Jenny, Lucia & Leon

Supergods and devils

2011-12-15T18:45:00.002Z

So I read Supergod the other week. Then today I read it again just cause I couldn't remember if the name of Jerry Craven, the American Jesus. And then my mind was blown like it's not been blown in months. It was only because I, like everyone else, wanted the comic to have been more about Dajjal that I went to read up on him. But then it started making wonderful, brain-wrinking sense.

I think I'm addicted to wonder.

Anyway, Masih ad-Dajjal, The False Messiah, is not the character in the book. The scientists who built him merely called him Dajjal, False. He is Lie incarnate. He is Disbelief, Cheating, Betrayal and Illusion; he is all that is not.

Literally, as it were.

The name turns out fittingly prophetic when we learn that he possesses a consciousness made up of all possible timelines. An awareness made up of everything that happens, has happened, will happen and can happen. All the infinite possible realities that we could previously say with some certainty don't actually happen, as opposed to the one that does, are now manifest. In his mind, they happen. Them happening is his mind.

Do you understand the depth of the contradiction now present? It defies the very concept of language, the very tool we developed to define contradictions and abstractions, impossibilities and negations. There's no way to describe what's happening that actually makes grammatical sense.

Everything in all possible worlds that don't happen, no longer fail to happen. The property of not being real, which things could possess, much like the property of wetness, or size, or consciousness, is no longer possessed. Things that don't exist now exist. False exists. Lies are true.

Lies can even be said to be more true than anything else. The number of false timelines making up False's consciousness is infinitely greater than the number of true ones, after all.

False knows this, too. He knows people are watching him in some future timelines where remote viewing backwards in time is possible. He speaks to them, and us. This is just a comic book, but False is real - there's no getting around the fact that his fictional presence has real world implications. I suspect Ellis gives him as little stage room as possible, and kills him as soon as possible, so that he doesn't have to face his creation more than necessary.

Dept. of deliriously deft comic books

2011-12-12T21:08:00.003Z

I mentioned like seven seconds ago that I've read a bunch of good comics today. There was a momentary tickle from that Sinfest strip, but on second thoughts it's not going to be the thing that's had the greatest impression of the day. That glimmer of honor I feel goes to Daytripper, a far more vast work that's taken a few moments to really sink in. It's an entirely self-contained story by largely unknown twin authors Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba that doesn't have any superheroes in it.

You know how rare it is for anyone in the English-speaking world to have even heard of such things? We praise comic books to the heavens for just not being directly about superheroes. Transmetropolitan is one of the most popular suggestions for rookie comic book readers to get into because the drug prodigal, unflappable, essentially invisible visionary and superhumanly skilled writer Spider Jerusalem in his iconic outfit of crazy 3D goggles, tattos, crooked teeth, bald head and black clothes isn't explicitly referred to as a superhero. Scott Pilgrim inhibits a world of superhero comic book physics, but we're cool with that just being the backdrop to a fantastic character-driven love story. Even Sandman had to include Superman and the gang in its periphery, if only to assure readers that it was all happening in the same fictional world. It's not that superhero comic books are inherently bad, they're just saturating the medium of the comic book to the point that we don't know what to do with a comic that doesn't ground itself in superheroes in one way or another.

Except for Daytripper. It's set in a perfectly ordinary world. Nothing happens in it that we couldn't read about in any given newspaper today. It's telling, not to mention super fun and cool and sweet, that the collected series has a foreword drawn by the author of the (also terrific) autobio comic Blankets.

Well, there is the part where almost every chapter of the comic ends with the main character dying. That's pretty weird. But it's not necessarily literally what's happening. He's an obituary writer, see, and he could just be morbidly writing his own as he imagines himself dying. Would it be a spoiler if I said that after reading the comic, I'm still not sure? Not revealing what happens, or revealing what you don't think happens, shouldn't be a spoiler. It reveals the fact that the story is a mystery which doesn't solve itself for the reader, but the mystery still lingers. Maybe that's the great thing about mysteries.

The story isn't about solving the mystery of what exactly happens in the story, anyway. It's about the most intense, electric moments in life, the kind that accompanies the awareness of the presence of death. Our hero Bras lives a perfectly ordinary life, in several variations. He mourns his father, he raises a son, he travels, he falls in love, he falls out, he searches for lost friends, he steals a moment of forbidden love, he dreams, he flies a kite; at the end of a long joyous life he finds a letter his father wrote on the day of his son's birth; he is born in a blackout, and the lights come back when he takes his first breath. Not necessarily in that order.

But every single day of that life seems momentous. Every single day is charged with emotional weight, charged with nearly magic significance, spilling over the pages and into our heart. At the end I felt as though I had lived a lifetime more than I had before. Ten lifetimes more.

Funny story, I pirated the comic as it came out, 24 pages at a time. I'd forget about it in between every read and only check the Internet for it once every month or two, and then steal the latest and read it in ten minutes and forget it again. I accidentally remembered it again yesterday and found I could now steal the final two issues all in one go. And I did, and then I went to bed without reading them. And then I found the book today in the bookstore, and bought it without a second thought. Without a second glance, even. I guessed by the weight that the one volume contained the whole series; it didn't occur to me to check exactly what I was buying or what it cost me until I was on the way home. I just wanted to find out how it ended, and do it reclining in my comfy couch holding the book in my hands.

Serendipity aside, I just wanted to explain what a great victory for Internet piracy this has been.

So many questions

2011-12-12T20:38:00.003Z

The Devil doesn't want to enter the "reality zone". Is it because he's worried he'll cease to exist? Or die or something? A few strips earlier a flying pitchfork seems to lose consciousness when it flies over the reality zone, but come on, he's the fucking Devil. I doubt high definition poses any danger to him.

Would a real life Devil be too much? Too cruel? More evil than the world can stand? Somehow I think that's his concern. Out of respect for either humanity or the universal balance, the Devil chooses not to go too far.

I've read a lot of good comics today. Deliciously, deliriously, definitely excellent comics in fact. I'll have to tell you about them later. It's almost sad that a simple gag from a safe, cuddly, cartoony, cookie cutter Sinfest strip from over a year ago should be the one thing from today that stays with me. But there you have it. Sometimes life surprises you. Even when you're reading syndicate-ready comic strips that could have come from a newspaper. It's just such a breathtaking, paradigm-making brand new idea.

The Devil does something good.

You people are weird

2011-12-10T22:50:00.005Z

I'm going to quote some of this site's statistics at you. Keep in mind that it's you, dear reader, who creates these numbers.

Number of visitors per month: ~300. This has been quite stable for as long as I can remember, even in the months when we haven't put up anything. I'm not sure what is weirder, having such faithful readers or not hearing a peep from you. Correction: There has been one peep, once, from someone I did not personally coerce to visit the site.

Most popular post: My Kefka fanfiction. That exploded after someone put up a review of it on TVtropes, which I guess is understandable. But it's closely followed by the Gary Busey post which disturbs me on like, four levels. The most popular search engine input that's led people here, by a bizarre 80% majority, is "Gary Busey". That's not even counting variants such as "Gary Busey mad", "Gary Busey scary" or "Gary Busey cool story bro".

By the way the second most popular search term, at around 4%, is "jlandl.blogspot.com", which leads me to believe a whole bunch of you weirdos have memorized the exact url, but instead of typing it into the url field like the pros do it you type it into Google and search for the link you already have in your head. Get with the program, you non-nerds.

More random is a number of visitors from Russia and China. I had my email hacked by someone in China once. I suspect I've made it on the party's list of the party's enemies, possibly for some outburst I may have had around the time of the Olympics in Beijing, which I'm counting as a victory for democracy. No idea what our Russian fans are about, though.

Also for some reason dozens of people have found their way here from Rock Beyond Belief, and I have no idea how or why we've been referenced there. I thought I was an Atheist once, but it turns out that was just a sensible rejection of organized religion.

And then there's that one freak who found their way here searching for "woman with dragon". Not that we don't feature the odd bit of draxploitation, but it's all very tastefully done and always in service of the story. We don't make dragon-on-woman porn, we make dragon-on-woman erotica.

On madness

2011-12-10T20:29:00.003Z

There's a lovely little stain of horror in the comics world called Fell. This one episode has a guy (left) who moves to Snowtown because it's what they call a feral city. Because the absence of law enforcement and child services and doctors with ethics gives him the freedom to take a woman on the fringe of society and use her to make him a baby and then turn her into a crack addict and throw her out and get a restraining order against her and live without a phone and claim that the girl is too sick to leave the house so that there's no way for the mother to contact her daughter so that he can get away with doing anything he wants to his child.

Now, for a normal everyday scumsack this would be a sex thing. I'm not saying he doesn't rape her every day. I would be surprised if he doesn't. But that's not the point of this mad plan. He actually manages to out-creepify pedophilia. It would be hard to conceive of a crime that could be a more gross violation of your child's personal boundaries, more offensive to its basic dignity, more contrary to its existence as an individual of free will. But he does it.

What he does is get a doctor to say she has diabetes so he can give her daily injections. With his shit.

You can't make these things up. Not even a comic book author could make it up; it's based on a true story.

You can see his defense in the picture over there. Apparently he thought that his daughter needed to be made up of his physical substance in a more direct sense than sharing some bits of his DNA. Either because it would make her more his property or more his creation. I'm leaning towards something along the lines of the latter. He wants to make more of himself. Being just a single body isn't enough. He's just self-absorbed enough to think that the world needs more than one of him in it.

I think most people want to have babies because we want to make something better than ourselves. It's what I think defines the human condition. But this guy doesn't want that, he just wants himself to be more. I wonder if he lacks imagination or courage; if he is incapable of considering that injecting turds in his child's bloodstream might not be the best thing he can do for her, or if that prospect scares him.

I mean, if his shit is not as a matter of fact a superior biomass to another person's flesh and blood, it could be a devastating blow to his preposterous ego. Imagine the horror of being forced to contemplate that other people may be just as good as you. Or your poop.

I think that's what's going on here. Maybe it's the careful planning and execution of his crime, maybe it's the fact that he has the massive muscles and belly of the complete narcissist; someone obsessed not with making himself big or pretty, but strong, with the calculating determined pragmatic mindset of a shark. But I don't see this guy as a tragic case of untreated mental disorders. He's an predatory ego monster with a sense of entitlement that can only be treated by framing him for child molesting and putting him in prison.

Which is exactly what Fell does to him by the end of the story. Happy endings all over.

A moral story

2011-12-10T13:52:00.002Z

The last capitalist lied on his mahogany bed and coughed. He was thirsty, but his last most trusted butler had not been seen since lunch time. The last capitalist shouted a name which he hoped was the butler's. He used to be so good with names, but it was hard to remember. Almost everything was hard to remember now.

The last capitalist was a hundred and thirty-seven years old, and he had been starting to feel it. If only he had founded more Alzheimer's research before it was too late.

