A Long Time Ago, We Used to Be...

Participants in the same after school activity. Er... I don't think it has quite the same ring to it.

I like you and it makes feel odd. The last time I liked someone it was a thirteen year old boy, smile as slow as molasses as it stretched out over braces. In my own defense, I was 12.

You’re only a little older than me and I always thought I’d want a bigger age difference. Yet, you drew me to you with your poise and intensity.

I don’t know if that spark when I first saw you was recognition of a face I haven’t seen since my high school days or if it was attraction. Maybe attraction came when I saw that pale strip of skin when your shirt rode up that one time. Maybe it was the self deprecating tilt of your smile. Your hands as they spread and clenched to make your point may have played more than a part in capturing my attention.

I don’t know what to do. Your talking about NGOs shouldn’t make my heart flutter. You’re a friend of a friend; I don’t even know how I’ll see you again.

I hate playing games. I don’t do coy and flirtation. Can’t I just come up to you and tell you I like you?

In (?) WeTrust

Trust. It’s an interesting concept. Princeton’s WorldNet says it means to “have confidence or faith in” something. It doesn’t say how much confidence or if that faith is all compassing, or what it is in which we have that confidence and faith. I have faith in you. Some? A lot? Absolute? Faith that you’ll do what? I’m confident that you’ll protect me from physical harm, but that you’ll let my psyche be destroyed. I believe that you'll hurt me if you're able. I have faith that you’ll keep me from danger but only as long as you’re completely safe.

I don’t know that I trust. And yet, I have to trust. We all do. I trust my parents to love and care for me, until they see a part of me they cannot accept. I trust my friends with one of my most important secrets, one that I have not even trusted to this blog, but I don’t trust that they’ll look at me the same way if they read my past journal entries.

Is trust an absolute? Trust, you either have it or you don’t right? How about those little doubts that whisper seductively in the back of your mind, do they negate your trust? We’re human beings, we are by design imperfect fallible creatures. If I trust you implicitly does that make me stupid? Sucker, patsy, chump. There's one of me born every minute.

I waver, I doubt, I fear. My faith, it does flicker. And yet the candle for you is still lit, my vigil for you has not ended. I trust you. I struggle and fight my darker nature, my cynicism and lingering suspicions. I don’t know that I trust you, but I think I do. Try to forgive me this shortcoming, and if you prove unworthy of my trust I shall try to forgive you yours.

Back Again. Er.. Again.

So, Sometimes you have to fall off the face of the earth. I've gone to ground with nary a resurfacing in months. Lots of things happened, significant to me but probably not that interesting. Also forgetting your password and your username is not conductive to good blogging. In short, summers and new beginnings in life, but in small ordinary ways. Sometimes you renew your lease but it's all routine and water under the bridge. So I'm a little less emo, a little more... me. I'm not sure if this blog is now obsolete,but, as always, I post into the void, and the void weighs the worthiness of a response.

So anyway, I thought after such a long absence, better come bearing gifts. Small, but heartfelt.

We were born to be heroes, you and I, that is our fate. We are humanity's last great hope. We are our last attempt at a good thing. We built the world, height upon height, we rose up reaching for the sky. We thought we could leave the mess, the grit and dirt of humanity behind. Reaching out to the clean expanse of sky, dirtying it as we reached. We spread and multiplied, full of ambition and hubris, brushing aside the pain and squalor of the seething masses. Little did we know that from that squalor would rise our downfall. So rose the end of the world, born of pain and misery and fear. So our numbers dwindled down to nothing and we withered away. And so, here we are, you and I, heads raised about to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. To defend the fate of a species that has led us down the road to hell, with their good intentions and ambition. Then they left us here, living in the shadows of what they have wrought, mere skeletons now. Left us with hollow husks, laying under this blotted out sun. What a legacy they’ve left us, cadavers, monoliths, useless, a tribute to a pointless race whose outcome has been lost to time. This is what we have chosen to defend, have been chosen to sacrifice our lives for. To preserve humanity, the feeble remains of the seething masses. We’re broken, you and I, the lonely relics of a proud race. We will stand, shoulder to shoulder, back to back, on the frontlines of this battle. We will fight. For our lives, for their lives, for the future, whatever its worth, we will fight. Fight and die and be forgotten. Like those who have brought us to this point. Die for the fleeting wish for existence. Die for the faint hope that we will prevail. Never has a battle been fought for something so insignificant, never has a battle been fought for something so profound. We were born to be heroes, you and I, that is our misfortune.

