The Midnight Collection, Volume Three!

The Midnight Collection rides for again!  Just in time for xmas, you can read a winter-themed collection of short stories, poems, etc..  My man Joseph Kelly has published this compilation of dark fiction that I’ve previously mentioned.  You have a few options on how to read it – and one is completely gratis. I’ll explain that later.

frosty hell

This third installment of The Midnight Collection is themed “Bitter Cold.”  The collection is basically produced without profit at this point.  I’m just pimping it because I’m a contributor, and I’d love to hear what you think of my writing.  Although I am really curious what reviewers, casual or serious, will think of all the stories.

This is truly an unusual collection. Despite the uniting theme, it’s as diverse as the members of our secret cabal of writers. There’s poetry, comedy, a sprinkle of queer representation, and dark fiction ranging from traditional ’80s style horror to fantasy to sci-fi.  Overall this volume leans toward themes of social isolation and dark moods, as befits the season.  Some of the writers are more conventional, some rather unusual.  A little tour of the table of contents:

A GIFT FOR MANNY – Kelsey Nie
A new author for this collection, and what a character.  I did not see where this is going, indeed, still not completely sure what I beheld on the way there.  A brisk read with a bent sense of humor.

VARIOUS POEMS – Saoirse Aimhirghin
Returning from Vol. 2: Dark Harvest, this author serves up a passel of icy poems, interspersed throughout the book.

THE FROST ON TOMBSTONES – Kate Bledsoe
The most christmas’d out story in the collection, replete with a big pile of gifts, unethical medicine, and monsters.  Something for the whole family, from a returning author.  The spooky elements were gratifying.

SOUL EATER – Dominique Palma
She’s back from Dark Harvest, again bringing that international flavor, in a story that ranges across the Atlantic Ocean and history as well.  This is the author’s second story for us to include poetry, which is interesting.

KISS OF THE ANCESTORS, WATCHING TREES, THE ICE BOX – Joseph Kelly
My lovin’ man has entries of his own, besides pulling rather extreme labor as the editor of these little beasts.  Watching Trees is a short but immersive creep show, Kiss of the Ancestors is a dark fantasy tale that might trigger those of you who have suffered religious abuse.  The Ice Box is exceptionally well-written, spot-on for the theme of bitter cold, and emotionally brutal.

SLAY RIDE – Emily Socia
In Vol. 2: Dark Harvest, this author brought us a creep show of her own.  This time around, she’s written a narrative poem in that classic genre of christmas horror, each verse a haiku.

A CHRISTMAS NINJA – Christopher Scott Shelton
A poem about a christmas-themed ninja, this thing is my inner 16-yr-old’s fault.  And reflecting on the experience, I’m fucking pissed I didn’t work in a reference to Michael Dudikoff.

THE NEAR-EPIC OF INDOMINUS CAESAR – Brett Elijah Shelton
Back-to-back poems by Sheltons!  This one mounds archaic language to obscure its true narrative to the last verse.  True dad humor.

UP ON THE ROOFTOPS – B.A. Kerchner
Another returning author, Kerchner keeps the family horror and slimy monstrosity, but this time adds seasonal humor, influenced perhaps by the Fallout universe.  Enjoy.

RITES OF MILK – Damian Golfinopoulos
Before the first volume of The Midnight Collection came out, I personally invited this guy from our secret writing cabal to submit something.  His ideas were wild, influenced by stuff like Cronenberg and Burroughs.  And yet the stories he produced in the first two volumes seemed more buttoned-down, serious, even sad?  This is more like what I was originally expecting.  Good and greasy.

THE IMMOLATION OF THE THORNBLOODS, I BOUGHT THE TICKET – Caesar Train Magenta
In my pencil moustache-having persona, I wrap the collection in my Rod Serling way with I Bought the Ticket.  But earlier in the book I have a proper entry, my first gothic BDSM soap opera.  Will it be my last?  Probably, but it was an interesting experience.

HINTERKAIFECK, A WINTER’S FRIENDSHIP FAIR – Saoirse Aimhirghin
Hinterkaifeck is a true crime essay, A Winter’s Friendship Fair is horror short about cutesy white people facing mysterious peril.

