Glory Be

We are returned from the shadow realm!  Hail!

While the website was down, I had a few queued posts, so somehow, the streak continues.  Go ahead and read those, if you please.

As for me, I’m so tired I’m just gonna lay down dead now.

Wait.  I wish I could remember this dream I just had better.  Super detailed, something about young ladies that were friends, but one of them was an aquatic creature with properties of or kinship to cnidarians, even tho she looked fully human.

That amateur porn contest a local weekly mag used to run was involved, and some hijinks with the law.  Banana cream pies?  Fear of heights?  Was jellyfish girl trans?

She reproduced by cloning at the end of the dream. Some of her new selves got tangled and died, mute and mindless.  She got away.

I feel like both girls were parting ways to chase down love and glamour in their own particular ways, and one was meant to feel uplifted about it.

The main run of the plot is gone.  I cry.

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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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Die Microsoft Die

Big agreement with commenter Bekenstein Bound here, windows has gone off the fucking rails into enshittification and they are extremely fucking due for a market adjustment.  You know what the biggest thing keeping me away from linux was?  Getting used to a new UI.  Smart phones that change UI every two minutes have taught all with a tiny shred of tech savvy to overcome that flavor of hesitation.  I wonder…

The other side is program incompatibility.  Most of the programs most of us use are exclusive to the windows-mac oligopoly.  But I wouldn’t be surprised if win or mac could be emulated more safely and effectively than running the original dogshit OSes themselves, as a bare bones nested thing to run those exclusive programs, or at least pirated versions.  Anybody know the subject enough to offer opinions on this one?

On a related subject, I’m earnestly wondering how long the US government is going to be able to continue using windows.  The OS has gotten so fucking rotten that at some point, crucial systems absolutely need to be on more reliable software.

Still have trauma from Win 11 defaulting to uploading my entire shit to a cloud the second I started up.  I “disabled” it, but still have to live with daily reminders they want me to do this.  Fucken hell.

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Insert Saved Payment Method

I’ve been doing one post per day for a lil bit now, but I’ve come to the bottom of the shallow well of my random-ass thoughts.  Figured I’d let y’all know what’s going on in my life.  As I went to title the new post I saw the keyboard on my cell suggest I fill in a saved payment method.  Can you imagine me posting that?  Wouldn’t that be a hoot?

Not really; I got nothin’.  So, why am I posting from a cellphone?  My future husband’s new $1300 computer is a pile of shit and we’re trying to use the manufacturer’s warranty.  I dropped it off with fedex saturday and it probably hasn’t been picked up quite yet because of the holiday.  I expect when lenovo’s contractor in texass looks at the thing, they’ll call me to say it’ll cost seven hundred bucks.

I give my dude my computer because he needs it more than I do, but I can’t type for shit on my cell, so it’ll be a minute before I do any more ambitious writing, like finishing Centennial Hills.

Meanwhile I have to wonder why I have such dogshit luck buying computers over $1000 in value.  Both times I’ve done that, they were fucked up from go – worse in some ways than computers that cost more like $300.

I think the last one saved money on the phat processor by using substandard parts in other ways – most crucially the wireless, which had connectivity issues with then-current router tech.

This one sat in a warehouse for three years before purchase and had random shit wrong with it so diverse it was probably a motherboard issue, like it got exposed to high heat in AZ and slightly melted, I dunno.

How in the fuck do you buy a low end gaming computer that is worth a shit?  Has never happened for me.  Swore off HP after that and another went bust, side-eyeing the fuck out of lenovo at this point.

I’m not the kind of person that can plunk down several k once a year just to have my shit work right.  Any advice?

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This Job I Have

I’ve been workin’ for The Man in social services, in a call center type environment.  That means I’m dealing with people navigating arcane bureaucracies to get the things they require, often in cases of greater need – people with disabilities or generational poverty, senior citizens, etc.  This job is the most intellectually and emotionally demanding work I’ve ever done.  At five years in, I’m better than average at it, but it’s depressing and stressing and just never ends.  Still, one abides.

