Elric Report

So I’m three and a half volumes into listening to the Elric books by Michael Moorcock and I haven’t been Inception’d into the sensory deprivation tank full of urine yet, so I thought you might wanna know my thoughts.  Spoilers?  Not very big ones.  Also these books are old as hell so who cares?

Reminding me of Vampire Hunter D by Hideyuki Kikuchi.  The writing is a lot more blunt than I would have imagined for the towering gothickal shadow he cast over the genre.  Kikuchi’s book may well have been influenced by it.  Indeed, the dispassionate kinda evil pretty men with long white hair that recur in anime might all be descendants of Elric; I don’t know enough deep cuts of Japanese culture to be sure.  That said, Elric is a lot more emotional than Sephiroth or Sesshomaru or Benten or etc etc.  One emotion in particular: Fear.

It’s really common for writers on both sides of the Pacific to characterize a cool badass character as never feeling fear.  I get where they’re coming from.  Cool, badass, it’s a power fantasy, and we’d like to imagine ourselves in hardcase mode as immune to all such weaknesses.  But this trope does feel pretty damn stale by now, and it always undercut the ability for the story to feel like it has real stakes.  If the worst a hero would feel in defeat is annoyed or angry, that’s a lot less intense than him feeling afraid of serious injury, torture, whatever consequences.

So that’s kind of nice, even if the character is still an outrageously special specialboy.  Ladies love Elric.  Apparently he can lay pipe with the best of ’em.  Dickmatism as the kids say.  The stories are not at all explicit about it, but one gal is a queen and is like “i know u killed my bro but take my kingdom, just gimme that somethin somethin.”  He’s characterized as having poor health, in the first book only sustained by drugs, and this specifically manifests as weakness.  What’s his stroke game like if he has no stamina?  He manages to say no to drugs by getting a cool demon sword that sucks souls and gives Elric the life energy, but in at least one of the subsequent books he still needs the drugs.  Had he gone too long without soul sauce?  Book didn’t say.

One disappointment is that he doesn’t show near as much skin as he does on book covers.  About half the search results for Elric art, he at least has his arms and leggies out.  If u got it flaunt it, boy.

Oh, I didn’t really say what I meant by the writing being blunt.  Let’s put it this way:  If this were a movie, almost all of the dialog and much of the characterization would have to be original.  It could not rely on the source material.  In the books, Moorcock just tells you things about Elric.  In a movie, you’d have to show them.  The pivotal character moments have no real buildup, they’re just plopped on you.  It feels like short stories, where there’s no time to characterize through prose and you really just need to spell out what’s going on, if the plot has any complexity at all.

I once wrote a short story wherein I earned the love story through writing, really hard pressed to keep it under 9k words.  I do think the Elric books started as short stories and were collected, at least some of them, so that’s probably why it’s like this.  It mostly feels heavy-handed in the first scene of the first book, where his whole backstory and main conflict are just dropped on you like some Acme traps on Wile E. Coyote.

I wonder about Moorcock’s monster inspirations.  How original are his beasters?   They seem pretty original, but some people know more obscure monster lore than I do; maybe they aren’t.

Oh yeah, and one more thing struck me funny.  One of the books is called The Weird of the White Wolf.  The White Wolf is Elric and he’s having a weird.  But the book doesn’t tell us what the fuck a weird is.  The weirdest thing in the story is how he makes a bunch of really bad decisions for no obvious reason.  The worst is when the dragons come out and he is just totally unprepared for that.  He knew the dragons were there.  Even if he was like, fuck it, let’s do this even tho we’ll be dragonbait, he should’ve been bracing for it the whole time.  Instead when they come out it’s like Moorcock remembering they exist for the first time in pages.

But it’s all big dark fantasy bigness.  Sleesh slash.  Kill the guys, win the prize.  But feel empty inside.  That’s all I’m there for anyway.

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Ever See a Dead Body?

I’ve never seen a dead human body before.  Many people have; I may be very privileged in this regard.  I’ve heard it supposed that the advent of modern ambulances – whisking away the dying to hospitals and filing them out of sight into a refrigerator – has had the result of far fewer people seeing their family members after the moment of passing.  Same person suggested that this may have increased belief in ghosts, as the person’s absence would feel less final without the experience of seeing them gone.

