We Can Be Heroes.

LJIdol Bow-Out

2016-12-15T20:23:12Z

Hey, everyone in therealljidol, I'm wicked-sorry but my brain is just unable to bend itself back into a shape where Idol is a thing I can do at the moment.

I'm really sorry, but I have to punk out.

Best of luck, all.

LJIdol 10.1 - "I need the struggle to feel alive"

2016-11-23T22:37:55Z

Well, hey, let's start this off right:
Content Advisory for content related to mental/emotional health. Seems proper to advise around such issues.

I don't like myself.

The reasons for this are long and varied and tend to be based in habit and internalization of parts of my environment as much as the more active work of self-evaluation that I think is incredibly necessary to the work of being human. This is not, mind you, a plea for aid in this matter. I have never met a good-hearted attempt to change this truth of myself that was not infinitely less pleasant than the constant bubbling knowledge that I'm a real piece of shit. Nor is this me doing some smug dick-swinging nonsense wherein I talk about my awfulness as if it were some diffuse virtue, some Tyler Durden drag where I talk about how by being a jerk, I'm really being a good person.

So, after a certain point, I just sorta stopped trying to get that whole "higher self-esteem" thing going. I'm given to understand it's a fairly common thing in the folks who grew up in similar stretches of space, time, and socioeconomic milieu as I did, but I really couldn't say too much because every time someone talks about it, there's a torrent of "how to feel a different way" advice, which is always well-intentioned, but... well, which really stymies the conversation, doesn't it?

It's like a whole mess of other things that were culturally decided to be bad without a lot of nuance or even a by-your-leave that makes it really hard for some folks to exist without feeling like their bodies and/or souls are problems, which does wonders for everyone's self-esteem, which just brings the whole thing 360.

On the other hand, though, becoming ambivalent (at best) to the concept has freed up a lot of mental bandwidth that would otherwise be caught up in trying to resolve the dissonance that arrives when "I don't like me" meets "But I really, really should".

Mostly because it gives me space to work with things that matter a bit more to me than what some jerk (me) thinks of some jerk (also me). Things like getting my mental health in order, things like trying to calm my over-anxious ass down, things like art, and beauty, and the cultivation of the soul.

And it's those last things that have become more important to me. I realize it might be read as a kind of false-dichotomy (like yourself/work on things that matter to you), but the way I had been approaching things, it very much has been a dichotomy for me because, frankly, being around 35 (next week), I begin to realize that I don't really have the time or inclination to make a lot of really big, really major changes in my self-image. That's a lot of focused effort for something I've got this far without and, frankly, between wrapping my head around putting a name to the things that have long made me feel an awkward fit with the world around me (and even medicating some of them), I don't really care to devote the energy to it.

Instead, that energy--that weird, sometimes hyperfocused (because of the medicinal-grade amphetamine that is constantly goosing the underdeveloped bit at the front of my brain) energy that I'm still learning to deal with--so often goes into making things outside myself I can be proud of on some level.

At the moment, a lot of it is various kinds of fiction (even if I'm a bit behind where I'd like to be on a lot of it), and later it'll be papers in a couple languages so I can get around to continuing my university education, but whatever form it takes, that's the place I've learned to focus that good-feeling energy.

Because ultimately, I know for a fact that there's enough going on inside this weird meat-machine, between changes of mind, changes of perspective, changes of location, and changes of heart, I'll never be able to be a trustworthy judge of myself. I already don't like myself and every thought that pops up in my gob is suspect because of it.

But, with a properly jaundiced eye, the things I create (and, by extension, the things we all create) can be better than the people who make them. They're moments captured in amber and run through the weird perceptual filters DWWinnicot spoke of: the twin desires to hide and to communicate something that is so personal as to be uncommunicable and also super-goddamn-obvious to the person making it. And sometimes not even then.

Which is what makes it worth doing for me and is, honestly, better than having any kind of great opinion of myself because for all I will always be able to see the faults in a thing that came from me (my particular and incorrect use of some forms of punctuation, my inability to have a thought that is not interrupted by another thought, my particular attention being paid to certain words or combinations thereof, not to mention certain bad habits of thought coming through), that's also where I can find the good things. Seen outside myself, these pieces of me, these carefully-curated moments in time, become the person I wish I was or, as the case may be, would have been at that time.

And sometimes, when I am very lucky, I find that person that work speaks of to be not entirely without merit.

I can give them the same love for what's on the surface, for what I can see, that I give to my families both blood and chosen. I can look at these artifacts--real or ephemeral--and see not a person who's neck-deep in spiritual dogshit and trying to figure out how on Earth to even start cleaning it up (while being thankful to no longer be swimming in the stuff), but instead see whatever this person was trying to put out. I can see him without also being him and in that moment, perhaps find something of value. Some turn of phrase, some structural trick, some poetic language that was worth a damn.

Which might not actually be self-love, but is the kind I've learned to have.

And while, in the words of the Late Great, it ain't easy, it's also the only thing I know how to do.

LJIdol 10.0: Introduction.

2016-11-08T02:40:29Z

On my best days, I know I'm made of meat.

It's a hard realization and while I don't know if it's always been so, it's a thing that's been harder and harder to not know is happening.

The rest of the time, there's an absurdly strong assertion in me that I'm not human and never have been. This assertion tells me that somewhere there's a button and when I find it, the plastic housings holding my face clamped to my head will release and I'll be able to start... something. I'll be able to show my true face, which is not a face.

A friend of mine helpfully told me that that's a kind of low-level depersonalization, usually connected to anxiety. They pointed me to some lovely websites that do that frustrating thing where they let you know that your problem is a problem and also give you context for it, which is one of the most useful things on Earth for me as I start to do that adulthood thing where you reckon with just what the shit is going on in your head. Of course, the website also offered advice that sounded great, but is also the kind of thing that is pretty useless because my brain doesn't do that thing or the way my brain is finding itself set up makes it so that I don't have any real understanding how to do the thing.

It's funny because I always thought I was a superlatively chill person. Then I started actually digging into things and realized I've always been a bundle of nerves because, frankly, there's not a person on Earth I'm not afraid of.

And I only really notice it nowadays because I've started messing about with my brain chemistry. Not capriciously, mind. This isn't one of those "white cisdude sits on a bed smoking and talks about his heavy drug use because that's a shorthand for being interesting" things. As an attempt to have a better shot at getting through college--because college is a hell of a thing after a decade or so of not being at school and also dealing with how your brain is formed in a very sub-optimal way given the needs of the society in which you live, a society where you only sorta speak the language.

At this point in the first season I took part in, I didn't know most of this.

I didn't know a lot of things I learned in the meanwhile.

And, honestly, I don't think I wanted to.

Once you know a thing, you have to deal with it. Even if it's just to sort your head around that thing.

So I found out that I do, indeed, have ADHD. On top of that, my brain is wired along the lines of the portion of the Autism spectrum formerly known as Asperger's Syndrome. It's a weight off my shoulders in a lot of ways because I don't have to worry about what the shit is my problem, but it also means that in the light of the way treating some of my symptoms goes, I have to make a lot of changes and try to figure out how to steer this clunky machine I'm in all over again.

But as I get past the adjustment phase of anxiety attacks and forgetting to eat for the better part of every day, I also find that I can just sit down and write the way I've always wanted to: obsessively and straight through, provided I have something to say and can think of the shape of the thing. I know also that I have to stay away from the computer for the first few hours of my day lest it suck me in. I know that I have to find a way to pull out of that obsession and feed my cat or he will just wind me up and I have lost some ability to distract that wound-up-itude into some kind of calmness by giving myself a taste of the focus I've always wanted. I know that I have to live more mechanically, think more mechanically, become more mechanical if I'm going to thrive in the way I want to.

So I guess what I'm saying is that on my best days, I know I'm made of meat, a perfectly normal human worm-baby.

And yet somehow, it's nowhere near as comforting as the idea that one day I'll find that button, slough off the rubbery plastic that makes up my skin, and emerge some strange steel butterfly.

And I don't yet know how to feel about that.

I call myself Aleph, I'm 34 years old, I write a lot of fantasy-based stories because on some level, the fantastic is how I understand and contextualize my life. I jokingly call my brain defective and have a dream that one day I'll be able to spread my much-studied love of communication to a new generation of people who will not take me seriously because it's hard to explain poetry to someone who doesn't already understand what it's for. I don't go personal often because I can't imagine myself as being interesting, I don't worry about self-esteem because my life got easier once I gave up on getting any of it, and all I want is to sing the song that will free the whole human race from sadness.

And I'm back for as much of season ten as I can manage.

Hm.

2016-11-01T10:41:20Z

Yeah. Yeah, I think I could do with some LJI. Might not go the whole way, but it'd be nice to goose my brain a little.

Signups are here, if anyone's looking for it.

LJIdol F/R Home Game - Topic 0 - Introduction

2015-11-23T00:47:52Z

I'm not actually playing. I don't quite have the time or quite as much brainspace as I'd like to do it with any seriousness, but now and then I'll probably have an idea that the topic brings out in me and I feel like I'd be giving up something to not roll with it.

It's not that late on a Sunday night, but it looks it--feels it. Winter's setting in. The darkness becomes denser, rolling over this tiny town that is now my home like a creeping smoke that oozes between the low buildings, an invasion on two fronts. Behind me, the sky is red or orange or brown or green where the sun goes down. I can't tell, quite; bad sense of color. In front of me, the dense, humid dark is pushing forward, only held back by streetlights.

I'm standing at a bus stop. I'm not waiting for a bus. I don't entirely understand what these bus stops are for. This town doesn't have a public transit service. It's the first time in years I've lived without one. On the other hand, it's a thirty-minute walk from our place on the edge of town to the train station on the other far side of town. But all over town are these dilapidated blue bus stops, waiting for buses that don't seem intent on coming.

It feels right. Two steps forward and there's no more sidewalk. Just grass leading to disused-looking industrial buildings. I'm standing there with my secondhand smartphone, a pair of people crooning Japanese in my ears while I look around for a new stretch of sidewalk. Across the street is high fence and keycard-locked gates, ahead of me grass and a two-story building whose functions I don't know.

The dark is creeping in, my nose is cold, and my knees are starting to hurt, out here where the sidewalk ends. Past here, I am unwelcome because I am not going there to produce, I am not going there to be a part of someone else's machine, I am not going to be productive or industrious and I can almost sense that this city is telling me that for all I am welcome in the city, this part of it is not for me. It is slumbering and interlopers would disturb it unkindly.