STEALING CHILL – Bébé Mélange
Didn’t like Diana’s job interviews in Supply Chain Banditos and The Pumpkin Spice?  Neither did the employers, so she’s back for another interview.  This might be my best yet, breaking out of the “my mom’s ex-boyfriends” mold to tell us more about her family.  The lore deepens.

TRAPPED IN STONE – Rachel Friend
Aside from a few random F-bombs, this little spook story has a lot of child-like whimsy.  A self-satisfied librarian is snowed in, which seems like a dream come true for her.  Until books start to get mildly damaged.  That shit is uncalled for.

DANCING SKIES – Annie K. Su
The last proper entry of this volume brings back the big heart.  Set in a fictionalized Arctic land, this has a grim premise, but an interesting path.

a cool boy

“Chill Boy” – Joseph Kelly, 2022

HOW DO I READ THE MIDNIGHT COLLECTION?

The way that results in the most direct support for future volumes is through Ko-fi.  For a minimum three dollar donation, you can download the e-book in formats that work with most e-readers.  Due to holiday jackanapery, the printed version is not currently available, but may be soon.  And lastly, as promised, you can just read it for free at the Collection’s website.

There are a few original works of art by the authors and editor (nice!) but most of the illustrations are lovingly curated from public domain resources.  Some version of some of most of the illustrations are available on the website, more in the e-book, but yes, the best way to appreciate them is a hard copy… whenever we make that happen.

I’d love to see reviews, either of the whole package or individual stories.  For lowest effort you can drop some general thoughts in the comments below this article.  You can also leave comments on the individual stories at the Midnight Collection’s site.  Thanks!

Note:  I’m given to understand some non-USA people can’t use a card to purchase it through ko-fi, but if somebody specifically requests to make it available through Amazon, we’ll look into it.

–

Andvaka

Flashing Light Warning on this video:  It doesn’t actually have flashing lights, but the jarring camera movement and hard cuts between scenes in chiaroscuro lighting might have the same effect.  Also the music is intentionally cruel to the ears, but artistic.

Andvaka is the Icelandic word for insomnia, which isn’t terribly meaningful in itself, but as Iceland gets a season of excessively long daylight, they probably feel it harder than we do.  Last night I got to sleep about 2:00 AM and woke up hard at 5:30.  Time to get ready for work rolled around at 9:20 and I was still awake, so I had to call off.  As I type this it’s 4:30 PM and I’m flagging badly, glad I had the luxury of a paid sick day so I’m not making potentially ruinous mistakes right now.

I had a night a little over a year ago that was similar.  I couldn’t sleep, and my mind kept turning paces.  At that time, I was going over what I’d say if I was being interviewed by Rachel Maddow, over and over and over again.  Last night, it was a little more varied and less grandiose, but I think it dipped into talk show interview territory for at least a bit.  This seems like textbook mania, for a bipolar person, and there’s every reason based on my immediate family to think I have some risk of that.  But it doesn’t happen often enough to be a major problem.  Still, fingers crossed it doesn’t get worse.

There is something else related to my family health history that was on my mind.  I’m mutated.  I’m a mutant.  Seems to be from my father, and possibly my brother has the same issues.  We all have arthritis and degenerative disc disease in our lumbar vertebrae.  Last week I found out I have a mutation that increases risk of certain cancers of the abdominal organs.

it's a riverdale reference

This made me wonder if there’s a connection between the cancer risks and the spinal stuff.  Call it a developmental biology question.  As an embryo’s cells divide and differentiate, they move and branch.  Grossly inaccurate, but you could imagine it like a river delta branching fractally as it runs to the sea.  A mutation is like a stone near the head of the delta changing the shape of the waters downstream.

The mutation is known, but the mechanisms by which these things cause health problems are less understood.  I’m just wondering, when I was an embryo, did the mutation throw some shit in the river, neighborhood of my lumbar stem cells, that made both the spine and internal organs “downstream” from it more likely to fuck up?

Do the pancreas and colon even come from the lumbar part of the embryo, or do they grow in a different segment and migrate to their respective positions?  If the latter is true, my notion doesn’t hold up.  Every DNA-having cell in my bod has the same issues, whatever they mean.  I also have two other mutations that could mess up children if I had them, so good thing I’m no breeder, and another mutation with unknown ramifications.  It might explain the telekinesis and laser eyes.

