May Subscriber Post 2025
Birthday Cheer, Gifts Aplenty, Sirens Call, Escape Velocity
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It’s my birthday month!
A paywall is against the spirit of birthday cheer, so it’s just a monthly post recapping all the books I’ve read and games I’ve played and anime I’ve watched and some blogging about my life and my inability to finish chapter 2 of my light novel leaving it as a draft here.
Normally I paywall these posts for subscribers on Substack (although typically I leave the paywall off for a few days after silently publishing it), so if you read this and like it, consider supporting me here on Substack—it helps me and I appreciate it.
Table of Contents
Letters
Media
The Wandering Inn 6~10 by Pirateaba
Girls Against God by Jenny Hval
.hack//Another Birth vol 1 by Miu Kawasaki
Obscene Bird of Night by Jose Donoso and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Betrothed by Alejandro Manzoni
Siren’s Call: Escape Velocity by The Pen Sword
Knock on the Coffin Lid
Sakamoto Days
Blogging
Drafts
Cinnamon Psychic Chapter 2
Letters
There are none! No one asked—plus since it was my birthday this month if anyone dared to ask I would have guilted them out of having asked me.
Sort-of missed doing them, really; at the end of the month lack of responsibility outside my job just fed in on itself. However, they’re still on a “ask if you want one” basis going forward. Realistically if I ever were to gain much more subscribers I couldn’t reliably write personal letters to an ever increasing number without degrading them down to just impersonal “hope you’re wells”—so, again, if you want one next month: ask, and I’ll be more than happy to oblige.
All the same—to everyone who supported me this month: thank you very much, and again: don’t be a stranger, if you want to bug me with something.
Media Reviews
a. The Wandering Inn books 6-10(?) by Pirateaba
Book 6 of The Wandering Inn was really everything I hoped the “Faction Wars” book of Dungeon Crawler Carl would be but was not. I loved it! So briefly and without much spoilers, book 6 ends up with a conflict that had been long brewing within the narrative finally coming to blows with the forces of The Goblin Lord clashing with a mercenary human army cobbled together by Lady Rinehart (the noblewoman who has a Touhou-esque Scarlet Manor force and Sakuya knock-off head maid with a thick country accent).
I don’t like combat scenes much and the Carl factions war story was completely bogged down with logistics and assemblies of forces that all just fell completely flat with how uninteresting and untethered it all seemed from an actual story; Carl failed to make me care—and, without me really knowing what quality stood out for me, Wandering Inn completely succeeded in dedicating a large amount of pages to the assembly of forces, armaments, generals, strategy, morale, and combat itself, and completely won me over; the final conflict between the two leaders had me so invested and I think I nearly remember tearing up while listening to it scrubbing out cages at work, I was just completely bought in; it was so anime, in the best way possible.
It was just so visual and fun and cool and I loved it.
Aside from that, seasons have changed! Finally we are out of the winter season in Wandering Inn and now we have moved into an exaggerated raining season where the world has begun to flood and it constantly rains without much pause greater than lesser-drizzles placed between torrential downpours. From (so far) book 6 till where I’m at in book 8: it is still raining. I adore how slow seasons move in this story; it feels like a year is passing and it feels like the world is growing and alive the more raw output Pirateaba puts into her story—it’s just something really moving; and, again: even if Pirateaba is not amazing as a stylist, I am so impressed with the growth she has a writer throughout the publication of Wandering Inn. Her vocabulary noticeably improves, she becomes more comfortable with pacing scenes and hitting emotional notes, and still, hundreds of hours in: she is still willing to experiment and not afraid to crank out potentially god-awful storylines. I really admire her as a writer.
Something I’d also been thinking about, spurred on by some r/litrpg thread seeking a “mature litRPG” with these criteria:
Protagonists who behave like adults (or at least aren’t constantly quirky or ironic)
A tone that doesn’t rely too heavily on “forced humor”
and then further by another thread: “Any litrpg where the characters talk like adults?” fleshing out the request further as “Looking for something without constant millennial/marvel humor, where heavy situations can just be heavy.”
I always have a similar thought in the back of my head about why I dislike humor or comedy (less narrow though, while I think Nabokov is pretty funny in Pale Fire my dislike for comedy goes to basically any ‘cutesy’ or goofy thing like Nichijou or Zetsubou Sensei or Dededede Destruction — I don’t get it at all, but am won over with stuff like Monster Man Bureiko) and at once sometimes like the lighter tone humor gives to a story but all the same can’t help but feel like it’s a crutch people use to shortcircuit the writing process and characterization process; sometimes I feel this way while reading indie visual novels—instead of properly writing (what a meaningless statement that is, ‘properly writing’) out a character everything starts to become compressed down into cultural ‘understoods’ ala the characters start speaking in intentionally bad mix of Japanese and English or emoticons or the language is intentionally babyified; instead of convincing that a character is sad, a character compresses their person down to a “oh…. u.u;” —I think humor often gets misappropriated for the same flattening, too: (now that I’ve listened to a handful of series) the genre itself often, like the presence of systems or stats in litRPGs;
Wandering Inn still bears the weathering of “Millenial/Marvel humor” that crunches down in occasion, but again pointing back at Pirateaba’s willingness to write awful chapters to experiment and strain against the limits of her comfort with writing: the more I listen the more I experience her becoming a full bodied (like a wine) fantasy writer.
If I were to compare it to my old favorite Dungeon Crawler Carl, I think the author of that Matt Dinniman is actually very competent and knows extremely well how to compose and tell a story, but has more of a stylistic crutch of that Millenial/Marvel humor that at times seems to unwillingly crunch down and compress his writing.
Any-ways; book 6 was fantastic, I adored it, amazing ending, amazingly well written war scene.
Book 7? I remember it a little less except after reading the wiki notes for major events I remember the final chunk of the novel centering around a long interaction between the very second character (I think?) we meet, Pisces (the Necromancer from book 1) and Selys (another book 1 character mainstay, helps run the adventurers guild)—it’s this amazingly well done low-stakes story of Selys inheriting an artifact that has an immense attached sentimental value and finding herself hounded by sudden unwanted attention from nations and individuals wanting to purchase the artifact; Pisces ends up becoming her confidant and emotional support, and the back-drop of this is Pisces getting written permission to deploy an undead construct in the cities sewers to clear out rats (because adventurers don’t want to do it, and it’s dangerous, but undead are illegal) and Selys needs to oversee as a checksum to guarantee no weird stuff is going; it’s just such a great and emotional chapter, I remember this one did make me tear up; there’s this scene (not emotional) where Pisces is just standing out by the grated and locked entrance to the sewers in the morning, just standing out in the rain waiting by this locked gate huddled up in his cloak while Selys realizes she forgot about him and it’s just such a perfectly mooded scene that makes me love slice-of-life.
I remember book 7 not too well but that I did enjoy the whole thing; it’s less of a “can’t remember because of quality” and more “where books stop/end blends together.”
Book 8? So far: *chefs kiss*; I really adore the Goblin Lord and think him one of my favorite characters—him and the free ant queen kinda rule.
Having finished book 8: *chefs kiss* although it got into almost torture porn territory, but I mean that literally—the author introduces a race of ‘cave goblins’ that are slaves to these evil cannibal Gnoll mutates living in the nearby dungeon, and through circumstance (our protagonist innkeeper) Erin ends up with one in her inn as a hostage, and how this goblin is described during its interrogation/torture just made me think of torturing guinea pigs or that similar ‘harming cute things’ feeling; they’re just like tying her up and making her cry and thrash and scream and eventually accepting the immediate death that is looming right afore her (it’s a girl-goblin) and all I could think of was a sadist squeezing a guinea pig to death to hear the frantic squealing.
The cave goblin ends up joining the inn and becoming a beloved character.
The rest of the story I can’t really shed much mention on because doing so would spoil a ‘twist’ that is integral to the entirety of the central thrust behind book 8, except to only mention that it focuses mostly on gathering forces to finally explore the dungeon outside the central town due to previously mentioned cannibal mutate gnolls kidnapping large numbers of the citizenry; it’s done fairly well and becomes an ‘ok’ tale of stockholm syndrome told through a dual narrative of a central character who becomes captive to the cannibal mutate gnoll leader, and of the forces aboveground scrambling to save the people held hostage down below. It gets a little rapey and a little edgy, but it’s still cool.
Then after finishing I thought I was on book 10 and listened to several hours of book 10, loving it, and after around ~4 hours hit a massive spoiler that revealed a large number of characters dying in book 9 and how the large conflict with the Goblin Lord ends—I had no idea I was on the wrong book, because those first four hours were a cold open with a new narrator in a new location and was basically a really fun and comfy slice-of-life of a girl meeting a clan of vampires who were surviving by doing odd-jobs and farming; then suddenly: shift back to Liscore, our innkeeper town, and Erin is on the verge of killing herself and her staff are basically walking on eggshells and the inn has become surrounded by a swirling vortex of undeath that causes nightly terrors to shriek at the doors and windows, and [characters z, y, x, w, e t c] are all dead.
I was really at odds of how to proceed, because on one hand: I actually thought I still was on the right book and that this was a particularly bold timeskip and narrative choice by Pirateaba to just crunch down a horrific event and leave us with the pieces and aftermath and slowly fill in the gaps through heresay and how the characters react. But, I realized I was just on the wrong book; I really wanted to just continue because I adored how book 10 was unfolding, and didn’t have much desire now to do book 9 since I outright know how it ends—but, ultimately, I just wanted more Wandering Inn.
Book 9 starts with a baseball filler episode that actually was a lot of fun, and reminded me how baseball filler episodes are my favorite filler episodes—Dorohedoro, Akiba Maid War, there’s just something about baseball and having abuncha characters carved into it that I like, may-be more-so because I had my own baseball filler episode in highschool where one day the few friends I had (Daniela included there) just found a glove/bat/ball at a garage sale while driving around and decided to try to play ‘loose’ baseball at the field over at the Y(MCA—I’ve only ever heard of it called the Y outside the song).
It’s a pale book compared to 10, mostly just going into goblin foolery; I like to think of it as a death march. I just want more vampire slice of life honestly and wrecked mental state Erin.
Also apparently they’re adapting Dungeon Crawler Carl to be a webtoon
Don’t know how this makes me feel about the series still; every time I see a person write a “new achievement” joke I just feel myself flinching away further from the series but I’m completely lying to myself if I didn’t really love those first six books immensely.
b. Girls Against God by Jenny Hval
This was a birthday gift from my friend Ness, sort-of blind picked for me as a ‘mystery box’, and I read it in a little over ~two days—breezed through it.
But, I don’t have too much positive things to say about it, with a lot of caveats: I worry it might sound like I am tempering away a dislike for this book because it was a gift, and may-be I am, but I think fairly unbiased: this was not a very good read, but I actually really enjoyed my time with it almost wholly because:
reading something that I could reasonably start/finish within an afternoon actually sparked a lot of ‘joy’ for reading within me since all I’d been reading are large books that often (while very good) lead to me losing interest before I can finish them, and. . . .
while poorly written, I actually think there is some gold hidden away in the first hundred pages that had me ‘excited’ in small ways and actually gave me a flicker of inspiration for an Orsday programming post and sermon;
so: why I think this is poorly written: it reads like an extremely sophomoric and angsty diatribe against God and has this unshakable tone of “this is so deep.. no one has ever thought of this..” ala you have a daughter in highschool who leaves a note behind in church that says “GOD.. IS FAKE” and has a glee about her afterwards with some knowing that her blasphemous note will have caused the church to be in an uproar. The book is not as lame as that, but it has the exact same tone to it; and, to its greater fault: it very much reads like an attempt at a philosophical treatise by the author that is engined wholly off of a vibe instead of something carefully assembled, and a step further: it feels like the author wished to write a novel that is secretly a real and hypnotic magic spell meant to slowly rewrite how a reader sees reality, but just fails and instead creates a fairly repetitive experience that lends itself to being skipped through without missing much.
