A Love Life – Emotional Bookkeeping

Randomly meeting people from your past, people that you had some kind of big feelings about, there’s a tendency to see that as significant, a chance to rekindle something or make up for whatever.  That is a mistake.  It means nothing.  I’ve randomly come across people I loved several times in my life.  In a region with millions of people, up to a hundred miles afield of where you met them, it feels unlikely.

But how unlikely is it?  I only knew those people in the first place because we have lives that are similar in some way or another.  The same forces that sent me down certain paths would send them down similar.  For example, I have always been a poor child of neglect, so I never could afford a car and never learned to drive one when I was young.  A boy I knew had those things in common with me, we’ve randomly crossed paths at bus stations.  I always romanticized gothy weirdos, I ended up dating one again, and while out on those dates at some obscure gothy movies, I randomly ran into the first goth girl I crushed on.

Not all that unexpected, but it felt shocking or significant to me anyways.  And years after those moments happened, I find myself thinking about them in the middle of the night when I should be going to sleep.

These things hang in the mind – loves lost.  Romance says love is big and important, that it should never be forgotten, and programmed with that shit, I will never forget these people.  But not being able to let a love die out completely, that leads people to all sorts of terrible crimes.  It’s a failing of our sometimes hard-earned emotional maturity.  Every relationship I’ve had was bad on some level, but they taught me lessons that made the ones that follow better, until I got with my current guy fifteen years ago.  We’re good – our travails aren’t because of flaws in our relationship, just global misfortune.  So I’d like to be able to kick the others out of my heart.

I’m just going to put some thoughts into writing and see if it helps exorcise them from my head.  I’ve heard PTSD is associated with sense memory, and that turning traumatic experiences into verbal memory weakens their power.  Then again, repetition of a verbal idea can turn it into a mantra, give it a type of reality that is hard to shake.  What’s the best way to go about this?  Exorcism feels right.  I continue.

The first person I ever confessed my love to was a boy.  I was deep in the thrall of homophobia at that time, and so I assumed that my surprising uncontrolled outburst was platonic in nature.  Looking back, nuh, I’m a fucking jackass.  I recall telling that boy he was good looking more than once as well.  I’m not sure how I missed myself on that whole situation.  What’s worse is that as time went by I had two more random encounters and a phone call from him that would have been good opportunities to find out if we could be lovers.  During the first random encounter there were pretty heavy hints he was into dudes but I was still waxing homophobic.  Some time after that, the phone call was a confession of love from him, and I was feeling so remote from our childhood at that time, chasing ladies like Don Quixote, and said some bullshit about how time faded my feelings.

No, of course time didn’t fade my feelings, or I wouldn’t be writing this.  It might have felt true while I was on the phone, but from where I sit now I can’t help but think my life could have been profoundly different if I’d had my shit right in that moment.  He joined the navy after that.  The more recent time I met him, he was in functional alcoholic mode working toward cirrhosis and there were no pictures of cocks on his wall.  I can’t help but wonder if I sent him that direction.  A morbid form of self-aggrandizement, or self-awareness?  I just think about my relationship with him and it haunts me like a motherfucker.  Did I fuck up somebody’s life?  He was always a very dark person emotionally – too dark for me, we probably would have been a bad match.  But again, could I have done something about that?  It’s disturbing.

I objectified women.  On one level, there’s the obvious aspect of that – sexual commodification.  I felt like they were something to be chosen from, something to be had.  Their inner lives as humans had no emotional reality for me.  What made that hard to see was that on a rational, conscious level, I didn’t feel like that at all.  I was well aware that they are real humans with their own rights and prerogatives and such.  But in my heart I didn’t feel it, and I didn’t notice that about myself.

So there was this that goth girl I used to love.  I spent a lot of hours of my life courting her, talking to her, going in circles around her.  I heard about her interests but I didn’t partake of them, didn’t come to understand them.  Why not?  Years later while courting another goth I finally, very belatedly, got into Twin Peaks and The Cure and such.  Then it clicked.  When I was lavishing attention on that young lady, she thought I was paying real attention to her.  I thought I was too, but it was utterly superficial.

What that looks like:  I can see that she likes Twin Peaks and The Cure and Crispin Glover’s weird art shit, I can see that she has razor blades in her purse for art reasons, but this is all just details of her appearance – like her velvet coat or her patent leather shoes.  If I’d wanted to genuinely understand her mind, I’d have bothered to look into that art, see what it is she likes about it.  I thought I wanted her body and soul, but I was utterly blind to the reality of women’s souls.  Fucking bizarre, in retrospect.

