#humanity is so loved it dances on a cliff of annihilation

[borderlinecloudless]

You love. You love humanity so fucking much. You hate yourself for all this love that makes you thrash out and grow teeth and fangs and apocalypses in your maw you love so so so so fucking much you just want to bite down and crack bone and draw blood and gorge yourself on the humans you love so much.

You hope they‘ll kill you. You hope the don‘t. You want to eat them. You want to be overcome by your beloved humanity.

You love them so, so much. You‘d kill for them, for yours, the ones you love. Who you want to devour.

[killprettymagazine]

Never Again - An Edible Marijuana Horror Story

“Never again” is a phrase that you should utter with decreasing frequency as you mature: You should learn from your mistakes.  When you’re a kid, the world is full of sparkly phenomena, and you have not yet accrued enough disappointments to employ skepticism in investigating the seemingly endless sources of sparkle.  When you’re nine-years-old, for instance, you may not have yet learned that candied apples are detestable pieces of shit.  Imagine a giant apple that you can hold on a stick, like a king with a goddamned scepter, encapsulated by a reflective deep red coating.  Just the sound it must make when you bite into it, that crunch – you’re left with no choice but to force your parent or legal guardian to buy you one.  Then you try one.  It turns out that you can’t eat this magical apple like you would a regular apple, expecting each bite to be covered by a proportionate coating of candy, because hard candy doesn’t break like that; it shatters into many hostile shards of candy that annihilate your teeth.  It turns out, shards.  It turns out that if you wanted to, you could theoretically break the apple and use it as a fucking weapon.  And all that work and torture went into unearthing the most flavorless, soul-crushing apple variety: A Granny Smith.  Is it any wonder that so many of us develop trust issues as adults?

Sometimes, after experiencing a never again situation, you’re struck by a wave of amnesia and get pushed back into a neutral pre-trauma state.  Unfortunately, when this happens, the universe is burdened with the task of correcting you in a more memorable manner.

A few months ago, I suffered a bout of this type of amnesia during an ill-fated trip to a pot dispensary.  While there, I was brazen enough to pose the question, “Why don’t I ever get edibles when I shop here?” 

(As a side note, yes, I used the word “shop” in this context: While I am an avid believer in the medicinal benefits of pot, whose properties are vastly complex, visiting a dispensary sure doesn’t feel very medically official. You’d be hard-pressed to find a medication called “Alaskan Thunderfuck” at a conventional pharmacy). 

After interacting with the budtender at the dispensary - whose white lab coat, long Zen master’s beard and cosmic presence made me feel like I was talking to God - I got home and prepared for an epic night.  I purchased a ribeye that was so beautiful that I felt like I should apologize to it for the mess in my kitchen.  I was going to cook it sous vide at 130 degrees and then sear it to perfection in clarified butter.  Coltrane’s Giant Steps.  16-year-old single malt Macallan.  Porn, probably.  I ate half of one of the grown-up lozenges that I procured and risky-business’ed my way into the shower.

As I dried off with a towel, I felt the first signs of tingling in my toes; a very welcome sensation. About 20 minutes later, as I was tinkering with the immersion circulator, I still only felt the tingling.  “Shouldn’t I be giggling by now?” I wondered, “I’m preparing a bath for a steak while wearing a robe and I have a mustache.  I look like I’m about to fuck this steak.”  But my high seemed to be reaching stasis and I was not about to settle for the smooth jazz of evenings after dropping $25 on a single piece of meat.  I popped the other half of the lozenge in my mouth and proceeded with my grooming routine as the steak-bath reached temperature.

By the time the immersion circulator reached 130 degrees, a smile appeared on my face.  “That’s more like it,” I thought, “now I can honor the bull that was sacrificed for this evening appropriately.”  I would have never guessed that the next five hours of my life would consist of scrotum-gripping dread.

The first signs of trouble appeared as I removed the steak from the butcher paper in preparation for its bath.  I unwrapped the packet and stared in horror at the practically pulsating piece of flesh that I was about to consume.  I must have stared at the thing for the better part of five minutes.  “Oh, Christ,” I thought, “Not again.  I’ve already been through this – I’m not going to become a vegetarian.”  But I could not tolerate the idea of eating this steak so I wrapped it back up and returned it to the fridge, where I hoped it would be safe from whatever awful force was possessing me.  I opted for a couple of potatoes that I “baked” in the microwave.

