Insanity! Dreams! Existentialist Metaphors! Oh my!

NaNoWriMo excerpt no one's interested in, because you know who's a lazy blogger?

Taylor is!

Here. It is from this book. Context? First off, Mortimer is dreaming. Secondly, he is a member of a polytheistic society that worships a god named Lopt. Thirdly, he is trapped in a five minute long hallway that has a door that will not open on one end and a portrait of his lord at the other.

The time passed slowly.

Mortimer sang to himself. He babbled, lightly and easily, to his god, how he was sure he would find a way home, positive, he would find his star, he would go back to Richard and his parents and his job. He ran verses from the Law Books through his head like they were songs. He hummed hymns.

He muted the ravenous silence as best he could.

“My stomach hurts.

“From what?

“I don’t know. It’s. I don’t know. I feel sick. Lord, I feel sick.

“There has to be a bathroom around here.

“But I don’t want to throw up.

“It sounds like you need to.

“No, no, I just need to get out of here. I just need to go back to that door.”

Mortimer hesitated. “I’m fine here. We’re fine. It’s okay. Someone will come. Someone always comes. They’ll know what to do.

“I have to go back to the door.

“I have to stay here. It’s safe here. He’s here.” Mortimer nodded to the painting.

“I don’t know.” Mortimer wrapped his arms around his middle. “I don’t know.”

“There’s nothing back there for you.

“There’s a way out.

“There’s no way out.

“There has to be.

“You were there. You saw. The door wouldn’t open.

“We can make it open. We can break the hinges. We can break it down.

“We’re staying here, where it’s safe.

Mortimer looked anxiously over his shoulder.

“You’re right. It’s safe here. We’ll stay here.” Mortimer sank to the floor, leaned against the wall. “We’ll stay right here until someone comes to get us.”

Mortimer supposed he was there for years. Decades. Lifetimes and eons slicked past him.

Alone with his fear and trembling, Mortimer remained, his back to the door at the other end of the hall and the starlit room.

Another Jaunt Into Philosophy

Quickly and off topic: It's NaNoWriMo! This is my account! You are totally free to creepily, randomly buddy me.

Now, philosophy.

I'm going to let you in on a big, cosmic secret that the rest of the universe has woefully deprived humanity of, like we're the tremendously awkward kid in second grade whom they giggled at when our back was turned. Prepare yourself for this one.

Materialism is oblivion.

I'm not talking the end of the world fireworks show, which can be anything between Earth collapsing in on itself or masochistic, exceedingly grumpy horsemen romping through the burning ruin of civilization, depending upon what belief and degree of logic you subscribe to. This is so much worse, and significantly less dramatic.

This is an oblivion that comes upon you quietly, and it festers, and it decays. We call this rot rot the American dream, and it feeds and thrives upon the mind. The little bastard will drill through your creativity, will devour ingenuity like a serpent will a mouse.

Trust me, you won't feel a thing.

This is how it works.

You spend the formative years of your unfortunate life learning the mechanics of the world. You're not born with materialism; no one is. It's not even a smudge on your tiny baby brain. It is here, in the years of the purest form of discovery you will ever know--and gradually forget--that it begins to creep upon you. Next to "no," this is the earliest concept your loving parents or siblings will force down your throat: "mine."

You will come to love this word like you will never love another human being.

Mine is rational self-interest, desires, greed. Mine will become gluttonous as the mind atrophies.

You will spend your adult life accumulating things and debt, until at last, somewhere in the future, an older you with more wrinkles and a metastasis-inclined pancreas will own a house, a car, retirement money. Everything you've ever wanted will be yours.

You will become acutely, uncomfortably aware that now, you don't know what to do with yourself. The mind stutters and goes still.

You'll die, eventually, leaving behind a proud legacy of stuff that will not matter some three or three hundred years from now, that your kids will shovel out to the nearest Goodwill, on the double. It's no coincidence that "stuff" is synonymous with "shit."

If you're lucky, there might be a heaven, and St. Peter won't fancy you too unscrupulous to turn you away. Kurt Vonnegut, in his God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, calls it rightly: This heaven we've imagined of eternal peace will be soul-crushingly boring. After all, you were perfectly content to waste life. Why wouldn't you waste the afterlife?

Don't feel bad. It happens to the best of us.

Mine causes this. Materialism, capitalism, the entire logical fallacy of a system climaxes in an incredible disappointment: the death of creativity.

