There’s an owl outside my window, within a guama tree. My cat has sussed her presence. They speak, both he and she. She does not hoot, but instead warbles, as screech owls often do. My cat is all a-chatter, and thus he tries to woo. View attachment 23051
Here be spoilers. Warned, ye be. My take on season 1, devoid of any context Mr. Scott may be offering because Roland Barthes says the author is dead, and thus he shall remain, in the grave and silent. The entire story is about religion on both a meta-level and on a literal level. Androids are programmed to take some human fetuses to a far away planet to raise and start anew without the corroding taint of religion that is destroying Earth in an end-of-days war. The religious side - of course - is also trying to escape what is to them the corroding taint of unbelievers. They end up on the same rather barren rock of a planet. Not completely barren, though. There’s more here than meets the eye. The occurrences on the far away planet include and intertwine both sides of the exodus. It’s about religion on a literal level because it is the one topic over which all of the characters obsess, both the religious and the atheist side of this story. This part is rather ham-fisted, tbh, but that feels purposeful as things roll out. It's a red herring because... It’s about religion on a meta-level as well because as the occurrences unfold, one realizes that this is all a grain of sand, the grain that lies at the core of any pearl of religion, the events and happenstances before the uncountable layers of nacre accrue around that grain, hiding it, obscuring it, making it inscrutable and unquestionable under layer after layer of ever-more lustrous story-telling and mythologizing. It is the beginning of a thing before religion wraps itself around it. And this thing was clearly never meant for us. We serve only as a catalyst, complete with visions, voices, holy sites, virgin births, and round-trips to a very real, physical Hell. And now that God is among us, His days begin with zero, and we, well we lie on the wrong side of that number line and our fate feels like a thing that God is not engaging at all because One does not concern Oneself with the wishes and wants of wood and nails, cement and rebar, or any other materia prima.
We’re not getting them. View attachment 23043 And it’s not because they are impossible to make. We’ve seen any number of iterations across the decades, from “that’s pretty much an airplane with wings that can fold to make it fit in the garage” to the more modern take of “oh, you mean a giant drone I can sit in”. And it’s not because the human animal is a horrific pilot requiring years of intense education and training in order to achieve near-negligible accident rates, and near-negligible would need to be the bar because flying cars don’t just crash in the street in FRONT of your home - no, they crash INTO your home, from above, so… But again, we’re close enough to fly-by-wire being affordable as a feature for something like a car to negate the vagaries of hominid pilots. The reason we’re not getting them is because the reason they were promised in the first place is fading. And it’s fading fast. The flying car wasn’t even a promise made to us, today. No. It was a promise made to 1950’s America and the sudden massive proliferation of suburbia that gave birth to the dreaded commute. We separated our daily work lives far, far away from our daily home lives, and, on a cultural scale, that was a brand spanking new concept in the 1950’s. We tend to view suburbia through the lens of the is/ought fallacy, inferring or deriving what “ought to be” from “what is”. In short, we see a landscape currently dominated by tract homes and subdivisions and assume this is the natural order of things. It’s not. And it certainly hasn’t always been the usual thing. This particular mode of life we now experience where the Insular Nuclear Family reigns supreme as the core unit of life within the prefab suburban hive is a statistical anomaly, an invention purely of the 1950's, and merely one link in a chain of events that has had many other links in the past that looked quite different, and assuming we don’t wipe ourselves out, there will be many more links in the future that also look very different. But the idea of suburbia, it’s appeal and call, is fading. It will certainly hang around for many years to come, but there’s an entire generation of people who will never see a home out in the burbs as the rock-solid investment it once represented. And even if the appeal of a quiet suburban neighborhood still calls to some, the mass need to commute is in the early stages of dying out. And just as suburbia will always exist in some form, so too some form of commuting will always exist (some jobs have no telework analogue), but not mass commuting. It’s unsustainable for many reasons and every single day technology gives us new reasons why it's no longer needed. More and more people are able to work from home. The days of household production are experiencing a corporate-driven renaissance. And again, the housing collapse of 2008 left a scar on a whole generation who were already convinced that a suburban home was no longer in their reach because the societal and economic structures that made them once affordable to a past generation were demolished, and after watching the housing collapse, is it any wonder they turned to the tiny home movement? Something you can take with you when circumstances change feels much more secure these days than a dubious investment that ties you to a physical location. And, of course, there is the new specter of contagion leaving its mark on all of us. Can anyone ever really look at an office full of cubicles the same way again? I mean, we always hated how boring and depersonalizing they and their predecessor the "typing pool" were, but did we ever think of them as dangerous? *shudder* The flying car was never a goal in and of itself. It was merely a Science Fiction I.O.U. written to 1950’s people now commuting in traffic jams, a disingenuous palliative for Herb to daydream about as he putters to his office job two hours away from his home. It was just a carrot on the end of a stick. Go get it, Herb! Go on, boy. Who's a good Herb!