Something bad happened in my not too distant ancestry and that’s life, babey.  Something to think about when you aren’t sleeping.
–

When Fat Ladies Sing

Fatphobia is still permissible in almost every aspect of society, tho some specific manifestations of it fall under sexual harassment laws.  If a doctor doesn’t treat you because you’re fat (“Broken rib?  You’ll feel better when you lose weight.  Next!”), that’s close to completely legal.  All the medical discriminator needs is a tiny sliver of plausible deniability about the specific diagnosis (“How could I feel ribs through all that fat?  Fat people should die tho.”) and their malpractice insurance rates don’t even go up.

So it’ll be a long time before fatphobia is addressed as a conversation at the level of society the way transphobia is now.  As bad as it is for trans folks now, it’s these kind of crucibles that lead to improvement in awareness, and real progress – eventually.  That conversation has barely cleared the ground, in how we treat fat people.

It’s annoying how all the prejudices of the world echo each other, though they have their own flavors.  Like black people in most of the 20th century, fat people are stereotyped as a joke, as funny, and not as someone you’d ever imagine in a romantic situation.  I’m thinking of the archetypes in black depictions by white people, like the picaninny and sambo.  No coincidence one of those stereotypes, the mammy, was also fat.  Intersectional oppression, oh boy.

The last one crosses my mind more, lately.  Fat people not allowed to be seen as romantic, beautiful, desirable.  There are a few depictions that get close, that show them as humans who deserve respect, who have needs, and can find relationships.  But even within those depictions, the characters are usually seen as funny, earth-bound, immune to lofty experiences and deep passions.  Nobody who would ever be desired in a deeply romantic way.

There’s some back and forth in activist discussion about how important that is, with some people saying it should be perfect and great for everybody to be allowed to be considered ugly and still get treated with full and proper respect.  Ugliness itself, from whatever source, shouldn’t lead to prejudice.  That’s not exactly my position, though I see a lot of merit in it, and I may be getting the particulars wrong.  I do disagree with the first part for a few reasons.

It feels like giving up on the possibility of fat people being seen as beautiful, which is ceding ground to fatphobes before the fight’s even really started.  It’s natural this exists as a counter to fat activism that focuses excessively on beauty, I’m cool with that, but I just don’t want to see the possibility of beauty in fat people casually chucked out the window.  Cultural archetypes influence us profoundly.  There has never been a movie where the hot girl that everybody wants is also fat.  That hasn’t, to my knowledge, ever happened.

And I, as a person who has always found fat people attractive, had my imagination warped by that.  (The following has less than nothing to do with sex work or sex workers.)  The madonna/whore complex, drawn broadly, is that there’s a dichotomy between those one finds romantically beautiful and those one finds sexually appealing.  Early in my life, this lack of romantic depiction of fat ladies shunted them all into the “whore” category.  I’m sure the way black people are treated by white lovers is also fucked up by this.  (Actually, for people raised in compulsory cisheterosexuality, they can often view their own assigned sex in the same way.)

That problem in my imagination hasn’t had any impact on most of my life, that I’ve noticed, but it annoys me.  I want to hold up the fat people I’m attracted to as beautiful in every way, but in the ancient core of my psychology, there’s a dissonant note in that.  I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to shut that shit off completely.  My stake in this is emotional, not practical.  I don’t want to fix my heart because it will help me treat people better, since I’m already doing that well enough.  I want to fix that aspect of my heart because of the way it feels.  (Per my last aside in the previous paragraph, I’d also like to see men more romantically as well, but that’s a little easier to find cultural reinforcement for.)

Anyway, for fat ladies being romantic, a good source is singers.  When an unskinny lady sings a love song, she’s the star of a romance.  I’m thinking of Ella Fitzgerald and Ann Wilson at the moment, but for a song specifically about romantic desire, observe Sólveig Matthildur.  She’s not very big, but bigger than most are allowed to be on the top 40, and that makes this song hit different for me.  Also she looks hella like a nose ring girl I crushed on in high school.  You’ll always be a star in my sky, Stephanie.
–

–
PS – This may also be on my mind as I’ve been playing at being feminine more often, and the reality that I’ve been fat for a long time finally begins to sink in.  My sense of self-worth was formed when I was skinny, and so has not been saddled with that burden of oppression.  As a usually masc-looking AMAB person, this doesn’t come up often, but I was fatphobia’d recently at an office party.  So here I am: a fat lady singing, in my own way.
–

These Dreams

These dreams go on when I close my eyes, every second of the night I live another life.  No, I’m not gonna embed the Heart video where the camera became allergic to Ann Wilson’s plus loveliness.  But I am going to tell you about my recent dreams, as if that was interesting, haha.

