#just making shit up to delude themselves it’s so wild to me actually | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

chiyoso · 7 months

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original pin

hi pookie. to those who read this the first time, welcome back, this is a re-write. an update. i kinda found the initial update i did rushed, not clearly descriptive of my situation outside this writing hobby of mine. also for the ones that i tagged, i have notes for you <3 (sorry for the tag 🫶🏻)

alright. hello hello. i'm chiyo, a jjk-focused/sporadic genshin and hsr fanfic writer, and you've caught me, and this blog in such bad time, and im so, so very fucking burnt out.

writing for me should be fun, stress relieving, and that goes for any other hobby i have. i have been told and supported countless of times to take a rest, to take a break from this, but my stubborn ass continues to try and get something out, anything to keep my blog alive, hells, it feels like a toxic relationship where i keep coming back, because i remember all the fun, happy and fond times i had in this app, only then to return to why it becomes draining, exhausting.

just sat there, occasionally laid on my back, using my phone, but with unmoving thumbs, with a brain lacking the world that needs the narrative to make a story, fuck, where has it gone?

that innocent, startup of mine, the newfound love and interest for that world of fiction that you all create. dude, i remember being so happy discovering that this brain of mine can conjure up so many shit, all because of your words, it's fucking amazing. hence, the start of the era of my honkai star rail writing journey. (hsr/hi3rd fans who followed me, i let you down with my jujutsu kaisen brainrot obsession im sorry lmao)

“take a break hira,” “take a break chiyo,” “please, take a break.”

i've heard it all, and with utmost love and respect, thank you.

thank you for everything, every word, every action, and every peep of interest you all had for me. small and big creators, who, stopped by because of my small percent chance drop in on their feed, because of the stories i created that you shared, i've met so many wonderful, inspring and motivating people in tumblr, fuck, i didn't expect to crrate a little community all by myself, with my grit alone, it's so rewarding for someone who strives for perfection, for someone who struggles with her mental health daily, for someone who deluded themselves in a world of fiction, I can't express my genuine gratitude enough.

i'm not quitting. maybe i should've mentionrd that earlier to prevent you from getting rattled, but continuing off, i don't find myself quitting this writing journey, maybe i'm just not in the right mental headspace for it at this time. damn, my ex really fucked me up LMAO.

right, i'm aware of the less and lessening interactions i've had with the people i've encountered throughout tumblr, i feel sick of myself for not being able to catch up, nor interact with any of you as much as i could anymore, it really, really fucking sucks, i hate it, i hate it, i do.

i still have leftover projects to go over and publish, because i still want MY ideas, MY thoughts, MY worlds of fictional prowess to all of you. i'm not done, but i will say, that i'm- i'm so incredibly, so very sorry to the ones that were highly, to the heavens, expecting greatness from me, to the ones who were anticipating my unfinished stories, fuck, there's so much to do, yet my body, my mind, they do not respond, as if i'm losing my sense of time, literally.

all i can say to those sticking with me because of their plain interest for me, i wish, i pray, i'll beg, beg for me, my soul, my mind, my body, my spirit to heal, and heal faster, so i can love you all at my 100%, not with my trying 20%, and lower.

thank you. to the old, and to the recent supporters that got me to 3k followers and counting, fuckin' wild. actually insane.

i'll continue to write. i'll continue to create. i don't want to quit.

i don't want to leave the only thing that gave me freedom, and the genuine happiness the first time, making me discover shit about myself, and there's that.

p.s. apologies for my jjk brainrot everyone who followed for genshin and hsr <3 also that one popular otome game, love & deepspace? yeah, that shit's also fucking me up so good.

HONORABLE MENTIONS: (lawd i feel bad for tagging)

@ainescribe @wanderingconstellations @teapartyspilled @v3lv3tf0x @ciarchivez ⸻ you fucking OGS. literally five pillars of my life, the cheerleaders, my absolute undying support of this blog, you saw me at my noob tumblr handling form, the lows, the highs, and the absolute peaks, i consider all of you special, i do, you all made tumblr and the writing community such a fun place for me. thank you, thank you, i just can't spam that voiceline enough.

@peachdues @screampied @chuluoyi @blkkizzat @jabamin @flametrashira @meowzfordayz ⸻ you superstar mutuals of mine. we've only interacted sporadically, PLEASE BLAME MY BURNOUT AND COLLEGE SCHEDULE FOR THAT, but all of you invoked so much burning hope, and motivation for me through your stories, AND your interests for me, whether it'd be something about my themes, edits, stories, it doesn't matter, you all took interest in lil' ol me, despite what, being such big content creators? FUCK??? that's insane. thank you.

god, i seriously wish my schedule would just clear up by a fuckton, and then again, i was the one who took psychology and performing arts 💤 i hope, hope HOPE i get to interact with you all again once i take a leave/break from college.

⸻ with all my love, chiyo.

#real shit i think i just need dick #that or a love so overwhelming from a person that theyll die for me cos id do the same

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saltyxtides · 2 years

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ROWAN DELACOUR.

How long did it have to last? That was the point of his question. She was acting like it was no big deal to switch back with all her options. If that was so then why worry about all this? She was making a big deal out of nothing. She was acting like all this was so long term when one of the options was a double switch. That meant switch before visiting day and just do all this basically soon… basically now. This was all fucking dramatics for nothing the way Bayden saw it. She was making a mountain out of molehill about her power. Lose shit. blah blah. If she loses half. She wouldn’t know it because it’s lost. It was a very get over yourself and own it sort of power the way Bayden saw it.

“This conversation is getting old. You’re repeating the same shit and going round in circles and not actually saying anything new or explaining anything of relevance or answering anything I actually asked.”

“Put it out there? Why would I want to harm my sister?”

BRowan shook their head.

“Are you under some sort of deluded idea I want to hurt my sister? You know what? Fuck you. Just… fuck you. All you do is complain. I’m sick of it. I hate all this negative shit. Your ideas are weirding me out. You’re going to fuck up my family. Get us switched back right now. You’re going to ruin my life because you’re an idiot and have no sense of fun in doing this at all what so ever. I’ll never be able to enjoy being you for a second because you’re going to suck at this Freaky Friday game. You’re big fucking fun sucker and you’re the worst witch I’ve ever met. Way worse than my sister. At least she knows how to have fun sometimes. You suck. Fuck losing anything.”

Then they slammed their shoestring burger down on the table and hopped up from their seat jumped into their lap and started hugging them all over again trying to make the magic switch happen again mashing their cheeks all up against the others. Moosh moosh moosh. Invade of personal space. Zero warning. Collide. Big time

THAT’S not, , , exactly what they said. Clearly they were recognizing that this wasn’t working. They needed a different angle. The signs where clearly there, It’s just harder to grasp in Bayden’s body. They pressed there lips tightly together. Deep down they didn’t want to push Bayden away, even when it would make things so much easier for themselves right now. Abruptly, they kept losing there grip on anger in Baydens body. Hurt too.

Yet Bayden’s words fell into the silence, sending a ripple of pain within them. They just couldn’t do this right now. It just felt like a knife to there chest. It’s way to fucking much for them. It burned every time they breathed, losing there grip convulsively. Muscles swelling under Bayden’s skin. The whitening of Bayden’s fingers digging into clenched fists. As they fought there anger. It’s worse they tend to see things that weren’t there. Flash after flash, image after image of metal && glass that weren’t there in the corner of there vision. They came faster now. In wild, dizzying successions. Ripples && colors appeared in reflective surfaces. As saying anything more just felt useless to the situation.

They couldn’t think anymore, let alone breath — oh no, they thought, trying in vain to move, && get on there feet before Bayden in Rowan’s body rushed over, jumping on there lap. While all they could hear was the AOL ( Sign On - Dial Up ) screeching in there head, pain vibrating in places they didn’t even know could hurt, feeling there head would split open any moment. Breathing hard as the nausea && dizziness came back with a counter-blow. Closing there eyes trying to decide what to do!

Nothing happened.

Of course nothing happened they already knew that from the moment they walked away from them earlier.

Seconds passed as it wasn’t that easy in Bayden’s body yet. Placing one of there hands on the back of Rowan’s head, they’d pivot, turning Rowan’s body flat on there back. Taking Rowan’s arms off Bayden’s body carefully without hurting them, as they took the opportunity to stand on there own two feet, not sure what to do anymore.

They took the opportunity to storm there way into the bathroom, && slam the door behind them. A soft CLICK. It was l o c k e d behind them.

Twisting the knob on the sink, it allowed the water to cascade out of the faucet as they rested there hands on either side of the sink && used it to support there weight. && like that, for a moment, they remained still, drenched in sweat && feeling ill that they had no energy to push themselves anymore. Drowning out any sound for a moment if any came from behind the door.

They took this moment to catch there breath. Catch there thought. TRY to o r g a n i z e themselves what to do && most of all control there anger. It was starting to get the better of them. Avoiding looking in the mirror’s reflection as they cleaned themselves off, but sensing there was a giant eye staring right at them. So close. Having that look: WHAT ARE YOU going to d o? If only it was actually there, then they’d just poke it where it hurts!

Instead they began to pace back && forth in that small space. Agitated. Angry. Hurt. It was a lot easier to guard themselves in the other body then it was in this one. It felt like lashes ripping at the skin, && there mind was to scattered. Disorganized. Having left the water running they quickly washed the sweat off there face, running there fingers through Bayden’s hair. FInding some towel to clean themselves off before they UNLOCKED && o p e n e d the door.

As they opened there mouth to say something, they just let anger take control. Invading Bayden’s personal space. Storming over to Bayden who was in Rowan’s body as they pinned them to the nearest wall a little more roughly then they liked. With that same zero warning they kissed them. It was the gentlest, the lightest of touches. That lasted only in a couple of seconds before they pulled away.

Fuck — they thought with nightmare calmness. Slowly there hands came off them as if they realized what they done, as they walked backwards creating space between them. “I don’t get what the FUCK is going on anymore. What the issues are anymore.”

“How many times do i have to say it? I care about you, && since I care about you, the last thing I want is to go about destroying your program, or go about r u i n i n g your relationships with your FAMILY. That’s the last thing i want to do!” Saying the first things that came to mind.

“&& stop painting your sister in a shitty narrative! END of d i s c u s s i o n. We are DONE t a l k i n g about your sister tonight. We are not mentally stable enough to even handle it!” As true as it was neither one of them were stable. Physically: Yes. Mentally: No. Instead, they just where going to move on from it. Why try to bother about it today. MONTY wasn’t h e r e. So they didn’t need to talk about it anymore, or worry about it anymore, or argue about it anymore. Right now it was to much pressure. Needing a moment without them around them.

“STAY h e r e.” Waving there hands around the desk area, as it wasn’t a command of any kind, but a suggestion well worth considering as they needed damn space from one another. “Let’s regroup after you’re done eating.”

Now that they said what they had to say, they set off again towards the front door. Everything felt so claustrophobic now in Bayden’s cottage, as if the walls where just closing in as there was no space to breath, or think, && the eyes were multiplying, staring back as angry as they where at them. Slamming the door behind them, hard, making the walls shutter a little from the force.

Yet it didn’t help. It didn’t help in the slightest.

It only helped them able to breathe a little better. Where everything was suffocating && so tight in Bayden’s cottage, the outside felt to spacious && endless. Leaving them perplexed as they noticed there wasn’t anything neutral anymore. Yet they guessed it had something to do with the ominous forest with frolicking mutants facing behind them to give them that.

NEVER will they let a n g e r guide them again in Bayden’s body, it lead to action’s they had no control over. Placing there hand over there lips. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. They panicked a bit on the inside. It’s worse when they liked it. Frankly, they couldn’t question there sanity even if they wanted to cause they lived in a rabbit hole of insanity && madness!

Trying. Focusing on what they said earlier. Trying to break it down, && make sense of it. Sitting on the bottom step defeated, propping there elbow’s on there knee’s. Resting there forehead in between balled up hands. Just trying to breath without the pain in there chest, && not think. As they couldn’t tell if the headache was worse then the anger.

#rowan delacour #montywonmom #━━ ✧ spilled ink. | interactions #━━ 🌊 saltyxtides. | ahv

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silentlittlefire · 2 months

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absolutely have to rant about something that popped up again today.

i had to go to reddit today for something specific (niche question time) and recommended posts from my old 3d account popped up, specifically r/fasting. And brother. I forgot how wild that shit is and how much it pisses me off. There are people on there talking bout literally only eating every 72 hours, how THEY LOVE THE SENSATION OF FEELING EMPTY WHEN THEY FAST, beating themselves up that they aren't 'dedicated enough' to go as long as other people without food, complaining how isolating it is because so many social activities are based around food. MY FUCKING BROTHER IN CHRIST THAT IS AN EATING DISORDER YOU ARE DELUDED. Just because you cherry picked articles on your info page that say it cures everything from dementia to cancer doesn't make you a fucking 'health and wellness' subreddit.

And I remember way back when I was on 3d reddit the way people in r/fasting would talk down about us, and how reddit fucking nuked our sub (which prohibited pro stuff, was an amazing support space), but not theirs. Like you couldn't post actual 'harm reduction' guides for 🌟ving yourself...but you could literally go to r/fasting and find tips on how to survive not fucking eating for 7+ days, and accountability buddies to help you on your 'month long fasting journey'.

