America’s Gravestones

As I posted 9-11ly, I believe bin Laden won.  I believe he killed amurrica, like a hunter convincing buffalo to stampede off a cliff.  This has a ramification I didn’t initially consider:  any and all 9-11 memorial monuments are functionally gravestones to the US.  There’s a line in that SNL sloths video “they eat cocaine off america’s gravestone,” which is objectively hilarious, but was not a thing you could do in real life… or was it?  Call up your local sloths, score some coke, and pay your respects.

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oh no you di’int

i’m in position to be knocked off the sidebar, and while this is good for ftb – it means a lot of people are posting, and what inspired my now defunct streak of daily posting was a ghost town vibe on the network – i cannot abide that ignominy.  i post now just to stay in the sidebar.  watch me burn!

i had a thought recently i wanted to hold onto.  it has a few attached thoughts.  this is a memo to myself; make of it what you will, or disregard.  i’m cool with that.

-i remembered while listening to Princes of the Universe that once upon a time highlander made me feel some kind of feelings.  it’s a kind of magic yo, and you have heard too often how i feel about magic in fiction.  i’m into it.  the thing i don’t want to forget – i’d like to remember what i felt about the show, so long ago, and without necessarily injecting immortality as a theme, put that quality into something i write.

-i relate the feeling of these powerful transcendant characters like paul atreides and connor mcleod to the powerful emotion created by surreal fiction like the works of david lynch and leonora carrington.  my husband would get the latter but very much not the former, because the highlanders and space messiahs are power fantasies, like the superheroes he couldn’t relate to as a boy.

-srsly he related to wesley willis singing about how batman would kick his ass, because he saw a big buff representative of the dominant social order beating on weird outsiders and saw himself in the villains.  therefore, he will never see the potential of a profound impact from fiction with messianic peeps.

-is that connected to his bad self-esteem?  if so, could i give him .005 self-esteem points by helping him feel such a narrative?  how could i play up that aspect of what i feel in those narratives, what sets them apart from superhero stories?  i think of li mubai in crouching tiger hidden dragon and how he died, forever denied love by his heroic lifestyle.  i dunno.  i think about the ending of woo’s a better tomorrow II, where the guys have a heroic gunbattle and sustain a surely lethal number of gunshot wounds, living just long enough to have a cool pose for the closing shot.

-that’s the main shit.  i think there was more, and if i remember, i may edit it in or drop it in comments.  i should take notes more often so i don’t forget these things.

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edit one:

-the messiah thing.  i wonder that this sense of profundity from heroic narratives relates to the way christians and their ilk feel so cool about jeezy peets and their respective special boys.  if i gets a tear watching a the crow meet his ghost wife at the end of the movie brandon lee died to make, is that what they feel when they see yahweh’s meat puppet twitching on the cross?

-i have immortal characters and a notion of including demigods in my big gay RPG project.  wonder if these notions could find a place in there…

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It’s All About the Sidebar

I’m just going to do bullshit posts to keep me in the sidebar on FtB.  Clancy Brown or Joe Elliott said it’s better to burn out than to fade away.  I say, it’s better to linger forever in some kind of useless state, contributing nothing but low key annoyance to all who make the mistake of clickening.

Man.  Like Matthew Broderick said shortly before killing two ladies in Ireland, life comes at you pretty fast.  I am decidedly not keeping up.  I plan to go back to Hurricane Ridge in a few weeks for a cold weather picnic.  Hope I don’t slip up and do some cold weather plummeting.  I also plan to try to start drawing again soon, at least for a lil bit.  Hope I don’t slip up and draw butt-ass dookie.

My husband was talking about when he had the art industry job and how he’d get personally abused by the management, how that damaged his creativity for a while.  I remember around that time I asked a guy about where he was working, and he suggested it would be an unpaid internship for a shot at making less than I would at McDonald’s.  Let these jobs be replaced by AI slop.  Free the artists from arting for a living; all of these industries are vampire factories and have been hurting and even killing people for over a hundred years now.

Not where I was originally going with that.  He was saying that when he was working as an artist, he was told he was a bad artist.  Whereas when he wasn’t working as an artist, people would say he was a good artist, and should do art for a living.  People know not of which they speak.

I’m a bachelor of the fine arts and I’m in social work now.  Wacky shit.

Anyway, midnight-oh-five and and another work week begins in a lil over eight hours.  Good night everybody!

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Two Weeks

Two weeks without a post?  Good googly moogly.  When I goes off the wagon I goes hard.

I’d like to talk about writing likable characters.  I was inspired by a description of a sleazy movie directed by a cool auteur in his younger days, how it got unusually good reviews for soft porn, that specifically mentioned likable characters.  That’s something his later works had as well.  He’s got an advantage over a novelist because he’s equipped with actors – or as i call them, professional charisma-havers – but his writing and directing do count for something there.