This will be a short one.  I didn’t make an effort to remember the dream well right when I woke up, and it was some time last week I had this?  Anyway, I was an evil clown.  Just for a minute, but that’s kinda weird.  It was one of those dreams that changes perspective, like movies change who they follow in different parts.  So it was basically one of the scenes that follows Jason around while he’s slashin’.

I shot these teenagers in the head with a crappy little revolver, but it got the job done.  One dead, two dead, three, four.  As I was killing these kids, I felt no especial joy or malice or anything.  I had only one thought:  Am I doing this wrong?  I’m supposed to be scaring them first, aren’t I?  I’m doing this wrong.

So now you know what lurks within the heart of the killer clown.  Mild self-reproach.

–

Socialize Social Media

Social media is clearly an essential service in modern life.  I was thinking about this a while back, because blogs like ours are just not seen by the masses, and I wanted a solution aside from “link every post from a social media account.”  I couldn’t come up with a single answer that seemed likely to succeed.  It’s the agora, for better or for worse, and nobody wants to lose access to that.

The idea that social media actually is essential has led to the proposal it should be owned and regulated by the government, not by private businesses.  That it should be socialized.  I had hit on this as a solution to the twitpocalypse, but I figured this had been proposed by others, and wikipedia served up an answer to that question.  The article I linked takes the usual pains to be neutral, includes the arguments of detractors, but you can see how flimsy those arguments are.

“It would harm consumers because only the competition of private enterprise drives innovation.”  Essential modern services like internet and phone service are horrible in the USA, carved up into fiefdoms by oligopolies that exploit corporate welfare, extort from customers, and provide the minimum service they can possibly get away with.  The supposed competition doesn’t exist, and government services are capable of innovation.  They do this all the time, usually in incremental ways.

Plus the most popular social media is the most simple fuddy-duddy retrograde one out there – Facebook.  Socializing the service isn’t an all-or-nothing deal.  The boring backbone service for all the oldsters and low-fi people, the one that connects families, helps dying uncles feel less alone, that one should be less innovative!  Facebook changes up its UI all the time to allow more ads and other creepiness, you think 70-year-olds love learning a new interface every three months?  Then all the other social media can stay private.  The most essential and basic version of social media is there to fall back on when businesses fail, all the fun zazzy insta tiktok whatever can continue to benefit from all the supposed magic of capitalist free enterprise.

“It isn’t essential, technically you can live without it.”  Technically you can live without phone service, until you can’t.  If it is the public square, keeping people out who couldn’t afford the internet connection is discrimination.  The conversations we have on social media have toppled governments; indeed they are within spitting distance of toppling the pretense of democracy right here in the USA.  That means access to those conversations is as important to representation as voting itself.

There’s more, but you get the idea.  The reason it has become critical to bring this idea back?  Musk has shown that all you need to violate the privacy of billions of people, to completely fuck up the program, is phat bank.  A decade of people communicating in private with each other, assuming the platform would conduct itself with a bare modicum of ethics, and all it took was one creepy apartheid heir with a few billion in the back pocket to burn that trust to the ground.

Every branch of the USA government including the military has official twitters.  I’m sure they weren’t using the DMs of those branches to send classified info, but it points to how vulnerable these systems are to bad actors.

This got me thinking, the USA has a lot of public services that have been made private.  We let private businesses handle our power, our telecommunications, and so much more – varying from state to state and sometimes city to city.  All of those services are potentially prone to billionaires with napoleon complexes.

What’s to stop Jeff Bezos from buying Verizon and then just shutting it down?  If he wants to burn his cash, he can.  If he decides to buy a major power company, then simply turn it off, he’s within his rights.  Municipalities with private waste disposal, what happens when that company is bought by somebody who just wanted to see your city buried in rats and sewage?