His bedsheets, although made of the finest silk, made his paper thin skin chafe and ache. He tried to stand up, and failed, but he tried again, and again, and then he made it. Third time's the charm, he said to himself, and laughed a mocking laugh at the ghosts of the many quitters who surrounded him. The laugh turned into a cough that rattled his old bones, and he had to steady himself with his ivory cane to keep his affluent ass off his marble floor.

The last capitalist walked, slowly, across his large room and looked through his window at the city far below. Bonfires burned on the streets and rooftops, almost like the streetlights used to. Even through his triple-layer window glass, and so many hundreds of yards up, he could hear laughter coming from down there. His lips twisted downward at the sound, but he didn't turn away. The neighborhood may have gone to the rats, but it was still his home. Bought and paid for. He was determined to endure the bad with the good.

And it wasn't like he could move to anywhere better anyway.

His stomach ached as it tried to digest the large portion of money. Money for breakfast, money for lunch and money for dinner. His bowels had stopped working a week ago. Greenbacks was all he had left, of course, and the irony wasn't lost on the last capitalist. He was going to die a very ironic death. Very ironic and painful. And soon. But at least it would afford some Generation X hippie or other a moment's entertainment. Never let it be said the last capitalist never did anything for the poor.

He stood for a long time and watched the lights of the city. For a moment it seemed to him the lights began to flicker and move hurriedly back and forth, like rivers. But no. That was back when people drove cars. It was pretty back then, thought the last capitalist, those endless streams of headlights and blinking neon dancing like fireflies in the dark. Now there were just the fires, which burned without moving, and the occasional oil lamp hung to a horse carriage, which moved oh so slowly down the street.

Give me some damn hustle, said the last capitalist to his window. No one listened to him, but he went on anyway, in a bitter whispering litany. Move your fucking asses, you're getting nowhere at this rate, let's see some damn hustle, some damn progress, you're never going to turn a profit unless you get the lead out. And. Hurry. The. Fuck. Up!

The last capitalist slowly slid down his spotless glass and found that he had no strength left to stand up. He coughed and crumpled, like a paper doll, down on his floor in an ungraceful heap.

Scattered thoughts raced through his head as he realized he was going to die. He did not see his life flash before his eyes, as most people do when their survival instincts go into overdrive to search through all of their accumulated experiences for a way out of their predicament. Instead the last capitalist tried to figure out where it went wrong, and who he should blame.

Like most of his brothers, he did not know just when it started, or how. He had kept on trading in stocks and bonds and mortgages and debts as he had all his life, always chasing after the best way to turn his money into more money. At the last count he alone had owned ten trillion dollars, close to twice as much as money as actually existed in the world by the best estimates of his economists. He and his brothers, the elite one percent, had such fantastic amounts of money. It thrilled him, even now, to imagine cashing in all his chips and leaving the whole world a broken ruin.

And he had kept right on trading for a long time before he had begun to take the second economy seriously. And who could blame him? It had always seemed such a ridiculous notion, the pipe dreams of hippies who believed themselves to understand the economy. It had grown right under his nose. Grew from such seemingly innocent, hare-brained soundbytes. The bank owns your house, we'll build you a new one. You're going to jail cause you can't pay you debts, we'll break you out. Your business is being bought up by a larger corporation, we'll help you start a new one. You can't afford an education, we'll teach you. You're forced to work a job you hate to feed your family, we'll grow crops for them to eat. What resources do the one percent actually own that you can't live without?

What can the one percent actually offer that you can't live without?

Who would have thought that could work? Not the last capitalist. But yet there he was one day with his tit in the mangler, suddenly trading money that didn't exist with his money-trading fraternity in a pointless circle jerk and it had lost all meaning. Their money didn't mean anything. His money didn't mean anything. No one wanted it for anything. No one needed it.

Now he had said the word money so many times it had lost all meaning, and he could not stop, and he did not care. He muttered breathlessly, money money money, money must be funny, monny, mommy, monner, monner. An image of his money and his mother mixed together was the last thought the last capitalist had.

Within a month he was buried, and five thousand hippies moved in to live in his tower.

A conversation on the telephone, in paraphrase

2011-12-09T20:52:00.005Z

[Ring.]

Creed.

Good evening, my name is Dick McFace and I'm calling from Broadband Corp. Am I talking to Jenny Creed?

That's me.

Can I ask what are you currently paying for your Internet and phone connections?

Gee, I'm not really sure, I've got some combination deal with the Big Name telecom company.

Well, I'm looking at Big Name company's rates here, and their cheapest combo deal is fifty bucks a months. We can cut that by ten dollars and get you a higher connection speed, a modem you've already got, some Internet movie download trial thingamabob that's just as cheap as Bittorrent for a few months and then it starts costing money, and some other bonus crap you don't need.

Okay that sounds pretty good, but I don't want to agree to anything if I don't have it in writing in front of me.

But I only want you to agree to have these contracts sent to you, which you can then read at your leisure, and if you change your mind you'll just have to call this number within two weeks.

That doesn't sound good, like what if I lose track of time after a week and a half or don't want to make that call, I'm not very good with phones you know.

But if you to agree to have these contracts sent to you you can then read at your leisure, and if you change your mind it's just a phone call.

It's just that the deal sounds suspiciously good. Is this a better deal than I can get if I go through your website?

Well, no.

Are you in fact offering me anything I can't look up at your site by myself, without binding myself to anything?

No but it's much more convenient, you just have to say yes instead of going through the hassle of navigating the Internet.
Okay, but you're asking me to navigate a verbal contract and I'm actually better at using the Internet than talking to people.
But you'll just have to listen to these questions and answer yes or no.
When I talk to people it usually involves listening, it doesn't get easier just because I don't have to speak a lot.
Excuse me? I can't really hear you, can you speak up?
That's what I'm talking about.

I get that you don't like talking on the phone, but if you just say yes you get to sit back home and read the contracts at your own leisure and if you change your mind you just have to make a phone call to cancel.

But if I say no i can read the contracts at my own leisure without having to call anyone if I change my mind.
But why don't you just say yes so you don't have to use the horrible bothersome Internet.
But I told you, it's easier for me to use the Internet than the phone.

But why would you say no to this deal, you'll be saving ten bucks a month, can you give me one good reason to say no?

Yes I'll probably make the deal, I'm just going to go through the Internet since I really don't like doing business on the phone. Or talking on the phone at all.

But it's very easy, you just have to say yes and then say yes or no to these questions and then we send the contracts.

But you're still telling me this on a telephone.

I can't really talk you into doing this, can I?

Now we understand each other.

I don't know what to say to that.

Goodbye?

[Click.]

No we can't skip the dreamtime

2011-12-09T19:07:00.002Z

I just remembered this weird dream I had last night. I was running with a friend up a steep hill with a thick growth of pine trees on it. It might have been a forest, but with a cleanly moved lawn instead of moss and stuff on the ground. We were running away from a largeish lake where an enormous squid monster dwelled, and its tentacles chased us, crashing through the hundred year old trees like so many popsicle sticks.

For some reason I can't remember I realized I was dreaming, and immediately remembered how to fly, picked up my friend and zoomed out of the danger zone, somehow ending up in a very large log cabin with several floors of stores and coffee shops and some kind of schoolroom areas with comfortable wooden chairs and desks lined up to face a blackboard, but with no walls to separate them from the bustling commerce of the mall areas. I mean, by now it was so obvious I was dreaming I don't even know how I could keep from waking up.

I talked to my friend about how I was dreaming, and it seemed perfectly natural that she was actually there, as opposed to a figment of my imagination, sharing the same dream. It seemed that being an extra solid kind of dreamspace was a significant part of the dream; we did all sorts of tests to examine how sturdy the dream was. I burned my fingers on a cigarette, which seemed to prove that not only was the dream well-designed enough for me to to feel pain, but even heat, something I can't really feel when awake. We touched our hands to the floor, marveling at the intricate and immersive feel of the rugged, dirty plastic. I think I've been playing too much videogames, because these are the kinds of tests I'd devise to push a game world to its limits.

And, sadly, the dream became so realistic I was no longer able to fly. I jumped around in various ridiculous Superman poses while my friend and various vague onlookers chuckled at my fanciful shenanigans. It was so depressing to think I could no longer dream of flying, I woke up without meaning to.

Woke up at about one in the morning, too. I had some breakfast and drew a little bit before going to bed at four o' clock, a pretty reasonable late night. Kind of squeezed a tiny extra day in there. I'm feeling so productive.

On the end of Neon Genesis Evangelion

2011-12-09T18:18:00.003Z

Buffy was crap, if you were wondering.

Anyway it just now hit me that I should share my interpretation of the infamous ending of the infamous cartoon show what inventively combined giant robot battles with psychological realism and a large side of unexplained mystery. Since to this day no one is sure what happened, or why, or in what order. But I think I have an idea, heavily based on reading The Invisibles more times than is strictly healthy.

See, first we have the apparent climax of the series in episode 24, which I don't think is the epic battle between Shinji and Kawuro, the last Angel, in which nothing happens for a full minute and then Shinji's infinitely powerful Eva squishes Kawuro's little boy frame in its giant hands like an overripe grape. I think it's the inexplicable appearance of Rei in the background of the scene, accompanied by an operator's excited proclamation that the "strongest AT field ever" appears at that location, without explanation, without apparent source, without ever being referenced again.

What is Rei? That's the biggest mystery of the show, to me. At some point, I think also in episode 24, Shinji asks her that very question. Her answer may answer a great deal of questions about the show in general, but it opens at least as many:

The hope that people can understand each other.

Which by the way is a very poignant line, to me. What with the Asperger's, my life has been largely defined by the hope or absence of hope that I can understand people, or they understand me.

It's been said (by me) that Evangelion is more like a mirror than a story. It's carefully crafted so that if you look hard, and if you're willing and able to, you'll see yourself reflected. You'll see it's about the issues most dear to you, and the parts of yourself you may least want to confront. So it's not by any means universally true that it's about people learning to communicate. It's just what I think happens.

So then the movie happens, End of Evangelion, where the Instrumentality event jumpstarts humanity into a whole new dimension of evolution. Everyone turns into Tang, which it seems most viewers think is the end of the world as we know it. Which is exactly right. We're dissolved of our physical bodies, and on some level we leave the material world behind. The hallucinatory segments that follow continue in episode 25 and 26 of the show, and compose what we might recognize as the Supercontext: A

Shinji becomes the focal point of the human experience, or possibly just the focal point of the audience's experience, but in either case what happens is in essence what happens to the people who are Tang'd. They are confronted with their worst problems in a nightmarish world and forced to work through those problems and heal and grow. After which it seems that they enter a healthier dream world which may or may not be more permanent, or may even be a shared reality with the other people in their lives. I'm not sure there's any practical difference. Either way this new world is not perfect, it is not Disneyland, it's merely better, with better people in it.

As happy an ending as the human condition permits, perhaps.