But why?

The first thing rational self-interest, an inevitable byproduct of materialism, accomplishes is the destruction of your empathy for others. This is a crucial component of humanity, the conscience, our instinctual and initial driving force. Rational self-interest corners it in a dark alley, shoves it in an unmarked car, and speeds away.

When you lose your conscience, you absolutely lose the ability to see the world beyond yourself. This is how fantastic lawyers are made. This is where business happens. When your goal is your own comfort, interaction with the people around you, particularly at an intellectual level, ceases. The singular goal of more, more, more stifles the conflict necessary for innovation. Mine lords over the individual, until they can't notice that they've stopped thinking, imagining, dreaming.

This is the oblivion we are swiftly, happily approaching. The end of ideas. If the writers of the 1920s, old Ernie and the rest, were the Last Generation, then we are surely the Lost. Mired in greed, killing ourselves as slowly and accidentally as carbon monoxide poisoning.

If nothing changes soon, then are are as good as dead.

I Am A Big Wuss

I'm awesome at acting tough. I have a curt, witty remark for everything. I have mastered the dispassionate smirk. I am emotionally removed from most people and situations*.

But, fuck me if I don't invest everything I've got into scary movies.

I love those raging dumbass main characters who go lurching around in the dark, who think it's a great idea to start some good old fashioned procreating in that abandoned shack with the serial killer, who scream at inopportune moments, who seemed to be off drooling and scratching themselves when The Big Guy was handing out common sense.

Most of those movies, regardless of how fundamentally ridiculous they may seem, I love the characters like I'll never love another human being.

But that's a bit of a silly thing to do, so I try to hide it. Which I'm also embarrassingly bad at.

The Boys have taken notice. The Boys are Boyfriend and Tanner, Boyfriend's broski and my verygood friend.

Boyfriend and I are on an unending quest to find a horror movie that scares us both quite shitless. We have been thus far unsuccessful, which I maintain is because I let Boyfriend pick the movies so far, and he mistakes violent for scary. But, to be on topic: We have had multiple scary movie nights because of this.

One of these was with The Boys, and, because Boyfriend demanded it, we rented The Hills Have Eyes (the remake, for you connoisseurs out there; yes, yes, declaim me as an infidel, we wanted the remake). We formed a cuddle pile at Boyfriend's house, me snuggled next to Boyfriend, Tanner with his head on my chest. I was properly laughing along with them, making fun of the movie, pretending that I wasn't Freaked the Hell Out because there were dogs and babies being hurt and it was anxious-making.

Boyfriend: Oh, come on.

Me: That was ridiculous.

Tanner: Do not even. You're so into it.

Me: What, no.

Tanner: Your heart is racing. I can HEAR it.

Boyfriend: I want to hear!

Me: No stop I'm fine watch the movie.

Tanner: You're scaaaared.

Me: WATCH THE MOVIE.

Thus commenced another hour of Tanner going "Taylor's scared :)" at every mildly extremely tense part, and Boyfriend mockery, and.

I don't even want to talk about when we watched The Last Exorcism this week, which is corny and I know it, and I kept clinging to Boyfriend. And he smirked and asked if I was scared. And I shushed him appropriately.

There, now you know.

*Unless there are puppies or people crying. Then I'm a mess.

Look My Face

I'm doing a vlog with two of my friends. It's not particularly good.

Here, my face. Twice. Because I've been doing this like two weeks and forgot to tell you.

and

You tube gives me just the prettiest screencaps.

Anyway, channel's name is vaguelyinappropriate. I post on Mondays. Watch. Appreciate.

Unreasonably Disturbed

I had a nightmare.

I've been awake from it for the past half hour, maybe forty-five minutes, and I am saying farewell to any hope of a decent night's sleep tonight.

You know the kind of nightmare, where you're afraid to listen too hard to the dark, or to go back to sleep, or even to turn on the lights and see what's here?

It's that kind.

I've got a startlingly good awareness of dream time. I know when I've been asleep for a while, how long it's taken for a dream to truly go underway, when exactly my conscious mind was stilled and my subconscious took over.

This dream, my subconscious never showed itself.

This nightmare came upon me like a storm. It plodded, gathered, and came upon me climaxed violently, without warning.

I heard howling in the house. A death howl, a winter wind curse, these terrible and inhuman screams, jerking sobs of a woman who is not my mother hunting my sister. Where is she, where is she, give her back to me.