So she thought I could be a close friend, when I had a huge barrier to ever achieving that, and I wanted quite badly for her to be my lover.  She couldn’t love me physically and I couldn’t *genuinely* love her mentally, so we wasted each other’s time for years.  And that was mostly my fault, my pursuit.

Much later, I saw her in movie theaters, Jan Svankmajer and Kiyoshi Kurosawa movies.  I came in with my date in a timely fashion, she had a seat saved for her by a friend and came in at the last minute.  Both times, she ended up one row in front of me and a few seats to the right.  Weird coincidence, that.  But it means nothing.  Any excuses my rational mind comes up with for reaching out to her are just sublimated vestiges of that romance that never dies, some ludicrous fantasy that there could be a relationship there, where there was never anything but bullshit in the first place.

I don’t want that.  I don’t want relationships with either of these people.  Even if I tried to be friends with them, my past would fuck that up.  I want them to be well and I want their lives to go well.  And I want myself to be well and my life to go well – and my best relationship ever to continue for the rest of my life, as it likely will.  But Romance.  You’re not allowed to forget, just like you’re not allowed to forget any given moment of embarrassment from ages three to thirty.

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Thank Fuck the Rich are Cowards

See Marcus’s post about Caesar for an example of what courage looks like.  Courage is a virtue, in the sense that “virtue” originally meant manly qualities, and while it can sometimes be good, it can also be decidedly evil.  From the time those American nazis entered the Capitol Building, all it would take to snuff out the already miserable vestiges of US democracy would be a rich person exercising evil courage.

I say a rich person rather than a politician because they’re the ones with all the levers.  If a Koch grew a pair and took a risk, they could grab Trump’s ear, tell him all the right things to say, grease the right palms, pull the right levers.  Trump has very little control over his messaging because he’s an impulsive dipshit with a paper-thin concept of reality.  But if the right rich person sidled up like the serpent and told him what he had to gain from following a script?  He could be far more dangerous than he is now.  He could actually be effective, instead of just being a half-assed stochastic terrorist.

But late capitalism is all about playing it safe.  Don’t take risks, even the bare minimum ones necessary to maintain control.  Just keep ratfucking everyone in sight and hide when you get spotted.  Cowardice.  They know they own Biden, that he’s the safety, the security, so while they’ll boost the Trumpism that lets them run riot over the natural resources and slaughter-me sheep of red states, they won’t help keep Trump himself in power.

Nothing good will come of today, but the worst case scenario will not either, and for that I’d like to thank our country’s rich for being more Antoinette than Machiavelli.  Stay down, cowards.

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Latin Heat

Content warning: Misogynist Magic

Back on that Latin shit.  I was translating a spell and one particular scribal abbreviation was giving me the business.  It looks like “heat” with an arc over it.  I couldn’t easily track it down on internets, was looking for second opinions.  On the other hand, I think I’ve gotten a lot better at the transcription / de-abbreviation process than I was.  Check me out…

Including any grammatical and spelling mistakes of the original writer and likely adding my own, here you go:

“…et per omnes virtutes celorum , ut in hoc speculo hanc virtutem venire faciatus : et infundatis : ut quecunque mulier ut virgo , ut vidua intuita fuerit , ut nullam requiem sui corporis he^at : neque sedendo , neque stando : neque dormiendo , neque vigillando , neque comedendo , neque bibendo , neque aliquid faciendo : donec meas omnem voluntatem impleat :- ”

This is a spell to dominate women, because Renaissance wizards were incels.  Lacking any Latin skills, bouncing between wiktionary and google search and google translate, this is my rough interpretation of this part of the spell, slightly rearranged grammatically for ease of reading:

“…and by all the heavenly powers, as bound and established in this mirror: Whatsoever woman observed within, be she virgin or widow, shall not rest her body (he^at), shall not sit, not stand, not sleep, not see, not eat, not drink, not do a thing, until all satisfy my will.”

So what is the Latin “heat”?  Based on the usual way these abbreviations go, “hemat,” but what would that mean here?  This grimoire often reduces compound vowels from Latin to a single letter, for example turning ae into e, like in “celorum” from the first phrase.  The closest word then that I could find was “hiemat,” which would turn the phrase into something clunky like “shall not rest her body though it be winter.”  Also if this was a dip into Greek, it could be something to do with blood.  “Shall not rest her body though it bleeds.”

What do you think?

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Mortal Jelly

Humans are just piles of jibbly meat, highly derived structures propping up a primordial worm / digestive tract.  Our overdeveloped sensory processing node/brain wants something more.  In their earliest form, brains would have more basic info to process – dark/light, pain/satiation, things like that.  Is the human desire for a transcendant experience a misguided version of some kinda worm drive, wanting to move into the light inside the light?