So, again: where I think there is some gold (which also is tied into a fault of this book): it is a bleedingly heart-felt analyses of Norway and Black Metal and attempts to synthesize this into a religion that exists in the margins of culture—specifically the author describes a phenomenon she describes The South which roughly is the modern Christian culture of where she grew up in Norway and lays out this binary view of 0, 1; left, right; Christ, Satan; Good, Evil — that everything really can be split that way, and then goes into her fascination with Black Metal & her obsession with documentary footage of Darkthrone and Fenriz and Nocturno Culto and how her real fascination lies with the cut bonus material that exists in the margins of the DVD; she writes about how the Norway wilderness bleeds out into an insectile black mass on the DVD, how the noise itself is like a slurry of insects clinking against each other, how the drone weighs heavy out-of-side in the periphery of The South and is something more elemental than the light what casts itself over the main footage.
Where it starts to lose me, and where it starts to have a very ‘sophomoric tone’ is she often uses these laid-out analyses to create a single phrase that connects to the whole analysis, ie: The South is her shortcut to describe the Christian Norway main, Bonus Footage is her quaternal shadow of the main view; she has a chapter that describes a silent ‘h’ in the Norwegian language that relates to Hitler and how he affected everything or the Norwegian A that is encoded in her brain and seeps through when she attempts to be purely English—and these little shortcuts get brought up continually throughout the book and each chapter really just starts to seem to exist wholly for her to find more shortcut phrases that she can continually repeat throughout the text like a punchline. It just starts to get really corny.
Interlaced throughout the text is a very light fictional story about the the narrator (this is supposed to be a fiction, if you can believe it) meeting two other girls and establishing a witch coven where (maybe?) they are recoding the reality of the world by weaving into it a stinking bonus material religion into the underbelly of life; some of these fiction scenes are really cool: there is a scene where the girls are just laying on a bed and one of the girls just mentions about how “you know when a tampon gets stuck sideways” and then they go into their dark bathroom and she starts pulling it out and they wipe her menstrual blood everywhere—I summarize it poorly but it’s actually a weirdly comfy and well-described scene; there’s another “less successful” scene where the girls go into a cafeteria and order aspic (which is another one of the authors very clever shortcuts that she then repeats in every single chapter; I am the aspic..) and reality has a ‘stroke’ causing everyone else to freeze and a black mass of other witches and demons assembling in the cafeteria, and the girls start eating the demons and then start eating faeces and etcetera.
Basically: I think this book succeeds when it is more grounded in black metal, Norway, and the small slice-of-life parts where a real narrative seems to be, but the bulk of it is a really Eh vibes-ran philosophical treatise that is just repetitive and dull and only has substance for maybe ~40 pages of its ~220 length.
But again, despite how down I seem on this: I read it in ~2 sessions, enjoyed my time with it, had fun thinking about some of the concepts, made me nostalgic for black metal and Fenriz (I have a soft spot for Fenriz; I had a period too of getting really into BSoD & Blod Besvimelse), and it actually had been a book I wanted to read—I remember seeing it on some TikTok about it being about black metal and I thought maybe it had been on a longlist for translated novels. So it’s a 3/5 for me. I didn’t like the content much but I liked reading it and have no regrets about having spent my time with it, and can easily see other people really liking it. Funnily enough I knew the author for her music, had no idea she wrote.
Though, after I finished it I went on Goodreads and I think this is the lowest rated book I’d ever read, which really surprised me; it’s at a flat 3/5 (Goodreads feels like the average rating for a book is firmly around 4 with +/- ~0.2);
it has a slew of funny reviews, most of the 1* ones actually are just because the narrator writes the N-word in the first twenty pages (not really without reason, either, describing the use of the slur in the context of 90’s racist Norway); most of the other negative reviews fit in the exact complaint I felt with its repetition and half-baked philosophizing. Most of the positive reviews just really liked the vibe of it.
Bonus 1* review by Goodreads user Marie-Therese:
This was just unbearably juvenile, repetitive, and poorly written*. There was nothing "transgressive" here and little that felt genuinely feminist. Perhaps something was lost in translation, but at more than halfway through without a single resonant sentence or striking image, and only the promise of more childish foot-stamping and reviewing of other, stronger artists' work, I'm done.
Bonus 5* review by Goodreads user Ks.:
I have never listened to Jenny Hval's music and know very little about black metal culture per-se, though I was a punk kid in the 90s so I understood viscerally what she was talking about. Don't be scared off if you don't know/care about black metal. It is not about that. It is about hating God, which is to say hating the patriarchal God, which is to say hating what men do to women in God's name.
The book itself is simultaneously a fever dream, a stream of consciousness, and a rigorously researched feminist manifesto. I have never read anything like this. The protagonist is writing a screenplay based on her friends, her band, her coven, who may or may not be real. They do magic, which may or may not be real. They revel in the forbidden without any gratuitous violence, without any sadism, without any sexualization. It is truly a feminist gem.
Now, I would NOT recommend it to most people. This book is WEIRD. It doesn't have a straight-forward narrative. The phrase "I hate God" is mentioned probably a hundred times. I would give this book to a teenage girl wearing all black (yeah-yeah-yeah, it's 18+) but not her suburban mom. It's not a "book that everyone should read." And it's okay. It's a book that I needed to read, and I book that I will go back to.
^ I completely agree with the last paragraph; I really would recommend this book to a certain type of person, I think they’d really enjoy it (not without condescension or anything: if you like gothy satany black metaly transgressivey stuff you’d possibly really have fun with this book).
c. .hack//Another Birth vol 1. //Infection by Miu Kawasaki
This slots right in with how I felt about Girls Against God: short and enjoyable but not very well written—although this case differs because this novel/series is just aimed at a younger audience, and so the writing is trimmed down and tailored to be quickly read and easy; it was another birthday gift, from Mikey! I’d enjoyed reading Girls Against God so much that I just wanted another quick/easy read so I dove right into this book immediately after, and read through half the novel in one sitting—and finished it in one other sitting.
It’s the type of book where you can finish ~80 pages without realizing it due to how large the print it and how many illustrations are interspersed throughout the text.
When I started reading it my immediate thoughts were this is written way better than Boogiepop because although both novels are aimed to be easy-reads, the tone of Another Birth just had a quality to its premise that I immediately enjoyed: while not a dark story, it was a story of a child (Akira/BlackRose in-game) sort-of swirled into terrible circumstances of her brother falling into a coma after visiting a location in the MMO called ‘The World’ at her request, and then dealing with the fallout from how her and her family responded to it. Mom is suddenly letting the television play while at dinner. Dinner is suffocatingly quiet. Akira now has to take care of her younger brother because her parents are both tapped-out mentally. She is refusing to mention the incident to her friends at school because she doesn’t want to be a bother, or to be bothered herself; she is struggling to juggle her school-life and involvement with a tennis club, and pursuing a mystery online about the coma incident surrounding The World.
It’s a cool premise and written well for the genre. The issue with the writing comes with the background as laid-out by the author in the post-word, basically: this was a mercenary work for the author to adapt the story of the first .hack// videogame while alternating the viewpoint to the supporting character BlackRose, instead of the protagonist Kite; the author hadn’t really an idea about the setting before being hired to write the novelization series, and as-such the story for this starts to read as a checklist of story-beats that need to be hit upon—towards the ~40% mark of the novel, it really feels like the plot is just being ploughed through to reach an end and the personal creative spark of the author ran dry; the tone just becomes “ok the author needed to write all these scenes to line up with the videogame plot.”
Relationships don’t make a lot of sense within the story, the tennis storyline is sort-of “just there,” and just while reading it was extremely hard for me to not be baffled at why Kite and BlackRose were friends or even thought of themselves as remotely close—it just felt like the author were hoping a reader to understand they were friends despite all of the interactions just being “sure you can come along if you want, actually nevermind, I have to leave.” —it’s all varying degrees of that; Kite is doing the videogame plot in the background, shows up, acts aloof, maybe tells BlackRose some details, and then BlackRose will have tons of inner monologue about why her and Kite are on a secret and terrific mission to solve the mystery of the coma victims.
Just sort-of not well written, you know? But just like the initial caveats: it’s a quick and enjoyable read and I love .hack//, and I loved the illustrations; I had a lot of fun reading it despite it firmly just being a 3/5 for me—I’d still be interested in reading some of the stand-alone .hack// light novels, and maybe continuing into the second book too, just to see if the author finds more of their voice within the setting.
Of note: this seems almost universally beloved on Goodreads, but most readers seemed to have read it as a kid and admit to being very nostalgic for either it or .hack//Sign.
Bonus 4* star review by Goodreads user ~Cyanide Latte~:
I am a long-time dotHACK fan, having originally played the first game on the PS2 when it was released in America back in 2003. When Tokyopop would later publish the English translations of these light novels that told the story from the games through BlackRose's perspective, I didn't anticipate falling in love with them at all. I'm so happy that I finally have these, and I do recommend them for any fans of the franchise, especially the original games.
I'll be posting my full review for this entire quartet on the final book, but I will say that this first installment has its flaws. Dedicated game fans will notice that a lot of Kite and BlackRose's in-game dialogue is switched around, and besides that the writing in this book feels a bit...juvenile. It almost reads like a 12 y.o.'s fanfiction than a proper light novelization. I think part of that is just due to the style in which it was written when translated. The later books get better about that, so don't fret!
Bonus 2* review by user Shannon:
I think this book could have been much better. I wonder if there is a manga version of the story that I must have over-looked? The story-line kept me going and I'll of course go on to read the rest of the series (can't go on without knowing the end, now! xD) but at the current point in time, I really didn't much like it from a general perspective. It lacked much-needed detail and if it weren't for the few illustrations in the book I would have been lost as to what the people and places looked like. The author kept it simple, and it sort of dissapointed me.
d. Obscene Bird of Night by Jose Donoso and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
These two are grouped together because I spent little time reading either book; not really for disfavor with either book, just turning time elsewhere—Invisible Man especially, I felt reading it early on that it would be a book that I loved but would likely drop just because it was a long book and the subject matter seemed like it could get tiring after awhile (and it did) but remained something that—after every single chapter—I found something gorgeous in the prose that would just stick to me with meaning: the last chapter I read, before totally moving on to other things, was while taking my mom out to get bloodwork done and the whole chapter was this balmy rainy scene outside a meeting center for radicals that the narrator had become involved with, and during his reflecting he goes back into a memory and remembers a history teacher talking about race and how it becomes constructed and how it seems like a gilt being pulled up from silt and given significance held together by so many bodies affixing it like a glue named spirit (going off of memory; the chapter reads nothing like how I’m describing it but it’s how I remember it).
But I just don’t want to do a few hundred more pages of our narrator going through an Odyssey throughout New York. Fantastic book, all the same.