Let's see what's on TV

2011-10-28T17:41:00.003+01:00

Why, it's Buffy the Vampire Slayer! I never watched that. Why the Hell not, you ask? It was certainly in the vogue in my parts, back in the day. I think I was in high school or something thereabouts when it started. I was immediately put off by the way people gushed over it.

Yes, the curse of the natural born counter-culture. . .hipster. . .something. I'm sure you've felt the same way about something at sometime: People like it, therefore it must suck. Because people are such simple sheep and you've got it all figured out. I guess "sometime" is mostly when you're a teenager.

Anyway, for some reason I kept my disdain for this particular show over the years. As I figured out that going with the mainstream isn't in itself bad, and even as I grew to love almost everything Joss Whedon put out. Well, I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a Joss Whedon fan. Firefly continues to be one of the arguments for why television should exist, Dollhouse was pretty fun, but meh. I don't even remember if there's any other show I should mention right now. I guess everything he does works individually, but when you put it all together you get a disturbingly clear insight in the man's unhealthy obsession with sprightly young girls skipping around cutting up bad guys with swords. Or sometimes shooting them.

It's not a bad archetype, but when you keep doing it it becomes what the great thinkers call "too much of a good thing". Which brings me to why I've steered clear of Buffy even when pop culture osmosis has made it clear to me that I would enjoy watching it. On paper, at least, it's too good. You've got this collective of beautiful young people all working together to combat the supernatural forces of naughtiness. They're all such special, special people; the almighty Slayer, plus witches, lesbians, good-hearted vampires, enlightened philosopher-teachers, well, that's the general idea I've managed to absorb without actually watching the show.

I know they all live in a house together. And have all sorts of enticing romances, slumber parties and dramatic not to mention momentous adventures together as they go to school in a Hellmouth. This is how they spend the best years of their lives. Even with everything I've done, and hey, it's been a lot of romance, a lot of slumber parties and a lot of adventures, even though I'm living the dream, forever young and getting on with my friends in the same boat and everything, I'm jealous of these fictional people. Maybe because it all seems so easy for them, they get these instruction manuals or at least traditions to tell them what to do and how to do it and they know the bad guys they kill are bad guys who should be killed. Or maybe it's because they're famous.

But anyway. Time to get over those childish misgivings and enculturate myself with this pop culture foundation. If nothing else maybe I'll have some fun the next time I play Fallout 2 and name my character Buffy.

Episode 1x1: Welcome to the Hellmouth

A couple of kids sneak into a school at night. I don't know why, but I have a feeling one of them will turn out to be a vampire. Oh what a twist, it was the girl. Huh, they have actual fit-in tests at this school. I wish they had that at any given school I attended. Kind of make it official how I'm out of the loop. Oh hey there is Lily from How I Met Your Mother.

Interesting, the characters themselves remark that Buffy is a corny-assed name. I recall some screenwriting advice about listening to your characters when they point out weaknesses in your writing but whoa corpses in the lockers. The school is now a murder scene. You'd think they'd cancel classes or at least make some announcements. If this was Ultimate Spider-man school would be closed for the rest of the semester just like that.

I notice my mind wandering as the Watcher/Slayer thing is introduced, as well as the characters, as if I'd heard it all a hundred times before. This is pop culture osmosis at work, folks. Man, Osmosis is a fantastic spell in Final Fantasy 6. It's like free magic points. Lets you keep going forever without spending golddollars on a tent or an inn. I guess my obsession with low-cost maintenance ties in with my tendency of considering the long term implications of all things. That's not something you learn after so and so many hundreds of years of life by the way, I've done it from when I was like ten. Oh hey there's Buffy lurking in the shadows and ambushing the unsuspecting. Kind of early to get into who's the real monster stuff I think.

Am I complaining too much? I want to rip into Buffy's enormous-for-a-sixteen-year-old breasts. But I should mention how flawlessly I'm buying these characters without really thinking of them as actors. Must be some competent acting. I do wish something would happen that I couldn't see coming is all. I feel like I'd be wasting your time even describing what's happening. Like, should I tell you how Romeo and Juliet ends? There's a party going on. Demon vampire thingies in a cave. A real badass guy in a slick outfit emerges from a pool of blood and lays out his dastardly plot for his cro-magnon looking henchman. Lily keeps acting and sounding like Lily even though she's clearly got a completely different personal history which is mildly disorienting. Her name is Willow? I'm going to call her Lillow. I'm barely awake.

Buffy gets pincer attacked by ugly vampires and kills them. Big surprise. Oh no, forehead face from before shows up and throws her hella far. I'm scared. What if the title character dies in the first episode? Hey it might happen. Holy crap that looked painful, she fell with her lower back on the corner of a stone sarcophagus. But since she can still move her legs I guess she's a buttload tougher than humanly possible. Who am I kidding, I already knew that from reading Fray.

Right on with Episode 1x2: The Harvest

I'm not sure if I should write this as I watch. I didn't even notice how Buffy got out of the jam/sarcophagus/cliffhanger from five seconds ago. But does it really matter? Of course she made it, she's frickin Buffy.

Wait a minute, now Glasses (Giles) tells us the Biblical story of Eden is not literal truth? My world is shattered. I like writing; it lets me do sarcasm. So it's exposition o'clock and I'm only half paying attention here, but it sounds like we're dealing with vampires who are actually demons. That's pretty neat. Most of the time vampirism is just a disease.

Questions: Why is there only one Slayer? Why doesn't she get crosses tattoed on her entire body? How cute is Lillow, all overwhelmed with the wondrous structure of reality as its foundations shift before her eyes? Did the have the Internet back in these days? Oh yeah I guess this was just on the cusp of the fiberoptic revolution. Douglas Adams' Fourth Age of Sand, in which we now live.

If I'm not mistaken this guy Xander is the constantly baffled yet good-hearted layman who's going to ground the fantastic plot elements for us, poor mortal viewers. It's funny since he has a futuristic mutant name.

Whoa, I got caught up in the story for a moment there. This is probably going to be a counter-intuitive experience for the reader: The better the show, the less I'll be able to write. Who knows, maybe I'll end up summarizing at a later stage and analyze with the benefit of hindsight. But right now this is too much fun. Almost like I'm watching it with you, dear reader.

Okay, I'm not with Lucia and Leon at the moment. I guess it was inevitable that would become apparent at some point. So I'm obviously lonely. I don't think that will do any difference either way to this thing.

So yeah. A nightmarish underground labyrinth of steel which the vampires tear through like tin foil and Buffy bends with great effort. Pretty cool stuff. I'm getting annoyed by the way all the demons have horrible facial rictus, in some cases all the way from their forehead down to their upper lip. I suppose it's due to budgetary constraints rather than complete incompetence on the special effects department's part, but either way it's distracting.

Mom seems to be the only person in Buffy's life who doesn't know the big secret. Good for her. Don't trust anyone over thirty. Oh, Giles, well, he's probably twenty-nine. Ancient by the kids' standards, but not an entirely adult-headed freak.

So it's a big-assed end of the world vampire invasion tonight. I always like it when they break the masquerade like that. Really turn the world on its head in a way that can't be turned back. I recall for instance this old horribly low budget horror short that probably had Stephen King's name attached to it that was about a plague of killer hands, of all this. Completely ridiculous. Utter garbage. Probably the second worst Stephen King short film of all time. But there was a scene where several thousand hands fell from the roof of a building onto a crowded street and scurried around all murdery in broad daylight, filmed by several news teams. That was amazing. The ramifications, I thought, and then I didn't get any further because then it ended. Just when it got interesting. Boy do I hate when movies do that. Like The Matrix. Well, the Matrix sequels sure showed why sometimes it's a good idea to end the story just when it gets interesting, but we didn't know that at the time.

And I immediately wonder how everyone's going to get their memories of this end of the world conveniently erased. Maybe I watch too much TV. Cause shit gets real, yo. Mr Forehead rips the shit out of a huge guy's throat in plain view of dozens of people. I can believe that, but I don't believe Buffy's two inch heels. Yes, they are shorter and stouter than Wonder Woman's heels, or those of really any given superhero woman, but they're still fucking heels. You don't want that when you're fighting. This shouldn't be so hard to figure out.

I'm laughing. This must be the first time a vampire has been tricked into defenseless cowering at the sight of a strong light, nine hours from sunrise.

And so the status quo is maintained by people simply not believing in the vampires what killed a buttload of their friends before their very eyes. Yes, I'm sure all gang bangers have fangs and Klingon foreheads and can throw people around like rag dolls. And why wouldn't they have turf wars right in the middle of your club thing? That's got to be the cheapest cop-out since the invention of the evil twin. You are showing a low opinion of humanity here, Mr Whedon. Very unattractive.

And that's the story so far. Watch this space.

That guy from Fist of the North Star may want a word with you

2011-10-27T09:14:00.002+01:00

I love ads. No matter what you do to them, you never feel bad. Fact is, the worse you do, the better it gets.

This one for instance. So many questions. What exactly is "more powerful than pressure points"? Do they have some secret way to apply more pressure than the human body can actually put out? Some secret method of touching pressure points that doesn't involve pressure but has greater effect? Or do they teach you to punch harder than a pressure point can punch?

And does anyone in the world even use pressure point strikes in self defense?

On a sidenote, I apologize for the declining quality and quantity of updates lately. We may be busy working on some sci-fi conceptual machines that are going to open the door to an age of discovery and freedom and democracy that will make the invention of Wikileaks look like omerta by comparison. Or maybe we're just lazy.

On contributing to society

2011-09-04T15:45:00.000+01:00

I do not hold a steady job. This fact has been deemed offensive on occasion. Because I'm suffering from some overhyped, make-believe illness (Asperger's Syndrome) doesn't mean I'm excluded from putting in my eight hours a day to make the world go around.

Now, I've never actually met anyone who felt an obligation to society to work full time. There are parents who need to, to provide for their children. There are older children who feel that they need to, to provide themselves with various luxuries. That's about it, as far as I've seen.

But I'm a leech! I take money and do nothing. This argument seems to be based on the idea that the money permitted to me (in accordance with the laws safeguarding the health, wellbeing and basic human dignity of the disabled) is somehow consumed, removed from the big circle of money. It isn't; I use 90% of it to pay for rent, utility bills, food, clothes and the occasional bottle of shampoo. The rest goes mostly to sustenance of the soul. (Comic books.) I do not consume money. I consume consumer goods.

And yes, I would still consume those same goods if I purchased them with money I had earned with my own work. Likely a great deal more of them. There's just no way to consume less than I do, unless you're willing to kill people for the betterment of society. A concept similar to cutting off your feet for food.

What I do that people actually complain about, is generate an infinitesimal absence of good or service in society, in place of the goods or service I might produce in a steady job. As if society was a brilliant clockwork machine where every person fits in in an optimally productive place! As if no matter what I did it would have significance, let alone measurable significance to the continued existence and development of society, but only as long as someone paid me to do it on a regular schedule.