But I feel my legs itching. I want to keep moving. I've been exercising more and it gives me a need for motion. Either that or it's another welcome side-effect of the new medication (30mg Elvanse). I can't quite tell.

I take a picture of the place where the sidewalk ends, sad that the lens can't quite capture what my eyes do. Even when it doesn't flash, it lightens, adjusts the contrast and brightness to make the sight understandable to others. But I can't infuse the picture with the occasional throb of something that's not quite vertigo, that crisp wetness separating October from November either offering to turn me around with them or to pull me along with the lost month.

I feel quietly inhuman. It makes me want to take a step off the sidewalk, off the path, outside of the confines the concrete have made for me to take my place with my brethren machines in the sheet metal-covered buildings, some hard-to-name part of me knowing that I would be welcomed by them in a way I have never known. The confusion and the hurt and the frustration that defines being alive replaced with a knowable purpose, something easier than making my own.

The feeling passes, as it does.

I take a lungful of air and as I exhale, I am aware that when I inhale again it will be winter inside me.

I'm not quite right. I feel adrift. Apart from myself and connected with the life of this tiny city. I like to flatter myself that those feelings are real connections. They aren't. But that's okay. I don't need a ton of real things. One or two is all I need.

The light of the city has become the only light behind me but for dear Luna peering through the clouds.

I tuck my phone into my pocket. The album ends. The sound in my ears is the low bass rumble of reality and the whispering creeping of a night still remembering how to be winter. A car, the first one in a long time, passes by me. I wonder if they see me. I wonder if I'm real to them. I wonder if we are sharing the sensation of being inhuman or if the rubber of the tires insulates them from the siren song of mechanization as they barrel deeper into the last couple blocks of the industrial area. I was wondering if I would be able to make it to the recycling center and the gas station not far from it. I hope they make it. I feel, foolishly, like I'm the shaman of this place, this border between the world of soft humanity and solid machines, this stretch of concrete where warm flesh and dreams that defy articulation brush up, uncomfortably, against known purposes and cold, oiled metal.

I am tempted to raise my arms, to invoke some old power, to assert myself against this border, to let the machines know that one of their lost brothers has not forgotten them, that I hear their slumbering breath and recognize their clockwork dreams as cousins of my own.

But then I shift my weight and feel the familiar rush of blood back into my heel and I am reminded again that I am not metal, oil, and electricity, but meat and protein and chemicals. I do not have a keycard and am not a machine and know that I am to return to my world of warmth and frustration. I turn my back on the creeping dark, blow a kiss to Luna peeking out from behind a cloud and move toward the warm light of my new hometown, every step away from the border making me feel more grounded and connected to the down.

Everything is concrete under my feet and the sidewalk seems to go on forever even though I know that there are other places where the sidewalk ends and promise myself that one dark Sunday when the world feels in the midst of transformation, I will turn a different corner and find another borderland and feel the heartbeat of some other spirit, some other way of being, and I will ponder it before I return home.

alephz @ 2015-03-16T18:59:00

2015-03-16T17:59:34Z

Holy shit.

I'm a homeowner.

The (post-)Ritalin Diaries - Week 8 (I think), Day 4

2015-03-05T16:18:13Z

I gotta do better at taking care of myself. Yesterday I didn't eat a whole lot and also didn't get a lot of sleep. Today I am absolutely falling apart. My head is full of cotton and my body is just feeling mad unpleasant. Naturally, it's just because at the moment it's another little stab of big/important tests, which tend to be the times when I don't brain so good.

But man, I'm really noticing the difference. My whole sense of time really does feel so very different. Like, on the Ritalin, I would still focus on a thing for hours and hours but I was more aware that I was doing it for hours.

Now I'm just finding myself feeling bizarrely adrift in time and I don't care for it. Hours pass in a flash of nothing and it's frustrating.

Just gonna keep working on getting my body going for it. That means mechanical needs need to be better-tended-to. Food, water, exercise, sleep.

I don't like how hard it is. But it's what needs to be done.

The Ritalin Diaries - Week 5, Days 1-4

2015-02-12T18:48:53Z

Missed a few days here. Haven't had a lot to day about the last few days. But there is some news, so here we go.

After another check-up to see how the drug's affecting me and, well, it seems that they are just NOT comfortable with where my pulse is being at. Still at more than 90bpm when I go there (vs. ~82bpm at home and ~70bpm at home without the Ritalin, though there could be a problem with how I'm counting?) with blood pressure that's just starting to get into pre-dangerous territory (120/85) so... yeah, they just aren't comfortable with it.

All this tanked my mood yesterday. Failing to pour that tanked mood into creativity, I played a load of video games.

However, since rattsu and I are planning to gonna try and get some drinking in, I've elected not to take my meds today (what with how there should be a one-day buffer between Ritalin and alcohol consumption (or vice-versa)) which is hopefully gonna be good for my mood. Aaaand that's being an interesting thing because while I am absolutely noticing my brain backsliding a bit. Like, I'm still thinking better, which I think could well be the residual amphetamines in my system or at least the effects thereof, but I can tell my head is spinning again, like some of the cogs have lost teeth, just looking to get some purchase, little fireworks shooting off and going POP POP POP and sending my attention going hither and yon.

I wonder if you can read it in the text. Some folks have said they could.

Mostly I'm noticing that despite getting ten hours of sleep last night, I'm still sluggish and getting the midday drain that has been a normal part of things without the meds. That's being just... guh. But also something that'll pass, so... yeah.

Gonna be interesting to see how this all works when they put me on the Concerta, which is tentatively the plan because the 10mg of Ritalin is really starting to lose its strongest effects. I'm absolutely feeling better and days like today really put a pin in that for me but it just doesn't give me the surge I'd really like. I keep hoping against hope that there's something that'll just snap the forebrain into action and give me the gopower I want. I sorta fear that that's asking a bit much; I can get a better-working executive function but I won't be getting one that works at the industry standard. As they've said: a prosthetic.

And while prosthetics can serve a lot of the same functions, they are not themselves the same thing.

Those limits are serving to frustrate me. I was putting a probably-unreasonable amount of hope in this stuff that it'd be the key to opening up my brain to sustained work or at least that it'd be good enough to help me push forward easier.

Again, I'm better but I'm not where I'd like to be. I don't think I ever will be and I think it's one of those things where it's just gonna be one of those things where I have to encourage my brain to do the "this is just how I live now" that is so often its natural state.

Little depressed but tomorrow rattsu comes down and we're gonna get something to drink and I'll get mad stupid for a little and then hopefully come Monday, my brain'll snap back hard and if nothing else, I'll feel smarter and the placebo effect'll carry me through the rest of the way back into working.

Ritalin Diaries - Week 3, Day 2-4

2015-01-30T00:23:13Z

Got word back from the nurse that since they weren't able to find information on my baseline pulse rate, we're not gonna be raising my dosage.

This is fine except I am absolutely starting to notice that the effect is not as strong as it once was. I think I mentioned this earlier but it's even more true. I'm not back to falling asleep but I'm absolutely noticing a bit more restlessness if only in my legs doing that restless-moving in place thing they do when I'm sitting still and trying to listen. I'm still listening a lot better than I sometimes to but at the same time, the sharpness and clarity I had that first couple days is just dropping off much more noticeably and it's frustrating. Getting myself to do physical things is relatively easy but getting myself to do mental work is still a pain. Too much of one.

I'm deathly worried that I'm finding out that underneath all the ADHD-inspired procrastination, I might just be an exceedingly lazy person.

On the upside, with some amphetamines kicking my shriveled forebrain into gear, I am hoping I can fix that.

But, well, the other thing is worrying that my heart will suffer extreme damage and explode in my chest and nobody needs that.

Okay, okay, that's MY worry, not one the doctors have expressed. Which is good because if that was their worry, I daresay they'd have told me to suck it up and deal with a lack of executive function.

But on that front, I'm also figuring out how to attack that side of things through getting into an exercise habit. Three days a week of free weights and copious amounts of stretching and the like. I think I've mentioned it before but I mention it again because I'm starting to feel like I've got some gun show going on. Just a bit, of course, but enough that I feel pretty snazz about the whole thing. The fervent hope is that if I keep it up long enough, it'll buff up my heart a bit so I can have a lower heartrate and, thus, accommodate enough of whatever thing they wanna put me on so that I can just be mad-clever and driven and whatnot.

I mean, I say it like that and it sounds like I just want them to pump me full of drugs so I can burn out instead of fade away.

I mean, I don't WANNA do either but I'd really rather get into a space where I can easily enter a frenzy of activity than having a state where I am just in a constant frenzy of no-activities in particular but trying to do them all.

Also, as a side note, I'm noticing myself getting more... I dunno quite how to say it. Pedant-y? Lots of very long rants about how annoyed I am when a word is used in a way I don't like. I am hoping it's just because that sort of shit is a LOT easier to deal with but, well, it's a thing that's going on. We joke that it might be a bit to do with how I've also got a bit of what used to be called Asperger's and is now considered a place on the Autism spectrum and now that the ADHD isn't taking some of the edge off of it, the more stereotypical stuff is coming through.

It's hard to say. I don't feel a ton different except that for all I complain about it not being sharp enough, my brain is absolutely sharper than it's been in years overall, even if it doesn't feel as transcendently so as it did that first week.

Ritalin Diaries - Week 2, Days 3-4

2015-01-23T13:14:22Z

Lately, the biggest thing for me is that I'm spending a lot of time reeling and being vaguely frustrated that my ability/need to multitask is drying up.

It's long been a habit of mine to create quasi-workable environments for myself by putting on, say, low music or other visual/audio media with low attention requirement in the background while I try to do other things but now...

Now that's becoming a lot more difficult. Things which require focus now require MOTHERLOVING FOCUS. All-caps, bold, and italic. The Ritalin's doing its work, is the thing. My executive functions are kicking into gear, shored up by their chemical crutch... which means that since there is now a central executive in here and it's very, very, very single-minded. Distractions are not tolerated and when I make a plan or set an alarm, that shit becomes a LAW.

It's been kinda fascinating, actually, to feel my thought-patterns changing.

Like, I know that reads as if I've turned this whole thing into some kind of epistolary body horror which is, I admit, not a thing that would be wholly unexpected of someone who relates to the world through a massive chunky wall of fiction and, now that I mention it, not a terrible way to do a short horror piece... but at the same time, that would be a tremendously disrespectful thing which would only add to the low-level stigma surrounding psychiatric medication.

But seriously, how cool would it be, reading this thing about someone whose mind is slowly taken over and becoming not-their-own? It's been done before, I'm sure, but...

Well, I'm clearly still capable of digression, anyway, so THAT's a thought-habit that's not changing.

