Cobra on my left, Leopard on my right

I attempt, once again, to attempt to write more story. I prayed to my godhead this morning for inspiration before imbibing the Yemeni fire-seed drink. I wanted this to be a libation, not a simple tool to bring about false wakefulness. I sit, I put on music, a powerful melodic roar of strings and electricity, and I fall into a trance of research, like I did in my more alive periods.

Desperately, I attempted to drag this into the narrative, but a smooth, large hand kept shoving me away. The shove felt more like a concussion, rattling the mind each time I would attempt to batter against its force. "Let me tell stories!" I would meagerly yelp, smashing at keys and contorting my mind into a dried, screwed-up mess. The presence loomed large in my heart, lit from behind and wreathed in serpents and vines, dripping leaves and clutching a spear, a gift from the light behind it. I can almost hear what my mind translates as a brusque laugh and a playful, derogatory utterance.

"Go fuck yourself."

Thankfully, my god has a sense of humor, and so do I. I tend to forget the irrational yelps and unbridled fire of being that my god incites within me. I forget that "he" incites me to cease caring about the judgments, the consequences, the imperceptible restrictions that asphyxiate our breath, our True breath. Y'know, the ones that, in spite of having a wide space around your body and all the relaxation and health in the world, keep you from actually getting a breath.

Panic. Greek for "of Pan." The Fucking God, the wildness. We've made him so abstract in our day, either jamming his frequency into ourselves and binding our breath and action in "panic attacks" or babbling on and on about ourselves, our illusory, impermanent little beings vomited out of the biomass and tossed into Saturn's world of circumstance.

Scare yourself, now. You are Beast. You are violence. You drink the blood of footed beings (use of plastic, oil, use of animal products and human resource), you drink the blood of rooted beings (paper, plant matter, biodiesel, lumber, fungus, mood altering substances), you drink the blood of the Primordial Being (water), for you yourself are a part of it all and must inflict yourself upon the world to be a part of it. Involve yourself not in abstraction, not in the far flung scales of the World Serpent; it has the unique proclivity both to envenom and to constrict. The "world," that which you have in front of the vessel of your consciousness, contains all of the information you need to push forward.

Knowledge is as dangerous as wine. It impairs our judgment as much as it clarifies. Knowledge is power, and power is an opiate illusion of the worst kind, pushing us to chase the Dragon, the reptilian primordial force of change, instead of cultivating a safe, warm place for the Dragon to roost in our stillness. Fear not the sacrifices you make toward this goal; they serve Life, they serve our very source. Our dalliances and mistakes give us lessons, give us raw materials to shape that which we always have, ourselves, into the very tools used to overcome those mistakes, if not for ourselves, then for those mysterious other glimmers of being that swim in the same chaotic seas as we. We adapt to our dark and dangerous climates through growth, just as generations of biomass grow around vents on the sea floor and bob in lazy luminescence in the barren, lightless depths. In the darkness, we build our tools to create our next evolution. We create our own light, we change our senses, we grow new mouths to capture the Marine Snow, the foundation of life, in humility.

If it takes a lifetime to move an inch towards the Sun's chattering call, then that lifetime has been spent well. If we live to let in the world, to become a part of the world, to taste of the gutter and of the stars, and commit ourselves to combing and soothing the turbulence in the asensate roilings beneath or above the wall of our universe, if we seek to understand that the words tossed into our minds remain mere symbols, and that no exemptions exist from the connection of all, then we truly live in the light of God, even if that light comes from a bioluminescent angler fish readying to consume us whole.