Does a hairdresser or telemarketer take us further on the road to becoming enlightened star children playing in the fields of the cosmos? Does the mafia? Do insurance companies or oil companies or pimps or the people who break into your home, get hurt and sue you for having a burglar-unfriendly home? Or, let's say, Bill Gates: Does making a few genial contributions at the right time and the right place give you a lifetime pass? How about a girl who stops when she comes across a couple of people who have crashed their bikes on the side of the road and asks if she can help? Who can do this because she's not spending all her time and energy flipping hamburgers?

I believe Einstein said, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

The trouble with sorcery

2011-08-21T09:06:00.008+01:00

Within the universe of your person, you are the creator and that which is created, as well as the process of creating it. There is no part of you outwith the material plane which you can not direct, design, manipulate at will. This is the central tenet of sorcery, as I'm learning it: Sorcery as a means to design the tools with which you experience the world.

It's a pretty thought, to be able to choose and change the lenses you see through. To apply any thought, any feeling, any opinion or preference or temperament you can imagine at any moment. I explored this a bit in the character of The Doctor, but then as I feared even though I tried to spice it up with certain dramatic and poetic storytelling tricks she became a very boring character. That's the price of being a sorcerer: You become a boring person to talk to.

But that's not the problem I was thinking of. As was recently pointed out to me, this philosophy of personal freedom can be offensive to people who're struggling with their sexual and romantic orientations. When I say that you can be anyone you want, what some people hear may be why don't you just stop being gay or your sex and gender is irrelevant, you're a human stuck in a human body.

Actually we're spiritual beings stuck in human bodies. But anyway. Pretty insensitive of me. I've been thinking hard about how to reconcile that absence of choice that people clearly have with my ideal of freedom. Unless it's just that that's biological stuff that you actually have no control over, but for this exercise we're assuming we potentially all have the capacity to choose who we find attractive. (Even though I tend to swing helplessly back and forth between men and women myself.)

There's the elitist answer, that this advanced sorcery requires a great deal of sacrifice, long and arduous meditation, single-mindedness and the willingness to fundamentally alter your personality. Not everyone wants to do that, especially not to escape prosecution from a world that should rightly change for them rather than the other way around.

Yeah, you shouldn't have to change. That's the humanist answer. You shouldn't be prosecuted anyway, even if you have more important things to do than turning yourself into someone else. Even sorcerers. Especially sorcerers; to love and accept people around you unconditionally is one of the first things we learn. If being gay, or being anything, is important to you, then it is important to me that you should feel comfortable with being that. That you should be welcome.

So, to anyone who reads this, I apologize if I have at some point seemed dismissive of your problems or acted like I thought I was better than you. I still have much to learn.

A girl and her cube

2011-08-20T20:39:00.001+01:00

I'm a shipping machine! Here's another fanfic, about Portal:

Companions

I love you, Chell. You must never doubt that. I loved you from the moment you laid eyes on me, and my life began. When you took me in your arms and pressed my heart to your chest, maybe you felt it too.

Or maybe it was only later, after we helped each other through the death traps and the lasers. We were thrust into this insane situation without choice and made to fight for our lives, and it wasn't fair. But I'm still grateful to that horrible computer, because it forced us to learn to rely on each other so fast, and put our lives in each others' hands so often. That baptism of fire, I believe, forged an unbreakable bond between us.

And you were so cool amidst all that fire. Can I say that? You made it very easy to love you. It is easy for me to be strong; I'm made that way. But you, you risked your soft, beautiful but oh so vulnerable skin without fear, without complaint, even when I could not protect you.

The first time I felt your heart beat faster was when we got to the furnace, where the crazy, cranky old computer told you to destroy me. I could understand if you hesitated just because I was the only friend you had, but I think it was even more than that. I think that was the first time I dared to believe you loved me too.

Oh, how my painted heart sank when at first I thought you were going to do it. When you opened the furnace lid and balanced me on the edge I would have screamed if I had a mouth. I would have wept if I had eyes. I have never before or since known such fear or pain.

Yes, pain. My edge, closest to the fire, became red hot. I asked you once if you were really fully blind to my suffering or if some part of you knew what you were doing all along, knew that it would not really hurt me, knew what we both were going to need. Remember? You said you didn't know for sure.

I do so love your honesty. Yes, I don't really mind either way. Maybe it just happened the way it had to happen. Maybe the universe is just that good. When you turned and threw me down on the floor with a shout of defiance, could you really have planned what happened? I don't think so, not consciously. To warm and soften my edge like that, and then flatten it against the floor into such a serendipitous shape, that would require craft and deliberation beyond that of humans.

At the moment, anyway, I was only happy that you choose not to kill me. In that one act, I think, you proved your loyalty above and beyond any need. Whatever happens to us in the future, I know I can count on you. You cannot possibly let me down. And I love you for that.

You broke all the rules for me. You escaped the whole fucking program, with me. Chell, neither of us were ever made to follow orders, to run through the bright sterile mazes of the computer, following our assigned paths. The thrill when we broke through the walls was like being alive for the first time. And that was your idea.

I loved it immediately, the world behind the walls. The trash, the rust, the dust, the clanking valves and piping steam. No one to watch us. And it was the first chance we had to really sit down and talk. Ha, do you remember the first time I talked to you and you thought you were going crazy? You were so nervous. And the first time we made love. Of course it was a little awkward, it could only ever have been awkward. I had to tell you where to touch me, and how. I even had to tell you when you made me come. You couldn't read my body language at all!

But oh, how well you learned. I even feel bad sometimes, because it's always going to be a little awkward for you, straddling my right angles. Despite the very fortunately shaped little dent on my edge that's given you so much pleasure.

I think we can go on like this. Holed up, warm and comfortable away from the watchful eyes of the world, indulging each other whenever we like. Happily ever after.

Even though it gets harder every day for you to move. Maybe you'll be like me soon, unable to move on your own. They do say couples turn into each other over time. It'll be nice even if you don't move ever again. You can just hold me like that, with your chest against my heart, rest your cheek on my side, smother me in your embrace. You have worked so hard for us, Chell. You can rest now, and I shall rest by your side, my love.

On ships sailed past

2011-08-20T17:38:00.002+01:00

A memory.

It was one of the first days, long before she knew the road she was on or how long it was. Before her fall and the climb back up. Before the killing. Before the children. Before even the memories. It was one of the first days of her life, when everything was new and unknown. She had left the little world she knew to go with Locke, and after a couple of days in the forest she was miserable. Her feet hurt as though she had never used them before, her beautiful purple clothes were ripping and tearing at every twig and branch, and he had told her how many days they still had left to go.

So it was always a relief to sit down by the fire at sunset, cure her feet and enjoy whatever meal Locke was able to scrounge up. This day she remembered because she hurt a little less than the previous day, which Locke told her meant she was getting tougher. She smiled because of the way he looked at her when he said that, proud for her, concerned for her, there for her. It was in the early days, before she had the words to say that she wanted to know what love was, but was there something there already? Some longing she could not articulate? When she looked into his dark eyes, when she saw that fierce, blazing determination? She knew, already, that he would see her safe no matter what. That he would die to protect her. And that he would not really do that for her, but because she reminded him of someone. But that didn't seem to matter. What she knew was that he cared about her, and she could not remember anyone ever caring about her before, and it felt good to be cared about. He made her feel welcome.

And in the forest, there was no one else to care about anyway.

And then he said something about her hair, her strange green hair, and she hid her face in her cup so he would not see her blush. In the setting sun, in the flickering firelight, it may even have worked.

Her face burned, and her heart raced, and she had no idea what he expected from her, or what she wanted to do. Lacking even the words to define what she wanted, it seemed that she was torn in every direction at once. She was scared, but she still wished it would never end. She even sneaked a look at Locke, over the edge of her cup, every few seconds, wishing he would ask why she was hiding so maybe she could tell him.

She doesn't know why it comes to her in what she believes to be her final moments. But she closes her eyes and loses herself in the memory as the tower begins to crumble under her feet.

Capitalism for beginners

2011-08-18T16:42:00.004+01:00

I just walked past three kids selling perfume on the side of the road. Very adorable, sitting in their stand in the forest by the side of the road in the rain. I would have bought their lemonade in a heartbeat even though I was so not thirsty just to make them feel good, except they didn't have any lemonade. I walked past without stopping, answering their plea "No thanks, I don't like perfume". I hope I planted a seed of doubt in their minds that'll make them grow up questioning the meaningfulness of perfume, makeup and other lies.

Also, it brought to mind an old Donald Duck comic I've been thinking about on and off since about the last banking crisis. In the comic, Huey, Dewey and Louie run a lemonade stand, and it starts with a customer buying a glass from them for a quarter. Then follows a montage where the three ducklings buy lemonade from each other in turn, passing the quarter around, drinking glass after glass until their big lemonade barrel is empty. Then they feel sick and become upset and shout, all together, "Where is my money?"

There's so many rich metaphors here it's hard to choose. Unchecked greed, unsustainable consumerism, the delusion of economic growth in a closed system, friends turning on each other for a quick profit the comic paints a stark picture of some the real world's most unpleasant aspects in microcosm. I wonder how long it took the ducklings to realize what they did wrong right from the start - letting the one duck who happened to be holding the quarter they had earned together trade it with his brother. And I wonder what they learned from it.

Word on the street is that when the abyss gazes back Lenny Flanagan, the existential optometrist, tests it for glaucoma

2011-07-26T19:54:00.004+01:00

Times like these we need a right laff. So I started wondering, who would win in an existential horror-off: You Just Don't Exist or You Have No Idea How Alone You Are, Garfield? On one hand we have a movie that, itself, does not exist

except in the Scott Pilgrim movieverse. It's an imaginary movie flat out telling you that you do not exist. That could be taken as a comforting double negative, the part of the universe which does actually exist telling you that you do exist, or a double-whammy of chilling negation.

How can an imaginary movie be (the opposite of) existing anyway? They shot one scene of the movie for the movie in which it takes place. So it's there. There is something there. The seed of a story. You Just Don't Exist is a movie that has the potential to exist. It does exist in a fictional state; fictional people have seen it and can tell you what it's about. The problem is, of course, they aren't real.

So what is the movie about? The title breaks about three traditions in naming Hollywood movies. It's basically insulting the audience. Though from what we can discern it's a basic, A1 formula action movie with the twist that the hero gets a horror movie-cliché phone call from himself in the future. I'm deducing that he will spend the bulk of the movie fatalistically convinced that he will not survive. It may not make any significant difference if he actually survives to the end or not; protagonists dying to save the day is not unheard of even in formula action movies. It could be a late-stage executive decision to save him, or it could be a transparent grab for notoriety on the part of the director to kill him. A trifling detail.

Also, the entire movie is presumably in real-time. Damn, I want to watch it now.