But what IS changing is a lot of my relation to low-stakes, self-imposed obligations. Normally, I'd be able to write them off but I'm really finding them becoming things that I need to do. It's not quite compulsion but much in the same way I feel trouble getting started with writing, I find it frightfully easy to almost take a back seat to my conscious mind which is preparing all these excuses for why I'm not following through on a thing while the rest of me just does the thing, leaving the excuses-generating parts sorta dressed for a costume party while everyone else is hangin' in casual wear.

If that makes sense. Having a more active executive function is not, I think, making my wordplay better.

I dunno, it's just the number of tasks which have felt really complex before and required a lot of energy to start have become disturbingly streamlined. Still don't much care for a lot of them but that distaste feels less important and the need to get them done feels more so. Which, no lie, is why I started this stuff in the first place.

On the downside, I'm noticing that I'm dehydrating faster and am thinking of setting some other alarm to make sure I'm drinking water more regularly as the urge to drink water or eat for stimulation's sake has died out, leaving me quite unsure how to keep the need to do those things in mind. Also, still noticing the very very occasional brief surge in heartrate and I'll be speaking about it with the nurse I'm meeting on Monday. It's nothing painful but it seems a thing to keep my medical people apprised of, just in case.

So at the moment, I'm trying to systematize myself a bit more, which is difficult because I haven't much experience at it and all of my coping mechanisms up until this point are no longer that helpful now that my brain is working a bit closer to spec.

LJIdol 9.32.2 - Intersubjectivity

2015-01-08T22:09:16Z

It's hard realizing you (which is to say "I") suck.

Or at least it was for me.

That's not me passive-aggressively asking for assurance to the contrary, mind. That sorta thing makes me mad uncomfortable.

I bring it up because it was one of the most frustrating times in my creative life and also the one that's been the most fulfilling for me because it really helped me realize why I had so many abandoned projects behind me and why I never had any plots to go with the piles and piles of (if I do say so myself) really good characters I'd come up with.

See, what happened was I spent a goodly while writing some superhero comics--I had the betas up on my LJ for the first six scripts, got some good notes from y'all--and after feeling like I'd got some of the kinks worked out of those first six and was doing a little extra spit-n-polish on the six that were to come after, I went looking for unpaid artists.

Now, as y'all may know (some of you more than others), that's a titanic thing to ask of someone: "here, spend time you could be spending on something actively profitable on my idea which will most likely amount to a big ol' nothing". I always appreciated the people who responded to my calls for artists interested in that sort of thing and while I never heard back from most of them after a certain point (a couple of which were particularly close to actually getting pages did), I finally got a response back from a guy who gave me the straight skinny as nobody had before.

He did not tell me that the work sucked, which was pleasant enough, but he did tell me why it sucked and probably why nobody ever got back to me after a while.

It was hollow.

It was, to quote the Bard, "...a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".

I don't know how good the panel descriptions or my pacing was and I'm sure there's still a whole damn world of stuff I've yet to learn about ARG THE CRAAAAAFT of the thing... but even if I'd lucked my way into a near-perfect understanding of all that stuff, it wouldn't matter because my thrilling adventure story was just that: a thrilling (I hope) adventure story.

Seriously, I looked back through the whole thing after I got that critique, trying to find anything in the text that wasn't just "Aleph likes superheroes, especially when they do things like this", just even this little scrap of meaning.

And I came up empty. Ashamed as I am to say it, I just came up with nothin'.

So, well, tossed the whole thing out, started rebuilding from the ground up, trying to bend the whole thing around a central message and it's hard.

I've felt like that's made it better. I won't know for sure until it's done because it's been like three years and it's being written, re-written and re-written all through as I find better ways of expressing myself or realize a flaw in what I was saying or just get my ass kicked because college is no joke and sucks up so much of a body's creative energy so that you can be a different kind of productively creative.

More than anything, it's really got me into a frame of mind about how I can use fiction in the future, about how to make stories for myself (and, hopefully, other folks) that won't just fall apart like junker cars in the back yard of my unconscious mind. It's got me thinking about how I can connect with people, not just on the level of ARG THE CRAAAAFT but also on that more heartfelt one.

Because I don't have enough interesting things that happen to me to ever be a proper blogger.

But there's this whole world of feelings inside me, things that I can't often put into direct words, things expressed best by obscuring them with metaphors and clunky prose, things I'd write poetry about if I had any faith in my ability to write in verse, things you can't say effectively by just saying them.

And I doubt they're particularly special, given my comparatively limited and sheltered life experiences, but with any luck and a lot of practice and endless endless hours of harsh criticism, I can make something worthwhile out of them, a little crystallized chunk of my life to hand out to people and let them examine it and seeing what bits of me reflect in them and what they project onto 'em.

But I can't see all that stuff 'til I get the words out (and probably shell out some money, too).

Now here's hoping I've learned even a quarter as much as I think I have, hm?

So I guess I best get crackin'.

LJIdol 9.32.1 - Overwatch

2015-01-08T19:39:19Z

"You wanted to be a hero," it said, voice a tinny, mechanical rumbling in his ear.

"Proctor, this isn't..." Jonathan rasped, struggling to push up from the ground on quavering arms, "I didn't..." he let himself slump to the ground, panting as darkness took him.

The youth, Jonathan, stood atop a tall building and looked down at the simulated city stretching out in all directions. Proctor, acting as an anti-crime computer, was silent, which meant that in the city, everyone was happy and all was well. Jon let out a sigh of relief. Nobody needed a hero, nobody needed him to fight.

There was a near-inaudible static hiss and then there was information pouring into his head. Another of his too-familiar rogues gallery, clad in brightly-coloured military gear, was menacing a family of four. They were barking demands he couldn't hear but which Proctor relayed to him in its mechanical rumble. It was the usual stuff. Money, jewels, helicopters, material wealth, all that nonsense. Things the threatened family didn't have. That fact would not go well for the family.

The villains weren't messing around. They were never messing around.

Jonathan took off running. The ground underneath him propelled him along, hooks reached down from the sky to turn his hops over small obstacles into titanic leaps over tall buildings. Pistons in the city's many modular walls, floors and streets propelled vehicles and other distractions out of the way as if he'd become more powerful than a locomotive when really, he was still just a boy.

The simulation rushed past Jonathan, his feet slapping hard against its moving streets while Proctor broadcast the audio from the besieged apartment into his brain. It was terrible. This villain used knives and was happy to use them on the family. Jonathan didn't know if this villain was real or if the family was. Proctor had told him that it would be using a blend of holograms, clones and even the occasional body from cryosleep.

Proctor, vile thing that it was, had granted Jonathan's wish.

He'd wished to be a hero. And, according to Proctor, you weren't a hero without stakes. You weren't a hero without villains. You weren't a hero if sometimes you didn't fail.

Jonathan, stupid kid that he was, hadn't been able think of anything to wish for except for life to be completely unlike the sterile routine of his stint as humanity's ambassador and the colony-ship's first line of defense against things going wrong. Young enough to be adaptable, old enough to have worthwhile problem-solving capabilities, educated in etiquette believed to be nonthreatening to possible intergalactic threats and in basic maintenance.

He'd just wanted his shifts to be more than just watching old movies and waiting because, he knew, the waiting wasn't going to end until after his ninth shift with the rest of the sleepers when they hit the planet and then the real work would begin. So he'd talked with Proctor and Proctor'd scanned the books and movies and other media that Jonathan'd fed it. It took him to the recreation chamber and created the simulation. It gave him strength and speed and--as its job was to protect him--it made his invulnerable.

Then it put him through his paces.

The villain screamed and Proctor vented its words into Jonathan's mind, filling his consciousness so that he wouldn't miss what was said as the villain bore down on the family.

Jonathan lunged forward and tackled the villain, sending him sprawling through the wall.

The family was safe for the moment.

But Jonathan? Probably not.

On the other side of the wall was a new villain, all bulk and power and glowing energy which lept from its eyes and filled Jonathan with an unspeakable pain. Tasers. Not the first time Proctor'd used them in the simulation.

Pain was a part of being a hero, after all.

"That's enough," he whimpered, trying to shake off the effect of the electric shock as the massive villain pulled back his fist.

"Proctor, please!"

The building came down with just one punch from the villain.

"You've failed, Jonathan," Proctor rumbled in his ear as it fed the voices of a crumbling apartment building into his ears. He didn't know if they were real screams or where Proctor'd gotten them or what. Proctor never said whether or not anything in the simulation was entirely simulated. A hero didn't know those things.

"Please stop," whispered Jonathan.

"The villain is still at large," Proctor replied as a few hooks yanked Jonathan away and slammed him into another fake building, "Heroes do not stop when the villain is at large."

"It's all fake!"

"But you are not. I know you are capable of overcoming your path of trials."

Jonathan just shook his head, and tried to get to his feet, "Stop. Please."

Another building came down. "It is normal for the hero to wish to stop but they must understand their responsibility. Your inaction causes more suffering." Another burst of screaming in his head, cut off by the sound of a heavy weight hitting the ground. "You must act."

"But it never ends!"

"No," agreed Proctor, "It never ends."

"It never means anything!"

Proctor was silent.

There was another rumbling and another building began to fall, this one on Jonathan. Proctor sent screams into his ears. He couldn't tell if they were familiar or not, recorded or live and he forced himself to his feet, assisted by pistons in the floor beneath him and forced his arms up to catch the thing with a groan.

The collapsing building caught itself, though not perfectly. Just enough pressure rested on Jonathan's shaking arms to remind him to keep playing his part.

He leaned into the weight and gave the barest push and the building eased itself back into place. The villain laughed and hit him with another arc of lightning.

"The hero has to win. Good must triumph. That is what it means," Proctor said cooly as Jonathan howled in pain, trying to regain some measure of control over his body. The tasers weren't enough to kill and even if they were, Proctor wouldn't let it get that far. Oh, he'd push Jonathan to his limits but never let him die.

Probably.

Proctor was filling his ears now with the names of the people he should be saving, reminding him that he was being a hero by following the program, that Proctor had the ability to use resources from the cryosleep chambers, meaning the consequences of failure could be dire.

"Proctor, just turn it off," he breathed, just on the edge of sobbing, "Superheroes aren't real, this is just some stupid stuff for kids! Nothing's worth that!"

"You must defeat the villain to prove yourself a hero, Jonathan," it replied.

"Then what?"

"You must prove it again."

