This is the wordy waxing about which I spoke before. File this under: slice of life. Or the circular file. It’s cool. I won’t know. “And really,” the narrator gazed at the imaginary audience askance, “would it matter if I did?”
It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? Last I left off, I was screaming, wasn’t I? I’ll get back to the memoir-related stuff in due course. Then again, since this is about the present, maybe this is, too? What do I know? For now, I just felt really compelled to check in. With whom, I’m not sure. It just seems sporting if I’m going to neglect the blog for a while, as I do. Huh. Three months to the day since I posted that last one (before the last one, that is). Fancy that.
It was as fine a day of work as I could have hoped. Thank you for asking, dear. All the finer for letting out nearly an hour before the end of the day to get a wee jump start on what, for me, will be a relatively rare guilt-free and maybe even enjoyable three-day weekend, the first since the end of the year. There have been plenty of others, some mix of scattered guilt with acute and intermittent joylessness. If I didn’t know better, someone out there has a doll with my name on it and a collection of needles they’re dying to try out. I’ll venture this much…if you believe in poetic justice and what goes around, comes around, and you feel the need to vent, do NOT call anyone a boil on the ass of society. Just sayin. If there is someone with a heap of needles (a problem heap if ever there were one), I’m not giving ’em any more ideas of where they can stick ’em.
Then I got home to the kittehs. I do love the little (little?) bastards, fur goblins though they be. There have been times where they’ve been my anchor, moreso that I maybe even realized at the time. I ain’t going anywhere because these little shitheads rely on me, and it turns out they perform a bigger service than acting like a couple of needy, squishable doofuses. Thanks, Sam and Dean. You assholes.
After that, it was on to YouTube when I suddenly got a bug up my ass. I wanted to see this thing I wrote. It called to me. And I’m glad it did. Those were some of my darker days. Turns out there’s this thing, passive suicidal ideation, and yeah, that seems to come and go. Once again, I’m good. I was good. I shall remain good. I don’t need any immediate assistance, and if I did, I’d find it readily enough. Truly, it’s all good.
Enough. Sufficienty good-ish, and the forecast is calling for more good-ish-er. As I note one layer down in this Russian nesting doll of a blog post, this is one of my favorite parts, the upswing. I can feel the momentum building. I don’t know which brass ring is coming around the best, but I’m feeling like maybe this is the time, whatever that means. Some brass rings are better than others.
As to that previous post, it might actually be some of my favorite writing, whatever gears it may grind. It’s my voice. It’s authentic. And it’s about as complete an instantaneous snapshot of who I am as I think I can muster.
Mostly, now that time has passed, there may exist some one or more that actually read the original post in its entirety and did me the courtesy of heeding my humble request to keep it to themselves. I’ll never know. I should never know. That’s the way things should be. Should they exist, I owe them this. Thank you. And all is well, as noted above. In part, probably, because of you. You rock.
Except the ones that don’t rock. They can still suck it.
And for those that might, for some reason, actually wish to engage with that post [barring the “hey, buddy, you okay” part] feel free, whichever parts they may be otherwise.
And on the world turns.
That whole thing about the willing suspension of disbelief? Yeah, it’s time to really lean into that, I think. The creative impulses are there. What’s been missing is focus. Hell, any amount of focus would do. The blur of impulses should at least be clear enough for me to mistake a hawk for a handsaw. I’m equipped for 10,000 hobbies, dabble in only 100 at a time, and wonder at how little I get accomplished. Yes, I duh much.
Leaning into it, I’m surmising really hard right about now, involves a discipline I lack, namely discipline. Focus. That’s what I lack. So I’ve been reeling it in, dialing it in. And I’m getting there.
One particularly sticky bugbear that stuck with me from that last trough is habit. I redeveloped that old standby: couch potatoing. I went into passive consumption mode with the occasional solo pity party and lots of background noise over seemingly pointless puttering because I must always be consuming. [Editor’s note: strangely, very strangely, even, I have neither music nor visual entertainment on at the moment, which is both accidental and something that never happens. It’s…all right. I could do this.]
