called third world, the global south, finally having a shot at setting their own terms and protecting themselves from the depredations of colonial powers and empires like ours.

Basically, an end to the USA as an empire.  And that is something she’d genuinely agree with.  She doesn’t want us to be trading with foreign powers.  She really would prefer to buy garbage manufactured in the USA.  She really won’t like what that costs, at first, but she could get used to it, especially if it helps maintain the integrity of the fortress.  Nobody in and, once the purges are done, nobody out.  Every activity our nation engages in overseas seems so pointless to her.  Charity, trade, diplomacy.  Why you gotta be out talkin’ to undesirables like that?  Take care of yer own!

I had no idea shitler was going to do something I agree with.  And he’s not going about it in a way I’d ever like to see.  But the end state, where the empire has properly imploded?  Where we’re stuck on our own shitbird equivalent of Brexit Island?  Where nobody in any other nation looks upon us as something to aspire toward?  A world in which the harm we do can never be so terrible that it threatens everybody else?

I’m into that.  I care about other people in the world too much to want us large and in charge.  Make America Smol Again, with your tiny tiny hands.  God damn, I would love to see a peaceful and prosperous Africa so much it makes my soul hurt.

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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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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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Is This Going Somewhere?

As I’ve been trying to queue articles in advance, to write at least one article for every day going however far in advance I can, I’ve been writing a lot more than I used to.  And it’s giving me a long view of the boundaries of my thoughts.  I will run out of shit to say at some point, and start sounding like your seventy year old college professor.  Salright, we abide.

But in this, I’m also getting a feeling of my work as a whole, as a very long thesis, as a possibly unified idea.  Almost like I could turn my whole blog history into a book.  Not as is; it would have to be edited and rewritten extensively.  But it’s funny to think I could just write The Big Book of Everything I Think and have it done.

Reminds me of Jenny Nicholson’s criticism of Batman v Superman, that Lex Luthor’s shithouse philosophy took up too much screen time.  Her joke solution was that Snyder could record a podcast of his ramblings as bonus material and whenever the screen character is tempted to go off, he just promotes his podcast and moves on.

If I ever make the big book of all o’ my thunks, I will just publish it as a web version where I can link people to my points whenever I feel tempted to repeat myself.  And they will ignore it and move on with their lives, and I will slouch on my couch in practiced ignorance of my ignominy, smiling to myself about how I told ’em what for.

Take that, kids.

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1000th Post

My 1000th post on this blog network was queued to be a birdpost about an LBB.  Observe it later today.  This is no kind of celebration of my multifarious thunks, my grande historie of letters.  So.  Gotta think of a way to honor myself properly.

Remember when I was Great American Satan?  God, that was so long ago.  What an innocent child I was back then, cavorting in alpine meadows and singing to the little birdies.  Lalalalala.  But seriously, this is a good time to explain again why the name change.  Great American Satan is derived from the words of Ayatollah Khomeini, as mocked by USian propaganda that was intended to depict the muslim world as uniquely backward.

It was islamophobic.  I still proudly stand against almost all of the shit ayatollahs believe in, but can’t disregard the fact my country is the greatest purveyor of evil in the world.  We genuinely fucked Iran for oil, for military adventurism, for capitalism – and most of the countries in the world besides.  The only reason we regard Iran’s nasty theo-fascist ass as an enemy is because they beat us, and refuse to make Nikes like Vietnam does now, or give us sweetheart deals on oil like nasty theo-fascist Saudis.  Now we’ve gone full fash.  How could I mock anybody in the world who has a bone to pick with us, no matter how shit they are?  This bone must get picked.

But back to the real subject at hand:  Beauteous I.

How do I love me?  Let me count the ways.  Didja know Edgar Allan Poe was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s biggest fanboy?  He had some over-the-top praise for her, at least.  History seems to have validated his opinion; the average fool remembers some of her words, if not her name.  She’s well known and well regarded in her field, I think.  Poets correct me if I’m wrong.

