Monstral Cladismo

As part of my notion of building all my monsters and playable races at the same time, making them feel part of a creative whole, I’m establishing ways to categorize or group them…

COSMOLOGY
Where the monsters be at.  I don’t want the spread or ambition of some big-ass multiverse.  One world will do.  Center of the universe, it is.  It’s got its own heaven and hell et cetera, and this is the breakdown.

GAYA
The physical world where every ridiculous thing comes together, where most adventures would take place.  Situationally any and all monsters can be found there.  Some, like humans and sheep, are native to the plane, with the Gayan type.  This realm is associated with Body magic, as it is the place where incarnation happens – where flesh is truly flesh, not some spiritual illusion of the same.  Also associated with Drama magic, as the stage where the greatest stories play out.

THE ABYSS
Around every plane of existence, seeping into them, breaking them gradually down to nothing, is the big realm of Death and the dead.  Fools that imagine they’ll live forever in the afterlife don’t know.  The afterlife’s days are numbered.  No small amount of undead dwell there, but creatures born of the plane are called Abyssal.  The realm is of course associated with Death magic.

THE SKEINS
Everything is bound together by threads of meaning, of relationship.  For example, all humans would be bound by a “human” thread.  This is the basis of Binding magic.  The metaphysical manifestation of this is a spiritual web that, like the Abyss, connects to everything.  Unlike the Abyss, one with the right magic can travel on the Skeins directly.  The few strange creatures native to this interstitial space are called Ideal.

THE DEEP WILDS
In the wild places of Gaya, go far enough and the map may lose you.  The Deep Wilds are where wild creatures like sileni, satyrs, and faerie folk come from.  The realm is a spiritual reflection of nature, but taken to great extremes.  Some creatures of the Deep Wilds have been incarnated on Gaya or even been born on Gaya, to where they lose some connection to their ancestral home, but are still considered to be of the Wild (or Wild and Faerie) types.  This realm is associated with Wild Magic.

THE ELEMENTAL REALMS
Pretty stock biz.  Fire, Earth, Air, Water.  Realms of ’em, easier to reach from the Deep Wilds than from Gaya itself.  Associated with Great Magic, Alchemy, and creatures of the Elemental or individual element types.

HEAVEN
Associated with Holy magic, Heaven is where order and obedience reign supreme, where harmony creates something resembling eternal bliss.  Sometimes that may be genuinely beneficent, but beings from this realm, whether god or angel, can be as evil as anything.  Tread carefully, and take the actions of their followers on Gaya over the words in their hymns.  Most easily accessed by dying while sworn to serve a deity there, or from the Singing Realm.  Creatures of Heaven are called Celestial.

THE SINGING REALM
The Singing Realm is a strange place somewhere between Heaven and Gaya, stairway to the gods in the form of an endless city of ever ascending ziggurats and temples.  Souls of the dead who didn’t quite get to Heaven are found here, playing out a lesser paradise until they get so bored the Abyss takes them, or they change into something new, ascend to Heaven or incarnate again on Gaya.  Other creatures live here as well, and like those in Heaven, they are considered Celestial.  Many communities of dwarves and giants have dwelt there so long as to not remember their own origins, and those that dwell on Gaya descended from these.

THE SILVER VOID
Associated with Mind magic, the Silver Void is a place of seemingly endless mental energy.  It plays out there like an unending amusical tone, like psychic tinnitus.  This is soul energy devoid of the Law of Heaven or Chaos of Hell, just alien and buzzing.  Creatures that live in the Silver Void include the greys, flying in their silver discs, some few gods and their servants, and myriad spiritual reflections of the ways that thinking beings exist.  Those that are born here are considered to be the Astral type.

THE SILENT REALM
As the Singing Realm is to Heaven, the Silent Realm is to the Silver Void.  It’s a desolate reflection of Gaya, turned in on itself in endless mazes where souls play out their struggles over and over, until they disintegrate, ascend, or reincarnate on Gaya below.  Some natives of this realm include oneiroi, who play the roles of “supporting cast” in the psychodramas of lost souls.  Like those in the Silver Void above, they are considered to be Astral.