I am terrified of her.

I'm afraid of what she did to my family to convince them that she is my mother.

I'm afraid of what she'll do to me.

I'm afraid of the telltale footsteps in the hall beyond my door.

A Sign of Life and Some Vonnegut

Hi! I'm alive and well!

No real time to make a decent post today, but I come bearing a lovely Kurt Vonnegut quote that is all at once a compliment, a call to arms, an insult, and undeniably Vonnegut.

The excerpt comes from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. At this point, one of the main characters, Mr. Eliot Rosewater, is speaking (drunkenly) to a convention of science fiction writers.

"'I love you sons of bitches,' Eliot said in Milford. 'You're all I read any more. You're the only ones who'll talk about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that'll last for billions of years. You're the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, and catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billions years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.'

***

Eliot admitted later that science-fiction writers couldn't write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn't matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well. 'The hell with the talented sparrowfarts who write delicately of one small piece of one mere lifetime, when the issues are galaxies, eons, and trillions of souls yet to be born.'"

I'll leave you to contemplate the implications here.

Me and My Near-Death Experience

Yesterday, after my boyfriend, Max, and I went swimming, I almost died, and Max didn't care.

We live on a lake. It's this pocket of water beside a downtown with overpriced shops, an underwhelming resort, a park that is good to play in after dark, and tourist things like a boardwalk and large walking hill.

Our story begins on that hill.

Nuzzled safely between downtown and lakeside, this is the saddest little hill you ever did see. Carved with trails official and improvised, punctuated by trees and, toward the top of the hill, the occasional house, the only good this hill has ever served, for me, is a place to swim in the summer that is far removed from The Tourists. The Tourists never venture away from the main trail, down to the fringes of this hill, where rocks and sand give way to water, and you can find perfect little beaches and diving rocks.

One of our usual swimming places is a west-facing rock just large for two people to lie down on it beside each other. Nestled against a sheer rock face, the only way to get down to this slab is by following a spiral staircase of smaller boulders from the crest of the hill.

Max calls it the skinny dipping rock for reasons I trust you can infer; I call it the Beatles rock, because someone's gone and carved ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE on the wall behind it.

We were returning to the main trail from this rock, which involved Max giving me a lift up because I'm a little weak lady writer person, who is short and ginger and awkward. With his help, I scrambled up to higher ground, brushing a large spider web in the process.

You need to understand something, here: I am deathly afraid of spiders.

You can imagine my reaction when, with spider web clinging to my fingers and palm, I felt something crawling on my arm.

I swiped at the kamikaze insect, desperately, managed not to scream. and felt a sharp, staccato stab, like a fountain pen nib boring into the flesh of my ring finger.

I stared at my hand. An island of small, needly white floated in the angry pink sea of the rest of my finger.

"Max. Oh my god. Max."

"What? What's wrong?"

"A SPIDER BIT ME."

"Where? Let me see."

"Look, see, my finger, spider, bit, hurts."

Max studied my finger. "I think you're okay."

"It is TINGLING."

"Shh. You're going to be just fine. I don't think you got a spider bite."

"Yes I did." I tried to suck the spider venom out of my flesh. "I'm going to die. Or get rabies."

"If you got rabies, by the time you know it, it'll be at the point of being fatal. So, realistically, you're going to die either way."

"THERE IS TINGLING IN MY INDEX FINGER NOW."

Max held my injured hand in his to get me to stop worrying at it. "I was gushing blood earlier this week and didn't even complain this much." Max brightly and neatly changed the subject. "Hey, you know how they test for rabies?"

"No."

"They drill into your head and scrape away part of your brain."

I didn't say anything.

"Bzzzzzzzzzz," Max said, in his approximation of what a drill bit must sound like when burrowing into the human skull.

"I hope you know that, if I die, I'm going to be really upset at you."

"Bzzzzzzzzzzzz."

"I'm serious."

"Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz."

"There are puncture wounds, see?"

"I don't see any."

I held my hand closer to his face. "Right there."

"There's only one, Taylor."

"Then it was clearly a spider with one tooth. That's not the point."

Max reclaimed my hand, told me once again that I was fine, and we continued back to my car with a minimal amount of bitching and bzzzzzzing.

It was not until later that someone pointed out to me, intelligently, that I had probably been stung by a bee.