If this is too grim to deal with, please do give the post a pass.  If you want to talk about your experiences of seeing death or its aftermath, and the way it made you feel, comment away.  Personally, it’s hard for me to imagine, save that I expect it’s pretty gross.  I’ve seen glimpses of lethal violence because edgelords prowl  the earth trying to spring shocking content on you for fun, but I’m pretty good at averting or unfocusing my eyes – have only the vague impression of what goatse looks like.

I bring this up because of my recent posts about murder got me feeling some type of way.  Been fortunate it always missed me.  I guess it always does until it doesn’t.  I say my hail satans and pray my body and mind last long enough to have a decent retirement.

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Proximity to the Scene of the Crime

content warnings: domestic violence, murder.

I recently related the tale of how I met a murderer IRL, before he did his misdeeds and died sad.  In another post I have mentioned the murder and attempted murders that transpired in my last apartment complex.  Got one more brush with true crime, which I shall presently illustrate.

The last place I lived with somebody other than my boyfriend was in Everett, Washington, living with my father.  This was during the last of my time in art school, the era of the messed up pants.

I actually loved that area.  It was a mid century -lookin suburban feel, tho considered downtown-ish, on top of a huge hill.  Just over the hill was a view of Puget Sound, just north were some plain but pleasant old brick buildings, just east down the hill were a few places to eat and get groceries, plus a transit center with only a touch of racist graffiti (“all faraners must go home or be hunnt”).  The streets felt clean, the skies were often blue, and the blustery winds felt elemental.  It was far enough north there was more snow than Seattle gets too.  Just my memories, possibly distorted.

This was the last place I ever saw the first boy I loved too, in those random moments of our lives when our paths crossed, as he was working for the navy and drinking half a box of wine a day.  Melancholy low key hangout, then vaya sin dios.

Me and my father were living in a shotgun shack at the place where the pleasant little houses gave way to ramshackle creepiness above the fast food joints.  There was a “basement” which was too exposed to be of real use.  Everything we made the mistake of storing in it was covered in mildew and rat droppings.  But the owner was low key and the place was uncluttered.  Life was lonely in a way that’s easy to romanticize.

My room faced the alley behind the house and one time I was awakened by the sound of tweakers breaking the window of my dad’s van to steal his painting equipment.  I ran out shirtless and yelling, and scared them off.

Another time somebody sent a jacked-up bb thru our bathroom window, shattered the glass window of our shower.  The shattering unfolded in slow motion, radiating from the site of impact before total collapse.  It sounded like a glacier melting in summer.  Just malicious mischief, zero priority for cops, tho it would have been trivially easy to find which neighbor’s house it came from.

Very near the end of our time there, a young couple moved in next door, to another property owned by the same guy as our shack.  They seemed a little squirrely, but affable.  He was a veteran fresh out of a war, she was somebody I never met, though my father had some brief interaction with them.  Recalling my last murderer was also a vet and the stats on spousal murders, you might see where this is going.

Soon we moved out.  I got the last of the cheap studio apartments in Seattle before those ceased to exist (no rent control so when it was done being cheap i was done with it), my dad used a bit of an inheritance to buy a trailer and go help with cleanup in Katrina.  That venture didn’t end well; my dad had atrocious business sense.

So neither of us was anywhere near there when it happened, but my dad found out (probably from our former landlord) the very day after we moved out, the young lady’s body was found in the same dumpster where we took out our trash.  That’s all I ever heard of it.  Don’t know if it even made the news.

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So Many Magical Mysteries

Remember the audiobook snorings?  I chanced to look at the rest of the videos on that channel and a huge amount of it is devoted to the ostensible health benefits of urine.  Drinking it, soaking your feet in it like a vulture or a slender loris or a binturong*.

So here’s the mystery.  Is the thespian the piss drinker?  Or did he merely mirror videos produced by another content creator?  I could find out by playing a peepee video, listening to the man’s voice, seeing if it matches.  But I am not doing that, thanks.

*why nature so into water sports?  and why did i have this knowledge on tap?  i know not.