Good Enough For Me

But appaarantly not for Bobby McGee.


Lasts post’s poem was hint enough.

I’m so far to the left of normal I don’t remember when I left it behind. My dearest sacrifice is of course sleep. Isn’t it interesting how creative sleep disturbance can be in manifesting?

Always a new twist on an old story. A few days where time and again I refuse to wake up, avoid being awake as much as possible. Next, three days on a total of three hours of assorted dozing, trying to get away with as little shut eye as possible.

Eyes burning temper flaring, I am so on edge. Tired but I don’t want to sleep and I don’t know why. Certainly not out of affection for the way the lack of sleep makes me feel.

Angry and resentful and so fucking sad. Me, junk food, Ms. Joplin and Ms. Stone.

I’m craving a book, a good piece of fiction that will hold me hostage. For some reason people’s recommendations keep falling flat. Something that will hold my increasingly fickle attention.

As usual my concentration is shot to hell. I can’t focus and my senses are feeling the strain of my deficiencies. At this point I’m not entirely certain that I am adhering to the rules of grammar and spelling.

Even my vocabulary seems to be cracking under the pressure. It feels like I’m experiencing some kind of aphasia, words that once came easily are dancing teasingly out of reach.

My feet were too dirty so I gave them a lavender soak with the works, bath salts and bath oils, essence and cream.

I think I’m going to bed now even though part of me doesn’t want to give in to reason.

I think Tarantino is only halfway a hack but I hate the arrogance of his pronouncing the Italian cinema dead. What a prick.

Running on Fumes

I have a secret. It’s big bad and tearing me apart. I’ve been living with it for so long and I am so fucking tired of hiding it away. It’s not shame that’s making me hide it; choice was mine I’d shout it from the roof tops. It’s just so powerful; it has the power to ruin everything. I’d rather have it eat away at me than destroy the people I love and the life I’ve built. I wish people wouldn’t give it the power they do. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live as myself, no lies no pretence no apologies. What would feel like to just let go, stop clenching my teeth and blurt it out. I love my family, love my people, but sometimes I hate them so fucking much. The anger, the resentment, the fear, it just builds and sometimes I feel like I’m going to burst. I have a secret and it’s tearing me apart.


Insomniac by Sylvia Plath

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole . . .
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue . . .
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

I'm Just Saying

I hate that I’m 22 and still afraid of growing up. I hate that I still refer to being an adult as growing up. I hate that I have absolutely how to be an adult.

I dislike that it’s very hard for me to end things with a friend I no longer trust and with whom I have a cycle of growing and waning resentment. I dislike the fact that I feel a lot of unresolved and unspecified anxiety. I dislike that I don’t photograph well.

I like that I am probably not a stereotype. I like that I am intellectually curious. I like that I am not narrow minded. I like that I am probably not boring.

I don’t know that I love anything about myself.

Please, no pep talk, just… yeah. I don't need anything positive or supportive, just stating things.

In other news, watching Life on Mars, and enjoying it immensely. A police officer is involved in an accident, and wakes up in 1973. He has no idea what’s going on, no one else seems to think that anything is going on. I admit my favorite parts are the music and the protagonist’s emotional and psychological deterioration.

Also, can you believe that a year has passed since this post?

Mama Weer All Crazee Now

Or I am at least.

The following is not at all connected to Wet Works. Or possibly completely connected.

