sadoeuphemist

Optimism

2019-09-27T12:37:44Z

You ask if we will live to see the dawn. I do not think we are alive now. That is not the sky hanging over us, but a shroud—the unremitting darkness of the grave.

It is quite bright then, considering. No, not so very dark at all.

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Maiden Name

2019-09-18T06:27:14Z

Now listen, that's my mother's name,
the name she used before she wore a face.
I can't pronounce it properly anymore,
not here, out in the sunlight, out in the open air.
It should be spoken in a cavern, in a lagoon,
and echo off the mossy walls, be half-swallowed
by the dark. It should falter from your tongue
like an eddy of translucent scales, like
the discarded skin of something plunged
beneath the waves, something deeper now,
and gone.

These things don't work like blood, you know.
There's no trace of her name left running through me.

Maybe we might see the ghost of it, written
with a finger over poured concrete,
tracing the raised ridges of the fossil in the shale
deep beneath the earth. Or hear her name whispered
through the rattling of the pipes right before
the shock of icy water against naked flesh - a reminder
of huddling defenseless, scared and cold,
before walls, before the foundations all were laid,
before our kitchenware, the refrigerator on at night
with its electric hum. As if we were naked, still,
in the darkness, blood set in our veins; in
the home we built our bedrock on.

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Murmur

2019-09-18T06:08:36Z

At times he could feel a woman, her legs delicately fluttering, in his ventricles.

Of course, it might not have been a woman. He had no way of knowing for sure save for being put under, having a team of expert doctors pry open his chest, crack his ribs, incise a slit into that tender pulp of the heart so that she might be revealed bathing in the blood-red coves of his heartbeat, a deep-sea creature for the first time exposed to surface air and light. Otherwise, the faint flutters he felt in his chest might have very well been a writhing eel, a worm, a shrimp, some parasite; or just another man swimming in measured strokes, with a flutter in his heart as well, made miniature; or a loose filament of cardiac muscle tickling at the inside of his heart, portending the unraveling of all the rest.

But he was certain it was a woman, for in the gray sameness of his days, when he sat alone at breakfasts drinking bitter coffee and looking at the faded wallpaper, he would feel a brief kick in his heart, a playful flutter, as if to remind him she was still there; a caress. The touch of her, her fingertips brushing up against the striated muscle of his heart with every stroke, was so tender that it could be nothing but a woman, and he had come to depend on those moments of her touch as a dear and necessary warmth.

At nights, when he lay awake in the darkness, she would stroke him, soothe him to sleep. She eased his days with the promise that she would be there; and that loneliness was a temporary thing; and that in his heart he was a fruitful, tender person capable of loving and being loved, who only needed the kindness of a human touch to nurture him, a gentle hand to help him bloom.

Except.

At times he would wake up from a nightmare, sweating, his heart pounding as if to beat out of his chest, having glimpsed some awful truth just beneath the surface. In his calmer waking moments he dismissed it as night terrors, irrationality, and tried not to think about it; and mostly succeeded. But the notion would resurface, periodically, like a murky presence just beneath the waters, its pale skin bobbing up at the receding of the tides.

He had killed her. His heart, near full to bursting with desire, had beat indecently, vulgarly, battered her with waves against the walls of his heart until she had strangled on his blood and fallen unconscious and stopped swimming. She had been trapped in him for years, decades, forced through the chambers of his heart without respite or air or sunshine or place to rest. Her body floated listlessly, sightlessly, eyes swollen shut, drowned limbs moving with the currents. It was, and had always been, only his own self-gratifying heart within him, beating, pulling, clenching, stirring up spurts and eddies, puppeting her pale compliant body to brush against him, arousing him with each flutter and caress.

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An Excerpt from Haunted Houses, Haunted Stories (Under Construction)

2019-04-19T23:57:26Z

Orblez’s short story, We Who Have Been Spoken For, presents itself as the documentation of a fictional novel, The Chapterhouse Murders, in which Orblez’s fictional narrator, Andreas Paz, is gradually driven mad by a sort of existential terror over the course of reading the book. The plot of Chapterhouse can be summed up simply enough: twelve people find themselves trapped in a house in the middle of nowhere, and one by one meet gruesome deaths until the novel’s final chapter, in which the unseen narrator of Chapterhouse is revealed to have been the murderer all along. As Paz proceeds through the novel - which he describes in architectural metaphors, as if he is venturing deeper into a structure as he goes - he discovers that previously-read chapters of the book have been defaced in a similar manner in which their occupants were killed: the pages shredded, burnt, waterlogged, blood-soaked, spindled, mutilated, etc., all made unreadable. The nature of the murderous narrator (from hereon used to describe all instances of the narrator of The Chapterhouse Murders), as well as the ambiguity of the story’s ending, and that of the novel-within-the-story, have been the subject of much academic discussion.

As none of the text of Chapterhouse is ever quoted directly within Orblez's short story, all guesses as to its prose structure must be reconstructed through the ramblings a secondary unreliable narrator, Andreas Paz - a meta-narrator, essentially - as he succumbs to madness. From Paz's narration, we can glean several clues as to the nature of the work: Each chapter is told from the point of view of the character who meets their end within it. The characters are called occupants by Paz, but notably only in the sense of them 'occupying' their fatal chapter; i.e. Paz only begins using the term after the first death, and only to refer to characters during their respective POV chapters, or those who are already dead by that point in the narrative. In the infamous final chapter, the last surviving occupant, Herman Silva, begins to hear a mysterious 'disembodied voice' approaching him. Paz identifies the voice as the narrator's, suggesting that Silva is hearing the text of the novel itself spoken out to him. Paz describes the effect as 'echoing', 'maddening', and at one point writes frenziedly that 'the walls [are] closing in!' We are told that Silva, too, dies at the hands of the narrator, but the exact nature of his death, and the ultimate fate of Paz, are left unknown.

Part of the effectiveness of Orblez's short story is the metaphor of novel as haunted house, the suggestion that text itself is inextricably haunted by the 'ghost' of its narrator. The narrator may be read as some sort of malevolent entity capable of extending beyond the limitations of text, tormenting Paz the reader, and then by inference capable of progressing metatextually to potentially haunt the very much nonfictional reader of We Who Have Been Spoken For. On one level, this may literally be true - the nature of the written word, persisting past an author's lifespan, allows a current reader to be piqued, disturbed, aroused, tormented, etc., by the words of an author long since dead. But, then, what are we to make of the narrator's slaughter of the characters - would not all the characters in a story be equally undead, sustained only by the narrator that creates them?

Much discussion of the short story focuses on the apparent contradiction of its climax, which proceeds as follows: the final chapter is supposedly told entirely from the point of view of the last surviving occupant, Herman Silva, who ultimately also dies at the hands of the unseen narrator. This would seem to be incompatible with the reveal that the narrator is the killer, as surely the final confrontation would have to have been told from the narrator’s point of view. And if each chapter is told from a different point of view, then how can the narrator be considered as a singular entity throughout the entire book, much less the one responsible for the murder of all its characters?

As one potential resolution to this conflict, consider Paz's repeated descriptions of the final chapter as 'echoing.' Silva, he implies, can hear every word of the narrator, presumably including the descriptions of Silva's own utterances and thoughts, and so we might imagine his final confrontation with the narrator as a sort of feedback loop, Silva forced to constantly react to an accounting of his own reactions. Attempts to reproduce such an effect in various fanworks have achieved varying degrees of success, but we might imagine Silva's torment as that of a consciousness examining itself, turning ever-inward recursively. The ambiguity of the murderous narrator might then be seen as the shifting existence of the self: is self-examination ever truly possible without slipping into a similar feedback loop? If I narrate my own thoughts out loud, is there not then a necessary distance between the spoken word and the thought in my head - a necessary process of editorializing that elides the fact of my own self-examination and instead speaks out my words as if describing a stranger's? Is this shortcoming not present in every attempt at communication? In her review of the story, Piregu imagines the infamous final chapter of Chapterhouse as recursing into smaller and smaller text, overwriting itself, and that it is this glimpse of infinity which drives Paz to madness.

Brillantes, meanwhile, has made the suggestion that a narrator and a point-of-view character, while commonly considered to be the same thing, need not necessarily apply to the same voice. In Brillantes’ own words:

We imagine that to identify himself as such, the killer must say “I”; must say “my hands around his neck”, must say, “I then slaughtered him.” But such an “I” is merely an identifier, a name as interchangeable as “Andreas Paz” or “Herman Silva” or "Ferdinand Orblez". We can tell stories in the third person, we can project ourselves, look out through a character’s eyes and puppet them as intimately as a self, without saying that incriminating word “I” even once. Who then, is to say that the narrator-as-murderer could not tell the final chapter from Herman Silva’s point of view? Is that not then our fear of colonization, of someone else telling our stories for us? If we recognize some intimate part of ourselves in a story written by a complete stranger, who is the “I” that has spoken? Perhaps we are interchangeable, then. Perhaps we can dispose of each other at a whim.

Brillantes’ proposal has inspired a number of fanworks that attempt to recreate the text of The Chapterhouse Murders, resulting in several truly convoluted narrative attempts to separate the narrator and point-of-view character, all in all of highly varying quality.

On the other hand, perhaps it would be simpler to read the work as if there is no contradiction, and to simply accept Silva the killer all along, the ‘disembodied voice’ of narration that he hears in the final chapter simply an auditory hallucination, Silva talking to himself and envisioning his own death prior to committing suicide. In this reading, Silva/the narrator’s descent into madness then parallels Paz’s worsening mental state, there being no supernatural quality to the novel, the defacement of previously-read chapters easily explained as Paz’s own actions, the knowledge of them subsequently suppressed. We may understand, then, that it is the reader who is the ultimate narrator and interpreter of any story, influencing its tone and meaning through their own preexisting prejudices and assumptions. After all, it is your voice you are hearing now, as you read this. It is you who has brought these words to life. It is you, in the end, who will lay them all to rest.

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Burd Ellen to the Dark Tower Went (Unfinished)

2019-03-05T08:44:28Z

I walked widdershins, back against the grain

And blade of grass, against the light, the sun,

Giving in to the gleeful urge to run

And circle back to childhood again.

I never thought to cause them any pain.

I circled the church, and the deed was done.

There, clad in all the raiment of the wood,
With retinue of laurel, leaf, and lind
All drifting at his train and with the wind,
Astride the church's walls the Elf King stood.
A shadow crossed my heart, and yet I could
Not for my life imagine how I'd sinned.

He took my hand, took half a step, a half
Step more.