I have to think that blogging will never rise to the level of famous prose and poetry because of the disparity in effort, and this is a good thing.  A blogger might have a bon mot go viral, especially masters of microblogging, but few posts will outlive their moment.  How many can you remember?  PZ’s Grenade, tho that was more about the circumstances than the craft.  Intent! It’s Fucking Magic! by Genderbitch?  Journalists of the dead tree variety, to the extent that exists, suffer a similar impermanence.  I’ve seen journalism described as “writing on running water,” and it’s telling that I don’t remember with certainty who coined the expression or if I got the phrasing right.

Having a thousand posts of a blog, that is something of an achievement.  It takes a special kind of self-regard to keep spitting the contents of your head into The Void, day after day for years on end.  Most FtBers aren’t up to the task.  Before I started using queuing to achieve a post per day, I wasn’t doing daily posts either.  Often I’d miss a week or two, sometimes I’d miss a whole month.

And yet I was always more of a presence here than most of those sidebar characters.  This I recognize as well in my writing group: I often do the writing activities, far more often than anyone else but my husband.  He succeeds at noveling months more often than I do, but I have more morale for seeing the writing prompt events through.  Everybody else?  They try, sometimes, but it doesn’t even come close.

I am the champions, my friends.  I don’t mean to denigrate my colleagues; I am simply wondering aloud, why is this so hard to do for so many?  Why is regular blogging such a challenge?  Since it’s the majority of aspiring writers that have this issue, I can’t regard it as something to be ashamed of.  The freaks that post all the time, there’s probably something wrong with us.  But I dig being that kind of freak.

So raise a glass for your humble Bébé Mélange.  Life is indeed a gas, powered in part by satan and america and some flavor of greatness, as much as I’m trying to move past those things, generally.  And read the next post for some bullshit about birds.  You enjoy life.  I’m watching you, and if you do not, there will be consequences.  Everything is coercion now, it’s cool.  Compulsory fun for you.

Take your medicine!

This is just random crapola.  But then, that is the essence of blogging.  I hope other people get something out of it, but I would definitely be doing it for myself alone, if I had to.  The world needs my opinions, obviously.  One day, in circling the trashfire like a confused turkey and poking at the mess, I will accidentally into the answer for Lasting World Peace, or otherwise solve the big intractable questions that have dogged us since time immemorial.

Be here for it.  Thank you.

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Death Magic

See my previous couple of posts for some thoughts and feelings on magic and death.  Continuing my most recent thoughts and building on them, welcome to this post.  Although it’s being written pretty stream-of-consciousness, so if anything coherent comes of it, that’s just luck.

I had a brief moment watching a playthrough of Elden Ring wherein I genuinely felt the magic of spooky weirdos in the service of death sorceries.  Reminded me of when I feel tha magic in other media, like the weirding way from Dune, like Jim Morrison bullshit in that Oliver Stone Doors movie, like… I dunno.  The part in Lord of Illusions when the ground is crumbling away from Nyx’s feet and he’s still levitating like it’s no biggy.

So this has me wondering how I might use that inspiration to write better magic in my own stories.

Y’know I still don’t have a good strong idea of just what Josefina in J&B is capable of and how it works.  It would be super useful to have that figured out before I write the last half of that book.  The last scene of my first big chonk of that book has her teleporting short distances and anchoring a spirit creature to the ground so Blasfemia can finish it off.  I do know at least one big impressive thing I want her to do at the end of the story.  What can build toward that?

A bit off topic but related and I may double back to it before I’m done here.  In this one I was thinking about my thinking about my notions on Death Magic.  Previously I said that magic in this context is less about exerting one’s will over reality than interacting in a more profound way with the big important concepts in life – love sex chaos death etc.  It’s about emotion.  Surrealism is not much without feeling behind it.  It helps surrealism hit right if the feeling is one of the big ones; magic too, I think.  Maybe.  Like I said, working off the top of my head here.