Disclaimer the First: I have much respect for human life, I do. In Real Life, I’m quite the pacifist. This is just too little sleep, too much caffeine, end of term jitters, and a well meaning and usually lovable friend who would not just shut the hell up even though I was not in the effin mood. Not a psycho, just like to play one on TV.

Disclaimer the Second: The following material is of a graphic and disturbing nature. If you've got any qualms about murder or torture in fiction you should give this a miss.


If I were to kill you, this is how I would do it. The room would be empty of furniture, stark clean lines, no color on the walls, no covering on the ground. Well lit center, edges in shadow so that you can wonder if there was an exit out there somewhere. I’d like to have you hung from your wrists, but it would be too much of a cliché. Instead I’d have you on a table, ankles and wrists bound tight, stretched out in a nod to the medieval. Black Sabbath’s Paranoid would be on constant repeat, to prevent things from getting too somber. No blindfold because that would rob me of the pleasure of your expressive face.

We would be alone, you and I, with no one around to hear you scream. And trust me, you will scream. You’ll resist at first, choke them down, but I’ll rip them from your throat until it bleeds, and then I’ll make you scream some more. See my plans for you are much bigger than a happy dagger slipped softly between your ribs. I’m going to take my time with you.

I’ll let you admire my large, shiny hunting knife; twist it this way and that in the bright lights, letting it glint cheerfully at you. It would rest briefly at your temple before traveling oh so slowly down your face. I’m going to use it to lightly trace your neck, sinews tight with fear, down down, collar bone, fluttering chest, heaving sides before stopping just below your navel.

Just as panic begins to set in, filling the room with the wet rattle of your breathing, I’ll pause. Frowning and feigning reluctance I’ll pull away and wait for the guarded hope to slip into your eyes before plunging in to the hilt. My grip will tighten on the handle before I pull up. I wonder how much resistance your body will put up as I split you open.

I’m not going to eviscerate you. Entrails are all good and well in theory, but the reality tends to be too messy. That said I don’t know how I’ll resist the lure of being elbow deep, and tinkering around with your blood warm insides. The liver is supposed to hold your body temperature for ages I've heard.

Will you beg? Will you cry? Cover everything in tears and sweat and snot and the stench of your fear? Will you be worth all the work, all the quiet preparation? I put in a lot of time and effort for you, you know.

“Shhhhhhh,” I’d whisper to you stroking your face with a maternal touch. I’d press my lips gently to the top of your head and lovingly smooth back your hair. I’d solemnly look into your terrified eyes before slashing your throat and stepping back to watch your life bleed away.

And Now For a Horse of a Different Color

Less dark at least.

I have great affection for words that begin with an S and a consonant. Slick, smack, swift, stark. I like how they sound and what they mean. I like them in fiction, Wolverine’s snickt! and Potter’s snitch. I prefer the single syllable words because they have pizaz, and their counterparts tend to be less pleasant like study, or god forbid, student (if its not self referential). Stars, the fiercely burning heavenly bodies are great, unlike their human namesakes. These words make great weapons, spears, swords, and grammar sporks. They can be interesting verbs, like sneer, spew, steal, and scorn. Without them we couldn’t make our silences stony or Joes sloppy. They are vital to many a genre, whether for the slaying of fantasy’s dragons or the science in our fiction. Our live would be out of shape without spheres and squares and the scalene of triangles. Our children wouldn’t be the same without slides, spills and stickiness. Don’t you think loss of all that is quite a scary concept, even if you really can’t get rid of that stain?

When the Going Gets Tough

The crazy gets going.

Weeks of being uncomplicatedly alright and then things get a little tangled up. I’m not convinced of borderline personalities, they seem like something they stick you with when there isn’t something wrong enough with you for them to want to figure you out. I just react badly to stressful situations.

Not So Standard Disclaimer: Let me explain something about myself. In the Real World I am a puppy; overly enthusiastic, eager to please, annoyingly cheerful and about as subtle as a pile of bricks. Blogging is many things, a catharsis, a place to interact with others without the pressure to be well adjusted, a place to expose the inner working of my mind. Here I can let my cynic out to play. That said, I would love to go for coffee Krispy, if only because your brain, and by extension you, roxxorz like a rocking thing.

