#your death will be a symbol of his ineptitude to me

[abluehappyface]

In the event that the rumors of cheating aren't enough, and things are really going to be like this, consider this a warning. The censorship that may unfold because of this has prompted me to attempt to figure out to download a blog and... leave. I don't plan on leaving right away, but in the event that I have to just know that I loved you. The mutuals I talked to every day, the mutuals I saw only once a year, the ones I shared fandoms with, and the ones I didn't. I loved all of you. In the event that I'm forced to flee this hellsite of a home and I never see you again, know that I loved you. Know that I will think of you. Know that your life has made a positive impact on me. I wouldn't be the person I am now without this place and without you. Know that I'll miss you. I will never forget you. In the event that this blog becomes inactive, promise me you won't miss me because I'm gone, but because of all the happy memories we created. I'm not going to leave this site right now, but don't be surprised if I do. If I leave it is an act of self preservation. In the event this is goodbye, I truly hope we somehow meet again.

-Bluey

[bookandcranny]

If You can Change Your Tune

The interloper arrives in a rented moving van, the same sort as all the ones before.

“Are you sure about this?” her friend asks as they pull up to the house. “I know you’ve always had a thing for fixer-uppers but this place might be beyond saving.”

Even as she unlocks the front door the wind whistles a note of warning through its rickety frame. The floorboards beneath their feet crackle and moan at the intrusion.

“All it needs is a little love,” the interloper retorts. Her name is Ann. I remember her from the showing, a woman of insufferably good cheer walking room to room with the equally annoying realtor of the week, a dopey smile hanging from her lips.

I didn’t think much of it at the time. People like her come around from time to time with aspirations in their heads of moving into the rural countryside to rehabilitate my thickets into sprawling gardens or write the next great American novel from within my historic walls. Seeing the reality of the place in person was usually enough to convince them to chase their fantasies elsewhere. However, it appears this particular happy-go-lucky thorn in my side needs a bit more work to dislodge.

“Are you sure you’re not in over your head?” the other one asks. I try to guess at their relationship. Friend? Sister? A lover? I’m sick to death of couples.

“It’s a little late for me to back out now,” Ann laughs, twirling the keys around her finger. “Don’t worry, Nick’s bringing his crew over tomorrow to start on the repairs. She’s a project but the foundation’s sound. Next time you see this place she’ll be a real beauty.”

“’She’?”

“Yeah, you know, like how people call cars or boats a she.” She climbs the stairs and runs her hand along the dusty banister. I think of splinters— with luck maybe she’ll get tetanus- but nothing comes of it.

The house is my body. Two stories, twelve rooms not including the attic, an old-fashioned spiral staircase, and me, the greatest antique of all, left to rot. Once upon a time a family used to live here: a mother and father, a veritable litter of hyperactive young children, uncles and aunts and cousins who would stay with them some summers and during Christmastime, and the wizened pale face of a grandfather who watched over them from above the mantle. It was all very precious, very southern hospitality, very postcard perfect. All very gone. Not even their ghosts remained; just me, and all the better for it.

Chesterfield is the name of the county as well as the nearest town, though from what I understand that’s using the term lightly. Most folks local to the area know better than to disturb me, but sometimes they get bold. Bored teenagers mostly, or suited vultures looking to see if there’s any profit to be squeezed from the property. In its heyday, the house was probably a sight to behold, but I wouldn’t know much about that. Memories of my life, if ever I truly lived, are slippery like oil on the water’s surface, impossible to grasp.

Though without eyes or ears or a mind to make use of them, I can “see” through my many windows— if eyes are the windows to the soul, maybe windows are can be eyes to the spirits— and “hear” any sounds that tremble through my frame. I’m grateful for these senses; they help me keep things in order. If someone starts to get a little too cozy with my corridors, and providing the spiders don’t scare them off first, I just slam a few doors, flicker a few lights, and they go running.

The interloper and her extra finish moving in the last of the boxes. She squeezes her arm and gives her a peck on the cheek.

“I’ll send you pics once I’ve got my room set up,” she says.

“Bold of you to think you’ll survive that long. This place is definitely haunted. Do you get cell service out here? I want to call a coroner and tell them to save your spot.”

“I don’t remember making this big a deal when you moved into your first place.”

“It had bed bugs, but it didn’t have ghosts.”

Ann makes a face. “I’ll take my chances with the ghosts.” She puts an arm around her shoulders. “Kim. You’re acting like I’m dropping off the map. You’re the one leaving the country.”

“For two weeks!” Her expression grows tense. “I feel bad leaving you like this. I should’ve been there for you, there was just so much going on.”

“It wouldn’t have changed my mind.”

She sighs dramatically. “No, nothing can, can it? I fear for whoever you end up tricking into marrying you.”

Ann slaps her playfully on the arm. “Do not start on that. Speaking of which, don’t you have a honeymoon to be on? Go on, get.”

Kim puts her hands up in mock surrender and backs out the front door. I raise one of the loose planks on the porch and she trips, just barely evading a tumble down the front steps.

“See? Cursed!”

“Go!” But she’s laughing as she adds, “Thank you for the help. It means a lot, even if Sophie is gonna kill me for keeping you this long.”

“I’ve got time to talk her down.”

The U-haul rumbles away down the dirt road until it’s a muddled blur in my perception and then, finally, gone. I’m alone with the enemy now. More importantly, she is alone with me.

I slam the door. It’s the easiest most classic trick in the book. Ann jumps and looks around. I know what she’s thinking. Just the wind? Or could it be…?

But no, one small act like that won’t be enough to convince her. With a shrug, she returns to the task of moving in. She shuffles around a few boxes in the foyer and starts moving them one by one up to the second floor. All things considered she hasn’t much to move in, but I’m not fooled. Where one intruder appears, more will follow, and bring all their junk and their noise and their petty living problems with them.

All my original furniture was auctioned off in an estate sale. It took place right here on the lawn, and I watched through my windows as they divvied up my family’s belongings, breaking them down into numbers and measures of worth for the masses. For the most part though I didn’t miss it. The absence of clutter made the space feel bigger, and I got used to the emptiness.

The interloper sets up in the master bedroom and unpacks some supplies to give the room a cursory cleaning. The agency normally sent someone over to prepare the place for new residence, but since the last few rounds of movers had come and gone, they hadn’t bothered. If Ann minds, she doesn’t show it, and I have to admit it’s nice to have someone sweep away the dirt and detritus.

After cleaning to her satisfaction, she starts opening boxes with foreign labels and assembling her furniture from strange little kits, turning sheets of instructions over in her hands as she nibbles on a hangnail. The result is a set of cheap-looking geometric furniture that makes her curse as she accidentally attaches the table leg to the chair and the chair leg to the bedframe. Something about watching her work transfixes me. Probably her comical ineptitude.

After she fixes all the furniture she dresses her new bed and starts cluttering her shelves with all kinds of bizarre toys and knickknacks. Among her affects is a paperback book titled “the art of moving in and moving on”. I scoff.

“This is a temporary arrangement. Very temporary, you got it?” I tell her, though I know she can’t hear me. I know this, but it still annoys me. It feels like she’s ignoring me.

The interloper smiles to herself and takes out a black rectangle that she holds up like a camera, though the shape is far too small and thin. She lowers it, considering, and then from yet another box digs out a string of Christmas lights and hangs them up above the bed.

“It’s June,” I say, dumbfounded.

I look at the string of lights and put pressure on one of the bulbs until it bursts. She jumps, but the moment passes. She spends the bulk of the evening fussing with her camera-thing until she falls asleep.

Fine. If she wants to play hardball, I’ll play hardball.

 --

 In the morning, the interloper’s camera-thing plays a tune to rouse her. Her waking is both a curse and a blessing, for while I was glad to be free of her active meddling, even as she slept I was never able to completely ignore her presence. I feel her like an itch, like a stubborn pimple forming beneath my skin, and I’m glad to sense her rising if only because it means I can get back to business sooner rather than later.

The water heater and other facilities are still in good condition from the last unfortunate newcomers I drove from my doorstep, which frees her to take a long shower, singing obnoxiously all the while. This, however, is a perfect opportunity for me. When the heat from the shower fogs the chipped bathroom mirror, I brandish my loathing like a pen and write her a message. Granted, precision isn’t my forte, so the words come out a little smeared and crooked, but still the intent is clear as can be.

LEAVE

Ann squints at the streaked mirror. “Love?”

“Are you really that stupid?”

She looks around but, seeing no one, shrugs it off again and starts to brush her teeth. When she ducks her head to spit, I quickly try again.

MINE

“Mina? Who’s Mina?”

I groan. Okay, perhaps a more symbolic approach. I will the mirror to shatter, but just then a loud knocking sounds and Ann runs off in a frenzy before she can see the long crack forming down the center.

“Door’s open!” She calls from the landing as she hurries to finish dressing with one hand and wrangle her hair into a towel with the other.

I try to hold it shut, but despite my efforts, the door is forced open and a parade of half a dozen handymen file into the entryway. As they start setting up, a burly towheaded man breaks from the pack and goes to meet Ann as she’s bounding down the stairs.

“Careful, careful. Don’t put your foot through anything before I’ve even had the chance to bill you.”

“Nick,” Ann says fondly. “If these stairs could handle me, Kim, and the fifty-pound mattress we lugged up there yesterday, I think they’re stable.”

“You gals didn’t have to do all that. I could’ve—“

“It’s fine,” she insists. “You’re helping me out enough as it is.”

“Yeah, well, we’re even for that whole thing at Kim’s wedding now.”

“More than even,” she agreed. “I know this was last minute. Dinner’s on me tonight. I’ll order enough pizza for the entire crew.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep. You haven’t seen how much Seth can eat.”

Their easy banter disgusts me. Living people are all the same; wandering around with blind optimism or bemoaning every bad turn, blissfully unaware of how little it truly mattered. One wrong step with those tools of theirs and any one of them could be joining me among the shiftless dead. I don’t have any desire for that kind of company so I decide to wait until they’re done with their renovations before I risk trying to scare anyone again.

As it is they hardly need my help. Ann, it turns out, is more than just clueless, she’s a klutz. If that isn’t enough she insists on “helping” right up until she almost shoots herself in the foot with a nail gun. Nick warns her not to try it again but I don’t feel any anger from him. The crew are all familiar with one another and with her. They chat and toss around jokes between tasks; someone puts on music.

The feeling isn’t quite a tangible one, but then neither am I. It’s an energy I struggle to describe, something like wading in a river and being aware of a splash rippling from upstream. Compared to the sharp tang of fear I’m accustomed to, all this amicability is nauseatingly sweet.

Ann beams, and the high arches of her cheeks dimple and flush darkly, round as apples.

“What exactly do you have to be so happy about?” I hiss in her ear.

As much as I hate to admit it though, I can understand why someone like her moved so easily among the crowd. Even when she was getting underfoot, she’s a difficult person to condemn for it. How could anyone begrudge her excitement when it was so abundant? Or her love when it was so freely given?

Growing impatient with it all, I knock a toolbox off the top of a stepladder and send its contents scattering in all directions. It lands hard and the sounds of work, the music and the laughter, all come to an abrupt stop.

“What was that?” someone asks. A worker crouches down underneath the arch of the ladder to collect some of the scattered screws and I, with great satisfaction, tip the thing over on top of him. The damage is little, but it’s enough to get the entire crew good and spooked.

“I didn’t touch it,” the injured handyman insists as he nurses his bruises with an icepack. “It just collapsed.”

“Maybe this place is haunted,” another jokes, but her smile doesn’t quite cover her nervousness.

“Kim said the same thing,” Ann muses to herself. Nick looks at her and she startles, as if she hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud.

“I was wondering how you were able to afford this place, even with the damage.”

“Oh don’t start with all that black cat broken mirror stuff. You see bad omens in everything.”

“And you don’t see red flags until they’re waving right in the face. Not even then,” he accuses. Her guilty expression says there’s some truth to his words. “Tell me honestly, is this house haunted?”

“That’s silly. Of course not.”

“Then how do you explain what just happened?” I demand with frustration.

“Then how do you explain what just happened?” asks the injured worker.

“Thank you!”

Ann hums thoughtfully and looks up at my aged walls, my decrepit ceilings. “The realtor warned me there were rumors about this place. This house has survived fire, flood, and an attempted demolition; somehow nothing was ever able to destroy it, and every person who’s lived here had reported seeing strange things. Objects moving on their own, strange sounds at night.”

Nick leans forward in his seat. “And what did you say when they told you all that?”

“I told her it sounded perfect.”

He puts his head in his hands. “Ann. Mary-Ann Thorne. Tell me you did not buy an actual haunted house. When Kim told me you just up and bought a house on a whim I thought that was crazy enough but this…”

“I didn’t buy a haunted house,” she says. She stood up straight and spread her hands with a dramatic flourish. “I bought a survivor. Houses are like people. They have personalities, they have their own little quirks, their likes and dislikes. Old houses most of all. I could tell as soon as I walked into this place that… well that she had something special. I can’t explain it, I just felt so drawn to her.”

She places her hand on the wall and holds it there. If I were alive I think I would shiver.

“She’s been through a lot, but with some TLC she’s gonna sing, I can feel it.”

“That’s crazy,” Nick says, but she isn’t listening. Not to him. It’s almost as if… almost…

“Can you hear me?”

She doesn’t respond. Of course she doesn’t. I berate myself for even daring to expect something so deluded. However, her little speech seems to encourage the crew, or else they’ve just calmed down enough to put aside their reservations and get back to work.

Watching them I feel… strange. Even when my house had been lived in before I had never really felt so cared for. It’s all ridiculous of course, a blind act of charity sprung from some silly woman’s misguided and misdirected affection. While the workers patch holes and replace crumbling pieces, the interloper sweeps and scrubs, eager to do her part.

Evening falls, and Ann prepares to head into town to pick up dinner.

“The guy on the phone said they don’t deliver to this address for some reason,” she says. “Weird.”

“Why don’t I go,” offers Nick. “I’ve got the truck. There’s more room.”

“Okay,” she reluctantly agrees. “But I’m still buying, clear?”

“Crystal.” There’s a faint air of nervousness wafting from him, I think. I suspect he’s been hoping for an opportunity to get away from me for a while.

The rest of the crew seem mostly recovered from their brief brush with the supernatural. I intend to fix that.

I start by flickering the lights, another classic. Someone gets up stammering about checking the fuse box in the basement, but as he and Nick each go for the doors I slam them both at once, creating a nice echoing effect that rings all through the house.

“Try writing that off as the wind.”

“I got a better idea,” another someone offers up. “How about we all go into town for dinner? It’ll be nice to get out of— it’ll be nice to get out, let the dust settle here.”

“Come on, Ann,” Nick gestures. “We can swing by the bar after. It’ll be fun.”

She hesitates, a strange look on her face, and takes a step back. “You all go ahead. I’m not that hungry.”

