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.