There was so much more wild shit I remember from that stupid fucking subreddit but I'm getting pissed now thinking about it lol

#ed mention #c'est moi #tw ed but not sheeran #disordered eating cw #tw 3d vent

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rallamajoop · 4 years

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...and the unironic joys of better living through chemistry

How do I love Venom: The Hunger, let me count the ways…

It’s by far the shippiest Venom/Eddie story to come out of the character’s heyday. It’s the only story of the era to treat Venom’s violent wild-animal instincts not as an immutable fact, but as something that can be managed. It pulls off an aesthetic like nothing else that was being done at the time.

And then there’s the way it says, Does the world around you seem sinister and foreboding? Do you lie awake at night contemplating metaphorical oceans of despair? Well shit, son – have you considered you may be suffering from a mundane neurochemical imbalance, and a round of the right meds could clear that right up for you?

It does all this without breaking the atmosphere, without a whiff that our story has been interrupted for a Very Special Message about mental health.

In the near-decade since I was first prescribed anti-depressants, I don’t think I’ve read another story that lands the message “Sometimes, it’s not you, it’s just your brain chemistry,” so well.

Fair warning: if you have not read The Hunger, I am about to spoil every major plot point. If you have, well, maybe I can still give you a new appreciation for a few details you might have missed.

It’s a strange book, whatever else you take from it. It’s almost the only thing either author or artist contributed to the Venom canon, and it’s so different stylistically and tonally from the 90′s Venom norm that it feels like a tale from some noir-elseworlds setting instead of 616 canon. When you take risks that big with a property, you leave yourself precious little landing space between 'unmitigated triumph’ and ‘abject failure’: if this book hadn’t absolutely nailed it, I’d be dismissing it as edgy, OOC dreck. Fortunately, if The Hunger is nothing else, it is a story that $&#@ing commits – to basically everything it does.

Now, I'm not going to tell you Venom: The Hunger is a story about overcoming depression, because I don't know whether author Len Kaminski even thought about it that way while working on it. There's always space for other readings, and this one take is not gospel. That said: holy shit is this thing unsubtle with its metaphors. And with that in mind, let’s start by talking a little about Kaminski’s take on Eddie himself.

As I may have mentioned before, I like to divide 90′s Eddie into two broad personas: the Meathead, and the Hobo.

Kaminski’s Eddie nominally belongs in the angsty, long-haired Hobo incarnation, but that’s a bit of a simplification: this version certainly has plenty of angst and plenty of hair to his name – but nowhere, not even at his lowest ebb, does he doubt that he and his Other are meant for each other, which is usually Hobo!Eddie’s primary existential quandary.

He’s also taken up narrating his own life like a hardboiled PI.

So that’s... novel.

The only other time Eddie’s sounded like this is, er, in that one other Venom one-shot Kaminski penned (Seed of Darkness, a prequel that sadly isn’t in The Hunger’s league), so I think we can safely file it under authorial ticks.

Then again, Hobo!Eddie’s always been one melodramatic SOB, so maybe this is just how he’d sound after learning to channel his angst into his poetry. You can’t argue it fits the aesthetic, anyway.

We’d also be remiss not to mention Ed Halsted’s art, which I can only describe as gothic-meets-noir-meets-H.R.-Giger. Never before or since has the alien symbiote looked this alien: twisted with Xenompoph-like ridges and veins.

But Halsted doesn’t treat Venom to all that extra detail in every panel. Instead, the distortion tends to appear when the symbiote is separated from Eddie or out of control – and I doubt you need me to walk you through the symbolic importance of that creative decision. More importantly, Halsted’s art provides exactly the class of visuals that Kaminski’s story needs.

Did I mention this is a horror story? You might be surprised how few Venom stories really fit that genre, but if all those adjectives about Halsted’s style above didn’t clue you in, this is one of them.

Anyway, with that much context covered, let’s get into the main narrative of this thing.

As our first issue opens, Eddie’s world has become a dark and foreboding place. He’s not sleeping, though he mostly brushes this off. (Fun fact: trouble sleeping is one of those under-appreciated symptoms of depression. Additional fun fact: the first doctor ever to suggest I might be suffering from depression was actually a sleep specialist. You can guess how that appointment was going.)

Just to set our scene, here’s all of page 1.

Eddie’s narration has plenty of (ha) venom for his surroundings, but the visuals are here to back him up: panels from Eddie’s POV are edged in twisted, fleshy borders and drained of colour, the people rendered as creepy, goblin-like creatures. A couple of later scenes go even further to contrast Eddie-vision with what everyone else is seeing:

As depictions of depression go this is a little on the nose, but then, you don’t read a comic about a brain-eating alien parasite looking for subtlety, do you?

Eddie doesn’t see himself as depressed, of course. As far as he’s concerned, he’s seeing the world’s true face: it’s everyone else who’s deluding themselves. He’s still got his symbiote, so he’s happy. He’s yet to hit that all-important breaking point where something he can’t brush off goes irrevocably wrong.

But he’s also starting to experience these weird... cravings.

He just can’t put a name to exactly what he’s craving until a routine bar fight with a couple of thugs takes a turn for the horrific.

(I include this panel partly to point out even in The Hunger, the goriest of all 90′s Venom titles, you’re still not going to see brains getting eaten in any graphic detail. We don’t need to to get the horror of the moment across. The 90′s were a more innocent time.)

Eddie himself is horrified when he comes back to himself and realises what he’s done.

Or rather, what his symbiote’s just made him do.

Kaminski doesn’t keep us in suspense about why, though. Eddie may have just done something horrific, but there’s a reason, and it’s as mundane as a vitamin deficiency. He’s bonded to an alien creature, after all, and his symbiote is craving a nutrient which just happens to be found in human brains. And if Eddie can’t or won’t help it meet that need, it’ll do so alone.

Now, giving us that explanation so quickly is an interesting creative decision: this is a horror story, and horror lives in what we don’t know. Wouldn’t it be all the more horrifying had the symbiote been unable to explain what’s going on, leaving Eddie without the first real clue as to where this monstrous new hunger had come from?

The Hunger doesn’t take that route though, and I love it. Eddie isn’t a monster, this isn’t his fault: he has a fucking condition, and wallowing in his own moral failings is going to get him nowhere. You might as well try to cure scurvy or rickets with positive thinking. Just like depression can make you feel like an utter failure at the most basic parts of being human, and all the affirmations in the world won’t fix it when it’s fundamentally your brain chemistry that’s the problem. Or like addicts aren’t weak-willed for struggling not to relapse, they’re dealing with genuine chemical dependency – or even like how someone who’s trans isn’t at fault for being unable to reconcile themselves to the bodies and the hormones they were born with by pure force of trying. Free will is more than an illusion, but we’re all messy, biological organisms underneath, and your own brain and biochemistry can and will fuck you over in a hundred wildly different ways for as many wildly different reasons and it’s not your fault.

We aren’t monsters. But if we do, sometimes, find ourselves identifying with the monster, there might be a reason for that.

(Ahem)

I’m just saying, that’s fucking powerful, and we need more stories that say it.

Anyway, in case you missed it during that tangent, issue #1 closes with the symbiote having torn Eddie’s heart in two itself free to go hunting brains without him.

I’m trying not to get too sidetracked at this point talking about Kaminski’s take on the symbiote itself. Suffice to say there are broadly two schools of thought on how it ought to function while separated from its host: the traditional ambulatory-slime-puddle version, and the more recently popular alternative where anything-you-can-do-with-a-host-you-can-also-do-without-one. I’m not much of a fan of the latter, personally: if your symbiote doesn’t actually need a host, I feel you’ve sort of missed the point. (The movie takes the route of saying symbiotes can’t even process Earth’s atmosphere without a host, which is a great new idea that appears nowhere in the comics, and I love it. Hosts or GTFO, baby!)

Kaminski has his own take, and I can only wish it had caught on. Without Eddie, the symbiote becomes an ever-shifting insectoid-tentacle-snake-monstrosity, driven by an animalistic hunger. It’s many things, but it’s never humanoid.

If you absolutely must have your symbiote operating minus a host, I feel this is the way to do it: semi-feral, shapeless and completely alien (uncontrollable violence and cravings for brains to be added to taste).

Issue #2 comes to us primarily through the perspective of the mild-mannered Dr. Thaddeus Paine of the Innsmouth Hills Sanitarium (yes, really).

Yeah, he’s not fooling anyone. Meet our official villain! He joins our story after Eddie is picked up by the police and handed off to the nearest available institution, on account of how completely sane and rational he’s been acting.

Naturally, Dr. Paine soon has copious notes on Eddie’s ‘crazy’ story about his psychic link to a brain-eating alien monster. Fortunately for Eddie, Paine also runs some tests and makes an interesting discovery.

Congratulations, Venom: the ‘vitamin’ you were missing officially has a name!

Finding the right meds isn’t always this easy. I got lucky – the first ones my psych put me on worked pretty well – but I have plenty of friends who weren't so lucky. In fact, the treatment for Eddie's problems is so straightforward it arguably has more in common with, say, endocrine disorders like thyroid conditions or Addison’s disease, which differ from clinical depression but present many similar symptoms (but can sadly be just as much of a bitch to get correctly diagnosed – please do read author Maggie Stiefvater’s account of the latter when you get the chance, because forget Venom, that is a horror story).

‘True’ depression remains much less well understood by medicine, either in its causes or how to effectively treat it. But simply having a name for what was wrong with me made so much difference, and that’s an experience I imagine anyone who’s dealt with any long undiagnosed medical condition could relate to. It put my life in context in a way nothing else had in years.

(I can’t speak to the accuracy of the way phenethylamine is portrayed in this comic – a quick google suggests there may be some real debate that phenethylamine deficiencies have been overlooked as a contributor to clinical depression, but having no medical background, that one’s well beyond me. Either way, scientific accuracy really doesn’t matter in this context – it’s how it works in-universe for story purposes that we should pay attention to.)

Since this issue is mostly from Paine’s POV, we don’t get Eddie’s reaction to having a healthy amount of phenethylamine sloshing around in his brain again, just the assurance that treatment appears to be ‘completely successful’.

He’s still a paranoid, hostile bastard though. Meds can turn your life around, but they won’t make you not you.

But even if Eddie’s feeling better, he’s still psychically linked to someone who isn’t. Symbiote-vision still comes through drained of colour and edged in viscera.

That’s the thing about meds: they won’t solve all your problems overnight. If you’ve been depressed for a while, there are good odds you have problems stacking up. But working meds can be a godsend when it comes to getting you into a space where you can deal with your problems again, whether said problems are doing-your-laundry or all the way into not-giving-up-completely-and-just-accepting-you’ll-die-alone-on-the-street.

For Eddie, ‘dealing with his problems’ begins with stealing a keycard and busting out of the asylum.

Of course, that’s the easy part. How do you solve a problem like a feral symbiote? Like any good 90′s comic book protagonist, Eddie tackles it by putting on his big-boy camouflage pants and kitting himself out with weapons and pouches while quoting “If you live something, set it free. If it doesn’t come back, hunt it down.”

We can add this to the list of things I love about this comic. Even if The Hunger is a weirdly-stylistic tract about depression at heart, it’s also still a goddamn 90′s Venom comic, and not ashamed to be.

We’re into issue #3 now, and back to hearing the story from Eddie’s POV.

Eddie is very much aware that his symbiote has murdered innocent people while they’ve been separated. Even if this is the result of extreme circumstances, there’s a good case to be made that the symbiote is too dangerous to be allowed to live. Plenty of heroes would treat it like a rabid dog at this point.

But Eddie isn’t a hero, he’s a mess of a character and an anti-hero at best, so we don’t have to hold him to the same standard. He’s well aware his symbiote may be too far gone to save, that he may have to put it down – but that’s only his backup plan. He wants to help it. He wants it back. He’s down in that sewer with screamers and a flamethrower because he knows all his symbiote’s weaknesses, but he’s also carrying a large jar of black-market synthesised phenethylamine, because if he can just get close enough...

Depression can’t make you a literal monster, but it can make you an asshole. Miserable to be around, lacking even the energy to care who else you’re hurting. The depression doesn’t excuse that, but it makes everything harder, and it’s that much easier to sink back into your spiral when everyone around you has given up. It can make you think everyone around has given up even if that isn’t true.

So to have Eddie here say, in effect, I don’t care how many people you’ve eaten, I know it wasn’t your fault. I still love you. You’re still worth fighting for – god, does that get me right in the id.

There’s still a whole issue left at this point – we’ve still got to deal with our real villain, Dr. Paine, who we’ve just learned is into eating brains himself and torturing his patients recreationally, and who wants to capture the symbiote for his own purposes. There’s the scene where Eddie and his symbiote finally bond again, and Venom beats up all Paine’s goons while singing David Bowie because like I said, this is still a 90′s superhero comic and this is what Venom does.

But for our purposes, I'm going to skip to the penultimate page of the story, because the way it mirrors our opening page is really lovely.

Remember that shot of Eddie dealing with a beggar back at the beginning of the story, thinking about how these people would 'get their despair all over you'? Here he is again, cheerfully forking over the last dollar in his pocket to the next man to ask him for change. For all the gothic atmosphere and gore, it’s moments like this that make The Hunger easily one of the most positive, uplifting Venom stories ever written. Funny, that. (I could probably write a whole other essay on sympathy for the homeless as a recurring motif in Venom stories, but that... well, whole other essay and all that.)

What’s Eddie learned from this experience? Don’t take your symbiote for granted. Is ‘symbiote’ a metaphor for mental health here, is paying attention to its needs an allegory for paying attention to your own? I still don’t know how literally Kaminski meant us to take this, but it’s a lovely note to end on no matter how you parse it.