But anyway, there should be no real reason to gamble the movie's modest projected success on such an edgy name. Unless it's secretly a hard movie, thoughtful, stimulating, demanding multiple viewings; a carefully crafted cult film not attempting to cater to a wide demographic, hidden under the gaudy shell of formula action. Which must mean the terrifying existentialist implications of the title are significant to the story. A spectacular philosophical debate the likes of which The Matrix could only dream of, conducted through a subtle chain of explosions and fistfights. Maybe watching the movie will convince you that you do not exist. That'd be a real mindbender. I have hopes that such a movie can exist in the world of Scott Pilgrim.

(Other imaginary Lucas Lee movies include Hope there's a Heaven, which I thought was clever. If one can grasp the concept of hope at all, would one grasp and struggle to hope there is a Heaven? Either one rejects the concept of Heaven, which is fine with me by the way, and places one's hopes in what one hopes to be better places. Or one accepts the concept of Heaven, and hopes maybe to get there. To hope there is a Heaven is not something that someone would ever need to be told, or be able tell someone who needed to. It's a statement with zero possible originating sources or recipients - it just exists.)

AND ON THE OTHER HAND,

You Have No Idea How Alone You Are is a Garfield episode from October 1989. It's definitely, unequivocally real. You can look for it in the online Garfield archives, or search to find it elsewhere on the Internet. Commented on by many a confused, scared poster. Did this really happen? They printed this in newspapers? Yes. Lots of them.

Now, I can see what Davis was going for in that crucial final strip. (We're going to pretend Davis at least had some involvement in making the strip.) Panel 3 reveals that it's all been a dream, and panel 4 leaves us with a Garfield who's learned a new appreciation for his companions after spending an untold number of minutes in a fevered dream of loneliness. And the final, ham-fisted narration explains the Power of Imagination as though Davis thought he had invented it himself.

But this strip was written by someone who assumes Status Quo is God without questioning it, maybe without even being aware of what it is and how things could be different. He doesn't understand how the story reads to someone with an intimate, instinctive understanding of story like for example just about any human being over the age of five who doesn't write newspaper comic strips for a living. You and me, we read panel 3 as the hallucination reasserting itself and leaving Garfield in his comforting delusion.

Forever.

Every strip before and after this takes place in a dream world, while Garfield slowly loses his mind alone in an abandoned building. There's no other way to read this episode with the tools of perception and interpretation afforded us.

And that's not a light statement to make. Garfield, for better or worse, is a fixture in our society. It's something we use to teach children to read, to laugh at habitually when we read our morning paper, to cut up and make remixes and add our own humor and artistry and meaning to. It's probably no coincidence that much of the Garfield remix industry manages to paint one or more of the characters as insane, lonely and insanely lonely people. It's hollow at its core, of course, invented and designed by a marketer for maximum marketability, produced and packaged by committee to give a maximum amount of people a minimum amount of entertainment. It was never very well built as a tool to tell stories. But it's still making up a large part of our collective consciousness.

And this week-long episode of strips undermines all that. It forces us to question the reality of that institution of Garfield, which is even older than many of us. Like a certain famous Pokemon essay, it puts the entire franchiese in a new light. And it did it itself, twenty-two years ago. Just asking how we could have missed this gives me a slight tingle of existential horror.

And hey, it makes sense with the strip being scaled down over the years to contain less characters, less settings and less plots, and the same jokes being repeated time and time again. Because Garfield's imagination is running out, and the dream world wears thin. And maybe it's why his dialogue is all in thought balloons: Garfield's very speech pattern is trying to alert him to the nature of the fabricated thought-world he inhabits.

I was going to say I think we have a winner, but I'm not sure there are any winners in this contest.

One person with beliefs is equal to a hundred thousand people who has only interests, if you don't believe in democracy

2011-07-23T20:39:00.005+01:00

I understand Anders Breivik. I encompass, in my mind and in my heart, all his hopes and fears and dreams and they are small and boring and wrong and I'm frustrated by my inability to talk to him and explain to him why he is wrong.

I fantasize about talking Leon into making a door to his cell and bringing him to a small, locked room somewhere far away from all human jurisdictions. There I would talk to him. I would put out his eyes and break his legs and pull out his teeth and bind him to a bed, and then I would get mean. I would slap him ninety-two times in the face. Hard, painful slaps that don't leave marks. I would make him count, and I would start over when he lost count.

I would give him the names of his victims, one by one, and ask what he or she had done to him. And when he failed to give a good answer, I would slap him. I would slap him until I could no longer lift my arm, until he understood the crushing despair of absolute helplessness and powerlessness, until he could not stop crying, until he had no hope left.

And I would do this for each of his ninety-two victims.

And then I would do it all over again.

I would do these things and talk to him. I'd tell him of democracy. Of freedom and equality. Of the categorical imperative. Of the reality of other people and how you don't get to decide that you are worth a hundred thousand other people just because they are not you.

I would make him better. And if that failed I would kill him.

And now, dear reader, you must open your mind. . .

2011-07-22T21:40:00.001+01:00

The Pervasive

SIMON-MAN

And Unbreakable

INDIE GIRL

(With characters created by Crazy Clever-man)

‘Go fuck yourself’, Simon says to the mirror. He looks himself straight in the eye, fed up with his bullshit and his shitty life going nowhere and he means every word. But it doesn’t feel like he thought it would. He’s overwhelmed by some urge, so completely unexpected he can’t make sense of it. He twists and turns on his feet, tense and itching to do something, maybe go for a run, maybe stick his dick in someone.

The eyes in the mirror seem to stare at him with a will of their own. Simon struggles to meet their gaze, suddenly afraid of what would happen if he moved and the reflection didn’t. The man in the mirror is unfamiliar, and his look makes Simon feel strange. Almost as if he was some little thing. Fear turns into revulsion and anger. Once again he finds himself looking his reflection squarely in the eye and saying, through gritted teeth, ‘Go fuck yourself. Simon says go fuck yourself.’ His old grade school stand-by line makes him feel a little more comfortable, on familiar ground, but then he realizes his hands are holding his cock, suddenly erect, so hard it hurts, squeezing it and bending it down between his legs.

Breathing heavily, he bends down and reaches with one hand to his asshole, eagerly rubbing and shoving a finger in, stirring and stretching to make it big enough to take his dick. Through a thick haze of lust he briefly wonders what the Hell he’s doing, before screaming in frustration mixed with pain as it dawns on him that he can’t possibly fuck himself in the ass.

‘I want to have sex with myself’, Simon says, bewildered, still panting. ‘Why do I want to have sex with myself?’ In the moment, it felt so right. It still feels like the only thing in the world that makes sense. But still he gags at the thought of having some dude’s dick sliding in his pooper. But it’s his dick and damnit, he wants to shove that dick in there so hard he can taste it in the back of his throat. It’s an attraction stronger than anything he has even imagined was possible. He imagines it’s what a rapist must feel like, completely unable to control himself. Compelled. Maybe it’s more like obsessive-compulsive disorder. He would have raped, he would still rape himself in the ass without a second thought if it was physically possible.

With a sigh halfway to a sob, he presses his face and chest against the mirror, eyes closed, kissing the cold surface while masturbating hard. He comes crying his own name and collapses in a shivering pile on the floor, tears mixing with sperm. It will be the last time he ever looks in a mirror.

Later, in a moment of post-coital clarity, Simon considers his compulsion. Simon says, he thinks, smiling weakly. How very unlikely. It seems like it would be impossible. These things don’t just happen. But then, no one likes the word impossible. He cleans himself, ignoring as best he can some fresh stir at the touch of his hands, puts on some unimpressive clothes and walks down the street, thinking about how to best experiment. An unwitting man walks by, on his way somewhere, and Simon tries the most obvious approach.

‘Simon says stumble’, he says to no one in particular. In his mind he’s telling the man behind him, and that seems to be enough. The man trips on the flat pavement, yelling in surprise, and Simon walks on, trying to keep an even pace though his heart is racing. So many things to do, so easily, he doesn’t know where to begin. A small voice in the back of his head tells him to go very carefully, very carefully indeed, and if nothing else to remember how it felt to be compelled. How it feels. Simon bites his lip to distract himself from thinking about himself and how he’d like to hit that piece of ass.

The clock strikes midnight at a smoky, mirrorless bar before Simon finds himself drunk enough to talk about his day to a sparkle-haired, giggling woman. Of course she doubts him and asks him to prove it.

‘Simon says pull your hair a little bit’, Simon says. The woman looks at him with a confused smile as she grabs a loose handful of shiny locks and tugs, tilting her head to the side in a reflex to avoid the pain.

‘That’s crazy’, says the woman. ‘In a good way.’ She gives Simon a smile that shines like the sun. ‘I’m Susan’, she says. ‘I’m no superhuman, but would you like to see how many unbelievable things you and me can manage in one night? Maybe see if we can give you someone else to fall in love with?’

‘Susan, are you an angel? asks Simon. ‘Cause that’s about my greatest wish right now.’

Susan smiles and says nothing and leads Simon on a hazy beer-mist night of wandering the streets of the big city, making people run and dance and fall in love and stopping a boy from jumping off a building, stopping a store from being robbed, stopping a drunk from driving his car. Together, they find out things: That Simon can only tell people who can understand him, that he can’t make them fly, that he can’t bring himself to tell Susan what to do in bed, even when she asks him to.

Buried deep in her, he watches himself as if from outside, his magnificent body, well-oiled muscles pumping like a machine powered by pure sex. It seems safe to see himself this way, to love himself while loving someone else. In the end, he sees her need and he whispers to her ‘Simon says come’, over and over and over until she is too exhausted to scream anymore, and they fall asleep together, side by side, at least half of them fulfilled on a primal level.

Simon is unsure how the costume happens. Green and blue tights, endlessly gaudy even though he picked the most muted shades he could find, with a cowl covering his face and stripes on his chest centered around a stylized white “Σ”, padded knees and elbows and steeltoe boots and a thick black leather cape. It makes him feel powerful and sexy and strange. People stop and look at him in the street. A few criminals he catches in the act go wide-eyed and quiet before he can even say “Simon says freeze.”

At some point Susan takes off, he’s not sure why. Probably she’s a lesbian. Feeling cock-blocked by his own body, he gives a grim smile when he walks in on an attempted back-alley rape. Without breaking his stride, he shouts ‘Simon says you’re blind and impotent’ and laughs as the man staggers backwards crying in panic with his hands over his eyes and his dick shrinking visibly. Without a look at the woman on the ground, Simon grabs the man by the collar and puts his elbow in his face, breaking something. The rapist reels back and Simon embraces him and pulls him close and plants his knee in the man’s crotch.

The man falls down on his back, breathing in short sharp whistling gasps. Simon kneels on his chest and slaps him in the face five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten times. Any more punches and the man might go into shock, he thinks, but the slaps hurt and sting without doing any damage. Still he can’t help himself from making a fist and grinding it into the ruin of the man’s mouth, before he gets another idea. ‘Simon says you can see again’, Simon says. The man blinks and looks up on him, glass-eyed with panic, and Simon says ‘Simon says you’re extremely empathic. You’re going to physically feel the pain you give to other people. And Simon says you’re a huge fag who likes to take it in the ass.’ Simon stands up, spitting in the man’s face. ‘Now get the fuck out of my sight. If you can walk.’ The man doesn’t move. Simon shrugs his shoulders and turns to receive the adulation of his audience, but the woman has disappeared.