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An Incomplete List of Stories that Undid Themselves

2019-03-05T08:41:14Z

Sucking Stones, by Samuel Beckett

Glory, by Vladimir Nabokov

This Person, by Miranda July

The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton

The Wish to Be a Red Indian, by Franz Kafka

If I Had a Nickel, by B.J. Novak

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Re: Translations

2018-09-25T07:12:30Z

appropriated from Elisa Chavez

The Siren and the Fisherman

The siren was lifted from the seas
to find her place on dry land.
By the beach, the fisherman came upon her,
a beautiful unnetted catch.
Her tail, still wet and glistening; scales
running down her breast, her arms, her face,
a veil of waves that followed in her wake.

The fisherman took that trailing tail,
shortened it, divided it in two.
"Now," he told her, "these legs are your own.
Will you not walk with me?"

The siren began her song, telling the ocean
that she had found aid, all trace of blood transformed
into rainbows amidst the shore and sand.

She sang to the fisherman, "I forgive you,
I forgive you, I forgive you."

Perfection

A woman built a house
on nothing.
It lacked all human comforts, but was beautiful.
She tried to grow a pear tree, always
left the door hanging open should her
darlings wander in. The windows stretched high
and the sun glared through. The roof leaked
in torrents after a storm,
and she was trying to repair it.

The man, who had not laid
a brick of its foundations, saw the house and
exclaimed, "How can you live like this! The windows
crooked! The lamps
burning dim. We need to
burn this house down and build again."

The woman looked around and knew
that he was right, this man
who'd had no hand in its construction:
in none of it had she found perfection.

She humbly said, "You're right, sir.
But where would I live come morning?"

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Fingers

2018-03-14T12:35:54Z

You cut off your fingers, one by one.
You cut off your fingers, one by one.
You cut off your fingers, one by one.
You cut off your fingers, one by one.
You cut off your fingers, one by one.
You cut off your fingers, one by one.
You cut off your fingers, one by one.
You cut off your fingers, one by one.
You cut off your fingers, one by one.
You cut off your fingers, one by one.

And then there's nothing left worth writing.

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*

2018-01-25T11:46:01Z

“We’re all immortal,” says Shen. “The universe begins when we’re born and ends when we die. Anything beyond that is just speculation.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I say. “My parents, for example, are proof of a history before me.”

“It’s true if you don’t believe in any other people.”

*****

Space is curved. It curves around my mass, cradles me, imbues me with that subtle pull we call gravitation. That yearning for each other. All the vastness is shot through with cosmic radiation, the light from a billion stars come traveling over impossible distances, painting for me a map of nebulae, galaxies, faraway solar systems. If I had the means, I could analyze their spectrum and calculate the atmospheres they passed through, look to the stars and envision worlds waiting on the other side. Space is not cold. I'm bathing in light, with nothing here to steal my heat. Just the photons, ions, electromagnetic waves, the emissions of the stars unencumbered by molecules of air, and me, at the center of the universe.

All the universe is reaching out to me.

Why am I so alone?

*****

“What's the alternative?" says Shen. "You live and the world dies around you? The sun swallows up the Earth, and you persist. The sun belches you out, hurls you into space, collapses in on itself and dies, and you persist. You're left floating in the void, the stars winking out one by one, watching the universe die, and you persist, and you persist, and you persist." Shen laughs.

"How will you know unless you try? Maybe we’re immortal right now. Maybe we’ll cut ourselves open and nothing will bleed out. It’s easy to say we’ll kill ourselves if things get bad enough. But what if this is it, this endless tedious persistence? What if it never gets any better, never gets any worse, and this state of being continues until the end of time? Could you slit your wrists here, right now, in front of me; could you tear apart the skin, rip open the veins, do you have the fucking guts to do it?

“What makes you think you’ll be able to work up to it it a hundred years’ time, in a thousand years’ time? What if this is the way things are going to be forever?”

*****

There’s something wrong. There’s something missing.

There used to be a world here. Lights, radio waves, an electromagnetic spectrum of existence. Space is uniform, between the stars; empty except for all the things in it. But there’s a radiant hollow here still giving off waves, a thing marked out by its absence. An empty space in the universe.

A black sun.

All I can see are the stars. Even now, my own two hands, are just starlight reflected off me, starlight picking out a tiny shape in the cosmos. All I’ve ever seen is the sun, once removed. Nothing in the universe has changed. Space is uniform, constant, the same vacuum we’ve been spinning through since the universe began. Every molecule of me is how it has always been, the same physical structure, unchanging. Except now the universe is illuminated by a black sun. The excrescence of a star carving out the image of my hands, illuminating every molecule in existence.

Nothing’s changed. The universe is as how it has always been.

*****

“The solar anus,” I say. “It’s from Bataille, I think, originally. I’m not smart enough to be reading Bataille. I picked it up secondhand from this guy I followed on the internet. He wrote about things like that. Clever things. Obscene things. The solar anus. The black sun that shits its light onto the world and reveals it to be dead. All the air stagnating.”

The streetlights fade the night back into dusk. Plaster storefronts. Pale purple shadows painted over streets. All the stars washed out of the sky. None of this is real. “He was writing about his depression.”

“Give me a name,”says Shen. “Maybe I’ll look him up.”

“There’s no point, he hasn’t posted a thing in ages.”

“Gone? Dead? Mysteriously offline, the contents of his archives the only thing to remember him by? A reminder that so many the people we invest ourselves in can evaporate at a whim, leaving nothing behind but their dusty old posts and the outline of their absence?”

“Yes? No? Maybe. Either or neither. Whichever. He was outed by the MeToo movement. So he’s dead, as far as I’m concerned. Good riddance.”

Shen laughs appreciatively.

“A woman he went on a date with. Maybe not even a date, technically. He was handsy from the start. She tried to placate him, put him off nicely. Said she wasn’t into PDAs. So he wrenched her neck around and forced his tongue down her throat. Tried to bully her into getting drunk, et cetera. She managed to get away safely at the end of the date. Pushed him off her bus.”

I pause.

“This is the funny thing: a few weeks before this happened, I was thinking idly to myself: Of all the people I followed. The well-known ones. If any of them were outed as abusers, would I be surprised? And I thought his name, and thought, no, that wouldn’t surprise me.

“And this isn’t to say that people should have known, that I knew all along, because I didn’t. I had no idea. But.”

Neither of us finish the thought.

*****

I’m recreating the world from memory, every street and sidewalk, the power lines strung between the poles, the subways, the turnstiles, the houses that I’ve lived in, all the empty rooms, the trees, the rocks and uneven soil, the paths worn between them, the glass-faced booths, the insides of cars suspended in the half-light, the lights that drowned out the stars, the lights snaking home from above, the lights that metastasize like cancer, the steps I walked, the railings I leaned over, the windows that looked out onto crowded streets, every vending machine and ATM and computer screen, every empty city, every human-concrete interface, every light and sound in the world.

All of it, everything but the people.

They are dead, and I am ever-living. Preserved in formaldehyde. Vacuum-sealed. Unchanging. There were people out there once, there must have been, detailed in their entirety, with loves and hopes and so on so forth, capable of things called compassion and mutual understanding.

There's a tug from way out there, a pull, a gravitational inevitability. The light from some dead star. And the light is real, the light is a message cast out into the universe, carrying with it the sight and texture of everything it's reflected off or refracted through, the light is the sum total of my understanding of the universe. The light is a promise I'm not alone.

It's all a lie, of course: the light, the gravity. Billions dead in the time it took their message to reach me, planets playing out their dance, self-absorbed, bleeding all these inadvertent consequences into the ether.

I've been talking to myself.

There’s never been anyone here.

*****

I will recreate the universe.

This is a star:

This is an asshole:

This is the universe, going on forever:

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Hero's Journey

2017-11-10T10:31:12Z

I. Return

1. The Call
You have made your journey, and you've returned empty-handed. You've found nothing out there worth keeping, worth fighting for - or, no fights that you could win, at least. You spent your days away homesick, in thin and distant longing, an unfinished song in the back of your heart. You drift the last few feet, carried by the tides, and your feet touch the shore. You are home. After all these years away, you are home at last.

2. Refusal
Your hometown is in no mood to welcome you. It is dying, sluggish, rudely indifferent. Your home is all crumbling concrete and stone, slow stagnation, and you were meant to either stay and help revitalize it, or to escape it. You have done neither. All you've given it is a history of debts, a past left unfinished. So many long-forged chains reeling you back in.

3. Crossing the Threshold
There are no great upheavals to your return. You slot back in easily, as though you'd never left. There are the glances, the snide remarks, the insinuations, the barely buried resentment, but for the most part you have returned to the quiet cozy town of your childhood. Much has changed, but much more is just as how you had left it. You feel as though there should be some mark on you, some irreconcilable alteration to your spirit, that sets you against the home and the family that you left behind. But the lot of you are simply older, and more weary. Nothing more than that.

4. Supernatural Aid

You've begun to have the most vivid dreams. Who wouldn't? There's a box that's been cracked open in your subconscious, all the long-buried things come flooding out. If you have not accomplished anything in life, you can at least be anointed by your dreams, made significant by the burden of premonition. You hear the howl of wind in an endless black sky. You see ghosts. You see visions of the future. You see death. You see death. You see death.

5. Belly of the Whale
The rot has grown, metastasized, but it was there from the beginning, pulsing and fecund even from the carefree days of your childhood. Your home is rotted through: beneath the floorboards, up through the grand stone buildings, in the very air you breathe. It was invisible to you at first, but your time away has made its presence so much more repulsive. It extends past your hometown, to the very corners of the land you traveled. It is bad here, and it is better elsewhere, but there is nowhere that you know of that is safe.

II. Descent

6. The Road of Trials
Your days are full of simple pleasures and anxieties, people and their problems, those who you once knew and those who are by now unfamiliar. You are not from here, after all, not really, you were not witness to the last several years of their lives, you are not bound up in their internecine disagreements. There is an air of unrealness to you, as if you were not meant to return, as if you will soon once again vanish. People talk to you freely, grudgingly; they are scattered all across the land and social stratum. You are helping them, you think, or they are helping you. Either way, it is a reason for being.

7. Atonement with the Father
Your parents are alive, still there to support you, as they have always been. They are older now, more fragile than you remember. Perhaps one of them has died. Even in this case, they are an ever-present absence, a void that warps the space around it, grounds you in its gravitational pull. You have never built anything of your own, you have not yet cut these ties. They are disappointed, they are supportive, they are struggling, they will keep you afloat amidst everything. They are human now, so much more than you were previously capable of understanding.

8. The Meeting with the Goddess
Of all the people whose lives you intercede in, there is only one who truly matters. She is in the end the reason you returned, the business you had left unfinished. There is still so much you owe her - explanations, apologies, missed opportunities - nothing that can fully be repaid. You are an ancient thing to her, a flickering, long-forgotten hope, someone who abandoned her in her time of need. She welcomes you back regardless, holds you to her heart. There is so little here that she loves. It's unsettling to see how much you still matter.