“Ann.” He speaks more sternly now, looking something like an older brother with a neat wrinkle of worry taking up residence on his brow. “Come on.”

“I’m fine here, and you’re being silly. If you don’t believe me, bring me back something after you eat and you’ll see that I’m perfectly safe here alone.”

“But you’re not alone,” I whisper, for nobody’s benefit but my own. “What would you say, if you knew. If you really knew.”

“Besides, I’ve already spent the night here once. If something were going to happen, why didn’t it?” She pulls a smirk, puts her hands on her hips. “Maybe it’s just you guys my house doesn’t like.”

Nick huffs an almost-laugh and relents, not entirely satisfied but not looking to argue the point any longer. He tells her to call him right away if anything changes and then he leaves. The workers file out after him, the last of them gingerly shutting the door behind him, so as not to anger me.

“Why didn’t you go with them?” I ask her. My voice, such that it is, takes on a plaintive edge. Pitiful. I correct myself, refocus my aims. “You’ve had plenty of chances to run, and it’s only going to get worse from here on out. You know that, right? You’ve got to know this isn’t just some twenty-four-hour fever. You can’t get rid of me. It’s my house.”

She starts up the stairs. I follow. I have no other choice.

“Are you really this dense? How can you ignore the signs? How can you believe there’s anything here worth salvaging?"

She walks into the bathroom and stares into the cracked mirror.

“What are you doing now?” I complain. “Looking for answers? I couldn’t give them to you if I had them. Or are you just admiring your pretty reflection?” I stroke the mirror’s surface. “Must be nice, to be young and lively. If you leave now, you could have years and years of perfect ignorance, uninterrupted by those pesky reminders of death. You could have a life, and you’re wasting it.”

She touches her fingertips to the cool glass with a mystic look in her dark eyes.

“Mina?” she whispers.

“My name isn’t Mina.”

Or maybe it is. Might as well be, for all I know. I think I must’ve had a name once. Surely there was a word, a simple sound, some collection of syllables that meant I see you. Surely there had been someone to speak it and make it real in their mouth. But how should I know? And if such a person did exist, what does it matter now? I’m not a person anymore, I’m a thing that happened, a thing that’s happening still. I’m a box built to hold my history, filled up to the rafters with hurt and resentment. That’s as close as I get to living. If I could move independent of my dour walls like her, I think, I wouldn’t be wasting my time moldering in the darkness.

Ann shakes her head. “Silly. I’m being silly,” she tells herself. Looking up at the dim light fixed above her she adds, “I should probably check on that fuse box after all.”

She goes back down and opens the door to the basement. She flicks the switch on the wall a few times but that bulb's been long neglected. Even those who swear up and down they don’t fear the fables or superstition became suddenly shy when it comes to probing the deepest depths of this old house. Ann turns, presumably to seek out a flashlight, when her heel catches on one of the repairmen’s screws that had rolled loose. It’s not even my fault this time, technically.

Like some kind of morbid slapstick, her foot shoots out from under her and she stumbles backwards towards the open basement door. It’s a long drop that awaits her, followed by a fast end if she’s lucky. And I know well enough by now that she isn’t.

Without thinking, I push her. Instead of that foresworn drop down the basement stairs, Ann finds herself tripping backwards into the wall instead. She rights herself, takes in a sharp breath, and then releases it with a sigh. She’s dazed but unharmed. I find myself mirroring her relief.

She smiles. “Thank you,” she says.

Then she closes the door and walks away.

That has never happened to me before. Normally, to manifest, to have any direct impact on the physical world, I have to summon up a great deal of anger. That isn’t too hard for me; I’ve been angry a long time. But in that moment, I hadn’t been angry. I think I’d been afraid. For her safety? No, of course not. More likely I’d been worried she would leave behind a ghost and I’d be stuck with her invading my personal space for eternity. Still, I’d never… never done anything like that before. I’d never helped somebody. I suppose I’d assumed it couldn’t be done, even if I wanted to. Ghosts, spirits, malevolent spectral entities or whatever you like to call it, that’s not what we're for. That wasn’t what I did, until I did it.

I become aware of singing coming from the kitchen. The fool is never not singing or humming or whistling something. I know music; it’s not as if I’m totally uncultured. While I have no lungs nor lips to make sound, sometimes on a stormy night the wind whistles through my walls, each creak and moan playing for me the orchestra of slow degradation I’ve come to know well.

This is not that. This is… I don’t know what to do with this. I don’t know the words. Is it too late, I wonder. I can’t. I’m not ready. Oh but if you can give me time, stranger, I think I want to learn your song too.

[gon2ba1e]

Sindel Chapter 16

For a moment, Quan Chi felt nothing but satisfaction with the deed he passionately carried out.

“This Edenian Empress has been a thorn in my side for centuries. Her pragmatism would’ve compromised my master’s return. But, thanks to Shang Tsung, I have put an end to her life. And now...victory will soon be in his hand.”

Then, a visage of Shinnok appeared before Quan Chi from the amulet. Unlike the necromancer, the fallen Elder God is anything but pleased.

“My servant. Your victory has accomplished little. This Edenian Empress has cost us our claim to Earthrealm. I feel a barrier encompassing all of Earthrealm. An invasion would be impossible.”

The satisfaction which filled Quan Chi was suddenly replaced by frustration and dismay. Few have ever outwitted Quan Chi in the past.

“The charm this empress used for her barrier is not within my knowledge. Neither is it in yours. It will take time to understand and destroy it.”

“What about Shao Khan and Outworld my master? Surely they will take notice of Sindel’s death soon enough.”

“Of course they will. You will inform them yourself. Just be sure to have a convincing story in mind.”

“Yes lord Shinnok.”

Quan Chi promptly made his way to Outworld, requesting an immediate audience with Shao Khan. Thanks to Shang Tsung’s insistence, Shao Khan allowed Quan Chi to speak with him. Quan Chi told the emperor Sindel had just died on Earthrealm. In recent decades, Quan Chi explained she made enemies with a number of Earthrealmers in power, particularly with the Lin Kuei. Quan Chi took notice of this when Sindel’s soul left her body. By the time he arrived, her killers had vanished, leaving behind their clan’s symbol in the ground. Not surprisingly, Shao Khan was skeptical. 

“I find your tale dubious necromancer. Even if Empress Sindel is truly dead,  her power rivals my own. How is it possible for a handful of assassins to take her life?”

“With all due respect Shao Khan, even Earthrealm is capable of producing potent warriors. This Lin Kuei clan is a perfect example. I have seen its members wield remarkable power over the elements. Even the god of thunder would be intimidated by their prowess.”

Shao Khan agreed with Quan Chi on this. He noticed Earthrealm’s warriors were becoming more powerful with each tournament. He also began to believe perhaps the Earthrealmers could be capable of such a feat.

“Very well Quan Chi. I’ll spread the news to Outworld.”

“A wise choice, emperor.”

“But know this. I do not take kindly to those who try to manipulate me. As I said from before, Sindel’s power rivals my own. If anyone can survive an assassination attempt, let alone come back from the dead, she can.”

“I understand Shao Khan.”

Immediately after his interaction with Shao Khan, Quan Chi confronted Shang Tsung in private. The possibility of Sindel’s survival began to trouble him.

“What kind of magic has Sindel mastered Shang Tsung?”

“Any magic which could keep her alive and strong.”

“That’s not an answer I am content with.”

“Whether or not Sindel survived your attack doesn’t concern me. I played my part as promised. This is officially your problem, necromancer.”

“Mind your tongue old man. Lest I confess to Shao Khan-”

“I do not fear the emperor. Not even the empress either. They will never be as cunning as I am. You have nothing to threaten me with. Now leave me. And have a nice day.”

Quan Chi left Outworld for the Netherrealm in a huff. Upon his arrival, the necromancer conversed with his master.

“I will not take any chances my lord. I will ensure Sindel is indeed dead. I have dedicated my life to seeing you take your rightful place on this realm. I will not fail you again.”

“For your sake, I certainly hope you don’t. I would hate to lose such a dedicated disciple because of his ineptitude.”

“Yes Lord Shinnok.”

*Here is chapter 16. If there’s any part of this chapter any of you think I should fix, let me know in the comments. I am open to making changes wherever necessary. I hope you enjoy this.*

[mbti-notes]

(1/8) Yayy, I love Fleabag and I love your blog and everything you write, so I hope you're up for a discussion of your typings (and I hope all the asks come through). Agree about Fleabag, the Godmother and Harry's (his frequent breakups with Fleabag seemed INFJ door slams, but his endgame points to Si) typings. Boo and Fleabag seemed to have been the sort of BFFs who matched because their personalities were quite similar... What made you conclude ESFP rather than ENFP? Same goes for Martin...

Boo’s interests are all concrete, her thinking is always immediate and short-term, Ni grip was apparent in her hasty death.

Same goes for Martin. While I see signs of tertiary Fe in his deliberate manipulation of Claire and pleasure at bringing Fleabag down, and also the overall recklessness of unhealthy EPs, I couldn’t be sure whether he was Se or Ne dom.

I see no evidence of dominant Ne nor inferior Si but many vulgarities and desires that are indicative of unhealthy Se.

What about the Bank Manager? My memory of series one is fuzzy, but he makes an effort to work things out with Fleabag (and women in general) even if he judges too quickly, which could point at aux/tert Te-Fi, I guess.

He is honest and straightforward, no pretension, but severely limited in his perspective. His moral reasoning ability is rather rudimentary, which makes F unlikely. His life is in a deep rut and he is drawn to Fleabag because she is his opposite and helps spark his lower function development. She comes to symbolize the key to understanding his failures and frustrations (both in terms of how he treats women and his lack of function development), therefore, helping her succeed is also helping himself find his own way. He’s reconciling who he is by reckoning with his past mistakes through Fleabag.

The Father clearly struggles with expressing his feelings. He wants to communicate better with Fleabag, but he understands and prefers Claire (a T), so probably IxTx, perhaps Ti-Fe if we consider the main issues presented in the story plus the fact that he quickly fell for Godmother, a Fe dom? I’d like to know your reasoning for him. Anyway, I’d typed Claire and the Priest as ISTJ and ENFJ respectively, and these ones I was sure to have gotten right. xSTJ was clear for Claire, and episode 203 was the one that cemented her as ISTJ for me. She is constantly anxious and full of routines and rituals and micromanages everything, from actions to looks to even jokes, implying a lot of overthinking (I); she clashes with Fleabag because she’s insecure about the possibility of not being as interesting and funny as Fleabag (tertiary Fi). Also, she tries to pretend that she enjoyed the night, that her marriage is going well and that she thinks Fleabag kissed Martin rather than the opposite because of Si’s need to maintain security and stability and not lose what she’s conquered. By accepting her individuality, her feelings and the possibility of something better for herself, she takes action to improve her life, which implied much needed extraverted development. Also, most ESTJs I’ve met, despite being control freaks privately, are more adaptable and relaxed as well, especially in public (higher Te-Ne).

The show centers around Fleabag’s dysfunction. In Si grip, Fleabag tries to pinpoint Boo’s death (and her own hand in causing it) as the “point of origin” but her problems go far deeper than that, all the way back to her family relationships. Everyone in the family is equally messed up despite appearances. The show doesn’t go very far into the historical causes of their collective dysfunction, but it does a good job of illustrating the dysfunctional patterns as they exist in the present. The characters are largely products of old family patterns, therefore, it’s hard to understand each member individually without the context of their collective family dynamic.

A very common family dynamic involves projecting all of the family’s history of dysfunction onto the “weakest link”, aka, the black sheep. The black sheep is usually “chosen” according to their so-called inferiority for failing to live up to the family’s unspoken values, then they are routinely criticized and shamed for being something that is perceived as contrary to the family’s survival and well-being. Over time, this dynamic places an unspoken duty/expectation onto the black sheep, namely that they should always be “the one that ruins everything” whenever the family requires a scapegoat to deflect responsibility for dysfunctional behavior. Fleabag is obviously the black sheep, so everyone uses her as the punchline (for easing tension), the punching bag (for displacing their frustration), and the punch down (for a cheap win during power struggles).

As a defense mechanism, Fleabag believes that she is actually the superior member of the family because she’s “clever” enough to see through people’s fakery or hypocrisy. Despite the concrete proof of her own life being a total mess, she likes to think of herself as being more self-aware than others, i.e., she implicitly blames her life failures on the fact that she can’t fake it or lie to herself like everyone else. However, she doesn’t realize that playing the black sheep role is her form of self-deception. She is deeply caught up in a logical contradiction of knowing she is less than but also believing herself better than, and we see this over and over again in her asides to the audience. By exercising crude power in exposing other people’s fakery, she doesn’t have to look at her own and expose herself, and this plays perfectly into the family pattern that always ends up ricocheting back onto her. Whenever she exposes anything resembling the truth of the family’s dysfunction, regardless of whether she does it kindly or maliciously, she is roundly blamed for “acting out”, being “cruel”, “screwing up”, “ruining everything”, etc etc. The family immediately comes together to activate the scapegoating pattern and, in the end, nothing changes and the pattern repeats the next time they get together. Her twisted way of “caring” for her family is to play the black sheep, and their twisted way of “bonding” is to collectively reinforce their status as not the black sheep.

When people treat you like a black sheep long enough, you believe it and it becomes your identity, and playing this role so well leads her to blow up all of her relationships outside of the family. In accumulating many failed relationships, it’s very easy to slide into settling for less or settling for what you think you deserve, and she has been trained over a lifetime to feel less than deserving. As a defense mechanism, she’s romantically attracted to people who aren’t capable of knowing who she really is, which in turn gives her justification for blowing up each relationship as they are always shallow and meaningless anyway. But this automatic and destructive pattern hits rock bottom when she destroys the only person who’s managed to really know her. She then gradually becomes more aware that she’s repeating unconscious conditioning and could perhaps choose otherwise, but ingrained patterns are hard to change without help and guidance, which eventually invites the influence of the priest.

You might think that their father bears the brunt of the blame for the family being so dysfunctional, but he has plenty of his own unresolved issues that make him more like a child than a parent. The show does not offer any explanation for him but everyone has a history. It seems that he has always been emotionally absent and socially inept in that he allowed their mother to do all of the parenting and caregiving. He is not aggressive, obsessive, or controlling as you would expect for unhealthy TJs, rather, he is detached, distant, avoidant, and indifferent. When you talk to him face-to-face, there is some natural warmth there, but once you are out of his sight, you are out of his mind. You know that he loves you in his way, you know that he tries to empathize, but you also know that he utterly fails to understand anything about you no matter how hard either side tries to bridge the gap. It’s hard to fault him for what is clearly a “disability”? Because of his ineptitude, he traps himself in a codependent relationship with his shadow opposite type, a narcissistic person who calls all the shots in the relationship so that he never has to lift a finger, i.e., he never ever has to bear moral responsibility for anything, and taken to an absurd conclusion, he lives in a pitiful state of learned helplessness. You never have to feel bad if you never do anything, right? Wrong, he is still guilty of sins of omission, and for that he’s never able to truly be at ease no matter what he does to shed away every difficulty. Ideally, a good stepmom takes care of the step-kids, but he was not lucky enough to snag one, so he must accede to the bad stepmom’s judgment or else, heaven forbid, he loses his easy life by having to take responsibility for the girls on his own.