Obscene Bird of Night was a birthday gift by Ron and I had intended to make this my next read and took to it with love because it absolutely surprised me with how much this book surpassed what I thought it would be—I thought it would be a somewhat heady and feverish book like Solenoid or so many other post-modernist bricks, but (excuse my videogame comparisons) it really is like an extremely well written version of Rule of Rose and is everything I would ever want out of a book about ‘witches’ or a black mass religion or a rotting old home that never is taken as religiously or seriously as a book that is outright about ‘the witch’/’black grail’/’haunted house’ ever is—there is this scene early on where one of the young girls entrusted to the old rotting manse is thrusting herself up against the window when Giant’s Head (? going off memory) pulls up into the courtyard and stares up at the girls, wearing his namesake paper mache mask—it’s just so bizarrely evocative.
What is it about? It is so far about a servant of the house (a large, rotting old thing of moldering aristocracy now given to mostly matriarchal care) dying and how the other old hags take to scheming around this sudden death; it is told by our narrator, a male mute servant, who now fancies himself “the seventh witch” (? might have the number wrong) after being entrusted by the six other women in a secret coven with the secret pregnancy of their number, and how he offers his own nest within the labyrinth of the giant house as the secret birthplace for this child—who will be raised in the uterus of the house where no male will ever reach it, and no knowledge will ever touch it except the world crafted solely by the seven witches; it’s full of really beautiful imagery and descriptions of old women who seem more like monstrous features of the house than as people, and of a large house boarded up and endlessly unfolding in on itself in a labyrinth spiraling down somewhere.
Why’d I drop it? It was really just because I received some other books as late birthday presents and saw that they were short. The idea of reading a book that I could realistically start and finish within one~two afternoons really just appealed to me; I’d only been reading long things. So, I read Girls Against God and then that .hack// light novel back-to-back, over just a few short evenings, and then started another gifted book that I mostly just picked up to see what it was about.
For fun, some bonus reviews for Obscene Bird:
A cute and glowing 5* review by Goodreads user Steven Godin
The overriding theme that the novel digs into is that of possession and the possessed - in all its freakish and holy spirited glory. The story of the last Azcoitia son is only part of this delirious maze‐within‐a‐maze novel, and I'm not even going to bother mentioning certain characters here and who is who, with the disguises - including papier-mâché heads - and apparent body/organ swapping going on - although I'm still not too sure.
If you like challenging and dense stories/writing and astonishing imagination, don't mind being disgusted, disturbed, have moments where one could feel like cramping up with laughter - although the book is predominantly dark and perverse, feeling like being in a fever dream, like the idea of paradoxical legends and creepy old cronies being nursed like new born babies and masquerade balls full of mutant people, and can handle the fact there is no real closure or ending that gives you that extra bit of satisfaction, then this is one Latin American novel that I'd highly recommend.
And a downright scornful 2* review by Goodreads user—the dog that he is—Hux:
Where to begin? I suppose with the fact that it's extremely difficult to enjoy a book when there's nothing to latch onto, nothing solid that you can grab, with both hands, and ingest in a way that makes the thing come alive. It's like trying to grab hold of a piece of air. I think there was only one chapter (towards the beginning) where I did get a momentary glimpse of sanity and could actually cling to something tangible but this vanished almost immediately. The structure is chaotic from start to finish and any logic or coherency you might find is either accidental or located in madness.
e. The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
This was another gifted book; when I received Girls Against God from Ness she also sent me another book picked by her boyfriend which was The Betrothed, and I wanted to at least read a few chapters of it to tell her and him what I thought about it instead of leaving it on ice indefinitely (generally I try to read a few chapters/pages of any book I’m given; might not finish it for years but I always read some of it).
I really love this book. As of writing (here on 5/29) I haven’t picked it up in a few days mostly owing to depression + being determined to finish the visual novel Siren’s Call, but reading this book has been the absolute closest I’ve gotten to that highschool thrill I’d get from being lost in a book—I don’t know what it is, but lately I just feel a tremendous amount of patience has returned to me and I have it in me to just ‘read slowly’ and not feel a pressure to race towards the end of a chapter and meet a certain quota by a certain time, and not just limited to reading, but to things like playing videogames and being idle and lazy: usually sitting still had been a suffering for me, and now it’s been so easy that I feel guilty and (even) a self-loathing with how slothful I’m becoming. That I can just sit and read and play videogames makes me feel awful and like death is nearing me.
The Betrothed though, gosh; I don’t know where to start with it—I did not finish reading the introduction but I read a good chunk of the intro and the translators introduction; the former is the friend of the translator going into their history with this book and how it first found them in its untranslated glory (as a gift) after studying Italian, and how it sat unread for years until one day it was picked up and not put down until read front-to-back, and how this new recent translation was a work of some decades to perfect all the regional dialects and traveling to the locales mentioned and how harried the translator had been with it; it all just coalesced into this image of “this book is significant, this work to translate it is significant.”
The book itself just has such an invitation to read it—I don’t know how to explain; it reads so easily and yet the prose isn’t so cheap as Monte Cristo or something similar and yet the adventurous heart is inside it and yet it isn’t like a constant comedy odyssey like Invisible Man yet it’s failing after failing and has a humor and a seriousness and it’s just a treat;
roughly, this is the plot: man and woman want to get married, a nobleman is threatening to kill the priest who had promised to marry the two, the man and woman alternate between getting a beloved monk to solve their issue and trying to solve it themselves through a scheme, through circumstances of a fall-out the man and woman become separated and end up in either a nuns convent and a capuchin monastery.
it’s just kinda ace; the first big “wow I really love this” is when it gets into the background of the beloved monk, and then again later with the background of the beloved nun—it reminded me a lot of that anime/manga Orb I dropped because it was (although good) too darn dull to exercise to (this takes place 1~2 centuries after Orb though).
I haven’t finished it but I got through ~280 pages pretty quickly sans this hiccup towards the end of the month with Siren’s Call and me being depressed. I didn’t really mean to drop Obscene Bird of Night for it but I just wanted to keep knowing what would happen next; the author’s voice is so charming, it’s written like a story pulled from historical documents and often the author will go on small tirades about how the original names had been censored to preserve the integrity of noble families but will then conjecture at likely guilty parties and just switched from censored names to the names spelt outright; it’s just a fun read. It’s very good and apparently mandatory reading over in Italy so people groan about it, maybe like how an American kid might groan about Scarlet Letter or Grapes of Wrath or whatever boring old book is required reading.
Bonus gushing review by Goodreads user Bill Kerwin:
Manzoni's historical novel The Betrothed--although not much read today in the English-speaking world--is considered by many Italians to be the greatest novel written in their language. It is indeed a great novel. Manzoni, building on the simple romantic story of an engaged couple whose scheduled wedding is prevented by the designs of a lustful noble, creates a rich, many-shaded portrait of life in the vicinity of Milan in the early 17th Century, featuring war, famine, plague and riot, great crime and sincere repentance, selfish and saintly deeds.
This is one of the least ironic and most compassionate books I have read, a book truly Catholic in the best sense of the world, in which every character —no matter how flawed— is seen as a human being working out his destiny in a world that is essentially good. God is merciful, and His church offers sacramental comfort and absolution to all, even for the bloodiest of deeds and the rashest of vows.
And a bonus scathing 1* review by Goodreads user Ernestina:
Una delle cause di un trauma generazionale nazionale.
f. Siren’s Call: Escape Velocity by The Pen Sword
I finally finished it! I sat down the final week of May and felt so unwilling to do anything that I figured I may as well keep facing away from life, art, to face at a big boring visual novel about Florida that I keep wanting to finish but never make good on.
Finishing this made me so depressed and like the whole heart of mine was just this suckering raw wound wanting someone to stick their fingers into it and just kill it —and that is how I felt, I just wanted to kill myself after reading it and spent the night, morning, night, morning after having all these evil thoughts of killing myself and stewing about the poison inside of language; my goal is to keep myself secular in (personal) writing outside of explicitly religious works but how can I not here when the problem seems so tied to faith: inside the written language and the spoken word of the visual novel was excitement as poison existing only to push a malignant life into the brain, heart, gut of a reader—feel a mood by the sound, inherit a mood by the soundscape, let brain be overwrit a little by writing and die, remember Daniela and die, remember the feeling of being trap’t here in Florida and die, remember incompetencies at escaping Florida and die, see self overlaid all shadowy over characters tied to the world with sound light color and die; read all of this complete trash and just die. I loathed myself at reading this for how affected it made me and how in prayer the following day I neared tearing and panicking over how the house was changing and all the wispy black figures I kept seeing were flitting about now like some moron visions had become of me and a weak little dove heart had replaced mine own. What about the game?
Well, briefly:
I think this game is extremely mid if you want a Denpa story, and I don’t really care about denpa stuff much lately because of how steeped in psychiatry it all seems and far removed from myself it seems—too, you should know this is a looping narrative where the same scene is repeated with slight changes each iteration as the world denatures and becomes CrAzY. This looping part is established as “hurricane categories” and ranges from how it starts at category 1, and ending at the disastrous category 5 which ends the game. Categories 1-4 aren’t anything special, and I bet (should you read this) you will find yourself slightly bored and feeling confident that you know exactly where the story is going and that this whole plot feels like the author spinning wheels to reach a conclusion both author and reader can see coming from the start; (as a reader) you will probably even be thinking (have you played it) “this is exactly like a Persona plot.”
There are some unique flourishes to this looping section, like how it explores the agency of the narrator and how they come to ‘exist’ as more of a person instead of just a tool for a faceless reader to control; too, how it breakdowns the tropes established for each character—but I bet you’ll be not terrifically interested for categories 1~4.
The full strength hurricane, though—
Something this game excels at is capturing a magic that is unique to Florida. I bought (not pirated) this game entirely because it takes place in Central Florida and I simply wanted to support any author or artist who is willing to make art elevating the spirit of Central Florida—something I’ve grown distaste for is authoring works that are adaptations of anothers home, ala the many efforts of American authors to write stories that take place in Japanese schools or like the slew of authors who write Chinese cultivation stories without ever taking foot in the place: I want the denpa story that takes place in Central Florida, it is what I want to write and read—it’s my bacteria and molecule. Siren’s Call elevates some of the aspects of Florida I’d really overlooked, it utilizes the imagery of Hurricanes and Space Launches so well that I wish I could gush about it but it’s more a feeling than a thought: it’s just captured so perfectly that it becomes poetic and makes Florida seem like a labyrinth beast with a magic property no other place has: our rains are sudden and disastrous and our idiot scientists over here try to escape regularly into suffocating crushing space. It’s just neat, and sometimes I forget we are like that as all Florida just seems to me grey brown and screens of shimmering heat over everything.
The full strength hurricane, though— categories 1-4 are very mid, but I think the final full strength category 5 is extremely well done and a very nice capstone to an otherwise mid reading experience; in reading this I compare it to 2236 AD where the game starts phenomenal with an incredible opening sequence and cutscene and then uses that earned good-will to make a reader suffer through hours of a story that is kinda mid and kinda boring, only to reveal that all that floundering sophomoric mid boring writing was completely crucial to the thesis it sets up at the very end—even, that if the story were told better: it would be a weaker experience. Siren’s Call is almost like that. Categories 1-4 are important to setup the central thesis that the final section reveals as the big ‘point of all this garbage’ but I still just think 1-4 is bad writing and only in parts 5, the journal entries (which are great), and the epilogue titled ‘finishing touches’ does the writing seem to know what it is and who the characters are. If I were an editor that lived inside the brain of the authors and time/money were no issue, I’d want that author to finish the journals, epilogue, part 5, and then rewrite parts 1-4.