9. Temptation
You were cruel to her in your departure. No, cruelty could be renounced, could be forgiven. This was not so much a willful act as it was an utter lack of conviction. You did not fight for her, you did not contact her. She has suffered all these years you were away, watching her world constrict around her, and from you she heard not one word, gained not one ounce of comfort. There was nothing stopping you but your own insecurity and regret, the gnawing sensation that you had discovered nothing to offer her. Even in your tender moments together, you can tally up the records, you can list down your sins and know: you do not deserve her.

10. Apotheosis
You cannot save her. You cannot save anyone.

11. The Ultimate Boon
Your anxieties will coalesce into a monster, someone who has thrived amidst the rot, someone who at times grows impatient and reaches out and suffocates the weak. He is well-heeled and respectable, not powerful as such, but someone beyond your reach. He has killed someone you loved, and he will draw you in, toy with you as prey, and you will charge in heedlessly. He is an individual, or a small group of them, with eyes and arms and hungers. You will see his face. Here is something you can hurt. Here is someone you can kill.

III. Departure

12. Refusal of the Return
You will die here. You will die in the depths of your despair. It is an incontrovertible, mathematical fact. The arc of your life has led to this, its momentum, its trajectory. You have returned to this dark place, again and again and again, like some sick compulsion, a slow spiral around a drain. You have been given your chance at joy, your chance at freedom and escape, and you have wasted every opportunity. You returned to this place voluntarily. You will die here. You deserve no less.

13. Magic Flight
The path from here is long and stumbling and uneventful, with nothing to bar your way. The monster is dead, diffused, distracted; you are once again beneath its notice. All you must do now is walk, put one foot in front of another, walk through the dark and past these crumbling walls. These halls do not end, they simply widen out into the world, into the open night sky and all the streets and walls of your hometown, where all the evidence of your uselessness surrounds you. All you must do is walk, as far as your legs will carry you. All you must do is walk, as far as you can bear to go.

14. Rescue from Without
Along the path is everyone you have ever met, everyone you have ever helped, listened to, comforted, manipulated, scorned. All the ties you've formed, everyone who would remember you, miss you, resent you, everyone who would be made lesser by your absence. It is not grace that saves you, for there is no God here to administer it. It is not hope, for there is nothing left to hope for. The only thing left is another person's presence, that you are here, and they are here, and for now you are all here together, regardless of whatever has come before and whatever will come to pass.

15. The Crossing of the Return Threshold
Your home is dying, rotted through, and the rot has spread far beyond its borders.The rot is vast, and ever-present. You would see the world burn down before it died, you would see deaths in the millions. If there is to be revolution, you will not lead it. The most you could do is be swept up in the flames, live to stumble among the ashes. The rot has infected everyone you know and love; even now it pulses through your veins. You understand this now with an almost fond familiarity. You are home. You are dying, and you are home.

16. Master of Two Worlds
You will have a moment, a week or so, a moment's worth of love, of earnest and wholehearted devotion. You cannot save her, you cannot save anyone, no more than you can stop the course of death and rot, no more than you can change the world. This is the Hero's Journey of our times: you circled back whence you came so that she could know that there was happiness for her still - for a moment, for a week, for a moment that would last you the rest of your lives.

17. Freedom
The world will end, and you will meet it with open eyes.

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Self-Care

2017-10-23T11:45:21Z

90% of self-care is just convincing yourself that you want to do things. That you want to eat, that you want to sleep, that you want your life to continue as normal. That you want to be here. That you want to be somewhere else.

Convince yourself that you want to start a diet, that your flesh is bagging, slumping, bunching, ballooning out around your waist, that you are sloppy and slovenly in the mirror, and that you would do anything to make the bloat around your belly disappear. Convince yourself that you want to be fit, and that not eating is a step towards fitness. This is discipline, isn't it? The regimented denial of the flesh, the conviction to withhold the stuff of life. Convince yourself that hunger pangs are normal, that you should never eat to satiation, that the human body as a machine is designed to be emptied and emptied and always just on the verge of hunger. Or, convince yourself that you want to eat endlessly, indiscriminately, constantly nibbling on anything and everything. Convince yourself that this is what counts as pleasure, the repeated succumbing to impulse, desire as separated from need. Convince yourself that those calories don't matter, that you have hovered around the same weight, the same physique, for as long as you can remember, that another square of chocolate or spoonful of gravy or just another bite of food amounts to nothing but the pleasure of eating it. Convince yourself that you are a civilized human being in no danger of starvation, and that eating or not eating has never revolved around hunger either way.

Convince yourself that you want to sleep, that you're exhausted, that the lack of sleep is going to bore through your brain and wriggle down your nerves and send your heartbeat trembling in irregular pulses, that you're going to die if you can't sleep tonight, that you're going to go mad if you can't sleep tonight, that you're going to put a bullet in your brain if you can't go to sleep. Convince yourself that your insomnia is self-inflicted, that if you don't think about it - that if the thought never occurred to you to begin with - you would naturally pass out at the end of the day. Convince yourself that you are killing yourself, one day at time, that you will have to bash your brains in, render yourself insensate if this is ever going to stop. Or, convince yourself that you are fine being awake, that lying in bed for hours, drifting back and forth from consciousness counts as rest, counts as a semi-lucid dream state that fulfills the need for sleep. Convince yourself that you think better in half-waking states, that your dreams and thoughts are freer, more vivid, that you would never be as uninhibited fully wake. Convince yourself that there's no need or pressure to sleep, that your brain will periodically shut down throughout the day regardless and you will continue as normal, as if nothing at all is wrong. Convince yourself that your normal waking hours are filled with tedium and sloth, as if you were barely conscious to begin with, that there is no difference at all between being awake and sleeping.

Convince yourself that you one again want to wash your face, your hands, that the oily, gummy coating of sebum coats your keyboard and your fingers and your forehead and everything that you touch. Convince yourself that you want to shit your guts out under a controlled scenario, that you want to be empty, purged, scoured clean before you venture out into the world. Convince yourself that you want to cut your nails down to the quick, that you want to peel off your dead skin, that you want to cut off the uneven patches of hair on your head, that if you just scrub enough, scour enough, cut off enough dead weight, there will be an example of purity underneath. Or, convince yourself of the value of inertia, that it doesn't matter, that it doesn't matter, that it doesn't matter. That you can grow your nails long. That you can not bathe. That you can not wash your hands every five minutes. That you can shovel food in your mouth with your filthy unwashed hands, that you can eat the dead bacteria that coat every surface and it won't matter, it won't matter, it won't matter. Convince yourself that you can lie in bed unwashed, that you can reuse your towels and blankets and bedsheets until they are stained through, convince yourself that the world is an extension of yourself and your secretions, that there is no use being clean, that the air itself is just a miasma of dead skin cells and saliva particulates and filth.

Convince yourself that attachment is affection, that by simply following strangers over the internet you can establish a relationship. Convince yourself that your habits, that your established routines, have become precious to you over time, and that you will whine and squirm and claw against any attempts to disrupt you. Convince yourself that you were happy, or if not happy, at least indefinitely sustainable. Convince yourself that you would do anything to be left alone, as you are, that you will self-destruct if forced to change and they'll all be sorry afterwards. Or, convince yourself that you were unhappy to begin with, that your life was tedious empty misery, that abrupt change is your only hope for satisfaction.Convince yourself that you have been wasting your time on things that don't matter, hollow simulacra of companionship and affection, that you could abandon all the personalities you follow online and come away no poorer. Convince yourself that you need to leave, that you need to abandon the ramshackle construction of your life, that you need to be empty and hollow and groping and cold and thrust into a strange place if you are ever to find anything that you need.

Convince yourself that there is some pathology in you, some impulse incompatible with living, that must be unspooled and laid out in words; convince yourself that you feel better by the examination of it. Convince yourself that you are miserable, dysfunctional, and that this deviation from the norm is worth recording. Write down every thought that flits across your mind and convince yourself that this counts as productivity, that there is something inherently compelling about your thoughts, if arranged nicely, that there is an ultimate end to this, that you will know when you are finished. Or, convince yourself that this is all flourishes, all dramatization, all an elaborate attempt to seem interesting, if only to yourself. Convince yourself that you are fine, that you have always been fine, that you will be fine going forward into the future, indefinitely. Convince yourself that everything you write is a fiction, a pleasant, pretentious fiction, with no greater significance or meaning behind it. Convince yourself that your best writing is on random topics, unplanned bursts of inspiration, subjects that you personally care nothing about.

Convince yourself that the world is going to tear itself apart. Convince yourself that nothing will change. Convince yourself that you are going to kill yourself if this continues. Convince yourself that you are fine, and that you could keep on this way forever.

90% of self-care is simple. Just act as though you want things. It's as simple as that

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Worms

2017-10-20T06:21:01Z

There are two worms, and the first is called destruction. It festers at the roots of things and sends them tumbling down.

The second crawls among the ruins with all the squirming creatures, and whispers in our ears and says:

"There is profit to be made."

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Fantasy

2017-10-02T12:19:33Z

Here and there a whole new world is lurking, just waiting to be written down. It comes in hints and references, one word at a time, the terms breeding and multiplying with one another. There's the loamy, fertile medium of established tropes, everything so commonplace as to be beneath notice: the Elves and Dwarves, the Mages and Rogues, all the inbred and indistinct cousins. And then there are the seeds of something new. Ashen-Born that shuffle forth from razed fields and burnt-out fires. Sightless cultists who comprehend the world through the palpitations of their flesh and skin. Brands of ice that sear onto forearms and lash out with frost, instantly identifiable, impossible to remove. Just add a single, barely-original idea - a single simple word, sometimes - and cross-reference it with the components of an already exhausted world. And just like that, you'll have created a Fantasy of your own.

The beauty of Fantasy is in its taxonomy - lists of races, and racial traits and abilities; classes, attributes, skills and specializations; artifact and weapon types of all varieties; schools of magic and the laundry lists of spells to choose from; bestiaries teeming with monsters and their modifiers; elemental alignments, resistances, weaknesses; subclasses, domains, clades, and orders; any category you could imagine. This is the potential of human imagination: going down a list of options and ticking off the boxes. Modular fantasies, units of prefab inspiration, mix'n'match 'em as you please. Select a race

[Dwarf. Elf. Goblin. Human. ]

and from there pick your class.

[Rogue. Bard. Fighter. Mage.]