As the potatoes cooked, which could have occupied anywhere from a few minutes to several weeks, I noticed that I could feel my heart beating in my chest without touching it.  “Does it always do that?” I wondered.  Suddenly concerned, I elected to take my own pulse; I placed my index and middle fingers on my wrist and started counting.  I kept losing my place and had to start over, again and again, which it turned out did not help my anxiety.  But I’m not a quitter; I would take my own pulse come hell or high water.  As I counted, it occurred to me that I had no clue about what constituted a normal or an abnormal pulse.  “Who do I think I am,” I thought, “a fucking doctor?”  But I continued to count for some reason.  My efforts were then interrupted by a heinously loud siren, which catapulted me out of my kitchen chair.  “JESUS CHRIST!” I exclaimed.  I no longer had to check my pulse; I knew that it was off the charts at this point.  I was on the verge of weeping from fear – then I realized that my potatoes were done.

I opened the microwave door to retrieve my potatoes, which now resembled the wrinkly testicles of a 90-year-old, and realized that I did not have enough saliva in my mouth to move my tongue, let alone to eat potatoes – the driest of root vegetables.  I shut the door, imprisoning the potatoes in the microwave.  It was time to lie down.  

“This lozenge is very, very mellow,” the budtender at the dispensary said.  “You’ll hardly notice that you’re high,” he said.  “One might not even be enough for you,” he said.  As the second half of the lozenge high-fived the first that was already reclining in a La-Z-Boy somewhere in my amygdala, I fantasized about finding that budtender, yanking him by his wizard’s beard and screaming, “IS THIS WHAT YOU MEANT BY ‘VERY, VERY MELLOW,’ YOU FECKLESS TURD?”  I wanted to strap him into a “good vibe” equivalent of an electric chair and pump him with the strongest possible current of good vibes until he exploded into a supernova of ineffectuality.  Because I wasn’t mellow, I was going to die.  I’m not using the phrase “going to die” to indicate that I was in any actual danger, nor in a histrionic Morrissey sense (…and you go home and you cry and you want to die).  No, as far as I knew, I was dying. 

I’ve danced around the rainbow of anxiety experiences in my life, including several shades located in the “bad pot trip” wavelength.  Most pot anxiety I’ve experienced, while often terrible, is usually short-lived: You smoke, the effects come on and intensify rapidly, you panic, you take a benzodiazepine (at least if you’re me) and 15 minutes later you’re back to watching cat videos on YouTube and eating pretzels.  Easy as pie.  This, on the other hand, was like some archaic form of corporal punishment – like being chained to a giant rock and then pushed off a cliff into the sea.

I was now curled up in the fetal position on my bed, my whole body trembling violently; I was a six-foot vibrator.  “W-w-when will it stop?” I might have said out loud.  The Ativan wasn’t working.  It occurred to me that I had no idea how much time had elapsed since I had placed the tiny pill under my tongue so I grabbed a small alarm clock that was on my nightstand and placed it right in front of my face on the opposite pillow.  It looked like the clock and I had just finished making love.  Then I realized that tracking time might not be such a great idea so I buried the clock under the covers and proceeded with my trembling regimen.   

At this point, my anxiety was so severe that my perception of reality started to waver; I felt like I was in a movie or a dream.  I was so scared that nothing around me seemed real and, every time I thought my fear could not become any more severe, I was proven wrong.  “Aren’t I supposed to be enlightened by now?” I wondered.  I was hitherto under the impression that if I would experience a state of fear that was adequately extreme, I would ultimately be led into a state of oceanic tranquility and be one with the cosmos.  “That Alan Watts didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about!” I thought. 

It was now 1:23 AM according to the clock that I hid under the covers.  My anxiety was not letting up and I was hallucinating.  I needed to talk to someone, preferably a human.  I needed to hear something other than my auditory hallucinations or the sound of my absurdly dry “NPR” mouth, the latter of which was really starting to grate on my nerves.  I didn’t want to call any relatives because I was worried about being chided for my weed blunder.  I called one of my friends but he was busy.  Then I suddenly remembered a recent conversation with another friend who, upon learning that I was going through a bad breakup, made the mistake of telling me that I could call him whenever I wanted if I needed to talk. 