At the very least, come up with a social media platform comparable to Facebook, run by the government.  Zuck Fuckerberg, he can cry about that on his pile of gold bricks.

–

What to Say, What to Say

I have a few sticks in my craw lately and don’t know which of them I should post about, or if posting about them would just rile me up worse.

One, Apartheid Beneficiary Musk letting famous transphobic inquisitors look at your DMs.  That put me in mind of the way cisheterofash always accuse LGBT+ people of being pedophiles, and the way actual pedophiles get nothing like this level of persecution from them.  Actual pedophiles are incredibly commonplace.  We all know them, they’re in every community.  They would not be hard to hound in this way, to be exposed and have their privacy invaded, to be threatened from all corners.  And yet, where is that?  Oh yeah, it’s somehow different for right wingers when it’s their dad, their brother, their pastor, their football coach.  Somehow he’s the one who can be saved if you just let him off the hook this one time with a promise to be different and never do that thing again.

Two, given how my boyfriend’s life has been enriched by using AI art, the prevalence of irrational and uninformed luddism in that discourse is especially depressing and infuriating.  On this site, at least, people pride themselves on being skeptical thinkers.  I thought I might leverage that to spread the word about how unfounded the AI hater’s main points are.  But focusing on that at the moment?  I dunno.

What do you like to see me write about?  What’s your preferred GAS content?

–

All the Dollars, Genre Edition

Capitalism is about every business needing to maximize profits at all times, at the expense of quality, of careers, of productive businesses themselves, of individual lives, of communities, of art and intellect, of the continued existence of the human species, etc.  I don’t much cotton to it.

Something wiser people than I have remarked on, or expounded at length, is that this has the effect of reducing consumer choice.  That might be small potatoes compared to it reducing the life expectancy of the human race, but it’s not nothing, and it’s what I’m talking about at the moment.  Briefly.  This will be a total driveby.

I’ve been reading Paperbacks From Hell by Grady Hendrix, mostly for the pictures.  It’s an art book of schlocky horror book covers, but also a history of the industry, artists, and writers.  Some combination of tax law and corporate greed led to the destruction of the mid-tier book market in the ’90s, and more relevant to my point here, led to trend-chasing and the death of entire genres.

It was never about public desire to actually read this or that.  It was about the money men’s perceived need to put all your money on the winning horse, to hedge no bets.  When Silence of the Lambs blew up, supernatural or scifi horror was chucked in the dustbin of history.  It couldn’t get published without a select few author’s names on it.  It was serial killers or thrillers, for the spooky end of the book rack, or nothing.

I haven’t finished the book yet so I don’t know if it mentions the way book stores don’t even have a horror section now, but they do have a supernatural romance section, boy howdy.  Anyway, all these genres are ridden into the dirt like so many Dr. Strangelove bombs, leaving the public tired and wired.  We still have needs for artistic and intellectual stimulation that are not being met, interests The Man has deemed unprofitable.

And thanks to cultural balkanization driven by social media, it’ll be pretty hard for The Man to keep these gravy trains on track.  Disney’s historically recent media monopolies seemed like they could rule forever, but those profits are sure to get limp over time.  What then?  For us, the consumers of media, we have our rabbit holes, our communities, our own trends that flicker this way and that like cat’s tails.

I don’t know if I have anything to say with all this.  It’s just what was on my mind.  I’m going to self-publish a supernatural horror action-adventure sometime soon-esque, and that would’ve been among the casualties of this mess, once upon a time.  Who’s to say what will happen with it now?

–

No Solutions

Content Warnings:  Mental Illness, The Failure of Social Services, Poverty, The Failure of US “Democracy,” Child Abuse, Murder, Paranoia, Doomy Thoughts.  But I’m OK, don’t worry.

People get overwhelmed, look at the whole of everything that’s wrong in the world, or just their lives in particular, and feel hopeless.  Generally, I think that’s depression or some other problem messing with you.  Life can be made bearable or have OK moments for almost anyone.  But I have to admit, sometimes in life there are problems with no solutions.