There’s this bullshit kiddies are into these days which is characters lacking in all redeeming qualities.  Amateur writers sayin “Look at my guy, he’s such a piece of shit asshole motherfucker, i love him.”  Cool, but will anybody else?

I even think there’s a place for that and it’s probably fine.  I just think that the ability to write likable characters is much more impressive.  Writing a jerk is easy.  Successfully threading the needle of charisma, that’s somethin’ else.

That said, the most likable character in my recent work Josefina and Blasfemia vs The Wall of Ice was probably the mute homunculus.

I just don’t have the time to do this properly, to make the thesis strong, and I know you’re gonna shit all over me in the comments, oh, my favorite fictional guy is an asshole, how dare you say i’m not allowed to like assholes, rabble rabble.  Whatever, im right and ur wrong.

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Bin Laden Victory Lap

Bin Laden inaugurated the new millennium by breaking some bottles airplanes on the prow of a ship world trade whatever whatever, with the goal of destroying the america.  How did that work?  Like a charm.  We flushed ourselves down the toilet after that, always looking for a bigger and better daddy to tuck us in nighty-night and make us feel safe from our craven cowardly baby shivers.  His terrorism terrorized us into giving up on the idea of freedom.

About this much has been said, but one thing I don’t often hear expressed is that he really did win.  He died, but if he was a true believer about martyrdom leading to a sexy paradise, then Obama helped him achieve that part as well.  More importantly, the big aim has come to pass.  The republic is over, and while the empire will look shiny for a few seconds, that’s just the beginning of the end.

Who’s gonna be our Caligula?  Our Nero?  Our Caesar is a fucking humiliation, so I’m sure the succession ain’t gonna be much better.  Maybe Barron will be the one holding the fiddle when Canada finally nukes DC.  Wait, DC will be underwater from global warming, so maybe they’ll nuke Nuevo Mar-a-Lago, Greenlandsylvania by then.

This is not to be a doomer.  I think plenty of us will have passable lives under that tyranny.  This country is too big to successfully be run like North Korea.  It’s just not feasible.  But whatever greatness this country possessed has jumped the shark.  It’s all downhill from here.  Hats off to the man behind 9-11.  And if it turns out sasquatch is real and that man is Dubya, hats off to him.

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What was I saying..?

I seem to recall in a blog post and a podcast mentioning that we’re about to see more terrorism from leftists, and there you go…  Is this a bad thing?  It’s fuel for the jerks.  After all, Israel’s current big genocide push was inaugurated with a terrorist action by members of the oppressed people.  Terrorism is often the tool of the disempowered, and the left here is more disempowered than ever.  We may have fewer guns, but you know which leftists do have guns?  The ones most inclined to do a terrorism.

This won’t just be leftists either.  There will also be centrist terrorists and more right wingers as usual.  That’ll be interesting to see.  People who were fucked over by conservative policies who themselves would be favorably inclined to said policies until their face got eaten.  We’ll be seeing some of those fellas exercising their oh-so-sacred second amendment rights as well.

Who pulled this trigger?  Who cares?  The right wing, in going full fash, has made itself an existential threat to immigrants, to lgbtqia+ people, to members of racial and religious minorities, to women who need abortions, to anybody with the wrong bumper sticker in the wrong part of red country…  People feel their lives have been threatened, because they have.  Some people respond to that with deadly force, because that’s what this country has told them to do.

My brother usually avoids “faces of death” type content, but he made an exception to watch the video of this one.  I personally am still going to avoid it, but I see where he’s coming from.  You get enough horror and enough hopelessness meted out to you from your political opposites, you take your gratification where you can fucking get it.

If the UHC motherfucker didn’t ring in hunting season, this one surely did.  This will be ugly.  Sorry to any decent person who is harmed as a result, truly.

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Abortion Action Nonsense

I had a dream that started with people talking about a young lady who just had an abortion.  There was some sensitive discussion about whether she was going to attend thanksgiving with the folks, about her feelings, and about how people should respond to her presence, help her feel okay without pressing the issue.  Sensible shit like that.

But instead of a family dinner, the imagery pivoted to that of a a quasi-futuristic nightclub with black light and strobes.  The girl was dancing, when another group of young ladies invited her over to talk.  Suddenly the music stopped and the lights went up -focused on our young protagonist- and the mean girls started saying bullshit like “you tortured your baby.”

At first it seemed like she was going to cry, but then she started beating their asses.  As Carl Douglas said, everybody was kung fu fighting.  Guns came out, seemed like the cheap end of action show from late ’90s TV or cable.  Somewhere between Johnny Mnemonic and Cleopatra 2525.  God that show was weird.