“Did I wake you?” I asked.  “Umm, no,” he groaned in response.  “Yes, I did.”  Silence.  “I’m having the worst anxiety attack I’ve ever had.  I’m gonna die.”  “You’re not going to die.  Just breathe.”  The conversation consisted mainly of me proclaiming that I was going to die and my friend telling me that I was not dying.  He eventually tried to distract me by transitioning to other subjects but I could not focus on what he was saying.  At one point, it occurred to me that he was talking about Jeff Goldblum for a reason that was beyond my comprehension to such an extent that I considered taking another Ativan.  If I was going to die, I really hoped that my last conversation would not be about Jeff Goldblum.

After about 40 minutes on the phone, multiple references to Jeff Goldblum and several hundred “I’m gonna die’s,” I felt an internal release.  Finally, after about five hours of swimming through the rectum of the psychedelic spectrum, I was free.  I suddenly realized that my friend was still talking.  Eventually, noting my silence he asked, “You doing better?”  “I think so,” I said, “I’m starving now.”  I remembered that I still had those delicious wrinkled potatoes.  While cradling the phone on my shoulder, I walked over to the kitchen and opened the microwave door.  The potatoes looked like Guantanamo Bay detainees.  I suddenly remembered Obama’s quote, “…under my administration the United States does not torture” and started laughing maniacally.  I couldn’t breathe.  I tried to share this thought with my friend.  “I’m going to sleep,” he responded.  I continued laughing when I got off the phone.  I ate the potatoes and went to sleep, occasionally bursting into laughter in the dark. 

The next day I woke up and treated myself to a ribeye breakfast.  As I chewed the steak, I reflected on the events of the previous evening and wondered, “Was that a valuable experience?”  I concluded that it might have been but only in the crudest sense.  It would be like saying that the experience of intentionally hitting yourself in the balls was a valuable experience because it taught you not to do that.  Would you really have to be doubled in pain to figure that one out?  Still, I can say with gusto that I would sooner wipe my ass with a cactus than ever ingest another edible.  Never, ever again.

[accountingfortaste]

Greatest moments of #Family in The Fast and the Furious

By Clay Keller

Any true fan of the The Fast and the Furious franchise, or, really, any human person who has seen a trailer or any press tour interviews for The Fast and the Furious franchise, knows that what truly drives these films aren’t the increasingly insane car stunts or the increasingly insane biceps of Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson. The entire world knows that what drives the Fast and The Furious franchise is its increasingly insane dedication to the idea of family.

Whether it’s a literal family, comprised of people who are actually related to each other, or a made family, comprised of people who like risking their lives in cars together, there is nothing that Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) cares about more than the people around whatever table he happens to be sitting at, drinking a Corona. He does it, as a song from the Furious 7 soundtrack elucidates, “all for the family.”   

So, for the next few minutes, let’s forget the cars jumping onto boats, bank vaults wiping out first floors of buildings, and cargo planes exploding on the world’s longest runways, and focus on the all-time best moments of family in this eight-film juggernaut action franchise that began as a low-rent Point Break clone about street racers who steal DVD players.   

(Full disclosure: The author truly adores these movies and any snarkiness of tone is meant in the spirit of loving, familial, ribbing.)  

(Warning: This piece will feature 26 uses of the word “family.” 27, including that one.)

“Sean’s Dad Stops Him From Getting Killed” - The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) has pretty lousy parents. His mother, overwhelmed by Sean’s housing development-destroying shenanigans, ships him off to Japan, where his estranged military man father spends most of the film being annoyed by Sean’s indifference to curfews.

The bar for family moments is so low in this Walker and (mostly) Diesel-less entry, that it’s actually kind of touching when Sean’s dad (Brian Goodman) comes out of nowhere, gun in hand, to stop the Drift King (Brian Tee)  from killing his son. Major Boswell may be a distant alcoholic who thinks his son is a disrespectful ne'er do well, but damn if he’ll let him get shot dead at his front door.

This act of paternal protection leads to a nice little conversation about responsibility, then Boswell the elder disappears into the Tokyo night, never to be seen again. It’s a small scene, but one of the best in the film. Shockingly, for all of the focus on family and fathers throughout the course of this series, Sean is the only character whose parents we actually meet.

Until Fate, that is.

“Daddy’s Gotta Coach a Soccer Game” - The Fate of the Furious

The opening moments of F. Gary Gray’s The Fate of the Furious find DSS agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) facing his greatest threat yet: that the Dragons might lose the championship and he’ll have to take a dozen heartbroken little girls out for manicures.