Take up a weapon,

[Sword. Spear. Staff. Bow.]

name a home from which to start

[Plains. Mountains. Forest. Swamp.]

and with just 16 words there are 256 different people you could be, 256 different identities to inhabit. Add a new column, a new set of modifiers, and watch the possibilities multiply exponentially. Select male or female, and double the possibilities. Select an alignment, select a main stat, go through the skills and count all the combinations. Add to the lists at your leisure. Make up new names, new variables to multiply with. Be a Chalk Giant. Be a Chirurgeon. Be a Half-Breed. Be Undead. Dual-wield. Dual-class. Multiply them, and multiply them again, and again, and again, and again. What did you want to be when you grew up? Could you have imagined a thousand, or four thousand, or twelve thousand, or all the multiplicity of options open to you?

Listen. We could be anything we wanted.

Our daily wanting's just so stunted in comparison, so dull, so undefined. Try to imagine a world of your own, without restriction: speak of your dreams, your fears, your barely-repressed anxieties, your hopes, the deepest parts of your soul. How rich and diverse and variegated of a world and its inhabitants can you create? Write, and write, and write, and see how long it takes to get as far as a table of 16 worn-out words would take you. Or, if that's too hard, imagine yourself as you are now. You are a thermodynamic miracle, a multiplying of improbabilities whose existence is nothing less than astonishing - the improbabilities of existence, of life, that your parents and your parents' parents and so on ad infinitum should all happen to meet. But without the statistics, without all the tables and factors multiplied against each other, how can you qualify that, how can you separate yourself from the crowd, how can you earnestly convince yourself that there's something unique about you compared to every other person in the world? How could you possibly live accordingly?

What do you live for? What do you most desire? Fight for your class, your race, your nation, the god you worship - and fight the ever-gnawing sensation that none of this is meaningful. There's none of the cleanly-differentiated factions of Fantasy here, no single words that set in stone your alignments and alliances. Don't all your most precious identifiers Balkanize and schism and drift and blur and crumble into obsolescence over time? Can you imagine your children's children living in the same world that you lived in? Don't even your mortal enemies likewise laugh, yearn, sicken, bleed, don't they share with you some same essential humanity that's impossible to strictly define? Isn't there some empathy there, some inescapable recognition? There's a part of you over there, on the other side. There's something that knows what it is to want, to delight, to suffer. There's nothing inherent about you or your clan or your ancestry. All that separates us is the arbitrary and reversible benefits of circumstance, of old debts left unsettled.

What would you want to be then? What's worth wanting? What speck of identity can you claim other than being Yourself - and what's left for you to aspire to then? Change everything you can about yourself, change your job, your nation, your allegiances, immerse yourself in different schools of thought, reinvent yourself entirely - and all you have is the same simple skein of flesh stretched along some other imaginary axis. A different set of delusions, a different set of arbitrary values to defend. Deep, deep down, aren't we all the same? Then how could you hope to ever be anything different?

Real life has no discrete variegations, it all just slurs together into points on a spectrum. Fantasy's when you delineate all the options. Fantasy's when you read out all the rules. Fantasy's extrapolation from a series of variables, combinatorics, because math is so much more imaginative than any human could ever hope to be. All our identifiers in real life are arrangements of convenience, blinkered, tribal allegiances designed to set us against each other. We're born and raised in largely pre-generated roles, all attributes neatly correlated, a series of predetermined futures for us to imagine. Fantasy takes our inbred biases and abstracts them - Good and Evil, Chaos and Order - makes them clean and distinct and separate, and lets us believe in the possibility of assembling something new.

So imagine a world of your own to inhabit. Put a name to it, a hybrid word, a derivative, a variation. Write your demons down - reduce them to a single word, something tangible, something concrete. Write about something that can stain the pages, or something that can wear a stain. Write of Ash, or Snow, or Sightless Skin, or Stone. Write in compound words, in broad generic building blocks slotted clumsily against each other. Write of the Eyeless Sea that roils at the borders of the world, the Ashen Maw, the Eyeless Stone, the Ashen King, the Sea of Ash that stretches far as eye can see. It's simple, isn't it, once you've got the words written down. The churn of creativity, words permuting under their own momentum, an entire world waiting for you to fill it in.

Write, and pretend you're writing down your dreams, elaborating on your fears, that all the words form something meaningful. This is Fantasy. None of it has to be true.

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Fatter

2017-09-20T10:33:30Z

Do you ever worry about getting fatter? Like,

absent any immediately threatening concerns - you're not unhealthy, no,

nor is it visible on your frame. You look, when clothed,

much like you always have. It doesn't weigh on you. You might not,

by strict definition, be putting on weight.

You've always had that pudge on your belly, the creases

when you slouch; you could take a pinch of your gut and get a handful,

let the rolls slide over each other -

You're healthier than the average person, I want to reiterate that, thinner, just -

Soft. Fleshy. Undefined. Of an average build. You're used to it.

You really should be used to it by now. And yet

you think your jeans are getting tighter - still perfectly wearable, mind you.

You don't need to change, that's the gist of it. You could eat

just as you have been eating. And yet -

and yet and yet and yet - you

can't stop squeezing at your stomach again and again, in an

absent-minded attempt at revulsion. You have learned

to appreciate hunger, that gnawing sensation

that tells you there's a hollow somewhere within all that fat,

something being eaten away. You manage your portions. How much

do you need to eat to stay alive, really? How many mouthfuls, how many

swallows of water? Take a nibble, and maybe

that'll satiate you. There's no strategy to this, no calorie-counting,

no rigorously-followed diet, no numbers, you see, no

weights on a scale, no tape measures. Because you didn't do this

to lose weight, you see. You didn't start this with a goal in mind, a summer bod,

an old pair of jeans, a body you would like when you looked in the mirror.

All you have is the creeping, unconfirmed sensation that

you are getting fatter.

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Monsters

2017-09-20T10:07:58Z

(shamelessly stolen from Beast: The Primordial)

All categories, by their nature, are human constructs, artificial. We may pretend there's a difference between a thing warm-furred and a thing with scales that crosses the sea, but link blood to blood and you'll find a tangled skein of nerve and vein. We all crawled out of the water, once. We all burnt in the heart of a star.

So here's the difference between the kin, just a blood-thick membrane between them.

ANAKIM
Nightmares of Helplessness
to walk and feel the world shudder beneath you

You are the giant, the earthquake, the storm, the enormity that sends humans cowering. Some may say you represent the fear of Power, but the truth is much simpler: humans are scared of things bigger than they are.

Cruelty comes naturally to you, with every shift and rearrangement of your limbs, as if effecting pain from a great distance. You have been dimly aware of others' suffering, their fear, but there have always been more consequential things to focus on. Namely, your own satisfaction. You have never had quite enough food, enough space, enough opportunity to exert your will. No matter. You continue striving. This is not ambition, or even appetite, not any more than it is your lungs' ambition to take in air. You're a growing child. You need to eat. It's as simple as that. You've crushed people, animals, heard their bones break, heard them whimper and beg and scream. You are of the Anakim. All this is beneath you.

NOCTIS
Nightmares of Vulnerability
to reach out from the darkness to extinguish a flickering flame

You are the boogeyman, the stranger, the hidden knife, the thing lurking in the darkness. Humans feel the hairs stand up on their necks and know fear of the Other. They live in terror that there's something out there that wants to hurt them.

There's something absent from you, you've always known that, and so you've lived so as not to attract attention. People nod past you, take you for granted, and that's how you like it. Humanity fascinates you, the mundanity of their day-to-day lives, and you enjoy playing with them at your leisure. You are never bored, but very easily distracted. Sometimes you want to see them joyous. Sometimes you want to see them suffer. You've never known satisfaction, satiation. There's only ever the dull disappointment at the end of your most in-depth pursuits, after you've finally revealed yourself to them, after you've broken your toys to see what's inside. Still, no matter, it's not as if there's a shortage of humanity anyway. You are of the Noctis. They're all equally beautiful to you.

ABYSSI
Nightmares of Insignificance
to study a mirror and look upon an empty face

You are the depths, the abyss, the leviathan, the gaping maw that threatens to swallow everything whole. Humans all know fear of the Void, and perhaps that proves the truth of it: they fear that everything they have wrought so far is worthless.

No matter where you look, you see yourself. In the television screen, in the shrieking invective online, in a politician's smile, in the averted eyes of your fellow subway passengers. There's a pleasing reliability to this pattern, as if you could extend outwards and outwards and outwards until there's just the molecule-thin membrane of your skin encompassing everything. People are mostly horrified by you, once they see you clearly, and yet none of them can ever look away. You would be happy alone, and you are. If there's any disturbances that happens around you - a spate of suicides, a doomsday cult, a lost generation - that's only inevitable. These things happen, and you happen right alongside them. You are of the Abyssi. The end of the world comes turning on its axis.

NIRGALI
Nightmares of Contamination
to turn your gaze upon the world and reveal it as diseased

You are the plague, the swarm, the rotting corpse, the inevitable revulsion humans feel at their world. Some may say you are the fear of Entropy, but what humans really fear is seeing the world without delusion.

You've never been satisfied with the easy answers, popular narratives, the trends and factions of the day. Inconsistency rankles you, all the little blind spots people maintain in order to continue living their comfortable lives. Everything you've previously believed, you've since reevaluated and judged as insufficient, all the twisted hypocrisies standing out in knots on the back of your mind, crawling up the back of your neck. In truth, you take a great pleasure in gouging out the hypocrisies one by one, like so many wriggling maggots. There's a teeming beauty in it. Flesh rots, and the maggots and bluebottles swarm in and feed. People may resist your accusations, but more often than not the horrifying reality of it becomes too compelling for them to deny. You are of the Nirgali. You cannot help but pick at lies.

STRYGOI
Nightmares of Exposure
to claw out the heart and feed on dead flesh

You are the harpy, the ghoul, the gawker, the set of leering eyes that feed on humans at their worst. Humans are wracked with fear of Judgement, but in simpler terms, humans are scared of each other.

Unlike your many siblings, you were human, once. That part of you is long since dead now, a distant memory, but you can still recognize it in others, with a sort of yearning that verges on nostalgia. Other people become precious to you, fragile sparks of potential that you hope to cradle and nurture into fully-actualized human beings. A hot red reminder of what you once were. The marrow in the bone. Of course, it never happens. The past is the past, and all the yearning in the world won't turn back time. People are stumbling, nervous, fallible, perhaps even more so under your gaze, incapable of realizing their full potential. That's fine by you, though. The appeal of nostalgia is in its bittersweet tang, the delicate stirrings of loss. You are of the Strygoi. You could watch them struggle and fail forever.