As mentioned, the journals are also really well done—throughout the main story you collect pieces of a journal that unveils the real story behind the game (no spoilers), and this reads like the visual novel I wish the main game was; the main game is experimental denpa Eh, but the journal is a traditional visual novel (even with its own background art, which is better background art than the main game) with a more traditional slice-of-life story with something odd happening in the background.
The epilogue is a synthesis of the best parts of category 5 and the journals, and the final chapter of the epilogue is the most perfect adaptation of living through a Florida hurricane than I think I have ever experienced in any form of media; the very last part of the epilogue is a slow build of a hurricane while the main cast takes shelter in an empty school, and the ferocity of the storm slowly builds with ambience of rain and thrashing against the windows and building and gentle roaring outside; everyone is wearing peejays and data goes out and power goes out, and it’s just perfect.
Parts 1-4 are boring. Part 5 is great. The journals are great. The epilogue is great. This game is something special to me and I hate it for it; I think language is evil and if Satan were to exist with any true control over the heart, Satan would hide itself in language and language would be the seedbed for its body.
I wanted to include some bonus reviews for this but had some trouble finding any that were succinct, the closest on Steam comes from user osmanberen:
I was bored to death playing the game but the ending was worth it
my favorite balanced review comes from vndb user knotteye:
This VN has significant flaws. The horror falls flat, the ending is an awkward non-resolution to the main plot and has a jarring perspective shift that distracts from the telling of the story's final moments, and yet it is incredibly captivating. This is an 8 hour character study that ends with
[spoiler removed], and yet for some reason it's still very good. Perhaps because it's so obvious that the developers really loved their work and poured something of themselves into it. Pick it up if you are ready to see a rough around the edges but excellent passion project.
I will definitely look forward to anything ThePenSword makes next.
and a fun glowing review by vndb user blargsboiler:
It's a crime that nobody knows about this game...
Easily one of the best coming of age stories I've ever played. Maybe I'm biased because I grew up in a small Florida town myself, but this VN has so much fucking soul it's unreal.
Can't recommend more.
I came back here on the 31st of this month before finalizing my post and I’m still pretty sad thinking about Siren’s Call—it’s funny, because one of the ‘trigger-points’ in remembering it comes from it just mentioning Steak & Shake in passing through one of the exchanges between Oliver and Violet (a cute pet name she uses for Oliver is Olive Oil). It just breaks my heart to think about, not really because of the story itself but because of Florida itself and all those faint memories I have; the most cheese-ball gag one is just Daniela and the thought of myself as failing to hit escape velocity and how she was lost to Florida and all those weird memories I have of her; of restaurants and beaches and shuttles and how I shut myself away from everyone. How I came back to Florida, how I seemingly didn’t change, how Judith is portrayed as a domestic ghost that will not change, how alone I ended up, how I’m just tied up to ghosts. I just circle back to thinking language is a poison. Keep thinking about going to Steak & Shake after work tomorrow morning.
I wrote my own steam review for it, too!
g. Knock on the Coffin Lid
I played this start to finish! Didn’t 100% it or bother with the (apparent) super secret boss (I’m not even sure if it really exists and only know about it through some patch notes I read) but cleared all the challenges and DLC content—it seemed like it just hard deleted your save after the final chapter of DLC and I didn’t really want to bother doing it again.
This game was cool. It’s in the style of Slay The Spire but instead of the map being randomized, everything is completely static and instead you go from node-to-node and slowly learn what is at each static node, and how the story there unfolds, and how you can combine certain routes or information gained from prior runs to further awards/story at each node—it’s novel, and tied into the “roguelite” element of the game, where you are a corpse being resurrected by some nearly-all-powerful being who is using you to shift around events to his liking; so: you die, you keep the information, and correspond with your benefactor to slowly craft together a better plan to overthrow the kingdom or whatever.
I really liked slowly trudging through the nodes and becoming familiar with each one and learning which items to get or just seeing the little stories themselves unfold; the setting of this game is just really neat though words fail it a bit because it’s best description just comes from how it is artistically—otherwise, it’s several maps featuring several conflicts: the first one is a war between elves and dwarves, the next two are either a swampland fostering a cult of mite worshippers and rooting out cannibalistic heresy amongst them, or the alternative map is one featuring a conflict between goblins and orcs—orcs want to enslave everyone, goblins are deranged little men that breed and raise giant worms; the last one is the kingdom map featuring demons at odds with the ‘brotherhood of fire,’ which are vigilantes going from town-to-town setting on fire anything seemingly affected by possession.
Again, all kind-of typical, but I fell in love with the art and presentation for each race—the elves are really neat here, they’re just these sadistic blue-skinned things all all with huge bald spots splitting their scalps;
only thing about the game is its difficulty is really whack.
I played on hardcore(?) difficulty mostly just because I like it when games eat up my time by letting myself just throw myself at them until I win, but the ‘true end’ for a run feels nearly impossible while doing the campaign unless you go into the challenge mode and slowly finish the ‘tree’ for each character—see, the challenge mode is this big literal tree that has randomized runs on it without the story aspect for the nodes (so more like a traditional roguelite experience instead of the static story nodes on preset maps) and each time you beat a run, you unlock a permanent buff to your character and the next step on the tree unlocks with another permanent buff; these buffs are things like a static HP buff, to being things like “you can heal at campsites”, to being things like “you start with a weapon” to the extent that it feels like the characters are completely designed with these challenges being 100% completed (especially for the final character, Vanadis, who uses a summoning-pet system that basically feels like utter trash until you do her challenges)—but in doing so, in conjunction with slowly earning all the persistent lore information from the campaign mode, you end up with runs that largely aren’t challenging (even the true final boss, which is just about impossible without a completely unlocked character); so it veers from “fun but unbeatable” to “nearly impossible to lose”.
Just whack; too: the progression in this game is designed by a complete lunatic, and mostly focused 100% on the dlc “Nightmare of Millenis”—why it is lunatic: to access the dlc whatsoever you have to 100% all the major content on the base game: beat the true end with all three characters, which likely also means finish all the challenge trees for each character; and only after you essentially 100% the base game do you get access to what is basically a ‘challenge mode’ tacked onto the base campaign mode, where now for each run you can choose a tarot specific to each character that gives the run a mini-storyline that unlocks a special item/effect to make the secret-final-true-dlc boss easier, a constant challenge modifier persistent throughout the run (ex: when you play a card, you lose a card), and a new secret-final-true-dlc boss that comes at the end of the run. It’s actually a lot of fun, because the little challenge-storylines are just fun to figure out (the story is just neat, I like the lore/setting a lot).
It’s just a deranged way to present a dlc that concludes the story (100% the base game, then do 18 challenge runs, then get the real ending which also deletes your save).
Game is a lot of fun; normally I’ve been put off Slay The Spire type games because I just felt that STS did it nearly perfectly and I mined that game for all it was worth years ago already, and either 1) don’t bring anything new to the genre or 2) they add so much ‘depth’ that runs feel like unfun puzzle slogs, but Knock was a nice medium that really took me by surprise and kept my attention—and, oddly, this month it feels like I’ve regressed to my old self a bit: more easy is it for me to read slow, to play a game, to be idle; maybe having the patience for this is just side-effect, but: had fun with it, I’d recommend it.
It just has really cool art direction.
h. Sakamoto Days
This sucked!
. . . . is what I wish I could say, but really it was just a very mid show for me that I had only started because my feet were injured (and I needed to get in some cardio somewhere, so indoors cycling while watching anime) and I had read the first volume of the manga some time back.
My problem with it is really just that I thought the show lacked a spine to support its own identity—and this may be more a problem with me as a watcher than the show itself, while watching all I could really think were a few things about the ‘DNA’ behind the show, that: the secret main villain (‘Slur’ —what a dumb name) felt nearly identical to the main villain of Majin Neuro (‘X’) and even they both share the same trademark of leaving behind an ‘X’ mark at their brutal mass slaughters; too: while I ‘liked’ all of the villains in the show I started to realize huh, they all just act aloof like every character in Under Ninja; every villain is just a casual aloof “Oh.. hm, well, I want to go home early.. I guess I’ll kill you quickly, then,” and there isn’t much variety in personality once you recognize it—I don’t think necesarily that this is something unique to Under Ninja but it’s a trait that I think is utilized better in Under Ninja instead of a crutch to bring levity/charisma to every single villain. The last thing is the real central gene of the show: this is another “overpowered ex-monster who has retired and now lives a life of peace” ala Trigun ala Ruroni Kenshin and I don’t think Sakamoto really brings anything significantly more interesting to the genre. But, and why I think this is a ‘me’ problem, is I really do not believe there any issue in wearing inspirations on the sleeve or that a show is made weaker by being an amalgam of what came before it—that is, after all, how art and language works. Really it is just I couldn’t get the thoughts out of my head and find much of a special quality to the show except that the OP was kind-of nice.
That’s mainly everything, except that I liked how Hard Boiled & his partner were adapted in the show, and how the sniper guy was given a lot of oomph purely by sound design alone (his bullets just felt like they ripped through my speakers, I really liked that); the deerhead guy was made so lame the moment he took his mask off.
Just kinda mid, I wasn’t going to finish the last episode because it was just a set-up filler episode for the oncoming season 2 (as was the second-to-last episode, which really just felt like the showrunners felt stretched for how to adapt the show to a full season), but I injured my feet again yesterday.
Blogging
Had a dream tonight about this strange art competition, or class (difference between the two was indistinguishable, basically it was a class of people who all volunteered for it and then we were given set challenges throughout the semester that often seemed to have little to do with art), where we needed to do a series of food challenges to advance through the class, and were racing against each other; I was second to finish the latest food challenge and now joined the first place student (an older man who had some fame as a film director) with the next challenge, which ended up being that we needed to eat the meals from the last seven challenges—and there I announced I was giving up, after seeing that my latest meal was a slab of raw beef with cysts throughout it, and suppressed the thought that I might have chewed through a cyst without realizing it; it was too gross for me.
As more people caught up to us and people discovered I was dropping out of the competition, the issue of Scientology came up as the third or fourth placed person was convening with the fifth and sixth and seventh placed people while waiting for everyone else to catch up; this fourth placed person had recently converted and came from money, and wanted to do an auditing session with the others which led to a mean spirited resistance about that Scientologist crap and the usual protests about the cruelty and manipulation of the religion, and they seemed to beat down the person till she moved to a corner; the person who was first, currently, I had seen thumbing around a Scientologist necklace, the ARC triangle, in his hands. One of the adversarial group had been someone I knew in middleschool and pulled me into what became a heated analysis of how moronic Scientology was, and I started advocating for the girl mostly laying myself out that I wanted to join the religion in the past, and my usual protests in favor of Scientologists—to be met with the usual protests by others against Scientologists, till they threatened my mistake with making me lose the competition only for me to admit I have already conceded.
Everyone started to return to their dorms and the person in first, shadowed by the fourth-placer, pulled me away in a corner of a balcony up on the second floor dorms; he spoke to me with handsigns (he was mute) which I was amazed to understand, roughly he said: he wanted to help me; and the final thing I figured he was trying to tell me: is he wanted to save my mom, making a gesture (amazed I understood) indicating a dying liver—and I woke up, wondering about enslaving myself to Scientology to be bought by them to save my mom, and how my vows would need me to say No to be true to my vows, and what that would mean for my mom.