Now, on to the crazy.


Hellfire merrily flickering away, flames licking at my toes. Layers of my soul crack and blacken and peel away. Is new skin revealed? Pure and unblemished and oh so sensitive to the nuances of morality? Quickly marked up with the dirty finger prints of my mind? Again and Again buried under the gray, there is no real cleansing to be had. Only false hope, itchiness, and a slight burning sensation… Do they sell antibiotics for that? Other that those wrapped in little metal jackets? Leaf after new leaf turned only to be sullied with the chicken scratch of my life. Vitriol; it bubbles up and bubbles over, corrosive and where it doesn’t eat away it stains everything with a murky hue. I scrub and scrub but the residue wont disappear so I paint over it to leave everything sparkling new and if only I could keep my Hands Off the white wouldn’t wear away to reveal the dirt beneath. Facades are all good and well for shooting the biopic but they’re a bitch to live in, especial'ly when things aren’t highly fictionalized.

Torn, worn, used and faded, my dysfunctions may no longer be in vogue, but they are my own. Scout’s honor and since I never sold the cookies let alone took the oath, that doesn’t necessarily have to be true. Preparation is for pussies any way. Dry baby, take it like a man until you’re raw and bleeding out the eyes. Isn’t that a symptom of reading something with this little talent? Talent can go eat my shoe anyway, I’d be happy with cohesiveness, or even a sense of coherence for heaven’s sake. Although it may be blasphemous to invoke it while you’re dipping you’re toes in hellfire before you take the plunge. Plunge.

The Best Policy?

I am a huge mystery to myself. Not one of those cute little puzzles you pick up at the toy store either. I often feel like a frustrated convoluted maze, its hedges overgrown and its pathways lost in shadow.

Honesty, now that’s an interesting concept. How can you be honest when you don’t know where the truth lies? Sometimes I feel every aspect of me is deceitful, even those I present to my self. Honesty, who looks into themselves and sees the humanity within? And I’m not talking about the sweet giving humanitarian side. Humanity, the dark ugly messy kind, the steaming pile of entrails kind. The pettiness, the suspicion, the envy. I lay myself open and gingerly toe my psyche and think, ‘I am not a good person’. I don’t think I’m Evil, not the horns and forked tail mysterious super villain kind of evil, but I’m not good either. I’m incredibly, depressingly infinitesimal. I am an infinitely immeasurably small person. And that makes me sad.

In other news I’m back in school and rubbing shoulders with all those eager shiny faced peers I left behind a few months ago. It can grate on one’s nerves a bit. Also I just had a birthday which always makes things look particularly overcast.

If Blood Be the Price of Admiralty

300 words of Fiction

I wake up to you wrapped around me warm and pliant with sleep. Your breath is hot and wet on my shoulder and my heart is breaking. So this is goodbye. Turning to face you shouldn’t hurt this bad. My hands on your face, and I brush kisses over every part. Your nose, your eyes, your cheekbones. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. Your fingers tighten on my hips but I know that you can’t hold on. This is us, maybe for the last time, soft and drowsy, thigh to thigh and hip to hip.

Last night was about holding on, your lower lip trapped between my teeth, and a bruise beneath you collar bone. Last night was fierce and desperate, and staystaystay. Last night were the last tears I had left to shed. Last night was sweat slick bodies slipping against one another and sliding away in desperation. This morning is about connection and affection between the crumpled sheets where our scents mingle.

I’ve promised not to wait for you. I didn’t lie, I didn’t need to. Waiting is moot. I will never find anyone else because you have ruined me for all mankind. After you everyone seems flat and colorless, like they’re not really there. I will never drink my fill of you, not even if we had all eternity, but even if I never see you again I will be content. I found my one.

My lips on your jaw, my lashes on your face, my legs, my hips, my finger tips, they all say the same things to you. Be safe, be happy, do great things, come back to me. But most of all they say, god I’m going to miss you. I hold you tight to me and ignore the whispers that say this is the last time.