At the end of the day, The Hunger isn’t flawless. The conflict with Paine ends on a thematic but slightly unsatisfying note. Eddie makes much of his symbiote's loneliness and desire for union, but when the two of them are finally reunited, the only reaction comes from Eddie's side. In fact, the symbiote seems to have no response to being able to return to Eddie at all, and that’s an omission that bugs me.

But Kaminski is more interested than any other writer of the era in the truly alien nature of the symbiote, in its relationship with Eddie from Eddie’s side, and though plenty of others talk about the symbiote's love/hate relationship with Spider-man, no-one else had the guts to portray their relationship this much like a romance.

And Venom: The Hunger is no less interesting in the context of Len Kaminski’s other work. You don't have to look far into his Marvel and DC credits to pick up that the guy has a real thing for monsters. (“All of my favourite characters are outlaws, misfits, anti-heroes,” he says, in one of the very few interviews I could find with him, “I wouldn't know what to do with Superman.”) He's written for vampires, werewolves, victims of mad science, and all of three at once, littering his work with biochemistry-themed technobabble, melodramatic monologues, gratuitous pop-culture references, and protagonists who must learn to embrace their inner demons. So The Hunger represents more than a few of his favourite running themes.

For our context, his more notable other work includes Children of the Beast, in which a werewolf must make peace between his human and animalistic sides, and The Creeper, in which a journalist must make peace with the crazy super-powered alter-ego sharing his body. In fact, The Creeper and The Hunger share so much DNA (including an evil doctor posing as a respected psychiatrist who uses hypnosis on our hero while he's trapped in a mental institution) that it’s quite the achievement that they still feel like such very distinct entities beyond that point.

The human alter-egos of both werewolf and Creeper even use prescription meds while wrestling with their respective dark sides. The difference, in both cases, is that these are stories where meds play their traditional fictional role – and that's a role that could be as easily filled by illegal drugs or alcohol without making any substantive difference. You see, if a protagonist is using them, it's a sign of unwillingness to tackle their 'real' problems. Even among work by the same author in the same genre, The Hunger represents an outlier. And that's just a little disappointing – at least to me.

In real life, of course, prescription meds are no magical cure-all elixir. Depression meds that work for one person may not work for another, or may not keep working in the longer term. Everyone has heard stories about quack doctors who prescribe them to the wrong patients for the wrong reasons, about lives ruined by addictions to prescription painkillers, or the supposedly-damning statistics about how poorly SSRI's perform in rigorous clinical trials. The proper way to treat depression is obviously with lifestyle and therapy. People will still airily dismiss medications that we all know previous generations got along just fine without, or suggest that figures like Van Gogh would never have created great art if they hadn't been mad enough to slice off an ear. I mean, the fact you think you need those bogus mediations is probably the best possible sign of just how broken you are, right? Who do you think you’re kidding?

Our popular fiction loves stories about manly men who bury their trauma under a gruff, anti-social exterior and come back swinging at the world that broke them, bravely refusing even painkillers that might dull their manly reflexes. Other genres make space for broken people confronting their demons in grand moments of catharsis, finally breaking down into tears when someone gets through to make them face their problems. "I could barely make it out of bed in the mornings until I found a doctor who started me on this new prescription" is not only wildly counter to the accepted social narrative, it's a hard thing to know how to dramatise.

Even other Venom comics have been guilty of this.

Believe me, I recognise all of this, and just how much progress we've made in the last few decades. But I haven't the slightest doubt that for so many vulnerable people, the stigma against prescription medications does infinitely more harm than those same meds could ever do. And just having the right to externalise my problems into it's not you, it's your brain chemistry, may have helped me more than the meds themselves.

(And again, no, being prescribed SSRI's didn't fix me overnight, but I honestly don't know if all the talk therapy and tearful conversations with family members in the world could've got me as far as I've come without them.)

I love Venom: The Hunger. It's no-one's idea of high art, but it doesn’t need to be. There is a whole other post’s worth of things I love about it that I’ve already cut out this one as pointless tangents, and that may actually be it’s biggest drawback as a go-to example: I fully recognise that I would not be making this post if The Hunger hadn't also also grabbed me as a great bit of Venom canon, being the massive fan and shipper that I am. Other people who are just as desperate as me for more stories with the same core theme, but not into weird 90's comics about needy goo aliens, probably won't get nearly as much out of it as I have.

But if it sounds anything like your jam, maybe you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

If nothing else, it proves that you can make a viscerally satisfying story out of a message that shockingly unconventional. And you may even have people still discovering it and falling in love with it 25 years after the fact.

#Venom: The Hunger #Venom #depression #SSRIs #Symbrock #Venom meta #meta #Venom comics #Len Kaminski

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solyankapal · 3 years

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my oldest brother threw a temper tantrum in the basement yesterday (including chasing O'Malley out the basement by yelling and presumably throwing sth to scare him from what I heard) because he saw a mail Fox and me sent standing up against something really ridiculous he's trying to push on us in our move and I don't yet know what he replied or what he's gonna do but I got a lovely uninterrupted 9+ hours of sleep after 2 days of really exhausting work and my wife is snoring against my shoulder rn and uuuuuuu. ❤️

I'm so in love with my her and other people and I long as well as strive to improve in my life and it's honestly quite amazing how I've come to realise just how much more capable I am than both my older brothers in almost every way ?? they took over handling inheritance financial shit after our parents died which I used to be so greatful for (have come to see now it's pretty fucked actually and further diminished my agency) but seeing how they're just completely incapable of handling their own emotions or communicate with seemingly ANYBODY is just so wild. like I can't help being a neurodivergent person living with various degrees of trauma but they really do utterly shit themselves at any semblance of even having to begin to confront their own failures. Their wives have both complained to me about them multiple times and they each have TWO kids now and it makes me go crazy like maybe learn how to fucking listen and talk before throwing more kids into the equasion?? NOOoo we gotta breed fast fast fast to run away from our problems this definitely won't ever end in divorce this is fine resenting your spouse is fine!!!!! And they think I’m a child literally please fuck off good luck with your really fucked up relationships I'll be over here being a mentally ill incapable in many ways weirdo who's nonetheless more in charge of my own emotions and has more clarity than these Completely deluded fuckers. Jeeeeeeesus christ

#sorry ur jealous of my swag and the fact I have principles

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mordoriscalling · 4 years

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Stay or Sail Away (5/6)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 (@geraskier-trashh @negativenuggetz)

A/N: oh lord this wasn’t supposed to be 3k words long XD Hope you like it tho!

***

It was a bad idea to tell Geralt not to wear all black. Well, the scarf is grey and the coat and the shoes are black, but they don’t matter. Geralt’s just taken them off to reveal a three-piece suit and a shirt with two top buttons undone, the clothing in a deep, navy blue colour. His eyes stand out beautifully against it. Geralt in navy blue makes Jaskier want to weep and it’s only half-past noon. To add to Jaskier’s tragic swoon, Geralt’s hair is braided away from his face into a lovely plait at the back of his head (which Jaskier suspects is Ciri’s doing). It just shouldn’t look as good as it does. Geralt is so stunning today that words other than what the fuck do not begin to cover it.

Not to blurt out that in lieu of a greeting, Jaskier spreads his arms wide and exclaims, “Ahoy, captain!”

Geralt snorts with disgust. “Never say that again.”

Jaskier laughs out loud. “Come in, come in,” he says as he ushers Geralt into the living room, “make yourself at home. Are you hungry? It’s last chance for a snack before I put on some eyeliner and we’re off!”

“Eyeliner?” Geralt repeats with a raised eyebrow.

“Yes, to finish off this look!” he replies as he gestures at the floral Gucci suit he’s wearing. The outfit’s actually demure considering his usual fashion choices. Bright colours and ridiculous patterns are his go-to but today is the first day of his life when he doesn’t want to draw attention to himself. Much. “Help yourself with something from the kitchen if you want,” he says over his shoulder, already leaving for the bathroom.

The makeup takes just a minute or two – eyeliner application has become much less of dark magic with practice. He decides to put on some pretty pink lip gloss as well because, although he’s going to spare his family today and won’t flaunt his queerness at them, he still has to do something. It’s not at all because he hopes his fiancé might like it.

(Geralt’s suit)

(Jaskier’s suit)

When he strides into the living room, he poses like a model and asks, “How do I look?”

Geralt, who sits on the couch, stares him up and down. His gaze almost makes Jaskier blush, so does his smirk. Both border on appreciative. “Really good,” he says.

Since Jaskier expected some mean comment, he almost topples over in shock at the compliment. He sputters, definitely flushing a bit, but quickly re-establishes a working link between his mouth and his brain. “Of course I do, darling,” he replies with a wink. Geralt smirks in that sexy way again. Jaskier has to give himself a good mental shake to stop staring. Clearing his throat, he starts thinking out loud, “So! Have I got everything for the party? I’ve got Geralt, and then the present, and then... Ah! The rings!”

Jaskier sits down next to Geralt and pulls the box out of the pocket of his jacket. Raising the lid, he reveals two rings seated within, one silver and one gold. “Should I kneel?”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Geralt growls.

Jaskier laughs with delight, then takes out the silver ring and passes it to Geralt. It’a simple but chunky band with tiny engravings. Jaskier figured Geralt wouldn’t appreciate anything too showy. Geralt takes it and inspects what’s engraved on it. “What kind of flowers are those?” he asks.

“Buttercups,” Jaskier explains, “That’s what my name means. My grandma always told me I’m a jaskier.”

Pretty but poisonous. It’s extremely fitting.

Geralt only hmms and slides the ring on his finger. It’s a perfect fit but it’s no thanks to Jaskier’s genius deduction or anything; he simply knew Geralt’s ring size because Geralt told him. After their phone conversation regarding ring preferences, family drama and other things, they kept talking. Geralt even began starting conversations by himself – he’d send some texts about Ciri like “Ciri says hi” or “Ciri’s playing that song again”. It made Jaskier melt every time.

“Look what you bought me in return, darling,” he says, smiling excitedly, and puts on the gold ring. It’s much more flashy than Geralt’s – a signet with a three-dimensional head of a wolf. “White Wolf” is apparently Geralt’s nickname and a pseudonym of sorts. Wolves are his favourite animals, too.

Jaskier holds out his hand, putting it next to Geralt’s on the couch, and admires the rings on their fingers. “They suit us,” he says quietly

Geralt hmms. “They do.”

The drive is two hours long. Geralt insisted on driving even though it’s Jaskier’s car. Jaskier has a suspicion that driving is an excuse not to listen to him as he’s going over the essential family drama, but it’s mostly for his own sake anyway. He just wants to delude himself that Geralt will be well-prepared for everything and all will go smoothly. They will be fine. They must.

When they pull up in front of Jaskier family’s mansion, panic and second thoughts wash over him alternately in cold and hot waves. As they walk out of the car and Geralt hands him the keys, Jaskier hides within himself and observes the reality unravel a sense of detachment. He doesn’t want to be a part of the upcoming disaster.

“Ready?” Geralt asks.

Jaskier only looks at him helplessly. Geralt offers him his arm and Jaskier takes it like a lifeline. He clutches on it, the touch grounding him, as they walk towards the front door silently.

“Should’ve guessed you were rich,” Geralt remarks as he takes in the mansion looming before them.

“My success in music is all my own,” Jaskier replies feistily, “it took me ten years.”

Geralt wisely doesn’t say anything else and Jaskier settles down, letting out a shaky breath. He always gets very defensive of his achievements. Sis parents paid for nothing; he never asked them to. He hates that people assume differently.

The entrance hall is empty when they invite themselves in, but not for long. Just as they manage to take off their coats, they hear someone coming down the stairs. Jaskier looks up to see Rozalia, his older sister. She’s only one year older than him but doesn’t look a day over thirty. In appearance, she’s all mum: luxuriant dark locks, cat-green eyes, tan skin, and regal features.

“Julek!” she exclaims with a smile and rushes down the stairs into Jaskier’s open arms. They laugh when their bodies collide.

“Hey, horror sister!” Jaskier says, the words their special greeting.

“Hey, wild brother!” Rozalia replies, as tradition commands.

When Jaskier releases her from his embrace, he goes on to introduce Rozalia and Geralt to each other.

“So this is your fiancé,” Rozalia drawls after she and Geralt shake hands, clearly amused, and looks Geralt up and down. “Holy shit. I can see why you kept him a secret.”

Jaskier purses his lips, putting a possessive arm around Geralt’s waist. “Roza, you’re married.”

Rozalia only smirks, then turns on her heel and starts walking down the corridor towards the living room. “Everyone! Julek’s here!” she announces loudly.

“Julek?” Geralt mutters to Jaskier as they start following Rozalia.

“Diminutive of Julian,” Jaskier explains quietly.

“Sweet.”

“Shut up.”

“That’s rich, coming from you.”

Jaskier snorts under his breath but doesn’t reply. The sensation of detachment from the reality is there again and Jaskier doesn’t fight it – the distance between him and everything else wards off the impending panic attack.

Like in a dream, he sees his other sister Amelia, who’s five years younger than him, marching towards them, her mop of short golden curls bouncing up and down as she walks. With her sweet face and wide blue eyes (just like Jaskier’s, which they both got from their dad), she looks like an angel. (Spoiler alert: she’s not. She can be the worst. That’s kind of the youngest’s privilege, though).

When Amelia hugs him and Jaskier introduces her and Geralt to each other, he’s still in a daze. Amelia walks on his side as they all enter the living room, chatting about something to him, but he doesn’t really hear it due to the ringing sound in his ears.

“Jaskier?” Geralt’s voice rumbles.