Unhealthy TPs need uptight Js to help them keep life in order, but they often prefer Ps for their amusing company. The father does not “prefer” Claire for what/who she is, rather, he merely appreciates that she doesn’t make any trouble for him, which he wants to believe absolves him of blame. He can say, “See, I have one good daughter, so it’s not my fault that the other one is bad”. There are many parallels between Claire and her father in how they approach relationships very passively and helplessly. Deep down, his heart actually prefers Fleabag for the fact that she more closely resembles her mother and the fact that she is braver than him and challenges him (to be better). He wishes to have a better relationship with her, similar to what he must’ve had with her mother, but he’s unfortunately incapable of containing the dysfunction that bad parenting and unresolved grief has wrought upon her.

You say that Claire should be more flexible if tertiary Ne, but why would you expect her to have any healthy functions? She clearly suffers inferior grip quite often and thus cannot use any of her functions optimally. Every SJ with unhealthy Si-Ne uses micromanagement of routines/rituals as a crutch, so this is true for both dominant and auxiliary Si - your claim here only proves SJ. She’s just as fucked up as Fleabag is, only she is better at repressing her feelings, and for this alone, ISTJ is very unlikely. ISTJs are introverts and they prefer to give up and be at peace rather than double and triple down on stupid behavior in the manner that Claire often does. Her main problem in life is that everything she does to “manage” situations results in her betraying herself in some way, which is strongly indicative of infantile Fi. I disagree that stubbornness is her fatal flaw ala Si-Fi loop; if that were the case, she’d be more than happy to give up everything to Fi loop and disappear into the background. She would also never ever go near Fleabag nor trust her with anything due to the fact that she has already encountered countless past experiences of Fleabag blowing up situations in awful and unpredictable ways. ISTJs are at their least forgiving and never forget whenever it comes to delegating important tasks.

I argue that what gets Claire truly upset is not being unprepared for “all negative possibilities in the abstract” but rather the possibility of LOSING FACE, i.e., being publicly humiliated and exposed as the uncool simpering hypocrite that she is, which is indicative of deep-seated fear of Fi (she envies Fleabag for her “cool” factor for this reason). Unhealthy Te doms, falling apart internally, are still capable of maintaining functionality in external life far longer than other types. She suffers from serious grip problems but still manages to perform her duties at home and at work, which simply wouldn’t be possible for Ne grip. With Fi grip, she instantly switches to very ugly self-pity and irrationally self-protective behavior when threatened by anything. Her instinct upon feeling the vulnerability of exposure is to go on and on and on about how “successful” she is, which usually includes a few rounds of punching down at everyone in an attempt to disown her bad decision making. ISTJs are rarely capable of bullshitting themselves to that extreme; they are more likely to react with humility and even resignation when presented with incontrovertible proof of their failures (see: Bank Manager).

Claire was probably expected to be “the responsible one” (aka elder/caregiver sibling archetype) because there was no one else to take responsibility. However, at this point in her life, she has achieved enough career success to be independent from the family. The fact that she can’t help herself from enacting her old role speaks to the lack of self-insight that is characteristic of inferior Fi, i.e., as much as she complains about hating the pressures and headaches of being “the responsible one”, she unconsciously LOVES it because it grants her a superior position in the family. She’s not willing to give up the pain because she’s not willing to give up the payoff, and this internal love-hate contradiction is what makes her relationship with Fleabag dysfunctional despite the love and affection they have for each other. I don’t think ISTJs are able to bear such obvious internal contradiction and still manage to claim integrity. ISTJs find it much more painful, if not impossible, to pretend and posture for the sake of appearances, because they are supremely stubborn people when it comes to preserving their subjective sense of integrity. By contrast, inferior Fi makes it very easy to ignore subjective integrity and choose destructive methods of obtaining feelings of power and superiority, hence she ends up betraying her own well-being all the time.

As for the Priest, we both agree on him being a Fe dom. What made me choose Ni rather than Si is that he admitted to have been quite a different person in the past by alluding to his many sexual experiences, probably a hint of Se as well. But then he met God and everything took a 180 for him (N, not S), implying that he was uncomfortably adrift for a while and needed a sense of meaning and a clear vision of his path ahead to feel whole (Ni). Also, PWB has said that Fleabag was drawn to the Priest because he has an established sense of purpose, which she’s been looking for, which highlights their P vs J and Ne vs Ni differences. You could argue that he was drawn to her because of tertiary Ne, but I don’t see signs of Si’s typical grounded outlook (he uses a lot of abstractions to explain his ideas) or typical adherence to traditions (the path to his faith wasn’t primarily through this motivation as it happens to many) or typical narrow-mindedness (quite the opposite, he used to be quite open to experiences due to Fe+Se). Oh, and I forgot to mention, the Priest can read and understand Fleabag so well that he even gets to enter her internal world and listen to her personal thoughts. To be able to understand people with this level of depth is, of course, more natural for xNFJs rather than xSFJs, who help people on a more practical level (Fe+Ni v Fe+Si).

I think your understanding of Si is still quite stereotypical. ESFJs have a common pattern of using Ne to “find themselves” only to end up lost because what they’re really doing is Ne loop. ESFJs tend to grow up feeling very pressured to be rule abiders and it is common for them to go through a rebellious stage a bit later in life compared to other types, once the pressure finally reaches a breaking point. After swinging from the painful oppression of “rule observant” behavior in youth to the painful failures of “rule breaking” behavior in young adulthood, they eventually boomerang back to old touchstones, i.e., they ground themselves by rediscovering comfort in the known. IIRC, the priest felt lost and eventually revisited religion for guidance, he made the beliefs his own rather than blindly following dogma, and he chose to commit his life to doing good because HE genuinely wanted to, not because family/society told him to. A healthy ESFJ establishes a stronger sense of self once they reconcile with the past and make “rule following” more palatable by turning it into a personal choice (rather than feeling obligated to constantly self-sacrifice). I disagree that he “transformed” from one person into a completely different one, I think it’s more accurate to say that he had no idea who he was and got increasingly lost until he discovered himself by looking backward and making sense of his past experience. 

Religion is an abstract concept, there’s no avoiding abstract discussions about religious beliefs when you’re debating a non-believer, especially when that non-believer is Ne dom. Ne is tertiary and people often use tertiary functions for relief, therefore, ESFJs tend to enjoy abstract discussions, especially of the Ne variety that is full of humor and playfulness, exactly like the kind that he gets with Fleabag. I dare you to try joking around with a “true believer” ENFJ. Their beliefs are deadly serious to them, so they show far less patience for sacrilegious play (unless, for some reason, they have developed an irrational fear of being criticized as dogmatic and pretend to be open-minded). Also, why would an *N*FJ be shocked and alarmed or seem resistant to using intuition to “read” people? Why would their intuition seem so painfully accidental? NFJs generally LIKE using intuition and do it naturally as part of who they are, they embrace it and feel more confident the more they are in touch with it.

Ns tend to speak in abstractions but not everyone who speaks in abstractions is N, similarly, every NJ needs a sense of purpose but not everyone who seeks a purpose is NJ -> beware this logical fallacy: “every cat has four legs but not every four-legged creature is a cat”. NJs need a purpose for materializing their personal potential, SJs seek a purpose for the sake of grounding themselves in something unshakable within - you point out the behavior without grasping the true motivation. When ESFJs develop Si well, they recognize that what makes them happy is to be of service, to be a positive contributor to their community, to be a reliable source of help and comfort to those in need. He is not a charismatic and boastful preacher of the ENFJ sort, rather, he sees himself as a humble servant who uses reliable traditional beliefs to help ground people who feel lost in hectic modern life, using his own past experience as the starting point. The fact that he has the strength to end the relationship with Fleabag before it becomes negative and destructive is a testament to Si steadfastness and how strongly the rules matter to him (Ns are very masterful at rationalizing that the rules don’t apply to them, and that’s often how they end up in bad places). Why would you expect him to display all sorts of negative signs of Si if he is meant to be the positive moral guidance for the show? And wouldn’t it make sense for him to use his well-developed Si to reveal to Fleabag the true extent of her dysfunctional Si? Would an ENFJ instinctively know better than an ESFJ how to remedy Si specific identity dysfunction?

Can you please allow us to submit things to you? In the case of long asks like mine, it helps to avoid any part not getting sent.

I have considered this before but I’m not sure I want to do that.

[fialleril]

Imagine this.

The world’s greatest superpower is under the control of a fragile and insecure narcissist known for objectifying women, bragging about his wealth and turning every personal slight into a full-blown national crisis. His ineptitude would be comical were it not for the xenophobic advisers who hold court in his administration, threatening the lives of religious and ethnic minorities with unjust laws.

Sound familiar?

I am talking about King Xerxes of Persia.

In the Bible, this king eventually gets outsmarted by a Jewish orphan named Esther, her cousin Mordecai and a group of shrewd resisters.

There are many such resistance stories in the Bible. While Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders would have us believe Scripture teaches dutiful acquiescence to the state, the Bible in actuality brims with protest songs and prison letters, subversive poetry and politically charged visions, satirical roasts of the powerful and storied celebrations of dissidents.

Even Romans 13, which Sessions clumsily cited to support the Trump administration’s cruel border policies, was written by the apostle Paul, a man eventually executed by the state for following a known subversive named Jesus.

It is easy for modern-day readers to forget Scripture as we know it emerged from communities of religious minorities living under the heels of powerful nation-states. For the authors of Hebrew Scripture, it was the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek and Persian empires. For the authors of the New Testament, it was, of course, the massive Roman Empire. The writers of the Bible likened these empires to great mutant beasts, with sharp fangs, powerful claws and multiple heads. Much of biblical literature is consumed with resisting them, both as exterior forces that opposed the ways of God and interior pulls that tempt good people with assimilation.

And so the Bible honors women like Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives who defied the Pharaoh’s orders by safely delivering the sons of Hebrew slaves, and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who essentially “took a knee” by refusing to show the required patriotism at one of King Nebuchadnezzar’s state parades. The Bible includes songs of anger directed at powerful leaders who “pour out arrogant words” and “slay the widow and the foreigner” and poems that protest “those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless and deprive the foreigners among you of justice.”

Religious leaders who align with the oppressive policies of the empire are subjected to especially harsh critiques in Scripture. God declares through the prophet Amos:

“I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me . . . But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!”

Pronouncements like these are often made through prophets. Jeremiah, for example, wore an ox yoke around his neck to symbolize Israel’s impending oppression under the Babylonian Empire. Ezekiel memorialized the fall of Jerusalem by building a model of the city and lying down next to it for over a year.

America’s own prophets have a long tradition of employing the Bible’s resistance literature to advocate for justice. Black abolitionists invoked the words of Moses to Pharaoh — “Let my people go!”—to demand their liberation. Martin Luther King Jr. was especially adept at citing the biblical prophets in his rhetoric, his “I Have a Dream” speech drawing from Isaiah (“Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain”), Psalms (“Weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning”) and Amos.

More recently, when Bree Newsome scaled the flagpole at the South Carolina capitol building to remove the Confederate flag, she recited Psalm 27 as she was handcuffed by police: “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?” Last week, many of the protest signs at the marches against Trump’s family separation policy featured quotes from the Bible demanding care for immigrants and refugees.

Even those Christians who support the administration, or who say they want to stay out of politics, tend to inadvertently use the language of resistance as part of their religious parlance. In its biblical context, doing or saying something “in the name of Jesus” speaks in defiant contrast to edicts carried out “in the name of Caesar” or “in the name of the king” or “by the authority of the president.” Declaring “Jesus is Lord” implies by default that the present rulers are not as sovereign as they seem. Even calling Jesus the Son of God originally stood in specific contrast to the leaders of Rome, who demanded they be known by that very title. Jesus was not executed on a Roman cross for nothing, after all.

To put one’s hope in Jesus, then, is to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary Jesus’ way of peace, justice, mercy and compassion will ultimately prevail over the empire’s ways of violence, exploitation, oppression and fear. Christians believe the resurrection of Jesus from the dead gives shape to these wild hopes. Even death at the hand of Rome could not keep him down.

America is no ancient Babylon or Rome, I know that. But it is not a place where justice rolls like a river from sea to shining sea. There is just no denying the very things condemned by the biblical prophets — gross income inequality, mistreatment of immigrants and refugees, the oppression of the poor and vulnerable, and the worship of money and violence — remain potent, prevalent sins in our culture. These sins are embedded in nearly every system of our society, from education to law enforcement to entertainment to religion. We are all culpable, all responsible for working for change.

The word apocalypse means “unveiling” or “disclosing.” An apocalyptic event or vision, therefore, reveals things as they really are. My friend Jonathan Martin, a third-generation Pentecostal preacher, described the election of Donald Trump as an apocalyptic event — not in the sense that it brought on the end of the world, but in the sense that it uncovered, or revealed, divides and contours in the American social landscape many of us did not want to face.

Now, as Americans of faith struggle to find the language with which to protest, the models of resistance to imitate and the comfort for pressing on when times get tough, I suggest turning to the Bible. Just this morning, I prayed for the children separated from their parents at the border, as I read these words of Psalms: “You, Lord, hear the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, defending the fatherless and the oppressed, so that mere earthly mortals will never again strike terror.”

What I love about the Bible is that the story is not over. There are still prophets in our midst. There are still dragons and beasts. It might not look like it, but the resistance is winning. The light is breaking through.

originally posted 12 July 2018

[josephmxa]

Worldbuilding: The Beginning and the End

A Universe Begins just as it Ends. There’s not one way a world is a created. But everyone chooses to remember it differently. I choose to remember the truth of each one.

-Truth

Before there was anything, there was Chaos; a void. Then there came Cosmos, a light, and within it came a bang. Spread across the infinite space came the uncharted; a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust and dark matter. Humanity calls it a galaxy, like a compact realm, and they say there’s more than one. In this particular galaxy, however, came a system of several thousand natural masses circling a star known as Solaris, or what Humanity dubbed as the Sun, a near perfect sphere of hot plasma, a source of energy for Gaia, a body full of life. The body known as Earth. Humanity symbolized her as Mother Earth, the primal Goddess. She is, I am.

Like I am.

Time came when Chaos materialized himself on her land, fascinated by how out of all the other bodies in the universe he and Cosmos created, she burned the most with life with an unsettling presence looming over her. She emerged before him, a body sculpted out of the ground she breathed with skin and eyes to match. Her crown full of green and trunks. And she found herself in wonder before she knew what wonder was. Chaos mirrored her in a sense, his chest flat, his face square compared to her heart-shaped. His body bulkier than her curvy frame. Skin like literal personification of a void.