END

Title comes from Rudyard Kipling's The Song of the Dead.

Hear now the Song of the Dead -- in the North by the torn berg-edges --
They that look still to the Pole, asleep by their hide-stripped sledges.
Song of the Dead in the South -- in the sun by their skeleton horses,
Where the warrigal whimpers and bays through the dust
of the sear river-courses.

Song of the Dead in the East -- in the heat-rotted jungle hollows,
Where the dog-ape barks in the kloof --
in the brake of the buffalo-wallows.
Song of the Dead in the West --
in the Barrens, the waste that betrayed them,
Where the wolverene tumbles their packs
from the camp and the grave-mound they made them;
Hear now the Song of the Dead!


I

We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town;
We yearned beyond the sky-line where the strange roads go down.
Came the Whisper, came the Vision, came the Power with the Need,
Till the Soul that is not man's soul was lent us to lead.
As the deer breaks -- as the steer breaks -- from the herd where they graze,
In the faith of little children we went on our ways.
Then the wood failed -- then the food failed -- then the last water dried --
In the faith of little children we lay down and died.
On the sand-drift -- on the veldt-side -- in the fern-scrub we lay,
That our sons might follow after by the bones on the way.
Follow after -- follow after! We have watered the root,
And the bud has come to blossom that ripens for fruit!
Follow after -- we are waiting, by the trails that we lost,
For the sounds of many footsteps, for the tread of a host.
Follow after -- follow after -- for the harvest is sown:
By the bones about the wayside ye shall come to your own!

When Drake went down to the Horn
And England was crowned thereby,
'Twixt seas unsailed and shores unhailed
Our Lodge -- our Lodge was born
(And England was crowned thereby!)

Which never shall close again
By day nor yet by night,
While man shall take his life to stake
At risk of shoal or main
(By day nor yet by night).

But standeth even so
As now we witness here,
While men depart, of joyful heart,
Adventure for to know
(As now bear witness here!)


II

We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead:
We have strawed our best to the weed's unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid in full!

There's never a flood goes shoreward now
But lifts a keel we manned;
There's never an ebb goes seaward now
But drops our dead on the sand --
But slinks our dead on the sands forlore,
From the Ducies to the Swin.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid it in!

We must feed our sea for a thousand years,
For that is our doom and pride,
As it was when they sailed with the ~Golden Hind~,
Or the wreck that struck last tide --
Or the wreck that lies on the spouting reef
Where the ghastly blue-lights flare.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' bought it fair!

And the Truth Shall Set You Free

Then again, maybe not.

Non-fiction.

Tossing and turning in bed for hours until I give up sleep for a lost cause, I emerge from my room to haunt the house’s hallways, eerily empty in the dark. The house seems sad and lonely without the daytime’s buzz of activity. My family is quieter than most, but never this quiet. Parents and siblings all tucked in and sound asleep.

My days are all turned around and try as I might, I can’t seem to put things right. My body is weighed down with exhaustion but my mind refuses to give me reprieve. Hours grasping at the sandman in futility but he won’t come as long as my pulse keeps racing with unspecified anxiety. The future lurks hungrily at the edges of my vision waiting to devour me.

Attempting to escape my fate, I disassociate myself from the world around me. I’ve been stumbling around for days in a fugue state, avoiding reality. The tartness of under ripened strawberries is shocking on my tongue, and it seems to me the first real thing I’ve felt in days.

I feel trapped and vaguely panicked, like a rat suspecting that there’s no real way out of the maze. My eyes have started to linger a little too long on sharp implements so I make an effort to avoid being around anything sharper than the butter knife. The small cuts on my arms, long healed, have started to itch. Over and over I trace a crescent shaped scar on my leg. It’s faded almost to nothing. Over four years have passed since I heated a small spoon with a lighter’s flame and took it to my flesh.

Not Dead. Yet.

So this is the summing up of my radio silence.