HELL
Associated with Hexing magic, Hell is a twisted reflection of Gaya steeped in chaos and torment.  There is also a kind of vitality there, tho it doesn’t hold a candle to that of the Deep Wilds.  It’s the vitality of freedom, of accepting the pain and difficulty of existence, of living it to the utmost before willing oneself the rest of the way out the door, into the Abyss (or going unwillingly of course).  Some creatures of Hell are surprisingly kind, more are as capriciously cruel as the reputation would suggest.  The type is Demonic.

THE SCREAMING REALM
In a sense this realm is worse than Hell itself.  As the Singing Realm is to Heaven, as the Silent Realm is to the Silver Void, so the Screaming Realm is to Hell.  This is the purgatory where those who died in great strife or iniquity must face their personal demons until they either escape to a gentler place (most often the Silent Realm), reincarnate, disintegrate under the weight of their suffering, or fall fully into Hell proper.  There are other things to be found here besides a labyrinth of personal hells, including great cities of lamias and ogres.  The lamias and ogres of Gaya descended from these.  Like other creatures from here, they are considered Demonic.

RANKS
Categorizing creatures by their relative power and station in the world.

ANIMALS
Self-willed organisms whose limited cognitive abilities prevent from engaging in civilization. Can’t learn more than a very limited vocabulary, unable to learn a character class, although they can advance in levels and abilities.  You don’t wanna meet that 16th level Mosquito.  Your blood will be sucked.

RACES
The species that can engage in technological society on roughly equal footing, typically bipedal with stereoscopic vision and opposable thumbs, tho not necessarily.

HOSTS
A species or group of species that are united by a theme or hierarchy, like faerie folk, giants, devils, or angels.

LEGIONS
A species or group of species that more directly serve a higher power or purpose, typically more powerful than Hosts.

LEGENDS
Demigods and monsters, these are unique creatures whose status transcends the mundane.  Some are elevated from common creatures, others came into their current incarnation by other means.

GODS
Unique creatures like Legends but much more powerful, sometimes alone, more often part of a pantheon of related beings.

OVERGODS
Gods that have become so powerful they are often presumed to be foundational to the cosmos in some way, which is not true.  Some have pantheons in their service or arrayed against them as enemies, others hold themselves above those interactions.

TYPES
Lifting this concept from D&D, tho anyone could have come up with it and probably did.  Categories of creature.

Gayan – Native to Gaya, or naturalized there.

Divinity – In game terms, these are creatures that can do things that transcend game rules.  The weakest are magic animals, who usually have one abnormal reality-breaking power, like performing a great labors in moments, but only when nobody is watching, or telling absurd lies that can somehow fool anyone.  The most common are nymphs and demigods, who can on rare occasion perform heroic feats that defy reason.  Intermediate are legions, and the most powerful are gods themselves.  Divinities can come from any realm in the spirit worlds or from Gaya.

Spirit – All creatures not of Gaya.  Some creatures whose ancestry is not Gayan, but who have descended from generations of Gayan residents, can replace this type with the Gayan type.

Spirit Realm Types – Abyssal, Astral, Celestial, Demonic, Elemental, Fire, Water, Air, Earth, and Wild.

Animal Types – Animal is a type (for animals not of the races), and all animals, including those who are members of the intelligent races, have animal types.  These aren’t necessarily natural clades, can be polyphyletic or just make no sense beyond folk sense.  Amphibian, Bird, Bug, Dragon, Fish, Jelly, Mammal, Mollusc, Reptile, and Worm are the broadest types, and there are dozens that are slightly more narrow.  Some notable types include Ape, Serpent, Rodent, Swine, Dog, Cat, Cattle, Frog, Spider, Fly, Raptor, and Fowl.  There are creatures with less grand places in the imagination of intelligent races, which therefore lack a narrower type, like raccoons, skunks, and kinkajous.  Creatures that blend features of more than one animal type have both animal types.  Simply being a biped with opposable digits isn’t considered a type here, as that is quite varied.  The average person doesn’t recognize the kinship of humans and monkeys, and the most monkey-like races imagine themselves the true heirs to the title, so no over-arching term unites them.