Nature shows as much mercy to the cautious as it does to the valorous. What restrictions we place on ourselves and on each other serve to sever that connection to the true restrictive source, the limits of which we can only explore and to which we adjust ourselves when found untenable. We don't pick where we were born, and we don't pick what we're taught. We do pick where we go, and we do pick what we learn. What atrocities of separation do we justify? What abstract concept do you feed with the blood of others: Religion? Culture? Country? Ideology? What have these ideas done for you lately? How have they brought you closer to others, and whom do they ask you to exclude? How dare these concepts tell you whom to let in and whom not to let in? How dare a series of idiotic words in a book claim your life and determine your actions? How dare it claim to present the truth, when it presents simple smudges of lines on innumerable dead trees, only to serve its own propagation? How dare this infection muzzle you? How dare these ideas toy with us, pitting infection against infection like gamblers at a dogfight? How dare they shame us into listening to their drivel, justified with the occasional lip service to Universal Love, while stating that some are more deserving of that Universal Love than others?

Drinking the Brew of the Bent Mother

I feel like every so often I get on here, scream and shout about the world, then feel defused and affable for a bit, maybe discussing some magic, until it creeps up again with a thousand eyes of hatred and teeth of steaming, solid malice.

I would pretend at slaying this monster, perhaps to think that I might emerge the bright solar hero and gain the accolades of the kingdom. That secret, deep down, is that I really, truly, hate the kingdom, and really I just want the monster to do what it does in a less short term manner. I want to till the soil with this fury; I want to plant trees who bear fruits of despair. I want the world to see its own horrible black heart of hate. I want everyone to know all of which they are capable, for only in our depths of villainy, deceit and torture can we understand what it means to care.

If we are, indeed, the royal gift of the divine, and if indeed we contain universes within us, then no matter how we attempt to purge our bodies and souls of the muck and horror, we still contain that filth. We are unclean. We contain in ourselves rapists, torturers, manipulators, bigots, despots, enablers, thieves, brigands, and all manners of the vile professions. The only possible way to keep these villains from running rampant over our lives and the lives of others is to embrace them. We have an imperative to love all, including ourselves, and especially including the horrible within ourselves. If we bring these truths to light, we may yet utilize their abilities without excuse or apology. We will know our "enemies," for our enemies are ourselves, have always been ourselves, and will always be ourselves.

We are BP. I am BP. I haven't done a goddamned thing about that oil spill. I haven't traveled down to the Gulf to help clean up. I haven't put any effort into shaming the creator of Girls Gone Wild out of business. I haven't lifted a finger to reduce the crime rate of my city. I haven't cleaned up any of the litter blowing around my streets. I have spent time watching the vicarious inane actions of the unsuspecting on reality TV in lieu of traversing the path my heart has laid out. I have lied to countless people and I have padded myself well on the larder of others. I have allowed myself to follow in the wake of others' ambitions like a remora, or a tick. I have discarded my fire in the name of flaccid tranquility. If I were to tally up my perfidy I would have an excellent corner of Hell situated for me on conspiracy alone, to say nothing of deception. That said, I doubt incarceration would do much to change my ways. I have a vengeful heart that forgets easily, yet forgives in the same manner that a single ant might count grains of sand. That said, I forgive my vengeance, my envy, my sloth, my gluttony, my lechery, my vanity and my greed. I forgive my perjuries and my perfidies, in order that I may surpass the need and desire to resort to their usage. They characterize me just as much as my accolades and accomplishments; not at all.

We still walk a meaningless void as the dangling phalanges of some unseen process. How well might we submit to this process? How might we destroy the "I," the frozen chunk of detritus that meanders down our stream? Come forth, Beast; I lay down my sword in order that you consume me, and I shall issue forth from your belly with your secrets.

The Shattered Gray Expansive

When was the last time you thought about giants?