URGES:

HUNGER FOR POWER
The Tyrant

ANAKIM
Jo's a ball-buster, quite literally. She's crushed a man's testicles, felt them pop in her grip. All fully justified, of course: he got violent first, and as a woman all her self-defense classes tell her to go for the groin, the eyes, the throat. Jo's blunt, assertive - enough in itself to arouse resentment - and she's learned to target men with violent tendencies and poor self-control. It's not that she's after pleasure, or revenge. Too many men view violence as posturing, a show of strength. Women don't have that luxury; they have to aim to disable, to kill. Jo's just marking out her territory.

NOCTIS
Reynold's a health inspector for the city, and sometimes he likes to go above and beyond the call of duty. He visits sites ahead of schedule, incognito. He looks up employees' personal details, follows them on social media, occasionally takes a drive out to their houses. Most people hold quite a bit of resentment for their jobs, and Reynold puts that to use. When he's doing his inspections (stringently thorough, of course), he asks all the right questions, knows what to look for. He feels a certain ownership of them. He wants them to succeed.

ABYSSI
Ari's a cabbie and he's assembled quite a collection of regulars by now, knows their schedules - people who'll find his cab waiting and ride around for hours, going nowhere in particular because they have nowhere they want to be. The guaranteed income's nice, of course, but really Ari just likes the driving, the long and empty side streets, the skyline blotted out by buildings, the numbing hum of traffic. Sometimes his passengers can't stop talking. Sometimes he lets them sit in silence. Sometimes they tell him to drive out to a bridge overlooking the river, or to the entrance of a subway station, or to the front of a skyscraper, and that's the last ride they ever take with him. He always makes sure they reach their destination.

NIRGALI
Ms. Blaise is an assistant principal, and she's absolutely diligent with dealing with problem students. She makes calls to parents, asks about their home lives, sets up meetings, is always perfectly understanding. She can always get right to the heart of the matter, tell you why a student's acting out. It's such a tragedy, though, that none of her cases ever seem to get any better. The parents are always indignant, belligerent, the children always lashing out and resentful. All her insights only ever seem to give them more cutting insults to hurl at each other. She never gives up on a student, though. That's just not her way.

STRYGOI
Dave's a self-made man, worked his way up from the mail room. Did night school, got his MBA, was promoted to supervisor, and now he's got a corner office. He's given a commencement speech at his alma mater, does volunteer work at the local homeless shelter where he talks up job opportunities and shares his story. Every time one of his guys gets hired, or gets the slightest promotion, Dave's always there to hype it up beyond all measure. Sometimes he stands at his window, looks down at everything beneath him, and imagines a tower teeming with his little people, all crawling atop each other in an attempt to reach the top.

HUNGER FOR ACQUISITION
The Collector

ANAKIM
Zmei's been arrested for theft, sure, done time for it, but more often than not he just takes what he wants. If a man or woman takes him home for the night, in the morning he'll help himself to their food, any money they leave lying around, any shiny bauble that catches his eye (he's partial to silver). "A gift for me, yes?" he'll say, daring them to deny him. If he can't find anyone for the night, he'll turn up at an old acquaintance's without warning, and leave with what he likes. He doesn't use violence, of course. If anyone's strong enough to stand up to him, he'll leave empty-handed without any fuss. After all, there are so many more people out there who won't dare to speak up.

NOCTIS
Rose collects teeth, children's teeth, and it's slow but rewarding work. She doesn't take them by force, of course not; children lay teeth out for collection all the time. The key is the timing: there's only a single night in which to strike, before the teeth are secreted away by the parents to disappear somewhere into the trash. That's fine by Rose, though, there's a certain joy in just watching, night after night, being privy to a child's development, waiting patiently for the harvest. Rose has a full set of baby teeth from a single child, pieced together over years, and that's the prize of her collection, her pride and joy. Lately, though, a thought's been turning over in her mind - oh how she'd like the full set of adult teeth as well.

ABYSSI
Yin's hometown lies on the coast, and the storm a few years back was one of the worst they'd seen. That's history now, people are rebuilding, but Yin's found a little hollow just off the coast where the floodwaters ran back into the sea, where everything washed through and a few things stayed. That's where she dives deep, in that murky depth full of things not worthy of salvage, rotting timbers and rusted metal and the refuse of houses and homes and lives. She goes down there once a day, sorts as best she can according to their previous owners, rebuilding a hollow effigy of their lives. Every few years, she adds to her collection.

NIRGALI
Tim's a culture vulture, an outsider artist, and his photos of roadkill have gotten him quite a bit of acclaim. They're like diagrams of a death, a life turned inside-out. Anyone can look and see that here's where the tire crushed the spine, flattened fur into the asphalt; here's a tiny paw outstretched in a panicked attempt to flee. There's also an unnerving clarity of background to his photographs: he renders quiet neighborhoods and scenic roads into crime scenes. The dead dogs and cats are what get the most attention, sure, but they're not Tim's favorites. He only shares his most precious photos with a very select audience: the drivers who helped him make his art.

STRYGOI
Anya owns a picturesque apple orchard just outside the city, a momentary retreat from the cares of the world. Many of her employees are previous customers of hers, lured by her charm and enticing tales to give up city living and start a new life working at her orchard. She has each of her new employees plant and tend to their own sapling as a symbol of their growth. And then, weeks or months later, when their new lives inevitably fall apart, she transplants their saplings into a little out-of-the-way grove. They flourish there; they're well fertilized. Anya makes sure her trainees always leave a part of themselves behind.

HUNGER FOR PREY
The Stalker

ANAKIM
Darius likes to hunt, it's that simple. It's a good, clean predatory urge. He doesn't have the teeth of a wolf, nor its packmates, but the basic principle is the same. His fingers dig into flesh, rip out chunks of muscle, spill blood. Sometimes he'll manage to get his arm around their neck, his fingers up their nostrils, and he'll choke them out in a matter of seconds, but more often than not it's a death by attrition: a faltering, a stagger, a collapse, and then Darius' hands digging in. They're usually still conscious when he starts to feed, but that's only because by then he's too eager to restrain himself. Whether they're screaming or not is entirely incidental.

NOCTIS
Father Landon isn't the only predator in his diocese. He's watched more than one troublesome priest be shuffled around from parish to parish, and he's uncovered their past sins. Their victims are often skittish, reluctant to trust someone in Father Landon's position, so he's had to get creative in collecting his evidence, the precious little mementos of the sin. Then he plants his little scraps of bait where his fellow priests are bound to find them. Sometimes they turn to prayer. Sometimes they have a breakdown and confess. Sometimes they're driven to re-offend. Father Landon doesn't have a preference either way. He's just in it for the hunt.

ABYSSI
Brianna hit her Awakening early. She's in middle school now, captain of the swim team, and there's a special initiation ritual she's established. They sneak down to the beach, a quiet spot where they won't be disturbed, and then they swim out to sea. It's always just Brianna and the new recruit, swimming as far as they can until their limbs weaken, until the current's too strong and they're gasping for breath, as the rest of the team watches from the shore. No one ever drowns; Brianna makes sure of that. She just wants them to get a taste of what it's like.

NIRGALI
Vanessa likes blood, likes the uncovering of it, the revelation of what lies beneath the skin. She's learned to sniff it out from behind long sleeves and scars, learned to recognize those who have already gone digging, or those who have the gnawing urge to start. She shows them her own designs on her forearms, tempts them, coaxes them, arranges it so that they can both bleed together. There's never any completion to the designs, never any sense of fulfillment, just the constant urge to keep digging deeper. Vanessa lives vicariously through her prey. At least for them, there's eventually an end to their search.

STRYGOI
Dawson owns the big empty house on the south side of town, full of big empty rooms with high rafters where he invites people to stay. They're always just temporarily out of a home, just until the next payday, just until they can get back on their feet. He provides them with toiletries, food, all the basic necessities, accepts their promises that they'll pay him back. And then the weeks stretch on into months, and they're still living in the big empty house, huddling in the empty rooms, helplessly indebted to him. He's always very compassionate when he turns someone out. They've had their chance, after all, and there are always so many more people who need a place to stay. He never really abandons anyone, though. There's so very little difference between the inside of his house and the outside of it.

HUNGER FOR PUNISHMENT
The Judge

ANAKIM
Ogre got his nickname back in high school, where he learned that the only thing you're worth is what you're owed. Hurting people got inconsistent results at best. Being on the wrestling team, with a set of rules that laid out just what he could expect when he hurt people - now that opened up the world to him. Ogre likes rules, oaths, contracts, promises, IOUs and debts. He's good at collecting what's been promised to him, and even better at extracting promises from people. He's even drawn up a meticulous exchange rate - so many bones broken for so many unfulfilled debts.

NOCTIS
Even among zir fellow monsters, Jess is a boogeyman. No one knows zir real name, or zir assigned gender, what ze does in zir human life. No one knows how ze hunts, or how ze picks zir prey. It's just, sometimes people disappear. Sometimes some terrible secret emerges in the wake of their disappearance: child abuse, or date rape, or sexual harassment. But more often than not, there's just the absence: the absence of motive or meaning or justification, the absence left in other people's lives. That's the way Jess likes it. So much cruelty is senseless, arbitrary, inflicted without reason. Why should justice not be the same?

ABYSSI
Ahmed and Patrick are a pair of Abyssi lovers. Patrick's an interior designer, and maintains a collection of photos of the homes he's so carefully crafted: intimate, almost intrusive pictures that reveal how his clients live. Then Ahmed uses that knowledge to go sneaking in. He keeps watch as the inhabitants of his lover's homes grow uneasy, dissatisfied, until the homes and possessions and lives they thought they wanted begin to box them in. He waits until they lash out, disrupting his lover's designs. And then he tears their homes apart for them.

NIRGALI
Angela's a lawyer known for her pro bono work, her tireless advocacy for those with little other recourse, the poor and marginalized who would otherwise be railroaded by the legal system. It's taxing work, and her victories are few and far between. It's not court wins she's after, though. Her cases inevitably highlight the injustices inherent in the law, leaving almost everyone involved with a bitter taste in their mouths afterwards. And she visits her own brand of justice on them afterwards, one that comes to them in their sleep, on many crawling legs.

STRYGOI
When Benjamin comes for people, most of them mistake him for an angel. He catches them in a moment of guilt, snatches them up and carries them away to some dizzying height, and tells them that God has intervened in their lives. They must make a choice, he tells them: to confess themselves as sinful and repent, to declare themselves unworthy and relinquish all hope of salvation, or to give themselves up entirely to God's judgement. Benjamin has seen people take all of the three options. It's not his fault that all three options tend to lead to people leaping to their deaths.