Lord Robert Unanue, 2nd Earl of Idiotas joins Her Ladyship, the Duchess J.K. Rowling of Upper Scullery and Lower Treebog as the latest in a line of fully grown, adult as fuck people who missed the accountability conversation. They each said some things recently that were diametrically opposed to the sentiments and concerns of the group of people who give them money and are now crying “suppression” because the people who used to give them money (fans, purchasing public) are making their choices with their wallets. Now, I understand that individuals as monied as these are unaccustomed to being held to account, but the truth is that Rowling is as common as the commonest yank and so is Unanue. Also, the accountability conversation is a conversation one has with a 5-year-old, not people who ride the cusp between last-wave Boomers and first-wave Gen-X. Simply put, these people want to say what they want to say (no prob, go to town) and then, regardless of the “had a bad curry last night” diarrhea that comes out of their mouths, they are demanding - yes, demanding - that we continue to love them the same and throw our cash at them the same. I have a little ditty by which I live and write. Make your choices. Own their outcomes. Never ask permission. They didn’t ask permission for what they said. No problem, totes cool. They made their choices. No problem, totes cool. But now they don’t want to own their outcomes, and for that the two of them can fuck aaaaalllll the way off.
… remain a complete stranger to you if you wish to continue loving those books. Ever hear the phrase “never meet your heroes”? Not only will they not live up to your expectations, those expectations were likely so inhumanly impossible to actually achieve, when you discover the skeletons in their closets, you’re not just falling from a normal height. No. You’ve climbed Olympus expecting to find a plinth with a placard ready and waiting to accept your beloved writer. The fall from Olympus is very, very long. Rowling is currently getting her turn on the rack, complete with orange coals beneath. Nothing new there. When she fished for "diversity credits" she never fucking earned in her actual books, I knew the path she was taking. Whether you agree with her current stance or not, she chose to be vocal and accessible. There’s a price to be paid for that, no matter who you are. Ask Orson Scott Card. Again, you can agree or disagree with him. Not the point. He opened his mouth (absolutely HIS right) and we all responded (absolutely OUR right). Even the ones who keep quiet. The ones who lived before the advent of all this modern claptrap. Even they have stories to tell that they never, ever wanted told. Don’t research Marion Zimmer Bradley of you love Darkover or Avalon. Don’t research Frank Herbert’s gay son, Bruce, if you want to keep loving DUNE. And Arthur C. Clarke may have given us the Monolith, but his dalliances with boys of a questionable vintage is a happenstance that has aged poorly indeed. Writers are artists. Artists tend to be interesting people. Sometimes “interesting” is an ugly color. So, if you're the kind whose metaphorical pearls find themselves regularly clutched, have a care who you follow on your platform of choice. I know this isn't remotely what Barthes meant in his essay La mort de l'auteur, but when he says that once the story is finished, the writer is now dead with respect to any further input, I think perhaps he should have added a blurb directed at writers, as a cautionary tale.