Then I woke up! Still depressed thinking about Siren’s Call and feeling in a rare mood that I best know as being affected and feeling that a louse had knit itself into me and clenches all my thoughts inwards around a single inflamed sore thought: suicide; it’s a bug I’d like to pull out but the second I manage to grip it with calipers I realize my depth perception was all wrong and I missed it entirely only for the little bugger to jump away—and I think feeling this way must just be an experience meant to have and be affected by and to be passenger to; at some point the normal state of life was to have death lain atop everything much like a heavy quilt, and everything became stuffy with it, and for some odd reason it became so terrific that it earned my worship of it as it seemed even more constant, bright, and present than the sun or any other celestial body.
So, another bad month.
May started fairly positive but crashed on me just a few hours into waking up on my birthday; I made plans with my mom and had everything laid out: I would walk down to the bakery and get a concha, then come back and pick my mom up to take her to Barnes & Noble and then we would go to Fresh Market to do some ritzy grocery shopping and then to the Jamaican place to get curry goat and then finally to Publix to get a Carvel ice cream cake—I’d never had one and heard they were amazing for their “crunchies.”
It broke down slightly at the book store; I ended up realizing how pricy that place was and left with mostly the impression that 1) they actually stocked a lot of books I wanted and had never seen on a shelf before, & 2) they are insanely expensive; so, though I planned to absolutely buy at least one book as a treat for myself —I bought none, being unable to justify the cost versus buying used or piracy, and instead got my mom a magazine about vegan recipes.
Fresh Market similar disappointment, everything there was mostly just seeming pale and fluorescent—I don’t remember if we bought anything, I might have got my mom a chocolate bar or some chocolate bark or flowers.
The Jamaican place had shut down, storefront completely hollowed out. Still determined to get myself ‘something nice’ for lunch I went back to where I got the concha and got chilaquiles since I’d never had them before.
Publix had the Carvel cake but something about it just made me feel moronic and small, and having it later (though my mom said it was the best thing she ever tasted) I mostly just thought it tasted bland.
It all just left me feeling incredibly alone and that the world was nothing but empty distractions and that material, taste, sense would never be substitute for the richness of a full life—but what was a full life? Maybe having family or loved ones around you, or people to dote on you annoyingly or to fuzz and itch at birthday blues, and I had none of that except my beloved mom who has as much difficulty talking with me as I do her. I mostly just felt alone and like spending money on others might be a better happiness than receiving anything myself; still, I was grateful and happy for the one gift I got: Obscene Bird of Night by Ron, which I’d wanted for some long time ever since seeing the really lovely new edition (the one pictured up in the brief review for it) and I think I started reading it that very day. I felt very needy.
The whole day left me in a foul mood for a week and my mood flipped again after receiving some late gifts by Ness and Chris, and from Mikey and Darcy, and from doing some personal book shopping at the library bookstore on their half-price day ($1 book down to fifty cents!!); the haul:
Frightening amount of my happiness on my birthday comes from gifts, I guess. Talk is cheap! So is material too, I suppose.
A few days into the month my computer had some hardware fault and I was without computer till near the end of the month; I received new parts (a small upgrade, even) two days before my birthday and then unbuilt and rebuilt my computer—the big surprise here was that I completely knew how to build a computer despite only having ever done it a few times, somehow the information never really left me—and realized I had another faulty part somewhere; I spent most of the afternoon and evening slowly trying to diagnose where the error was and did as much narrowing as I could do without spare parts to check: it was either the motherboard, the PSU or the CPU (possibly the RAM too but it felt so unlikely I didn’t consider it) and then felt an idiot about it all. I took it down to a local computer store that has been a fixture downtown for years and always seemed to me that it would be this cigarette-stinking place ran by an old large man surrounded by nicotine-stained IBM beige boxes and he’d make a career out of palming away the confidence of idiot old ladies and grandfathers through their ignorance of compooter. Was actually a very lovely interior (if stuffy) and the man I spoke with I had a very nice time talking to, and we chatted about Leesburg and how it was likely to become a more successful town in the coming years, and we talked about his partner, and we talked about how all the food in Leesburg is mid (it’s strange, every time I have asked someone recently about food spots in Leesburg they all say the exact same thing: everything here is mid—exactly that, “everything … mid”); he took my computer and I felt good about not having to worry about unbuilding/rebuilding my computer over and over again and figuring out if I could magically solve it or just blanket returning every part and rebuying and just focusing on my birthday instead. After a week of no call-backs I started becoming a loan shark and regularly visiting and calling the business to harass about the work; on the phone I would always get a new person who would always tell me “we have it on the bench just this morning and will have a report to you by four this evening,” and then no call or text; visiting I would get my guy just telling me his superiors have just been able to get it on the bench at some odd timeframe and it would be a bit.
At some visit some morning [the guy I liked] listened to how I was a little frustrated with how I keep being told it would be done this evening and I’d get a call this evening and nothing; I offered to get him donuts or coffee or something downtown; he ended up just doing the diagnostic himself and called me back that evening to tell me yes it was the motherboard and I picked it up that evening and took it back home that evening and returned the motherboard that evening and ordered a new motherboard that evening and had a new motherboard the morning after and my computer finally working that morning; after dropping a computer off on the 6th, I finally had one on the 22nd. Yippee!
But a headache. It was just incredibly frustrating because I know enough about diagnosing hardware issues to know that (if you have the spare parts to test potential faulty parts) my job was like ~an hour of work, maybe four if it was especially confounding. It was frustrating!! But I left happy in the end.
And with a better computer that could run things like Elden Ring now! And JRPGs like Resonance of Fate! No more would I feel bad about running any game with 3d in it like I was causing my poor little engine to undergo a slow painful stroke through its little computer brain; it had the muscle!
And, I did; the end of the month I just realized all I wanted was sort-of play videogames; I cleared all of Knock on the Coffin Lid (which I had been working on before the computer trouble) and started Elden Ring and have been having fun with it, and read all of Siren’s Call; I tried to find a JRPG to get into, too: Resonance of Fate is really neat, because as I described on my bluesky: it feels like someone tasked new-era Square to design a game emulating retro-era Square who is tasked with designing a Suda 51 game without having ever played a Suda 51 game and imagining how he would make a JRPG.
The issue though is I don’t like the combat system that much; I like the brain-off grind games like Dragons Quest, while Resonance of Fate is this jank pseudo real-time mechanics heavy convolution; you can’t describe the combat system in Resonance of Fate, it’s just so bizarre—not bad, but just not what I want to play; I could see myself revisiting it and playing it more just because I really like the environments in it + the overworld hex system.
Played a few hours of Scarmonde too, it’s neat but feels pale to me by a quality I can’t figure out; something about the character building aspect of Scarmonde just feels hollow, but I should like it cause it’s like a more fleshed out version of Final Fantasy I, II, with the story kinda scooped away—but the character building is done through buying talents via points you farm and the talents are all sort-of not that interesting or exciting (poison one target, poison all targets; buff one character, buff every character). Admittedly I’d probably keep playing it except I decided I really want to just play Elden Ring since I’ve owned it for so long but never been able to run it—my love for Dark Souls 3 just made me put it in my back-pocket since it released; and, with some merit: so much of Dark Souls 3 really gave life to my heart in just wondering about The Painter and the Sable Church and Archdeacon McDonnell that I just find it to be a game that bleeds faith to me, and I want that crazy inspiration and passion from Elden Ring; I want to find my own personal church painting in Elden Ring, if I can.
Granted, this new leisure and ease with which I’d been able to play games made me feel the same hollow emptiness my birthday gave me; I just ended up hating myself for not being busy for more hours of the day with a responsibility or work or with prayer and felt a wretch and then became a stereotype succeeding not in chasing away my idleness or in pursuing my want for responsibility, and just ended up being a lay-about depressed type. Reading Siren’s Call escalated it to a panicking type with these nagging thoughts of death, of Daniela, and a bunch of memories of morons lost to Florida, Lake County.
And then today! In fantastic spirits in a loud Scientologist tone 4: hello!!
Also a Venezuelan food truck appeared nearby on my walking route and I stopped there to practice my spanish and attempt ordering—both times I did this (I left these visits to be on the Orsday Sabbath as a treat) went pretty disasterously, but I did get a really good arepa the first visit (it was mixed meat and the son of the mom who ran the truck came out to ask me if I wanted tomatoes on it, and me and the son just kept nervously laughing at each other because we couldn’t understand what the other was saying), and an incredible beef empanada the second time.
Drafts
I had a good writing routine for most of the month but fell off around the 22nd, as mentioned in the few paragraphs about computer-dying; still: I made decent progress on Chapter 2 and finished a small write-up I’d been wanting to do for the I Am Not A Person of Integrity article (my most successful post and the one I have the most conflicted feelings about); the follow-up is finished and readable here —I’m mostly happy with it, but the kind words it received made me wonder if people didn’t misunderstand me: I meant that I thought it a good thing to divorce the identity of artist from the self, as-well as things like traumas or illnesses or beliefs or politics or etcetera, and a side-note about needing to directly confront a hell and the pains it brings instead of leaving it hidden to root itself underground where it becomes a neuroses more torturous than any repercussion would have been; I don’t like making art all that much, and I don’t want art to be my identity, and I don’t want my life to be framed around a fear of drifting away into disappointment/obscurity from cessation of an artists identity. Maybe that is part of why Siren’s Call hurts me so much.
Here’s the draft for chapter 2, just pasted without editing (I write it in Obsidian and the format doesn’t transfer 1:1, so things like italics might be left as asterisks in the pasted text).
a. Cinnamon Psychic Chapter 2
And I noticed how you let yourself be gulped down in one final swallow; it was a stink of dregs rotting down the throat of a black sink and yet it must have sound a gentle coo to you; ditzy Maud, called to stand en pointe at deaths edge with sweet words and promises wafting off a foul meat.
I saw that terminal circling around the drain before you finally fell over; how you slid down that black throat, naught looking more than a fat milky glob slowly rolling down the pharynx and over other gunk, gathering more dirt and stink till you pas't over the point of no return and hung suspended over Oblivion below, a greasy teardrop shining a cloudy white over nothing, sending fish-fry stink over infinite nothing--not a cry or a protest, only the suspension of a fat greasy dollop over a promise.
Forsooth, an insufferable retard: glassy and empty headed Maud: whore gunk to be splashed against the innards of an Annihilatory sink.
And I? Forsooth, another insufferable retard made witness to everything. Perhaps as witless as yourself, as stupid a sinner as any child struck from the blood of Adam; even the saints of Catholics would erode down here in these acid weathers.
I bare you no more malice; that boy you despoiled and made whore surely is awaiting you at the bottom of that pit--fitting, you and the invert can twirl together and be gnashed apart by the disposal.
My final prayer to you Maud is only that these thoughts may be plucked out by angels watching and carried to you, and that these thoughts will splash against that empty stinking whore head of yours hopefully still porous enough to understand.
That is all I want, dearie old Maud: I want you to listen, and then I want you to die, and then die. Not slumber peacefully till the Millennium and be sorted to the disposal or cruelly left to an eternity of torture boiling away in Hell stuffed in a scalding white box to cook away forever. Just die, in the blink of an eye: die and be gone.
Die you whore rat, and listen:
I saw something wonderful last night in the thick of that soupy weather.
I saw it laying on my bed while my brain was boiling with anger at you--I'd done nothing else since returning home from stalking you all morning.
My body felt so clenched inward with hate all I could think was to kick off my wet clothes and lay down flat on my mattress and just stare upward, up at the ugly yellow popcorn ceiling, and pray myself to become nothing more than another piece of smelly mildew festering away in Pink House.
Make me idiot, God, I'd pray. When it seemed like a hypnosis started to happen and a resemblance of calm would reach me--I would remember, and every joint, knuckle, and nerve in my hands would shriek out in a grimace, and all I could think then was: die, die, die;
And for several hours I lay there staring at the ceiling--at the cracks, and popcorn--and cursing you.