HUNGER FOR UPHEAVAL
The Destroyer

ANAKIM
Grace is fascinated by cars, by how even the puniest person can command two tons of metal and send it hurtling through the world with deadly force. She thinks it gives people a sense of what it feels like to be her. When she goes joyriding, she revs the engine at stoplights, cuts in, blares her horn, taunts, challenges, dares other drivers to stand up to her. She relishes her impromptu drag races, the flares of road rage, other cars vying alongside her until she inevitably swerves the wheel and slams into them in a carnage of steel and glass and bone and blood. It's almost comradely, she thinks. Almost like making a friend.

NOCTIS
Lester loves breaking glass - windows, picture frames, mirrors, display cases. There's something about the fragility and transparency of it that appeals to him, as if people have erected the flimsiest of barriers between themselves and the world. He comes in the dead of night and breaks into people's homes, shattering their delusions of security. His real pleasure, though, is watching them try and go about their lives afterwards, watching their facades crack again and again each time they stumble upon more of the shards of glass he's hidden.

ABYSSI
Naia tries to keep her appetites contained to her volunteer work for the city, helping clean out homeless camps and reveling in the detritus of other people's lives. But inevitably she goes seeking out disaster areas - typhoons, earthquakes, floods - wandering among the ruins of a city and witnessing the traumatized survivors struggling in the aftermath. She doesn't consciously cause any of the destruction, no. It's simply an inevitability, as regular as the tides rushing in, as regular as a city's expansion and rot. As regular as her pangs of hunger becoming uncontainable.

NIRGALI
Amon breeds all sorts of spore and bacterium and virus, his home full of Petri dishes and centrifuges and planters full of rich, moist soil. It's amusing, he thinks, how ill-equipped society is to deal with outbreak, how simply his strains can be bred given the right sort of equipment and know-how, and how a little package sent through the mail or left exposed in a public place can cause such complete pandemonium. It's not even that his little projects are particularly deadly. It's that the world is such a fertile medium for chaos.

STRYGOI
Diana works as an assassin, ironically because she deeply believes in the value of a human life. A single person can have an impact on thousands, even millions of others, and a single bullet can do the same. The targets she's commissioned to kill tend to be especially prominent or influential in their communities, but Diana's no elitist. Off the job she's found that any random person on the street, seen through the scope of her rifle, will have just as significant an impact in their deaths.

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Bones

2017-08-18T09:37:51Z

these are the bones of it

purposeless, needless, left bleached out

in the middle of the desert, removed from any causality or blame

we could trace these bones back a hundred years

(or fifty, or forty, or ten)
and find your ancestors here, or mine -
what face did this skull once wear, what
quivering brood begat here once -
we could argue over the history
of this place, the tribes that fought and conquered
whose bones these are
and what killed them, what broken path
led us to this

(we could imagine something living)

but I tell you now these bones
are no different from the rock or sand, worn into
their shapes by wind and grit and time
I have cleaned these bones myself and made them
sterile, scraped the meat from them until
my fingers bled, I have dragged them
into obscure designs
I have labored here
to make them unrecognizable

a living thing is too much yet to bear
too fickle, too vacillating in its intentions, too uncertain
(I cannot adequately defend it)
too much prone to revision

there is nothing left to understand
but the bones of it

a thing that once here died

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Blue Whale

2017-08-18T06:24:38Z

I think it might be a cruelty to talk so glibly about this. You know, talking about something that could very well have happened. Talking about something true.

1. On the arm blade cut f57 (blue whale, 4: 20)
2. Wake up at 4:20 and watch scary video
3. Cut lengthwise veins of the arm (not deep) only three cuts
4. Draw a whale on a piece of paper

The game's called the Blue Whale Challenge because whales beach themselves. Mysteriously, inexplicably, alone or in groups. Salt-slick carcasses heaving up on shore, drawing attention to themselves by their sheer mass, the weight of their existence warping the world around them. Who knows what's going on beneath the surface of the sea. Who knows why they did this. Who knows why they had to die.

5. If you're ready to become a whale you write "yes" on the blade leg, if not, do with their hands whatever you want (doing a lot of cuts and so on)

You count one day at a time. One step at a time. From one to fifty. A psychological build-up. A ritual. You carve in the symbol Day One and you follow the rules and on Day Fifty, you kill yourself.

6. In code
7. scratched f40
8. Write in the status #I'm a Whale
9. Should overcome your fear

It's children playing it, of course. Teens. Adults wouldn't need fifty days to get to the point.

10. Get up at 4:20 and go to the roof

11. It is necessary to scratch out a whale on the hand (or make a drawing on the hand)
12. The whole day watching scary video
13. Listen to music that curator send to you
14. Cut the lip

The game has all the qualities of internet creepypasta. Suicide by meme. The list of instructions flickering and obtuse, poorly-translated from the Lithuanian. There's a boogeyman here. Someone's sending these instructions to our kids, someone's doling out the rope, someone's whispering in their ears. The "curator," a sinister corrupting figure always just off-screen. Our kids are being manipulated, or blackmailed, or terrorized, or coerced.

They wouldn't have done this on their own.

15 .Poke the needle arm

16. Make yourself hurt

It's all bullshit, of course. Moral panic. Urban legend. Oh sure, there are people playing. Type #f57 on social media, ask for a curator and maybe someone'll get in contact with you. But all it is is some rando online, as likely to hit you up for money as to lead you to your death. Oh sure, sure, there are the dead children, hundreds of them. But you can't seriously think it's some stupid internet game that made them kill themselves, can you? There's a meme, there's an outward sign, there's a thought that they were toying with. Cuts on the arm. A picture of a whale. Some fucking hashtag status.

And then there's everything that was going on beneath the surface of the sea.

17. Go to the roof of the largest and stand on the edge
18. Going to the bridge
19. Climb on the crane
20. Check to trust

There's no secret sequence of instructions that'll program a kid to kill themselves. No master of psychology wrote this. It's not even good fiction. You start out by cutting yourself and progress to posting statuses online, watching music videos. There's no design here, no sense of escalation. Just vapid fluff, idle chores, a transparent series of branding exercises.

If anything, you should be grateful it's all so clumsy. Dragging this bullshit out over fifty days might at least give someone else the opportunity to notice something's wrong. Cuts and codes and disrupted schedules. Fifty days to cry out for help.

21. It is necessary to talk on Skype with a curator

22. Sit down on the roof of the feet
23. Again, the job with the code
24. Secret Mission
25. meet with curator

Kids have killed themselves. I don't want to minimize that. Rina Palenkova was seventeen years old when she jumped in front of a train. She posted a selfie right before she killed herself. She talked about it online. She went viral.

26. You say the date of death, and you must accept

It's all sites trying to drive traffic, you know. Trying to attract attention. Collating every one of her last words, making some up, commemorating her death in morbid detail. Some of it's sickos online looking for a perverted thrill. Most of it's the media, slavering in open-mouthed credulity over yet another tragedy to sensationalize. Here she is, the very first victim of the Blue Whale Challenge. Here's the malignant root of teen suicide. Here's where it seeps in, here's where it spreads. Here's the name of what you are most afraid of. Here it is, always just out of your reach.

27. 4:20 go to the rails
28. Do not talk with anyone
29. Give an oath that you're a whale

From 30-49 you every day you wake up at 4:20, watch videos, listen to music, and every day doing one cut on her hand, talking to a curator.

We jump (hangs up, jump out of the window, you go under a train, negativeside tablets)

We call him the curator because he's the one who turns us into art.

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Thought of the Day

2017-08-04T10:50:02Z

Compassion's an animal virtue, but it's all we've got!

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The Snail

2017-07-30T12:17:57Z

"I have no hands," said the snail, "and so everything I own I acquired through mere accretion." It sprawled limply across the ground, its body slack and undifferentiated, as if even the effort of speaking was too much for it to bear. "Everything I crawled through, everything I rasped up against, everything I took up for a moment and forgot to set back down - they all left their traces on me, particulates..."

Its voice dripped with disgust. "The crumbled remains of bone," it said, "left rotting in the damp places. Wood-ash. Broken shells. Limestone and sediment, fossils, debris - things dead for decades. There was something living wrapped in these once, something vital, and I -" Its voice hitched. "I don't remember how or when I got them. I only remember their presence as they are now, atop me, this fossilized arrangement. I passed through the world and I kept things beyond all worth of keeping.

"There was no plan in this," it said, and gazed up at the spiraling tower of its shell, eyes dull atop its stalks. "I mixed no mortar, laid no brick. I never once imagined living here. This began as a tiny lump on my back from the moment I was born, a calcified knob of bone. I resented it at first, this useless vestigial thing, longed to be rid of it. I flexed my back, strained myself hoping to pry it loose as it cut sharply into my flesh. But instead I've scabbed over the edges again and again, built it up imperceptibly along the lines from which it was first formed. It has grown, and grown, and grown, beyond my control or volition, from everything I've ever abandoned, ever forgotten -

"Is it beautiful?" the snail said. "It is beyond my comprehension." Its eyestalks swayed and reeled, tracing spirals, until it grew dizzy and lowered its head. "I could not have made this willingly. And yet I bear it all the same, and watch it overshadow my flesh ..." It stretched out its neck, twisted and turned to show the glistening texture of its skin. "Am I beautiful? Or do I carry beauty with me, distinct and separate, as a thing that will outlast me? A thing I only came to build by gnawing habit. That I could never again reproduce. A thing that I could not help but build if I was to keep living."

The snail let out a breath. "Well, yes," it said. "It is quite useful, I suppose. I retreat into it for shelter, and for comfort, and it is smooth and well-formed against my skin. I could not live without it. But, you see -

"I have a cousin, a slug," the snail said, its voice trembling. "And we are otherwise alike, in form and capacity and function. My foot is no less strong than hers, I can climb and crawl just as well. Except - except I carry everything I own with me.

"And she survives, just as well as I do, and finds comfort and shelter and - and that sense of safety, all without a shell to hide her.

"That's all usefulness is, isn't it," said the snail, and shrunk back, resigned, disappearing backwards inch by inch until only the shell was visible. "It's everything we've accumulated that we can no longer live without."

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Questing Beast

2017-07-28T08:53:19Z

The Questing Beast was not named for the fact that it was quested after (although it was, perennially), but for the howls and yelps that emanated from its belly, "the noise of thirty couple hounds questing." Such confusion is understandable (and perhaps intrinsic), as the Beast by its nature conflates two different definitions of what it means to quest:

As a transitive verb, to quest means to ask, or to search for, and thus is necessarily used with an object: there must be something to quest for, be it treasure or an ending or an answer. As an intransitive verb, however, quest refers to the baying of hounds on the hunt, and necessitates no such object of desire. The Questing Beast's name derives from the latter definition: the sound of thirty pairs of hounds howling aimlessly, never ceasing or relenting, never biting down, never satiated, constant as the rushing of blood through the Beast's arteries.