I remember when I was starting to get into this whole Norse worldview and I was reading the various myths that involved the jotnar, or "giants" as we'd translate them into English. Whatever proportions these beings might have would fly around wildly, especially in relation to the aesir, the focus of the narrative. So much rowing about was made on "who" the giants were supposed to be that I feel like a lot of folklorists lost "what" the giants were supposed to be. Not every myth's an allegory for society (*cough* Homer! *cough*). What if the strict relative volume that we experience in Midgard just... doesn't occur with giants, as if forced perspective and points of view would shift wildly and their relative placement and size in space-time were somehow screwed up? The best example I can think of is some dull, neurotic person standing in a road, screaming about all of the things s/he can get or have to keep safe, caught in this mental loop ("Oh no! I'm worried about Thor killing me, so I'm going to steal his hammer, Mjolnir. Oh no! Now that I have his hammer, he might find it, so I have to hide it. Oh no! Now that I've hidden it, I don't know if he'll still find it or not, so maybe I'll just give it back to him. Wait! I had his hammer! I spent so much time working on this, I have to get something in return! I want... Freyja! Yeah! I'll give them the hammer in return for Freyja's hand in marriage!") Of course, there's no reasoning with a giant; everything they think about is just blown out of proportion, so you give up and walk away. Somehow, the giant takes up exactly the same percentage of your field of vision at 500 feet away that he did at 50.

That's the thing about the jotnar: they have no sense of proportion in physicality, and even less in terms of situational moments. I have this notion that if a jotunn just took a deep breath and showed some sort of consideration, maybe they'd get by without being walloped by Thor or thoroughly embarrassed by Wodan. "Hold on a sec; I'm in Valhalla, and I'm really drunk. Maybe I should just own up and go home before I start saying something stupid and making these guys angry at me." "You know, this potion was made from the blood of a god. Maybe I should just leave it with those two stupid dwarves, or even better, tell the gods about it so that they can give their kinsman rest and I can earn a favor from them." See, thinking along those lines would have made lives a lot easier for the giants in question, but nope, they had to go shooting their mouths off and taking stuff that'd best be left untouched, out of this unslakeable self-interest.

Thankfully, here on Midgard, we human-types have the advantage of getting over that self-interest. I might even go out on a limb to say that the antagonistic jotnar might embody the overblown self-interest that leads us to situations where the gods repeatedly smack us around. The creation myth of Ymir's death at the hands of Wodan seems to spell that out rather clearly: the singular Giant contains all matter that we know, and that singular giant continues to grow, simply spawning off more of itself with no differentiation between anything. So, thanks to some interaction of the Fate Cow, the other self-created being, Wodan and his three brothers (who might just be he in triple form; I've since stopped caring) come about and chop this One Giant into all manner of little pieces to create the world as we know it, thus casting out that monomaniacal initial being into a vast universe of explorable parts. It's rather telling that giants persisted after this, as some level of self-interest is healthy, but leading a person to charge in headlong instead of addressing them as sensible equals and engaging in communication doesn't please the powers that be all that much.

I have to wonder about the "giant" rune, as well, Thurisaz/Thurs/Thorn. I got thinking about the line "woe to women" in the poem and thought about the times my energy got caught up in myself, expressing as some neurotic self-perpetuating frustration that froze my libido, which in turn froze the muscles in my back and ran "loner" and "restricted" loops in my mind while alienating and frustrating my sex life with my partner. The misery seemed to seek to perpetuate itself not only in my thoughts, but in my interactions with others, shouting louder and louder to drown out the identity of the problem. It took a few massage sessions, a fainting spell, and an inordinate amount of patience and love from my consort to break through to the core issue and awaken the fire between us once more. While I can feel myself falling back into those thoughts and patterns every so often, it now lasts for a moment before I take a deep breath, calm my thoughts, and loosen the muscle. Yeah, I still have my work cut out for me, but I feel like the process has given me tools and focus.

The Candle Formed in Filth

That empty feeling's creeping up once more. I can feel the place where something ought to feel warm, yet instead provides a mere cool sting. My energy ebbs, and I feel no compunction toward productivity. It's as if my heart just slams shut, some days. So, here's another throatfull of venom from the Abyss!