Sometimes experiences feel like they’re touching on an abstract higher realm, like getting closer to god or transcendance or nirvana, whatever.  When I’ve felt this it’s usually from music or film, more rarely from physical experience.  It’s kind of like buzzing.  Like if your thoughts are all wave forms and they’re peaking.  Maybe transcendance is just your mind’s wave form hitting a ceiling, like a mistake in audio editing that causes a loud part of a song to turn into an obnoxious rattle.  We don’t like hearing that audio track, but if it had a sense of self, maybe it would feel pretty cool.

Anyway, listening to The Doors veers between wondering why you’re listening to this clownish nonsense and feeling like true magick is about more than just casting spells, maaaan.  I put my finger on the veins of the cosmos and find the pulse uncanny, retract.  Back to work.

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A Bad Dream

Content Warning: Gore, COVID

In my waking hours, I’m not concerned about COVID.  My household is fortunate to be able to isolate well, we live in a state doing better than most (though one of the worse cities in our part of it), and there’s very promising vaccine news floating about lately.  I think we can hold out ’til the stuff comes available, and while I can feel bad for victims, it’s not a very deep sorrow for me.

But apparently when I’m asleep it’s a different story.  I had a dream where COVID symptoms included hemorrhagic sores, open wounds, and plague-like swelling.  For unclear reasons the bodies of victims were in chopped-up chunks.  Still-living victims were burying the dead in mass graves at the sides of the road while the rest of us drove by.  There was blood soaking the ground in large patches.

India was having some success training animals like monkeys and wombats to help care for children with the disease, which was heart-warming.  I wondered in my dream if I should pay money to that charity, or if it would be better spent in helping research a cure.  I somehow ended up in an isolation cell with one of those plague children, which was sad and horrid, but I half-realized I was dreaming and was able to logic myself out – not fully awake, but to a previous area from the dream.

Somebody wondered on a previous post what a bad dream looks like to me.  This wasn’t the worst, but it was bad.

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Random Thoughts on Ethnic Stereotypes

The title of this post probably makes it sound like it will be more substantial.  No, this a Random Thoughts from Satan post, and not that deep.  I was just looking at the search “Hayden Christensen Movie Trailer” on youtube for laughs, and laugh I did.  But it occurred to me that in “Little Italy” he was essentially doing brownface.

As many people have pointed out, across the world there are varying definitions of white.  To a Persian guy in Iran, he’s white.  To a Berber in Egypt, she’s white.  It’s defined by having somebody darker than you, and usually further south.  So to some Germans, I expect, Italians are not white.  And by that definition, a Scandinavian Canadian with his hair darkened rocking a tan to flip pizzas would be doing brownface…  Although I found out he’s like 1/4 Italian, so *chef’s kiss* mama mia!  Uncancelled.

In all this I caught myself being amused at the cute ethnic stereotypes of the world, which is, I expect, not SJW kosher.  And yet, how can you not automatically be charmed by people with funny accents?  So cute.  One time I was in a basic English class at the community college, while I was reading aloud some depressing stuff I wrote, it prompted my teacher to say “My God man, are you a drinka?”

It was one of the highlights of my life, honestly.  He was so Jewish his name was Murray and he was from Brooklyn, where in the summers it was like a foinace, oy vay.  Freaking delightful.  I wonder, in places less mainstream blando Anglo-American, would my accent charm and amuse?

As an exemplar of the most over-represented culture on the planet, I kinda doubt it.  C’est lavie.  I’ll have to be cute in some other way.  Maybe my taste in shoes…

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Not a Bad Dream

Content Warnings: Surreal Violence, Death, Drugs, Prostitution, Deformity.

I had a dream I was Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten fame, though the rest of the band didn’t enter into it.  Me and some artist / drug friends were living in some kind of underground ruin over the course of a few decades.  In later years it also became a brothel and I was arguing with my best friend about allowing caning in the S&M action.  I don’t remember why I opposed it, but my friend the art pimp said we needed it to stay competitive.  The main points of action in the dream were when cops tried to raid us and it turned into big siege situations.  I killed a few cops in self defense and the defense of others, and somehow legally got away with it both times.  Those parts of the dream weren’t bad.  Later in the dream a sad prostitute with a elephant man-like skin condition and semi-liquid flesh started chasing me around and dividing like an amoeba, which wasn’t cool, but not as scary as it should have been.  I woke up to a day off from work, so not a bad time.

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Gonna Work on a Screenplay

Content Warning: This could be perceived as making light of gun violence and that ain’t cool.  But I’m an action movie fan, and this came to me in a dream, so I’m obligated to do what I can to make it a reality.  Unless, like, that ain’t cool.  Damn I could use a nap.

How do you like my screenwriter name?  The T is for Train.

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