Questing after said Beast was thus a confusing proposition, as it was difficult to determine whether it was being hunted or not - whether or not the questing was transitive or intransitive, and what exactly (if anything) one was tracking. From a distance there was only the baying echoing through the woods, which might have been the sound of one's own hounds, or the hounds from another hunting party, or (very rarely) the Questing Beast itself. The hounds themselves were similarly confused at trying to track down something that sounded exactly like they did, and at times kept up the baying simply out of a confused excitement, or sheer comradely instinct. Attempts to capture the Beast thus frequently devolved into a farce of hunting parties chasing each other around in circles.

Adding to the confusion was the fact that there was never quite a clear consensus on just what the Questing Beast looked like. The most widely-distributed description held the Beast to have the neck of a snake, the body of a leopard, the tail of a lion, and the hooves of a hart - in other words, a medieval attempt to construct a giraffe. Perlesvaus, on the other hand, described it as a snowy white creature somewhat larger than a hare and smaller than a fox; i.e., some sort of stoat or weasel in its winter coat. So at the very least the boundaries were set: the Questing Beast must be no larger than a giraffe and no smaller than a hare, its color anywhere between a tawny orange and a snowy white (though theorists would differ on where white should stand on the color scale, and thus on which spectrum of colors was plausible). In the heightened atmosphere of a hunt, with the baying of the hounds omnipresent, any hapless animal that should happen to cross paths with the party could easily be taken for the Questing Beast - and who knows, any of them could very well have been the Beast itself.

From strict point of fact, there was no reason to hunt the Questing Beast at all. There was no danger it posed if left to roam free, no rewards promised for its capture. Even the howling emanating from its belly was interpreted as a sign that the Beast's days were numbered: it hosted a brood of snarling children that would eventually tear it apart from within. Any mystical significance it held was as a symbol of some internal threat that would eventually lead to society's collapse - for some it was the tragedy of King Arthur's incestuous coupling with his own half-sister; for others, it was the Jews. In any case, the Questing Beast was merely a grim portent rather than a threat itself, and certainly was nothing to be deliberately sought after.

We may imagine that those who hunted the Questing Beast were simply confused by its name, and took it as an imperative rather than a description. Or, rather, we may imagine that the Beast successfully conflated the two possibilities such that there was no longer such a distinction. King Pellinore, for example, hunted the Beast simply because his father had, as had his father's father before him, and so on - a duty passed down hereditarily, like kingship, and with no more justification for it. For Sir Palamedes, on the other hand, hunting the Questing Beast functioned as a form of displacement for his frustrated romantic impulses - as Palamedes could never win the favor of his love, neither could he slay the Beast (a parallel that defeats the purpose of displacement entirely). In any case, both men hunted the Questing Beast without any hope of ever catching it, suggesting that, much like a hound, they were preoccupied with the action of questing itself.

Hunting for sport, after all, is an end on its own, and may be counted as a success regardless of whether or not one returns with game. The goal of hunting becomes simply to be hunting, to feel the thrill of the chase, to view all of nature as potential prey, to take the sound of hounds baying for blood as music. For a knight, this would be akin to the fulfillment of a single-minded devotion, taking up their swords for a quest of unimpeachable cause. Perhaps, then, it was to the benefit of all concerned that the Questing Beast could never be caught, could never be narrowed down into a single form or species, could never be resolved or be found wanting. Rather, as a portent of some impending calamity, it was ever just beyond reach and yet imminently attainable. It lurked in every forest, its howls emitting from every mouth, it wore a thousand furs and skins. It was monstrous and yet endlessly pursued. It justified every expense and effort taken to capture it. With every fresh hunting party and every pack of hounds, the Questing Beast was again born into existence.

We may then be tempted to imagine, given all these ambiguities, that the Questing Beast simply never existed to begin with, that it was a convenient fiction invented by those in power in order to justify their murderous excursions. And yet, when we turn our attention to the woods and from the depths hear the sounds of questing - ever-present, inexplicable, keening and bloodthirsty, the sounds of a savage brood tearing apart its mother from within - the Beast unmistakably sounds its call and it becomes impossible to deny the truth.

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Unhappiness

2017-07-19T08:01:47Z

My first impulse would be to say that I was "violently unhappy"
always that particular phrasing,
"violently,"
as if I can only understand unhappiness through demonstration
as if, when left untreated, unhappiness lashes out,
resorts to violence, makes itself visible
in form of lash and tear and welt,
as if it forces its way out through the skin
as if we had moved past the usefulness of advice and frank discussion
as if I had to be restrained somehow,
placated,
pacified
through urgent intervention,
made unable to hurt myself or others
before any further progress could begin

You'll note the subtext here
"as if,"
meaning that I was lying
not just about the nature of unhappiness, mind you,
but the idea that I was ever unhappy to begin with

If I had been unhappy
instead of just malingering
surely I would have been able to identify, however vaguely,
the source of my unhappiness,
surely I would have had some conception of something lacking -
this absent happiness, what it might look like,
and how I might achieve it -
instead of just these fantasies of violence,
of wanting to be unhappy,
to be helplessly, uncontrollably, congenitally unhappy,
just to have some irrefutable evidence of my distress

If I had been unhappy
surely I would have wanted something better for myself than that

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Writing Tips

2017-07-17T12:19:49Z

If you're pretentious enough for it, start your story with an epigraph. A quote without context becomes an artifact, something to be displayed in a museum. The line might have been unremarkable in the original work, a pretty line serving a purpose as banal as exposition. But when displayed on its own, all we can see is the strangeness of it. Every word takes on a disproportionate significance. A pot can be used to carry water back and forth to the well each day in quiet thoughtless necessity. Or you could shatter it and put the shards in a museum, and extrapolate an entire culture from the pieces.

Avoid adverbs. Adverbs sum up tone and emotion and purpose in a single word - haltingly, nervously, knowingly, kindly - obliterating the nuances of what actually occurred. Don't say, "He smiled kindly." Who are you to say how he felt at the moment, what was going on inside his head? Even from your third-person omniscient point of view, even if you stripped him naked and vivisected him and probed every nook and hollow of him, where would you find "kindness"? All you have to go on is induction, a fallible, falsifiable conclusion based on the sum of his actions. You might very well be mistaken. You might be deceived. You may be deluded.

Avoid generalizations, avoid abstractions. Thought is an abstraction, as is emotion. A story isn't something you think, or something you feel, but rather something that occurs. Say, "She was happy," and the words are vacuous. They're a Rorschach test. Every reader will imagine something different, and most of them have poor imaginations. What more do you have to offer them? Might as well splinter your pen and blot ink across the pages.

Write such that your writing is non-reducible to a simpler state. Take an Aesop's fable, a genre of story so straightforward that the moral comes attached at the end. WORK TODAY AND REAP THE BENEFITS TOMORROW. And yet, the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper is incomplete without the image of the once-joyous Grasshopper slowly starving to death. Take the themes of your story and then distort them through a character's voice, obscure them in metaphor, until they're buried within the scenario you've created and you realize that the message you started out with has in some fundamental way been proven untrue. If writing were as simple as communicating an idea, we could skip to the moral and forgo the stories entirely.

You may believe that the purpose of writing is to provide insight - to take a vast, overwhelming world and to put it to narrative. To find the perfect arrangement of words that crystallizes the reality of our lives and makes it meaningful. But there's no great skill in that. People instinctively reduce their life experiences to easily-communicable summary: Kindness. Loneliness. Joy. Pain. Any number of abstractions. Words are Rorschach blots; you can see an entire world in them. Everyone already understands for themselves what these words mean, understands the depths within them. If they didn't, living would be impossible. It doesn't take a writer to see the world for what it is, or to make it comprehensible.

Build a hollow facade of a world and people will populate it with themselves, read their own experiences into anything you write. Just write something as trivial as, "They were in pain," and already you'll have evoked that spark of recognition that passes for authenticity. Write about Death, or Love, or Hope, or Loss, in stumbling and generic terms, and somewhere out there will be someone who's had those experiences for themselves, and who will be satisfied with the simple acknowledgment of them. There's no art in evoking emotion, in writing down the right trigger phrase and letting the world do your work for you. A writer should aspire to something better than that.

Common advice to writers is to work in concrete details, as if to reproduce the world via its gross material constituents. Don't talk of kindness or happiness or pain. Rather, have your characters move through the story atomically, anatomically. Document every twitch, every idle gesture, where their eye falls, what their hand gropes for, all the subtle alterations in their posture. Write with the alien eye of an anthropologist. Know your characters and setting like the back of your hand. Document hairstyles, clothes, brands, all the status symbols that combine to constitute a society; build a city brick-by-brick and uncover the people buried there. Take a world that everyone understands and render it in such intricate detail so as to make it startling again.

I myself do not perceive the world in concrete details. I wouldn't be able to tell you my characters' eye color, or race or height or weight or form. I could not tell you what they were doing with their lives in the split-second before the story began. I can't tell you what I'm doing with mine now. I could not describe happiness to you, or its signs, in any degree of detail. I'm not sure I've ever seen it. I'm not sure it exists. The most I could do is gesticulate around its absence. I could not describe to you the world at all. I've only ever inhabited a tiny portion of it at a time.

All I can do is tell you a story.

I'm looking down at the backs of my hands as I type this. They're mottled pink and brown and yellow and green at the veins, slightly translucent at the tips. The skin bulges out and bags at the joints, is raised on the knuckles in a crudely quilted triangular stitch. This is an absurd description that evokes nothing to anyone. You'd think I'd never seen my hands before in my life.

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Fascination

2017-07-12T12:11:04Z

Here's the truth: I find you fascinating. That's a sick confession now, a display of prurient interest. It's like the worst thing in the world right now is to be boring. It's fine to be cruel or sadistic, to take pleasure in one another's misery; it's fine to be belligerent or selfish or predatory, to command a gibbering squad of harassers, to claw and tear each other down. The real crime is to not be worthy of the attention we've been given.

There's another idiot on Twitter shrieking about the end of the world - the end of their world - and a couple of thousand idiots all clamoring behind them. There's another white male savior. There's another public intellectual rephrasing common knowledge, stumping for the status quo. There's another armchair revolutionary. Pick who to follow, who to subscribe to, hold your mouth open for all the little trickles and daubs of opinion. This is what the world is now, this is what it means to be aware. All we are is enablers for the worst of us.

We can outsource our morality now, our aesthetics, our ideology. We're cyborgs, and the internet's all an extended repository, all the information and emotion in the world ready to be called up at a command. Reblog something, and it's someone else's best impulses, most artful phrasing, co-opted as our own. Or, conversely, we have our supporters hanging off us like prostheses. It's the loudest of us that thrive in this world, the most shameless, the most reducible into soundbites and snark. A stray neuron sparks in the brain and the body lurches, mindlessly, destructively, tearing apart lives at a whim.