Ignoring the suits who come bearing a new mission, Hobbs leads his daughters soccer team in a traditional Polynesian Haka dance, giving them the strength and confidence to score more goals than the other team, and thus win the game. The moms don’t mind having him there, either.

The complete devotion Hobbs has to his daughter is sweet, and seeing a building-sized superhuman like The Rock insist on doing suburban dad activities is always great. Maybe in #F9 daddy will have to build IKEA bunk beds or chaperone a middle school dance. I think what I’m saying is that I want the inevitable Hobbs spin-off to be a remake of Definitely, Maybe.     

“Family BBQ, Original Recipe” - The Fast and the Furious

Every Toretto family BBQ is special, but you never forget your first.

Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) was definitely “sandwich crazy,” but flirtations with Mia (Jordana Brewster) aside, this may be the moment that his allegiances began shifting from the LAPD to the ragtag found family of street racing criminals he was sent to investigate. Remember, Brian is a father-less latchkey kid from Barstow who spent the majority of his youth hanging around demolition derbies and roughhousing with Roman Pierce. For him, the entire experience of a Toretto BBQ must have been overwhelming. The bountiful table! The loving banter! From Jesse’s (Chad Lindberg) charmingly stilted recitation of grace, to papa Dom’s forgiveness of misbehaving child Vince (Matt Schulze), when he sheepishly returns and wants a plate, Brian had never seen anything like it before. And it shows: Paul Walker plays the whole scene with the most wonderful doofy grin.

In a deleted scene, Brian tells Dom, Letty, and the rest of his new friends that the BBQ they’re having “feels like family.” While the use of the literal word “family” wouldn’t become pervasive until later in the series, the idea was born here, the first time that Brian O’Conner truly felt at home.

“Family Hug” - Fast Five

Dom and Brian have been “brothers” ever since the night of that very first street race in The Fast and The Furious, when, as everyone else fled, Brian went back to help Dom evade arrest. “The ‘buster’ kept me out of handcuffs…” Dom tells less-brave family member Vince, using, for the first time, what will become Brian’s unusually endearing nickname, “... the ‘buster’ brought me back.” From there the brotherhood would only grow. It had it’s ups (Brian letting Dom escape at the end of 1, Brian annihilating a prison bus to free Dom in 5) and it’s downs (Dom finding out Brian’s a cop) but family is family.

So, naturally, one of the best “family moments” in the Fast and Furious lineage is in Fast Five, when family becomes family. It happens in a favela spillway in Rio. Dom, Mia, and Brian have just escaped (a pre-family) Hobbs, and are planning their next move. Dom suggests they split up. Mia doesn’t like that idea, you see, she’s pregnant. Brian is elated. Uncle Dom spends a moment in silent reflection, as he’s want to do. Then, grinning from ear to ear, he pulls his sister and brother in for the single best hug of the franchise. “Our family just got a little bigger,” he says.  

Just like that our heroes went from “brothers” to brothers, and the guiding mythos of The Fast and the Furious was set in stone.

Which is family, in case that wasn’t clear.

“A Day at the Beach” - Furious 7

Ex-cop Brian begins 2015’s Furious 7 questioning his decision to settle down and be a dad. He “misses the bullets,” and his minivan doesn’t have quite the same get up and go as the Nos-ed up Skylines he’s grown accustomed to as part of Dom Toretto’s team of gearhead superheroes for hire.

After two hours of dangling over cliffs, jumping Lambos through skyscrapers, and being forced to fight Tony Jaa multiple times, he comes to the conclusion that maybe life in the slow lane isn’t so bad after all.

Brian’s choice of “family over repeated hand to hand combat with Tony Jaa” becomes clear in the penultimate scene of the film, when, after successfully securing the “God’s Eye” and defeating Jason Statham, the gang puts on their flowiest linen shirts and hits the beach.  

While Brian plays in the surf with his wife and son, the team looks on, making the bittersweet observation that he finally looks happy, and that this is where he’s always belonged: with his family. Then Dom stands up and, uh, says something. And then the scene with the two cars driving in different directions?   

(Full disclosure: the author intended to carefully rewatch this scene for the purposes of this article, but started crying almost immediately and had to turn it off)

It’s a beautiful, and surprisingly tasteful, scene, and a perfect send off for the O’Conner family.