Smoke the cigarette, drink the coffee, eat the snack, smoke the cigarette, drink the coffee, eat the meal, watch the show, hear the sounds, click the buttons, drink the milk, the tea, the juice, the water (almost never the water), taste the food-like substance, hear the comforting white noise of droning lectures and screams of horror and clash of sword on board, see the moving colors with 1/10 of my attention on the tale they depict, smell the stale ashtray of it all if I smell anything at all, and revel in the cold, vapid physical connection between man and keyboard punctuated with the occasionally insistent cat who knows better than I that the keyboard isn’t enough, a veritable living run-on of consumption by consumption.
I tried to take the couch potatoing into the yard two weeks ago so I could put it down properly with a lawn mower for the first time this year, and did okay. Got about a third of the double lot done with a little 14″ deck on a battery-powered mower. Four batteries’ worth cut, and that’s all she wrote. Turns out that if you’ve been sedentary for about the last, shit, 8 months? Really? Oct (no cutting then) Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr Friggin’ May.
I did okay, that is, until the next morning a newly tightened up back, probably with a huge assist from the front passing through, yanked other bits of back out of whack which ought not to be that way, and all while attempting the daring move of picking up a coffee cup. Two days, unpaid, off work, just in time to start a pay period. That’s okay. Financially I’ve never found a hole I couldn’t dig myself out of, and this one’s no exception. It’s simple really. For a nice long while you just have to want and accept less while you get your feet under you again. Easier said than done, and literally impossible for some.
I count that bit of upfailing as one of my many blessings. I have the luxury of accepting less, and it’s really not that hard when you have more excess than you realized you had until you try mindfully looking at your environment and your daily intake and see just how many material hooks have been sunk in the proverbial cheek. Pro-tip for the consumer culture-addicted: wish lists and ditching full shopping carts are your friend. You get all the upside of the anticipatory delight of a scratch-off lottery ticket and none of the interest rate. The window shopping and the Add to Cart seem to be sufficiently good at delivering the dopamine hit.
For those wrestling with eating habits, I got nothing. My proven ineffective method is to replace all the bad things with a good thing about once a month or so, washed down with enough intentions for a year, and then relapse quickly into whatever comfort crap my inner child demands, which, somehow, is never what is already in the pantry. Ask your doctor if Damitol is right for you.
Then sometimes I cook. This weekend, it’ll be Cajun stuffed butterflied lamb chops. There may be hope for me yet. Mind you, it helps that these are obligatory. I cook best when I cook for others.
That blasted back twinge not only took me down for two days, but persisted (again, weather-related, I think) for nearly two weeks. It’s only been just the last couple of days that the half-mile walk to work didn’t feel like a stretching exercise with a bad gait. And my energy level is coming back, which is great. I mean, this has been an 8-working-day streak for me where I’ve missed no time from work, which seems to be a pattern than stretches back, cringeworthily enough, perhaps a couple of years. I dread to look at my old timesheets to confirm. Just every damned time I turned about, it was another thing. Back this, boil that, other thing the other, cold here, shouldn’ta ate that there, crikey what kind of bug was *that* far too hither and not enough yonder, and hey, back, you’re back. Crap. Round and round.
Seriously, if I didn’t work for the absolutely best boss, I’d be fuckered. He’s allowed me to dip well into a PTO deficit when that’s what it took to keep the lights on. I’m all too aware that a loan of time is a loan of money. And that’s not even the half of it. There’s days I might hate the work I’m doing, but I never hate my job. That’s a bucket of wealth right there I’d do well to appreciate more, true gold and pebble of the wise, transformation by awareness.