As for the unsettling presence, it had happened to be Cosmos itself, emerging before the two as a reflection of Chaos with skin as bright as the rays of Solaris. Gaia hadn’t been alone like she thought. They may not have been the life she made and nurtured, but they were the life by her side. The life she needed to create anew. The time spent on her land, however, the materialized forms of Chaos and Cosmos became separate sentient beings like Gaia herself, their bodies as defined and featured, their energy in rhythm with hers. The first Holy Trinity.

The first act they made as one paved way for humanity’s debut among a world full of wondrous, dangerous, and beautifully unique creatures. It is stated humanity went through evolution as any animal. But people wondered. They weren’t as adept, or socially aware. People got curious. What drove humanity in its first beginnings? What made them strong and willing? So determined and fearless? What made them foolish and careless? Selfish and rude? They survived through evolution time and time again until they reached the Twenty-First Century. All grown up in a harsher world than it is today.

The weak-willed become the strong. The prey are now the predators. How?

Well let me tell you. By the accounts of known philosopher Aristotle, it’s theorized humanity began with fourteen basic behavioural traits; Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy and Pride; Chastity, Temperance, Charity, Diligence, Patience, Kindness, and Humility. The world’s Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Heavenly Virtues. Somewhere down the line, evolution took it and ran with it. What’s not being said is how these traits were separate entities themselves formed by the Holy Trinity as a way to drive humanity through or up the animal kingdom. I mean, when they first came in contact with their creation, they were astounded by the sheer ineptitude of such an animal who seemed to lack purpose and nature like the others. They continued constant watch studying their growth to no avail at first.

A persistent Chaos noticed something. Traits. Behaviours they repeated. And from within a single primate, Gaia reaped each as an individual being as the driving force behind humanity’s development. At the time, of course, they had no name. To me, their names were their vices and virtues. They grew behind humanity, evolved as they did until humanity’s evolution peaked. They stopped aging. Forgotten by those who grew too old, so the cycle never broke.

But one day came when a few questioned their nature; were they only going to be defined by their singular behaviour? By the act of Greed or Pride, or by Humility or Charity? The humans who they were designed to strengthen were more than just a caricature of Lust or Temperance and they wondered where their growth lied. Surrounded by the ever-growing rich, cruel world of wonder took a heavy toll on their psyche. How could they resist the temptation of change?

After twenty centuries, to be frank, some were sick of what humanity became. Some fed off of it. Others were content seeing as how humanity’s evolution may have come to halt didn’t mean it could never return. Besides, history had been made. Beliefs were curated. Religion created. Morals grounded. Stories were told, tales were written. Humanity kept showing potential they either wasted or achieved. The unpredictable nature of it all truly fascinated the bunch who desired no change. They could drive humanity further, and maybe in a better place as to cool the nerves of the others.

Easier said than done, humans say.

Inevitably, they grew apart. The year 2012, the 21st day of December. They’re living their own lives.

“Now comes the time you must live your true nature,” I said. The look on their faces, heads whipping around. They shouldn’t have been surprised, they knew from time the atmosphere felt off. But it was too much to ask of them to place where, why and how. In this moment, though, they hesitated not. Made rounds back to Africa, where the World Tree resided. Where they thought they could ask the Holy Trinity some questions. They just never thought they’d come face with their corpses instead.

Each impaled by roots of the world tree; roots out of Chaos steeped into the ground, roots out of Cosmos sprouting leaves up towards the sky, and stems covering Gaia all over making the tree she was. Her face showed the most content.

“This is the consequence of life,” I said. Collectively, they turned. Jaws dropped. “It feeds off the vitality of the matter used to create it in order to sustain itself and the more organic matter that is produced means more energy generated in the atmosphere and redistributed amongst itself upon death. Gaia understood this.”

“So, are you the one who spoke to us?” Pride asked.

“Time has come for the world to reset.”

“Reset?”

“From the moment Chaos pitched the idea of your nature, Gaia came to understand the implications. She felt the first wave of her power diminish when she gave life way before Chaos or Cosmos came. She understood the more she, or they, produced, the toll they had to pay.”

“But what does that mean for us? We’re human.”

They were taken back when I smiled. “The minute you showed life beyond your vice or virtue was the minute they made you more. Earth is at the hands of abuse and enough is enough. The Holy Trinity couldn’t do anything. They barely had the power nor the energy. What they had left, Gaia sacrificed.”

“Why?”

“Time has come to reset the world. You hold the power to turn back time.”

“Do… do you know what you’re asking of us?”

“Gaia’s not asking. She’s begging.”

They were the New Gods and they hadn’t accepted it. At least not all. Pride… he was too prideful of the world he helped create knowing how much it abused the resources given to them. Gaia did not anticipate nor ask for the abuse humanity gave her. She did not ask to leave a world she created. Not yet anyway. Not until she raised her kids as the New Gods she expected them to be, even if unbeknownst to Chaos and Cosmos. She begged them to fix her wrongs. Maybe never let humanity evolve.

“The abilities the Holy Trinity had has been split amongst you fourteen. You control the tides now and it’s in your nature to bring life to a new cycle.” The visible disgust on some of their faces piqued my curiosity. Maybe Gaia thought wrong. They grew too much, they thought exactly like them. And they fought like them, too. War never changes. It’s violent and bloody, it’s tense and claustrophobic. It’s cataclysmic.

Sometimes, it’s also how a world begins and it’s how one ends. A different tale for every occasion.

Science says a universe begins with a big bang and there’s not much to argue against it, per se, but people have different views on how the world and the life that came to inhabit it came to be. They say there’s life on Mars or on distant planets. There’s talk of Gods and Goddess making life in mythology or a a God with judgement in religion. They may be true, they all may not. It all depends what world it is.

But how I wanted to create this multiverse is that it begins with a single cause and spirals out of control in a chain reaction. The material above you just read is the cause of why this multiverse begins, or at least gives you the idea of how it happens--if that makes any sense. More on this topic in later discussion as I delve deeper into the characters of this particular universe for which is now dubbed Universe/Earth Prime for the time being.

Tags: @merigreenleaf

Anybody is free to be tagged if you wish.

[aalapdavjekar]

On Identity

First published in October, 2020.

At the age of fourteen, I found myself in my first online chatroom. "Asl," they asked — early Internet slang for age, sex, location. It was never self identifying information. No one was interested in names. No one cared about what you looked like. You were free to be anonymous as long as you provided a small token of details from which the rest could be inferred. Your interests were apparent from the room you were in and your avatar dropped other crumbs of personality. The concept of anonymity was still years from making sense to me yet the obliviousness to physical identity was real. The idea of a fourteen year-old from India soon became dull. So, I decided to get creative.

Some days I would be a 75 year-old living in rural Mongolia who had just purchased his first computer after selling 25 of his favourite sheep. On another, a divorced mother of three, fresh out of prison, looking for advice on everything from makeup to homeschooling. Each day was a blank slate, a new role to fill, a fresh start. Identity on the web is as literal as fiction. It could be as entertaining as you wanted it to be.

Regardless of how you chose to portray yourself, your personality was a central component to how each story was laid down. Regardless of how out there you wanted to go, to an extent, most would assume you were giving out correct information. In theory, you could be the Pope pretending to be the Queen. Not many would care but most would find it funny.

No one can judge the unknown. On forums such as Reddit, getting a new identity is as easy as coming up with a new username. There’s no one to question your motives, judge you by the colour of your skin, or ban you for being too young.

You have no age on the Internet, no gender and you have no country. Your username might change, your writing will mature over time, new subreddits will be found, some will disappear.

Yet, like real life, people can and do judge you based on certain criteria. Online, credibility is based on reputation — call it Internet points, karma, the number of followers, likes, etc. To some online services, these signify your commitment to your role. Like seniority in a real life occupation, Internet points signify how long a profile has been around. The Reddit karma system which was primarily developed as a reward mechanism also serves as an easy way to distinguish between credible profiles and inflammatory and digressive posters — trolls. If you post worthwhile content, you get upvotes — points! On the other hand, if people don’t like what they see, you get negative points. Unlike the virtual world, physical age plays a very important role in real life in determining your credibility. It gives people an easy excuse to ignore your opinions depending on how old you are while giving way to cultural cliches such as respect your elders or tradition is sacred. One of the harshest — kids are stupid might almost seem like a mathematical axiom but ignores certain aspects of the child that are seldom found in adults such as the ability to quickly master languages or adopt new skills.

ASL in the offline world is very much like the Internet. The major difference is that it’s much easier to catch someone lying. As an Indian teenager, I could never pretend to be a 75-year old Mongolian even with the best makeup advice. Yet, there were other ways to pretend. At the time, I thought of myself as shy but I could still stir up some confidence when I had to talk to strangers. I only had to pretend to be charming, smart, and interesting. Society even had my back. “You can be anything you want to be when you grow up,” they told me at school. “Always dream big,” they proudly added. Years later, I realized all these statements only translated into, “get a bigger salary.” So, yeah, they were pretending too. Eventually I came to the conclusion that everyone was pretending. Everyone I interacted with had a story to tell. They all had a big bag of words that they used to confidently describe themselves. Most interesting of all, they all took the story they told themselves and others very, very seriously and would happily clock you in the mouth if you merely hinted at anything otherwise. Like calling someone out in the chatroom for their alleged fakery, painting someone as a liar in real life was akin to assault. But my conclusions weren’t based on some impulsive thought. They were carefully considered observations. The wall of pretense we erect is not even a conscious decision. Almost always, it is based on years of cultural indoctrination.

Who are we?

Culture is a weird one. The typical North American and South Asian of the 1950s could be considered living centuries apart from each other. The Indian, most likely an illiterate farmer barely making ends meet, could not dream of life in the American Golden Age — minimum wage that could pay for two cars and a mortgage. He could not conceptualise the existence of luxuries such as refrigerators, ovens, swimming pools and shopping malls, hospitals and discotheques, or the ability to travel the world on tips earned while bartending. The average Indian farmer desired healthier bulls, better harvests, regular rainfall, obedient wives for his sons. But then, as much as now, drastically different cultures still overlap in certain ways. The Indian farmer, much like his American counterpart, looked to his neighbour to understand himself. If the Jones next door bought a fancy new car, everyone living in the neighbourhood wanted something better. If the Kumars next door threw a huge wedding for their son, inviting everyone from the closest twenty villages, the Chopras dreamt only of throwing a larger party next year. The collective psyche of each culture is only a reflection of the desires of each individual. But cultures, homogeneous or otherwise, are an echo chamber. They consciously or subconsciously produce edicts, rules and regulations that individuals integrate and pass on. Whether it’s capitalism good, communism bad in the American psyche, or India good, Pakistan bad in the Indian, from economic policy-making and government initiatives to television programming and pop art, everything must adhere to cultural norms and traditions. Unless it fits the identity of the collective and follows a cultural narrative, it will be discarded.

Take the never ending list of Indian god-men and celebrities who are routinely treated as infallible figures worthy of worship. Devotees are often so unflinching in their faith that they are willing to overlook overwhelming evidence of rape, murder, exploitation and extortion. This is not unique to India. Charismatic personalities have sway over swaths of people all across the world. Whether it’s Trump, Duterte, Bolsonaro or Modi, the ability to pander to the masses and speak to the cultural norm is more important than competence at one’s job. Trump gave voice to a collective that was scared of immigrants taking over their jobs. Years later, his ineptitude would lead to one of the worst administrative failings in American history and the death of over 400,000 people in the course of the pandemic. The actions of the Indian government during the second wave need no mentioning.

In many countries, questioning one’s cultural norms is akin to treason. Similar to questioning a person’s opinions, questioning the integrity of a political ideology often leads to terrifying consequences. The BJP’s rise to power in India has been followed by the arrests of intellectuals, academics, students, poets, and doctors for voicing opinions against the party. This is quite the routine for authoritarian governments. In the 1950’s, Mao Zedong’s government in China persecuted and killed half a million of its educated populace before launching the Great Leap Forward, a project that aimed at transforming China from an agrarian economy into an industrial power. While it looked great on paper, it led to the greatest famine in history and resulted in the deaths of at least 20 million people. This failure politically weakened Mao. In response, he launched another program to weed out and eliminate dissidents, killing another million in the process while leading to the destruction of thousands of Chinese historical and cultural artifacts. What was the outcome of this violence? It only strengthened Mao’s hold over the masses. His personality was now a cult.

To call humans sheep would be unfair because sheep are never pushed off a cliff by their masters. Human societies, on the other hand, are rife with power struggles, deep hierarchies, discrimination, and violence. Yet, each of us identifies as a good person. We can rationalize why we are good, therefore we must be good. No country in the world would ever think about labeling itself as a force of terror, cruelty, and animosity, but we can easily call “the other” any number of names. We look to our family, friends, and society to support and reinforce these views — call them nationalism, patriotism, freedom, equality — regardless of how accurate or even relevant these views might actually be.

Oscar Wilde said, “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

Our identity does not quite work in favour of our individual or collective happiness. We associate a feeling of national pride towards statistics, numbers, and symbols. Rising GDP is popularly correlated with the “wealth” of a country, but many forget that this number just smashes together a country’s total economic output over a period of time without distinguishing between “good” and “bad” economic activity. Even the man who came up with the concept, Simon Kuznets, was of the opinion that the number had nothing to do with individual well-being.

We look to our history to understand where we came from without realizing we have many incomplete pieces to an enormous puzzle. Many contemporary Indians would associate themselves with the iconic Indus Valley civilization and think of the core of their cultural and religious identities as unchanged for thousands of years. However, the morals and the values carried by the average Indian today — monogamy, marriage, vegetarianism, holidays and celebrations, rites and rituals — all stem from thousands of years of mingling with the outside world. What we define as violent invaders and conquerors today have played an important role in shaping our culture into its current form. Not only did the Mughals contribute to our aesthetics and our lexicon but they also brought with them mathematics, science and philosophy. Global trade helped carry the Indo-Arabic number system (the numerals 0 to 9) to Africa, Europe, and eventually to the rest of the world. The British brought their own legal and judicial systems, passed down from the Romans, the railway infrastructure, and a bizarre penal code which sought to divide the subcontinent culturally, morally, and geographically according to their own prudish Victorian attitudes.

Hinduism, a major global religion today, has its roots in the Vedas, a collection of manuscripts believed to have been written by ancient sages at least a thousand years before the birth of Christ. The Vedas described the lives and spiritual pursuits of the priestly class, the Brahmins of ancient India. Before being written down, they were orally passed on from teacher to pupil. The Vedas described the lives of gods, rites and rituals, spells and incantations, all of which have their roots in even earlier animistic traditions, or the worship of animals, plants and nature — a theme common to the birth of nearly all religions. These texts were central to the agrarian communities that inhabited the Indus Valley. However, one might be hard pressed to call this Hinduism. These ancient traditions later branched out into numerous schools of thought such as Samkhya, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Yoga, Mimamsa, and Vedanta, each with their own unique set of philosophies.