Spin the wheel and take your pick. Are any of them worth listening to? Are any of them worth killing? If any of them were evil - if they were some urgent and existential threat - we'd be compelled to kill them or die trying. If they were evil they'd at least be interesting. But no, they're only people, in all the dull banality of the word. If it wasn't them, it'd be another figurehead babbling roughly equivalent words in their place. A person doesn't mean anything anymore. At most we're an echo, an appendage, swarming and replaceable. An individual is just a weak link, after all - a flaw, a vector for attack. It's the ideas that matter, the vast and monstrous ideologies that crush us by the thousands. Kill your idols. Aim your sights higher.

Take the worst person in the world and isolate them, and they're so fallible, so pathetic, so full of chaff. Without their followers they'd be useless. The worst thing that can be said about them is that so many gave them the time of day.

So who am I to say you're the one worth the attention? Are you so much smarter, kinder, gentler, braver, nobler, more insightful than your fellow man? But I can't help it, I find you fascinating. I could watch you for hours, over months, over years. I could watch the walls, watch matter transition between states, harden over and crack, lose its viscosity. I could watch the shadows of leaves on grass moving almost imperceptibly into night from behind the glass. There's a hundred landscapes in there, as if you could connect them all side-by-side and have a panoramic view of the world from your backyard. I could listen to you talk for hours about your petty thoughts and complaints, about the fleeting thoughts across the internet that you happen to reblog, I could listen to you talk about nothing at all.

Listen: art's greatest failure is in its purpose. In theme and theory, in climax and conclusion. It's over, yes, and satisfying, self-contained, but it's over. It's already receding backwards into memory, partially eclipsed by the next new thing, the logical progression. I can't read the same book twice because by then I've already consumed the story. It's in me, digesting, moving via peristaltic motion ever closer to being shat back out. You'd think if a work of art was so great I could keep coming back to it forever, that it wouldn't go inert with time and familiarity. That I wouldn't turn to it one day and find nothing left that I needed.

Life grinds all attempts at illusion to dust. We tell ourselves we are righteous, we conscript history to our side and convince ourselves our enemies will peter out and die. When all history is, is the the slowly-eroding surface of the world, the bodies fertilizing fields, nations boiling over and collapsing. We've subsumed ourselves in story, and even though it's not over yet, we've still projected an ending forwards, rehearsing our lines, worrying away at them like gravel between our teeth. We turn to history to vindicate us and see only the slow mindless convulsions of it, the lack of direction or conclusion.

We tell ourselves we're part of something bigger, and it grows and grows and grows. Until it is bigger, until it's something vast and amorphous, until it's something so big that it encompasses the whole blindly-whirling world.

You're a nothing compared to that. So many puffs of air. So many breaths, so many heartbeats, so many days, so many nights. So many pores gaping open on your skin, so many farts, so much dead skin. So many fuck-ups, so many fleeting passions, so many false starts and failures. So many fragments, so many half-formed thoughts, so many vitriolic opinions. So many insecurities, so many trivial needs and desires going unfulfilled. So many anxieties, so many conflicting hopes, goals, that you latch on to and nurture. So many little acts of kindness. You could go on forever without completion or purpose in sight.

I could watch the grass grow. I could watch the paint dry. I could watch the world keep turning. I could watch you forever.

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Pets

2017-07-04T12:48:52Z

The dogs are dead. I don't want to see what's inside of them. That's the cruelty of a dog, or a cat, or a rat, or a weasel, or anything furred and open-mouthed, anything that licks its young, anything that pants or snorts or purrs or growls or wafts moist breath against your hand, anything warm-blooded, that you can put your palm against its torso and feel its heart beat.

(Have you held a shrew? it feels like they're dying. It feels like an insect beating its wings against the inside of your hand, battering itself to death.)

The cool intelligence of a reptile, or an insect, or a fish, is mostly all projection. There is fear there, sure, but indistinguishable from the mindless thrashing instinct not to die. Like a magnetic shaving being repelled from its polar opposite, like scraps of paper picking up the updraft from flames and flying away to safety. They don't make faces. They don't show terror. You don't hear them screaming.

When they crawl or swim or glide across your skin, there's no intimacy that lets you make-believe they love you.

That's the cruelty of being mammalian in a world ruled by hairless apes. There's all the capacity for emotion there, expression, joy and sadness and fear and loss and deviousness and greed and smug self-satisfaction, and no capacity to live privately. They're naked, every fucking emotion jolting down their nerves and involuntarily wagging their tails, standing their fur up on end, gleaming in their eyes and mouth and tongue. That dumb animal awareness exposed to the world with no option to tamp it down and put on a neutral face and go about your day without every eye on you.

No animal is born for scrutiny. We're social animals, not societal ones. We only really see each other through a web of necessary relationships. Parents, children, rivals, subordinates, superiors, lovers, mates, siblings, caretakers, predators, prey, symbiotic ties. I know you because I need you, because I depend on you in one of a hundred different ways, and that necessity is what endears you to me. We're hideous alone, patchwork products of evolution, simple-minded, feeding our own biases, focused on building scaffolding to support our own self-interest and well being. Who could love you, objectively? Who could tally up your pros and cons and conclude that another person should depend upon you for their continued happiness? We invented a God to tell us that we were loved, and concluded that we absolutely weren't worthy of it. That's what Grace is, isn't it? The conclusion that we otherwise shouldn't be allowed to exist.

Go into a shelter and argue for a dog's right to exist. To eat, to breed, to piss and shit as it will, to wander the streets and bark and scream at every stranger, to mark off its own territory, to defend its life with claw and fang. Argue that a cat should be allowed to predate, to fend off all perceived threats to its safety. Go ahead, argue for a rat's right to be happy.

A human can at least dissemble. A human can withhold. A human can put on a public face and offer that up to the world. If we're excoriated, revealed to be two-faced and hypocritical, all our flaws put on display - at least there's always the option to say: that's not the real me. That's not my entirety. You don't know me like my friends know me, like my family knows me, like I know myself. I'm here, underneath all of it. I'm just slightly displaced, always one step away, just beyond your judgement. I'm here.

Or worse, imagine being abruptly thrust into a celebrity you were totally unprepared for, imagine that fannish idolatry, that validation from strangers, and having it come and go, ebb and flow with the attention span of crowds. Imagine living like that, imagine being responsible for a thousand strangers' happiness. But even then there's always the small consolation of restraint, of fading gracefully, of the intellectual understanding that all those people never saw the real you at all. They were following a trend, validating their own biases, picking out the bits of you that they liked. They were looking in a mirror, seeing the possibility of their own acceptance, their own success, a place for them in the herd. All they were seeing was a person to teach them how to be, a position they could occupy in your wake.

A dog doesn't have that luxury of knowledge. A cat doesn't. A rat, a hamster, a weasel. Anything furred. Anything bright-eyed and screaming. There's nothing to an animal but boisterous fulfillment, nothing but bare affection. Feel them licking at your fingers, watch them dancing at your feet, understanding nothing but kindness and cruelty, food and hunger, affection and neglect. A dog can't understand why it's loved, it can only pant and wag its tail and prick up its ears and prance. A dog can't understand why it's being yelled at. A dog can't understand why it's needed. A dog can't understand why it's being killed, or being left to die.

We see a dog and think, if only we could be so happy. A dog only understands loyalty, you know? The words, 'can I pet them,' a stranger's hand running through its fur, cooing baby talk in a stranger's voice. A dog only understands itself and the other. A dog can only understand that it must have somehow been their fault.

The dogs are dead. There's something I could have been, probably. There's a thing absent of affection. There's a thing that used to be. There's a thing that screamed.

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FUN, AND FLIRTATION, FORFEITS.

2017-06-22T08:50:50Z

MODERN PASTIME
Or, IN-DOOR AMUSEMENTS.
INCLUDING

VENTRILOQUISM—PARLOUR MAGIC—ELEMENTARY
GYMNASTICS—BILLIARDS—FUN & FLIRTATION FORFEITS, ETC. ETC.

No. 8.
SELLING ADONIS.
One Lady and one Gentleman.

The gentleman must stand on a chair in the centre of the room, while the lady-auctioneer, pointing to him, says, "Adonis for sale!" She must then enumerate all his charms, qualities, and attractions. The company then bid anything they please for him—such as a red-herring, a tea-kettle, a curb-bridle, a magic-lantern, the old grey goose, a lump of sugar, &c. The bidding is to go on till the Lord of Misrule bids a pound of soft-soap, when the lot is taken to him by the auctioneer.

No. 15.
THE MAN WHO IS TOO HAPPY.
One Gentleman and six Ladies.

The gentleman sitting in the middle of the room must be complimented and paid attention by each lady in turn. Without rising, he is to respond by every species of grateful manner; first murmuring, in a whisper, "I'm too happy,"—increasing in the tone of his voice each time, till reaching the highest note, he rushes out of the room.

No. 17.
THE LORD MAYOR'S DINNER.
Eight Ladies and eight Gentlemen.

The ladies each successively go and fetch a gentleman and place him for a quadrille, according to the value of their respective numbers.

1ST LADY TO 1ST GENTLEMAN.
This is my chicken for roasting.
2ND LADY TO 2ND GENTLEMAN.
This is my calf's heart for mince-meat.
3RD LADY TO 3RD GENTLEMAN.
This is my wild duck to make game of.
4TH LADY TO 4TH GENTLEMAN.
This is my lamb's pluck for putting in a stew.
5TH LADY TO 5TH GENTLEMAN.
This is my green goose for stuffing.
6TH LADY TO 6TH GENTLEMAN.
This is my calf's head for my brain sauce.
7TH LADY TO 7TH GENTLEMAN.
This is my flat fish for a vol au vent.
8TH LADY TO 8TH GENTLEMAN.
This is my pigeon for cutting up with brain sauce.

No. 27.
MISS ANN AND JANE SMITH'S TABBY CATS.
Two Gentlemen and all the Ladies.

The ladies all remain in their places, and two gentlemen in shawls and bonnets or caps go round, one with a saucer of milk, the other with a teaspoon, with which she gives a sip of milk to each, saying, "Take that, my pretty puss!" to which, after taking it, "puss" must gravely answer, "Mew."

No. 30.
THE HORRID MAN.
One Gentleman.

He must go round and pay a bad compliment to every lady in the room, who is to answer, "You horrid man!"

No. 47.
INTERESTING QUESTIONS.
One Gentleman--one Lady; seated in front of each other.
LADY.

Are you Adonis?

GENTLEMAN.

No, Miss.
Are you Juno?

LADY.

Oh no!
Are you Cupid?

GENTLEMAN.

No, stupid.

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