Plant – Not all ancestrally photosynthetic organisms are sessile in Gaya, but those that get around are uncommon enough they are lumped by animal types into one perhaps overly inclusive type.  This type even includes non-photosynthetic fungus, because the beliefs of the masses are what form conceptual threads.

Race Types – Elf, Dwarf, Human, Gnome, Ogre, Lamia, Koneira, Crowten, Nymph, Centaur, etc etc…

Host Types – Faerie, Lycanthrope, Giant, Vice Elemental … I don’t have as many ideas for these as I’d prefer.  Maybe Furry?  For all the obligatory animal people.  Maybe Undead should be here.

Legion Types – Seelie Court, Unseelie Court, Angel, Devil, Oneiroi, etc.

Animated – Normally inanimate matter, made life.  Rudewood golems don’t count because the carved wood in them is still alive in some respect, and so they have the Plant type.

Types I’m Not Using from D&D – No Alignments.  I’m not even a partisan on that hoary debate, and kinda like D&D’s alignment system, for that game.  Feels more interesting to not have it in this one, personally.  I don’t see myself making Aberrations or Oozes, or not enough to where there’d be need of a type.  Mind flayers and beholders are the most iconic of those and they’re not included in the open game license, plus I’m just not that into them, or most other things that would be classified this way.

Physical Properties – Amorphous, Immortal, Intangible, Flying, Aquatic, Undifferentiated (lacking weak spots such as organs), etc.

Magical Properties – Enchanted, Cursed, Blessed, Transformed, etc.

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How do I use this guff?  Probably in a different post.  Before I move on tho, I wanna contemplate that notion I had of trying to make it all feel like it hangs together, like it’s unified conceptually.  I want to include a huge amount of playable races because players like to have that selection.  Ditto classes, later in my process.  But what kind of world has that many intelligent species hobnobbing?  A physically large one?  Henry Darger had a sci-fi setting with a world massively larger than Earth in geographical size and population, but subject to an encyclopedic variety of horrible weather phenomena that could kill millions at a time.  Kinda fun to see what people come up with when unfettered from expectations of physical feasibility.  I don’t feel that liberated at the moment.

Just deciding in advance I’m gonna go X far and no farther, that’ll help keep it from feeling like a whack-ass pile of random.  Be nice to have a bit more drilled down…  I should decide on animals and such as well.

I like the idea of racial diversity not being all orientalist or awkward.  Had an idea this world has a mega-continent like Pangaea, so everyone is together, but there’s a massive sea in the middle that somehow isn’t pulling a messinian salinity crisis on us.  Peoples from one area grade into each other culturally and physically, with people to the south having dark skin and curly hair, people to the west going pink for lack of melanin, people to the north olive skinned with eyes that get more epicanthic fold and hair that gets generally straighter to the east.  This applies to elves, dwarves, humans, etc, so we aren’t saddled with excuses for being racist about what they’re allowed to look like.  Locations can vary – a random enclave of unusual-looking people here or there – and with world travel possible, anybody of any color could reasonably show up anywhere.

The IRL disadvantages of the global south are too depressing.  Gotta wakanda this shit out at least a bit.  There are high- and low- tech places all over, the low-tech compensating with more powerful magic or other advantages.  There should still be injustice enough to motivate heroism, but I think, for me, the pattern of it should be less obviously tied to specific races and cultures being globally dominant or oppressed.  Thematically we could have technologically advanced kingdoms trying to oppress their neighbors or fight each other for territory, and getting beaten back by heroes.  But the techno-kingdoms could be run by black people oppressing black people, the barbarians could be white people being oppressed by white people.