Due to the geographical scale of the Indian subcontinent, the diversity in language, culture, and race, the ideological descendants of Vedic traditions were in the hundreds, if not thousands, and were regarded as a way of life by those who practiced them. The word ‘Hindu’ was simply used to describe people living near the Sindh, a river that flows through the northwestern part of the subcontinent. The word had nothing to do with the individual beliefs of these people. The modern form of Hinduism developed in the 18th century through reformist movements started by Ram Mohan Roy who wished to rid Hindu traditions of superstition and promote rational and ethical ideas about the religion. Thinkers such as Dayananda Sarasvati, Paramahamsa Ramakrishna, and Swami Vivekanada, would develop the idea of a unified Indian continent and seed missionary movements that brought Hinduism to the shores of Europe and later, the United States. Savarkar, who used the term hindutva to describe ‘the quality of being Hindu’, brought on a politically-charged connotation to Hinduism. This was further fueled by the Indian Independence movement that promoted the idea of ‘India as a Hindu nation’ before the eventual partitioning of the subcontinent along religious lines.

It is a topic of much debate whether an organized and unified Hindu nationalist identity that brought the sheer variety of the subcontinent under one banner to overthrow colonialism would have naturally evolved without the presence of the British Raj. More importantly, the idea of a ‘Hindu nation’ starkly contrasts the cultural openness of the early inhabitants of the subcontinent, and their acceptance of hundreds of cultures and different belief systems, which is ironic considering the foundation of Hindutva is based on the myth that India has always been a country for Hindus.

What are we?

Does my cat know he’s a cat? Do animals know of themselves? What about viruses and bacteria? You might say no to all of these questions and state that the ability to know oneself is unique to homo sapiens. The correct answer is debatable but not really the point I am trying to make. What if I asked you what you made you believe you were human, or conscious, or even real? There is good reason for you to believe in all of those things because you might think it’s ridiculous to believe we are just deterministic machines running on genetic code. Surely, we must have free will. Surely, we must be the most intelligent byproduct of evolutionary pressures. Surely, we must be the only creatures capable of stewarding the Earth. Surely, we must be correct about the things we know and accept as fact.

How comfortable would you be if none of these were true? I won’t attempt to answer these questions here because these are an entirely separate discussion but my point is that we believe we are a number of things only because we have identified with these beliefs for a good portion of our lives. Like the Ptolemaists who believed the Earth was the center of the Universe, or Creationists who believe ‘the Earth is 6000 years old and dinosaur bones exist only to test our faith in god’, there may still be numerous misconceptions of reality that we accept as common fact. Regardless of what these beliefs are, it’s critical to understand that our beliefs are our identity. Through many years of indoctrination, people on opposite sides of the Korean Demilitarized Zone still identify as human beings, but their world views are starkly different. One might defend the ideals of capitalist society while the other might think his leader is god and gladly give his life to protect this belief.

There is no distinguishing between one’s beliefs and oneself. Our beliefs form our habits, which in turn form our personalities. We live our lives from the point of view of our beliefs; a home forged from our own subjective interpretations of the world. We hold ourselves accountable to our identity; define ourselves with tokens of adjectives, layers of tradition and symbolism, while in the meantime, we fight to preserve every shred of it, and live the rest of our lives in a struggle to cultivate it. We try to keep it sacred, unique, and immutable. Otherwise, we ask ourselves, what is the point? We work tirelessly to make sure we’re not just another cardboard cutout while raking in trophies, certificates, photographs, children, exclusive club memberships, Internet points — anything to expand our fairytale legacy; anything to suppress our natural mortality and increasing vulnerability. We judge ourselves not through the motivations, beliefs or struggles of others; we judge others based on ourselves. Identity is a relational web. It is a comparison sheet we use to analyse our place in the world. It helps us weave a meaningful story to answer difficult questions such as: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die?

No one is born religious. No one is born to identify with a particular piece of land. No one is born to identify with a particular political party. No one is born as a specific identity. We are all simply products of indoctrination. Every single day, from the moment we are born, our education begins — not towards an ideal of truth but towards survival. The agenda of the education system is only a reflection of the cultural landscape it inhabits. Perhaps only science can claim the ability to course-correct and steer its way towards better models of the universe. Humans, meanwhile, are not so flexible. Between years three and four, most children start forming opinions about the world and themselves. I am this. I like that. This young identity is shaped through an education system whose primary objective is passing exams, failing which the child is immediately labelled as stupid. The child is routinely compared with their classmates, labelled any number of things — shy, honest, hardworking, problematic, unmotivated. Their place in the world begins to solidify. The child, in most cases, assimilates these assessments as accurate characteristics about themselves, never questioning their validity.

Over the course of a lifetime, many layers of identity are crafted and worn, each accentuating every other. Our identity has an appetite. It must consume knowledge and meaning or risk starvation. Some may be consumed by this hunger, turning into narcissists and megalomaniacs. Others might see through the illusion. Yet, most people never manage to leave their opinions behind, not enough to provoke a different perspective because the need never makes itself apparent. Most people internalise their self-beliefs themselves to the point where they are defined by them. People tend to stick with people who think like they do. They fall into a loop of self-compliant views and confirmation biases. Eventually, this simplistic view of the world and the self becomes hardwired and impossible to outgrow. Anything that challenges these hardwired beliefs is first ignored as fake news, but eventually, it brings forth an increasingly agitated response. The stronger the hold of identity, the greater is its tendency to fight back against change. People might call themselves vegan, neo-marxist, jazz aficionados, liberal, Muslim, pan-romantics, Indian first, Maharashtrian second, [enter artist’s name]’s biggest fan. They might have good reason to suspect these words as truth. Regardless of their accuracy, these are just layers of identity, to be worn as per the demands of the situation, like seasonal clothing.

When people communicate, it is a specific identity that does the talking. When I am speaking to my boss, I wear the mask of a loyal employee; when I am speaking to my son, I wear the mask of a loving father; with a stranger, all the politeness I can muster; with a foe, skepticism, mistrust, anger. We carry countless and distinct identities, only to utilize a specific ASL — a condensed and limited disclosure of the ego based on the situation and circumstance. These are like webpages which hide the underlying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code while only showing you what you wanted to see — a funny cat video. The individual’s relational web grows with every new encounter, every new discovery about the world. It begs to answer only one question — Where is my place in the world? The relational web offers a map to reality; a model that seeks to understand and tailor itself based on experience. This is an intrinsic biological mechanism without which the ego cannot survive.

Our identity is life itself. It is the very antithesis to death. These are polar opposites: creation and destruction. Identity forges meaning while death snatches it away in an instant. While the pursuit of meaning is a lifelong endeavour, ageing is a paradox. Ageing in the modern world is the contradiction between wanting a longer life as well as infinite youth. A trillion-dollar anti-aging industry that only seeks to postpone the inevitable, is testament to this fact. In the meantime, all we are left with is the pursuit of polishing our individual story. Some might cherish the annual event that signifies the day they were born while others might hate it, resenting the lives and achievements of others associated with a smaller number while casting everyone else into a basket of irrelevance. Perhaps this is why the shadow of anonymity offered by the Internet is such a comforting place to live. But whether offline or online, my ASL is whatever I want it to be as long as it gives me the joy that I seek and the comfort I need to go on.

There is no point in living in a cage of dubious and limiting self-beliefs. I am not suggesting you could fly simply by identifying as a bird. I am merely suggesting identity is an emergent phenomenon. It is a continuous carving and remodeling of the ego. It evolves in response to experience of an immediate environment because it is essentially a tool evolved for survival. With that knowledge, at the very least, it might bring you a step closer to staying open to new ideas and possibilities. Just don’t take yourself too seriously.

[whotookcheesuschrist]

Some excerpts from the playthrough

I was pretty close to getting chills from that intro. That is the most atmospheric video game intro I’ve experienced thus far. All the way from the menu to the actual game. Fucking damn. (Apart from maybe Dragon Age Inquisition.)

Made it through the first part on the first try. Saved. It didn’t save as far as I thought it would and I had to do it again, failing four times. :-(

“Behold, my amazingly rendered abs. And flat-ass face.”

You can tell this is game was a first attempt in many things; such as delivering awkward, awkward lines.

There is a mission briefing mimicking VHS tapes and I fucking love it.

Whuh... COLONEL DID YOU KILL HIS DOGS? NOOOOOOOOOOOOO

So... that was intensly antagonistic of a character who have up to this point been delivering barely any support apart from diet-coke Sun Tzu.

Speaking of Sun-Tzu...

As of writing I’ve finished MGS2, and there’s a certain related part of that that I will get into on a later date, but this one, more than what’s to come, reminds me of that police interrogation in The Venture Bros.

YOUU SHUT YOUR MOUTH!

In the most threatening way possible, say the words: Follow the mice.

These controls are hUaORRIBLe

In one way, yes, it adds to the difficulty without being forced, but good fucking god, trying to figure out which direction I’m supposed to push the stick while pressing up against a wall is a nightmare. And having to stand still while shooting and not being able to move while aiming at all is... not very user-friendly design. Thank God for auto-aim

In a similar vein, a third-person shooter with the camera angle being from what we Norwegians call bird perspective is a bit of a challenge

The game play is still pretty dope though

Bee tee dubbs, the ex-Fox unit is hereby dubbed the Suicide Squad

(I would totally play a super-hero video game with that kind of lay-out of the villains and the hero. I think this could actually transfer to comics as well, the way the villains are set-up, introduced and used.)

First meeting with Metrosexual Noodle Eastern.

"I love to reload during a battle! There's nothing like the feeling of slamming a long silver bullet into a well greased chamber." — Revolver Ocelot, Metal Gear Solid.

I bet you do, Ozzie

This game is not complete without a ninja.

There’s a masturbation joke lying in there somewhere.

So far this game has been surprisingly Not Gay. Except from Snake’s sick abs, but then comes Otacon and fucks my shit up on so many levels.

Johny’s grand introduction: Face down, ass up

Meryl... I really like Meryl, but she is so obviously one of the “not like other girls”, tomboy-ish archetype that isn’t really all that useful. It’s pretty sad, because we see her kick ass. We know she can, so it’s a little sad that she isn’t properly utilized.

Poor Otacon.

The ninja was depressingly easy to best. I know the TWEETHT!! that comes later with this guy, but man, you’d think it’d be more of a fight.

OH. MY GOD. Let me count down how many ways Otacon’s introduction is gay.

After being saved from death by katana, Otacon stares at Snake downward-up. When the camera stops, we get a damn good shot, yet again, of Snake’s Sick Abs.

“You’re uniform is not like the others...”

The disappointment in Otacon’s voice upon learning that he was not the goal.

The symbolism of Otacon literally coming out of the closet.

Snake sitting with legs crossed like a fucking femme fatale as he and Otacon catch up to speed

Snake inspecting Otacon, crotch on up

Snake walking up to Otacon until he’s one foot away, laying his hand on his shoulder and asking “you okay?” in an uncharacteristic, caring voice: and Otacon being weirede out by it, commenting: “What’s wrong, getting all friendly all of a sudden...”, to which Snake just awkwardly backs away and says “uh nothing, just... glad you’re okay”

Forget Meryl, Hal’s your love interest and we all know it.

“I’ve been therapied into not having an interest in men and no one can break the spell at all none at all nuh-uh...” And of course Snake is going to prove them wrong. Eww. Call it a product of its time, but still, gross.

Bee-tee-dubbs, Otacon and Snake discussing Meryl’s low-pixelated ass strikes me as hilariously “no homo”. I’m pretty sure, given how Hideo is on the subject in later games, that all of it is intentional. Subtext included.

Psycho Mantis, stop dissing my game stats

Poor dude. Seriously, that is a sad and solid backstory for a character

“Riussiain lieady rieportyingk in on wieapions” I like her tho

Man, this game... In all of the silliness it is STILL on-point with its social commentary. Nastasha’s talks about the START programs, nuclear disarmament, the money involved, the ultimate plan of the Foxhound members, nuclear programs made for short-range launches... All of these are things that I’ve seen in the news this week, and what goes on in the game takes place in the year 2005. Not to mention us becoming more and more desensitized to violence and warfare. It is frightening to behold. I wish I had it in me to talk about all of this at length, because there is really a well of subject matters to discuss here.

Once again I experience a video game trying to impose on me that, in the story, something is urgent, but in reality, I have hours of backtracking if I want to.

I... kinda like the voice they gave Sniper Wolf. And that she’s Kurd; it is nice to see that Hideo remembers a little history. And it brings a little variation in a very formulaic artistic industry.

There is nothing so jarring as video game characters talking specifically about the controls on your PS controller. Abs are still sick. I like the little touch that this death will be different from the others, and set you somewhat back in progress. Not enough for it to make an impact, but I appreciate the effort; the game is present even on its own metalevel

Otacon, you sap. Oh and thank you for massaging my arm, Naomi

If Johnny were ever to be in a Rambo-parody the first movie would be called Johnny - First Brown

My old enemy... Stairs...

OTACON DO YOU EVEN UNDERSTAND WHAT SUBTEXT MEANS

My tactic for handling this: laying down land mines whenever possible and run like a pussy.

Sniper’s demise, the entire scene for all parties involved, is pretty heartfelt still you two should kiss

I have literally played Die Hard.

HUHHHH! THE PLOT THICKENS! WE’VE BEEN BETRAYED!

Vulcan Raven has no sense of humor. I am big man McLargebeef. Fear me.

One of the greatest things about this game is the boss fights. All of them are different and interesting, fun to play. Same goes for the rest of the game: nothing ever gets to the point of being samey.

I mentioned atmosphere earlier, and oh how I do love this for keeping it throughout. This feels like a beautiful tribute to the 80′s action movies, in tone and spirit as well. This is what the 80′s style tribute that we’ve seen lately really ought to be: specs of hilarity and ridiculoussness mixed with complete sincerity and genuine, dark depth, without getting to caught up in aesthetic.

Metal Gear Chicken.

How can anyone survive working on that thing.

I wonder what Ocelot really thought of Liquid.

GAAASP! MILLER IS BRITISH! OH NO!

Liquid is just an asshole, but if that was his upbringing I feel a little bad for him. No wonder he hyper-compensates.

Snake takes these news surprisingly well

Snake being made into a weapon, robbed of information that he really needs: this game makes his feelings and responses, however douchy, feels quite earned

I am fighting a giant mecha and this is STILL a stealth game.

Okay that... that surprise from Gray Fox actually was a surprise. And what the fuck is he MADE of.

So Richard Dawkins is to blame...

           OF COURSE-

SHIRTLESS BATTLE! OVER A WOMAN!

“MACGYVEEEEEEEEEER!”

Surprise bitch I bet you thought you’d seen the last of me

Liquid’s death is surprisingly evocative for me. I really do feel like Liquid’s plan is more important to him than anything, because he that desperately needs to prove himself in the light of his “father”.