On the downside, fell off the happy wagon. Depression, insomnia, overeating, oh my. Sometimes, I forget how to relate to others so I lock myself away.

On the less nihilistic side, it’s a whole new year for me to fuck up… er I mean get my shit together.

In entertainment news, I recently downloaded the third and final season of Deadwood, which had the most anti-climatic finale known to man. I agree with a lot of people that the third season was a stupid waste of time and a show that rocked so hard for two seasons. I truly believe that a good finally could have save it but, alas, it sucked mightily.

Also, speaking of finales? Dexter, the first season ended about a month ago. Now there’s an ending fuckers. So much love. Michael C Hall nails the character, cute as a button and completely psychotic. There’s something naïve and childlike about my favorite serial killer. Love, love, love.

Can’t wait for the second season. In the meantime though, Rome’s second season just started. No decent torrents as of yet. The aftermath of Caesar’s death. Octavian’s rise to power. Ah my serpent pit how I have missed thee.

That is all; hopefully I will resurface more frequently.

Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax

I did the weekend family thing. I came back with my eyes red, brain fried, back strained and I would do it again in a second. I got to do the female thing which I don’t get to do too much, being a socially inept loner with a gender unspecific brain.

I went to Villa Moda for the first time this week. Me mater got me there under false pretenses, and let me tell you all the funny stories you hear about women going at it over a bag during sales are all dirty lies. I was unimpressed, probably because I’m not into the designer label thing. Not against it, but I can take it or leave it. Didn’t think Dubai was that hot either. Also probable is that it was because most of their clothes were made for anorexic 12 year olds.

I love music. I love it in many forms. I was going through my old CDs and I found a couple of Pearl Jam Live Concert ones. I like Pearl Jam a lot. I don’t really keep up with any kind of ‘scene’ so I don’t really know what they’re up to, but man, they used to rock. Last Kiss? The apex of pathos when you’re a high school student trying to pose as independent, and not bad these days either. Wishlist, because hey tis the season. Black, see Pathos.

I found American Gods last Wednesday at Virgin. I tried to stretch it out, but I am not a junkie for nothing. Wound up sitting down with it on the ride back and resurfacing sometime before dawn with it lying decimated in my hands. So much for that. I liked it for a lot of reasons that I may or may not get into later.

Meanwhile, these were my favorite two lines.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migrane. -Page 79, First Sentence.

It says so much. How the city blends into the surrounding area, sure, but also exactly how you’re supposed to feel about it, the moment you set eyes on it. That line hits you right between the eyes.

I effin forgot the second line. I remember that it grabbed me, and I looked around in vain forsomething to use as a book mark. I almost regretted that I have too much respect for books to dog-ear and underline. I remember it hit me somewhere below my solar plexus. Ah well, it’s be something to find next time I read the book.

Once More Into The Breach

So tomorrow (today?) I’m going to the Kheiran Resort. Not because we don’t have a chalet, but because it’s the only place big enough to pull of something on the scale of what my family is planning to do. They’re having this huge weekend get-together of extended family, of cousins, second cousins, cousins twice-removed and God knows who else. I think they’re renting a total of about 20 units or so. Cool but weird. Which kind of describes my family. I love them to death but they’re nuts (Thank God).

I’m thinking it’s going to be tons of fun but insanely busy. I’m taking Jayne, but I don’t know if I’ll have online access or even time to get online if I do. Hopefully nothing too interesting will happen within the ‘sphere while I’m there. Either way, I’ll be back on Friday with many stories I’m sure.

In other news, you know when you’ve hit the upper threshold of geekitude? It’s not when more than half your library is sci-fi fantasy. No, it’s not when your speech is peppered with expressions exclusive to fandom (and mostly sci-fi fandom at that). It’s not even when you find it necessary to correct people who misquote your shows.

Hitting the upper threshold of geekitude is when you read anthropomorphic erotica with the pairing academia/pure maths and you think it’s cute, funny as hell and kinda hot. I… I think I might be a little shell-shocked. And a pervert. I’m sorry ok? I have a math kink. Math talk is just… it’s hot people!