... as we grow fat. There's a new roll I can feel when I bend a certain way. It's strange because I've always been a thin fellah. I'm the guy at the gym who has trouble gaining mass. I never really expected gaining weight to be something you felt in the areas of gain, physically, like a sock hiding in your shirt just pulled from the dryer. Some shirts feel like they aren't mine anymore. They don't sit right. They're just - wrong. But in every other aspect, I've grown thin. Patience. Creativity. Ability to hold a thought. Capacity to engage an intelligent conversation. I've written and deleted this post 10 times. Autocorrect on Chrome is behaving like a fuckboy. It shows me the red line, I go to right click the word, the red line disappears. Again and again and again. Fuck you, Chrome, right in the face with all 22 cm of my disdain. And I think this was his plan all along, for the final blow to come when so many of us are so completely exhausted. I know I read that somewhere. Crisis fatigue would be his deadliest weapon. How am I supposed to start paying attention to the Atlantic conveyor belt - which has already delivered two named storms before the season was even officially underway - with the rest of 2020 happening around me. Next Monday I need to go to Sam's to stock up the chest freezer for the coming grind. I've not checked in since yesterday. Is America a goose-stepping banana republic in unaccountably garish, non-tactical uniforms yet? I mean, it's been a whole 24 hours. Given the current speed of things, I feel like that's a perfectly reasonable amount of time for it to happen. Proud Boys... who thought of that name for you? You should fire that person. That's an embarrassing name, from a purely linguistic standpoint. It's flaccid and lacks any verbal testicles. Oh, wait, it's perfect then. Never mind. I'm trying to leave Facebook. I hate that I have to try. I went somewhere else. The silence is deafening. Thanks, America, for the congenital addiction with which you saddled me, the addiction that started when I was eight years old, sat in front of the boob tube every Saturday morning to watch a five-hour block of toy commercials interrupted by more blatant commercials for the same toys I was looking at during the rest of the commercial (we called them cartoons). That was my first professional indoctrination. Rampant consumerism. And, oh boy, was it ever fucking professional. Complete with pavlovian positive reinforcement in the form of a brightly colored box of Sugar Frosted Sugar Balls from Kellogs or Post or whateverthefuck, and even a cheap plastic toy inside for my brother and I to fight over. That last bit was training for Black Friday, one of America's dearest and most cherished traditions, the very soul of American culture. "Why didn't you just go out and play?" asked Karen. "Because I couldn't, you oblivious donkey. I had a brother to take care of and parents who were scared to death of your culture. HAD TO STAY INSIDE. Now I understand why. Also, did I remind you that you're a donkey? Okay, just checking." Before I was Gen-X, I was a Latchkey Kid. I'll go to my grave with that key around my neck as a noose. When I try to pull away from that constant cacophony of input, I don't know what to do with myself and start to fiend. Just as a twee doily, wallpaper that gives you vertigo, a cup of perfect tea, and a lady named Hyacinth is to the U.K., so too is a Gatorade, sweatpants, and standing in the front of a Target at oh-dark-thirty to spend a little less money on crap than usual is to America. What was I lamenting again? Oh, yeah, the culture that was happy to see the backside of my gay Puerto Rican ass when I left. This version of the Matrix brought to you by Windows Vista running on the most disposable Acer they make.
Up against the wall, face against the cement, hands behind my back. Choices. I see what is happening. I see where it's happening. I see why it's happening. I see who is doing it. I see who it's being done to. Choices. I made a choice 12 years ago when I left the country that never wanted me, my name, my skin, my sexuality. She was a cruel mother with her church so cold it was like a meat locker, and the home was even colder, but she was my mother nonetheless. Choices. You love a cruel mother. You do. Fucking biology. If you didn't, you would have dropped her like a hot rock. Maybe you did. What did it cost you? It cost you. It did. It absolutely did, but I understand why you've cobbled together a frame of thought that allows you to think otherwise. Choices. I see what's happening and it becomes more and more difficult to not say things that pick a side. Picking a side will mean the end of some friendships. I already told a cousin to go fuck herself when she tried to read me. She thought I'd forgotten about the trigueña daughter she abandoned in favor of her son, el jincho. Choices. I don't live there anymore. Haven't in so very long. But she's still my mother. I still check in on her. I make sure she's got food and electricity. If the lawn's a mess, I stick around for a day or two to tidy it up. I do it and she let's me and I'm a fool for having done it because there is no thank-you. Never. But I know that, so I'm the stupid one. I acknowledge that fact. This isn't my actual mother or an actual lawn. Let go of the literalism. Choices. I'm the milkman's son. Maybe not even his. Maybe not even that. They want me when they want me and don't when they don't. That may seem like a redundantly obvious statement, but the part you're not getting is that it's not my choice. Never my choice. Ever. When I'm there, I am ever the direct object to be addressed, never the subject deploying the verb. Choices. Where I live now, I am no one in the best way possible. I am unseen because all faces are my face. I am unheard because my voice and words are the same as everyone else. No one knows me because no one's looking to deal with me, to handle me, to decide my fate, to contemplate where I do or don't fit into the weft and warp. Those cold, bony hands on the shuttlecock are death's hands. They do not rush with blood; they are not soft with flesh. They are hard and chalky and dry. They have Anne Coulter's withering face. They speak in the screech of Tomi Lahren. My eyes water from the fumes of the 100 volume peroxide she places directly to her scalp despite the very clear warning that it's for wigs only. Look what happens. Fried neocortex. Choices. When I was younger I didn't realize the issue with how I was exoticised. I didn't understand the price for all those eyes and lustfull glances. The assumptions made about me were true to an extent, so it only seemed like facts, not dehumanization. I am more than what's in my pants. I am a man, not big uncut Caribbean cock over which to drool and make lewd comments. Choices. My mother is running down the street, naked, with an unshaven vulva and her pendulous breasts swinging in ways that look painful. Do I chase her? Do I save her? Or do I just let this be the price for all the cruelty, all the times she refused to say my name correctly, all the times she told me to stand up even though I already was because she just wanted to take a dig at how short I am, all the times I was berated for speaking in that other language as though it were a flaw, an aberration, instead of a skill. She's nearly reached the stop sign at the end of the street and there's traffic at the intersection. I think I'll just let her run on through.