But my pay rate has stalled.  The first raises you get are substantial, but when the job “maxes out,” the raises are only half that rate.  There are cost of living adjustments, but like the COLA for Social Security, I think it’s tied to the Consumer Price Index, which only includes the cost of groceries – not the biggest cost of living we’ve all been fucked by, the cost of shelter.  Utilities are going up too.

Getting a mortgage might turn out to have been a good idea, but I need to either refinance to a much lower payment, or start making big bucks so I can have a prayer of paying this shit down, and it ain’t looking too good right now.  I thought I’d catch a break on the endless increases in rent by getting a mortgage instead.  But what happened immediately?  The valuation of our property increased enough that the tax hike was almost as bad as the rent increases we’d been trying to dodge.  The other main income in my household is a senior citizen who ran out of steam for her original job and can’t make that kind of money anymore.  If I don’t increase my income dramatically, we’re one bad turn of events from hitting the skids.

But then, isn’t that everybody these days?  I don’t know.  Maybe just everybody I or my boyfriend are related to.

So there are paths to higher pay.  I have reasons why promotion at my current employer is undesirable, but to say more risks saying too much about where I work.  Let’s say those jobs are increasing your demonic rank, but you get even more exposure to what’s bad about Hell.  Best avoided.  I could try to slide to a different employer, but it’s hard to make the time to do that homework, and can I get as much telework as I have now, or will I have to throw away twenty uncompensated hours of my life per week on bus rides?  Also, will the most readily available jobs in my sector contribute in some measure to imperialism and genocide?  Insert ‘it’s more likely than you think’ meme here.

God I keep being tempted to say things that are overly revelatory about where I work.  Somebody stop me.  Anyway, I just gotta sell the screenplay for Gun Lemurs and make a bank fulla money.  Until that day…  Like I said, I’m avoiding doomposts at the moment.  I’m gonna win like Wario.  Just gotta keep making wild-ass leaps of faith, making hairpin turns, pushing harder and closer to the flames than I ever did in my youth.  I’ve always been lucky before, no reason that luck should run out now, right?  I rule.

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Monster’s Wedding

Me and my dude have a relationship.  Been together close to 19 years, if I got that right.  But we never got married, because a bunch of reasons that were not wholly clear to me until now, when the plan is in place.  We’re gonna make it official October 13th.  This is important for reasons of legal protections and whatnot, and also to get what we deserve, which is recognition for this thing we got.  But, this is kind of a bad time.

We have little money and incredibly few family and friends, we aren’t going to reproduce, and we’re not young.  Marriage as popularly conceived heavily leans on those things.  It’s to have a day of expensive shangri-la decadence?  No.  It’s a way to celebrate the merging of two families and sets of friends in a great big… there’s a guest list of officiant, wedded, and three other people.  It’s a way to make holy or legitimate the birth of your… nope.  It’s two wacky kids starting life together as…  nope.

If you put this question to the masses, the usual answer is “don’t bother” or “just elope.”  But our self-respect won’t let that stand.  We deserve a genuine ceremony, not scratching paper with ballpoint pens under fluorescent lights in an office space.  The thing is this – as you take away all the things of marriage as currently conceived, either because you can’t afford them or don’t want to do them, what do you replace them with?  Eventually, you have nothing left, and have to reinvent marriage from scratch.

One could wonder how we ended up with so few friends and family.  I have the stereotypical broken home, my dude just had a single mom from generation of socially maladjusted people who couldn’t stay married or get married in the first place, half of whom are now dead.  My dude has health problems that have him socially isolated, I just don’t feel the need for friends outside of my most important few, and I let the others all drift away.  I don’t think about this most of the time, but it does have us looking like a pair of quasimodos living on a blasted margin of human society.  A wedding of monsters.