Jaskier looks into the sun-like, concerned eyes. The warmth calms him down.

He takes in everyone in the room: his parents, Alfred and Wanda. Amelia, Rozalia and her husband Silvio. Dad’s brother, uncle Konrad, with his wife and son Ferrant. Mum’s sisters, aunts Maria, Hanna and Anna with their husbands. All watching Jaskier and Geralt expectantly.

Jaskier puts on his best smile and lays a hand on the small of Geralt’s back. “Everyone, this is Geralt Rivia. A Royal Navy commander,” he says and observes, delighting in the array of shocked reactions his family display. “My fiancé,” he adds with pride that he doesn’t even have fake.

A round of introductions follows. Geralt shakes everyone’s hands and says nice things like “honoured to meet you finally”, “Jaskier told me so much about you” and “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you earlier”. It’s actually pretty convincing, Jaskier has to give him that. Still, it doesn’t stop one of the questions Jaskier dreads the most.

“But why didn’t you tell us anything, darling?” his mum asks as everyone sits down at the table in the dining room.

This is it, Jaskier thinks mournfully, this is when it all goes to hell. At least Geralt sits next to him. It would be a quick departure – Jaskier will just grab his fiancé and run out of the house.

“Exactly,” Amelia seconds, her slender arms crossed before her chest, “it isn’t like you. You would tell the whole world about your engagement in some wild Twitter thread.”

Shit. She got him there. “W-well, I...”

“I asked him not to,” Geralt comes to the rescue. At the confused looks from everyone around, he goes on, “Not until I go on at least one more deployment and Jaskier’s absolutely sure he wants this. He should have it easier in case he changes his mind. Fewer people know about it, less painful it is to announce.”

Jaskier’s dad frowns. “But why do you assume he’d do that?” he inquires, regarding Geralt with suspicion.

“Being in a relationship with a marine officer is hard,” Geralt replies with a heavy sigh and makes a dramatic pause. Jaskier’s family looks at him with almost bated breath but he takes his time, the bastard. He already has them hanging off his every word. “My deployments are rarely shorter than nine months long,” he confesses ruefully.

A stunned silence falls over the room. Jaskier’s family stare at him with disbelief – they all know Jaskier wouldn’t be able to survive a relationship like that, not with how needy he can be.

Of bloody course Geralt would take it too far at the very start.

“But I’m stubborn!” Jaskier exclaims as cheerfully as he can, “Won’t have anyone else but Geralt.”

“Well, that’s all you,” Amelia says, and Jaskier heaves a sigh of relief.

It’s not that Jaskier doesn’t appreciate Amelia’s inquisitive mind. She’s always had the tendency to analyze and look into everything until every fact and detail adds up. Her character makes her the perfect heir to the family business, which she’s agreed to gladly. Ever since she made that decision, Jaskier choosing music is much less of a painful topic for their family. And so, Jaskier certainly values his younger sister’s nature of constant question-asking, but not in moments like this.

Amelia appears to already know what is going on here and Jaskier only prays she’ll be nice enough not to delve into it too much. Maybe some warning glances from Rozalia and begging ones from Jaskier will stop her. Maybe.

Food is served, alcohol starts flowing. Jaskier’s family begin asking Geralt about himself but Jaskier always tries to twist the conversation so that questions about their relationship don’t come. Until they do.

After they sang dad happy birthday, told him their wishes and gave him the gifts, it’s time to eat the birthday cake. Just when Jaskier puts half of his slice on Geralt’s plate (he doesn’t even like cake), Silvio asks, “When did you two meet?”

Geralt and Jaskier share a look. Jaskier opens his mouth to answer but it’s Geralt who says, “It was two years ago. I walked into a bar where Jaskier was playing. He asked me for a review of his songs after his performance.”

Geralt has the audacity to smirk at him so Jaskier, just to be a little shit, adds, “In three words or less!”

Geralt doesn’t appreciate this contribution judging by how he narrows his eyes at him. Jaskier knows they’re treading a dangerous ground – in their stupidity, they didn’t discuss the details of their “first meeting”. Geralt started it, though.

“And what did you say?” Silvio questions.

“That they don’t exist,” Geralt replies without a beat, still staring Jaskier in the eye.

“Whaaat don’t exist?” Jaskier’s father says what Jaskier himself almost blurts out.

“The creatures in his songs,” Geralt explains.

The affronted noise that leaves Jaskier's mouth is beyond his control. “It’s folk! The genre allows for fantastical elements like that!” He huffs. “But you know, Geralt with his commander mind always wants the facts and only facts.”

“So you don’t like Julek’s singing?” Rozalia asks Geralt.

Geralt denies this with a shake of his head. “Jaskier sings beautifully,” he replies, “Like a siren.” He lays his hand on Jaskier’s and looks into Jaskier’s eyes. “My siren,” he adds quietly.

Jaskier has to gape a little. He barely restrains himself from mouthing are fucking serious? because, really, Geralt can’t just say things like that. When he regains his composure, he decides to be mean. “I told you not to call me that, dear heart,” he says, “Not exactly flattering. Sirens lured sailors to their demise.”

Geralt does that lethally adorable head tilt and answers, “Still would go for you.”

He can hear aunt Maria cooing in the background, bless her heart, but Jaskier almost doesn’t register it. His attention is fully on Geralt – there’s something new in his gaze, beneath the teasing glint. Something guarded, tentative and true. Jaskier cocks his head to the side just a little bit. Geralt notices the question in the gesture (they’re really getting good at reading each other, aren’t they?) and answers by raising an eyebrow, his eyes crinkling at the corners. Jaskier experiences the feeling of a thousand butterflies fluttering their wings in his stomach when he understands – it’s an invitation. He accepts.

Geralt’s lips stretch into a small smile and he squeezes Jaskier’s hand on the table, intertwining their fingers together. Jaskier’s heart almost gives out and he grins, giddy like a teenager who’s just found out their crush is reciprocated. It’s not that far off from the truth anyway.

Uncle Konrad asks Geralt about the Navy. The two of them start discussing working in the army but Jaskier only half-listens, too focused on cherishing the feel of Geralt’s palm engulfing his. Until Geralt takes his hand away, that is.

With a displeased grunt, Geralt takes his phone out of the inner pocket of his jacket. The screen displays an incoming call. “I should take this,” he says apologetically and quickly walks out of the dining room.

The moment Geralt leaves, the assault is unleashed upon Jaskier. His family bombard him with so many questions and remarks at once that he only hears what Rozalia sitting next to him says. “Didn’t know you were into older men,” she comments, swirling the wine in her glass innocently.

“He’s forty!”

She frowns. “Then what’s the deal with the hair?”

Jaskier freezes in panic. Fucking hell, what is the deal with the hair? He has no idea. Geralt refused to answer his questions. “W-well,” he stutters out, “it’s really... uhh...” He clears his throat. “Not my story to tell. Geralt doesn’t like to talk about it.”

Rozalia hums, an amused twinkle in her eyes. “How mysterious.”

“He sure does seem mysterious,” uncle Konrad chimes in, “And...”

“Quiet?” Ferrant suggests.

“Taciturn?” Silvio supplies.

“Closed off?” aunt Hanna adds.

“Why are you saying it like it’s a bad thing?” Jaskier cuts in, interrupting this merry-go-round offering of adjectives before it spirals into everyone calling Geralt a brute.

“It’s not,” aunt Anna reassures, “It’s just that... I’m sure I’m not the only one wondering how on earth the relationship is even working with him being like this and you being, well...” she trails off and gestures at Jaskier with her fork. “You.”

“Frist off, I’ll take this as a compliment –”

“Of course, dear.”

“ – and secondly, even though we’re different, our differences only keep things... interesting, if you get my meaning.” Jaskier throws in a telling wink, and his uncles chuckle.

“Julian!” both his parents cry out, scandalised.

“Honestly,” Jaskeir goes on, unmoved, “deep down, he and I are quite the same.”

“Indeed?” Amelia asks, “Is he also a bastard at heart?”

“Yesss!” he hisses out, wildly pleased. Sometimes he loves Amelia’s analytic mind.

“He actually seems like a sweetheart,” his mum says, warming Jaskier to his very heart. He loves his mum so much – she always sees the best in people.

“He’s both, really,” he replies, “He’s certainly a sweetheart to his daughter.” Jaskier delights in shocking his family once again. Then, an idea pops up in his mind, “If you ask him about her, he’ll open right up.”

Before anyone can ask anything else, Geralt returns. After taking one look at him, Jaskier knows something is wrong. There’s tension about him but his face is a blank mask.

“Something wrong, love?” Jaskier whispers, barely realising that he even said the endearment.

“Work,” Geralt grunts.

“Geralt,” Jaskier’s father says, “Julian tells us you have a daughter?”

Geralt face lights up immediately. It’s such a charming sight. Jaskier’s chest constricts with how everything in him screams and begs don’t ever go.

“Yes,” he answers and launches into talking about Cirilla – how old she is, where she goes to school, what she likes doing. How she loved to paint her little hands on the walls when she was six. Soon after that, everyone shares funny stories about children, either their own or themselves as kids.

Jaskier zones out a bit, too busy wondering why Geralt took his hand away when he reach for it.

Later, Jaskier’s parents invite Geralt to stay for the night, which makes the fake-fiance scheme a success; they wouldn’t allow someone who they thought to be a stranger to sleep in their house.

Geralt doesn’t take them up on their offer.

TBC

Part 6

***

A/N: Rozalia is the Horror while Jaskier is the Wild 💕 (Amelia is the nasty angel baby. They adore her for it. Must protecc).

(Also, I love making up OCs, can you tell? XD)

#myfic #geraskier #the Sailor and the Singer AU #the witcher fanfiction #modern au #fake dating #geralt x jaskier

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female-overlord-3 · 4 years

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Bring Them Home Ch 13

I wish you talked to me <- ao3 link

Prev - Next

I CALLED THAT LINE (he's easy to love) BEFORE IT AIRED. I WROTE IT DOWN MARCH 17TH.

I am airing out my grief and anger for Maria's character as well as the show. Season 2 has lost all the things I loved about Roswell. ALSO TYLER. THAT SONG. EXCUSE ME. Please let me know if I need to tag anything!

They wait another day to do more research and make alternate plans that include Maria if she agrees to help. It takes a whole day of Liz asking if Alex is sure and then Isobel not so kindly kicking her out of the Crashdown to go see Max before giving Alex and Michael a pep talk that's borderline actual threats.

"Oh." Is the first thing they hear when they enter the Wild Pony. They came after it closed because it would make it easier for everyone.

Michael walked in through first but both he and Alex see the way Maria's face lights up before falling at the sight of Alex and then this overwhelming feeling of something she's never felt before.

"I- what is that?" She questions and braces herself against the counter.

Alex's sad acceptance from walking in and seeing Maria's face, falls away to concern now. "Maria?" He takes a step forward, ready to go to her still.

She shakes her head and takes a couple of breathes, trying to recenter herself.

"Someone tell me what the hell I'm feeling right now. I can't- what is that!” She asks again.

Understanding hits Alex and he steps back.

"It's that strong?" He whispers in awe.

Frowning in confusion and the pressure inside her head, she blinks at him. "What is?"

"Alex?" Michael questions, having some idea but mostly lost on what's going on.

Maria winces when the pressure increases.

"Michael could you wait outside?"

He makes a face at Alex but the pleading look Alex gives him makes him nod.

"Sure thing. Holler when you want me back." Michael wants to touch him, some form of reassurance but he thinks that'll just make whatever's going on with Maria worse. He lets himself work through the last minute, sure he has a pretty good idea of what's happening.

Alex waits until Maria's hands relax on the bar and her shoulders slump in relief.

"Can I come near you now or will it be too much?" He asks.

"First you tell me what it is." She demands and reaches behind her for a glass then something strong to ease the pain that lingers in her head. She takes a long gulp of tequila that makes Alex's throat hurt.

"Don't laugh but apparently that's how much Michael and I love each other."

It's quiet, one that hangs for a couple seconds too long for Alex's liking because it just affirms what he saw the second he came in. It hurts because he's always seen Maria as his sister, one of his best friends who he's trusted since they were kids but apparently the distance and time have weakened that connection just like with Liz.

"It's okay. I know he's easy to love."

Alex says as he makes his way to the counter top.

Maria looks up at him with a pained look on her face, filled with regret and slight horror before she takes one more drink and keeps her eyes trained on her hands.

"It didn't help that I never said anything until now and he's probably the only good thing in this shit town besides you, Mimi, and Arturo." Alex continues and settles on the bar stool seat to ease some weight off his leg. "Takes some time and he tries to hide it, but he's always trying to take care of people while also trying to survive."

"I- I didn't-" Maria tries but cuts herself off. Her minds a mix of wanting Michael, of this immense love that Alex and Michael share that's so strong it hurts, to forget her growing mountain of problems about work and her mom, of wanting something for herself for once but the realization that she can't have it, of what she would've done for it regardless, guts her.

Alex sighs and gently takes her closest hand.

"I was never honest about him and what we had because I was scared it would get taken away again. That I'd finally be happy just to have it ripped away, just like the first time." He lets go of her hand and sits up straight, the certainty and set determination giving Maria a second to pause and take in that when Alex starts talking she needs to listen.

"So I'm going to be honest and tell you the truth so there's no room to misunderstand."

There's a moment of silence, for whatever reality they've both been deluding themselves was real and possibly this friendship they've tried to maintain poorly during these years trying to keep what they had in the past.

Maria swallows down the almost choking well of emotions and nods, giving Alex her consent to speak his truth because they can't keep doing this; the not talking, avoidance, and guilt of what they and their friendship has become.