For the dismissively pedantic, of course every place is also a thing, but not every thing is a place, now is it? Where's the line? And for sake of clarity, I'm speaking of artificial things, artifacts of humanity. A car easily holds both titles, so does a boat, but boats can be much bigger than cars. Very much bigger. If you've ever been on an aircraft carrier, the uninitiated can easily get lost. You don't get lost in things. You get lost in places.
... never pans out. Ever. The original timeline for Blade Runner has come and gone. Priss, Roy, and the rest, had they not been retired by Decker, will have hit their expiration dates. So what is the point of the near-future story that paints an ultra-fantastic world just a couple of decades in the future? In a couple of decades, a huge of swath of you in the USA will still be living in homes built during the post-war boom and also the 80's housing boom. No swish-swish Star Trek doors and "smart homes" - let's face it - will still be the territory of the very rich and will not include AI's running your home. Not AI's in the Sci-Fi sense of the word, but maybe in the current down-shifted meaning, which is a far cry from a HAL9000 or a Samantha. I don't have an answer for the why of the near-future trope. I am usually deeply suspicious of the reasons people give for needing to give a hard date. It's rarely more solid than "I want it to feel like it's not so far way" one often hears. Okay, but why? So much Science Fiction never gives a date, just the revised living situations and things seem to trundle along just fine. View attachment 23033
Лафкадио. Lafcadio. Ангельский мальчик. Angel boy. Благословен красотой, проклят безумием. Blessed with beauty, cursed with madness. Что бы ты подумал о нас сейчас? What would you think of us now? Симфония, которая заканчивается крушение поезда. A symphony that ends in a train wreck. Lafcadio Orlovsky View attachment 23032
Sitting in the dispensary waiting room yesterday, there was a tall trans woman sitting behind me extolling a litany of natural curatives as though they were items to be found at Hogwarts. Garlic, it seems, is the panacea to all of mankind's ills. Ginger is a gift to us from the priestesses behind the veil at Glastonbury Tor and tumeric, well, there's even a photo of Zeus handing it over as a gift to cover whatever inconvenience his animal-form one-night-stand may have caused whatever hapless virgin caught his eye. I flipped through my usual assortment of cell phone distractions. This forum Facebook AO3 Mythicscribes This forum Facebook ad infinitum My badge says #7, though there are only two others in the room. The guard explains that they aren't reusing the badges until they have to, so today it means I'm the 7th client seen that whole day. I was here just the other day to renew my license. I made a purchase that day because the tendrils of worry were already caressing the lower part of my diaphram. I get called into the next room, the antichamber. You can sit in the waiting room if you don't have a cannabis license, like if you're the client's ride or whatever, but you cannot pass to this next room unless you've got your little card in hand. There's AC in here. Thank god. Other than the armed guard, there is only one person working in the entire establishment. We'll call her Clara. That's not her name, but she's not here with me writing this, so... Clara. I like her very much. Super sunny disposition, always very friendly with me. She's a European-kiss-on-both-cheeks kind of person. But not today. Today she's masked (she's never masked) and has purple hospital gloves on (she's never gloved), and it's the first live visual evidence I've seen of the inner clockerwork of others during this situation. I've not left the house save for must-do errands for at least two weeks. I'm one of the people who actually has to worry. I have a pre-existing situation. I don't blame her in the least for the mask and gloves. I don't give a borrowed discount flying fuck about the opinion of others. I know this woman, and she is a kind, thoughtful person. She's the kind of person who will absolutely treat you with what was once thought of as "southern charm". Southern charm was made morally reprehensible a couple decades ago, but it's alive and well in my culture since we weren't infected with the P.C. bug that has crippled the social niceties of the U.S. She never fails to call me corazon or cielo or amor. Those equate to dear heart, heavenly creature, and my love, though trying to understand those term via their damaged, broken English counterparts is going to lead you down the wrong path. My culture is not your culture. Don't get it twisted. "Deart-heart, so nice to see you again. But you were here just the other day. What's up?" "My card expires on Sunday and I know it takes a few weeks for the new one to come, so..." "No, no, sweetie. You're a renewal, and I know the reasons for your approval, so don't worry, you're good to go." "You sure? I follow rules and I don't want to get anyone in trouble..." "No, no. Trust me. I get 10 people a day who want to buy and haven't even been seen for a consult. You do follow the rules. Your ducks are all in row." She shows me on the computer screen that my validation is stretched to the new voucher. I'm covered. She gives me the kind of smile that says see, no worries. I still make another purchase, just in case. She rings me up and I leave with another month's worth of Northern Lights. I already have a month's worth at home. This new one will go in the fridge or freezer. She's checking me back out through to the waiting room and she gets a text message from the Puerto Rico Department of Health and Human Services (Departamento de Salud de Puerto Rico). The trans women who was next after me will be the last person they see. They must close until further notice. Her mask is back up because we're out with all the people (though it's just myself, the chatty trans woman, and the guard), but her eyes say everything. We tell each other to take care, be careful, do the smart thing, wash your hands. I'm worried about her.