Here’s a little quote:

Pure Maths iterated an algorithm in an attempt to hide its excitement.

"Take me," pleaded Academia. "Take me like a runaway freight train that leaves Boston at 9:18 travelling west at 143 miles per hour."

Pure Maths chuckled, its rich laugh reaching deep into its natural logarithms. "Party tricks," it sneered. "You want me to do party tricks? Applied Maths could do this!"

And:

"You want me to make you see uncountable infinities you've never even dreamt of?" Pure Maths asked, perhaps not noticing, perhaps not caring about the effect ending a sentence with a preposition had on its companion. "You want a long, hard Cantor's Diagonal Proof up against the wall?"

It was all Academia could do to nod acquiescence.

"You're going to have to beg."

For an anthropomorph so used to verifying its sources, this was not a problem. "I need you like I need footnotes. I need you like I need lecturers who mutter into the board rather than engaging with their students. I need you like I need Dilbert cartoons gracing the doors of my offices."

Full piece found here.

And Krispy before you shun me read this hyperbole/understatement romance.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

You know why I like Democrats? I like them because they’re internally focused. They care about things like social welfare, civil rights, rule of law. Most importantly, they don’t do much country building when they’re in office.

Remember Bush’s plan to spread freedom across the globe? How freedom was flowering in the Middle East? Remember how he planted the seeds in Iraq, and it spread to Lebanon and Palestine? (Almost Revolutions and Free Elections, w00t!) Well, it’s spread alright. Spread like a pestilence.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for democracy. My problem is with democracy that doesn’t come as a natural step in a country’s political evolution. America has to realize that they can’t play God, they can’t create countries in their image. It just doesn’t work that way. This is what comes from stomping around the world making demands; three countries in shambles, on the brink of civil war. Now I’m not discounting the extreme idiocy of the people involved in these conflicts, but I also won’t deny the affect of the US further destabilizing this already volatile region.

What I love about the whole thing is the sheer arrogance that goes into US foreign policy. See they were supposed to be greeted as liberators. They’re fixing our flawed systems of government. They’re freeing us from our terrible autocracies (if it’s in their best interest to do that, after all if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, financially speaking of course).

I will not even mention how freezing DPR Korea’s foreign assets probably caused them to step up their nuclear program. Or how they seem to have gone into the current six country talks with a ‘we will be obeyed or we will make your lives this much more miserable’ attitude which is just how you should treat a megalomaniac with nuclear capabilities.

Stupid arrogant neo-con FUCKERS.

End rant.

Meme Madness

I have so much Water Works trying to scratch its way out but the extraction process is stalled. I bomb Marzouq’s blog with talky comments and refresh Krispy’s, futilely, until now. I got tagged. A book meme.

It goes like this:

• Go to the closest book.
• Open it to page 123.
• Go to the fifth sentence.
• Post the next 3 sentences.
• Post the book’s name and author.
• Tag 3 more people.

Here it goes.

“He turned away from the body and looked for Fiver among the rabbits behind him. But Fiver was nowhere to be seen and Hazel was afraid to ask for him, in case to do so would seem like weakness and a need for comfort.
‘Pipkin,’ he snapped, ‘why don’t you clean up you face and stop the bleeding?’”

From Watership Down by Richard Adams

I was reading it a few months ago in an attempt to recapture childhood and hadn’t yet had the heart to stick it back on the shelf.

I tag:
Kwtia
Boojam
Mel

MIA Alert

I'm going to the chalet for the weekend, and I'm not taking Jayne (my laptop) with me. This means I'll be offline for a night and a day. If anything interesting happens in the 'sphere please let me know.

Wish me luck.

"Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'" - Sir Winston Churchill

Ok, so I may be just a leeetle bit of a junkie. Hopefully the silence will be inspirational.