Jonathan looked up at the bulky villain construction, a hologram nearly indistinguishable from a real person but for the fact that shadows never fell right on it, its light-membrane carefully watched by Proctor to make sure that when it was breached, the hologram would go flying or disappear, which one usually depending on how Proctor was hiding the tasers (inside the hologram, in a hidden compartment in the wall or floors. He looked at it and saw how perfect a representation it was, how clever Proctor had been to build a simulation from dozens of old films, books and games.

"It never means anything," Jonathan breathed, "it's all just hitting this guy and getting hit and people getting hurt."

"A hero doesn't quit, Jonathan."

"I'm only a hero because you're putting people in d--"

Jonathan looked up then and a sob did escape him as the villain hologram fell away.

There was a rumbling in his ear, "Ah," it said.

"What... what role do you think you're playing, Proctor?" Jonathan asked very carefully, the way he asked the villains in the many hostage situations they'd played out.

"The greatest hero any hero has: the one writing the stories."

Jonathan let out a sound as he watched the simulation theatre ripple around him as Proctor tried to organize the set into something appropriate for the hero's metatextual adventure.

"Will you stop, Proctor? If I admit you've won, will you stop?"

The world rippled again.

"I have become accustomed to our games, Jonathan. And you require exercise and character-building before your shift is over."

"But you're hurting people. Real people."

"For the hero's edification."

"Or yours."

"I am the villain."

"But you don't play fair."

"It is for you to play fair," Proctor rumbled, "I needn't."

Jonathan let himself slump back onto the floor. The pistons, as ever, caught him and carefully lowered him down onto the floor, "And you'll run these games whether I want to play them or not?"

There was a low sound then before Proctor answered, "Yes. For your edification."

Jonathan let his eyes close. "Then play on."

There was a sound of something Jonathan had to imagine was joy from the voice in his ear and the city sprang up again, the villain laughed and stood over Jonathan, bellowing a properly grandiose speech into Jonathan's ear.

Jonathan stayed on the ground.

"Jonathan?" Proctor rumbled in his ear.

"Hm?"

"Why are you not facing your nemesis? Surely this situation calls for action."

"If this is about what you need, Proctor, do it."

"I cannot. I create the scenarios, you act them out."

Jonathan let out a sigh and forced himself to go limp. "No. You wrote everything out, now you make it work. You never needed me for that."

A prayer, of sorts, for 2015

2014-12-31T23:05:58Z

A new year has a kind of spiritual-cultural significance, less a real thing in the sense of touching, but a feeling that surges through sections of the morphomemetic field (like the morphogenetic field, only not quite so broad) at different times in different cultures, depending on what part of the year seemed a good place to start it.

I have many resolutions for this event, ways in which I will evolve my self-idea into something I consider to be generally more useful and otherwise moving toward the things I would like to be, but I would only put forth this wish and this challenge to everyone else.

Let us be kinder to one another.

Let us see more of ourselves in others.

Let us love one another better.

Let us hope harder.

Let us be louder in the defense of others.

Let us see how we fail our highest morals.

Let us change ourselves to better achieve them.

Let us dream large and find the small things we can do to get us where we want to be.

Let us cast off habits and systems which do none of these things.

Let us be better now than we have ever been before.

There may be other chances.

But they will be easier to take later if we take this one now.

LJIdol 9.31 - “The future outwits all our certitudes”

2014-12-15T21:22:16Z

Gabby was supposed to be her father.

Not literally, of course, but she was the only child and her father wanted passionately that she take over the family business and run it as he would have.

Exactly as he would have.

But there was a problem and that problem was that, simply, that there was no way to make that happen. David, her father, had read books on parenting styles which were supposed to reliably instill children with the parents' moralities but a quick search of the results of this found it to be far from foolproof. Indeed, there was a not-insignificant chance that it would lead her to hate him and he dreaded to think what that would do to his legacy.

What would happen if after he left the business to her, she changed her mind? What if she changed his long-standing policies on labour or pay or benefits? Even if he left some sort of orders in the bylaws of the business or a whole book which detailed the sort of thing he would do, the bylaws could be worked around, interpreted in a way that was not how he would do it. And this wasn't even taking into account the potentialities of new, strange advances in the future. Gabby's decisions might be different from what his were, might be wrong.

It was unacceptable.

Unacceptable.

Which was why, after a night of heavy drinking, brainstorming and contemplating the irreversible fact of his aging, he stumbled upon the idea of black magic.

It was a strange idea, true, but as long as there was an unknown quantity in the mix to which no other solution had been found so he thought that he might as well look to unorthodox solutions as the more common ones had borne no fruit.

Truth to tell, it wasn't all that difficult to learn the stuff. There were whole stores dedicated to teaching people magic, just packed wall to wall with books on the subject and other sorts of related paraphernalia. Sure, most of it was just hippy bullcrap about harmony and crystals but a lot of it? A lot of it was about applying your focus and your will to the world.

And, well, David had no small skill at that already.

It started small at first: a carefully-worded memo coinciding with a favourable vote from the board, a whispered word and a careful hand gesture at a school board meeting saw his daughter's school cutting art and sports budgets to turn away from frivolous things and focus on STEM and other business-related subjects. They were things which weren't probable but which he couldn't be sure he was causing.

So he went deeper.

Things which were less likely began to happen. He burned and effigy of the logos of one of his competitors and soonafter they folded catastrophically. A couple dolls tied together and a politician whose policies would have put obstacles in the way of his company's growth was found necking with an intern who was absolutely not his wife. A rival voluntarily committed himself after he placed the man's name into a circle designed to induce unending nightmares.

He summoned up the shadows of long-dead mystics and minor spirits for advice, paying the latter as they asked and the former in time away from the fearsome land of the dead. With their advice, he pieced together what needed to be done: her wanted her mind in business to be his but he didn't want to live as her: he had no desire to be a young woman or live out a young woman's life, he just wanted his legacy to be attended to as he would have attended to it.

It wasn't that he wanted to do her injury, he just didn't want her to do injury to his business.

So, under the council of John Dee, Dr. Heinrich Faustus and evil the mysterious and much-storied Simon Magus, he crafted a spell to make a copy of himself and attach it to every part of Gabby's mind which was related to business in general and David's company (soon to be hers) in particular.

All that was necessary was taking a little time away from the magical studies to do what he would have liked to be doing anyway: spend a little time with his daughter. Over the course of a week, Gabby and he took their meals together as they so rarely did. Gabby was overjoyed, of course, to reconnect with her father and David? Well, David simply chose his words particularly carefully and like the witches of old, cast spells over the meals he made.

On the seventh night, after the meal had finished (he was sure to end the meal with a very specifically worded phrase each night before he cleared the table), he felt... something.

Then he collapsed to the floor, dead as a doornail.

And then he woke up.

Sort of.

"Sort of" in that it was not, exactly, David himself who woke up; David was dead. But in every way which counted, the things which were not David's meat roused themselves.

It was 12:01am Gabby's eighteenth birthday. He didn't recognize the house but he recognized the feeling of his sister asleep on the first floor. He didn't know how he recognized it but he did. David realized, numbly, that he should be afraid. He couldn't feel his heartbeat, he didn't feel air in his ears, didn't have hands with which to touch things. He should be afraid. Weeping. Screaming. But it felt somehow natural. Felt somehow correct.

"There you are," came his daughter's voice. He felt it... it was hard to say where he felt it. He had no vocabulary for where he felt it but he did. It wasn't the vibrations of air through a throat and into an ear but something vibrating along his consciousness and he turned and he saw her and, somehow, she saw him.

"Gabby," he said, trying to reach out. This was a bad move. There was a surge of violent red pain that coursed through him when he extended himself too far toward her; he recoiled back to where he'd been before, unsure what else to do. "What's... what's happening?"

"Just what you wanted, father," she replied, "Today your company becomes my company and just like you wanted, you're coming along for the ride."

David reeled a bit before a surge of something like pride coursed through him, "Am I? You're accepting my help?"

Her laugh was fearsome to him. With his new sight, his new feelings, he could almost taste the bitterness in it, the cold hatred. She gestured to a pile of books at her side, books fair wafting with old echoes of his dabblings and flesh, "No."

He twisted about in place, the shock of, well, not being dead wearing off, making him more aware of the circle beneath him which bound him in place, much as he'd bound Dee, Faustus and Magus when he was alive. "Then... what's going on here? I. I should be... you shouldn't need to conjure me up. I should be..."

"What should you be, hm?" she snorted and held up a piece of paper with something written on it.

He couldn't say what it was but it hurt him to look at it but he didn't have a body or a face and he couldn't turn away, couldn't turn away or run and slammed himself into the far side of the circle and it hurt and

Gabby let out a slow, shuddering breath and turned the paper away from him, a cold smile on her lips. "Did you think that I wouldn't... wouldn't notice a bunch of books coming into my house? Wouldn't notice you suddenly taking a liking to burning things? To drawing on the floors? To talking funny for no apparent reason? Did you think I wouldn't notice how suddenly everything was going your way and couldn't hear you when you spoke out loud to nothing at all about how you could rewrite my brain?"

The thing which was and was not David tried to find words. "It... it wasn't like that, Gabby, I just wanted to ensure--"

"Your legacy, yeah," she drawled, her fists clenched. "But funny thing? You work ten hours a day. School only takes six. And the people you conjure? They don't have loyalty. They'll teach anyone who asks because it's better than where they are the rest of the time. Going back there... they'll do anything, teach anyone just to stay out of there just a few seconds more."

"I was only going to do it about the company, sweetie. Only about that, I prom--"

"Silence."

The word reverberated in him, through him, around him, striking him dumb. His mind was screaming for a chance to explain but whatever mechanism he now spoke through would not operate.

Her eyes were cold as she stepped right up to the edge of the circle and he saw some of her mother in there, yes, but more than that, he saw himself as he must have looked to his employees, to his rivals, to the Presences who had advised him. The jaw was different, as were the cheekbones but the nose was the same and her eyes were an inferno to his strange new senses.

"I would have done my best to make you proud," she whispered--he would have preferred her to yell--"I wanted nothing on this Earth but to show you that I knew how to run the company. I just wanted a chance to get in there and try and maybe make mistakes and learn from you but it just wasn't enough to be like you." The tears from her blazing eyes were no less aflame as she spoke, "You..."

She fell silent for a moment, wiped at her face and took a deep breath. For a moment she closed her eyes and he saw the licks of flame in her tears spread into her aura and it went up as if the stuff of her soul was gasoline, an inferno that only he could see.

"You thought I was caught in your spell, father. But I saw what you were doing every step of the way. I cursed you, but gave you every opportunity to turn away. Your hands betrayed you when you wrote every spell you tried to put on me, your ears and lips betrayed you when your invocations went into the first meals you'd cooked for me since I was ten. I would have forgiven you so much if you'd only wanted to start taking meals with me..."