That’s the kind of shit I deal with at work sometimes.  I got somebody on the phone with paranoia, wanting help in protecting herself from imagined oppressors.  What the fuck is the recommended wisdom for helping people with paranoid delusions?  Do you humor them and act like you’re taking it seriously, but not facilitate any actual pursuit of their claims?  Do you tell them gently that they’re imagining things?  Tell them sternly?

Any action you take will only result in more paranoia, more delusion.  The best case scenario is that they get distracted and forget they talked to you in the first place, but unfortunately a lot of paranoid people have excellent (if warped) memories.

Sometimes at work* I have to tell people that they have no income, have a massive new debt, and are facing months of travail for a mere chance of setting things right.  Basically, “If you don’t have family to lean on, welcome to your new home eating rats in the underpass.  Or go back to work even though you’re disabled and stay doing that until it kills you.”

Technically, this is a problem with a solution:  Overthrow of the US government, or at least a progressive rout of the whole system.  But that magical probably-not-happening future does nothing for people fucked to death by the laws and policies of the here and now.

I wrote my senator about the need for progressive reform and her underlings sent a form response with clear tells that the message was skimmed at best, not really read for understanding.  That senator is literally the perfect person to write about the issue, sitting on a committee deciding the relevant laws.  Too bad, so sad.

Mutual aid is probably the only way the masses will survive late capitalism, but we’ve been systemically divided.  I don’t know the rotating cast of neighbors in my apartment complex and they don’t know me.  We have every reason in the world to regard each other as potential thieves and creeps.  We’re all busting our humps at work too much to do the emotional labor of establishing a community.  Instead we’re fighting over parking spaces, as the jacked up rent has the number of tenants per unit exceeding capacity.  There have been a few murders and attempted murders in my little apartment complex, and it’s not even considered one of the bad ones in my city.

One of those murders may have been the solution to a problem – a child stabbing a (possibly) predatory adult in the household many times.  But you know what happens to that kid next, and it looks like less of a solution in the end.  As common as child abuse is, most likely it was the motive, but I did open the article talking about paranoid delusions, and the murdered person may have been innocent.  Who can say?  As the meme says, the world is a fuck.

The idea that things can always get worse looks more true every year, with a natural end point for that in human extinction.  With a complex enough system there are thousands of ways for things to go wrong and very very few ways for them to go right.

But, you know, keep taking care of yourselves and each other, and maybe this will look less dire on the other side.  And in the meantime, if somebody can eviscerate Matt Walsh and use his entrails to hang JKR from the parapet of her castle, please do.  The sun will come out tomorrow, haha.

–

*This is the best job I ever had, in terms of recompense and security, and my only hope of clearing the traps of poverty in what’s left of my life, so changing jobs is not an option at the moment.  How’s your line, lately?

Negative Revelation

People will say they believe in god because of a convincing personal experience – the argument from personal revelation.  Interestingly (to me at least) googling this phrase yields mostly atheists talking about debate, but one highly ranked result is theist-on-theist bloodshed.  Some creep saying why “jesus personally told me it’s cool to be trans” is not legitimate because it’s an argument from personal revelation.

As for me?  I long ago decided logic and reason and debate are not much use against theism, or even advocating atheism.  Motivated reasoning is strong.  Your case can be ironclad and even if the theist is stumped, in that moment, they weren’t convinced in their feelings, which is the only place that ultimately matters.  Time erodes the momentary uncertainty you induced, and within a week they don’t even remember the particulars of what you said.

And even when somebody does say they were convinced by logic, which came first?  The logic or the feeling of the logic’s legitimacy?  There’s a tension in that, and probably more factors that fed into the conversion than the rationale alone.  Not to say you should give that all up forever, just that you understand why it’s not as effective as it should be, if we were purely rational agents.  And more than that, to preface my own personal revelation.

Personal revelation for a theist is a feeling or vision that powerfully convinces them of a god’s reality and effect on their own life.  While as an atheist I would never experience a convincing vision – I’d sooner assume I was having a neurological problem – I can get a powerfully convincing feeling.  If that counts as a personal revelation, then I have absolutely come to atheism by way of personal revelation.

For a lot of years I identified as agnostic, because verifiable knowledge coming from fallible grey matter seems logically impossible to me.  But I had a strong feeling of philosophical materialism, and that feeling alone pushed me away from that shyness.  Yeah, I’m an atheist.  Now the only thing keeping me from saying that with pride is the behavior of famous atheists, haha.