It’s kind of darkly funny.  I had an internet homie read one of my unpublished novels and she said it struck her as incredibly wrong the main character didn’t have a lot of friends and family, a community around her.  It never occurred to me to write that for her, because I don’t think of life as having a lot of people in it.  A little failure of my imagination.

ALL THAT’S TO SAY,

I am trying to reinvent the wheel of Marriage between now and October 13th.  Any suggestions that don’t involve additional invites or thousands of dollars may be welcomed.  The officiant is my brother, the witnesses my father and my dude’s mom, and my home boy Jeremy.

Ideally my bro will leave his daughters at home because they are about 6 and 4 and would almost certainly misbehave – less of a problem with a wedding crowd to disappear into than it would be in our tiny condo living room.  But he might not have a choice but to bring them and not his wife, so having her tend them is not a workable solution at the moment.  Maybe Jeremy can play croquet with them on the dead grass behind nuestra casa.

Meanwhile, what do we do or say at this thing?  How to make it feel like a ceremony instead of an awkward tea party of people who don’t know or necessarily like each other?

I’ve been pondering ritual magic.  My dude once had a hallucination as a small child, possibly a seizure, where he saw a small donkey go into his house.  He pursued it but could not find it.  In studying demonology, I found there’s a demon called gamigin or samigin (plus many variant spellings) that is sometimes depicted as a small donkey.  This tells us, if there’s anything in occultism, Sammy Gene is my dude’s patron spirit.  Who is mine?  I find Acar from the Fasciculus rerum Geomanticarum interesting.  Also our house is full of random arthropods, and Acar helps you control those.  Lambes, on the other hand, has male pronouns, appears as a woman, and causes people of all sexes to fall in love with the conjurer.  So much higher queer points.

Anyway, Acar and Lambes did not have Ars Goetia-styled sigils so I had to make up my own.  Sammy’s is as depicted in ye olde grimoire’s tho, save an update on the name.  How do you like me now?  Or as some transphobic catholic tweeter once famously said, This is the Age of Sin. Reject the order of creation.  Revel in the annihilation of Man as the image of God.  DESTROY.  Plot designs of death.  Disfigure the face of Man and Woman.

But still, one of the invitees -somebody we have to live with- is christian, so overt hostility to god jeezups is not gonna do.  I’ll just slip these bad boys under the rug.  Feel like I’ve lost track of the purpose of the post.  Back to business…

Invitees show up at small condo with tiny living rooms and dining rooms in which to hang out.  There is a back yard, which is not fenced off from our closest neighbors, but possibly also a place to be.  We have some minor refreshments and chit chat, then

THE INVOCATION

Some kinda preamble to the marriage.  Normally middle class people would feed everybody foie gras on platinum spoons or something, I don’t know.  I feel like we should try to fill ten to thirty minutes with this, whatever it is.

THE UNION OF QUEER PEEPS

Some kinda marriage.  Normally an able-bodied dad walks a daughter down an aisle, I guess a man gets escorted by a home boy?  Then a preacher says jesus is cool, asks if we wanna do some slam poetry vows, then asks the do you do you, then it’s I do, rings, mandatory public display of affection, and you are forcibly escorted out of the building.  I’m not sure how we’ll do this at all.  PDA would be super-awk outside of a chaste smooch.  Even standing for the ceremony is kinda dubious in our small space and general comfort.  I feel like the run time for this should be ten minutes-ish?

POSTAMBLE

If we were outside, we stay outside for a minute to do some kind of a thing.  If we were inside, we go outside, because one of the things my dude is into is getting confetti chucked at us, but he doesn’t wanna clean it out of couch cushions.  Normally the woman one of us would chuck flowers at some nerds, then we get rice bukkake’d.  I don’t know, this could be pretty short.  Oh yeah, and my dude is cool with cutting a cake together, so this could end in a dining room, perhaps.