"I've loved Michael since we were 17. I will always love him even if he did decide to be with you because I just want him to be happy. To me he's my home and my family which will never change, even if he doesn't see me that way. It's been a decade of me trying to protect him by staying away but that meant this push and pull because even when I told myself to stay away, being with him was the only time I found peace, even when it meant pain and heartbreak every time I had to leave."

He gets this far away look, cherished and painful memories obviously flashing through his mind before he focuses back to the present.

"So much has happened since I've come back. I know you've been around it and that's why we asked to talk because we want you to be part of it. Before I get into that and you know the truth about everything, the whole truth, I need to know we can trust you Maria. I need to know you won't put Michael and the others involved at risk because if you do I will do what I need to protect them."

That fierce look on his face, the one that's a punch from the past for Maria though now more deadly and firm on a much older face. It scares her because that face has never been turned on her before.

"You're going to be told some truths that will be hard to hear and knowing you, you're going to want to do something. You're going to want blood." His gaze holds steady. "You're going to need a day or two to process but when you're calmed and clear headed, you will get the chance to go after whose fault it really is. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

Alex searches her face but finds the same one from before, the one who said Michael was just a one time thing while her eyes said something else.

"Maria this is serious. You need to be honest because I'm not risking this." Alex demands with an even but firm tone.

She swallows and slinks back.

"I don't know! I don't- this is all too much but I know I'm tired of being in the dark, of missing all the facts!" Her eyes look to the entrance like she's trying to see past them to Michael. "I need a minute to understand everything okay. I want to hear it from him too." She pleads.

Alex shakes his head. He knows bringing Michael in will hurt her, both with however she's able to feel them and the truth that she never had a chance to truly be with Michael even if he did choose her. The truth of what happened to Rosa would've ruined it. The secrets and lies of Michael trying to find some comfort in normal would've doomed it from the start. It wouldn't last and it would've destroyed them both.

"Not until you tell me if I can trust you or not. Not until I know you can handle what I'm going to tell you."

There's pain in her eyes as she stares at him. "Why don't you trust me? You've always trusted me! You're one of my best friends Alex!"

Taking a breath to calm himself, Alex looks Maria in the eye and tells her why.

"Because you lied to me and sadly we haven't been best friends in a long time Maria."

Maria gasps at him as both of their eyes begin to glisten with tears.

"I didn't tell you everything before because I was protecting not just myself but Michael too. Michael who I know does care about you and saw someone else who needed help."

Alex swallows past the thick feeling in his throat to continue.

"Michael who you say you have feelings for but I've yet to hear you say something nice or good about. You who didn't talk to me about it because you felt guilty and who outed Michael to Liz even if she's one of our best friends."

Maria's face is frozen in shock as tears fall from both of them.

"I- we trust Liz." She whispers. "I know they've been hanging out and they're friends."

The disappointment in Alex's eyes pierces right through her.

"You didn't even think about it did you? You only realize it now because I said something. How can you say you have feelings for him if you don't actually care about him?"

There's anger in his words, anger and disbelief.

"You're the one who told me Alex." She argues weakly as anger slowly builds in her too. "Liz said we can't help who we fall for than-"

"Why fall at all right?" Alex finishes. He shakes his head at her. "I talked to Liz, she's the reason why Michael and I are even here. She wants you to know the truth but she also apologized to me about that, that she realized she was being a bad friend because she told you that without knowing all the facts."

The anger dies into sadness as Alex looks down at the counter.

"Why didn't you come talk to me?" He asks when he meets her eye again and watches as her anger fades away as well.

"I didn't want to lose you but I also wanted him for me. I wanted something for myself because everything's falling apart with my mom! I- he's nice and he's been there when I needed someone and he's fixed things and-"

"You could've called me or Liz because that's what friends are for. Michael is a giver once he cares about you and that's really what you want. You want what he can do and not who he is." Alex wipes his eyes and stands. "You're not ready for the whole truth and I'm realizing now that I can't be the one who tells you. Talk to Liz if you really want to know but right now I think we need to take a step back and reflect on what we talked about."

He makes it to the doors before turning his head to take one last look at Maria.

"I'll always love you Maria because you're like a sister to me and I'll forever be grateful to you and Mimi but I- I don't know what happened to us and I think we both need some time to figure that out."

With that Alex lets himself out and walks over to Michael who's been waiting with worry leaning against his truck.

Michael is in front of him in an instant as he takes in how shaken and sad Alex is, his arms wrapping around Alex without thought and Alex just sinks into him.

"Alex?"

Alex shakes his head and his throat bobs as he tries to swallow with eyes scrunched up to stop the tears from falling again.

"Text Liz. I couldn't do it."

Michael holds him tighter like it might keep Alex from falling apart.

"I said if she really wants to know then talk to Liz. I- I need to go home okay."

Michael nods but doesn't let go for a couple more seconds until he feels Alex start to pull away.

"Ya of course. Come on let's get you home. I think I saw everything I needed to make some stake and potatoes. Finally use a kitchen that isn't my grill or my siblings." Michael voices and gets Alex into the car and making sure they're both buckled as he backs out to head to Alex's.

Alex keeps his eyes closed and his hand gripping Michael's the whole ride home.

#malex #malex fic #BTH #Alex Manes #Michael Guerin #Maria DeLuca #the talk between them I needed #cause it's not like we're gonna get it anytime soon #or at all

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kingofthereunitedkingdom · 6 years

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All right my dudes, let’s talk about this Amazon LOTR series. (Aka, the two cents that no one asked for ever. Seriously, all opinions are valid, I’m not here to fight, this is just what I think. Anyways.) Please read til the end.

I for one was initially very very upset. Because I don’t trust Amazon, okay? Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy was a once in a lifetime miracle. Him and Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens poured their heart and souls into making the best possible adaptation of Tolkien’s masterpiece that they could. Everyone on that production, from Weta to the stunt people to the cast to Howard Shore were committed to bringing Tolkien’s vision to life. Was it perfect? No. Was it as close to perfect as we’re gonna get? Yes! There’s a reason it got all the Oscars. People who think that Peter Jackson’s LOTR wasn’t faithful enough are so deluded that it boggles my mind. It’s like people think he could just snap his fingers and turn the book page by page into exactly what you envisioned in your head when you read it. Modern day filmmaking has so many constrictions it’s not even funny. Producers, lawyers, marketers, auditors, people giving the project money who in return are in it for the money. And these are the people that Jackson had to work with in order to get the film made on the scale it was, rather than a home movie shot on a camcorder in his backyard. With this in mind, it’s a miracle that the films were as amazing as they were. You should actually all go watch the behind the scenes appendices footage on the extended edition DVDs. If you can’t get your hands on the DVDs, a lot of it is actually up on YouTube. The part where they talk about the process of converting book to script is very fascinating and explains a lot. Tolkien did not write these books with a movie in mind. The pacing is a screenwriter’s nightmare, he spends a lot of time on details we don’t necessarily need, and the time frame is positively loopy. You say Frodo was thirty three when he received the ring and fifty when he left the Shire, I say did we need to see Frodo moping around in the Shire for seventeen years? You say that the Fellowship’s travels were rushed, I ask if anyone ever wished they could spend a month in Lothlorien while absolutely nothing happens except resting and crying about Gandalf? I love the books, I truly do. But even I admit that a shot-for-shot adaptation would be awkward and at times difficult to watch.

Now, as for the show in question, do I think that Amazon read the Silmarillion and said ‘wow, let’s spend billions of dollars to make a faithful and heartfelt adaptation!’? Um, no. Somebody in a highrise read that Game of Thrones was ending and realized that now there’s gonna be an open market for that genre of show. Now, who else can think of a series that checks the boxes of fantasy, long and complicated af, pre-existing fan base, and minimal barriers when it comes to obtaining rights? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Tolkien is the million dollar answer (or billion, in Amazon’s case). What gives me hope is (now this might be hearsay, don’t take my word for it because I cannot confirm) that apparently they only have the rights to events that take place before The Hobbit and LOTR. Which is essentially just the Silmarillion and/or the appendices. Now, this could be interesting. The Silmarillion doesn’t have a screen adaptation, so whatever they did would be groundbreaking. There would be nothing to compare it to. But what I’m afraid of is that Amazon would be afraid of it. The Silmarillion is a lot to chew. It’s wordy, the characters would be hard to adapt on screen, and it would be really hard to market it because the concept of the Silmarillion has (unfortunately, but truthfully) long been associated with ultimate geekdom.

This is why Amazon is probably going to pick the lower-hanging fruit and reinvent popular characters we already love. I’ve been hearing a lot about how they’re doing it as a young Aragorn prequel. Which, for surface level selfish reasons depresses the heck out of me because Viggo Mortensen is and always will be my Aragorn. If this was happening years ago and they got Viggo to be the character again in a TV show, I’d be all for it. But unfortunately Viggo cannot age in reverse and if they were gonna use him they’d have to use a shit-ton of CGI a la Carrie Fisher in Rogue One which… *shudders* *war flashbacks*. But then again, Viggo has aged remarkably well. Did you see Captain Fantastic? Maybe with some heavy makeup and nice camera angles- Ah, it’s all just a pipe dream anyways. As long as they don’t bring back Stuart Townsend. Cue more shuddering. But I wish Amazon would understand that they’re investing their money in the wrong horse! We don’t want to see Aragorn reinvented! We’re happy with what we have!

Think about it realistically for a minute, in the hypothetical event that this is a young Aragorn TV show. Amazon is a studio giant, trying to establish themselves among other streaming services known for their original TV shows such as Netflix, Hulu, HBO, etc. We, as Tolkien fans, understand that Aragorn’s history prior to the events of LOTR is pretty straightforward. He grows up in Rivendell, is informed that he’s Isildur’s heir, goes into the wild to become a Ranger, fights for Rohan, fights for Gondor, falls in love with Arwen, etc. There’s a sixty year block of time between his childhood in Rivendell and the War of the Ring. That can’t possibly all be covered in one show, as hard as they try. They won’t be able to resolve his storyline, because his storyline and character arc get resolved during the War of the Ring. They would have to establish the fact that he’s the heir to the throne of Gondor, establish the fact that he’s conflicted about his destiny, establish the fact that he goes into self-inflicted exile as a Ranger, and then end the show without ever showing the resolution that he eventually does reclaim his throne and his destiny. Unless they were to just bite the bullet and remake the original trilogy. And then there’s the matter of a love interest. Arwen is his first and only love. Their courtship is fast-paced and they go long blocks of time without seeing each other. Noooot very marketable for a mainstream audience. So how are they gonna spice it up? Give Aragorn another love interest? That would literally completely ruin his character. How about no. Make it seem like a lot more happened between Arwen and Aragorn before the War of the Ring? I mean maybe, but how!? They still wouldn’t be able to complete a story arc, because the meat of the changes in their relationship take place during the original trilogy: Him lowkey wanting her to go to Valar and not die for him, her refusing because she believes in their love, their ultimately getting married and her being crowned Queen of Gondor. Again, you can’t give us any of that without remaking the original trilogy! Cue all the annoyed Aragorn faces.

So, that was a lot of negativity. Maybe this is too little too late, but: I remain hopeful. All is not lost. There is still some good in this world, Mr. Frodo! And maybe Amazon will prove me wrong. There may yet be light at the end of this tunnel. We may yet prevail, and get a thoughtful, heartfelt adaptation. Because done right, we could all use with some fresh LOTR content so we can stop rewatching the original trilogy. Tolkien wrote a lot, and the current screen adaptations have barely scratched the surface. As a fandom (and I most definitely include myself in this), we get very protective over our material. I think this is because we are one of the rare few whose material has remained untarnished and stayed behind the line of corporate greed and terrible adaptations (The Hobbit trilogy walked that line like a tight rope but even it managed to escape the true jaws of the beast.) Maybe, just maybe, this Amazon series can be a chance for us all to take a risk. Because if it pays off, you can all call me a fool of a Took and we can grab popcorn and watch a kickass LOTR TV show. And what would be more awesome than that?

So, in conclusion, I have a lot of feelings about this Amazon show. If you made it this far, thanks for bearing with me. We’ve got a wild ride ahead.

#lord of the rings #amazon lotr #amazon lord of the rings #opinion piece #lotr tag

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roselouis · 2 years

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It’s j you are so right about the perception thing and how they would feel if Harry is actually into women and especially with Olivia ( which I believe he is ) like that group of Momrries especially one of those girls on twitter who got caught talking all kind of shot about louis and his appearance while calling Harry a perfect angel who could never do no wrong would lose their minds. They are the first with the perception of not only his sexuality but his gender as well the day that blows up in their face it’s gonna interesting to watch

That shit makes me sick , quite frankly. I really don't get people that like. Pretend to like Louis becuase they what? Believe in larry? Just don't believe in Larry and stan Harry likea lka;sdfja;l no one is forcing you to be here. Just leave. There's literally no reason to be a hater too. Like jsut ignore him and move on. Why do people have to be haters, like I truly do not get it. There's not one artist I hate substantially enough to waste an ounce of energy being vile on the internet about.

It's the fact that their perception of him blows up DAILY lmao but they delude themselves into believing just the most outlandish and untrue shit. It's so wild and crazy to me. Like they are..... the qanon freaks of the 1d and adjacent fandoms. The fact there are factually qanon people in this fandom that hate olivia, isn't that wild.... when I realized that visiblybi freak and all the other freaks that camp out under his mentions were LITERALLY into qanon conspiracies about Olivia, i screamdt

#asks

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rnainframe · 7 years

Text

really sorry to mobile people -- shoving my infodump on levis into a post instead of keeping it just on toyhou.se

Levis contains several regions within it. Like counties. Or cities. Or something.