This world structure carries implications for flora and fauna as well.  Aquatic life in the big sea could be long separated from out in the big ocean, and very very different.  With few barriers to overland travel, there wouldn’t be as many isolated ecological regions with suites of unusual animals.  Like no Australias or Madagascars.  Sorry kangaroos.  Unless I want everywhere to have kangaroos.  The continents pushing and pulling apart and pushing back together again can result in clades of animals coming together that would not have evolved together, without the entirety of one area’s unique beasts wiped out, necessarily.  South America was raided in a way that caused lots of cool interesting beasts to draw the big ace, but they still have lots of distinctive characters, like caviomorph rodents, maned wolves, weird marsupials, cool monkeys…

I don’t want to dream up the paleobiogeography of this motherfuckin’ globe.  I’m not quite that species of nerd.  Close, but not all the way there.  So I’ll just pick the animals I wanna see.  Let’s see…

Next post!

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Bureaucracy Hurts

Had a dream I was at work, trying to walk someone through getting signed into a government website.  The security key involved the song Love Hurts by Roy Orbison, like interpreting the lyrics or pressing buttons at certain moments in the song while it plays, or living down to the story it tells.  Feel bad about your relationship in the right way so the website will let you in.

You know when you can’t sleep so you roll over and see if the other side will work better?  You ever feel like you’re doing that so much that to an outside observer you’d look like a rotisserie chicken?  You ever get restless leg feeling in your entire body?  You ever have difficulty sleeping because the morning sun is ripping thru your blinds or shining all the way thru your curtains?

We’re working on some of that, but other issues there are not the sort of thing where there is a fix.  At least I got a dreampost out of this one.  A candy-colored clown they call the Sandman tiptoed to my room last night…

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This one’s so short, have another dream detail.  Woke up by alarm and had to immediately workmode, so I remember nothing else from this.  I was in an ill-omened marriage between a superhero and a mermaid.  We had a child that was an octopus or aquatic ant, like half a foot long, a thing that had to be kept in an aquarium.  We were talking what our next child should be, like when cis people are saying whether they want a boy or girl, but I was suggesting a scorpion would have a good combination of our qualities as people, earnestly.

No idea what was up with that or where it was going.  Probably inspired by Shipwreck and Mara in GI Joe*.

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*sorry snakewreck shippers, marawreck was canon.

Thinkin on Monsterology

I was spending some time with demonology a few years ago, motivated by the observation that grimoires listing demons had enough in common that they presumably derived from an original source – that you could find that source, and get the “real” details on demonic characters like Belial, Samigin, Asmodeus, and Glasya-labolas.  I even found the name of this source: The Book of the Offices of Spirits.  The Lesser Key of Solomon and other texts purport to be transcriptions from that source, and yet, there are no extant copies that could be regarded as having high fidelity to the original – assuming it ever existed.  The copies of copies of copies change things up, so much so that the oldest version I could find, in the Fasciculus Rerum Geomanticarum, had a very different list and information from the later books.

And it was all hooey anyway.  If I could find the original Liber Officiorum Spirituum, I’d just be finding older hooey.  The trappings of systematic and encyclopedic information in the copies are enticing to that pokedex mentality.  I wanted to catch them all.  Once again, I find myself tempted to a similar end.  I’ve been trying to come up with the list of monsters for my big gay rpg, and the lure of finding the “authentic” or “original” monsters of fairy tales and mythology and legends is there.  But it’s all hooey.  Why do enough research to write a new entrant to the libraries of compilations that already exist?  Why not just make up my own hooey?

So I probably will.  But I’d still like to include the big iconic monsters of fantasy and folklore.  Pinning down at least that much, a useful thing to do.  Some campaign settings from 20th century RPGs went for the classic D&D list of playable races, plus or minus, and then tried to include some iconic new weirdos for flavor.  Others tried to reinvent the wheel with an all new list, or went for a more low-magic concept where all the players are human.  I’m pretty well decided on the first option.  As much as this is a TTRPG, I’m also inspired by video game RPGs, like the older Final Fantasy games.