EVENING ENTERTAINMENTS

I just don’t dig board games, for the most part.  I like scrabble but that’s because I’m better than average at it, and people don’t love losing to me, and I don’t wanna give anybody a bad time.  Uno feels low stakes and foolish.  Penny ante poker?  I don’t know.

After that I think we’re good.  Any ideas?

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live by political violence, die by… siiigh

the party of terror in the usa, who motivates their own voters by playing to their fears, who demotivates their foes with eliminationist nazi rhetoric, the party that has openly said they will kill all people of this and that demographic, well,

somebody took a shot at their own special terror boy that they want us to fear and to want dead.  who could have seen that coming?

but u know, when somebody who once held the high holy untouchable title of POTUS almost gets a wittle owie, we’re all supposed to forget our differences and rally around the flag and solemnly vote republican.

cool, cool.  yeah, let’s all do that.  that’ll be great.  that’ll usher in a thousand years of peace and pave the way for jeezy’s return.

sigh.

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incidentally, this is far from the end of the trail for democracy.  bring political doomerism in my comments and get banned.  but if u want an ftb place to talk about this without resorting to that, go right ahead.

Time for Bifocals

Got my prescription for middle-aged baby’s first bifocals almost a year ago and before that rx slips even further into the past, I figured I’d take a day off and get it done.  You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I would get this done easily.  At length I would get my bifocals; this is a point definitively settled — but the very definitiveness with which it is resolved precludes….  Eh, sorry.  What was I saying?

The HOA is having the driveways in the cul-de-sac re-slimed with black goo, so my chauffeur was unavailable – unwilling to drive across the lawn to escape.  Sigh.  I walked a short way to the bus stop before the day could get as hot as it planned to be, stood with my head in the shadow of the sign and waited about five minutes.  Coulda been worse.  Can’t do one of these posts without mentioning birds.  I think steller’s jays* were tusslin’ with some other kind of bird up in the treetops, hard to see.

The bus snaked through Auburn to the station, which is also a train platform, and there I had to wait maybe twenty minutes to catch the next one.  While I waited a thirtyish Islander guy tried to vape and was told to take it across the street by the security guard.  A West African lady with four kids came to catch the bus and the little boy was dragged away from where he was trying to watch the train.  I’d just been standing in the same spot watching the train a moment before he got there.  Some people just wanna watch the wheels spin.  I saw a few more Africans walking by, a short but attractive couple in very clean clothes.  The man’s shirt said he was the proud dad of a US marine, but I swear he did not look old enough to have a kid in the military.  Is the Corps taking twelve-year-olds now?

I make these racial identifications to illustrate the color of the world, but it would be foolish to say you can tell just by looking at somebody.  Nigerians look very different from Somalians on average, but it’s all a grade, with outliers this way and that.  The Islander I would not have been able to tell from a Mexican, except that he had some Polynesian pride apparel on.  Gotta have those turtles and surfboards.  Anyway, this is to add an unwritten question mark after any racial descriptor you hear from me.

I got off the bus and had to trek across the Mall-Formerly-Known-as-The-Supermall’s endless parking lot to get to a walmart.  I told the lady I need glasses, she asked if I had a prescription, I asked if I could e-mail a pdf and she said no, I had to print it, referred me to Electronics, and I swear I spent a full hour at the kiosk trying different shit to get it to recognize my files.  After every type of connection failed, I resorted to google Photos, which has to be tricked into importing pngs.  While I was at it, I found out my google Photos account had nothing in it but pictures of a walmart bathroom from when I worked at one in a neighboring city.  Did I take them because of amusing graffiti, too small to notice in thumbnail?  Not curious enough to open the files.

I finished hacking the planet to place my order and it told me to come back in an hour.  I knew better.  I waited five minutes, watched them print behind the counter, just walked into that employee-only area and snatched them.  Who would stop me, in the perpetually understaffed late crapitalist megaretailer?  Nobody saw a thing, but some security cameras which may or may not have even been watched by a human in that moment.