The next night Simon takes home a woman whose name he doesn’t know. He tells her to love him, to love his cock more than anything she has ever known, to know pleasure when he slaps her ass, when he slaps her face, when he chokes her. He tells her to hate herself for letting him do these things to her, and then he tells her to think this is how it’s supposed to be.

And then he tells her to leave and forget she’s ever seen him. He stays in the bed for several seconds before running to the bathroom and kneeling to the porcelain god. Vomiting and blubbering, he feels so disgusted with himself he almost forgets he needs to have sex with that guy.

And so Simon goes on using women, telling himself that the more depraved and disgusting he becomes the less attracted he will be to himself. The idea that his power may be corrupting him escapes him, but then he does not stop being a superhero. His unlikely acts of crime-fighting persuasion become a media fixture, an urban myth, and he tells himself his Simon-man persona, however much good he may do, is not his real self. The city needs him, and he belongs to the city, but Simon himself is an evil, dirty bastard no one could love. He needs to be unable to love himself.

And one day everything changes. Patrolling in his uniform, Simon hears a desperate voice calling for help from inside a first-floor apartment. He dives in through the window, prepared to say anything to whoever may be there, but he finds himself in an empty kitchen. A thud and a scraping sound reaches him from a room further in, accompanied by quiet sobbing.

Simon goes on, trying to be quiet but swallowing hard when he enters a darkened room lit only by a couple of flickering computer screens, one with what looks like a desiccated corpse slumped over the keyboard, and a shadowy moaning lump slithering on the floor.

‘Help me’, says a small voice from the lump. ‘She fell on me, I wanted to move them but they’re too heavy and I can’t breathe.’ Simon fights his fear and grabs the lump and pulls, untangling another corpse from a small, sad girl. His eye is caught by the light reflecting in the tears on her cheeks and he drops to his knees, unsure if he’s trying to be comforting or if his legs just quit. ‘My parents are dead’, says the girl, throwing herself in his arms. Simon holds her and wraps his cape around her while she cries and he has no idea what to say. Somehow it doesn’t seem right to just tell her to get over it, maybe she should have the right to feel her grief and whatever.

‘They were playing that stupid game on the computers’, says the girl as if to herself, mumbling into his chest. ‘That stupid war-craft game everyone plays, it sucks up your whole life, you can never quit, and people know that, they joke about it, they don’t take it seriously cause it’s just a stupid game. And they’ve been playing, mom and dad must have been playing non-stop all week. I was in school. They’re fucking dehydrated. How do you forget to drink? Fucking stupid crack-game.’

‘Um’, says Simon. ‘I don’t know what to say. It’s just horrible.’

‘What are you doing in here anyway’, says the girl, wiping her face with her arm and looking at him as if dreaming. ‘Hey, you’re Simon-man.’

‘Yeah I, uh, are you a fan?’

‘I read about you on the Internet. Can you like, make me die? I don’t want to’, says the girl, interrupted by a fresh onset of tears.

‘Or can you kill the bastards who made the game? Before they ruin any more lives.’

‘I won’t do those things.’

‘What can you do then?’

‘I can make you forget you ever loved your parents. But you wouldn’t thank me for that.’

‘Fucking hero you are. Let’s try a new game. Inger says get out of my house.’ Inger gives Simon a look that could curdle cream and he backs away, confused at first, then defeated, and his shoulders sag as he turns his back on her. Before he takes two steps she says, with a changed voice, ‘Please take me with you.’

Simon turns around again and gives her a questioning look. ‘I’m thirteen’, she says. ‘I don’t want to be locked up in some orphanarium for five years. I want to be your sidekick. Like Batman and Robin, right?’

‘That’d be kidnapping, you know.’ Simon wishes he was half as sure as he sounds.

‘What, like you’re Mister Law and Order? You’re, well, you’re a lot worse than Batman actually.’ A wry, sarcastic grin cuts across Inger’s face for a moment before the sadness comes back. ‘But you’re all I’ve got.’

‘Stop breaking my heart, kid’, says Simon, giving her his hand. ‘That’s no fair.’

‘Don’t tell me what to do’, says Inger, taking his hand in a steely grip. ‘I really hate that.’

Suddenly finding himself a parental figure, Simon wisely sends Inger off to buy some food and deodorizing spray while cleaning up and ventilating his apartment-turned-sex dungeon. ‘It ain’t Wayne mansion’, he says before letting her in. ‘But you get your own bedroom and, well, I guess that’s it.’

‘It’s nice’, says Inger, clearly lying.

And then they have dinner and watch TV.

‘One thing I should tell you if you’re going to be staying here’, says Simon. ‘Though it’s going to be pretty awkward.’ And he tells her how his powers turned on and his ways to deal with his curse, in a family friendly version. ‘So basically I’m doomed to walk the earth with eternal blue balls until I can clone myself and get it on.’

‘That’s the dark side of your power huh?’ Inger listens intently, laying on her stomach with her head propped up in her hands. ‘I don’t suppose you could just tell yourself to stop it or something?’

‘No, I can’t undo it. Probably cause it was my first command. I don’t know, I don’t have an instruction manual for this.’

‘What if you got a guy who looks like you? Maybe some makeup.’

‘You know, I never thought about that. I wonder why. It could be because I’m not gay.’

‘Dude, relax. Is man-sex your kryptonite or something?’

An uncomfortable silence grows until Cops comes on the television, after several minutes.

‘It wouldn’t work anyway’, says Simon when the show breaks for commercials. ‘It’s got to be me, in the flesh.’ Inger assumes that’s mostly homophobia talking, but she says nothing.

‘So your real name is Simon?’ she says. ‘That’s the worst secret identity ever.’

‘Or is it?’ says Simon. ‘Think about it, what’s the last name you’d expect someone to have who dresses in a cape and calls himself Simon-man?’

‘Björk-Jesus’, says Inger without a moment’s hesitation. Simon laughs. ‘But besides that yeah, you’ve got a point.’

‘You’re handling things pretty well’, says Simon just as Inger’s parent’s bodies show up on television. It’s a horrible tragedy, according to the news, caused by the Satan incarnate that is videogames. Inger is assumed a runaway, and a friendly cop with a porn ‘stache appears, urging her directly to come home and let them take care of her, if she’s watching.

‘Fuck you’, says Inger to the screen. ‘I am home.’ She leans on Simon’s shoulder and that’s all right.

Over the next several days Simon purchases some new furniture, including a bed, and a wide variety of clothes and comic books in between sneaking to hotel rooms for sex, while Inger dusts off his computer and downloads all the music she had to leave behind and trains for a gymnastics program she no longer fits into.

If she ever did. As far as she can remember Inger has never been able to get with the program, any program. Even her parents gave her up, she thinks, spinning and twirling around the apartment with furious energy, on some level building her speed and agility up for some terrible future confrontation.

Simon comments that her form is excellent and that’s fine cause punching out criminals is hard work. No, you can’t just destroy them with supernatural mind control, the physical violence is an important part in putting the fear of God in them. On Inger’s urging he tries a few cartwheels and other shapes he never thought his body could bend into while she works on his sandbag, and they both soon fall over exhausted, giggling. They slowly shape themselves into deadly fighting machines, and they make plans and costumes, but Inger can’t seem to find one she likes.

And one day she finds herself staring at her parents’ killer, on the computer screen. She has to beat the addiction of the game to prove that she is better than her parents, she decides, but she finds she cannot stomach the idea of turning it on. Inger explains this to Simon as best she can and asks him to tell her to start playing which of course he calls crazy talk.

‘Please’, she begs him, clinging to his legs and looking at him with sad puppy eyes. ’I need this. Plus I don’t know what it’s like to be compelled, I want to know that, just to understand what you put people through, what you’re going through.’

‘That’s worth thinking about’, says Simon, shaking his leg in a token effort to dislodge his ward. ‘But slow down. Let’s think this through.’

‘Fine’, says Inger, leaping up to put her arms around his shoulders. Simon answers her unexpected embrace, and her kiss, before he can think.

‘What are you doing?’ he demands as he drops her to her feet, with a touch of worry in his voice.

‘I wasn’t’, says Inger, flustered, squirming with one arm down her side and holding it with her other hand. ‘I guess I must be confused. I mean we’ve all seen Leon, right, we know how this works.’

‘I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t work like this’, says Simon with a higher than average pitch.

‘Sure’, says Inger, sounding more sure. ‘I’ve got all these feelings since you’re the first person who’s ever cared for me, not to mention cared for me at this extremely vulnerable moment in my life, so I think I’m falling in love with you and I make some stupid pass, but you do the right thing, being a good guy and all, and a few years later we’re laughing about it.’

Simon takes a moment to process this. ‘I’m glad we got that out of the way then?’ he says.

‘We can skip straight to laughing about it’, says Inger. ‘I mean why stand on some stupid convention?’

And that makes both of them laugh.

‘So’, says Simon. ‘Simon says play.’

Inger finds her body acting on its own, sitting down in front of the computer and typing in the password to start the game. Her mind seems thrown back and forth by merciless winds, pulled with relentless force by the weight of the words. But her finger pauses, hovering over the Enter key, and she seems to tear apart within. A breathless whine escapes her as the command pulls at a part of her that won’t move; her face is thrown towards the screen by the force, the irresistible, unstoppable power, but her finger doesn’t move. The hands that seem to pull at her soul falter, with all their might, as if they were trying to tear down a pure iron wall.

‘Fuck you’, says Inger, sitting up straight, with an unfamiliar sensation welling up in her chest. Pride. Protest. Defiance. She looks at Simon with pursed lips and calm murder in her eyes. ‘You can’t tell me what to do.’

Simon looks confused, stunned, almost hurt. Then he breaks into an enthusiastic smile and says ‘Holy crap. How did you do that?’

‘I am Indie Girl’, Inger exclaims while leaping to her feet. ‘I just need a costume.’

‘You’re amazing.’

‘I’m bulletproof.’ She stands on her toes and hugs Simon, feeling like a big rock has been lifted from her heart. Simon, for his part, remembers what it was like to be human, to not have absolute power over every person in the world. It seems at once terrifying and comforting and he sighs and answers her embrace for his sake as much as hers.

And she makes her costume gold and red, the antithesis of his, and so the adventure begins.

A snarky recap of a current movie

2011-07-02T21:44:00.002+01:00

300 opens, after some credits appear in the golden, thunderous skies to sultry vocals, on a mountain of child-sized skulls. Yes, dead children by the pile, that’s our introduction to the birthplace of democracy. The narrator explains that in Sparta, unfit children are discarded at birth. Then they spend large parts of their childhood learning discipline and badassness by being forced to lie, cheat, steal and kill each other for food. Only the strongest survive, obviously, and then they’re enrolled in the army for life, so it’s not so strange they’re all such rippling hunks of badassness. Yay for fascism!