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Dreamposting – Gun Culture

Had a dream that I was a security guard again.  Some kind of mayhem had transpired in Seattle in the night, wherein a gun had been discharged in public.  We were all under suspicion, but one specific guy had done it, and copped to it before we got into real trouble.  Even so, there was so much going on that I wasn’t aware of his confession until it had already transpired, and was running around trying to sort out defense evidence along with my home boy Clark.  Some seagulls had been killed, and during the course of events I found their bodies floating in water, gelatinized and translucent…

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Keys Mash

l;si;efj;oirejfoirjegfporwkgpokdpcodcp[okwrogkprwokvco;dlsl,qwpeoijfepiojf!!!!11!!!!

From one day to the next things look doable or not or yes again.  I took the last two days off work.  I dunno, I’m trippin.

Got a busy Octubre coming up.  Plan on doing Spooktober again, gotta get married and honeymoon, gotta have a Halloween, and the month after that is (unaffiliated) novel writing month.  Might have some hairy-scary nights ahead.

I’ve been doing one post a day for some weeks now, and just don’t know how sustainable it is, the way my life be.  Maybe I should officially stop doing that and maybe start up again next year if that proves less hectic.  Well, we’ll still be in home improvement hell until 2026, I’m sure.  Maybe then.

Yeah.  Yeah, I give up.  I’ll be around about as often as I used to be, which is much less than PZ and Mano, but much more than the average blog in the sidebar.  What was I averaging before, one a week?  We’ll see…

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Here Also Be Dragons

St. George can fuck right off.  St. Patrick with him.  In this house we dig the subjects of herpetology, reptile and amphibian.  Sadly, in their season we can barely hear the frogs from our cul-de-sac, most of the time my boyfriend can’t hear them above his tinnitus.  Also, though I know garter snakes are common in the area, I haven’t seen any since we moved in a year ago.  Certainly, I never expected to see a lizard.  I haven’t seen one since I was last in Kansas, half a continent away.

Now, like Charly on the other side of the planet, I’ve seen a drab brown lizard in my yard.  People further south could surely not give a shit.  Even in this state, east of the mountains in the plains, they would not be impressed.  Floridians whose houses are low key infested with invasive wall-crawlers would tell me to take my happiness to hell.  But no, this is cool and special.

There is an invasive creeping wood sorrel of the purple-leaved variety growing from a crack in the sidewalk between ours and our neighbors’ doors, which are right next to each other.  My boyfriend was stepping out to check on the sunflowers he’s growing, when he noticed a movement in the sorrel.  As the surprised beasty moved, his mind ran through possible identities – slug? snake? – before realizing it was a lizard.  He called me outside in time to see it, though if I’d gone for a camera, I would have missed it.

We did not have an amazingly good look at it, but enough to be confident it was a brown lizard about seven inches in length (18 cm) with no obvious markings. Based on the area where we saw it, range maps, comparisons of different boring brown lizards, we are moderately sure it’s a northern alligator lizard, northwestern subspecies.  I don’t know shit about lizards and presumed, wrongly, that I’d never see one on this side of the state, at least not here in the very developed suburbs.

It eats crickets, and I’ve noticed the crickets are less noisy this year.  Lizard population increasing?  Or did I just see lizard on the move because insect decline got them being more bold in searching for prey?  They also eat slugs, and I hope they do.

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Still on Xitter?

Just today it was announced Xitter was planning to remove some functionality in the Block feature, which of course has all sorts of legal and market ramifications.  One could easily imagine the fuckhead is trying to do some should-be-illegal market manipulation again, I dunno.  But let’s say you’ve been scraping along in the land of rapists and poison honey, just to follow the sad desperate personalities who haven’t been able to extricate themselves from the garbage fire yet.  Maybe it’s worth getting an outside perspective on what your current user experience looks like, and decide if you still want to keep doing this.

D’Angelo Wallace made a video about trying to create a new Xitter account and not get overwhelmed with ragebait and right wing content.  Worth a look.  Although if you are a person who appreciates my quaint ableism policy that nobody in the internet is following these days, note that D’Angelo does use the mild everyday ableist lingo, and skip the video.  But also if anybody shouldn’t be on Xitter, it’s you.  Take care of yourselves, people.

Because the video has musk’s shit-eating face on the thumbnail, I’ll hide it below the fold.  Also content warnings for all the fascism, transphobia, and conversely liberal despair that is now typical of the internet.

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The End in Sight

I can see the way thru, sorta.  Marriage in three weeks, trying to paint living room dining room and foyer ahead of the deadline.  That project had stalled for ages but is making some headway at last.  Still gonna be a tight one.