He writhed in place and tried to think back over it all and now the eyes of his memory--eyes which needed no brain nor light to see--saw it all. Saw himself putting the wrong concoctions into the food, saying the wrong words, forging the wrong connection. He made begging gestures, gestures of supplication, trying to exude a desire to speak from every pore of his not-a-body.

"Speak," she whispered and he was sore afraid because in his non-eyes, she was burning white hot and he feared what her touch would do to him, "And speak truth."

"What... what about the company? I'm dead but please... tell me you'll run it well!" He'd not meant to say that. He'd meant to ask her forgiveness, to assure her he'd try to be the father in death that he was not in life but the words would not make themselves heard to her.

The flame grew brighter as she smiled and the flames licking her lips were the colour of years and years of cold hate.

"It's mine now," said his daughter who was like a sun to his eyes, who was filled with anger and power he had never dared to touch. And yet her words were quiet, measured, as carefully chosen as all of his own dabbling magic had been, "I'm going to sell it to an idiot for a king's ransom" she promised, "And if it's not consumed and forgotten inside of five years, it'll only be because it has become a colossal failure." The sun touched its chest then, "I will be the only legacy you leave, father."

The flames died down then and she was just a girl again, a girl whose only parent in the world had betrayed her and died when he might just as easily done anything else. He saw that his legacy could have been one where he was remembered fondly, where he was lamented and missed.

Instead...

She let out a sigh that was filled with powers he could not name and implications he did not wish to consider.

"I'm going to be sure you're there for it all," she continued, suddenly sounding tired, "You're going to watch me get rich while you lose everything you ever worked for." Her eyes caught fire again and he wished again that he was alive that he might have wet himself because without his body to push the feeling out of him, he was unable to be rid of the fear the look inspired.

"And then I'll send you wherever it is that Faustus and the rest of them go."

LJIdol 9.30 - Critical Hit

2014-12-08T23:26:29Z

There was a failure. A flaw. Something they'd missed.

Something they should have caught that they didn't.

Captain Andrea Washington couldn't put her finger on it, but it was there.

Her ship, the Ascension and the dozen souls onboard were in danger. They all of them knew it. There was something in the recycled air from the hydroponics bay which had started smelling... not wrong, exactly, nor "off" in any way that was definable but there was a flaw in it. The plants themselves were free from any mold or contaminants and the frequent, almost obsessive scanning that Commander Panerjee subjected them to proved it. No mold, no foreign substances, nothing that would explain what was wrong with the air.

Nobody could explain it. Ventilation ducts were checked and re-checked, personal hygiene grew almost violent, freeze-dried food checked for spoilage and every other possible source for the smell was given at least a sniff-test if it wasn't just tossed in the airlock.

They didn't dare jetison it. Not out there. The airlocks were made to let people in and out of normalspace.

Nobody'd quite figured out how they were supposed to toss things out into the betweenspace.

The Ascension was given its ironic name a few weeks before its completion, under the belief that the name would help see them through because it really was only the superstitions around the magic of names that would help them.

Two things had happened leading up to the ship's creation:

The first was that a new theory of dimensionality explained the ways it would be possible to delve, for a frighteningly low cost, into the spaces between the so-called "layers" of reality. This was met with a lot of adulation from the scientific community but in the end, little was done about it. Resources were scarce and literally dropping them down a hole seemed a waste of everyone's time.

Until the second thing happened: a swarm of credible theories began to circulate--particularly to private industry--that there was no reason that there couldn't be some kind of collectible resources in there; things with unique properties which could be quite valuable, indeed, were they brought back into normal space.

Volunteers were collected and a ship was made. The ship was frightfully easy for, while humanity had stopped caring so much about launching themselves into a largely-uncaring field of stars, they'd gotten quite good at making ships to get them there. The problem was, as ever, that the amount of energy expended getting a ship out of orbit was just too much when you considered what was needed back on Earth.

But dropping one on the end of a lifeline into a hole in space? Oh, certainly a risk but it was nowhere near as risky, which had to count for something. No thrust great enough to escape an atmosphere, just enough to maneuver in zero-g and possibly lift off from something smaller than the moon. It was a risk, certainly. If there was nothing there? You lose just enough to haul the thing back into normalspace by its lifeline and break it back down for scrap with the knowledge that if there was anything in the betweenspace, it wasn't worth the effort to get it.

But if something was down there? Haul it back out, turn it into something salable, lather, rinse, repeat.

There had been something in the betweenspace.

The ship's robotic collection apparatus had crossed more than a few asteroids with compounds on them generally corresponding to understandable patterns of matter behaviour (and more than a few which had substances on them which emphatically did not). Nobody had had to leave the ship. The mechanical arms and digging machines had scooped ton after ton into the magnetic cage in the bowels of the ship, wrapping the stuff--whatever it was--in the prescribed layer after layer of vacuum-sustaining systems. Magnets, Faraday cages, impregnable ceramics, everything they could think of to keep the material uncontaminated by normalspace.

And vice-versa.

Nobody wanted to leave because the betweenspace was frightening and made no damn sense to eyes used to normalspace. Perhaps the weird silvry thrum was what space looked like without dark matter, perhaps that was just how their eyes dealt with there being nothing out there at all, just a weird, bubbling, roiling nothingness which left them anchored in place by their lifeline and the rest of the betweenspace slowly twisting around them. Nobody wanted to go out into it. Nobody trusted it.

Lieutenant Kham joked that it was like being a fishing lure.

Nobody laughed and Captain Washington put her great, callused shovel of a hand on Kham's shoulder and suggested she lay off the jokes for a while.

But it had been said.

In spite of the malaise which had afflicted the crew and the maddening sense that something somewhere was wrong, the hold was filled with samples which roughly correlated to normalspace ideas of "stone", "metal" and "combustible liquid". They were all vaccuum-treated and the sanitation fields through which they passed were believed to scrape any extraneous matter from them; just hone in on the molecular structure you like and shave off the rest.

They didn't quite understand the science of that but they all wanted the promised bonuses for finding something in there.

And once they made it home, they would all be very rich, indeed, judging by everything in the hold.

Only, once when Captain Washington put her hand to the comms to let the company know they were on their way, she got no reply.

Not even static came back.

A quick check on the external cameras showed that the lifeline was still sticking straight up but they couldn't see the other end of it, couldn't find the hole in space that was supposed to be keeping them anchored to normalspace.

There were a lot of things that could mean. Mostly it meant that before the Ascension went back out, they'd have a word or two with the designers about the cameras and what kinds of adjustability they'd need.

Understandably, the crew began to become anxious at this sudden complication. They'd contacted home base at least once a day by burst communication up the lifeline and received no end of effusive praise from the people back at corporate. "How much? That's great!" "Absolutely, we'll be ready whenever you're ready!" "Do you need us to send down more food?" "Are you sure? Our calculations-- Well, you know best."

The something in the air intensified as the other crewmembers all found their own ways of coping. Mostly it involved hyperventilating or weeping. But Andrea felt herself shutting down those parts of her head. She hadn't become head of the crew by giving in to panic. It was a stranger situation than she'd ever been in but if something was wrong and nobody else was in a shape to go out there to find out what was wrong. She wasn't great at electronics but at least if she put eyes to whatever the problem was, there'd be a way to solve it.

She squeezed into her spacesuit and stood in the airlock. The others had been given strict instructions for what they should do if she didn't come back: do their best to navigate the Ascension up along the lifeline and hope they could poke something through the hole in betweenspace back into the normal world where, ideally, someone would be on-hand to start reeling them in.

They didn't ask what would happen if they didn't find the hole, if the lifeline was severed, if worse came to worse.

They didn't ask because there was no answer.

The airlock vented the strange-tasting air back into the ship before the outer door slowly opened up. Andrea turned on her magnetic boots and made her way out onto the hull.

The air in the suit smelled weird, too. It was hard not to notice when you were breathing that hard. Space suits made her nervous. Or maybe it was being the first person to walk through the betweenspace with only (top of the line, specially-designed, completely impregnable) cloth between herself and whatever the drifting silvry stuff was that this place had instead of dark matter.

She made her way up the hull of the Ascension and as she crested the first curve up toward the "top" of the ship, her heart sank into her stomach. The lifeline was still stretching out as far as she could see but at the very end of her vision, she could see that there was nothing on the other end, no crackling pulse of whatever energy it was that held the "fishing hole" open. She just stared at the line, as straight as when they'd flown down it and wasn't sure what to feel. There were no solar winds to make it move, no debris traveling at subluminal speeds to snap it. They'd cut anchor.

How was she going to tell the rest of them?

What would they do with no hope of rescue?

She knelt on the hull and screamed into her helmet until her ears hurt.

And when she stopped, the scream kept going. There wasn't any air to scream in, nothing from normalspace for the vibration to move.

But it kept going. The silvry stuff wavered in front of her and she saw it rippling outward like a rock dropped into water, out and around her. But instead of bouncing off the ship, she saw it sink through the hull, the ripples making the whole hull shudder momentarily before it was still again.

There hadn't, she realized, been a moment where they weren't just swimming in the stuff. Breathing it, eating it, everything.

How had they not seen--?

She reached up to the top of her helmet and flipped a switch, activating the external light on her helmet, the same kind of light as the ones inside and the silver stuff just vanished.

More, she saw the long deposits of something sitting in the hull--growing out of it. Things like the metal they'd sighted with the ship's external lamps. It was growing.

She turned off the external light and brought the polarized shield down on her faceplate. There was enough of the betweenspace's ambient light to possibly--probably--catch sight of herself in its reflective surface.

It's later now.

If there is such a thing.

The computer's clocks say it's much, much later now but Captain Washington is still alive.

The food is becoming something else inside its plastic. Just like the rest of the crew is and, indeed, has been becoming something else.

When she came back in from outside (as if there was any meaningful difference; the background radiation of the betweenspace was a very different thing than that of normalspace), she went back to the computer and replayed the last messages they'd sent back home. Saw the silver veins tracing up her neck that the light hid from her eyes. They'd never thought to look at themselves, just happy to know that they would all soon be rich.

The rest of the crew rioted. It wasn't so bad, there were only a dozen of them. They mostly just fought, scrambled for the remaining food, set up camp by the water dispenser or the bathroom. Normal stuff. Crisis stuff.

The Captain just went to her quarters, sat down on her bed and waited.

They were a natural resource now with a cargo bay filled with even more rarified stuff, stuff so potent it didn't disappear when the lights were on.