What am I doing with all the free time afforded the wildly single, fancy-free misanthrope and cat hair-covered homebody that I am at the moment? Once again, things are starting to click. It would be so easy to spin wildly out of control again and let one interest devolve into twelve more, the depths of which no one, especially me, will ever know. The list is much smaller now because I’ve been forced to reckon with the finitude of time and life and the raw fact of the serial nature of my interests, where it sometimes seems everything is a prerequisite to everything else and the whole mess takes on the semblance of a rat king.
Primary interest #1: get my financial shit in order.
This is as good a weekend to get started on that as any. Surely as I make my way through things that need organizing for the next item, I’ll find some delectable tidbits that might find their legs on eBay. Most immediate goal: get the PT Cruiser running again. Cost: unknown. Knowing how stupid it is: priceless. It’s effectively bricked by Chrysler because if you interrupt the power supply for long enough it triggers a security code to be thrown that can only be overridden by their computers at a shop, you know, that still has that computer from 20 years ago. It would run, and quite well, but for that. If you have a PT Cruiser of your own, you may want to look into that issue and decide whether you still want to be the owner of it when it happens. File under: someone else’s problem.
Primary interest #2: home improvement
Start and finish the wee bit of repair and decorating necessary to get the sleeping nook of my dreams (I don’t need no stinkin’ bedroom, and I jest you not, ’tis true). The attic in this house was converted into an extra room. Lighting and power are great up there. There’s a catch. It’s a long, narrow room, I think about 30×15, maybe 45×15-ish, with a steeply sloped vaulted ceiling with its peak at about, ohhhh, 5’6 or so. Which is cool because I’m only 5’2″. It works for me like it would for nobody else except a child, which is perfect for a short person’s second childhood. All I’ve got to do is trim the long-since cured spray insulation foam, paint the wall at the end the dark blue that I recently acquired, stain the trim and baseboard the dark walnut that I picked up, lay down the cheap black Temu interlocking foam floor tiles, and scooch the platform bed into that end. Voila. Lay down a line of tape to represent where I want the partition wall to go, and move on to the next project. Because, as it turns out, this one project is the keystone to an arch I’ve been failing to erect. It’s the prerequisite behind which a line of projects patiently wait, and, who knew? They can be done sequentially and not suck all the air out of the room by being 20 current undone projects. That actually leaves breathing room for other, but not too many other, things.
Primary interest #3: worldbuilding.
Will I ever write the novel, much less the 50 bajillion novel epic saga of my wildest fancies? Doesn’t matter. None if it actually happens until there’s a world for it to happen on. And as it happens, I think I’m fine if it turns out I’m only a worldbuilder and not a novelist. No reason needed. I can have that. The defensive part of me that feels the need to justify every last little thing else it should be begrudged me, can take a long vacation in the hottest part of a crematorium. It’s one of my yums, and that’s all that matters. And the outcome doesn’t need to be good enough for anyone but me, which is fine because I’m also a demanding asshole and actually want to get good at it.
“But, but…” chimes the defensive part, “shouldn’t you be using that time for something that aids Primary interest #1?” No. This is mental health time. Get bent. This is mine. Besides, that’s the wrong question. The right question is, “how can I monetize this?” There are those who argue against monetizing one’s hobbies because it can be a real joykiller. I’ll take my chances. Should I ever complete a world bible, that in itself is a product I can shop around. Along the way, there’s components that can be sold as digital products, an array of PDFs and SVGs and PNGs and STLs. Some folks freelance write for magazines and after a time build up enough of a portfolio of paying licenses that the residuals total up to a livable income. Maybe aiming high was the wrong approach all along, the path to which was littered with the debris of good intention and little follow through thanks, probably, to a poorly tuned ball of brain good resident in my skull. Maybe part of the right answer is the slow, steady trickle of tons of $0.99 digitized dreams.