I shrink You grow I fade You glow I give You take I thirst You slake I hush You yell I wash You smell I wake You dream I’m done T'would seem
View attachment 23029 Some of you are fiending as you read this. You want a Genre Romance that doesn’t end in an HEA. You want a High Fantasy story that still takes place exactly where they always take place, but you want to see a little more diversity. You wanna’ bang that heroin into your vein, but you don’t want it to be heroin or a vein into which you are banging. You want it to be different, and at the same time you want it to be exactly the same. You walk into the Barnes & Noble, and head to the same shelves. 26 thousand square feet of big-box book seller but you only see one row of books. One. It’s always the same cover art that attracts you. It’s made that way on purpose; did you know that? There is 100% a science behind selling. Nothing is random. The way the store is laid out is a concept created by a team of experts designed to get you to walk through the greatest area of store when going from one buying choice to another. In department stores, women’s clothing, home goods, and children’s clothing are all as far from one another as possible. That’s because The Customer™ is a 40 year-old woman with two kids. She™ is who this store is made for. Her™. The areas of the store She™ will be most interested in are separated by the areas she’s likely not to be interested in, but if we can just get Her™ to walk by the men’s belts on her way from dresses to duvets, maybe she’ll buy one. Your book store is exactly the same, but man, those are some really big blinkers you're wearing. Back to the cover art… The days of actual artistry are long past. No one paints book covers in oil paint anymore. And it’s churned out in such a way as to broadcast a message to you. Look for the steamy section of books. The amount of skin you see on the cover is directly correlative to how frankly and boldly the fucking will be described. Oh, there’s a new book on the Fantasy shelf calling to you. You know it’s new because you come here twice a week. Oh, and look how hot that elf chick is! And that dwarf is pretty cool. And that castle in the background is big and brooding and ominous. You pick it up and flip through it and after taking the final sip of your iced chai latte (soy milk, of course), you head to the cashier. You take your book home and are once again disappointed that no one is described as being a person of color, or of Asian extraction, or LGBT, or anything else that isn’t part of Generically Standard Faux Medieval Northern Europe. You begin to hold forth about how things were actually more diverse than these books make it seem. You brandish examples of historical black figures from the era of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. I am a POC, so please spare me your protestations. Spare me your explanations. Spare me the insanity of watching you do the exact same thing, over and over again, expecting a different result. Have you heard that line before? Yes, you have. You know exactly where that comes from. So, a dare, or maybe a double dog dare because I know this will frighten some of you down to the bone: Buy a book with a cover that’s different from what you always buy. Explore the other 25.9 thousand square feet of the fucking store and get something else, but ffs spare me your constant bitching, moaning, groaning, and kvetching that you knowingly pick up the same kind of book, again and again, and are somehow disappointed at what you find inside. It’s more than ludicrous; it’s aggressively obtuse.
“Those are our car, so give us the keys.” Our husband, confused, just slapped their knees. “There’s only one car and only one you,” they retorted to us, and that’s when We knew. They see it so strange and so odd to the rest. It takes many twigs to build ye some nest. And it takes many parts to construct those old car. And billions of cells are in us, yes they are. Nothing are singular, give them some thought. Uncounted quarks in these Gordian Knot. Trillions of stars swirl 'round their black holes, The plural are all, glowing like coals. And into our hands our keys they did fly, Our husband did scoff with a roll of their eye. These poem are not about pronoun or name. They're about mathematics, we’ll thank you the same.