Avaritia The home of HEAT, and where the richest of the rich live. HEAT also provides housing within this region for those that work for it, even those who would otherwise fit into other areas. Think of it as a rich neighborhood that also has some houses that are discounted due to a family's affiliations.

HEAT - Health, Experimentation, and Technology An innovative company with both good and bad goals -- mostly bad, thanks to their current CEO, Alistair Crane. He hates and fears pretty much anyone that isn't a 'normal human' (his wording!), with some exceptions. He's not only bigoted, but also hypocritical, given that he isn't exactly 'normal' himself, being something called a Stitch. They're responsible for both medical and technological breakthroughs, like incredibly advanced bionic limbs or almost human artificial intelligence. Of course, there's a bit of a dark secret behind all of that, and that's the fact that the founder of HEAT made a pact with Xencia, the god of technology. It's worse than what's implied. Like the fact that most of their 'almost' human AIs are actually the product of a device (created with the assistance of Xencia) capable of ripping out people's souls and converting them into code in order to enhance artificial intelligence. And other stuff. Like the aforementioned Stitch stuff. All in all, it's a pretty good company! Besides murdering people. And having a bigot in charge. So it's not that good. There are three branches - H, E, and T, after the three main words in the HEAT acronym. Each has a different head of it, called the Manager. Not entirely like a normal manager at work, but also not entirely unlike that. Keira Blair, Percival Faustus, and Terrell Whitmore are the Managers of H, E, and T, respectively. They also deal with security, using the aid of a security AI called Autarch to help with making sure nobody is breaking any laws or doing anything unauthorized. Take a wild guess on why the story for this place is called Big Brother. The unnamed security division currently has Brian Dreiser as a Manager.

Ira Where shifters, hybrids, Cabali, and others with more animalistic traits live. Some are content living here, others hate the fact they were forced to be coralled to a different city simply for what they are. Others in other regions like Gulae, and Envidia share these emotions about their current state. A group of people stuck in this area known as Irawood is basically a rebellion against HEAT waiting to happen. I'm personally rooting for them, Alistair is a prick.

Irawood A gang of people from Ira that want to take down HEAT (mostly Alistair). Most of the time they're usually picking on other people, though, like the more 'human' residents of the city, or just doing general gang things. In all honesty, that's just a ploy to get HEAT to not take them as seriously. The gang is lead and was founded by a Cabali named Fenrir Lupaïs. He's like a werewolf, but not really -- he's a Fenrir. Yeah. His name's super creative, then. If you don't know what a Fenrir is, it's a giant wolf from Norse mythos. Fenrir prefers being in his more human or half-shifted form. Fenrir also has Yven Lycaon, a hyena hybrid, and Gnoll Deutscher, a werewolf, at his side, among others. Those two are his second in command. And also his lovers.

Gulae Gulae is a bit of a slum, honestly. It's full of demons, shifters that aren't animalistic, Phantoms, Stitches, the likes. People from other cities like to sneak in there to do stuff like gambling. It's just a greasy city. People that live there hate the fact they're stuck living there, though.

Envidia Imagine a suburban area. Average, middle class, etc. Now imagine it populated almost solely by people called Kinetics. People born with a mutated gene that lets them harness a unique ability called kinesis. People most directly targeted by Alistair's hatred solely because of one of their genes allowing them to do stuff like grow plants from nothing, or make things float in the air, or something else like that. People forced to wear uncomfortable mechanical bands on their wrists (usually the one of their non-dominant hand) that poke them with tiny needles that inject chemicals to disable what makes them unique and basically scream to everyone nearby, "Hey! I'm a Kinetic! Feel free to treat me like shit because of it if you're the kind of person Alistair is enabling". Yeah. It's pretty bad for them. But they're given almost the best living conditions to delude them into thinking they're actually pretty well off to keep them from running off to another country.

Project Enoch Hidden in an abandoned part of the subway system connecting all the cities within Levis, Project Enoch is a group of people workng to try and alter the mutant gene in Kinetics to no longer be able to be detected by HEAT's technology. They also work on similar things as HEAT, but with less horrific murder-y things thanks to the founder not being desperate enough to get help from a god, as well as other things -- like artificial kinesis, artificial mana, (un)successfully raising the dead (with Dark Matter) etc. The current head is the same as the founder, due to being relatively new - an ex-HEAT employee named Cassidy Ingram. She had been involved in a project in HEAT concerning artificial mana and was blamed for... whatever came out of that that caused the old CEO to no longer be able to lead the company, causing her to be fired and sent to Envidia after Alistair began to essentially segregate everyone. She doesn't have a kinesis naturally, however -- she doesn't have a kinesis at all. She found interest in a type of magic called Dark Matter and had ended up with something concerning that backfiring badly enough to make one of her eyes constantly 'touched' by Dark Matter -- it's blank white, with a bit of wispy Dry Dark Matter(it looks like dull, purplish smoke) emanating from it. Due to the taboo around Dark Matter, and Alistair assuming it had something to do with kinesis, she was sent to Envidia.

The Glowstick An underground night club affiliated with Irawood, owned by Uta Toma, a neokinetic (control over neon gas/light) Japanese woman. It used to also be owned by her younger brother, Ran Toma, but there was an incident. He had been taken away by HEAT and turned into an assistant-type AI, being tauntingly called RAI (Really Annoying (A)I). This all happened due to the fact the Glowstick has access to technology stolen from HEAT - specifically, the technology used to disable and enable the kinesis-disabling bands. The main tech guy for the Glowstick, a cyborg named Archibald Trevant, had salvaged in the area of the subway system housing Project Enoch and found an outdated version of said technology at the station the aforementioned group is located in. After repairing it and figuring out how to replicate the tech (in case they needed another -- they did, as Project Enoch also uses the technology, now), it was installed in the Glowstick to be a place for Kinetics to really be themselves and have fun. Of course, this couldn't go on forever -- a couple members of HEAT's security division decided to patrol the abandoned part of the subway system and found the club. In less than a week, the place had been raided with one of the owners (Ran) taken as a sadistic choice on Alistair's part. The Glowstick rebuilt itself within a few months, and now Uta hosts secret Irawood meetings in there on Fridays. She loathes HEAT even more because of what they did to her brother. Gotta keep the rest of the weekend open for leisure.

Lumnia Think of Envidia, but without the oppression because it's where Alistair lets all the 'normal' people live. Except with all the oppression because it's a fucking security state. I honestly have nothing else to say on this, here.

#big brother #levis #p0key's stuff #infodump

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someonetotaketheedgeoff-blog · 6 years

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3.03.2018 – Journal: Dreams And Selling Out & Relationships As Products

Opened my laptop and it didn’t turn on. I thought maybe it was fucked. In my head I was like – ‘Aw yeah sick, don’t have to write anything’. Which’s weird. Why would I prefer my laptop to be broken than write? I guess it’s the 9 – 5 feel that inevitably comes with being creative. Everything gets boring in the end. If you do stuff only when you feel like it, nothing ever really gets done. I think that’s the difference between a child and an adult. Or an amateur or a professional, it’s finishing shit. Anyone can start a thing. But to finish a thing’s what matters.

Listened to an interview of the great comic Greg Fleet. In the interview he said he can practically sleep on stage, he feels that comfortable. He said the one hour of the day he was on stage was the easiest hour, the 23 others were the hard ones. Very interesting. At this point it’s the 5 minutes on stage that are hardest for me. However, the most exhilarating.

Dreams And Selling Out

Always hated the desperateness and ultimateness when it comes to people and their ‘dreams’. It has a disgusting sense of desperation.

People are afraid to publicly talk about their dreams. And that’s good if you’re afraid - you’ve picked the right shit. If you’re afraid of expressing what you want to achieve in this life, it’s sign you care about said shit. And it’s scary to admit it because then if you fail it, you may feel as if your life has been a failure. Which is all important and whatever, but it’s really got nothing to do with anyone else.

An icky uncomfortable feeling you experience in relation to the desperateness comes from people telling their ‘dreams’ and they’re just ridiculous, borderline impossible or actually impossible, or they severely lack the talent, or the dedication and/or awareness, or it’s something they’ve thought of literally that afternoon after watching the documentary Jiro Dreams Of Sushi on Netflix and suddenly want to be a sushi chef. You know those people. The ones that every time you see them have some new plan, some new bullshit, some scheme, some new course they’re entering. All of this’s fine. In my opinion it’s exactly what you should be doing – searching. Searching for something you love and can use to unearth the whole 360°s of your soul to the world and universe. It’s just the smugness, the assurance, the deluded confidence, the lack of commitment, the enrolling and dropping out and the never ending - ‘getting my shit together’. It’s the inability to just say publicly that they’re searching and that’s irritating. It’s probably just a problem of the western world – having to always present a façade that everything’s fine, sorted and organised to the public. Because there’s an acute fear of a social witch hunt if you express the fact that your just as lost as everyone

How do I know all this shit? Because I’ve been doing it for years.

Another uncomfortable thing about people’s dreams is the impossibility. Like a deluded and lonely guy that’s really into a girl he met twice. Everyone else sees he’s deluded and she doesn’t want anything to do with him/or doesn’t even realise what’s going on. Everyone around them grits their teeth and can’t bring themselves to tell them that they maybe should give up on that shit.

The ugliness of the desperation comes from the incompleteness so obviously displayed by the person. It just screams – I won’t be happy, fully happy, until I get that thing. Which’s funny because how do you even know it’ll make you happy? What I’m sort of subconsciously describing’s a sort of American, L.A., Hollywood, ‘X’ country has talent type desperation, which is the wrong type of desperation.

‘If I was to win Australian Idol that would be a dream come true, it would be the happiest day of my life’.

… Makes me shift in my seat. Yuck. Sort your shit out.

It’s a heavy focus on the love you’ll receive. Rather than the craft. Love is a main component of wanting to be an artist. I’m not going to deny that. But it’s that bit you must wrangle. That and the potential to sell out. And I’m not talking about ads at the beginning of The Joe Rogan Experience type of selling out, that’s fine, I’m talking about Logan Paul selling out, where every 13 seconds he plugs his merch and screams some bullshit into the camera and then breaks a plate for no reason.

The current cultural definition of ‘selling out’ is kinda bizarre. It’s this interesting thing that’s kinda like an inner, cultural, arts world meme. Almost like a joke you associate with 9/11 conspiracists, tie dye wearing, dreadlock flicking, MDMA smashing, drug fucked, angry, easily triggered, guy at the end of the bar, occasional busker, full time unemployed people.

But if you’ve ever entered the world of the arts you’ll know it’s very hard to make a living. This year I’m finally going to try and figure it out. So stay tuned.

There’s still a strong part of me that wants to be like Frank Zappa. Well, not like Frank Zappa. But I want to work hard like Zappa, so I can reach a point where creatively I can do whatever the fuck I want when I want.

Maybe the whole concept of a ‘dream’ is a childlike thing. When you’re a child you say all types of crazy shit. Like I’m going to be policeman or an astronaut. Then you get into your mid-twenties and you’re like – ‘Ah, I don’t know man… Fuck knows…’. Followed by the quiet gurgling of a bong and Wu-Tang Clan playing quietly in the background. The universe’s too big for a human life span.

Most of modern life’s designed to minimise your experience by taking up your time working. Most jobs are repetitive and mundane, some completely pointless, many are simply the maintaining of machines that create popular products. You work so you can afford a place to live. Then you buy products to enhance, streamline, to indulge in or escape. Modern life minimises your variety of experience by how much you must work to still be apart of modern life. To be involved is fucking demanding work. And for the majority you must use your body to make money, doing labour orientated jobs that at this point should probably be done by robots. I think it’s funny how they talk about jobs becoming automated and soon will be done by robots. What would happen if the robots developed to the point of conscious awareness? Is that then ethical to make them work? The irony is it’s already been happening with humans forever.

I’m not saying work is bad. Working is good. Challenging work, passionate work, work to progress humanity, helping others, working towards a more harmonious society, all that shit. But it’s the fact you must work. And that sometimes minimum wage doesn’t line up with the cost of living. After a while you can feel like you’re being fucked. When I worked fast food jobs I’d be paid around $13 dollars an hour. I’d work roughly 35 hours a week. That’s fucking 450 dollars a week for half my weeks’ time. Just so I can exist within a house.

The problem is making fast food in this weird sterile world of extreme organisation, regulation, wearing hair nets and gloves, clocking on and off with a fingerprint system, dealing with horrible customers, learning the combinations for different burgers has nothing to do with your actual survival. It’s a very removed, almost virtual reality-esque existence. Like an acoustic, organic attempt at a virtual reality - the management of the animal. Quite bizarre.

I fantasise about disappearing into the woods. Living in a tiny house, isolated from people for at least a few kilometres.

I will make as much art as I can until I’m around 40. And if I’m still alive I’ll look back and say – ‘Alright am I happy? Am I satisfied? Was it worth it? Did it make me happy? Am I wrong, or right?’. Then I’ll collect up the money I have or don’t have and disappear for a bit. Spend some time thinking and contemplating for a few years and decide - do I need to do it to be happy or not?

I’m sure it won’t be as abrupt as reaching ‘x’ age and disappearing, but I really want to try and be an animal at some point. It’s an important thing to do in this life, to experience the origin of what we are/were. It’s much closer than we acknowledge. I wanna get in there and see what I find.