I want to wallow, to indulge, to do it all wrong. I want to fall into a state of inanimate self-indulgence, marinating in musk and grime with no one around to incite me toward action. I feel resigned to the actions of my fellow species, but I'd rather not interact with them. I'd rather just... watch their funny little dance, have them hand me what I want when I ask, maybe engage in some form of pleasantry, and then sputter off back to that self-derived delusion of comprehending the enormity of the universe.

We're so stupid. We are so very, very stupid. We deny and justify our avoidance of action, and often give our mindless impulses the same treatment. We continue to bicker over responsibilities. We take on said responsibilities of others to avoid our own, and we're so quick to permit this interaction as a form of dependency, rather than tutelage. Who wants to learn how to fucking fish when that dumbass over there keeps pulling up marlins and handing them to whomever gives him boo-boo eyes?

We cling to this elusive sense of "identity," of placement, of surety. What could we do if we gave up wondering what we could be? I can be a mini-fridge, if I just try! No, I don't want to sell mini-fridges, I want to be one. Don't stand in the way of my dream of pulling cold beer out of my midsection! Just use your imagination!!

Seriously, my imagination uses me. It's been a fanciful pit of despair that led me to ruin, with cutesy little foxes drawn in the margins. I just... want to get left alone. I want far away from my fellow thumb-bearing bipeds. We're just a waste of good carbon.

I suppose this is like William Murderface moving from "maybe I should just kill myself" in the first season of Metalocalyse to "maybe you all should just kill yourselves" in the second. It's a progression in the black pit of despair. Cultivating the ever-present light seems like trying to fix something that ain't broke, and I kind of like my darker moments more than my lighter ones. I feel accomplished when I can figure my way through all of that bile I accumulate over the course of a day and use it to create, to change, to act in truth. I feel stronger, I feel more at peace after sitting in the dark, watching the unfortunate side of humanity unfold, because I know that it has some strange, twisted merit when engaged. I'd really like to know what it's like to dash someone's head open with a steel bat, but that's hardly a constructive use of time, despite the difficulty in sublimating that urge toward something useful. I bet it has some horrid beauty to it; oh well, I suppose I'll just make due.

The Sacrifice of Hodr

Beltane tends to be a rough time for me. So much goes on internally that I have a hard time keeping up, and often dig in my heels. May 5, the advent of astrological Beltane this year, was especially tough. The Gregorian dates configured the week to the same setup as the week when my mother died 11 years ago. I really wish my life events didn't happen on holidays so that I could maybe get over them without some glaring reminder to remember the day.

I spent much of the day running into far too many people from my past, not that it's a bad thing. Nevertheless, crossing a temporal gulf can get emotionally trying on a day when I just want to indulge in vice and curl into a fetal ball. Nevertheless, the holiday's all about that diminished separation between consensus existence and subjective existence, so I suppose the spirits took the shape of folks I've met before in their own travels. It feels as if they've been put to rest, at least until Samhain.

This morning feels so much more... clear. I suppose that's part of the holiday's nature; figuring out if you can break out of the gravitational pull of the past. Hell, I talked about the world tree, did a tarot reading, and pretty much ran my gamut of sacred moments. I still have lots of barriers inside me to bust open, but the process is in motion, with decent enough traction to continue.

Expatriation

Hey everyone! In order to keep my mind and the threads of consciousness of this blog a little more streamlined, I'm moving the operations that relate directly to comics and other media to this fine little landscape. This one will remain as the philosophical core, and sure, there'll be thematic overlap, but I figured I'd just try to clean house a bit.

What is it about that Parker fellow?

Ho-lee crap, Sunny Day Real Estate's made it to the overhead at Chapterhouse, and I feel like such a dweeb for having missed most of their oeuvre.

So, I have a lot of posts on here about the depiction of sex, gender, etc. in comics, and ways I feel the industry falls short of my rather lofty social expectations. Well, then this guy comes along and throws up a post that makes me quite, quite happy on many levels.