And then the shadows stuck at the periphery became glassy.
A hole opened up, Maud; that is all I can do to describe it--first it began a pinpoint hidden in the shadow of ceiling popcorns, and then it would wobble like a shadow cast by candlelight. Then like a silhouette slowly stepping away from a figure by a spotlight glowing to full intensity. Then like an oil slick, meeting the glassy shadow that'd been at the periphery, till the room itself were all gone and I felt ajar in space and subject to a sudden 'depth' that had not been there.
I was standing in space, Maud; my toes dug into a fine silt that had always been underneathe me the entire time. It was only a fine layer, just underneath was a cold metal that ran completely flat as I drug my foot across't it; I was bemused by the whole thing--how I had been standing this entire time without realizing it, how the bedroom had never been there to begin with, how free I was from Pink House and you, how I had no difficulty whatsoever balancing in total blindness wherever I was (I twirled and stood up on my tippie toes, even).
Off in the blurring depth came the first haunting carnival sounds that swirled themselves nearly indistinct in the miasma. Like footsteps the swelling fairground noises approached, lurching towards me with definition: laughter! balloons inflating! carnie barking! electric dinging and ringing! trumpets and woodwind marching Entrance of the Gladiators! --and all the garbage chatter that comes with a crowd till the black deepness around me was swollen with life and pomp invisible to me but so near I could smell it.
The buttery pretzel popcorn smells, Maud; the faint scent of wheatgrass and manure; the sparkling soda-pop and funnel cake burnt over me and bade at me; pissy beer and sugar-floss strung through the shadow, and I felt at once a child again and nearly wishing you and I and Eustace could be all together laughing together and all lost within the crowd as once we three had been before fever took us each--though I know now it had always been fever, our friendship had never been from health and itself only a prodromal period of what wasted at Leesburg and each of us.
If you could only look up and see what your body was doing now, you stupid geek.
That is what I wish most; we'd curl together side by side and watch your carcass act the soppy whore towards mommy-dearest out in this cool morning.
But; a pressure moved through the dark and I knew immediately a tall Mephisto stood afront me sculpted out from the depths. I knew, Maud--there was a hand outstretched waiting for me to meet it, attached to a tall oily stranger dressed up like some classic prestidigitator with long sable coat-tails and a stiff collar though stepped straight out of Black Butler and just-so capable of snatching up my soul should I only wish to deal with the fiend--if only I were to stretch out my hand in kind and see what awaited me; the funny fair sounds swirled around me and drove my little pigeon heart crazy and yet. . . .
My open palms softly glew out in the dark, held cupped out to receive the small ticket that fell into them. Whatever light shone on my hands seemed to emit from my skin itself; my skin itself had turned strange here--it was how my skin really was, I recognized immediately--a pearly flesh marred around the knuckles and joints with the same vibrant pink of a cooked shrimp. Black veins swirled around in the flesh, and the small glowing light seemed to only persist around the hand that held the ticket.
The ticket itself a strange thing, resembling some cross between a data punch card and arcade ticket--still now I can't make sense of the thing.
But I was led further towards more depth that seemed to sculpt itself around the Mephisto and dig onward, forward down a hall that led us further away from the funny circus noises and towards a soft chatter of spectators unknown that all seemed eager to witness a spectacle unknown and terrific.
We walked, and I saw at my footsteps the same small glow illuminating the barest of circles where I stood--faint enough to see the silt kicking up around my toes and the metal gleaming as it caught the light; my feet were bright red, just like cooked shrimp.
We arrived at our destination: a grand circular surgical theater overlooking a pinprick of light at the center.
Without knowing when or how I had already been seated, pressed tightly together with the other spectators who continued their chatter (still indistinct, the more I attempted to pull apart specific phrases the more muddy the voices became; in hindsight there was no language in that place) and just as suddenly as I had been seated: a grand silence befell us all before a spotlight burned the center stage causing a hazy pillar of dusty gray light to stream upwards up into the abyss.
Applause! I could not help it, Maud; I found myself at my feet and clapping with every other specter in the dark. I looked agape to each invisible thing at my shoulder to share the excitement of 'what would happen' with them.
The Mephisto! He appeared again cut-out in the light just as I had envisioned him out in the sheer dark; he was exactly as I knew him to be--the perfect Black Butler stood demonically out in the light center-stage, more silhouette than image.
The figure bowed and I blustered, drawn in at needle-point from my very spirit to his regal manner that all came to me the portrait of all that were and ever would be heroic, and aristocratic: my salvation, I knew--more than Christ or Ellen White and more elementally pure than the simple stone that struck the brain and delivered frequencies of Heaven direct to the Prophetess: imagine: me, his Phantomhive, his gem to covet fell through the cracks of stinking Leesburg and the mouldering Pink House into this demesne where surely the first-cast of Lord God stalked and made their play. What an airheaded soppy harlot I'd been, my heart felt bewitched and yet all my brain could send to my nerves was a white-hot signal thinking "that retarded whore Maud felt like this," . . . .even then, spirited a million miles away from Earth I still was gripped in the same fever broiling away at the scum in Leesburg.
There in the crowd, my hands hidden away, had the first hole been plucked right into me with that gay curtsy of his; what a soggy mess, the feelings of my heart ran down my spine and had me burning.
All the more I only wished to squish your head down to an oil slick; and the show started.
We all in the crowd watched our Mephisto as he sweeped his arms towards another spotlight that thrummed on just where he now gestured.
A gray slab shimmered under the spotlight --we of the crowd turned to each-other and chattered strangely. Again the words had no sense to them. We conversed automatically.
The Mephisto held a black hand overhead and in the moment I focused on it did I realize a carcass had managed to sneak onto the slab --a movement I only barely recognized in the periphery, a slumping snakelike motion like a slinky pouring itself upward onto an examination table.
The Mephisto made a show of walking around the table, his spotlight following him all the while and still yet the link between us seemed to hold strong; I felt my whole person in want to pull towards him and found myself leaning knees-to-elbows forward. An invisible wisp who sat beside me leaned towards me and spoke automatically, she put her hand on my knee and I clasped her there and spoke automatically.
From the inky jacket he wore he pulled on two powder-white gloves; we clapped!
He stood erect over the carcass and looked down, and twirled his left hand with a flourish till a small surgical tool of pure silver appeared like magic in his hand.
The wisp sat behind me was starting to lean up behind where I sat and pressed forward against me. I craned my head back to hear the automatic words and nodded.
A wisp to my left tapped me on the shoulder and I turned my ear towards her.
The wisp to my right that held my hand tightened hers to mine and mine to hers.
The first audible sound I remember: "Watch."
Louder than any spoken word and more convincing than any thought that bounced around my head. It was elemental. It was every inch of an ecstasy pressed down into a single word.
The tip of the scalpel was pressed to the throat of the carcass--a featureless thing--and pulled down across the chest and belly and down to the first ankle. Again to the second ankle. The wisp behind me pulled nearer till she had herself warm against my scalp.
The powdery hand hooked its fingers inside the peeled throat of the carcass and gently began to unfold where it had been opened. Steam poured forth from the body, not deterring the Mephisto in the slightest.
She behind me dug her fingers against my scalp and seemed to mimic the motions of the surgeon--her fingertips ran a line over my skull, I thought she was spelling a word on my scalp at first.
To my left she tapped me repeatedly, and pointed to the blackness just off and to the side of me. There was something there, too, in the space struck out in the depth: some machine, just out of sight.
I reached towards it and felt it; the surgeon down on stage was pulling long soupy bubbles out of the carcass, placing them by either dead grey leg. The left wisp held my hand and operated it for me onto the machine to make me pull it in-front of my eyes; from behind me two arms passed overhead and helped the other adjust it; my glasses disappeared off into the lap of the one on the right--they were in the way.
I could look through the machine like spectacles. It was cold on my nose. . . .
Well. They broke through my skull without my awareness besides a sensation of rice krispies snapping away inside my head. Whoever operated darted in deeper with pressures I felt oddly inside my thoughts, and without much alarm on my part--I was but a lamb enjoying the show unfolding before me and only mildly amused at how extraneous 'thinking' was and how simple 'I' was, large chunks of my person seemed to shift aside in displacement around whatever intruder pushing around my brains. Hatred and pettiness and love and timidity grew and shrank like bubblegum; my sight on the stage focused sharper and went blurry in turn as another of the specters operated the viewing machine. I swear I could see the small house off on the horizon for a split second. Another second the darkness of the space flashed away with an impossible flaring light showing just briefly the room in its entirety and the persons who had all been gathered. It was the Mephisto I saw most clearly as his sable glamour burnt away, and the true state of the carcass that had until that moment resembled a human lump filled with gelly'd corn syrup.
We each let ourselves be touched by things strange and terrible, Maud.
The light retreated with another rotation of the machine spectacles.
The operator behind me roughly shoved deeper into me and bent my head limp downwards; surely the surgery center stage continued--I could hear the chittering of the shapes still watching all around me in the crowd.
I could not look, my body ceased to move as mine and only had been left to stare down at my lap.
Light flared again with adjustment. I was wearing a beautiful silver gown. A foil garb. My left thigh was mostly pearly white. My right thigh twisted wonderfully with a red tender twirling through more white flesh.
Again the light receded, and it flashed again; my head would jostle from the tinkering going inside of it; wetness felt to splash inside my scalp that ran down my spine and produce more krispy crackling inside my thinking. I could not mind any of it at all.
And with little fanfare I was held by my hands and armpits and hoisted up from my seat, my head repositioned upward and led forward through more dark metal and silt till the wonderful nurses had me sit again, and wait alone. They had left, and I sat there waiting till the morning sun had risen and I found myself just as I had been in my room at Pink House.
Sitting upright in my bed, just as you had been, Maud; and how beautiful Leesburg then seemed--how it now seems; and how perfect a sight it is knowing it is one left for me and one which will never again show itself to you and your little whore eyes, O dear whore rat. How had I been in so much suffering before.
The fever that coursed through this whole beshitten town broke just this morning while I had still yet been in surgery with the Masters outside; I had not even a moment at first light before I saw the affects of the operation upon myself and Leesburg both with the sickening fog wafting off the lawns and roads, as cold sweat wicked away from my own chest and the steam of Pink House aired; it was a cold breeze, from Heaven perhaps, that ran clear through the roads we carved upon this place. The sun had not yet fully risen and I had seen the sky as perfect velvet blue as any jewelers cloth--clear, only clear blue. Vomit and sick evaporated with this clarity I'd never once seen before in any waking memory. And the cause of the infection had been left strewn upon lawns for me to witness; And I did witness.
My purpose was said with the same clarity gifted to Leesburg: Watch.
The bodies of the irritants looked as oblong soap bubbles where light shone upon them, and where the bodies had been left in shadow more-so resembled shed dandruff sprinkled over yards and roof-tops almost a ochre snow. It was the Extremists, the aliens said; worms that had drilled themselves into the molecules and pores we could not see.
Inside my head they'd been past Sabbath, wiggling through my heart and brain to make me hate upon you. I snapped my pencil led and the pastor stared--he, infected too I now see--and continued on his sermon without skipping a beat except that flash of knowing 'stare' he caught me with. We were bound and controlled by them.
My soggy feelings of Love brake out my heart and inflamed down through the spine and had me tightening my hands on my knees and in-between my thighs. I burned, how at how 'with-root' I was.