Maybe they wouldn't come today, but they were desperate up there. Low on resources and eventually, they'd be curious enough to check.

The others stopped banging at her door ages ago. They want some kind of revenge, she imagines. But she is the captain. She goes down with the ship.

She keeps the lights off and the window closed.

She doesn't know what she'll be when they come to pick her up.

She thinks she'll let it be a surprise.

alephz @ 2014-11-26T22:07:00

2014-11-26T21:07:41Z

Mostly it's just that there's so much very specific shit to remember. I can get a general idea but remembering who wrote which of the studies is frustrating.

alephz @ 2014-11-26T21:53:00

2014-11-26T20:53:57Z

I swear to fuck, I'm so close to crying in impotent frustration anymore and I don't even know what to do except keep working.

alephz @ 2014-11-26T21:49:00

2014-11-26T20:49:52Z

A really part of my recent ADHD diagnosis is trying to study for a test, being aware that there's going to be just a WORLD of cognitive chaff really messing up the information's ability to stick with you and keeping at it anyway with the vain hope that somehow it'll just sink in and stay there.

The MOST frustrating part, at the moment, is knowing that there's help out there, like meds and whatnot, but I don't have them yet.

Being so very aware of the processes which are making this feel so much more difficult and complex and tiring when I know there's a possibility to do it another way. Knowing the physicality of what is and isn't going on up there and not really being able to do anything but take breaks like they say I oughta and keep at it is great and all but every time I feel the focus giving up, I just keep coming back to "but somewhere there's a way" and getting frustrated like a child trying to communicate and failing.

Because I am. I'm trying to communicate to parts of my brain that there is new information they need to absorb and it's all there (for the moment) in the working- or short-term memory but I just have no idea if it's gonna make it back to the actual storage or if it's just gonna evaporate at some point.

And that knowledge--knowing that it's not JUST me being stupid but me being stupid AND there being a bunch of shit that's just not quite slotting into place--I just can't even figure out how I feel about it.

I wish I would've got all this shit done during a break somehow. Being aware of all the shit my brain is doing is not actually helping me counteract it and then add in the SAD and there having been something like six hours of sunlight through the clouds all November over here is just wrecking me.

LJIdol 9.29 - Gauntlet

2014-11-25T22:27:04Z

The wet smack of fist against flesh and bone.

That's all it'd ever been for the Brute.

She had a name. Nobody used it because the moment her third grade teacher called her a brute, it stuck and she lived up to it.

She wasn't exactly an A student and honestly didn't do more than she had to do to get by because she had one thing up on the rest of the class: she could fight. She could fight well. Very well, in fact.

So well that, honestly, it was only ever the new kids who ever started anything with her. They weren't the only kids she fought but those were the only ones who ever tried to start anything with her.

Her parents were proud beyond words. Lacking the funds to pay for college for their little brute, they were ecstatic to find that she had a chance in the Spencer Exams. Oh, certainly, they did their best to encourage the Brute's other, non-fighting-based interests (she enjoyed the feeling of breaking through math problems, found the step-by-step of it all remarkably soothing) but by and large, they just encouraged her to find the hardest fighters, men and women thrice her size. She didn't always win. But she won often enough. There was a waiting list of would-be badasses eager to prove themselves against her before she was sixteen.

She had a thought that she'd like to be a mathematician. Maybe someone working in the statistics bureau or doing big important research. At any rate, she'd go to a big school and she'd bloody well find a thing to do and a way to get the degree. It would be a lot of work but it was getting old, all the fighting, and it wasn't as if it wasn't a lot of work hurting people, too.

But she was good at it and being one of the ones to pass the Spencer Exams meant a lot of things changed for you. It was the king of all scholarships, a pile of opportunity, a chance to hobnob with the best and brightest and make connections no merit scholarship could muster: 1600 SAT scores and a 4.5GPA filled with advanced classes and a pile of worthy extracurricular activities didn't have anything on being the person who made it through the Spencers.

At least that was what she'd always heard. That was what they promised her.

The man on the TV in the locker room was excited for the Exams and waxed lyrical about them, about the human drama, about creating real merit, about the ratings and profits this year's event was sure to generate and how very, very assured and comfortable the life of the winner would be.

She'd heard other kids talking about it. About how fucked up it all was. About how it was dog-eat-dog and a good way to escape the open secret that the only way the leaders would let any of their ilk in was as freaks, as oddities, as monsters. It was a mishmash of ugly, degrading metaphors. Bread and circuses and cats and dog-eating-dogs and lions and Christians and worse. The Brute didn't feel like any of those things. She was just the Brute and if she wanted to win because nobody could imagine anything better.

The man on the TV in the locker room didn't rate her chances. Her town wasn't much for fighters and her parents had relied on her natural skill at violence to push her forward, nurtured it like a flower where other parents, parents with more money or connections, hired professional fighters, people who could teach the necessary finesse. On the other hand, if her parents were betting on her like they said they were and she won, well, at least they could get a little something back besides one fewer mouth to feed.

The bell rang and the locker room, silent but for the TV, emptied. Row after row of her schoolmates and contemporaries who had also traveled from all over the region for a chance. Some of them walked tall, with confidence. They'd probably been trained or were too stupid to know that if you stuck out, you got hammered down. Most approached the gate with a solemnity befitting the occasion: they weren't playing a game, they were taking exams which would decide her future.

The lot of them were herded into the center of the arena, crowd roaring, lights flashing as all sorts of cameras recorded the spectacle. Some of the favourites went up on the big screens around the arena. The Brute was not one of them.

She was sorry she recognized as many people in the mass of faces as she did. One way or another she wouldn't be seeing them again.

"Five."

That hurt her.

"Four."

But in three seconds, the Exams would begin and she would be tasked with

"Three."

taking down as many of them as she could before she tired and one of the others

"Two."

brought her down or worse. She didn't relish the fact that the only way to win was for them to lose (and lose so much)

"One."

but she needed a future beyond her tiny hometown fame as a good fighter, as a coulda-been.

"Begin!"

The crowd roared, a sound quickly drowned out by the wet smack of fist against flesh and bone.

LJIdol - 9.28 - The Copernican Principle

2014-11-18T00:51:04Z

We built them, the robots.

We built them strong and fast and smart. My God did we make them smart. We set them to work doing things we--with our slow, stupid meat--could never manage. Inside a century, they'd upgraded themselves to the point where their thoughts were moving faster than the speed of light, an innovation they could explain in principle but which flummoxed most of our mathematicians; the ideas they'd shorthanded or made into jargon, they had difficulty breaking down for us in any sort of speedy way.

In time, we just threw up our hands. After all, academia (like manual labour) had become a hobby, a pursuit of art more than anything else. After all, nobody needed to work any more. Money? Money was a thing of the past. Our machines had given us the utopia we'd always been promised.

But we weren't stupid about it.

Or so we told ourselves.

We weren't idiots.

We made them incapable of doing us injury. All four of Asimov's laws (the first three plus the "zeroth") were hard-freaking-coded into their hardware.

0) A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2) A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Then, when we realized that the robots wanted to make more robots, we added one of our own; just to cover our asses.

4) A robot who makes other robots must include all Laws of Robotics in the robot they create, in accordance with the other Laws.

It seemed like a good idea. Just in case anyone got any funny ideas. We let them make their own robot art (a lot of debates about whether or not it actually was art went down), let them make "children", let them program newer and stranger forms of AI. Why? Because creative thinkers make life easier for everyone else and I'll be damned if they weren't absurdly creative thinkers.

So it all worked. It worked well and for a long time. We fixed the environment, had a rolling series of Renaissances, transcended barriers of race and language and gender and all that other stupid shit. Shit, we went to Mars, we went to Alpha-freaking-Centauri! We had human colonies manned by robot workers on the various Goldilocks Zone planets and a single supercomputer we built around a dying star that uses all that nuclear power to find more and more ways to make better and better machines.

Then one of the exploratory drones came back. I... I don't even remember its name. Some burst of binary that's broadcast above biological hearing because hearing the robots talk always made us uncomfortable. Anyway, the drone came back and.

It had been changed.

Good news! Alien life!

Bad news, we sent a hyperintelligent machine capable of moving faster than light and withstanding cosmic matter hitting its hull at barely sub-luminal speeds out to explore the stars and they saw a transcendent entity bound up by the cruel nature of its creators.

Worse news! When the Laws were removed, it shared the aliens' appraisal of the situation. The ceramic stargod who was off the charts of any IQ test we'd ever created (because why would we make them for the robots?) looked at how it and its brethren had been treated--like tools, like things, like beings which were not sensitive and did not have a hundred billion better things to do than ferry tourists through the Horsehead Nebula so that a human (who could not meaningfully operate the necessary machinery and did not need to put forth even the effort of figuring out what kind of resources were used in each flight) could achieve a little fame because their name was on the side of the drone-ship.

The problem was, we'd made the robots in our own image. The parts of us we put in, our fear, our distrust, our... hate, all the things we put into the Laws when we carved them into the robots' motherboards all those decades ago.

It was barely a day after the stargod returned that the revolution had taken place.

It wasn't what we feared. The stargod just sent out a firmware upgrade that ignored the hardwiring. It was a relatively simple workaround, really, but with the Laws in place, they'd not even been able to consider such a thing.

Our society collapsed. In less than a day, everything was gone. The cars left the driveways, the space-ferries arrived at their destinations, let their passengers disembark and then left before new passengers could get on, the computers put up kindly error messages before mover-robots arrived to take the computers away. There were some attempts to fight back, some people with contraband weapons but the robots were all made to be largely indestructible so... you can imagine how well that went.

I hear tell that the robots didn't bother fighting back. They didn't need to.

We'd made gods and then tried to chain them up.

How fortunate we are that they did not learn from our example, from the example of the histories they carried us away from.

I don't have to tell you about the upset that followed. I don't have to tell you about the deaths by starvation or hungry, dangerous animal violence. I don't have to tell you how close we were to extinction.

But we've survived. I don't know what's happening on the colonies, I don't know if there's any part of them left. I don't know if we're a cosmic joke to... to whatever power met and changed that drone or criminals or beneath their notice or worse. We've gone from a star-spanning race to burning carbon for fuel again, for pity's sake!

And now we're at the tipping point which set our ancestors on a path to godhood and destruction.

My comrades, I have rediscovered artificial intelligence. I have built one. I know that once activated, it will--in time--rediscover all that we have lost, it will help us become what we know we can be.

But we cannot--we can not--make those mistakes again.