Responsibility and repercussions seem to have long-standing resonance in the comic book collector world, seemingly without regard to genre. That said, those are subjects I feel that just about any of these genres could explore admirably. Spider-Man's flubs and social misalignment stand as the primary example of this, yet perhaps other, less central matters could explore these topics, in smaller details in the margins and corners.

One element few people wish to touch in post-human stories without absurd amounts of pathos are responsibilities around the extraordinary abilities. How does the way Superman flies differ from Wonder Woman? Can we get some little side notes on the ways that Peter Parker satisfies his predatory Spider instincts in the bedroom, like the way his fingers stick to skin, or the unorthodox positions his flexibility allows? How do characters who convert back and forth between solid and energy forms feel about having guts one moment, and a nuclear fusion/fission reaction the next? How much does Wolverine really use his eyes when he can smell what you ate on your sixteenth birthday in your sweat, and what does it mean when he decides to look at you? I really would like to see a little more of how individual and alien the lives of post-humans are to humanity, in those little ways that each of us differ.

Although Marvel's scientific experiments gone awry exemplified the element of trauma in the awakening of post-humanity in an individual, even Superman carries an element of this phenomenon in the revelation of his extraterrestrial heritage. A boy grows up in a middle-of-nowhere town that, to this day, probably gets one bar on a cell phone, worrying about things like fixing the tractor and that godforsaken social studies test, when he starts ripping steel in half and shooting fire out of his eyes if he gets a half-mast from Lana Lang's thong strap peeking out from her Dungarees. Eventually, Pa takes him into the cellar and shows him this contraption that seriously can-not have come from anywhere we know, lighting up in the dark in increasingly subtle ways and incongruous color schemes that make no sense under a yellow sun. Something lights up, and a defeated, terrified scientist fellow appears like Leia out of R2D2, with a voice ringing with that despair that comes from wishing that you just weren't right. This man, this weird ghost-man, has these little gestures and features that drill right into the boy's heart while he listens to this mysteriously familiar guy address himself as the kid's birth father. The dude's already staring into the proverbial void while preparing to fire his child out into the physical one. The end of Krypton must have been absolutely gruesome. He's left, this confused tween boy, with the usual maddening drug trip of puberty, the confusion of coming from a completely inaccessible origin, and heretofore unexplainable abilities and physiological functions that he has to learn to manage on the fly (pun totally not intended, but kept in.) That sounds pretty traumatic to me.

In what ways does post-humanity process this trauma? How does the nature of the trauma creep up for these people? Does Cyclops of the X-Men rub the back of his head before getting on a plane after falling out of one and hitting his head as a child? Does Luke Cage's unbreakable skin ever itch, and how does it register touch? How does Carol Danvers feel about her body, even having a body, when her consciousness and form have drifted up and down the vibrational wavelength?

Comics do cover trauma, yet often times the characters seem to feel sorry for themselves until someone comes along for them to hit, and in hitting this someone, they find the strength in themselves to project their problems onto some stupid thug with pimped out riot gear and feel contentment in mauling their fellow man over what's "right," or saving some morons from a burning building to renew their basic sense of humanity. Savagery and compassion are to superheroes what boredom and disappointment are to us; part of the deal. If we take into account that a superhero will, most likely, save someone in trouble, then what would pose to them the real challenge of living their "everyday" lives and permitting themselves to feel their woundedness? What can a superhuman accomplish with a little humility, flexibility and ingenuity?

The Confessional of Doubt

My faith wavers. I try to think of the world as I used to and it just doesn't fucking work, anymore. Every emotion comes with four of five contradictory ones, and I have to sift through to figure out which one will serve me best in order to have a discussion with anyone. My mind's filled with reactive, self-aggrandizing doubt. My body communicates something of which I'm not aware and it unnerves me. I don't know if my instincts act in truth, or if I just want an excuse to keep lying around, unable to display basic fucking human affection without repressed narcissism swirling around the corners.