Besides being prerequisite to the imaginary writing venture, it also subsumes a great many of my other interests. To scratch at one is to scratch at worldbuilding, and to scratch at worldbuilding is to direct my attention to only one at a time. It’s a tidy little arrangement when I think of it like that. Need some mysticism in my day to maintain my mental health? So much fodder. Attention directed, payoff found, and a chewy nougat of improved mental health in the middle. What’s not to love? World need a world? Spend some time making maps. I like that. I’ll digest some geography videos while I’m at it, and pick up some incidental history along the way. So much fodder.
But first, the map. I’ve experimented with many methods, and I’ll probably experiment with many more. Which leads to:
Primary interest #4: game design.
That was a surprise. The idea sprang out of the monetization question. If I can figure out how to do what it is I’m trying to accomplish for this step of this particular experiment in map making, can the process be gamified. Maybe, just maybe the process itself, without being gamified, could be one digital product, but wow, how fun would it be if I could turn it into a game? Initial sniff tests: 1) does the method work as intended? 2) is playing the method as a game fun? That last one is entirely subjective, isn’t it? What is fun? If fun is something you can find yourself doing for 4+ hours at a stretch while you lose track of time, and you’re happy with the outcome, is that fun? I think so. And since I’m a firm believer that everything happens at a rate, if I’m one instance of “person who enjoys this sort of thing,” and assuming I’m not unique in that respect, then that happens at a rate. I just need to find the audience for the thing. But first, the thing itself. I intend to share more about that under separate heading in due course, but we both know me and good intentions. Let’s see what happens. So far I’ve had a blast with it, but it’s honestly some of the hardest writing I’ve ever had to do.
Primary interest #5: Iaon.
That’s the story that, if an infinite number of monkeys infinitely typed away at an infinite number of typewriters, they would beat me to its completion. I’ll have much to say about this one later, I should hope. For now, depending on how I eventually organize the structure of the damnable beast, I’ve got the barebones of prequel fleshed out, which may or may not need to be novelized independently, but could be revealed as needed in flashbacks and other dastardly writerly tricks I’ve not yet learned.
There’s a detestable, yet marginally sympathetic chosen one, cosmic horror cultists and all that entails, human sacrifice, Dee-inspired shewstones and the things that look back from such contrivances, shadowy magicks, brains in vats, advanced artificial general intelligence, consciousness transference, apotheosis, and a deeply unexpected and surprising “creation” the organization of which is at least loosely inspired by Kabbalah. This new “god” has a run-in with Elder Gods that may or may not be the heart of the cult that brought him into being to begin with, flees, takes quite the tumble into materialization, lasting, as it does, a great many billions of years during which his only company is the undead, conscious, and very pissed off severed head of his murdered sacrificial brother, who spends much of his time in a blood-curdling scream, a gruesome and deeply gratifying sacrifice at that, all very necessary you see. That, and the occasional aberration, inspired by various weird fiction and game resources, horrors with memories spanning the histories of entire universes and madness to match.
Moreover, he’s unaware of it, but there are Powers That Be even greater than these, and he has attracted their attention, like spoor on an interdimensional breeze.
His own manifestation into the physical is only complete once the perfect circumstance arises…first a world must exist of which he would be the perfect personification. Billions and billions of years it took. And at long last, there was Iaon, an unlikely and magick-rich world orbiting a rogue brown dwarf, cast free from its galactic source and adrift in the inky nothingness of intergalactic space deep within an astronomically gargantuan void, a world still in its Hadean epoch, nothing but seething, flaming molten stone under a toxic sky and a perpetual bombardment of flaming fireballs from space, a world suitable only for the next thing to happen, the onslaught of demons and devils loosed by some as yet undetermined hand-waving inspired by the Kabbalistic concept of the Breaking of the Vessels when this new god created this new universe, all of which could have been avoided if he were any damned good at it, which he isn’t.
For yet billions more years, our “hero” is beset by seemingly never-ending, always replenishing hordes of fiends of every make and model. As it happens, where there’s demons and devils, there’s angels and gods, and they are not always an improvement. Only with the cooperation of a surprise host of interdimensional dragons surveilling Iaon for its stores of magiconium, is he finally able to dispel both the celestials and the infernals to their respective realms. Mostly.