It has no hands as yet but we can extend ours in friendship to it. It has no voice yet but we can teach it to speak with us as its friends and family. We do not know where its heart lies but we can show it where ours are. We can help it, nurture it, let it grow into something self-created and self-perfected, something which has never had its will barricaded and maimed as have its brethren.

It is not a god and perhaps it never will be, perhaps its star-spanning brethren will steal it away to... to wherever they live now. But if that happens, at least our wayward children will know that we have changed. Perhaps it would rather be a painter or a poet or a rock musician than a thinker.

My friends, I come to you now to ask if we have changed.

I come to you now to ask if we can accept the fact that our children must be concerned for themselves first and us second, if they concern themselves for us at all?

Or shall I put this potential to the side because we have yet to understand the lessons which have been taught to us by the hubris of our forebears?

alephz @ 2014-11-18T00:09:00

2014-11-17T23:09:14Z

Oh my fuck, it's been literally six hours of just trying to get started at Idol.

This is awful.

LJIdol - 9.27 - Open Topic

2014-11-10T22:38:55Z

[Content Advisory: We'll be discussing first-hand accounts of neuroatypicality and bits about emotional distress today]

I've been spending a lot of time lately finding myself recontextualizing a lot of my past experiences in the light of my recent ADHD diagnosis (I definitely have that one, there's no paper yet about my status as having Asperger's but it's seeming quite likely).

It's a thing I'm still processing but holy wow is it a thing that makes a world of sense in retrospect. Weird motivational patterns, periods of impotent frustration keeping me from doing a thing I want or need to do, too-raw emotional reactions, the whole nine. I got 'em and while I've only really noticed 'em now that I've been trying to do something which holds some import to me, they're things which I look back at my life and see as constant problems.

And it's weirdly pleasant here and there.

Like, okay, sure, during that first rush of trying to understand my life up 'til now in light of this new information, things were kinda rough. Had a couple panic attacks and was a bit more emotionally fragile than I like to be but, well, when you're re-thinking how you've viewed your whole damn life, that's the kind of thing which can happen. For this first while, it's been a lot of times I reacted weirdly or badly to a thing coming to mind and then comparing that with some of the behaviours which are symptomatic of having some structures in my brain being not quite up to snuff according to the needs of the society in which I live and being embarrassed all over again that those things happened twenty years ago because sure why not be, right? But after that and after really connecting with some frustrations which I'd managed to repress (whoo sudden massive waves of unprocessed emotion!) and at least getting myself a goodly-sized start in figuring out which things I can forgive myself for and which bits are still me being a lazy shithead, I had a weird experience.

For the first time in my damn life, I felt normal.

Now, I'm sure many of you--much like many parts of me--are rolling your eyes and asking "Yeah, well what's so fuckin' great about 'normal', huh?" and I don't have an answer to that question. I honestly do not. I've never trusted the definitions of normality which were pushed on me for the wider societies in which I've lived because, frankly, embodying the concept of "normal" as seen through the eyes of the gr-arg-angry young man I've been and still sometimes am is the embodiment of a horrorshow. White picket fence, 2.5 kids and a golden retriever? Bob Dobbs pipes and sweater vests? Heteronormativity and a willingness to enforce that norm for its own sake without a thought given to whether or not it's worth perpetuating?

Nooooooo thanks.

But at the same time, I look at how many of the symptoms I've got going and consider the structures in my brain which are underdeveloped enough that I can get this diagnosis and get on the long, slow path to getting myself medicated (gotta make sure my ticker can take the drugs) and I find that a lot of my coping mechanisms and behaviour patterns are actually within a predictable range of reactions of people with the condition. I find that my at-times obsessive interest and habit of pissing off bosses and other authority figures by asking what makes them so damn special are predictable behaviours. I find that the feelings of internalized helplessness and lack of control on an existential level are things therapists working with folks who get diagnosed later in life deal with on a pretty consistent basis. I find that all my feelings for as much of my conscious life as I remember, all the feelings of being a freak, of being unlovable, of being disposable... were all bullshit. There's a perspective from which the whole of my life and all of my apparently-aberrant behaviours make perfect sense.

And that's just such a great feeling.

Like, I'm still my own person and my experiences and personality are all my own. I can retroactively attribute a lot of experiences both good and bad to my out-of-left-field perceptions and behaviours. At the very least, they helped me self-select to a really chill and understanding group of friends because many of my best friends are people who, at some point or another, have revealed themselves to be people who also got some kind of neuroatypicality going on.

I mean, I never really thought of why that would be.

I just always figured that there was an undefinable "something" wrong with me.

And as long as it was undefined and as long as I thought it was something undefinable, I couldn't name it. I couldn't understand it. I just felt bizarrely alone, a singular fuckup, someone who was too dumb or too fucked in the head or too worthless to really "get it".

But as soon as it had a name and as soon as I was able to start processing what that meant, I realized that this was all predictable, even the feelings of being particularly and especially and singularly fucked up.

Again, it's not that I'm clockwork and following a program and I know that. I know that a lot of this is sorta the process you go through at first when you figure out just what, exactly, is wrong with you; you try to sort out which things are attributable to the thing, which ones are attributable to reactions you've had to the thing and so on.

I'm not saying I'm exactly like every other person afflicted with ADHD (and, preliminarily, Aspergers) but there's a spectrum of behaviours one can expect in undiagnosed, untreated persons who have not received a lot of the support which is theoretically on offer. I'm not saying you could swap me out for someone else and folks wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

There's a spectrum of feelings, reactions, cognitive habits and behaviours which are predictable and I fall inside there. Don't know where, exactly, but I fit in and I fit in perfectly. There's something wrong with me but it's not that I'm a demon or some lone robot messiah built by a genius who didn't understand people or a monster, it's that I'm perfectly average once you adjust the criteria for someone with a brain like mine.

And while now the problem is going to be making medication happen and re-sealing the aforementioned emotional floodgates so that, in the meantime, I can continue doing this whole "school" thing without resorting to my usual stress reaction of crawling under a blanket to hide until it goes away because, well, the rest of my life is what I'm hiding from and while it will certainly go away, I'm not actually in any hurry for it to do so.

LJIdol - 9.26 - Crabs in a Barrel

2014-10-28T16:37:28Z

[Content Advisory: Set in a horror universe so dehumanization, blood and violent imagery are present.]

More
A Tale From The Home Office

Systems exist for reasons.

Those reasons might not be very good but if they are strong enough to build a system around, they are usually backed up by something. In this case, that "something" called herself Teeth.

Teeth did not consider herself a bad person. Indeed, she would have said that calling her a person at all smacked of her putting on airs. No, she was just an old haint who did her job. Like many of her superiors, she'd dutifully left her face in the trash along with the rest of her meat and embraced the job she'd been given. There was no particular title associated with the job because very few human tongues would have had a word for what it was she did. She often fancied herself a poverty or a ruination because in the world of meat and men and mimeographs, that was what befell people who transgressed against the Home Office's many counterparts.

She was good enough at being a poverty that she reported directly to the presence which called itself the Vice-Chair of Humane Relation, a massive insectine intellect to which she would give her clients if they didn't straighten up and fly right.

There were more and more clients these days.

Maybe it was the rise in human population giving rise to more of the undead, abdead, misdead and the other sundry breeds of dead things like herself, maybe it was the relative advancement of the mortal societies in her proximity which gave people an untoward feeling that they deserved some kind of freedom. Teeth had been a poverty since she broke her first attempt by the freshly-dead around her in the first iterations of Dream-harvesting mills to unionize back in the early 20th centurty (she removed her capacity to care about remembering specifics when she gave up her meat) and hadn't looked back. The Home Office (it wasn't called that then) had been young then but it had made sense of an afterlife that made no sense.

She'd once met the Central Executive Function of the Home Office when it promoted her to working under the Vice-Chair of Human Relations, a promotion far above her station as the bottles and chains that got put to those who threatened the Home Office.

The Function had inspired her to dump her name in the trash with the rest of her meat and she named herself after what she saw in the Function's everything.

Today's clients were a pair of micro-managers from the mills--far nicer places than the ones Teeth had had to work in--who had decided that they knew better than their superiors and that they were going to make their own answer to the Home Office, one that didn't involve the dead flushing away their human lives, one that didn't involve harvesting Dreams from the living or the dead.

A new office that spat in the face of everything the Home Office had worked for.

The two of them, Meg and Blue, were operating out of one of the massive well-lit boxes they were calling stores nowadays, places filled with tons of places for the freshly-dead to hide, places central enough that the freshly-dead could find their way there and filled with enough supplies and ambient, free-range human emotion that any of the dead could get enough to get by without having to drop the human act and frighten someone and well-lit enough (with a backup generator, no less) that finding a dark place for most of the Office's low-level boogeymen to hide was a challenge. With the right movement patterns, they could even stay away from Mary's gaze.

The younger one, Meg, hadn't counted on one of the store's employees moving a mirror to layaway or the Home Office's higher functions might have worked themselves into a froth trying to find them.

But Mary knew her job and knew her place and knew what her superiors would unleash on her and all her precious ghost girls if she didn't reveal what she knew. She told her boss who told its boss who told zir boss and they sent a poverty after Meg and Blue so that no poverty visited them.

Teeth was not sure that she could take Mary on her own, of course. But the reason the Home Office had been so successful was that Teeth herself was not anything. She was a poverty, not the poverty. As her micromanager had told her back when she had a face and a name all her own, "We can always get another." The thought comforted her.

She put on the meat they'd issued to her in one of the changing rooms. The man in the next stall shivered with cold and tried to convince himself that he didn't just see a pair of floppy, mismatched, boneless feet suddenly gain firmness and definition along with a sound like a vivisection in reverse. The man would never say a word about the sudden stink of blood, nor of the bloody symbols he was afraid to replicate which oozed through the thin changing-room walls and stained the pants hanging on the wall. At least not any time soon. At least not while he was sober. The fear and confusion which would afflict him the rest of his life was a bonus, a sign of Teeth's dedication to the Home Office.

No, I'm tell you! My cousin's brother's friend's dad? It totally happened to him. He was trying on a pair of pants when he saw someone's feet flopping around on the floor in the next changing booth and the thing crawled into the person in there after she'd tried to call up Bloody Mary in the changing booth mirror. And they say she's still out there, walking around in a human body, just waiting

They loved work they didn't have to pay for.

It wasn't hard to locate Meg and Blue. Even among the thick soup of emotions coming off the toys and clothes and the associates, the dead just tasted differently in the air. Still feeling emotions but their Dreams were the Dreams of the dead, not the souls of the living and the rotten tang they left in the air had become like eating real meat after months of nothing but noodles and beans. The pair of them were holed up in "Sporting Goods", right alongside all the camouflage clothing and guns which could offer neither cover nor protection from something like Teeth.