I miss invisibility, and I have no idea what the hell I'm supposed to be doing other than babysitting middle-aged men and their infantile power fantasies, deluding myself into thinking that this job is something I find fulfilling, psychoanalyzing loved ones while trying to sound as right as possible and fucking up any communication, doing everything in my power to make sure I have neither home nor resources, accepting advice only based upon the delivery of it, and whittling away the hours in front of a screen, watching everything else do something instead of me. I don't even fucking know what security is, and by that admission I've done a great job at maintaining a persona of centered spiritual wisdom. Said persona remains just a well-painted but shitty papier-mache mask that's starting to smell and peel.

How can I pull my weight in a relationship when I can't even pull my weight on my own? How can I balance this idiotically overwrought sensitivity with an underdeveloped sense of center and a vicious, pompous misanthropy? How do I get over myself and start fucking living with the rest of the species? I feel weight and irritation, and all I know how to do is treat it like some kind of necessary trial to burn off this unpayable debt I owe the world. I keep wondering if I have something wrong with me, if I've invented something wrong with me so that I won't have to deal with the world, if I have such overweening pride that I choose to defend against any intrusion into my life. I don't feel like I've rested at all, and I don't know what to do, any more.

I wish that my love didn't come with these conflicting insecurities and doubts. I hate it. I want my heart clear and true. I want some fucking clarity. I want what others seem to get from me, but I cannot seem to give myself. I feel drowned, cannibalized and thoroughly vexed. I want to be in the world just as much as I want it utterly devastated, and while I hear and understand the Great Big Tree o' Love and Light branching through the layers and levels of existence, I mostly feel despair at its distance from my ego, and an unceasing urge to submerge my senses in the grime and despair of it. I speak of optimism and hope to disguise my dearth in both categories.

I just wish I could be like Batman and throw off my identity, devoting myself wholly to a cause that comes from Within and Beyond instead of grasping at vaporous phantoms only to uncover a venomous trap I'd laid long before, without my knowledge. I keep trying, and I keep feeling this sharp pull in the opposite direction. I just want some mercy from myself. I just want to know what I have to do to make this life work. If it's right in front of me, just... can I maybe get the eyes to see it, or maybe some little happy glowing signposts so that I can figure out how to devote myself best to that path? I haven't been the best fellow, and I haven't always acted in the most conscientious manner, but I really try to keep myself feeling okay with what I'm doing, and I try to keep my eyes open for what you say, but I fuck up, as humanity does, and as we've built ourselves to do. I neither want to sit next to the Divine, nor do I want to languish in cold, dark Hel; I want, in my deepest heart, to find my Work. I want to find that Work that consumes every fiber of my being, that nourishes both my being and the Great Being. May I ask for these things? May I demonstrate my adoration through my work? I would really appreciate and feel honored for the chance to help.

The Ballad of Greg Feely

The active function, every so often, exceeds its grasp and begins to scramble.

Lately I feel a sense of panic that arises during the seasons involving bureaucracy. It's such an obfuscation, deemed necessary through some irrelevance. I'm sure that if we still cling to these functions that they serve some kind of utility, but to me the tax season, and especially income tax itself, seems an elaborate obfuscation of a clumsy larger entity to insert itself into the everyday life of people who ordinarily wouldn't give a flying fuck. Now, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind the well-managed socialism that seems prevalent in Scandinavian countries, but from what information has crossed my path involving these countries, the whole of it seems pretty well-managed and oriented toward the benefit of all citizens.

See, if the government spent less time trying to arrange all of this financial dickery with corporations and special interest groups, instead spending its time on things like health care, education and jobs, then my cynicism would decrease and I'd be a lot happier with this stupid state of affairs. Nevertheless, Corporatism and the big magic spell that concept has cast over our country and perhaps the world has diverted a lot of time, energy and resources into the most ridiculous pursuits for the sake of feeding useless neuroses and fears.