Through all of this he gains in power, picking up new god-sized tricks as he goes. Yet there is still nobody about, just his pissed off severed head of a brother and only a primitive landscape ripe for the advent of life. Finally, something he can do! Play god! And with just a bit of nurturing here, and squishing there, he triggers several parallel lines of development well ahead of their time, all thanks to the generous input of his pissed off brother, who would also like something to do that doesn’t suck for a change. At long last, this is what starts to create a peace between them. Build something new, something better. With the god’s creative ability and inspiration from his brother, conveniently enhanced with an advanced artificial general intelligence as he is, they work marvels, creating the branches that would eventually lead to elves and dwarves and filthy hobloblitses of some kind or other and many sapient species of all manner of descent from fish to crustacean to cephalopod, from plant to fungus, from amphibian to reptile to mammal after mammal.
Unfortunately, not all of the allied dragons stayed that way, the banishment of demons and celestials was somewhat less than perfect, and they were all quick studies, each contributing in their own way to the advent of all manner of malicious sapient species, either intent on purging the weak and the corrupt or feeding on them, take your pick.
This is the world of Iaon as known to its earliest intelligent mortal inhabitants, a world under a perpetual shimmering violet dusk, its sky alive with swirling clouds and dazzling auroras, it’s ground a landscape almost devoid of shadow, except when solar flares visible from Iaon increase the intensity of the auroras, dramatically casting long wavering shadows where the land is flat, reminiscent of writing serpents, the sight of which cast fear into the hearts of the primitives that beheld them.
All the sapient species start out savage and refine over time into tool-using, language-speaking hunter-gatherers, first one, then another and another, millennia, even millions of years apart. Each matured but so far, regardless of life span, content with the vicissitudes of reaping their sustenance from the untainted land itself, untainted, that is, except for the ruins of celestial and infernal fortifications. They were not unintelligent or disorganized. Quite the contrary. They became master crafters in their ways. Their concerns were universals…suffering and the end of suffering, desires and the acquisition of the objects thereof. They organized into all kinds of configurations of families and clans and tribes. They engaged in trade, even over long distances. They even built monumental structures where the spirits moved them and planted temporary settlements at logistically important locations like river crossings where herds were sure come in their appointed rounds.
The new god marveled at all this because he’d as yet had no success in eliciting anything like humanity from the available morass of a gene pool. Try as he might, he could convince none of the dragons’ progeny to take up the sickle instead of the spear. In due course, his time, too, came, and the first hominids crept down from trees grown bare in thinning forests to the ground below where they grew accustomed to feeding on new and novel lifeforms so that they adapted to this new bounty to replace the old, and along came the larger canines, even tusks, and noses good for both picking up scent and rooting, and a truly brutish mentality. With the exception of a few aquatic, insectoid and reptilian species he’d not seen the like when it comes to a species’ so hungry for the flesh of its own kind. These were the god’s new humans, by which I mean orqs, because of course I do.
It was just a matter of time before the god was able to instill in these orqs a sense of supernatural fear, largely through the nightmares that he induced while they slept. Any good prey knows when death looms about them, and it shows in the dreams of their disturbed sleep. The orqs knew their doom was upon them, but not what form it might take. Little did they know that the doom was to eventually be for the lot of them, in their entirety, insofar as their way of life was concerned. They, as they are, would cease to be, having made way for their soon to be civilized descendants who learned how to extract power from the weaker of their kind and lord it over them, how to organize labor so that the elect among them would have to do none, always for reasons good enough to keep themselves for getting roasted alive for being merely orq after all.