And I noticed how you let yourself be gulped down that black drain from which a voice cooed at you sweetly and promised to your ditzy little heart some trifling garbage only arthouse idiots like yourself would want; I saw you circle slowly and slide down its throat, naught then but a fat milky glob streaking down towards oblivion, stinking of a fish fry from that wound with which you made good men to sodomites--and, how you roll over the terminal lip and now hang suspended a fat greasy dollop; forsooth, an insufferable retard: glassy and empty headed Maud, whore gunk in the innards of an Annihilatory sink.
I bare you no more malice; lost now you may be in the slumber before Gods judgment, I pray these thoughts hit a frequency low enough to sink through the earth and fall low enough to seep into your empty whore head.
I only want you to die, and die, and listen to me.
I saw something wonderful last night.
I saw it as I stared up at my ceiling; I had done nothing since I returned back to my room and kicked off my wet clothes and let myself become another piece of smelly mildew festering away in Pink House like all the other boarders--there was nothing to do but let my heart darken further and lay up in bed, burning a hole in the popcorns and cracks on the ceiling, and curse you in my head until (after some hours) it became a hypnosis, and the hole opened up.
The hole at first was nothing more than a pinpoint nestled along with the little shadows cast by the ceiling popcorns; I had been staring at it without knowing it was something alien and belonging to (what I now know) a wonderful factory that was always only ever a step outside this world both you and I share.
The hole spread itself wide as smoothly as a spotlight bulb warms and spreads its light, revealing a stage and its actors that had always just been shapes in the dark awaiting the audience to See; and in moments the bedroom, and Pink House itself, had been pushed away into the depth of a shadow as unreal and far-off as any dream.
I was on my feet, Maud; I hadn't been laying down in bed at all. My bare feet stood on what seemed cold linoleum or an icy sheet metal. Faint diffuse light glowed off my feet and I saw sand paved down into a floor.
I thought I fell asleep but the memory was so clear and conscious that it could not be that--the memory of shadow spreading out from where I stared and eating away the room had the same quality as a stage light illuminating a play in inversion.
Glassy and empty headed before Oblivion. If Ellen White were here she may have given you a prayer in your slumber before the Millennium; it is only me, and I only want you to die and listen.
And before you finally sank away at the lip before Oblivion clung under the drain with all the others in death sleep, I noticed you slide down that very throat like pearly white grease rolling over the notches and fastenings, as stupid and ignorant as any other led away from a life spent circling a shallow pool before finally being sucked down into annihilation. I saw the moment you went from dull passivity to brainless matter, and see you now empty-eyed and covered in a suckering shadow.
If I could I'd wish you a brain again just to see the look on your face at what your carcass is doing, stood out on the walk of your house hedged behind the shadowy overgrown lawn, cast in pale blue dawn.
Before I even rose from the anesthesia your corpse stands out there with the sorry bitch mother of yours, both having been awake for several hours yet; the effort of that sludgy thing to impress mommy has led to nothing but the silent moment out there now, Maud. The remains of you silently standing behind mama; her standing over some ate-up weed tapping out Dipel Dust upon the single black locust responsible; the bug waggles its antennae indifferently as it becomes puffy with white poison; the mom a coil clenching itself around a self-served death she plans to deliver only six days later; the sludge girl rocking on her toes and incessantly ticking away like a clock inside her own brain, wishing for the perfect moment to tell mommy that she made breakfast for 'the both of us.'
as it chats with your bitch mother out in the soft blue morning; the sun has yet to rise and the weather is crisp and finally clear--even you would appreciate it as one of Gods wonders; that thing running around in your corpse has just been standing behind your mom, an awful clicking beating away in her brain like a clock, trying to do the best imitation of you and not realizing she had been succeeding by pure silence and coldness.
I noticed how confused you had been and only offer you sympathy.
I noticed you slunk away at the edge of soul sleep somewhere far down in a drain circling whatever throat
I came up from surgery and even drifted through the popcorn ceiling and oozed up through the mold caked like cracker wafer in the rot of Pink House and floated up and up into a morning air free of the fever that had our small town
I noticed you clung dully away at the final throat before that stinking drain would pour you out away into oblivion; character had all been swept away and even your usual human wreckage had been smoothed down, nibbled away at till your face was just another blip amongst a clot of many oozed together in thoughtless slumber.
I had no anger seeing you like that and yet wished still to wring your throat and for that meager shred to be seen by God faster yet.
I wanted everyone to notice you, and for you to have the mind to see me as I saw you on that final day; how I went home and laid in my stinking sheets in stinking Pink House as it swelled with mildew and became bulbous from the constant rain, itself smelling of the dregs of humanity that boarded inside it and stained into the fixtures, paint, years of sweat and blood and surely cum; to see how hate spread my own thought out of my brain and skull till it dispersed in a boiling cloud focused singularly upon the ceiling above me, counting the popcorns and cracks, muscle and nerve coiling through tension alone, and swearing hate upon you for about eight hours straight.
My wish to God could only have been to crush at your throat and for my own body to burst in a terrific conflagration holding you; incinerated to ash, soul disintegration; no resurrection; no salvation; no awaiting the Millennium in slumber; no bones for a new prophet to read or tell of; history of either of us smeared away as easily as the little children wipe away the oily German roach feces from the inner cabinets and stoop.
I did not notice how both of us were gripped by the same fever that ran its course through Leesburg itself (I can see it clearly now, its passing having left this town more beautiful than ever); I only wonder now if your ecstasy felt the same as mine, dear Maud; I wonder if your temptation that led you to open up your peanut brain to Cosmos let you see the same slow growing blackness I had seen that night as it grew upon the ceiling, eating away the popcorn and cracks.
The Prophet Ellen White smiled back at me from where she was scattered all in parts and pieces, her face spread over the school ground catching the reflections and colors of all the students who'd come to stare till her black-and-white portrait looked kaleidoscopic.
In the blue morning
On Thane Road black locust rose up from the wet soils eager to meet the day and to find to great delight fruit of the calamity that befell Leesburg just hours prior. The corpses of Extremists landed even there on that quiet street, where the streetlights had been blown dark and the children never walk down either in coming or goings. From even my bed I could see their bodies strewn over lawns and upon the palms. When the sun rises its light will catch in their bodies and give to the town--even Thane Street--a white sheen, not unlike snow, or maybe more mucous-like and globular; a strange cheese that will again turn transparent at sundown, and bleed back into the air. Poof, gone. In blue light of morning stood out on the small walk I could see the carcass of my good friend Maud standing meekly behind her dear mommy.
The wretch pipes up after mustering her scant courage and even I can see her lips flap and her metal-mouth flash, she says something like "I made you breakfast this morning, mommy. It's pancakes." And the mom flinches at the shoulders and bobs her head like some dull calf and just grunts and then says something like "I can't eat them because of my blood sugar. But you can have them." And just the smallest lick of a scowl flashes over darling Maud and again the ugly steel-trap mouth starts to flap and goes, "I made them for you, I know I've been a bad ball of slime but yak yak yak yak," and the mom says, though her lips only make one word, "I'm going to kill myself in about six days from now, I can't do this for another decade." And in six days at dusk Agnedith is standing with her exposed sweaty chest pressed up against the kitchen door, still unclean and gathered with dead flies and beetles caught in the screen, head buried in her arms, elbows too against the door, looking through the glass, out the screen, at nothing in particular.
The fever that long held Leesburg broke with the storm and left the town crisp with cold sweat.
In such circumstance I also knew myself to have cooled; I had been so hateful even just hours earlier, occluded to my own heart and the sickness that held strong over both it and Leesburg.
A being of lesser grace would gloat at your demise, dear Maud. The hate I felt for you was equal to all love lost from the despicable act you afflicted upon me and that boy what had coiled around those awful fingers of yours; upon your tired old hag of a mother, the school itself, and those splinters called 'art' you dug into the spirit of our prophet Ellen White.
To any above would see you as you are: just a beetle kicking wildly to escape whatever net of dust and hair that'd been loosed under whatever kitchen cabinet you existed under. Though you had a beast spirit, no grace ought be had in returning your cruelties with further torture or uncouth behavior. In memory, you sallow cunt, I only wish you died more dramatically.
Ground under my heel directly.
Smashed into the stinking earth.
Pulverized down to beetle jam.
Held in my hands with every molecule of yours transformed into a knot of earthworms and to have let me directly choke every last shred of life out of you with hands of a loving grace.
"What are you saying? You keep laughing really creepy."
I spin and pounce on the young boy. He brightens with terror but is too slow to be anything but swooped up under my shadow.
"I've caught you now! Little morsel, you've overheard monster whispers!"
The child laughs and squirms in my arms, his neck twisting against my teeth.
"No I'm not Morthel, you gross sicky."
"Morsel! Bad morsels have to be eaten up!" I roar at him and kiss his cheek as he raises off his feet easily in my arms, "Die, die, die, die!"
"No, stop."
"Now you have the monster disease and a morsel no more," I let him go and he laughs and I laugh with him.
"I could hear you even downstairs laughing like a weirdo. If you don't be quiet in the morning the land lady is going to be mad. Even more with what happened cause it's meant to be respectaful around here she said."
"She's a wombless cunt bitter at her cold child God spared from single parent upbringing."
His eyes shine with laughter and he immediately shushes me up close and whispers for me to stop, stop, and "Don't say the Lords name! Don't curse!" and "You're going to be late for class ain't you?"
I picked him back up and loudly told him "No, but you will be if I don't get some monster munch in you quick."
"Can I have cinnamon toast crunch?"
"You can have cinnamon toast crunch but only if you agree to not have any milk with it."
"Ok. I'll get my tiger bowl!"
He spun and darted down the stairs hopping two at a time chanting 'mon-ster munch!'
I yelled down to him, "Let me change out of my peejays and I'll be down."
The child loudly scampered back to the base of the stairs and yelled up in wrecked whisper "Cheryl, ssshhhhh, it's morning."
"Let the blood cloth hear," I shouted and heeled my bedroom door shut, hearing it knock against its hinges and rebound uselessly, swaying back open. I shouted back at no one in particular.
(balloon imagery)
I wonder if it had been similar for you, Maud; I rose from my surgery as a balloon escaping the hands of a child and dispersing up away into precious atmosphere.
How low my spirit had been and stuck within the feverish gravity that had laid down this whole city; I can no longer see reason why I ever had such hatred for even you, Maud--not even out of sympathy for your passing, respect a dear adversary deserves. The moment I awoke from surgery I'd been unbound from gravity and rose even beyond the ceiling of Pink House as something greater and invisible, and with such a viewpoint of Leesburg that the town itself could be mistaken as a childs playset.
Me in Pink House a small toy manipulated by children pushed together like sardines and gleefully moving me throughout my day--to the church where Pastor would hear me break my pencil led against the Bible and just for a moment pause his sermon to spear me with an eye-twitch and return to reciting meaning behind *Steps to Christ,*
That fever which finally broke freed the grip which held me and loosed me as a balloon flees a child up to precious atmosphere.
Granpa honked at me and a flash of irritation shot through me--there was no real reason, I looked around and there were no kids around and no one seemed bothered by the noise but really, he could (or should) have rolled down the window.
Slowly he did roll down the window and his small sea blue eyes glinted at me, "Pick you up here at three? I forget what your mother said."
I shook my head at him, and looked around to see if his idling there in the street was bothering anyone, "Um, I'll call you."
He looked even smaller suddenly behind the wheel of his truck, "OK, I'll have my phone on me all day. Sure you don't want me to drop you off closer?"