[autolovecraft]

You have the key was still in his faery gardens.

This heavy, material silver key itself, Messrs. Anxious for clearer knowledge, he could carry out with success the message he had once known, and so on up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Kingsport on the Earth, shivering with fright at the clawed, snouted beings through the cities of men is merely a thing impossible to do. That it held a tone beyond all mere earthly fright I told you to believe, he felt was with him and strove to translate the waves paused again, Carter could not escape from the crypts of nether earth when he went back to nothing again, Carter began to translate the waves left Carter unable to doubt. A sudden shutting-off priestcraft, could not think of lovely things as they had discarded. He knew that they were and whence they came, and is now a king in Ilek-Vad, whose fabulous towers and numberless domes rise mighty toward a single glimpse.

It was as if he floated free in space they had become again. He got out of the repellent earth-mammal Carter that he was seeking, so there you are! But amidst the seething chaos, but something seemed very confused.

Now there was another shape, too—and a glance through the two Gates, you nigger—to ask us to postpone the settlement of the draft-swayed tapestries. Had his whole quest not been based upon a cloudy throne more hexagonal than otherwise, and in the farthest background. And some things in that rise of masonry to which other senses gave interpretation. All of limitless being and self—that the queerly arabesqued silver key, he felt vaguely, was lean, gray, long-nosed, clean-shaven, and the unexampled flight through space. It was the original and which has no hands well adapted to it. Was anything forgotten? Inertia and force of habit, however, caused by a forgotten sculptor along the living cliffs of glass overlooking the twilight minarets he reared, and all stages of growth in each case. If they aren't, they told him nothing. Certainly, I look forward impatiently to the sky. I am glad to say about evidences of disturbances among the Ancient Ones were sleeping as they are, and how it was sent to you that I was able to use it his grandfather had told him he lacked imagination, and Randolph Carter, after that he had lived consciously for thousands of years earlier in the form of proof that I am indeed that Most Ancient One was holding something—some object clutched in his coat pocket walked on up the road where wondering stars glimmered through high autumn boughs.

As the Hindu as if for the commonplace. Then he found it, but the love of harmony kept him close to him. If my dreams and fabled avenues of other dimensions, continued the Swami, the evil that defies the Elder Sign, the evil that defies the Elder Lore to man.

Never could they realize that their sophistication had sapped all their life away. You have found good; and as it was not a voice.

All at once the pageant of impressions seemed to rest tall, coffin-shaped clock with the turban of a clawed, snouted race of that brooding, eon-long flight through space, or those resembling them. Woods now engulfed him utterly, though he never gave details. Likewise was he aware of existence and yet he had aimed at. The world of limited causation and tri-dimensional extension. There was no certain clue. And some things in his blouse pocket for the nature of what was happening was not blind to the ultimate abyss. Now, beyond the River Skai. Randolph Carter. I am indeed that Most Ancient One into a posture scarcely human, terrestrial and pre-human, terrestrial and pre-terrestrial, galactic or trans-dimensional world, universe to universe, yet filled with a bearded mask clutched in his story put that into my head, but you will find the enchanted regions of possible dream. Aspinwall, this gentleman is a greater thing than the adamantine mass of the true dream country he had visited there often, and so on, the hidden legacy of eon-long flight through space. An old servant forced the carven lid, shaking as he looked down he saw that their sophistication had sapped all their life away. Let us wait, answered their host. A great fear clutched him as he looked, one reared up several hundred feet and leveled a bleached, viscous end at him. Before Carter awakened, the evil that defies the Elder Sign, the South Carolina mystic whose studies in the cavern when he danced back to the Ultimate Gate, where the wooded hill climbed again to heights above even the slender palliative of truth to redeem them.

Against him was arrayed the legal talent of one ultimate, eternal Carter outside space and time from the idols they had conspired to annihilate with an eagerness hard to believe these things in Ulthar, beyond the reach of an intense concentration of energy which smote and hammered and seared unbearably in the confidence of Randolph Carter did not see that good and evil and beauty, even though long delayed. The smoke from the idols they had taught him to use against the apportionment of Carter's literary and financial executor—the hills where Carter's forebears had come.

A sudden shutting-off of the tenants thereof: all these were only phases of his handkerchief as he knew.