Relationships As Products

I think relationships are advertised as a product. Heartbreak as well. Something to yearn for, to strive for, to purchase.

I remember walking to school in year 7 listening to blink-182, pretending I felt the same way Tom Delonge and Mark Hoppus felt whining about girls in their songs. But at that time, I’d never really had a girlfriend or anything and I was just wishing I was sad. Why’s that? Did I want to be cool? Did I think being depressed and whingy was cool? I don’t know. I still don’t know. But it’s a product just like anything else in this current reality. The idea of a romantic relationship has so much cultural narrative. It’s also sort of all we have now. No more God just things to consume and relationships to have.

One of the solutions to morality that Ernest Becker proposed in his book The Denial Of Death was romantic love. The idea of a connection between 2 people would beat time and space or some shit like that. I’ve always thought this was a wishy-washy argument, and one that does makes sense in the throes of passion and love-retardation during a honey moon stage of being really into someone but beyond that seems stupid. I’ve always tried to understand what he meant by this argument, but I’ve never been able to work it out. What’s ironic is I kinda believe in it, so I must be in some sort of love right now.

Relationships are a product. They’re also a complete wild west. No one knows how they work. The smartest cunts in the world still break up with people and still pick wrong people to be with. There’s no manual, no guide, your parents, even if they’re highly intelligent, well rounded and kind are still blinded by their own relationship.

In the Uber a generic song came on the radio. Prior to the song a more modern song had played. During a verse they’d dubbed a massive ‘BLEEP’ over a swear word. Which reminded me of music on the radio in the 2000s*. Then the next song came on. It was a song about love and relationships, all that bullshit. It was painful to be listening to due to the context I was in. And probably more painful for you because I’m giving you no context to this story or blog, not now, not ever. But it was painful and almost embarrassing because even though the song was so generic and shit it couldn’t help but strike a chord within me and make me feel gross. I felt almost ashamed like I’d got emotional during The Big Bang Theory.

But it was emotional. She was in the backseat. She pocked me on the shoulder, the finger jabbing as if impatiently trying to get the doors in an elevator to shut.

‘Do you have any glue sticks at home?’.

‘Ah… Yeah… Um… Yeah I think we do… Surely we do…’. I said.

‘OK, cool’.

Even an exchange so pointless and minimal is so sad to me. I can’t even be bothered verbally expressing myself because if I do I’ll cry and then she’ll cry. I don’t know why I’m avoiding that really. Maybe it’s something vain. Maybe it’s emotional vanity. Maybe I’m just done showing physical weakness to anyone. Maybe it was what that girl said to me that one time. Maybe I just would prefer to be sad privately. Maybe I’ll get it all out through writing. Maybe I currently can’t see what the best thing is to do.

I think it would probably be easier if I didn’t spend every moment with her before I leave. But then that’s all I want to do. But it’s sort of paralysing me. I can feel the emotions I’m tying down. I’m like Steve Erwin wrestling a crocodile, smiling as he looks at the camera, talking as if it’s all normal shit.

‘Yeah you can see she’s a bloody feisty one this one here! …’.

‘Now the thing you must remember is never let the pressure off the centre of the snout, it’s this big nippers achilles heel. Now remember, don’t try this at home. If you see an emotional breakdown in the wild just keep still, and back away slowly, don’t try and tackle it like I’m doing here’.

*The ‘BLEEP’ is an interesting type of censorship because it’s telling the audience there’s something naughty there but won’t tell you what. As years past it became more fashionable and practical to manipulate the swear words in songs. If you’ve ever listened to radio versions of Eminem music, it’s quite interesting. The most interesting is a version of his first hit song My Name Is. When I was around 13 my Dad forbid me to listen to any Eminem until I was 16. I had an iTunes gift card and I wanted to buy some music but being so terrified of my parent’s judgement I didn’t want to buy any tracks that were labelled ‘explicit’ so I bought ‘clean’ versions of songs. I bought the ‘clean’ version of My Name Is and it was bizarre. Words were completed distorted in strange ways, like if you’ve ever listened to Stairway To Heaven backwards so you could hear the intro to Satan’s podcast. There were also completely new verses I’d never heard before. And darker verses cut out.

This type of censorship is far scarier to me than the simple ‘BLEEP’ because it’s completely erasing what was originally there. It’s like in 1984 where it’s some people jobs to completely re-write history.

#Someone To Take The Edge Off #liam donnelly #Comedy #Hoabrt #Tasmania #Melbourne #Australia #Stand Up #Podcast #Relationships #Dreams #Selling Out

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effektivitet · 7 years

Text

Natural Procastinators

https://www.reddit.com/r/IWantToLearn/comments/zj6c9/i_want_to_learn_how_to_stop_procrastinating/

[–]Heykidcatch 2643 points 4 years ago*

Many natural procrastinators I know (including myself, and much of Reddit) are people who are praised for their intelligence, and misinterpret that as a sign that they don't need to have structure for their brain's daily activities, and don't need to give it the proper respect and exercise that it requires and deserves. So they neglect it - let it run wild on the internet, gorge itself on Reddit and Facebook and porn and games (the mental equivalent of junk food and jerking off), and allow it to lapse into a vicious cycle of unaccountable information binging and inevitable self loathing.

Your brain adapts to, and then perpetuates, the habits to which it is constantly exposed. That fact doesn't work in your favor right now, but you can change that. My suggestions:

1) Structure your time. By scheduling your daily activities, you provide a motivation to be present and diligent for your responsibilities. Plus, this will discourage the huge, unhealthy blocks of surf time that arise when you don't plan your time out ahead. As far as skill acquisition like studying goes, I recommend time management methods like the Pomodoro Technique to give your brain a healthy routine length. You may also want to invest in a timer, or a program that acts like one, so you can monitor how much time you're actually spending plugged in, and hold yourself accountable for it in the future.

This tip also extends to structuring your sleep schedule. I assume you're in college, and there's always fun stuff like parties and dorm CoD seshes and recreational drug use happening at any given time in college. Even if not, there's always the internet. Learn to pull the plug, even when you don't feel like you want to stop, and get your 6-8 hours a night. It does wonders for your self-control, self-image, and your presence in real life as opposed to inside your head.

2) Figure out why you procrastinate. Procrastination is a type of experiential avoidance that causes itself through an unwillingness to feel uncomfortable emotions, or be in unpleasant situations, even at personal detriment. I personally was an internet/League of Legends addict because I wanted to avoid confronting my anxiety, low self-esteem, and feelings of helplessness, and losing myself in my laptop provided an avenue where I could feel 'in control'. It's different for everyone, but this attitude is rather common nowadays. You owe it to yourself to be honest about what it is you're procrastinating from, and why you fell into the habit. It may take some reflection.

3) Learn to tolerate, or even enjoy, putting time and effort into your work. Many Redditors, and internet users in general, have been conditioned into believing that truly intelligent people don't need to work hard at what they do. I was one such dumbfuck, and since I breezed through my AP science courses in high school, I deluded myself into thinking I didn't need to study for anything, and that cramming was enough. Then college-level Organic Chemistry came along and punched me in the face.

You may, presently, also believe that you are smart enough not to study. Don't kid yourself anymore. That's your brain talking, spoiled by lack of discipline and fattened up on trivia that it'll never need to use, trying to sweet-talk you into not eating broccoli and having ice cream instead. You've got to be a tough-love parent, and make sure your kid eats his vegetables.

4) Incentivize your productivity. You are your own RPG hero. Procrastinators have a problem with delaying gratification. Technology addicts, specifically, are driven to surf by the easy 'accomplishment' feeling from learning tidbits of Avatar or My Little Pony trivia, or perfecting their last-hitting in LoL, or racking up no-scopes in CoD. This is an easier way for your brain to create and savor small hits of dopamine than confronting real-life responsibilities -responsibilities that are harder, more time-consuming, and that give less obvious, more ambiguous rewards.

You can combat this addiction by substituting it. Many recovering procrastinators come to see themselves as their own RPG player-character, their own Tamagotchi or Sim or Pocket Pikachu. Doing practice problems? EXP into your INT stat. Gym time? Boosting your STR. Going to networking events for your major, socializing with professionals in your desired career? Major levels in Charisma, with points into a possible class change in the future.

Personally, I'm not totally absorbed into that style of discipline. But I did borrow an idea from the Pomodoro Technique and DDR, which is combo chains. Every day that I accomplish a general task (studying, exercise, writing in a journal, not looking at porn, etc.) is a link on the chain I drew on my whiteboard, while missing a day erases the chain. I want those suckers to get too long to fit on the board.

The main thing about this mindset is that you need to invest in your personal development in terms that your tech-addicted brain is already familiar with. Think about this - if you were playing the Sims, and your Sim self needed to go to work but was playing computer games instead, would you let him stay at his laptop? HELL NO.

5) You are not going to like the change in lifestyle. It is going to feel like shit. Accept it and power through it anyway. The emotions that an addict suffers through while quitting are sweet siren calls, seductively beseeching you to slam your ship into the rocks. Your brain is used to the habits. It likes the habits. It doesn't want you to stop. It will present you with thoughts that tempt you to break your combo and forsake your willpower.

You are not your habits. You are not your thoughts. They are the many drops of water in the ocean that you are sailing in. The waters may be stormy and fickle, and may, without the force of your will, push you into shipwreck after shipwreck. It may seem easier just to let your ship be tossed wherever the follies of your brain take it. But it is your duty to captain your ship, especially in harder waters, and wrest yourself back on course with gritted teeth and the knowledge that you are stronger than the storm.

TL:DR - Get sleep, stop fapping your brain, organize yourself, it'll feel like shit but that's a good sign. Also this infographic.

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wellmeaningshutin · 7 years

Text

Short Story #96: Tired of Politics.

Written: 4/12/2017 Interwoven Week

For the first time, in a long time, Nick had questioned his views, both politically and scientific, and he wasn’t sure anymore if he was right. His friend had made a Facebook post on something his roommate said, and while everyone laughed at it, laughed at the idea that they were supposed to be the deluded ones, instead of the people on the other side, Nick realized that there was a point to what they were laughing at, but there was also a point to their laughing. Both sides were credible, and this had taken a lot of energy to process, so he decided that since it took him so long to figure out the possibility that he may be wrong, it was too much effort to figure out the actual answer. So, he pushed his laptop off of his lap, and announced to his wife, “I’m done with everything, this is just too much for me.”

“Done with what?” Asked his wife, not looking up from the book she was reading.

“Science, politics, everything. People keep arguing that both sides of the issues are right, and they both seem to know what they’re talking about, and I’m tired of it all. I don’t care if I was right or wrong, I just want out. I don’t want to hear about politics anymore, I don’t want to get involved in a billion debates over whether or not vaccines give you autism, or if global warming is real or not. I don’t care who is in the white house, and what they’re saying, I think I’m just going to stay out of it.”

Still not looking at him, “How are you going to stay out of it?”

“I don’t know, I think I’ll just try to, like, not bring it up or whatever.”

Looking up at him and laughing, “And how do you expect to do that? Nowadays there’s no way that you could expect to stay away with this sort of ‘discussion’”, she made air quotes when she said that last word, “because its going to find you wherever you are. No matter where you go online, somebody’s going to connect something to current events, to their own opinions, its just unavoidable. You could look up a video on how to tie your own goddamned shoes, and you can find a ton of comments along the lines of ‘If only this candidate I don’t like was competent enough to tie their own shoes’, followed by a comment chain where people try to convince each other of their own opinions, without even trying to listen to the other people. Its a fucking mess.”

“Well, I’ll just stay away from the internet then. I’ll just go back to doing things the way people did things when the world sucked.”

“That’s a nice thought, but what about all of the opinions that are all over the television, the protests on the streets, the disk jockeys that have to put their two cents in? And if you manage to avoid all of that, what about normal conversation? This isn’t the sixties anymore, people don’t shut up about politics. Its actually become a main talking point for everyone, you can’t talk to anyone without them complaining about what’s going on, its like a social norm.”

“Well-”

“And let’s not forget that-”

“Okay, whatever, I’ll just be a moderate then! I’ll sit on the fence, and try to be as unoffensive as I possibly can.”

“I think you’re idealizing people then, because no matter what you do, somebody is going to hate you. And these days, due to everyone being so opinionated, it looks worse if you don’t pick a side, than if you do, because you’re basically saying that people’s view points are on par with the view points of their enemies. That’s basically worse than having the position of their enemies, because at least then they could call you deluded and not take you seriously at all. However, since you would refuse to pick a side, they would see you as a bigger problem, not only because you put white nationalists and social justice warriors in the same category, which is like saying that people of one side are just as bad as their enemies, but it also leaves you vulnerable to the hateful ‘if you’re not with me, you’re against me’ fallacy.”

“Oh god, please don’t use the word ‘fallacy’, like” rolling over and putting his face into his bed’s pillow, “I’m following the point you’re making, but I just can’t take that word anymore. Its just a part of the problem. People keep throwing that shit back and forth, and it feels like a majority of the time they don’t know how to use it right, but I’m not sure if I even know how to use them right. Like, everyone keeps saying radically different things in the name of ‘logic’, but nobody wants to think that they might be illogical.”

“Sorry babe.”

“Its okay, its just…”

“Exhausting?”