...

                    ...

          ...

          ...

          ...

          .                           .                         .           

          WILL YOU           SHUT UP

BTW I made it through without sacrificing Meryl. I’ve learned what happens in the other ending, and it is pretty dumb how that one leads so much better into the next game than the other. And while on the subject

Woah, yet another twist. Although knowing what I do about Ocelot now it is hardly that surprising. The impact of this is still satisfying and intriguing, because there are things in the game that for someone who isn’t already completely familiar with them seems a bit weird. The reveals here makes some things falll into place, and I am surprised that the game actually did specifically build up to a sequel

It strikes me that I haven’t talked once about the performances. While there are a lot of them that don’t go all in, you gotta give David Hayter props for this, as well as several of the others. This must’ve been so very strange to work on for all of them: not quite a translation from a japanese work, not quite American either, giving this exposition-heavy dialogue a unique life of its own

And the game naming Snake after him is a very cute touch, one that I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t thought of before. And no one could give Snake the layers of believable capability and apparent ineptitude better than he. IQ of 180 my ass.

GOD that ending dragged on.

[junker-town]

The gore, guts and horror of an NFL fumble pile

Jameela Wahlgren

Stories from the bottom of the most lawless play in sports.

Retired NFL defensive lineman Fred Smerlas recalls them as the most exhilarating yet frightening moments in pro football, a purgatory of cheap shots and atrocities where you did your time unwillingly, a place where dragons lurked.

The fumble scrums. The barbaric scramble to recover a bouncing oblong spheroid, maddening in its Boing! Boing! Boing! misdirection.

As an offensive player, covering the ball keeps a critical drive alive. As a defensive player like Smerlas, you can proudly present the prize to your own sideline, offering it up like some precious blood-ruby.

In tight games, the fumble stakes were so high, the adrenaline coursing so strongly to the brain, that the big defensive linemen, those lumbering apex predators, would hold up the ball and beat their chests, howling primal screams of accomplishment.

“As a defenseman, recovering a fumble was the difference between getting off the field or having to stay there for another 10 plays and getting your head caved in,” Smerlas said. “They were huge. You trained for them since when you were a little kid. And then, boom! A fumble happens and everything goes dark. Only the ball lights up. No matter what’s around you, you go for that thing. When those lights go out, it’s ‘Here we come!’”

Now 62, Smerlas was a five-time NFL Pro Bowl selection during a 14-year career as a nose tackle with the Buffalo Bills, San Francisco 49ers and New England Patriots. No pushover between the lines, he was then the only Greek player in the NFL, with a 6’3, 270-pound body filled out by dolmades, bougatsa and baklava.

Inside the pile, you kept your eyes closed, like a feeding shark, to guard against knifing hands that were trying to maim and blind, yank and punch scrotums, and dislocate fingers.

Yet the billy-club violence of those pileups still makes him shudder. The man-weight was so great that he could hardly breathe, and players hurt one another for the fun of it. Nothing was safe or sacred when 2,000 pounds of unscripted National Football League flesh-and-muscle pressed down on anything lying beneath it — untuned baby-grand pianos crushing hapless players fighting for both the ball and for oxygen.

Inside the pile, you kept your eyes closed, like a feeding shark, to guard against knifing hands that were trying to maim and blind, yank and punch scrotums, and dislocate fingers. The football changed hands often and ruthlessly. Late-comers dove into the jumble with their helmets first, heat-seeking missiles looking to break or dislodge anything in their way — the ball, even teeth. You couldn’t even trust your own teammates because in the heat of the scrum, it was often impossible to determine friend from foe.

Years after leaving the game in 1992, Smerlas still remembers the screams that came from a snapped femur or tibia, the animal grunts, that soulless profanity. Perhaps worst of all, he can still smell the rank breath of those miners’ sons and blue-collar pigskin heroes, many amped up on amphetamines or steroids, or both, a concoction that made them unscrupulous and even dangerous.

“You got guys grabbing your balls, punching you in the chest, gouging your eyes. In the fumble pile, everything gets whacked. You’ve got 330-pound men jumping on you. Let me tell ya, get hit by guys that size with pads and helmets, and it gets ugly fast,” Smerlas said. “In the pile, we used a different language. Part Greek. Part Italian. Part filth. ‘You fucking cocksucker, I’m gonna kill you.’ Guys would purposely go without brushing their teeth and eat garlic for five days straight. You’d be down there and pick up some rank smell and tell yourself, ‘I don’t want to know what that is.’”

So dreaded are the pileups that they come to players in their dreams long after retirement: The ball is still bouncing. Mammoth men converge. All that villainy and violence, and without a referee in sight.

The average National League Football game is comprised of 24.7 possessions, about 12 per team, and 3.2 of them (about 13 percent) end in turnovers. Out of 2.3 fumbles per game, on average at least one will be lost.

The 1938 Chicago Bears and 1978 San Francisco 49ers share the indignity of suffering the most fumbles in a season (56), and the 2011 New Orleans Saints can boast about having the fewest (6). The most fumbles to occur in a single game is 10. That slapstick ineptitude took place four times between 1943 and 1978.

Those numbers don’t tell the whole tale. While fumbles are brief events, their casualties, from lost molars to blown momentum, add up quickly. Famous college coach John Heisman, canonized with his own trophy after he died in 1936, once advised his players, “Gentlemen, it is better to have died as a small boy than to fumble this football.”

Fumbles changed the rules of the game, and many earned their own monikers: The “Holy Roller” (also known as the “Immaculate Deception”), the “Miracle at the Meadowlands”, the “Butt Fumble”, and an incident between the Broncos and Browns in 1987 that was so crushing it became known simply as “The Fumble”. In the 1960s, a generation of players earned reputations as ball-strippers, boasting nicknames that evoked the wicked street-poetry of the The Longest Yard: “Refrigerator”, “Assassin”, “Night Train”, “Diesel” and “Bus.”

Jameela Wahlgren

Today’s game is its own cacophony of violence, and fumble pileups are still no place for the meek. Players are bigger, faster and more agile than ever before. But back in the old days, before instant replay and probing multi-angle camera shots kept players in check, before the emergence of new rules that banned head slaps and ruthless high-and-low hits, the field of play was more primitive, more ungoverned, more savage, according to interviews with 18 retired players, coaches and officials.

Gary Plummer, a former linebacker for the Chargers and 49ers, believes his era of fumble piles was more ruthless than today’s. He says that modern players are as prized and protected as Triple Crown racehorses.

“They can call it a respect for your opponent, but I think that it’s because most players realize that they’re making $5 million a year, and you don’t want to mess up somebody’s career, so the intensity isn’t as heightened,” he said. “When we played, guys were fighting to put food on the table. Today, it’s all about getting an extra Ferrari. There’s a difference.”

Cliff “Crash” Harris, a cog in the Dallas Cowboys’ fabled “Doomsday Defense”, was tagged by Washington Coach George Allen as “a rolling ball of butcher knives.” Oakland quarterback Kenny Stabler, himself known as “the Snake”, described mammoth Raiders offensive lineman George Buehler as a “Coke machine with a head.”

Defensive lineman Rich Jackson, who played for the Raiders in the late 1960s, was known for a bear-paw swipe called the “halo spinner”, and once broke Green Bay Packers offensive tackle Bill Hayhoe’s helmet with a head slap. Lyle Alzado, the terrorizing Raiders defensive end, called Jackson the toughest man he’d ever met.

Jackson called himself “Tombstone”.

“When they asked me why,” he said, “I’d tell ‘em that the tombstone is the termination of life, a symbol of death, the end of the road.”

Even Tombstone considered fumble scrums to be cold-blooded places. “You’d hear guys holler and you couldn’t imagine what was going on to make a man scream like that, the dirty things taking place,” he said. “But I was down there. And I did whatever it took. We played desperate in the old days.”

This lawlessness built football legends. Some players had particular reputations for violence. They possessed the honed skills of hired hitmen, only too glad to employ them inside the scrum.

Gremlins like Dick Butkus, Ray Nitschke, Jack Lambert, Lawrence Taylor and Joe Greene, who was known for being just plain mean.

“Everybody knew that you didn’t piss off Joe Greene,” said Clinton Jones, now 74, a former running back drafted by the Minnesota Vikings in 1967. “You’d even try to compliment him. You’d say ‘Nice hit, Joe.’ Because you knew that if you didn’t treat him nice he might try to eat you, and that would make for a long afternoon. Some guys had no limits.”

Then there was Conrad Dobler, who earned lasting infamy — and a cover story in the July 25, 1977, issue of Sports Illustrated — as the dirtiest player in football.

As Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray once wrote, “Conrad didn’t play football, he waged it. You couldn’t describe what he did as play. Not unless you figure the Indians played Custer. Dobler turned a line of scrimmage into a killing ground. He went about the game with … maniacal, suicidal fervor.”

For many players, the word “Dobler” meant frothing, filthy hits.

“Guys like Conrad Dobler would bite your eyeballs out,” Smerlas said. “Conrad would eat a child, for God sakes. He had no conscience. He’d tape his hands and rub them in salt and go after your eyes. He was like a crab. Everything on him was going to hurt you. If the ball was on the ground, he would punch you in the ribs or in the throat. You could beat Conrad to death, he wouldn’t care.”

Yet even the formidable Dobler quakes at memories of the scrum. “All that stuff they said I did at the bottom of the pile was bullshit; I avoided piles,” he said. “They were dangerous places. You could get hurt. Being there on the ground with your legs spread out and guys piling on, you could break something. One of the most dangerous places was standing around a pile. You’d get hit by some guy using his helmet as a battering ram. It was a good way to get your ass knocked off. All I wanted to do was get out of that pile and check my bones to see if anything was broken.”

Dobler insists he didn’t need the cover of a fumble scrum to inflict his damage. “If I hurt players, I did it out in the open. I’d bring up my hands and hit ‘em in the face mask. I’d catch ‘em in the solar plexus with my fist. That stopped ‘em real good. It was all legal. The refs didn’t like my leg whip, but it was sufficient to knock a guy off his feet.”

Fumble piles were the perfect cover for criminality. Players who moments earlier had been felled by brutal hits sought out scrums to exact revenge, knowing they could hide from cameras and the discerning eyes of opposing sidelines and referees.

“When we played, there was no place to hide between the white lines,” Dobler said. “If I got my hands on a defense guy in the pile, I beat the shit out of him. You got no mercy. I made a guy cry once.”

An opponent once tried to bite off Dobler’s finger in the scrum. “But I always wrapped my hands before games. They were caked in dirt and mud and sweat. I might have even picked my nose with those fingers. So I laughed at those guys.

“Myself, I never bit anyone. I liked my teeth too much. And I still have beautiful teeth.”

Though steeped in venom and hostility, the fumble scrum is also a place where real technique, finesse, sophistication — perhaps even something like artistry — could shine. Think of Mikhail Baryshnikov with a helmet and shoulder pads.

Some players entered the fumble scrum more as pacifists than combatants. The game was built as much on savvy and skill as testosterone and eye-gouging, they reasoned. Sure, smash-mouth worked, but so did sleight of hand.

“Players talked trash in the pile, but I didn’t get into it. You throw down all that hate and you get consumed by it,“ said Riki Ellison, who played linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Raiders between 1983 and 1992. “Every locker room had the big bad-ass defensive linemen who were on the top of the food chain and set the mood. But some guys played a game of psychology in the pile. Matt Millen always talked about stuff that had nothing to do with football, like the weather, how his parents were doing or what was going on in his life. It was pure comedy. It would throw off a guy’s aggression.”

Jameela Wahlgren

Few players were as crafty as Cliff Harris.

“As a free safety, I caused a lot of fumbles, many more than I recovered,” recalled Harris, who played in five Super Bowls and was elected to six consecutive Pro Bowls. “I had a technique. It wasn’t any big secret. I’d come up from behind a player and punch the ball out with my fist. We called it stripping.”

By the 1960s, teams were practicing how to snatch loose footballs. “You were trained to fall on a fumble in a certain way,” Harris added. “You weren’t supposed to dive and land on the ball, but hit the ground next to it and curl up around it. If you tried to pick it up and run with it, there was better chance you’d really get injured.”

Players worried the fumble scrum might result in season-ending injuries. Football could fulfill dreams of glory, then tear everything away when one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rolled over your leg.

“When I got to the NFL in 1976, I had to develop a receptivity to pain and learn how to deal with brutal, nasty, mean people,” said linebacker Reggie Williams, who played 14 seasons for the Cincinnati Bengals. “In the fumble piles, you’d expect someone to go for your gonads. Before instant replay, I felt a bunch of hands going for my nuts, so I’d get in the fetal position and clamp my buttocks together. One guy put his finger inside my nose and pulled, trying to rip the skin. Players would scratch your eyes, give you infections. It was all part of the nastiness of that pile. The dirtiest players were usually the ones on steroids. A steroid-induced athlete is a different kind of animal.”

Neck-twisting was considered fair game. “It wasn’t unusual for some guys to grab a player’s face mask and just twist, you know, literally wring his neck,” said Lee Roy Jordan, who played weakside linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys in the 1960s.

Thirty years later, necks and other vulnerable body parts are still being wrung in the pile. Today’s players don’t carry brass knuckles like Butkus or Nitschke, but they have ways of going for the jugular. “You put your hands up by somebody’s neck and, especially with an elbow, they stop moving,” said Stephen White, a former defensive end who played between 1996 and 2002 for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and New York Jets (and now contributes to SB Nation). “You hit the throat, the ribs or the midsection, somewhere that makes the guy cough up that ball.”

Smerlas likens the toughest players to prison enforcers.

“We pounded the shit out of people. A lot of guys should have been put in cages after the game. We brought the adrenaline to every game,” he said. “I popped a finger out a few times and pulled it back myself. Once I hit the side of some guy’s helmet and ripped the side of my hand off, pinky to wrist. I ran off the field with all this white stuff oozing out, and they sewed it up right there without any pain killers. That kind of aggression.”

Kevin Gogan, a veteran offensive linemen who retired in 2000, earned the nickname “Big Nasty” for his legal hits as much as his reputation for dirty plays. Calling scrum violence “learned behavior,” he offered some pointers on exerting maximum nastiness.

“The best place to hit was right in the soft tissue. I’ve poked my fingers in people’s eyes,” Gogan said. “It’s not a good feeling, oh no. I remember one game where I kneed this guy in the nuts, hurt him real bad. He got up before me and stomped on what he thought was my leg, with those fierce inch-long cleats they used for grass fields. But he hit my teammate instead of me.”

Even referees have developed techniques to survive the fumble pile. After all, they venture between the lines without the same protective equipment or blind aggression as players. In a scrum, they feel more like the Christians than the lions.