Backing this idea up a bit, an anecdote that may inform my motivation.  In the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition dayz, when Monstrous Compendium pages were hole-punched so you could put them in your own three-ring binders, my Tech Support Guy had a good solid binder going.  I’d look at the intelligent species in it and think, that’s a character.  Why couldn’t it be a playable character?  So I used the monster stats to reverse engineer playable stats for a bunch of them – particularly satyrs, nymphs, and fairy folk.  Were they balanced?  No, but they were accurate to where a player version would be functionally the same in combat as a “monster” version, until they started gaining levels.  I might have even spaced out supernatural abilities by level, like they did for some creatures in 3rd Edition’s Savage Species, don’t remember.

What this illustrates is my annoyance with systems not being fully thought out from go, being constructed piecemeal.  If I ever get this thing going, I will try to get it as close to perfect as possible first time, so I don’t have to fuck around with revisions.  Part of that is the monster and class lists themselves.  I don’t want to make people buy a zillion “splatbooks” to get the full package.  Those kind of products weaken the original game as an artistic expression, because they result in numerous duplicated concepts.

Like there will be several character classes that are functionally identical to paladins, or separate stats for a creature from folklore by several different names, which were always meant to be synonymous.  Or so many “subspecies” of elf you wonder how one world could sustain all of those isolated populations, like why they wouldn’t grade into each other more like humans do.  It all just feels poorly conceived, which is what you don’t want art to be.  I know, they didn’t want to be artists, but I can’t help but be an artist, so this is my thinking.

And being this goofy combination of analytical and fussy, broad and abstract, I find myself torn between building a pokedex out of every source of monsters fairies etc that I can dig up from everywhere forever, and trying to get away from that altogether, because a half-measure would not be satisfying.  As I have rolled through all these kinds of thoughts, while wiki-surfing mythological beings, I’ve come to a perhaps tenuous conclusion that I want to make up my own guys, that can be representative of various guys from IRL mythology and folklore.  That is, I want to make up my own fairy that could be a stand-in for multiple types, like clurichauns and leprechauns and kobolds and duendes and gnomes could all possibly be the same species by different names.  Make sense?  But at the same time, not be so broad that my monsters can just be anything wilson-nilson – so variable that the core idea is lost and they become a conceptual mush.

I’m a victim of the same mentality as all those old school TTRPG makers, thinking I’m going to do it right, where all who have gone before were inferior minds.  I’ll make the one game to find them and in the darkness bind them, muhahaha.  But like many with these tendencies, I’m OK with never really getting recognized for that magnum opus.  It can remain the humble home brew.  I’m doing it for myself.  I will share it if it ever gets to a publishable state, but that’s not the aim.  The aim is to make something that works for me in all my particulars.

(I’ve been told having one’s work stolen by AI is the worst.  Publishing anything at all, well, it definitely makes that possible.  All my bloggy thunks will one day be grist for the Bébésque Machinélange, likewise my “magic system.”  There is nothing truly original here.  Steal it, somehow magically convert it into money, then come back and laugh at my foolishness.  I’d like to see it.)

So playable species should look like a natural part of the world they live in, should be conceived at the same time as the monsters.  It shouldn’t just be ooh, thought of a random cool thing, I’ll ram it in there.  Make the tree of life, fill it out, and then go into the individual branch ends and do all the random cool thingening there.  I’m jacking for beats.  D&D 3e had monster types, which was useful for game effects – a sword +2 against dragons affects all creatures with the dragon type – but also appeal to my interest in taxonomy.  There was another way of classifying creatures they didn’t get into much, an idea I gathered from their Planescape Monstrous Compendiums: by social structure.  In Planescape there are groups of creatures from the Outer Planes of the D&D cosmology that group naturally, like demons & devils (tanar’ri & baatezu lol), angels (devas), modrons, yugoloths, slaad, etc.  That was another layer of flavor I found interesting.

I’ve already come up with a lot of the basic material I’m about to explain here, but it was before I settled on my guiding principles elucidated above – don’t try to make stats for rusalkas and zmeys and banshees, make something that could be any similar creature by a different name.  Like, I don’t need five hundred slightly different spooky horses that will drown you, even if Europe did feel the need for that.  Resist completionism.  Proceeding with all that shit in mind…

is enough material for another post.  I break this up.