How do I feel about death?  What is it?  I don’t like it.  Like, I don’t wanna die.  Really don’t.  There’s a goofy song by Depeche Mode called Flies on the Windscreen which states its case with the opening lyrics:  “Death is everywhere!  There are flies on the windscreen for a start, Reminding us!  We could be torn apart.”  This is real as shit.  Death and dying are everywhere you look in this world.  Part of life, of course, but if you’re feeling it, it’s sure easy to let that turn you into a goth.

The further I get from the moment that inspired this, the more the feeling is faded, like a dream.  I may have been drifting toward sleep in that moment.  God I feel like I could sleep any damn time.  When I retire, I’m gonna sleep six hours, wake up for two, then sleep another three.  And it’s gonna feel awesome.

Anyway, how can I get back to that moment, remember what it’s like?  Gotta focus on my feelings.  How do I feel about death, really?  If I strip away the bullshit and the philosophy, but don’t go so simple as to say “it sux and be scary.”  What is death, to me?  It’s so hard to focus.  I closed my eyes and felt it out.

First thing that came to mind was the inevitability of it.  It’s looming there like a monolith… more like the walls of a prison and I’m inside.  Second thing, the absurdity of it.  More specifically, of people’s responses to it.  There are the religious faithful, which we can scorn or pity in our own ways.  More absurd tho are the things people do with their lives.  The fact death looms large in front of orngdolf shitler renders the way he’s choosing to live his life profoundly absurd.  But that’s true of most of us as well.  When you consider that you could die at any moment but you’re still going to work and living like a human being, instead of wilding out, doing anything you love and that you’re capable of…  It’s depressing, appropriately.

It’s a joke and we’re all the punchline.  It’s meaningless.  It’s the return to zero.  Even the Universe is ultimately going to die.  When I’m having trouble focusing, it’s the quiet in between the notes of the static.  It’s the low point on the brainwave graph.  Again, it’s all around and looming and cannot be escaped.  So what was the feeling that intrigued me there, in something I normally avoid the contemplation of?

Maybe it’s the way I’m horny on goths.  In my cowardice, when I see somebody who does not look away from death, they become powerful to me, magnetic.  Was I just being horny on the concept of this character?  Doesn’t feel like it.

Truth.  The fictional depictions of magic that move me are the ones where a character knows something about reality and it confers on them a kind of power.  Fia the Deathbed Companion doesn’t look away from death.  She intentionally focuses herself on it fully, and though she has some magic powers from that awareness, the most magical thing about it is the awareness itself.  Drink a big glass of poison and in the moment before it kills, live forever.  Live the thing that others fear.  Don’t fear the reaper.

I don’t think killers are cool.  The cool assassin man from movies, nay.  It’s fun to watch the action as no-names go flyin’ from the paired pistolas of Chow Yun-fat, but he’s gotta have a good reason to do it, and they gotta genuinely not be human in any way.  Chaff, or Snidely Whiplash’d.  Killing people sucks and the extent to which it happens IRL makes the fiction less appealing to me these days.  But the mortified character, whether dying saintly or transcending life more grotesquely, cenobite style – that’s an interesting character.  Powerful.

I dunno i dunno.  Probably feel different about that tomorrow.  I’ve thought before that when I die, I wanna look like that bog mummy.  You know, the one that looks so peaceful, like he laid down to take a nap and crumpled into the earth just a bit, to lay there forever.  That guy died violently, of course.  Nice to imagine otherwise.  Let my sleep be peaceful and dignified – not that I’ll be there to care about it.   Still.

The death wizard is already dead and not dead yet, fully aware of and in communion with the walls of this prison, a part of the Universe in a way most are not.  That’s power enough.  I don’t know what it means.  Still haven’t figured that biz out.  Still can’t conceive of ways to express this idea on the page that don’t feel like aping what’s come before, or worse just come off like some dungeons & dragons.  This’ll have to do for now.

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