Jameela Wahlgren

Now 90, Jim Tunney was nicknamed the “Dean of NFL Referees,” and wore No. 32 on his black-and-white uniform. He was particularly wary of fumbles, which he called “the most exciting play in football.”

“As an official, you’re foolish to dive into those scrums. I told younger refs, ‘Take your time. Don’t worry about it. Let things settle down,’” Tunney said. “Sorting through those players was like trying to take a steak from a dog’s mouth. I’d see referees dig into that pile and I’d tell them, ‘What are you worried about? Trying to find the right guy with the ball? C’mon.”

Once Tunney sensed that the worst brutality was over, he pounced.

“That ball comes loose and 22 guys come looking for it all at once. Only one or two are going to get to it. The rest are piling on, trying to hurt each other,” he said. “As an official, you peel those guys off. You say ‘It’s over, it’s over. Get off of there.’ And most times they would. But until you got down to the bottom of the pile, it was Darwin’s survival of the fittest. I would tell players, ‘If you haven’t read Charles Darwin, you better go back and read him.’”

Most players simply have to come to terms with the idea that sacrificing their bodies is for the good of the team. Because inside the pile, some drooling 380-pound lummox with pads and an attitude could hurt you even when he wasn’t trying. Like a hippo rolling on the riverbed.

“The weight of the pile was overwhelming and caused physical pain. I broke my arm underneath one pile against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Just the weight of all those bodies,” Ellison said. “A guy was on top of me and my arm was in an awkward position. You can’t do anything about it. You just gotta suck it up and wait the 10 seconds for the bodies to unpile.”

Geoff Schwartz, an offensive guard who played for five teams and retired in 2016 (and now contributes to SB Nation), said that fumbles took a particularly hard toll on the largest players. He stands 6’6 and played at a whopping 340 pounds.

“Fighting for the ball in those piles was the most exhausted I’d ever been on the football field over a 30-second period,” he said. “Trying to keep control of the ball, when guys would do anything to punch it out. It just wore me out.”

Sometimes, fumbles would punish players for their instincts. When a football popped loose into the open field, big defensive linemen got hurt doing something they later reconsidered as plain foolhardy: picking up a loose fumble and trying to run for a touchdown.

“Defensive linemen never got any glory so when we could pick up a fumble, we tried to score,” recalled Bob Lilly, a Dallas Cowboys defensive tackle in the 1960s. “One time I had Larry Cole on my left, and Cliff Harris, another one of my teammates, wants the ball too. So he comes running up and hit me in the back and tore my hamstring in two. I thought two things while I was falling: I wonder who that son of a bitch was who hit me in the back, and that I should have lateraled to Larry Cole.”

“Tombstone” didn’t fare much better in a similar situation. “I was playing Cincinnati one day and there was a fumble on the 5-yard line. The rest is kind of blurry. But it was the worst experience I ever had,” he said. “I picked it up, and I was thinking TD. I took the first step and it suddenly felt like the entire stadium was on me. They had me by the arms and the legs and the neck, pulling and punching and doing everything they could to get that football. And I told myself right there, ‘Man, don’t you ever do that again.’”

If a retired NFL player’s long-past career can seem like a fading dream, then the fumbles are the nightmares, those nagging memory loops, full of anxiety and feelings of impotence, that wake you up in a sweat at 3 a.m. Suddenly, you’re drowning in the bathtub, or caught stark naked on a public bus, mired in quicksand while trying to outrun a serial killer.

Gary Plummer once picked up an opponent by the eye sockets in retaliation for being kicked in the groin.

Either you come to terms with the chaos and the powerlessness, maybe even embrace it, or you don’t. You shudder, block it out of your mind. Or get therapy.

Gary Plummer once picked up an opponent by the eye sockets in retaliation for being kicked in the groin. How’s that for a nightmare? His mantra: hit or be hit. “If you weren’t fearless on the football field, you wouldn’t have a very long career,” he said.

Many players avoided people like Plummer. After all, why mess with Bigfoot when you know the bloody outcome? “I wasn’t in many of those piles,” said Harris. “I chose not to be until I had to be.”

Wait, even the guy known as the “rolling ball of butcher knives” avoided the pile? “I was a tough player, but I was also a smart player,” Harris said. “What kept me healthy was my thinking, not my instincts. And my instinct was to stay away from those scrums.”

Though fumbles are still much-ballyhooed by fans, NFL officials maintain a love-hate relationship with them. In 2018, the league changed one rule, no longer calling a loose ball a fumble if the player who lost the ball regains control “immediately”.

Some have called for a possession arrow, like the one used in basketball, to curtail the violence and the guessing game of the fumble scrum. Even coaches have begun asking their players to hold back.

Jameela Wahlgren

Players who once sought out the fumble pile now can only shake their heads. “It’s amazing to look back on it,” said Plummer. “I was a broadcaster for the 49ers for 13 years and I’d go to practices and training camps and I’d watch the drills and hits and I started thinking, “My God, I used to do this. How crazy that was. It’s like you have this ’S’ on your chest and a cape on your back when you’re playing. Fear never once entered into the equation.”

Long-retired NFL veterans describe their fumble psychosis as if they’re lying prone on the analyst’s couch. “Our era featured the sons of coal miners and men who worked in the steel mills. For them, football was bloodsport,” Clinton Jones said. “And when players left the game, they had post-traumatic stress. They had nightmares of the piles and the intensity of the sport, one campaign after another. They remembered all the vicious hits. Deacon Jones was a good friend of mine, and he’d always say, ‘Somebody slams the door and I jump.’”

Deep down in that fumble-pile flashback, desperate men will always be fighting for the football, brutality still being waged. The ball is right there for the taking. The only question that remains: How badly do you want it?

Forever lurking in the deep are delinquents like Lambert, Nitschke, and Butkus. “They were fierce. They loved the fumble scrum,” said Tunney. “That’s all a linebacker cares about. He doesn’t care if he’s having dinner that night. He just wants that ball. If you’re a running back and you fumble, you might make one attempt at the ball, but you wouldn’t be caught dead on the bottom of that pile. You leave that to the big guys.”

By the time he retired in 1973, Butkus had hard-coded trepidation into a generation of NFL veterans, not only for his felonious tackles, but for what he did in the pile, and everywhere else. He broke bones, crushed egos and prompted stretchers to be brought onto the field. NFL Hall of Fame defensive end Deacon Jones said Butkus, “was a well-conditioned animal,” and that “every time he hit you, he tried to put you in the cemetery, not the hospital.”

After both retired, Tunney asked Butkus about his zest for violence. “I

always called him Richard. I asked him, ‘Richard, did you ever intentionally try to hurt somebody?’

“He said, ‘Nah, not unless it was in a game or something.’”

[planar-echoes]

How Many Eyes? (Unknown Plane) By Matt Cavotta (5/17/07)

Muggtoth huffed and winced with each stride. Hs body was not often made to run—even before it was stricken with necrosis. But necrosis was not the cause of his pain, or his flight. Necrosis was his normal, yet unnatural, state of being. The cause of his quickened pace and shortened breaths was altogether not normal.

Normally, Muggtoth avoided dangers. It was what he did. It was all he did. Yet somehow, this day, his eye had failed him.

*****

 "Eyes..." said Vissk to his pupil, pointing to his own, lightly closed. "Eyes are mostly symbolic. They are not what we use to actually see."

"Master?" asked Pinaphet, his own eyes crinkled in confusion.

"Everyone detects things with his eyes, the things that are plainly before him. But the truly wise, the sighted...see beyond the range of our little ivory orbs." Vissk touched lightly his closed eyelids. "We see beyond the mundane material of the now and into," he paused, and opened his eyes wide and bright, "the future."

"But how is it done?" pleaded Pinaphet. "How do I see beyond?"

"In time, young pupil, you will. You will become Magus. I have...seen it."

 *****

 "How could I not see it!" spat Muggtoth, struggling to keep moving. "How did I not see?" With each agonizing step he could feel his body stiffening, his limbs constricting like hairs caught in a tightening knot. With each step he thought of his miserable lot in undeath.

Through some curse unknown to him, Muggtoth was given a second life. Every day of that life was a test of his will, and of his wit. Through his one stained eye Muggtoth would see the pitfall of his own end, and each time he would sidestep it. At first he thought himself gifted, a seer. As time wore on he became bitter, cursed to unending visions of his own demise. He hated to see himself in pain, broken, falling to a second death. He also hated being alive. He hated himself for being a coward. "Face the future, end this misery," he would say to himself just before sidestepping his fear, again.

 *****

 Vissk led his apprentice through the impossible halls of his home. Pinaphet walked as close to his master as propriety would allow. Each turn was a wonder to him, stepping from hallway to ceiling to inverted staircase. They redefined up and down at every turn.

"Are we really walking on the wall, or do your eyes play tricks?" quizzed Vissk.

Pinaphet could hardly spare the concentration to consider the question. His every thought was on not falling off the wall.

"Always assume your eyes play tricks. Eyes are for fools. Eyes see what others aim to show you. My home is this way because I aim to confuse my guests, both wanted and unwanted. I find it makes for entertaining dinner conversation with the former and is effectively paralyzing to the latter. In your case, it makes a fine learning experience.

"Soon you will see through your eyes, not with them. Imagine each of them is a tiny crystal ball. To see truth, look into your eyes. To see trickery, look with your eyes."

 *****

 The poison reached Muggtoth's arm and seized it. His walking staff slipped from his stiffened fingers and clacked upon the rocky ground. Moving would be even more difficult now. His own ineptitude angered him. He had seen countless deadly events and avoided them all. Falling rocks, loosed arrows, hungry beasts of all sorts. But today, he had seen no danger. No dark future that he would cowardly flee. Yet here he was, suffering a slow and agonizing death. "It serves you right, coward!" he blurted at himself. "You should have let an arrow strike, or a baloth take you." These deaths would have been quick and easy.

He felt deserving of this long doom, and of the ironic twist that it would come blindly. In defeat he slumped to the earth, closed his eye, and wept inky blackness. And then he saw it.

 *****

 "One eye in the present and the other in the future? Come now, young Pinaphet, did you pick that up from an old ale-rat at the pub? Words like these are for fools—fools who try to comprehend what is beyond them. The truth, as I have been instructing you, is that eyes are not significant.

"Of course, we are aware of the present. It is a very important time. It is when we process the past and affect the future. But there is no one eye for this or one eye for that. Such words are the gushings of some struggling bard, tossing rhymes for refills.

Let me give you an example. This morning I saw the future, as I often do. I saw it as I read a book about poisonous flowers. What I saw was a dragon, long and lean, very fearsome, swirling within the two eyes that took in the print on the pages. At the very same time, my mind took note of the deadly beauty of both flower and dragon, and recreated an image from my past of an experience I once had with a firebreather. Past, present, future...all at once."

"How were you not confused? Seeing so much at once?"

Vissk chuckled. "Tell me, Pinaphet, are you confused by soup?

"Soup?" Pinaphet's wrinkled brow indicated that he was more confused by this question.

"Yes, soup. You feel its welcoming warmth upon your face as your nose takes in the subtle scent of carrot. The clank of the spoon on the bowl reminds you of your mother, and you remember her. Then the hot spoon and froth touches your lips, and you slurp it in and savor the wonderful marriage of carrot, ginger, and cubal root. All at the same time.

No, Pinaphet, it is not confusing. In fact, it is quite...delicious."

 *****

 There, lying in surrender upon the rocks, Muggtoth saw it: a vision, blue and rippling, of faces in horror and his flesh peeling from his hand before him. Behind the onlookers, towers he knew well.

Muggtoth sat up as quickly as his aching body could. So this pain, this torturous pain would not be his end. With renewed strength, Muggtoth turned eastward and was once again on the move.

 *****

 "It is important for you to note, young one, that everyone can see beyond the now. Well, everyone with the wisdom to do so. What I speak of is the past. The past is your guide in the now. Do what you can now to avoid the pitfalls and recreate the boons of the past.

"Future sight takes wisdom as well. It, too can guide our actions in the present. With it, a Magus can prepare for what is coming. We can affect what will happen before it happens, redirect timelines that have not even begun yet. With a mind on the past, awareness of the present, and visions of the future, a Magus can see...all. All without reliance on an eye."

Pinaphet was wide-eyed and rapt by his master's words. He wanted, more than anything, to see the way his master saw. He fought hard the desire to rush the process, to cut corners and open his ey...to see. But he knew that the process was long and arduous. He saw, in his future, much, much study. But he was curious. "Master," Pinaphet asked sheepishly, "can you show me?"

Vissk knew the question was coming, and had been directing his lecture toward it all along.

"Oh, I think you've had enough to process for today. But, I guess I can show you...something. Go to my study and grab the mortar and pestle on the desk. Take care not to be startled by the mouse that will scurry across the ceiling. I don't want you to spill what's inside."

 *****

 "Where are we going?" asked Pinaphet.

"Into the future," bellowed Vissk with drama and sarcasm. Pinaphet could tell he was not going to get a straight answer, so he just waited quietly until his master continued the lesson. "Fear not, young one, but we are going to see a dragon." Pinaphet stopped abruptly.

"A dragon?"

"Yes. The one I spoke of earlier. A time rift will open not far from here and from it will erupt the worm from the future. This will be a great opportunity for you—to see the future come into the now. Not exactly a 'sighting,' but exciting." The smirk on Vissk's face made it clear that he was pleased with his little rhyme. "The dragon will come out of the rift and let out a great roar. It will not strike immediately. I know, because I have seen it. And I have prepared for it.

"I told you about a dragon I encountered in the past. It should have killed me. I lived by luck alone. Now that I have survived this incident in the past, and researched greatly on the subject, I can, in the now, take actions that will safeguard us in the future. I have readied a possession spell that will put the beast under my control. That way, it can roar all it wants, but it won't hurt you. You can study it at your leisure, sense what the stuff of the future feels like. Then, in time, when you gain the sight, you will recognize the sensation. Then the time rift will close and I will send it back to whenever it came from."

The two walked a while in silence. Vissk wanted to give Pinaphet some time to ponder what was going to happen, to be prepared for the future the way he was. But, for the drama that he fancied so, he also wanted to wait for the right time to speak his next words.

"Pinaphet. Take this mortar and pestle," said Vissk, with the slow and methodical tone he employed to indicate the importance of his words.

"What is it.?"

"It is antidote for the poison of Viperwick pollen," replied the magus nonchalantly.

Pinaphet was about to speak when he was interrupted by shuffling and snorting in the thicket to their right. Out of the brambles stumbled Muggtoth. At the sight of the two men, the cyclops collapsed, groaning, upon the grassy ground.

"Don't worry, he's too sick to harm you," said Vissk. "Feed him some of the mixture in the mortar."

Pinaphet stood a moment, amazed at his master's power. He really could "see all." Vissk took a moment to let Pinaphet grasp what had just transpired. Then, after a self-congratulatory smile, Vissk barked out, "Pinaphet! The antidote. Be quick—the real lesson is about to begin."