I get to the front.  “I need glasses.”  “Insurance?”  I whipped out this card I’ve been paying for five years but never used.  She compared it against a big list in scribbly cursive.  I think she was Persian.  No dice, so she went to somebody else.  They were going back and forth until another lady – a blonde with some flavor of German accent – told me they do not take that insurance.

You’re probably starting to get why I took a whole day off to do this.

I hadn’t eaten, so time to go into The Artist Formerly Known as The Supermall of The Great Northwest Where My Brother Got Perma-banned From Incredible Universe on Opening Day for Hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del on a Locked Up Computer, there to ingest buttery little hotdogs in bread twists, or as we call them in jesus’s chosen nation, pigs in a blanket.  While I ate, I watched kittens wrestling in a storefront and looked at my insurance’s website to find acceptable providers.  I could take two buses to get to another part of Auburn or one bus to get to Federal Way.

Out to the bus again, the day now over 80 degrees, and me without a hat.  I’d just missed the bus, had to wait a half hour, but the shadows were still kinda livable, with a cool breeze blowing.  A skinny East African youth (American accent, may have been born here) asked me about the time, then laid out a tale of woe.  He missed the bus earlier because he fell asleep listening to a podcast, and when he woke up it was so much hotter, really unpleasant.  I helped him figure out which side of the road to be on, and he floated off to hang out with a less loquacious friend.

He wanted to get to the Federal Way Transit Center, and I wanted to go a little way past that.  He fell sleep again behind me on the bus, his big sneakers kept sliding under the seat and bumping me in the heels.  I don’t know why some young AMAB people are, for a brief season of their lives, practically narcoleptic, and then never again.  My boyfriend knew a white kid who, without chemical assistance, fell asleep on the bus so hard that they called the cops to rouse him.  We got to the FWTC and his quiet friend tried to wake him, but then gave up and left him sleeping there.  I was distracted and didn’t think much of it, but as we kept going past his intended destination, I realized that maybe I should be waking him up.

I was too indecisive or shy and left him dreaming his way to the Twin Lakes Park & Ride.  The first place I went had fancy brand names on most of their frames and I got a set priced at $367.  My insurance was covering like $45.  I should never have paid for that shit, not one fucken dime.  I told the tattooed hipster lady I was off to do a lil comparison shopping.

On the way to the bargain place that always advertises two for one deals, dumping sweat, I stopped at the daiso and bought an apple soda from a kid named Kieran.  It tasted like pears, somehow on a grade to cold vegetable soup, and cost three dollars.

I picked out two different frames I liked, anticipating the bogo deal, and found out it couldn’t apply for reasons.  Getting only one pair, max benefit of my insurance, etc?  $364.  At least the frames were a little cuter than the ones at the designer place, so I said fuck it, bought the things, and was done with it.  Well, they won’t be ready for pickup for a few weeks.

I was done trooping through the heat so I tried to arrange a ride back home and was delayed by miscommunication and foolery until the thick of rush hour, and it took forever to get home.  One of my cohabitants was cooking some peppers and asked me to tend them while she visited with her sister, who had just dropped me off.  I found a bisected produce sticker floating in the vegetable oil, and a few slices with the kind of creepy brown texture I would’ve pared off into the trash.  I ended up cooking dinner in its entirety – yakisoba with a mix of frozen and fresh veg, some kinda peanut sauce, just whatever ingredients had been left out.  I don’t even like that type of shit.  Yum.

But they’re coming.  The cute bifocals.  Should be here in time for August’s Podish Sortacast.  See if anybody can even tell the difference.

 

*That a thousand organisms are named after every colonizer is a fallacy.  Species Georg (Steller) is an outlier and should not have been counted.  Memes aside, I hope there’s progress being made on that project to decolonize bird names.  Let me know when the new names drop.

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PS:  Don’t miss Centennial Hills Part Five, posted a few hours before this.