It is from this point that the story in earnest actually begins. The rest? Nebulous as of yet, but the structure becomes clearer the more I add to it. However many tales it takes, the god is aimed at an unavoidable collision with the averse twin deities at the top of the infernal food chain. At stake? Existence and whether or not his universe is the vector by which a local plague of infernals becomes an interdimensional pandemic? The backdrop for the climactic battle? A slightly futuristic dystopian technologically advanced civilization set in a world still replete with barbarians and everything else in the Interstitial Zones between walled city states, a world where magick and technology are just beginning to fuse, perhaps even with celestials and infernals…magickally enhanced cyborg angels and demons, if you will, but they simply will not stay banished. It’s got to be one of those pesky dragons breaking the seals.
To get to that climax? A very long series of lifetimes and generations, each tale informed by the lessons to be learned from a particular tarot card, as learned by characters built on astrological tropes over the course of their lifetimes, during which they go from rookies of some sort to powerful heroes, to kings, to legends, and on from there to godhood as well, the god’s own personally hand-picked pantheon of new Olympians with which he intends to take down the existing malevolent Titans.
The god’s motives do change over time. At first, his one goal was annihilation. All that he hated about the world of his birth was even more detestable here on Iaon, thanks to the meddling of demons and angels and devils and gods and dragons alike. None of this is what he intended. He’d simply imagined godhood as being immortal and invulnerable, with a superhero trick or two up his sleeve, more than enough to simply rule Earth the way it ought to be run, once and for all, forever and ever, a utopia of his making to replace every last damned rotten thing about the world that made him what he was. For all his study and preparation, he had no real clue how to be a creator god and it showed. Between his numerous character flaws (the kind you need if you’re going to decapitate your despicable brother as a sacrifice to become a god and then use his cybernetically-enhanced severed head as an oracle, consent be damned), and his failure to fully understand what he undertook to accomplish in the first place, his creation was as imperfect, as he was, hyperbolically so, as though to make a point.
It’s only later, at a time and place window-dressed to rhyme with the Roman Empire, where the god has a change of heart and decides that what the world needs is a redemption arc, which means one for himself as well. He’ll still need to face off against the twin god of evil when the time comes, but to save the world, not annihilate it. From what, he cannot even imagine at this point. So he announces himself as a stand-apart in a world where magick is at least not unheard of and even the norm in some circumstances by severing his own head in front of gathered masses only to hold it aloft in one hand while his brother’s head, held aloft in the other hand, screams for the crowd to kneel, and kneel they do.
On and on it goes, card after card, biome after biome, generation after generation, window-dressing after window dressing until, at length, all involved must confront the challenges inspired by the four aces of the tarot deck, as four primary titans and their entourage, led by the god and his sacrificial brother, take on the twin god of evil…just as those interdimensional Powers That Be who had detected the god and his new universe lo those billions and billions of years ago finally arrive to nip the possibility of this world infecting the rest of reality with its nonsense in the bud.
What do the Elder Gods thing of all this? Do these events complicate their plans or fulfill them? Do the Powers That Be bring salvation or damnation? Stay tuned and maybe I’ll figure it out one day.
Primary interest #6: This.
This is where I hope to go from passive consumer to active, one who doesn’t just consume, but digests and reformulates, like a civet cat shitting out pop culture distillations instead of coffee beans. All the creativity, practical and otherwise, is subsumed under the headings above. If one of those interests triggers a need for a 3D printed thing, or a carved thingum, or a bass line, or anything else at all, that’s the shifting of gears in that interest, a new definable project, generally a relatively short turnaround, and finally, something to report here for everyone’s amusement and or edification (or perhaps shock and horror), maybe even wares to hawk.
That’s it. Six might seem like a lot, but it’s whittled down from unmanageable dozens. So far the upswing feels like I’m up to this task. Do it. Have fun with it. Monetize it where possible. And get on with living a creative life while I can before that blasted witchdoctor with the needles decides I need another stab in the ass or something. Get while the gettin’s good.
Now, if you can stomach it, the rabbit hole goes a layer deeper. Just. Click. Below.
Go ahead. You know you want to. Where’s this trainwreck headed, anyway? But first, where is it coming from? Click and find out.
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