There was an older lady character, I think, myself?  My perspective shifted a lot in this dream.  I was a Carla Gugino type.  I tried to protect the young lady, to have her back in the fray, but I kept getting attitude.  This led to a pivotal confrontation, during which I told her that a judge had reversed a decision, that a crime she had done was no longer considered self-defense, and now we were both wanted for murder.  The mean girls were actually bounty hunters.

The young lady was like idgaf, and the action started up again, blasting and karate kicking and running around.

I lost track of the young lady and went third person again, following different tracks of the fight.  Viola Davis was there, in a role more demon than human, walking down the hall setting death traps in these sci-fi pods as she went.  A monster fell into one of the traps, and she used long steel claws to rip out its eyeball.  She was smiling and babbling to herself as she moved on to another trap.  I have to say, the cheese and meat in those traps looked pretty damn tasty.

I was trying to get away and stepped into an elevator that I hoped would be empty.  There was a corporate dude inside and he got word on radio that there was shooting in the building, that he needed to escape.  He presumed I was a security guard for the building and asked me to protect him.

I used this as cover for my escape.  I believe the original girl escaped by transforming into a white serpent with patches of orange and black goldfish scales, and swimming through murky water.

I don’t remember anything else about the dream.  Anyway, shows that my inner attention span for gentle human drama is highly limited, but I could do whack action movie bullshit all day.

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The Tapout

life too hard for daily blogging.  did not manage a year of it.  sure was an interesting ride, at least for me.  the thing that made the most practical difference in my life was making myself listen to new tracks by The Dead Milkmen.  that changed the rotation on the radio station in my head some.

i’m too tired to do this tho.  it’s over!  see u whenever i get to it.  zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

zzzz.

zz.

Release the Beasts

i was chris pine with more scars, in a 1980s-ish tv miniseries about ghetto seattle under futuristic fascists.  i was buff and resistant to damage, so a hero of low-key resistance types.  i started with amnesia, but found out my name, and used it combined with voice recognition at a government computer terminal to recover information about myself.  turns out i’d been a nazi commandant in a corny uniform, and there was video of me being executed in an electric chair.

i used the access i gained to get into a secret hall of the building.  i walked past hospital orderlies and nurses that looked just similar enough to be clones, with the youth and looks of models, but not prettied up – casual and sinister looking.  there were creepy bodies on gurneys, doors open to bright unknown rooms, and as i neared the end of the hall, stacked monkeys recreating ghoulish poses from baroque art.

at the end of the hall, an evil old lady sicced flying monsters on the masses.  they flew past me and i ran after them, leaving the facility.  i helped some people i know survive the onslaught, and some bystanders and poultry as well.  the poultry included a hoatzin chick that was very clingy.

one of my homies was a psycho™ clown, but a nice one, which gave him super strength.  he used it to help fight the monsters.  then the fascists activated a sleeper cell of super crones in our midst that has been living as regular grandmas (inspired by cookie clicker?).  we had to beat them to death as well.

there was a lot more to it, but it’s fading fast.  overall artistic impression of it was somewhere between jacob’s ladder and V and a lightly solarized 1960s stop-mo horror film and mannerist painting with goya witchcraft themes.

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Rewrite This Fvcking Song Plz

“A teenage dream’s so hard to beat, every time she walks down the street.  Another girl in the neighborhood, wish she was mine, she looks so good.  I wanna hold her, wanna hold her tight, get teenage kicks all through the night.”

Behold, some shitty socially acceptable pedophiles.

My problem is that this song is so damn good.  Musically.  Fuck the lyrics a lot.  The music to this song rules ass.

That is not true for “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen” or “Young Girl.”  We can file those songs in the hall of shame, never listen to them again, and nothing of value is lost.  “Teenage Kicks,” on the other hand…

Somebody rewrite this song for me, please.  Thank you.

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alright, i dunno how old feargal and the gang were when they performed this, and one could say he’s doing a character, and the treacly-sounding creep in HBSS was just a few years older than the girl, whatever whatever.  the extent to which teenage girl sex appeal has been played up in music, doesn’t leave me feeling very generous about it.  i’ve known more than my share of dudes who are hung up on the sex appeal of teenage children.  one could, in theory, have that hangup and still power through it to be a decent person, in the way you conduct yourself.  reserve it for the life of fantasy, yadda yadda.  in practice, no, you get grown men trying to seduce teenage girls – and succeeding way too often.

letting this kind of messaging be acceptable was a big mistake.  you shouldn’t be able to say “teenage girls are so sexy” without getting looked at like the slime that you are.  certainly you shouldn’t be lauded for it.  fucken hell.

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