Figured out how I’m going to end Centennial Hills.  Didn’t really know before, but it’s clear to me now.  Still haven’t had the time to write any more at the moment.

A month point five from now, the dust should be settling on the election.  Can’t wait.

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Reading Woke

What’s the word for it, the Wokenment?  Consciousness-expanding?  Awareness-raising?  We’ve had a lot of it, from the atheist schism that ultimately created this blog network to Me Too to Black Lives Matter and so on.  Good stuff.  A recurring theme of that all: that in lacking awareness, the privileged can cause various harms to the oppressed or less privileged.  By knowing the issues, we can do better, and a more equitable world will be a better one.

A more interesting one at least.  The art of the less enlightened (if not woke, asleep?) is all about the same white people we’ve been seeing all our lives – particularly dudes.  How weird was that juncture in history where movies and TV had so many single fathers?  The wall of thumbnails in video game stores featuring stubbly white guys?  Time for other people to be seen, and I’m into it.  I genuinely want to see them.

Had a comment on a recent article expressing that said commenter did not want to revisit books they’d read in the pre-wokenment days (my phrasing, i’m writing on fumes dogg), because the racism and misogyny in them would be more apparent now.  This dovetailed in my head with a post I’d read on social media about works by problematic authors, works that felt important to somebody in their youth, becoming so distasteful as to become unapproachable now.  There are some differences between the situations described, and in this other post from social media, I feel the response lacked nuance.  My commentariat unintentionally reminded me I wanted to say something about that.

Even in a much better world than the one we’ve all been living through, in our better tomorrow, some art is going to have skeevy elements.  This is in part an artifact of our history – we have a lot of feelings to work out, regarding every creepy thing we’ve experienced in culture.  (in part it’s just because we ain’t burning books and still want to read classics.)

That processing isn’t always about getting through to the other side.  Sometimes that’s just how it is in our brains now.  Like, would forced-feminization crossdressing, humiliation fetish stuff work in a world where nobody was shamed for whatever gender expression they’re wearing at the moment?  Maybe not, but until nobody remembers the world as it is now, some people are going to have that as part of their sexuality.  (not me, i have different problems lol)

And some people are just going to find pleasure in art about things that are unhealthy, or even outlandishly evil.  There is, as we speak, a subset of romantasy fans that are into unreal erotic gore scenarios, serial killer fetish carried into the realm of impossible things – characters that can still bone down while folded spindled and mutilated.  Sexual fetishes aside, action adventure as a genre is all about the fantasy that there can be violence that is good, or at least cool.  Romance vaunts the chase over the catch, no room for the real love that is nurturing each other in less novel or thrilling circumstances.  Horror is a profoundly ableist genre and if you somehow stripped all of that out of it, what remains is still getting a thrill out of watching fictional guys get slaughtered in spooky ways.

Mark Twain said something like, “Censorship is telling a man he can’t eat steak because a baby can’t chew it.”  Grown-ups get to drink a scotch nightcap in their crushed velvet smoking jackets while they read books about promiscuous spies shooting filthy commies.  Just as long as those grown-ups know they might get the kinda cancer where their jaw gets removed, weigh the risks, it’s a freedom we should have, shouldn’t we?  Art is generally less harmful than boozohol but it can still put some ill grooves on an uninformed mind.  I say, know what’s messed up about your kicks, and get your kicks just the same.

On the separate but related issue, an author that you once liked turns out to be a scumbag.  Can you still read what they wrote?  Like my commenter, you may find it doesn’t hit the same as it did in your youth.  The queen terf’s baby books are kinda gross, when read through a lens of understanding what she’s like.  You might see things in them you didn’t see before, and things you don’t like.  But if you can power through that, and the things you enjoy about problem artist’s art reward you for that effort, go for it.  Just don’t give them any more money.

Sometimes that’s trickier than one would prefer.  Probably if I’m listening to Biggie Smalls on yewchoob, it’s giving some fractional pennies to Puff Daddy’s legal defense, and you might not be aware, that guy is a nigh-Epstein-level piece of shit.  Time to bootleg those tracks and get with mp3s like it’s 1999.

Nothing original in all this, but the issues I chose to highlight might be slightly different from what you’ve seen elsewhere, and different perspectives are always good to get, as I mentioned in the first paragraph.  Shit, was this a complete thesis?  Time to get back to shitposting…

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