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Life List: American Coot

Like Yurp, Amurrica has a coot.  A coot is part of a fucking weird group of weird birds, but is trying to pass itself off as something much more normal.  You see them on a pond and you might think, that’s kind of a duck, right?  It has some makeup on its forehead to indicate it’s an alien, like in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it’s a duck.  Right?

No, those toes are not webbed.  Those toes are lobed.  Each segment of each toe has laterally projecting flaps that help them paddle almost as good as webbies.  I haven’t actually seen coots in a long time, and I’m not sure why.  Throughout my life I’ve always seen mallards at rivers and small lakes much more often than coots, but lately…  Probably it’s just a coincidence.

Many of their cousins like swamphens and gallinules have very weird proportions, more leggy with just hugely long toes.  “He feet too big for he gotdam body,” so sayeth the meme.  That makes coots the boring ones, and appropriately they are grey and black.  Puritan birds with white beaks and blood-red eyes.

Coot is an american slang term for elderly people.  Really, it’s a slur, but one of the gentler ones.  It calls to mind a person who is losing their cognitive function.  Even if said with affection, best to not.  If you’re not there yet, I don’t think you can imagine how threatening the specter of losing your cognitive function is – or the awareness that it is already happening.  Some people might roll with it, some might be saddened or upset, whether they show it or not.

I’ve been thinking off and on lately – more within the last year – that I’d like to start writing about old characters, perhaps exclusively.  Why should I fantasize about youth, think only of the beauty of the young, when that isn’t me and never will be again?  The majority of my life will be spent looking old and feeling old, with various forms of age-related infirmity guaranteed.  I’m already experiencing them.  I’m bald, my remaining hair has been mostly white for years, and my spine is degenerating.

I enjoyed writing characters close to my own age in Centennial Hills, Shammy and Eliza.  Why not make them the MCs?  Murder She Wroteiverse.  Diagnosis: Murderiverse.  Just as a trans person would not want every story to be about the struggle against transphobia, a senior would not want every story to showcase the difficulties of age.  But I do think that can highlight another area for representation: disability.  Once you get over sixty, it’s sooo common to have multiple disabilities of varying severity, it becomes normal.  Normalize everybody in your story being disabled.  Shit’s like that, but we still abide, still have the best lives we can, as much as we can.

On the other hand, maybe I’m not quite qualified to write about that yet.  Maybe I need to experience more of it.  Not quite fifty.  And of course, it’s a hard limit on the commercial viability of a project, much like making the MC transgender.  Heh, like I should even be giving a shit about that, at this point in life.

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Zoroastrian Optimism

I was looking up monsters and some chain led to motifs from Middle Eastern art, which led to an article on Zoroastrianism, which led me to get confused about their concept for the soul.  I remember once reading some outdated conventional wisdom about the origin of religion, wherein the concept of the soul emerged from the observation that the living breathe and the dead do not – that a soul must be an immaterial thing that is in your body and subsequently leaves.  Simple enough, but a lot of supernatural ideas from older religions leave me scratchin templez.  More complicated.

If I got this right, the main part of your zoroastrian soul exists outside of the material world.  It sends a piece avatar-style when you are born, animating you, and that part returns to the source four days after you die, bringing with it the wisdom of your time spent on Earth.  As you spend various lives on Earth, you’re making your main soul more wise and powerful.  Juiced-in soul points.  Power ups.  I presume when you hit your limit break, you can do a special finishing move.

The concept of the soul that most amurrican christians believe is less ornate.  Your soul is born when you’re born, it goes to heaven or hell when you die.  I think most of the denominations preach something more like you stay in the dark until judgment day when the helling and heavening will actually happen, but that doesn’t stick in the heads of the laity.

Still, these are the conceptions I’m most familiar with, and you gotta admit, they’re more streamlined than that zoroastrian stuff.  Why the extra steps, zoroastrians?  I have to admit tho, I find their take appealing.  While you are alive, you are fighting against evil.  When you die, your main soul gets the XP, making you more powerful against evil.  We’re all getting better at fighting evil all the time.