Bits and Pieces

Sometimes contentment is curling up with a dystopian (my favorite kind of literature) graphic novel and a cup of hot apple cider (Second Cup, you rock). Sometimes it’s spending the night with chili cheese fries and a cherry coke from Johnny Rocket’s and season one of Stargate (going awww at the titanium gatesheild).

Sometimes contentment is spending time with your family in full view of a twilight sky that would not have looked out of place in a renascence painting. Sometimes it’s hanging out with your uncles (who you adore) over smoldering coals and talking over everything from Good Will Hunting to the crappy music they used to listen to when they were kids.

Sometimes contentment is someone letting you know that what you do matters (thank you Krispy). Sometimes it is finding your best friend online for the first time in ages and poking fun at her just like you did in high school.

Other times it’s very far away, not at all important, and all you have is 200 words of fiction.

Short? Yes. Sweet? You tell me.

I haven’t gotten rid any of Ari’s stuff. People have dropped a few hints about helping me find some sort of charity to which I could donate some of his things. The truth is, I haven’t even started packing things away. I still pay rent on his place, and when I’m there it seems like I’m there waiting for him to get ready so that we can go already. He's always late, and I'm always impatient. Impatient for what, I'm not really sure. For more opportunities to strike out I guess. A little pool, a few beers, you’d think I’d loosen up some but I just can’t talk to chicks like he can. He’s always been the suave one where as I tend to impress with my amazing powers of stumbling over every word I say. No complaints though, some chicks are into the whole bumbling fool thing, so it’s not like I never hook up.

The thing is, of the two of us, I've always been the more dispensable. I’m the one with no attachments to speak of, no significant academic presence, the one with the transitory lifestyle. If my life had ended that night the ripples that would have been caused would have been very small, infinitesimal. And yet I’m the one left to knock around in my empty life.

That’s why it seemed so much simpler to get rid of my stuff instead.

Waste Not Want Not

Despite being more than a little attached to my mind, my mind tends to find bloody imagery more interesting than other things at the moment.

Well, bloody imagery and handball, since it’s the only national team that gives us reason to be proud. So we kicked the Irani team’s collective ass and breezed through to Thursday’s finals. Some moments in today’s game our players truly were poetry in motion, and the Qatari commentator whole-heartedly agreed judging by his flowery sometimes hilarious metaphors. Go Blues. We may get something glittery *and* gold methinks.

Anyway, back to the wet works. A continuation of last post’s piece.

Blood. Lots of it slicking my hands as I tried in vain to staunch the flow. Had the bullet hit his thigh just inches to either direction Ari would still be alive. Instead his femoral was ruptured and he gasped out his last breaths in front of me, his hands and mine covered in his blood. So much blood, its smell so strong that I could taste it. Coppery tang and I kept gagging, but I couldn’t throw up until they came and took him away. Only then could I let my stomache rebel and the pavement was baptized with both our insides.

That was the first time I saw a gun up close. But the killing urge didn’t come then. Even after Ari’s death I still saw academia as a warm protective cocoon that would protect me from the harshness of the outside world. It was months before she revealed herself to be a fickle mistress who would lead you to your death as soon as warm your bed. I was naive enough to believe that we were victims of a random mugging, and it never crossed my mind that it was Ari’s research that put an end to my best friend’s life. Metzger may not have carried the bullet but a few whispers into the right ears and I watched the only family I had bleed out on a sidewalk. It was seven months and four days ago that I found out.

I finally get why he was so sympathetic, so understanding. At the time I was pathetically grateful for his presence. Right now I’m just glad that all I’d sobbed to him about was worthless sentimental crap about growing up in Ari’s shadow. I wonder how soon I would have joined Ari in the nether world if Metzger had gotten what he needed out of me. Now if only I’d get what he needed out of me, I’d know where to go from here.

Unfortunately, Ari and I hardly ever talked about work when we got together, which means I’m going to have to go through everything. This scares the shit out of me. Ari was brilliant, and not in my wildest dreams could I hope to come close. I only hope I can piece together what it was that got him killed before I end up in the ground alongside of him.