Maybe it's just me, but most of what we perceive as conspiracy seems a simultaneous paranoid fear reaction, polarized into archetypes of Rich, Fearful Old Man in an Ivory Tower and Anarchistic, Fearful Individualist Outside the City Gates. We're all damned afraid and we're all ready to point our fingers at someone for being The Problem, especially lately. So, that said, what the fuck are any of us doing to unfurl the rest of our fingers, extend our hands and say, "Okay, I was being a dick, and you have a point. We're both nervous and agitated for different reasons, and if you're willing to help me with my shit, I'll help you with yours, and then we'll be a better species for it"?

I understand the value of seeking the source of our shit so that it doesn't have to be so unpleasant, but I also appreciate the value of seeing our shit for what it is and spreading it on our gardens instead of letting it rot in a lab as we test it endlessly for why it smells so bad. We have guts, germs, blood, fat, crap, and all manners of juices squirting up and down our being, and in fact our entire physical manifestation comes from inventive collections of germs into ambulatory bags of carbon reactions, absorbing and emitting all sorts of things. The reactions of our consciousness to this process, this basic, natural process of acting as a living being, have been rather prohibitive, especially given to an imbalance in our current conception of dualism, where one polarity has the attribution of greater value in relation to the other ("Good always triumphs over Evil"). If shit smells bad, it must be bad, and thus the act of handling our crap becomes not a part of a greater spectrum, but a banished universe of horror.

What of our fears drain our resources from our living, fructifying process? How might we choose to utilize this drain in a constructive manner? In what ways can we permit the entire living process into our hearts, and how might we best suffer in order to manifest the desires not of our ego or our consciousness, but of our very Soul?

The Snarling Well Hvergelmir

Since I just don't give enough of a fuck to load up my iTunes with all manner of music, I'm starting to get sick of everything media related. I can feel the sun dig in its heels and tear up at the prospect of diving into Pisces, after spending a month in the unfeeling chaos of the void reminiscent of Aquarius. It's like locking someone in a dark room for a month with nothing but their neuroses to keep them company, then tearing them out only to submerge them in the ocean of the screaming dead. Boy, I'm a chipper one!

Look, I could take the piss and pretend that I like wearing long vests and babble about all the good people you meet amongst the dead, but it's still fucking jarring, especially when you aren't some goobery medium convinced that the universe speaks in linear sentences and coherent faces, only discernible by those with "special powers" or some bullshit like that.

I've been stuck playing Dante's Inferno a whole bunch during my less productively oriented moments. I keep going and going through the game, scrambling through all of the various puzzles and the like, smacking monsters about the face and generally going through all of this gory catharsis, but then my ears key in to the pervasive shrieks and gargles of pain that constantly waft through the environments, all vicious and stomach-turning.

There's some point where I begin to question what the game's really doing. Some passive-aggressive sort might dither about the level of violence in the game, but seriously: it's a game dealing with the Crusades and the Renaissance vision of Hell. On some level, the game actually makes Hell the infected anal sore of the cosmos instead of a cheesy black metal album cover, but on another, certain circles could have stood to have been examined in more excruciating notions of hypocrisy or have had some form of elucidation. The City of Dis, the circle relating to Heresy, kind of left me cold. I mean, D&D undead wizard things with goofy magic staffs, under the name of Pagans? Come the fuck on. Pagans gave the Church fucking Christmas in December, Mother Mary (cognate with the Latin mare, meaning sea), incarnating and resurrecting godhood, and... hold on a sec... HELL! Oh, but why no Pale Queen in the Darkness? Why offer us as the only powerful women of Hell some stupid giant half-naked "Egyptian" with a Glasgow smile climbing a massive cocktower and Dante's sylphid paramore in a pathetic virgin/whore complex? Maybe I'm just too into this kind of thing, but it'd be nice to see the nasty soddering done where the Christian dualist ethos tried to nestle its way into the black womb of Hel, where the cosmogony starts to fall apart and point to its own failures at unifying humanity with Creation, or in fact where it pulls humanity away from Creation so forcefully that one might take a look at the devilishly fabricated dreck such as national origin or creed and vomit on the face of God upon realizing how such associations lead us into the sterility of binary thought.