Whenever the zoroastrian end of days comes around, we’ll all be 99th level paladins, kickin’ ass on the angra-mainyu-something-whatever.  That’s optimistic.  That’s some “moral arc of the universe bends toward justice” kind of shit.  I can’t believe it, but it’s nice.

This is the part when people raised under the cruel repression of the zoroastrian bible belt come into my comments and explain how it isn’t nice.  As you will…

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Catgirl Zoo

Had a dream, felt like the raw setup and environment were recurring, but the feeling of remembering can be fake, like in déjà vu.  I was at a zoo adjacent to a small amusement park, trying to climb into an off-limits area with a better view of the reptiles.  The zookeepers caught me but I kept getting away on some woowoowoowoo nyuk nyuk nyuk shit like a cartoon character.

This time, outside the zoo, I was trying to explain why I do it, that I’m not animal thief, and while they didn’t believe me, they weren’t going to arrest me either.  I went to get a milkshake at a fast food restaurant, ran into more hijinks I don’t remember, then back, but this time…

I met a small group of zookeeperesque people who were trying to be very supportive of and help me in gender transition.  However, all their methods were geared toward me transitioning not to a woman, but to an anime cat girl.  They were trying to get me to eat cat food.

Even tho in real life I’m not pursuing medical transition (aside from an idle ambition to get facial hair removal if I ever get more money) or even more full time social transition (might if my life circumstances were much different), I was very accepting of the situation.

I didn’t like the cat food, but I was just like, This is my life now…

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a couple of weeks after this, i was awakened from deep sludgy sleep by a little gastroesophageal reflux.  my acid is strong enough i can’t ignore it, had to get up to treat my throat in some way.  i had been in a dream of details worth remembering, and i tried to, but only one odd bit survived my subsequent trip to nod and back.

i had to catch a violent cat, so i was trying to wrap her in t-shirt bondage.  she still managed to bite me a few times.  what was her crime?  murder.  apparently she had murdered somebody.

the dream was also guilelessly convinced that she was psychotic (how would you know this of a cat?) and that she was transgender.  the psychotic transgender murdercats must pay for their (imagined) crimes…

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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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Jurassic Living Room

Too tired from cumulative lack of sleep, I took a half day off work and slept in.  I dreamed my condo had some combo of features with apartments I’d lived in, and I was still trying to rest on the couch while weird bullshit was going on around me.

My husband came down to tend his houseplants and I had to explain why I wasn’t working.  Then I tried to watch tv.  There were multiple tv sets and I was watching some crappy horror movie on one of them, which was kind of an adaptation of nightmares I’ve had before.  When I tried to use the remote it would turn neighboring tvs on or off, or mute them, so I had to point the remote control very precisely.

We were also talking between moments of dialogue, about some company like those lying piss artist de-extinction guys who were supposedly making big dinosaurs out of birds, like that dino-chicken project.  As a “taste of the future” they developed a similarly miraculous technology of big fancy holograms.  The holograms projected from drones that could move with them, so they were like cartoon dinosaurs that could hang out.  The drones could push things around so they had some limited ability to interact with the environment.  Similar tech has appeared in scifi shows, nothing too creative in this.

My old ex-roommate Jed was living here and left to go out, and saw these holo-dinos at the door.  Assuming I would like to see them, he let two into the condo – a pair of pachycephalosaurs about nine feet long.

They were rambunctious and leapt over the counter into the kitchen, knocking down houseplants and tvs and pottery and dishes, destruction all around.  I managed to push them out the back door, and one left but the other stuck around, waiting to be let back in like a dog.

My husband was uncharacteristically chill about this.  I kept thinking about how I needed to get up and start work anyway, dreamed I was doing that, dreamed I realized I was dreaming and really did it, then finally woke up for real.

Instead of leaping into action, I took the time to write up this dream.  Gotta have blog content.

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Sips from the Iggy Bucket

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Life List: Grey Goose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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