One time when I was homeless child – maybe seven? – my family was temporarily staying in a hotel, and got our hands on some free bibles.  Hey, that’s kind of exciting.  Free stuff.  The thin paper and tiny print was interesting, the bold assertions within more convincing than the mealy-mouthed version that made a pre-school atheist out of me.  So I played at being christian for a few days.  I don’t remember what made that fall away – boredom? – but I do remember it was a thorough rejection in the end.

I’ve always had a strong feeling of the material reality around me, and its indifference to my desires.  Might be why the idea of levitation appeals to me, as a primal emotion that escapes from the otherwise constant feeling of literal gravity.  This feeling has reached peaks, moments of reality so stark and cold that I had no choice but to believe in my heart that god doesn’t exist, that magic doesn’t exist, that humans have no inherent connection that bridges our experience of life – nothing but imagination and the broken working of society.

These are the moments of negative personal revelation, when UnGod came unto me in a cloud of nothing and I received his word and his truth.  I’ve mentioned a few in my blog history, see which ones you remember!  Roughly in order,

One came when I failed to graduate high school, and everyone disappeared into their adult lives, whatever those would be, reminding me that I have no social importance except that which I painstakingly create and maintain.

Several came over the years, whenever the religious tried one-on-one to get me to feel what they feel, in parking lots and bus stops, and almost always in cold dark weather.

One came when I first had major surgery and experienced nonexistence under anesthesia.

One came when Child Protective Services took my first niece from my dad, because the jesus nazis from rural minnesota were more amenable to keeping her dangerous sociopath mom in her life.  That was the most direct confrontation with human evil I ever experienced, and had me dig under my fingernails til they bled.

One came while walking home from work at Pizza Hut, and made a foolish deal with the devil, because the unmagic of the world was so overbearing in that one random moment.

One came when my worst girlfriend ever dumped me and I took it poorly, gradually burning away every romantic instinct I felt until that version of love was fully dead to me.

One came on a vacation I took alone to a cold place in the dead of winter, again well exposed to my complete insignificance.

Loneliness is a recurring theme here.  I wonder that the most religious might be the most socially insulated?  That doesn’t track with the image of the average saint or prophet.  But loneliness, and even sadness, doesn’t count for all of it.  I’ve just had a profoundly, deeply, overpoweringly mundane life.  Not mundane as a synonym for boredom, just for the material, the earthen, the real.  The wildest moments gravity was always with me, telling me what’s up, and more importantly what’s down.

I am an atheist because that’s what my experience of life has told me to be, and nobody was there to give me the cultural static that would drown out or pervert that experience.  Negative revelation.

–

The Miracle of Faith

Isn’t it miraculous how we religious types can believe in something that runs counter to everything that makes sense in our experience of life?  Isn’t faith amazing?  Sometimes religious people will marvel aloud at how amazing it is that they can believe in super-ghosts, and it’s usually phrased something like that.  Of course, the atheo-skeptic finds that less beautiful than horrifying, seeing the close kinship between religious persuasion and medical woo, con artistry, and trumpism.

(Sometimes the “miracle of faith” is termed more like “the mystery of faith,” to give it the air of an intellectual enterprise, but also one that defies answer, thus shutting down earnest inquiry.  It’s slightly more humble in its way, even if it’s cheap.)

To which progressive theists would have a reasonable counter argument, lovingly provided by our atheist “thought leaders” and their slide into fascism.  Does atheism really afford any protection at all from faulty reason?  If so, should we fear or revile religious thought?  Aside from the fact that argument just doesn’t feel right to me, I can’t say I’m ready to shoot it down.

The conclusion this dialogue is leading me toward is one of total disillusionment with the powers of the human mind.  Just assume everyone, including yourself, is broke as hell in the headpiece, and the best you can hope to do is paw in the dark for a less-than-harmful consensus with your peers.  This, unfortunately, weakens one’s power of persuasion, as people respond more emotionally to bold and reductive statements than positions couched in caveats, asides, and uncertainty.

I don’t love that.  I’d love to spout Universal Truths like a demagogue and rally the warriors to the cause of righteousness.  Shit just tends to be more complicated than that.

–