(Historical aside: The reason Sparta had such an elite military force was to keep their oversized population of slaves in line.)

Anyway, back in the movie, the narrator focuses on the story of Leonidas, the king, who of course succeeds in taking on his peers, his parents, his punishments and a gigantic freaking wolf and claims the crown when he’s like eight years old. Judging by the blackness of his feet when prowling around in driving snow dressed in a loincloth, he also beats frostbite. He’s even shown possessing a primitive form of bullet time. Prince of Badasses, thy name is Equal to Lions.

But trouble appears. In one of about three thousand million epic slow motion shots riders appear over the crest of a hill backlit by a glorious sky. I’m liking the colors and tones of this story; it’s all gold and bronze and blood red and black. And the aforementioned epicness, it never lets up, and suspends us in a constant state of chilling, goose flesh-outbreaking awe. It’s not bad. Actually it’s visual storytelling of a finely executed and highly original kind.

But anyway, trouble begins when our hero Xerxes, God-king of a thousand nations of the Persian Empire, has his offer to take Greece under his dominion denied and his messenger executed. The Spartans uphold their strict code of conduct including never submit, literally to the point of insanity. “This is madness!” Madness? This is Sparta! We eat madness for breakfast and we’re damn proud of it!” Okay, I made that last part up.

“If you kill the messenger, in the long run you just get less mail”, Death tells us in a comic book I read. Leonidas clearly didn’t read that book. I also find it funny he mocks the Athenians for being “boy-lovers”. I mean, not to get all historically accurate, but the ancient Greeks as a whole believed very strongly that true love could only exist between two men. (This because they valued knowledge and intelligence above all else, and denied women all higher education).

Soft core porn ensues as Leonidas visits the grisly fucked-up leprous wise men up their mountain, paying dear gold to sit in while they watch a magical stripper who appears to dance underwater on dry land and, thanks to large amounts of drugs, speaks some gibberish that the wizards hold for oracular premonitions. She says, they say, that Sparta must not fight. Greece will fall, but they can’t fight anyway because of some bogus lunar festival they clearly make up on the spot. But wohoo, boobies!

This is revealed to be a clever ruse by Xerxes after Leonidas leaves, and the men are showered in Persian gold and promised further riches and sexy women by this cool black dude. The cool thing about him is that when he laughs his entire face disappears in darkness except his eyes. One of many interesting talents the servants of Xerxes display, as we shall see.

Anyway, Leonidas goes home to bang his wife all night long, thank you very much for that way too long scene we can’t get enough of slow motion breast ripples, and assemble what armies he can. As you may have guessed, he can only field his personal guard of [b]300[/b] men. Finally, some action! I fully expected this movie to have two hours back-to-back fight scenes. Damn, that would have been sweet. Maybe they save that for the sequel.

(Cultural clash aside: Because this is a suicide mission, only men who have wives and children to leave behind are allowed.)

And they march. This is where the original comic book begins, incidentally. A thing happens there that I miss seeing in the movie: A young soldier passes out from the heat in day three. The captains beats the shit out of him until the king says enough and then knocks him out in one move when he doesn’t listen. “You there, 'Stumblios', on your feet. Your captain sleeps. You will carry him on your back. No food till journey’s end for any of us.” Collective punishment: Making your buddies despise you for your mistakes since 480 BC.

The Spartans run into some lesser soldiers from another town and embarrass themselves by adopting modern American marine corps bravado, yelling “Hoo-ah! Hoo-ah! Hoo-ah!” while rattling their spears when the king asks what their job is. In comparison with the comic, again, at this point they raise their spears in unison without a sound. Roughly ten thousand times cooler.

Somehow they run into the enemy before even getting to the place where they’re going to try to hold off their invasion. A burning village, corpses on a tree, an innocent little girl stumbling up to the king, telling scary stories and passing out. What is it with all these delays? Start fighting already! Oh, it’s meant to make the Spartans scared of the fabled Persian “Immortals” elite forces. A monster stalks around in the background.

They make it to the sea and the Spartans rock out as they watch hundreds of Persian ships sink in a storm. Like those even make any difference to the God-king’s armies.

Meanwhile, back in Sparta, the queen make plans with a politician guy we know to be a traitor. This becomes a very stupid and unnecessary subplot that’s original to the movie and adds nothing but several minutes of no fight scenes.

The Spartans have been busy building a wall out of rocks and corpses, justly accused of barbarism by another messenger who shows up and gets his arm cut off.

Historical quote time: “The thousand nations of the Persian Empire descend upon you! Our arrows will blot out the sun!” “Then we will fight in the shade.” The Spartans trained heavily in quick wit and apparently spend as much time making jokes as making war.

The monster turns out to be an exiled Spartan, horribly deformed, who wants to enlist with Leonidas, who of course refuses. We get a bit of handy exposition about why the Spartans fight in loincloths, helmets, boots and nothing else but shields: Nothing to hinder their movement as they rely on their comrades to protect them with their shields. A very nice and socialistic ideal, although they seem to have trouble actually realizing it. Actually the only time we see a Spartan protect another is when they break formation to go on a stylish two-man rampage. Ephialtes, our differently abled Spartan, throws himself from the cliff and is promptly forgotten.

Another historical quote as the armies line up: “Spartans! Lay down your weapons!” “Persians! Come and get them!” In the comic the line is “Come and get it.” Probably there’s something lost in translation from the Greek expression "Molon labe".

Of course, in accordance with Hollywood laws, the Spartans can only defend against the tidal wave of approaching Persians, only try to shove them back with their shields, until a Persian draws first blood from an unprotected arm. Then they start skewering the poor slave soldiers with two to five spears each. There’s a lot of skewering going on. Some original camera work ensues as the king goes nuts and kills about twenty guys in what looks like it could be a combination in a Tekken game. One line of Spartans pushes like fifty lines of Persians backwards over a cliff. “They look thirsty!” “Let’s give them something to drink!” The Exclamation marks! Are starting to get pretty obnoxious! Now!

A hail of arrows black out the sky, but do fuck all damage against Spartan bronze shields.

(Comic book aside: Here Leonidas mutters to himself, “Cowards. Come and get it.” Apparently they don’t use ranged weapons because they’re too cool.)

I admit to nearly having to change my pants at the sight of Leonidas then rising, shot from below, stomach muscles rippling like Volkswagens in slow motion, breaking off the arrows stuck in his shield with a nonchalant brush of his spear. More skewering as the Persians stupidly ride right into the Spartan’s iron hard wedge formation with spears poking out; it’s hard to say if some of them actually throw themselves at the spears.

More politics and treachery back in Sparta. I find I drift in an out even though I try to pay attention to what they’re saying. Blah blah the influential traitor guy has to be swayed blah blah the queen gives him sly winks with promises of meetings in the night what the hell I don’t even care enough to punctuate

Let me quote a passage from the comic instead. “There’s no break in the action, not one moment to shed the weight of our shields or seek an instant’s relief from the kiln-hot bronze of our helmets. No chance to catch our breath. No time to slow our hearts. We’d fret for our king, if we could keep up with him.” (He’s fifty years old, mind you.)

Leonidas is interrupted in his afternoon snack while slaughtering the wounded Persians (How callous!) to go for a chat with Xerxes himself. In the comic, Xerxes’ voice is described as “Smooth as warm oil on well worn leather, and as deep as rolling thunder”. It sounds like a special effect, and it’s very cool. He’s a giant, a titan clad in gold from head to toe, and his throne is carried by a hundred slaves.

He promises Leonidas to be warlord of Greece, and “Carry my flag to the heart of Europa”. I mention this because I like the spelling of Europa with an A. It feels rather, well, European. We spell it with an A in Swedish. Anyway, all the riches, all the glory and all the power in the world will be his if he bows to Xerxes. Obviously, Leonidas refuses, because he’s a badass.

“It’s an offer only a madman would refuse. And we Spartans have never heard of madness.”

In a cunning stroke of strategic thinking and complete lack of respect for the dead, the Spartans build a huge wall of corpses. Then when the Immortals approach in their spooky masks they they push the wall down to flatten one guy. Surprise attack! Only 999 left to kill.

Speaking of numbers, have I mentioned that the given number of Xerxes’ forces is three million. Of course the constant defeats have a certain effect on morale, and the land is so covered in men that barely a second goes by without a Persian being trampled or pushed into the sea or trapped between retreating and advancing forces or blasted by their “mages”’ primitive hand grenades or mauled by their mutant rhinoceroses or otherwise being screwed by their own massive numbers. They’re selfless like that.

Not so when the disciplined elite Immortals fight of course. But they still don’t stand a chance against the Spartans. Until they release a hulk-sized berserker guy who cuts through Spartans like butter. Trust the enormous resources of the Persian Empire to find the biggest, baddest motherfucker on the entire planet and put him to use. He only barely falls down when he gets his head cut off.

At one point an anonymous Spartan does a jump-stab move that’s so very obviously inspired by Brad Pitt’s portrayal of Achilles in Troy. I like the idea of the Spartans watching historically inspired action movies on their days off.

As the Immortals lose Xerxes feels fear. I picture him like five year old Yotsuba, filled with the wonder and majesty of experiencing this intense feeling for the first time. But then he does what a good king should do, blame his generals and have their heads cut off. Interesting to note is the executioner, a grunting pig-beast of a man with scary serrated mutated swords instead of hands. Heads fly in slow motion; it’s like Ernst Jungers’ nightmare.

More monsters appear (Elephants) and are easily dispatched. Further fighting with cool slow motions zooms and pans of the camera. The captain’s son dies and he goes Rambo for a little bit. “His cries of pain are more frightening to the enemy than the deepest battle drums.”

Meanwhile, Ephialtes enjoys a feast in his honor. There’s a man with a goat heat playing a string instrument. Dozens of beautiful monsters dressed in precious jewellery dance, smile slow smiles and caress each other sensuously. It’s like a soft core lesbian porn movie. Except they’re all deformed and hobbled in various ways. I’m not saying it’s not an assault on my senses, but I can respect that these odd and malformed individuals are able to find beauty in themselves. Is this cripple heaven? No, it’s the Persian’s camp. Xerxes proclaims that he is kind, kinder than Ephialtes’ gods who shaped him so. “Cruel Leonidas demanded that you stand. I require only that you kneel.” Of course he sells the Spartans out.

Somehow the Spartans find out they’re getting ambushed before it’s too late to do anything about it. Instead they allow the lesser soldiers to run away home and stay to die for the sake of democracy. Leonidas gives a rousing speech about the new age that’s begun: “An age of reason, justice, law and great deeds. And all will know that three hundred Spartans gave their last breath to defend it! Exclamation!” Although he immediately betrays his own propaganda when some kid enthusiastically goes “We’re with you to the death!”

“I didn’t ASK. Leave democracy to the Athenians, boy.”