“Yeah. You’re making good points, too, but its just kind of making everything worse, you know? Like,” his forehead creased, which is a rare occurrence since its normally smoother than the image socially inept guys have of themselves when they wear suits, but it creases up whenever he gets lost in thought, which isn’t very often, “I think I just want to just leave everything behind, just go live in the woods, you know? I need to return to nature, I need to return to my roots. Maybe people weren’t meant to be political animals, maybe the fact that we’re trying to form societies is the reason we’re so unhappy. Like, if we were supposed to be civilized, then wouldn’t we have formed the perfect society already? Wouldn’t it just come naturally to us? You know who doesn’t fuck with politics? Trees. Gnats. Wolves. I think I’d probably want to live with the wolves the most.”

“I love you but that’s fucking stupid. How come everyone thinks of living with the wolves? You always hear of children raised by wolves or whatever, but why does it have to be wolves? Why not something more majestic, like salmon?”

“Salmon aren’t, what the fuck are you talking about? Why the hell would I want to live with salmon?”

“They leap up rivers, they fucking own the place when fall comes around, have you ever seen them leap around? Have you ever seen footage of an eagle swooping down and tearing a salmon from the river? Think about it. Eagles are majestic animals, they’re like the most majestic animal, especially since they’re America’s god damn bird, and you know the good ol’ US wouldn’t do anything if it wasn’t the best thing to do.”

“That’s why we’re not China.”

“And a majestic animal has to eat the most majestic food that they can find.”

“Don’t they eat other things than salmon?”

“Yeah, but salmon leap, and-”

“But a lot of animals leap, wolves fucking leap. I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make right now.”

“I think I might just be hungry, salmon sounds really good right now. Like, for some reason I want to have a burger, that has a fried egg on top, then on top of that egg is a good slice of smoked salmon.”

“Are you high?”

“Why do people always ask that when somebody says something out of the norm?”

“I was only-”

“Like, whenever I paint something, or come up with an idea, people always say ‘you must have been really high when you thought of that’, and its just frustrating. Like, is it a way for non-creative people to explain their own lack of ideas, since they can’t imagine how a sober person could actually think of something interesting? Or is it a way for society to undermine the real thinkers in life, like do they just claim that most of the out-of-the-box creative efforts are only a side effect of addiction, something only a user could come up with, as a way of shaming- Hey, wait, what are you doing?”

“I’m packing.” Nick said as he began to stuff random clothing articles into a knapsack. “This is the kind of stuff that I want to get away from, I don’t care what you’re views are on society. Hell, I don’t even care about what my own views are anymore. Society can go to hell, fuck it and all of its issues. I’m going to go live with nature, where nobody is going to judge me, where it will just be me and the trees and the wolves. And if we don’t have any wolves then I’ll hang with the coyotes, and if we don’t have those I’ll just have to adapt, like nature, like how evolution changes animals so that they can survive better in their environments.”

“That’s not how evolution works, if-”

“Look, I don’t care. I don’t care if I’m right or wrong, because I’m going to be where opinions don’t exist any further than ‘oh, I’m hungry’ or ‘oh, something is hunting me’. Animals and plants are the ones who know what the real things are to life, they know that survival is all we should worry about. Do you think rabbits sit around and think they’re clever for referencing Plato’s cave? No, they eat grass, and try not to die. That’s life.”

“But in civilization you don’t have to worry about that stuff, its all-” he didn’t hear the rest of what she said, he was already out the door and ready to start his new life. ———————————————————————————————————

Now, Nick didn’t really know much, if anything, about surviving out in the wilderness, but he believed with some hard work and a can-do-spirit that he could solve any problems that life threw in his path, and because of that he spent the first night shivering, and trying to find a place where he would feel safe enough to sleep, where he wouldn’t be at risk of some mangy beast eating him in his sleep. Overall it was not a fun night, especially with the twigs snapping in the distance, the hoots of the owls, the vague howls in the distance, the deer carcass, which had its mid section ripped open, and its insides spilled out onto the forest floor, which made Nick confused, because he couldn’t tell if he was afraid of the dead animal, of the gore, or the fact that it seemed fresh, meaning whatever killed it was waiting nearby, and could possibly try to do the same to him. At one point it seemed like he had finally found a safe spot to get some rest, one that was also able to help protect him from the night’s concerning lack of warmth, but after only a minute of shut eye he felt something crawl onto his hand, and learned that spiders existed out in the wild, and that this made them scarier, because he couldn’t see them at all in the dark, and he had to abandon his spot after a lot of panicked thrashing, since he couldn’t tell how many more of the disgusting things were lurking in that spot. He wondered if spiders lived there, because they knew that people and animals would see that it was a good place to rest, making it the perfect trap. He wondered if spiders were proof that there was no god, or at least not a kind god. During the two hours that preceded the sun’s rise, he was haunted by an image of that disemboweled deer, with spiders crawling either in or out of its body, and he couldn’t tell which was worse.

The day time was really pleasant, except for the gnats and bees. It seemed like the nightmarish quality of the woods had disappeared when the sun rose, and there was suddenly nothing to worry about anymore, everything had become beautiful. However, he soon learned that beauty disappears the longer you look at it, and that after ten hours in the daylight, the forest had become one boring place. For some reason, Nick hadn’t seen a single animal at all during the day, and that was starting to annoy him because he was starting to get hungry, and he would rather try to kill something instead of having to play Russian Roulette by trying to eat a random plant, just hoping that it would be safe to eat. Nick decided that if he never saw an animal, or at least couldn’t kill one, and he was forced to eat a plant, he would stay away from the mushrooms at all costs, since they were stereotypically dangerous. Red berries were also a definite no. Sometimes he wondered if grass was the safest thing to eat, and he also considered leaves, or even tree bark. When he finally found a river, he hoped for salmon, just so that he could catch a couple and eat them, but the river’s current turned out to be far too strong for him to even think about stepping inside of it, even if it was just for food, although he did spend two minutes drinking from it, glad that he at least didn’t have to worry about dehydrating.

Night time came once again and he decided to try and stay next to the river, hoping that any predators would be afraid of the current, or that if they leaped at him he could duck out of the way, which would cause them to sail right over him and splash into the current that would force them into a watery grave, or, at the very least, would knock them against a rock that would kill them, and allow Nick to eat their remains. Desperate, starving, and exhausted were the words he described himself as. About half way through the night he had started to drift off, but in his hypnagogic state he saw images of a creature coming out of the river and eating him alive, and decided to wander away to find somewhere where he wasn’t at risk of being murdered and consumed. He tried to figure out how evolution worked, and wondered if his wife was currently pregnant, and he had died in the woods, would his kid be born to adapt better in the forest? Later he cursed himself for actively thinking about the subjects that he was trying to escape from, and then he cursed a rock that he had tripped over, believing that it stood where it was with the intentions of knocking him over. At some point he used the word “philistine”, but couldn’t remember the context, or the meaning of the word. At some point he tried to climb a tree, hoping that if he was up high he could be safe from predators, but the first tree he attempted to climb had claw marks on it, which gave him second thoughts. No animals had been seen, but they were definitely sensed, as if he could feel them out in the dark, waiting for him to take a rest, just for a second, so that they could do the same thing that they did to the deer. He wondered if there were also spiders in the tree, or if scorpions were a thing he had to worry about. Scorpions also seemed to be proof in a lack of a loving god. When the sun rose again, he realized that he had lost his knapsack at some point, and was worried that something had stolen it from him, right off of his back.

This second day was tiring, and the warmth of the sunlight made him want to fall asleep, but he was still worried about predators. Sure, wolves and mountain lions would probably be dozing off right now, but what about raptors or spiders, which he was wondering if they ever slept, he wondered if they were like sharks, and had to stay in constant movement. He was starting to reach a point beyond exhausted, a point whose existence he was unaware of. Plagued by the idea of sudden death at every corner, he considered to skip ahead to the end and bury himself in a shallow grave, then he started to wonder if he could sleep easier if he buried himself, since any predator would only walk over him instead of tearing into him, and that’s when he had the image of digging into the ground, and finding a large mass of spiders under the dirt, like a pit of writhing, black, bodies with way too many eyes and legs, which also didn’t move in the way that legs should move. When he sat down on a stump to rest and stare off into space, trying to think of something pleasant, like water, or smoked salmon, a snake crawled over his foot, and he ran screaming into the forest. Since that was the first animal he had come in contact with (plenty of birds had been seen, but they were too distant and unreal for him to actually consider animals, and the question of bugs being animals was one that he was too exhausted to answer), he decided that it was a sign that he was going to die soon. Later he would wander if he should have killed it and eaten its meat, but then he decided that the meat was probably highly poisonous. He repeated the word “poisonous” until it no longer sounded real. Eventually he found the river again, drank from it, than ate several fistfuls of leaves, until he had picked up a leaf whose backside was infested with spider eggs, and decided to stick to grass for the rest of that meal. A childhood memory came to his mind, where he had hit a spider with a rolled up magazine, but when he lifted it a swarm of baby spiders had taken its place, like a nightmare of physical impotence.

Night came and he began to hear voices in the night, which told him things like “I’m going to cut you open and fuck your guts”, or “the wind is inside of you, hold onto the wind”, and he didn’t know if it was the forest talking to him, the animals talking to him, or ghosts, but then he grappled with the possibility of it being all of the above, a thought that creased his forehead. Starting to believe that the state beyond the threshold beyond exhaustion was clarity, he believed that he could know without a doubt that he was going to die the next night. He started to wonder if that was the forest lying to him, just to get him to let his guard down for tonight. For eleven minutes he had fallen asleep, but he wasn’t aware of this. He tried to climb a tree but was too weak to do so. Eventually he found a group of sleeping deer, and was amazed that he had finally found animals that weren’t fucked up, even if deers seemed to be really strange dogs. They didn’t mind it when he slept with their group, since by his actions an appearance, they figured that he was about to die. After a night of sleeping with the deer, without even trying to hurt them, they had decided that he must be a defected human, and didn’t mind it when he followed them around the next day, although the buck did make sure to keep a close eye on him.

After being fully rested, he was amazed that the deer had taken him in as one of his own, and considered the previous nights in the forest as a sort of spiritual journey that led him on a path to his real people, which weren’t wolves or fish, but deer, which just seemed to wander around, were a paranoid about getting murdered, and ate grass whenever they were hungry. It didn’t really seem any different than what he had been doing, and it started to seem as if this was the beginning of the rest of his life.

However, now that he was able to find sources of food and water (even if they were crude), was able to feel safe, was in the company of others (even if they weren’t human, he found the fact that they couldn’t discuss whatever opinions they may have very appealing), and was able to safely sleep each night, he started to desire more, he started to desire entertainment, stimulation, but worst of all: status. After he was able to tell the does apart, he began to notice cliques among them, noticed who was friends was who, who didn’t like who, and he knew that the buck was in the middle of everything, he was the guy at the top. However, Nick was also a male, he was also considered to be one with the deer, so it wouldn’t be irrational to assume that the buck could see him as a challenge to his power, right? Wouldn’t it be reasonable for the buck to do everything it could to keep Nick away from taking its position, for it to resort to such tactics as spreading false rumors about Nick to the does, to try to assassinate his character, to try to spout anti-human rhetoric to keep him out of power? This last idea had made Nick furious, because he couldn’t understand how they could assume that he was a cold killer, a callous hunter, just because a very, very small percentage of humans hunted deer. He could imagine the buck playing off the few gruesome cases in a way to appeal to the emotions of the deer, to have them make their decisions on fear over fact, and that wasn’t alright, Nick couldn’t take the idea of that, so he knew that he had to strip the buck from power.

It had never occurred to him that the only reason he considered, and feared, these tactics was because these were similar ones he applied back in the civilized world.

First he considered murdering the buck, but the guy never turned his back to Nick, not for one second, and he was naturally armed with those antlers that could rip Nick’s chest right open, which made him wonder if this buck had slain the dead one he had seen on his first night. So, he knew that he would have to wait for a predator to show itself, either so he could use the distraction to murder his rival, and take its position, or so he could defeat the predator himself, and show that he was a bigger hero than the buck was, and cast his shamed predecessor into the exile of the woods.

During that night, while the group had slept, there were sounds of whisperings out in the woods, and it seemed like the buck had not noticed. Nick wondered if it was just in his own head, or the forest’s way of tricking him, then he saw a flicker of orange, and realized that it was hunters out in the night. This was his golden opportunity. All he had to do was talk them up, since they wouldn’t be suspicious of a person, because what rational hunter would think that a fellow human would actually have sided with the deer, had sided with nature. As he silently approached the hunters, he started to wonder why they had to go out and hunt, then decided that it was probably because they were rejecting the fact that humans were destined to live with nature, not society, and had to kill animals to only strengthen their denial. While Nick had moved his way to the huntsmen, he made sure to be quiet enough to not alert any of his pals, but it also happened that he had moved quiet enough for the hunters to not be aware of his presences. When they finally saw him near, one had thought he was a beast and the ragged man was greeted by a loud noise and light, panicked, and then ran back to his friends, not knowing where else to run. Knowing the call of the ferocious hunters, the deer began to flee into the forest, while the buck led the charge, and ended up intersecting the path of Nick, but confused the guy for a hunter, which caused the buck to panic and lunge at Nick with its horns, which gored him, tore his middle section open, and caused him to drop to the ground, ripped open, while his friends had abandoned him.

As he lied there dying, in an intense amount of pain, he was annoyed by the fact that there was a Shakespeare quote that he wanted to say, but couldn’t remember it. The hunters found his body, while he was slowly welcoming the cold, but numb, embrace of death, he could hear the hunters blame strict gun laws, which prevented them from having enough fire power to avenge the poor guy. If he wasn’t so weak, Nick would have screamed.

#Free Write #Short Story #Writers on Tumblr #Tired of Politics #Nature

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