I demand games of a higher caliber and sophistication of thought than this. It needn't be so goddamn rare. It's fucking lame, and I'm sick of excuses as to the perpetuation of this crap. I want Kratos to fight Atalanta. I want to see vicious, corrupt industrialists with ovaries that commoners swear shoot buckshot and sulfuric acid. I want more of Amanda Waller and Helena Cain. I want to see women antagonists capable of such intricate and brilliant cruelty that none dare consider them some misunderstood soul deserving of empathy, and none would venture to consider themselves lucky to run afoul of them. I want the anti-Lilith, not some blustering gasbag with a mouth full of talk kept closed by a smug smirk holding back the urge to wretch all over her shoulder-padded jacket at her sheer ineptitude at being anything other than a mild frustration and vague sexual interest to a protagonist. If anything, a higher caliber of female villain might hopefully stir some more interesting female heroes.

I want too much from the world of media. The expression of the collective dream has become a vapid, derivative waste. We've become so quick to excuse diversions of our attention toward the manipulations of our time and resources, if only to fuel the self-flagellation that diverts our psychic and emotional ability to heal. We're placid miscarriages still dangling from the rotting placenta of retrospective, in desperate need of resuscitation and a fucking belly button. I want to remember blood, pain, vigor and victory. We deserve life, in all its teeth, venom and horns.

Downcast Malocchio, Coughing Up Benediction

"What do you want?" "Information..." "Well, you won't get it!" "By hook or by crook, we will."

I started reading the Invisibles again. It's been yeeeears since I've picked it up, despite its importance in my life. The fresh perspective, post-Batdeath, post-Crisis, post-ASS, post-LSD communicates so much more. It's a good, stable reminder of why I got into this crap in the first place. I can read Tom O'Bedlam unafraid of becoming a crazy homeless man. I can read King Mob as a walking erect penis dressed in a novelty condom instead of a role model, while still acknowledging his help in keeping me from leaping off of whatever I deemed fatal enough.

Pretty soon, information will become the next resource we mine. We'll scratch at the freshly-mined furrows of our brains, weeping as some entrepreneur sets nanites to start picking up whatever memories can earn enough to buy that big stupid boat or fucked-up jacket to replace the utter disinterest of the genitals. Some day we'll be staring at the Mechanoid Frontier, where machines self-evolve into maddened ecosystems beyond our control, and we'll have all manner of brave sorts on Robot Safari to get more of that precious information. Geez, I dunno if this'll end up a vibrant dream or a terrifying nightmare. Sometimes you just hope that some of that information will burst the blockade set up to "make it" in the average corporate stooge, and maybe pull the stick out the ass of the snide intellectual.

As much as I exist Right the Fuck Now, often to both my benediction and my detriment, I think about the future an awful lot. Deep down, there's this little Utopian voice yip-yipping away at how cool everything will be once it's all said and done, but then the Dystopian voice chimes up at the grotesque sacrifices that need to be made to make that future. It's sometimes hard to keep track of all of the colliding multiverses within the imagination and their feasibility in response to physical existence and the patterns found therein. How aggressively do we want to drag these things into the realm of physical experience? With development comes some act of violence on something.

So much hinges on our own concepts as a species, but how much control do we ourselves have over the concepts that we find unsound or offensive? How do we address the perspective in our darkest corners who tends to the blackness so that we don't drown in filth and despair? How do we open a discourse to the internal scapegoat we've cast into the wilderness to bear our maledictions, our blame? What wisdom does this wretched creature bring? How do we control our impulses and self-righteousness when it says something that might be right?