The apprentice quickly shuffled over to the hulking creature and reached out with the goo-covered pestle. The cyclops opened its bony mouth slowly and took the antidote.

Muggtoth felt the poison, and the pain it caused, recede. His muscles limbered and his clouded vision cleared. He stood, and saw two men standing before him. They were talking to each other, but he could hardly hear them. They paid him no mind at all. He recognized the faces, but not their expressions. He recognized the towers in the distance, but something was different. He was too groggy to try and figure it out, or to move.

"Preparation, Pinaphet. It is what we do with our knowledge of the future. Now leave the creature," said Vissk, pointing out into the glen, "and have a look out here. Just seconds before the air turned cold, seconds before a sharp thunder pierced the quiet, Vissk boldly announced, "The rift. It opens."

Muggtoth saw the men grow wide-eyed as they were bathed in blue light. He heard his own voice speak softly in his mind, "It is here." He closed his eye and threw his arms wide.

Beyond the broad silhouette of the cyclops, Vissk and Pinaphet saw a bright blue line slice across the glen like a blade through a whaleskin. The thin now tore and split wide, releasing a blue glow and a shadow from the future.

"Worry not, Pinaphet," barks Vissk, "I have seen this. I have seen." The wavering shadow lurched forward, piercing the light, and took form. "It is the dragon, the dragon of my vision," said Vissk. The beast looked around at the unfamiliar landscape and at those standing before him.

"You stand?" bellowed the dragon. "Before Ugin?"

Vissk turned calmly to instruct his pupil. "The roar," said Vissk, as he readied his spell. "The roar is next." The face of the great worm contorted. It reared back and drew a long gulp of air. Pinaphet stood paralyzed with fear. To calm his apprentice, and display his control over the now, Vissk continued to announce what would happen next. "I will now..." The beast snapped forward with its jaws open. The air rippled and a blackened line was torched from the dragon's maw across the ground, through the Cyclops, to the men, and beyond. Both cyclops and human saw nothing, their five melted eyes tumbling down their blackened, fleshless faces. But they felt it, the moment of utter hell as their existence both inside and out was boiled away. Vissk burned out in anger, wondering "How, how did I not see," while Muggtoth burned out in peace, thankful for the end.

[r-29-blog]

A short gait

It’s Friday afternoon. My eyes gleam in the summer sunlight. It shakes me, tearing off my shirt

  Graceful gaits gaily walk down the crooked road; a gait of laughter strolls down the crooked road. As my sight remains fixed in the distance, I see the vibrant lights emanating from the insides of manufactured bliss. It shines so brightly through its transparent, glass windows. I see it gleaming in the distance as it slaps me in the face with its own incantation of laughter. It roars and howls to the tune of blues and microhouse, a hyper-minimalistic amalgamation of oppression and monotony. There, among the breeze, it subtly interlocks its fragile pale hands onto the spiked gloves of my head. Strings in the background begin to take place. I let the movement flow through my ears, upwards and toward the stimuli ridding itself of studs and dust.

           In the far distance, no longer than a short half-minute strut, I see the transparent barrier barring me from my destination. I make two strides closer and realize that it does not do anything but remain in front of myself. I make another two steps—this time without losing that lost third. Here, and among myself, I see the steps I once lost, remembering the instances in which my hair, with its rocks and steps flowing in the sky, eating its own carcasses and smiling along the way, grew. A dazzling three rattlesnakes long, with its slimy tips and steering-wheel eyes, the tips of my wavy mahogany locks reach upward my nipple. It is so soft and yet so malice with its gentle presence perfectly concurrent with the breast it lay upon. Shrieking, noting the moments that pass—one, two…two….two—, and realizing the ineptitude that surrounds me, I begin to think.

           To my left, resembling a monstrous white devil, a body continues its mechanical struts, dressed in mismatched colors, patterns clashing, the large sign of their logo shirt nearly repulses me more than the giant word that fills their chest. It shines brighter than the entire shirt, where eventually no shirt could actually be seen. Instantly, the shirt disappeared, leaving behind only the luminous language with its accented serif finishes carefully embracing the empty presence it harbors along with a calloused thumb attempting to subdue its naked kin. I chuckled to myself, realizing that the image that I had just described was nothing more than a pure hoax, a trick to play on you—my dear reader—an empty gasp that shrieks in your ears and erupts into laughter brief moments following your death. I dance on your grave for you are dead! Good day, good bye, no longer am I compelled to appease your pathetic existence. No longer do I have to live and hope that your wretched mouth gasps for its final breaths, “Help! Please do not do this to me. I have done nothing wrong. My son…He is no longer with me and I cannot do anything but make sure that he has his lunch in the morning. Kind stranger, would you not be so helpful as to give my son and her crimson red suitcase a ride to the airport. She is going home tomorrow afternoon, but he will lack the time that is absolutely needed for orientating themselves in the sky.” At last, with this final breath—one, that I may add, can only take more than a few seconds— you scream: Mon-SURE Koo-rtz, il VEE-re.

           I momentarily stopped. Before the end of this sentence the person will have continued walking forward, gaily strutting while whistling the tune of Kant’s third critique, and, at last, cross me so that I may continue toward my destination. There it is, the light that comes from the distance and crosses my sight and figures itself around the chilling days and the chilling nights. I hear a knife cutting cheese and garlic, the smoky scent of lemon chicken sautéing on a small portable stove—and let me tell you, I purchased this contraption for only sixty dollars on amazon.com. It’s refurbished, but who isn’t these days?

           Tangents seem to keep bringing me away from the actual point that I am attempting to make. However, now that I am done thinking, I will no longer be incoherent. My eyes will look forward, sternly march toward the distant fluorescent light, and ensure that we traverse the short space marking the threshold between my body and the concrete monolith. There—there—here—air—I wait. I see a light blinking. It is a red hand ordering me: HALT. It stares at me and continues blinking. I stare at it back realizing that the abyss that surrounds it is covered by “SKATE OR DIE” stickers. I scoff. Only then do I realize that it is I who stares back at the individual staring at the abyss. I have become the abyss and the nuisance it has caused various street-dwellers. The sanguine hate…halt symbol has stopped blinking. I stare and now a slim white palm faces me. I remember the instances of friends who carried bags with an open palm, its finger closely attached to one another, bearing a single dark eye in its center. It stared at me and I remembered a time even further behind, a time in which was not quite new to me as it happened in a time quite distant from here. Although, at this point, I am quite unsure as to exact direction this distance occupied. Was it left? Or up? Or possibly to the side? I could no longer tell.

           The large axe oscillates until a large cannon falls from the sky, its rigid dance with gravity, shooting as its descent further descends toward the dirty dirt that I stand upon. At last, the demons to my left, with their monumental size and inept control seem, and it is only this choice of words, to finally come to a complete stop. Allowed to continue, I cross the scorching hot earth and I feel the blazing red sun stab me with its pricked fingers, unshaven for no less than thirty-three days. Here, at last, I could finally see the very light that separated me and the object of my desire. I saw it. It looked at me. I saw the light that came between us. I moved forward, passing the signs that suggested that all of its interior organs—and do not forget its esophagus—were made in the U.S.A.

           Fuck the skies that turn bright as I valiantly march past the concrete painted lines under my feet. They walk further and faster and see how the other timid feet around me do nothing but gawk. They are squeamishly walking while thinking about jolly mundanity. They stand there, walking without motion and without thought. How is it that they can do so much, and manage to remain all the same, without thinking and wanting what it is that they are? The gleaming lights still emanate from the transparent glass. It is a window into my soul. My father used to tell me that eyes were the window into another’s soul. Too bad I did not have a father; he was castrated the moment I was born. I castrated him.

It was a glorious event. I remember distinctly seeing his face full of anguish followed by his butterfly screams. He pleaded for assistance, asking me to help him and to eradicate the pain. I stood there with his freshly cut testicles in my left hand and, in my right, I held the dull machete that I slit his balls with. Its sharp edges, now covered with a glorious halting glow, were no longer visible. He continued crying and begging for mercy. I continued standing there. I looked into his eyes and tried to find his soul. Alas, all I saw were the empty signs saying that he, too, was made in the U.S.A.

           After this sudden and quite anticlimactic realization I looked down at his bleeding groin, a gateway back into the same myth I was destined to fulfill. This thought enraged me. I did the only thing I could do at that point. I approached him. I embraced him and thanked him for all of the help he had hitherto provided me. He was always there, a positive paternal figure ensuring that I continued to abide by rigorous masculine standards, ensuring that his image would be reproduced so that I could carry on this inept last name. The shark teeth, now visible and still doused in an ornamental crimson, called me to do it. I sat there thinking of the conversations I would have with my interiority, only to realize that it would do nothing but fuel the additional anger I felt. So I lifted up my machete and with one small swipe I severed my father’s head. And the moment that my little tiny butter knife managed to separate a tablespoon of butter, his head began falling down toward the cement-colored floor.

           This severed head—although I cannot think that a head would retain its figure if it is no longer membered—rolled across the ossified gum and bits of crumbs. Eventually it managed to reach the pigeon a few miles to my right. With another short swoop, I picked up his head and stared into its now white eyes. Once again I tried to see if I could see his soul. I looked in, and after a few seconds, in its periphery, I saw it glow. I began panicking, regretting these actions and not wanting them to have occurred. I was on the verge of tears since I realized that I had fulfilled this carnal, oedipal destiny. I was troubled by the emptiness that filled me and the means by which I had killed the only one who was willing to push me forward into normalcy.

           My eyes blinked. I continue past the transparent windows, seeing the boxes bearing logos and homes. This place was going out of business, a fate suffered by so many others. Alas, what was I to do? I continued my gay gait down the feces-covered path, whistling the tunes of Tina Turner and Miles Davis, two prominent myths. I look down and my father’s head now in my right hand, with each of his testicles now in his eyes. My father always had piss-poor vision. His mouth suddenly opened. He began speaking to me: my child, you have forsaken me; you have disturbed order; you will no longer survive; you will no longer exist; Just remember this day; you will never bear the same pain as I do today. It is not in vain for I enjoy you as you enjoy cloudy skies. Following this bizarre sight and after the lips no longer gave words, I chuckled. Suddenly the chuckle grew, growing at an exponential rate, and it became a roar in less than three seconds. I raised the head, still in my left hand, up to my perfectly membered body, locked eyes with this Acephale-like head, and looked once more for the soul. After an hour, I looked for that small luminosity I once encountered, only to be immensely disappointed. I should mention that I did not stop laughing, or rather roaring this entire time. His lips began to move once more, but they did not create a sound. So I spoke for him: you are not my father, you never were. We lied to you and now your home is destroyed. So be free and become one with the earth, no longer needing to trouble me with your inane quotes. I threw his head back into the sea that I crossed, and rapid sharks shortly came, devouring this putrid skull.

           After this vexatious debacle, the headless body finally arose, professed its immense gratitude, and then proceeded to join me for a stroll.

             The chilling evening air whispered in my ears while the radiating lights, much like lighthouses, flashed in front of my face as I walked past storefronts and shoes. The eyes that stare and see me here only say hello to each other. They laugh. They gawk. They eat their processed meats and beans in-between diced spices folded together in a grand concoction of grand doctrine of American consumerism. How tragic that they pay so much for what, three hundred miles south, consider to be peasant food. Truly, when the wall arises, where will they be able to find a meal without spice? Oh well. I keep walking past the various storefront windows. On my left, there’s a restaurant that sells Mexican food. It’s a chain restaurant that is often considered to be healthy despite its past dealings with the largest and unhealthiest food conglomerate in the fast-food industry. “But you really have to love it,” I hear a voice say. I chuckle to myself realizing the irony in their statement. It is unite interesting knowing that others themselves can willingly transform an object and do so in such a short period of time. Yet, why should this even matter? Time is such an important thing for us, and yet we cannot seem to ever do without it. We are not slaves to capitalism! No we are slaves to time! Although who could ever tell the difference?

           While I kept walking forward, right in the middle of two different street corners, I begin to notice the vacancies. There were three glasses bearing ‘For Lease’ signs. I walked as I saw my reflection follow me as I traversed the road. It followed me and kept me company, for I was quite the recluse. I sat there looking inward, not just into the paper-covered windows, but also into my own mind. There, I saw the glass-windows lined with brown paper with three separate signs evenly separated from one another. They all bore the same message: FOR SALE. What did it mean? What was this sign trying to convey to me? Was it selling itself? How could it? It could not simply stand upright, shake my hand and say “DEAR FRIEND, how lovely you look, how amazing the wind blows alongside my hair. How I wish to sell myself to, allowing you to do all as you please to.” Immediately after, the building turns around, and begins running toward the snow-covered hills. As they move closer to the cliff’s apex, he suddenly stops and yells back “FOR SALE.”

           I walk past this first sign and I notice the second sign, a twin to the former. This one does not look back at me. It just stares into the nothingness that surrounds me. After making prolonged contact with this strange sign, it gets up, moves to the side and covers its sibling. It says: WHY CAN YOU NOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOU AND I? I was stunned. I stopped walking. I kept glaring at the brown-paper lined glass window with its signs, one sign now over the other. Imagine selling crack out of your grandmother’s room. It is truly a sight and a thought, one that seems nearly impossible but yet all too real. It is the reality in which some of exist. Those of us who often lose ourselves to the system. Or rather, are lost to the system. For how does anyone end up in such a wretched position, constantly subject to violence, discrimination, and instability without it being necessitated. There are often instances of tractors of time who merely mow lawns. These were the same lawns owned by the slave-masters. The slave-masters always ensured that their thoughts were cut nice and short, tailored to match everyone else in the community neighborhood. After all, they did not want to receive a citation for an unkempt lawn.  

           The last sign did not bear anything but a number combination: 930-293-7381.

[abluehappyface]

As an add-on, if any of my close mutuals wanted to give me some sort of method of contact, wether that be a phone number, email address, or otherwise, now would be the time to do it. In the event that tumblr does crash, I'll try to contact you based on what you've given me. It should be noted that I don't use discord, nor am I ever going to, but almost everything else is fair game.

In the event that the rumors of cheating aren't enough, and things are really going to be like this, consider this a warning. The censorship that may unfold because of this has prompted me to attempt to figure out to download a blog and... leave. I don't plan on leaving right away, but in the event that I have to just know that I loved you. The mutuals I talked to every day, the mutuals I saw only once a year, the ones I shared fandoms with, and the ones I didn't. I loved all of you. In the event that I'm forced to flee this hellsite of a home and I never see you again, know that I loved you. Know that I will think of you. Know that your life has made a positive impact on me. I wouldn't be the person I am now without this place and without you. Know that I'll miss you. I will never forget you. In the event that this blog becomes inactive, promise me you won't miss me because I'm gone, but because of all the happy memories we created. I'm not going to leave this site right now, but don't be surprised if I do. If I leave it is an act of self preservation. In the event this is goodbye, I truly hope we somehow meet again.

-Bluey