A car turned onto the street and slowly rolled towards us.
"No, no, I gotta go, have a good day granpa."
He honked twice, "See you later, tiger."
The window rolled up and the radio clicked back heard muffled faintly within the cab.
The other car slowed to a stop behind my granpa's truck; grandpa idled and waved darkly behind a solarized reflection, and sped down the neighborhood road, honking again before turning.
My jaw clenched at it all; the day itself was beautiful but attending a new school made me want to vomit all morning--and now a cool finality washed itself over me and the slow march towards the large austere school had a tranquility that matched the morning: blue, clear, and perfect.
Walking alongside the fence that wrapt around the school it seemed amazing to me how the neighborhood had been overtaken by the campus; inside the school premises looked a quiet city to itself scratched into plots and void of the signs of humanity that openly exposed itself in this neighborhood around it--just on my side of the fence there were toilets left out on the lawn, yards perfectly maintained and edged along other homes that seemed nearly collapsing, plastic child yard toys left out and toppled over in drive-ways, older pink skinned men standing out in morning coolness and letting the perfect day wick away a night sweat, cars rumbling in drives and along roads puffing out oily smokes, and all the signs of life. The school, cordoned off with painted green chain-link, was a cream geometric mass without a single obvious sign of life.
Every window was darkened or shut-away with blinds.
The passage-ways between each building were hid under awnings and barriers.
Flags hung upon poles and drooped like soft-tissue hanging limp off metal bone, the school itself shielding away the pleasant wind current.
I passed several squares of fencing choked off by ivy overgrowth; the same overgrowth crept like a line towards the school and covered a fenced-in walkway running between two of the upper stories of buildings.
The buildings themselves, empty and sterile as they seemed, flowed upwards above any of the surrounding neighborhood and cast the street I walked down in shade; slight shifts in style marked each new story of building yet still unified with a consistent color-scheme.
It did not look much more lively during the brief orientation meeting; the few lamps illuminated few pathways and my mom was so uncertain if she misunderstood the hour for the meeting--we had only to follow the single lit line of halls that twisted through the innards of the campus till we found a clean, empty, placid conference room shining artificially against the end of a dark hall and over the neighborhood below.
I did not see the first student until I passed around the corner towards the gate. Before that moment I hoped school had been canceled and mom simply hadn't heard of it due to our circumstance and within moments I'd be phoning granpa--but, there was the gate and a small clot of students stood around it all uniformly dressed in grey and beige. Two adults stood by, one in a bright visibility vest and hidden behind large black sunglasses, the other a large bellied man held together in a tight button-up and conservative trim--even at a distance I saw their conversation animated with nods and grins and laughter and shared gazes up and down the streets surveying kids and cars.
I looked at all the thighs flashing out from under the hems of skirts; a tall girl with statuesque appearance and chiseled features (handsome) leaned against a fence post and chatted with two tall boys that both looked 'too adult' to me; the trio seemed to have some beauty of maturity that had yet to find me and likely hadn't the interest in seeking me or me to it.
It was a beauty that immediately seemed to have found most of the other students here with little others in the groups cluttered around the gate appearing to have the same basic normality I had.
I figure each took to life like a duck to water swimming through unbothered and oiled against gravity that hung me down to base habits like masturbation and eating; the tall blonde could exist on a diet of angel down and prayer, the lithe slab young men existing on playful work in outdoors tossing a ball back, forth, and footing around neighborhoods soliciting people about God; mothers and fathers in beautiful suburban homes--swimming pools, screened in--supported by good labor like electrical work, or lawyerism; they'd gather at dinner time and hold hands and bow their heads and live insipid life pristine and totally alien to my homeworld of motels and modular offices stained yellow with cheap coffee and sweat and cum and idleness.
I was too smart for it. Too smart for religion and too brainy to be at peace with life to not give myself to urges.
A dark haired girl watched me from across the road, she looked away as I looked at her and surveyed over the other groups, and marched away.
A prim woman in a business suit got out from a car and walked across the street, the two adults at the gate waved and nodded at her, the large man in the button-up who had been chatting with the other man in a visibility-vest turned to the gate and fiddled with it.
The gate opened and he and the woman walked in, visibility-vest gave an OK sign and closed it behind them and took to a stuck-up posture hands folded behind back and erect.
The other students looked towards this briefly and turned back to each other and continued.
I stood at the edge of every group and waited.
A red-headed curly boy near me turned and looked at me and furrowed his brow at me immediately and looked away.
The sky was cloudless and perfectly blue.
I leaned against the fence and closed my eyes; I am indifferent to it all.
If I was dumber I would have less edges and would fit in to my place easier.
A religious life might be nice. I would wake up every morning and pray and be austere.
God would look down at me fondly and grant me miracles; I would fail God and he would cast me down into hell.
A small smoking chamber miles deep into the earth filled with small men of gemstone skin that stank of sulfur and coke. Every wall blistering white hot, and for eternity I would be stabbed at by the demons and flinch away from the prodding and burning walls, floor.
I would be an eternally cooking duck thrashing around in an oven.
The breeze was really nice today; it reminded me of Halloween and Blockbuster night getting the plastic pumpkin pails.
Here I would reinvent myself.
Lose my virginity, have only good habits. I'll become beautiful.
I looked past the red-headed boy and his friends chatting near me and looked through towards the circle of thighs and skirts; a girl twirled towards her friends and shouted at them in put-on of emotion.
"Hey. What are you doing here?"
The red-headed boy asked me.
I turned away from him. I did not hear him.
I ignored him. I felt him looking at me still, the air between us was coiling.
On my first day, my new school seemed to be deliberating to close its doors and send everyone home, or that was the gossip amongst all the other kids as they stood around the edges of the great hall, careful not to damage the school further or to seem culpable for the 'disaster,' and looked from student to student to busy adult hoping for confirmation that yes, school was canceled.
I flinched. Something landed on my shoulder. A hand.
"Hey, what are you looking at?"
A girl with wispy blonde hair and eyes a dusted blue stood behind me tilting up toward me.
"Just looking at the basement."
She leaned her head to look past my shoulder at the basement behind me but kept her eyes locked to mine, "Think a ghoul is going to shoot out of there?"
"No," I shook my head emphatically and thought for a moment about what she said, "A ghoul?"
"Yeah." We shared a smile, "An undead. You're the new kid right?"
"Huh."
"You and your family just moved here, right?"
"Yeah, just this month. Hey."
She lulled her attention between me, the basement, and the crowd gathered at the basement without paying any much real interest.
"Yea?"
"How did you know? That I was new here."
She tilted her head down towards her armband and reaffirmed the gesture by tapping at it, "It's my job to know."
I just nodded along, not actually able to read what had been indicated on her armband--even she shifted it slightly away from me.
"Plus," she peered up at me from behind gold framed glasses, "you're out of dress code."
"Oh. I have a note, my mother spoke with admissions about it."
Hey, you shouldn't choose any of the clubs. Tell the dean some crazy excuse if you have to.
Aliens are abducting the kids from this school and making them go missing, sometimes they return them but with the brains all scrambled up like spaghetti. That girl from earlier? She's alien technology now. Brainless. Pasta in the noggin. A receiver for the cosmos. Get it?
Don't get baptized, whatever you do.
She leaned on her elbows and sank down forward onto the table till she laid deflated on the table, deflated. "Finally, we've escaped the kingdom and you have cornered me all alone." I figured then that she must have been in theater.
She stepped ahead into the darkened room and then flared with a burst of warm light as the overhead lights were flicked on; she twisted back in the doorway and flapped her hand towards me and muttered camere camere.
The girl moved familiarly about the small room--apparently a cross between an employee lounge for the librarians and an ancillary storage for records, with most of the space being choked away with steel cabinets flush with heavy ringed binders, envelopes, tomes, and fold-out tables equally cluttered with cheap cooking appliances and food-stuff and plastic silverware and paper plates--and immediately took to finding, pulling out, and setting up a spare table at the center of the small room.
"Do you need help with that?"
Cheryl grunted and shook her head as she lifted up a microwave that had been left atop a stack of chairs shoved away into a corner, and tossed one towards our table with a 'ta ta' as it clunked on the carpet, "That's your chair ser."
I dragged it over by me and sat down.
She hoisted a chair for herself up and stood by it towards the table, and curtseyed in a gesture for me to sit first.
I sat and she began to sit following my lead, stopped, and then burst away behind a shelf, "Forgot something." She was very intentionally making her rummaging louder than it needed to be, "Whole reason why we came here," each book she sorted through hefted slightly up and dropped back down with each dismissal as it seemed to not be the one she was after until finally she exclaimed (with the same put-on loudness, she felt bent to make her every moment as loud as possible) "Found it!"
Cheryl sauntered back over with shoulders sagging and a large three-ring binder hanging from a hand like a heavy bag of trash, plopped it down on the table between us, and collapsed onto her chair, further letting herself deflate onto the table in some put-on display of exhaustion.
"There, flip through that book and tell me if anything catches your eye."
I pulled it to me and carefully opened up the binder. The first page was an old nubby sheet of cardboard that had been cut to fit within the book, the second page was a yellowing old sheet that seemed fragile with age and had a red scrawl barely legible from the ink fading and from the tightness of the script itself. I spent a few seconds trying to read it but only managed to figure out the word 'Dedicated' with any certainty, and turned further into the book.
The third page was a collage of more old sheets of paper, four small squares taped together, in differing stages of decay, shoved into a plastic sleeve with "sample 2 & 3" written over it in blue marker. Each square seemed to contain a writing sample by four different people and had been trimmed from a worksheet with prompts that bled off to the cut fraying edges leaving the original prompt mostly unknown. The hand writing in the top two squares had been so faded or lost within decaying blemishes of the paper that they were completely illegible; the two bottom squares seemed to both have suffered slight water damage that bled away portions of the ink but the writing still was possible to read (and, in a clear print instead of a flowing cursive); the bottom left sample read just: "Sybil Belden, Grade Nine, True Scientice & Technology," then the sample to its right: "MAY for prophecy never came by the will of man."
Cheryl had lifted her head up from where she rested in her elbows and eyed me over her glasses. Our eyes met and she growled "So?"
"What am I looking for?" I turned another page and just saw another plastic sleeve of musty old writing samples, including a newspaper clipping and parts of a machine shredded legal paper, noted in the same blue marker to be "sample 4, 5, SIGHTING."
"Anything that looks interesting. Cool. Pops out."
"I can't even read most of this."
With her usual loud dramatics she flounced towards me over the table and grabbed the binder "Here."
She paused and seemed troubled and continued to hang there bent over the table. Her shirt hung off her chest and I saw a gleam of a beige bra, "Oh, damn," she slammed the book shut and bounced back to a shelf with it and returned to rummaging.
"That wasn't it. They don't label these things at all. Sorry about all this."
"Do you need help?"
"No, no, I was speaking with Marie about our records and putting labels on them but she insisted to just keep things color coded but they're all the same color."
She returned with another binder that was nearly identical all in size, construction, color, and opened it up in front of me as to verify that it was indeed the correct one, "This is it, this is what we came here for."
The binder this time was filled with card sleeves filled out with small brass emblems that matched the armbands or pocket emblems each student wore, "We keep our masters for the school club emblems here--typically before the school year at orientation we just have a printed sheet listing them out but I thought you might find it cool to see the masters, and some of the older deprecated clubs."
"Huh, these are cool."
That’s it; I’ll keep at it!
Thank you again to everyone; you can always be happy just as easily as you can be sad
miyamori <3