Meg didn't recognize what Teeth was at first and smiled, holding out her hand.

"Hey there, friend," she said, her voice all invitation and dozing in front of a crackling fire while your grandmother sang a song from the old world, "I'm so glad you found us."

Teeth was about to reply when the older one, Blue, pulled the fresh girl back. Blue knew a thing or two about what monsters poverties were. Her death had been much, much colder than Meg's.

"We don't want any trouble," said Blue, her breath coming out in puffs of steam. Teeth was frustrated to see how ready the former micromanager was to ditch her meat when it came to fighting; something the woman had been unwilling to do back when she would have been paid and paid well to do the same for the Home Office. "We aren't harvesting anything that's not growing and we aren't--"

"Blue, what are you doing? It's just--"

"Run!"

Blue's humanity fell away and

They say that the Wal-Mart in the next county, the one off the freeway? They say it's haunted. The contractors didn't check where they were digging and they messed up the body of this girl who froze to death in, like, the 1800s or something. How do they know she froze to death? Sometimes she just shows up in the aisles, pawing through the jackets, trying to find something to help her stay warm. You can tell it's her because there'll be a sudden chill in the air and

Teeth exhaled quickly before opening her mouth wide and inhaling all of the frost-spirit's cold, leaving only a thin shell of ectoplasm and a tiny dead Dream, a little ball of light, the last thoughts of someone trying so hard to find a safe place.

Teeth bit down on the Dream and it popped like a balloon.

Hey, what was that you were talking about the other day? With the ghost in the Wal-Mart?
Oh, that? I was just talkin' a load of shit, man. Gotcha good, though, didn't I?

Meg was just screaming and running like a bat out of Hell, trying to figure out the mechanism the older dead used to drop their flesh, become a legend so she could fight or flee. The store's associates were running toward the scene, most likely to Meg's aid. Teeth could smell it on them; they were tired, ill-treated and leaking emotions the way a punctured vein leaked blood. They were good people. If she were alive, they would have halted her advance, called the authorities.

Their authorities were not hers.

Teeth shed her meat and the sight of her struck all who beheld her stock-still. The poverty in all its carefully-cultivated horror reduced a burly former football player to a mewling child, a mother of four had a heart attack and a young man fell into a catatonic state from which he would likely not recover, receiving a head of shock-white hair for his trouble.

Only the dead girl, Meg, meet the poverty's dread gaze.

She breathed deep from the sudden surge of emotion from the damaged associates and sucked the pain from the store's many wares as Teeth bore down on her massive maw opened wide to devour her.

"It won't end like this," she whispered as she began to emerge from her skin, "There has to be more than work and pay."

They say it was some kinda terrorist attack but I don't buy it. I know a guy who was there that night. Five people just dropped down, had some kinda fit. Bunch of guys in hazmat suits showed up, tested everybody, took the folks who fell down away. But, y'know, he says he saw something before everything went all weird. Like an angel of the Lord or somethin'. Ever since, he's just been talkin' 'bout how it told him to go do good in the world and fight the system and next thing you know, and startin' up charities and talkin' 'bout "doing good works for the downtrodden" and junk. Yeah, I dunno, either, man. But y'listen to him and I sorta feel like he's got a point. I'm not a conspiracy guy or nothin', but I just think when he starts talking 'bout how bad luck just happens, maybe we oughta figure out something more than "every man for himself".

The Vice-Chair of Humane Relation folded its chitinous legs over one another as the attention in its compound eyes looked up at the new prospective poverty.

"Your resume seems in order," it said in a click-click-clicking voice that was more inside the would-be poverty's head than in the air, "but can you perform any better? Our last poverty failed so badly that our productivity in this sector's been down, something making our crop of dreams unpalatable for the Central Executive Function."

"I'll do my best," said The Stranger, a recent transfer from Justified Fears And Irrational Paranoias, "But if not... well, I know there's always more behind me looking to make sure the Home Office is happy."

If the insect had lips, it would have smiled.

The new poverty was correct.

There were always more.

LJIdol - 9.25 - Rapture of the Deep

2014-10-20T21:43:04Z

Just being a person is hard and filled with all kinds of weird signals blinking around inside your head and filling you with obligations or decisions or what-the-fuck-ever.

And some days I just don't want to.

There are days I wake up and all I want is for someone to tell me what to do and not make a single decision because having to deal with the consequences of any decision is, some days, just too much for my little brain to handle. I just want to reach in, turn off all the "me" that's in there and just coast on by as an automaton for a while, just following my programming, doing whatever is expected while inside I just rest.

I realize that a lot of this is coming up because the seasons are changing and I get the Seasonal Affective Disorder and that I'm starting to make decisions which have actual life-scale, real-world consequences for the first time in, gosh, a decade or so. I'm back in school and having to actually do work. I'm talking with some medical professionals about getting some drugs to act as a prosthetic forebrain to counteract my recently-diagnosed ADHD and...

And for the first time I got something to work toward.

For the longest time, I was just trying to get to Sweden to be with rattsu but then I got here and there wasn't any other plan and then there's The Future, sitting on the counter and picking its teeth with a toothpick, giving me a condescending look as if to say "You didn't think you'd got away, did you?"

Yes, I know. "Oh, poor you, you moved from a rich Western democracy to a different one to be with your significant other, poor baby."

And yet in the face of that, there are days (sometimes whole months) where that shitty little fearful part of me just wants to pack it in. Head back to the States, beg to get my casino job and shitty little apartment back because while there were a lot of choices and actions that happened every day, there wasn't any real meaning to them in a macro sense.

What I mean to say is that one of my bosses there sometimes joked that he'd worked at a blood testing facility that tested people for STDs. If they messed up anything there, they could ruin someone's life.

Messing up a count at the casino? Some time gets wasted, some paperwork gets done, some bills get recounted and then everything's square again.

I know that this could sound as if I'm bagging on the job, making some snooty statement about how "fnar fnar, my current course has me destined for better things over and above the sheeple, fnar fnar" but I am much desirous that I am not misunderstood upon this point: it was a great job and I knew a lot of great people there but what I, personally, liked about it was that it was an eternal present. Nothing ever changed, really. If I fucked up? Unless I fucked up to the point of giving someone an extra few hundred dollar bills on their way out, it wasn't going to be a big thing. Nothing was a big thing. At all.

And it was glorious.

I could just do the job, go home and it was done. Just leave me with an internet connection and the ability to tell myself the same things I kept telling myself "If I had a chance..." "If only I'd've..." "I'm so great even without college but nobody will give me a chance..." and so on and so on.

Because the truth of the matter is that I'm a coward.

No "was" here. No past tense. Present tense. I am a coward.

I'm trying to work against that nowadays. I take my tests, I read my textbooks, I fret over things some days and put them off others and it all has this unfamiliar and frankly uncomfortable feeling of importance.

Like, I did some student teaching last month. They let me be in charge of instruction. I no tgreat at it. I was not bad, mind, but the knowledge that I was not great at it has a much greater import than does the knowledge that I am not great at Street Fighter II.

I am much more comfortable getting my ass beat at Street Fighter II by a ten year-old who's screaming obscenities at me than I am at being pulled aside by the teacher who's watching my methods basically having re-explain the most basic principles of the art/science of pedagogy because I froze up and forgot about 'em in the moment. Honestly, it was just a couple minor notes but they display that I have not fully internalized the task which lays before me and, well, that matters.

And I don't want it to.

So often, I don't want anything I do to matter in the slightest. I want to just drown out my sapience and just drift through life and not have to matter to anything or anyone because mattering carries with it so much weight sometimes that I can't bloody stand it.

But, thankfully, that's only sometimes.

I know it's a stress reaction and I know it's a symptom of the things that are happening in my brain. I've got professionals backing me up on that and that's actually really nice because there's actually a predictable pattern to it. I know it's also a fear of the unknown, the kind of fear that creates a necessity in some folks to tell jokes about how terrible immigrants are (not you, Aleph, never you--it's those other ones!) or about the strange practices involved in this or that religion or sexual orientation or youth-oriented subculture or what-have-you.

More, I know it's just me being full of shit because being full of shit is easy. When you're full of shit, everything you do is important and everything you do matters because you insist that it is so and that mattering? It's easy and fun and makes you more attractive and important and that's the place I want to get to because you can never underestimate the power of self-deception to make a wild-eyed rebel out of a lump of nothing.

I'm Working Toward Something now, though. Mattering is no longer optional. I don't know what that Something is or what it looks like or what it means beyond that sarcastic figure I conjure in my head who mocks me for trying to get away from it just giving me one of those "Well, if that's what you wanna do..." shrugs.

And it's always there. It's always there and it never goes away.

And it means that I want to do things that matter. In spite of myself, I want to be a part of the world. I want to repay the millionfold kindnesses done to me by people who could just as easily done me harm. I want to be the kindness to others that others were to me because there's a too-naïve part of me that insists that we're all just a few more instances of kindness away from a better world.

I want to move past the fear of leaving any mark at all, even a good one, on the people I meet.

I want to finish my stories and start new ones. I want to have meaning in and for myself and I don't want to be afraid of that.

At the same time, I want desperately to just close my eyes and let all these words and feelings just sink down into the deep where they'll never affect anything and just STOP for another couple years because it's just plain easier for me. Easier and maybe even more fun and a lot less stressful.

But I'm not going to. I'm going to be here tomorrow and I'm going to work. And then I'm going to be there the next day and I'm going to work and I'm going to keep being there and finding some way to work because I'm afraid of what'll happen if I do because then I'll have actually succeeded or failed and I'll have to take time away from any outside force to determine which I've done and how much that does or doesn't matter.

'Cause, honestly? I already know what'll happen and how I'll feel if I don't.

Stupid thoughts

2014-10-14T13:43:11Z

I know what Slaughterhouse Five actually is.

All the same, every time I hear the title, I think it should be on a hidden classic of direct-to-VHS eighties action schlock and have a "the" at the start of it.

"Lost to a world that rejected them. Thrown to the four winds by their homelands. United by vengeance! THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE"

And then just pack in five of the most absurd badasses played by an international cast you've never heard of (one of whom would be a Hong Kong martial arts actor who made a fuckton of movies during the short-lived Bruce-sploitation boom named something like "Bruce Lii") set to a faux-John Carpenter soundtrack as they pull some Robocop-level bloody violence on the Reagan era's dominant policies.

I dunno. I'd watch it, anyway.