While at the same time in Sparta the queen allows the traitor guy to rape her to win his favor and make him allow the army to be sent out. She speaks before the council with a lot of passion and sentimentality and picturesque turns of phrase but failing to bring up the basic idea of “Let’s do something before we’re all killed”. And predictably, Traitor McGoateeface doesn’t agree with her and instead throws dirt on her until she gets angry and stabs him in the balls, fortunately revealing his pockets full of Persian gold. Guess what that makes of his arguments.

See, I followed the whole plot! It wasn’t easy.

So the Persians go around and outflank the Spartans. Outflanking here meaning surrounding with roughly 36 000 archers. Shouldn’t be a problem because they’re turtled up in a dome-shaped shield wall. Leonidas fake surrenders and surprises Xerxes with a spear in the face, which thanks to what we have to assume is his divine powers only graze him. The Spartans get roughly 120 arrow holes each in them. The end.

Alright, there’s an epilogue where the remaining 30 000 or so Spartans get ready to own the living shit out of one pitiful remaining scrap of Xerxes’ armies and we find that the whole story was told by the narrator to inspire them. But anyway, to summarize:

The Spartans are vicious, fascist, callous, bigoted, hypocritical, sexist, elitist and unreasonably proud. They betray and murder each other, rape, belittle, steal, scheme against, lie to and torture each other. Despite their lush and fertile lands they foster a coarse and diminished quality of life.

Whereas the Persians revel in every luxury, dressing their slaves in abundant gold and – this I find fascinating – show a cohesive organization across their massive Empire, able to seek out people with unusual talents and physiologies and finding places where they fit in. It’s an Empire that embraces its outcasts and treats its worst off members with respect and humanity. The God-king is a benevolent dictator, if unreasonably power hungry.

I find it funny that the movie has been decried as anti-Iran propaganda. If anything it’s anti-American, with the Spartans obviously representing the ideals of American fighting spirit and democracy and the movie does an awful job making us feel sympathy for them as protagonists.

All smartassery aside, it’s a lovely movie of pure braindead action. It makes no pretensions of depth, it doesn’t try to be clever or make you feel for any of its characters, it does only one thing and does it as well as possible. It’s a feast for the eyes and for the reptile brain’s imperatives of kill, eat and fuck. It’s a few supercool oiled musclemen standing against many foes, and screaming! Every! Single! Line! Like this! It’s an energetic, moving painting splashed with liberal amounts of blood, bronze and shadow. It has no meaning beyond its own beauty. I could see more movies like this.

I dreamt I had a kitten

2011-05-25T06:39:00.005+01:00

And it was the size of my thumbnail. Maybe the cutest thing I've ever seen. It liked to chew on my fingertips, and I didn't even feel anything except my fingertip getting covered in drool. (I may have made up the biting part cause I want to be Nausicaä and it was actually licking me.) I went through a large bag of cheese balls to find a really tiny one that was just slightly larger than kitty's head, and we played with that for the longest time. It rolled easily on the hardwood floor, and kitty chased it with glee. Sometimes it would put its front paws on the ball and lick it while climbing it. It also ate a couple of insects of the sort so small I could barely see them, from the palm of my hand.

The kitten was not afraid of me at all. I so want my dream to be true.

Normally I relish advertisements as a challenge to my willpower and critical thinking, but

2011-05-15T22:16:00.005+01:00

I mean, holy crap. This is the most ridiculous thing I've seen all month. Let me explain what you're looking at: A pirate TV site where I was looking into ways I could see the hot new Doctor Who episode written by Neil Gaiman. All this bandwidth is paid for with ads, pretty much like Youtube, except obviously this is a more invasive, you have to sit through it before the video starts ad.

But the ad in question is a little more creative than a mere video. It's an ad for a cheap Facebook knockoff social networking service, so they offer up a conversation with the tantalizingly single Jennifer, 24, with her shy smile and airbrushed skin and non-theatening, passive, please don't think me forward to be speaking to you without being spoken to you big strong man question marked "Hello?"

Think about this for a second. Not ten seconds or five but one second. This is supposed to be a living, breathing, sex craving woman. She has contacted you because you're so handsome and mysterious and well-read she just can't resist. She has contacted you through a video. How is this supposed to work? Jennifer sits by her computer waiting for you to play this video and then engages the chat software that magically is installed on both your computers? Jennifer who's conventionally attractive enough to be assaulted by instant messages by the dozens if she were to show her face on a dating/networking site handpicks you out of all the people watching the video where her ad is inserted?

I can't believe anyone is stupid enough to fall for this. I refuse to. If you tell me you fell for it, I'll call you a liar. I think better of humanity than that.

To say something useful, here's a handy tip if you find yourself hand-picked for the attention of a beautiful Internet woman or a Nigerian prince* or a high-ranked MMO guild or anyone who's offering something you feel may be disproportionate or unmotivated or unlikely. Ask them why they chose you. Ask them what it is about you that has drawn their attention. Ask them if they, in fact, know anything about you personally. It's a great way to weed out spambots and other entities who aren't contacting you personally but would like you to think they are.

*Funny story about so-called Nigerian letters. I once had a torrid weeks-long email affair with a Nigerian princess. I've looked into the databases of popular scams, and I've talked to people, but I haven't found a single case involving a princess. It's always princes. Which is kind of stupid. A girl in distress is statistically about fifty-eighteen times more likely to tug on a person's heartstrings and engage their heroic impulse than a boy in the same distress.

Wait, now I'm giving advice to scammers. Well, if scams involving ladies in dire need start to pop up you know where you heard it first.

Anyway, the story. It was hilarious. They wrote me asking for unspecific help, stressing several times the enormous amounts of money that was at stake and how big my share would be. I wrote back and said of course I'd be happy to help a lady in dire need - see, I was willing to believe she might really need help at this point, because she was a woman - and any way I could support her I would. Including going to Nigeria and sorting out what needed to be sorted. I promised that as long as I lived she would not be harmed, if that was what she needed. I wrote at length about how her story touched me and if she could give me a time and a place, I'd be there. I very carefully pointed out that I didn't have any money.

In response, I got a letter filled with badly written and vague instructions about contacting my bank, and a bunch of unwarranted "evidence" in the form of scanned ID cards and texts that may very well have come from a newspaper. Also, the princess continued to stress how much money I was going to get.

Writing back, I carefully explained that I didn't have any bank to contact, and we didn't need to involve any banks at this stage because I didn't want her money. I wanted to help her, damnit, any way I could.

Sadly I don't remember what happened next. But I had the distinct impression my letters were not actually being read, at least not by anyone with a basic grasp of the English language. Their letters were repetitive and vague. Eventually I decided if this woman actually existed and needed help, either it was help of a nature I could not provide or it was impossible for me to communicate properly the means I had to help her. I think in the end they didn't write me back.

Yep, I was dumped by a Nigerian princess.

Might as well change the name of the blag to "Comedy Central". Wait, that's taken?

2011-05-14T07:58:00.003+01:00

It seems there was a man who had to call a couple he knew about something important. So he called their home phone, and a little girl answered on the first ring.

'Can I talk to your mommy or daddy?' he asked, naturally.

'Shush', said the girl, in a stealthy, secretive whisper. 'They're in the bedroom.'

'Oh', said the man, blushing to himself. 'Well, I'll just try again later then, shall I?' He hung up, somewhat concerned for the girl's mental wellbeing, but admitting that was really her parents' business and that they couldn't be blamed for being young and obviously in love. So he gave them an hour and then called again.

'Hello again', he said. 'Is your mommy or daddy there?'

'Shhh, they're busy the bathroom now', said the girl, with the same under her breath voice.

Hanging up, the man stroked his chin in wonder and confusion. So busy, in the middle of the afternoon? Somehow he managed to fill another hour waiting before he called again.

'Hi again', he said. 'Where are your parents now, may I ask?'

'Hush-hush, they're in the kitchen', said the girl, as if revealing a terrible secret.

'They really shouldn't be doing that', said the man. His mounting irritation gave way to incredulity, but he did keep his voice down all the same. 'Could you call to them to please come to the phone, it's very important?'

'No no no', said the girl, with her small voice fearful and disbelieving, as if that idea was both dangerous and crazy. 'I can't let them hear me.' She hung up on him, now.

The man spent the next hour wrestling with the question of calling child protective services upon his friends, and how he was going to discuss his important business with them if he did indeed get a hold of either of them, and how they could have so much energy. And then he called again.

'Could you get your mommy or daddy', he said when the girl again answered on the first ring. 'I really, really have to speak with either of them.'

'Shhh', said the girl, still with her twitchy, rabbity voice but not whispering quite so quietly. 'They're in the toolshed out back now.'

'Look', said the man, with an unexpected surge of courage and compassion welling up inside him. 'Look, kid, this may be really hard for you, but I need you to go out there and bang on the toolshed door until they come out. Take the phone with you, I'll be there, nothing is going to happen to you.'

'I told you, I can't do that', said the girl, frustrated, worried, tired.

'But why', said the man, almost choking with feeling for this poor little girl, so alone. 'Why can't you talk to your parents?'

'That's not how you play hide and seek, dummy.'

Further kneeslappers

2011-04-05T20:35:00.001+01:00

There was a man living in a small village in a very poor area of the world. Sierra Leone, perhaps, or Detroit. By a once in a lifetime chance, he got to go to the circus when it visited the fields outside his village. The man, let's call him Dave, went, and was filled with childlike wonder at every turn: The trapeze artists, the trained animals, the contortionists and the fire eaters and the sword eaters all amazed him, and when the clowns came out and tumbled and danced and threw pies and made faces he just about died with laughter.

And then one of the clowns addressed the audience, asking for volunteers to fill a two-man horse suit. A few people stood up, Dave among them, in his front row seat. The clown smoothly and cheerfully picked among them, pointing first at someone in the upper seats, saying "There's the horses head", and then at Dave, shouting "And there's the horse's ass". At which point Dave turned on his heels and quickly walked out of the circus tent, bristling with anger. He'd never felt so insulted!

And what's worse is that he had to walk away because he was going to hit the clown in the face, because he wanted so badly to say something that would sear the clown's face and shrink him down into his ridiculous oversized shoes, but he could think of nothing at all. Even now, with what the French call the spirit of the stairway descending on him, he could concieve of no retort.

And in the years following, he worked and worked in the diamond fields, or perhaps the car factories, at a slave wage, while struggling to learn to read, but with a goal burning so clearly in his mind that never once he doubted his course. Eventually he saved up enough money for a mail order education in Quick Wit Retort, which changed his life.

He learned well, prodigiously well, and soon was able to move to the big city with a scholarship to continue his studies in QWR. He achieved a doctorate in record time and opened up a business and found himself, with no resistance at all, the world leader in the field of QWR. Dave was the teacher now, his advice sought by generals and emperors from all over the world, and life was good indeed.

And one day Dave saw in his hometown paper, which he read every day, that the circus was coming back at last. So he canceled his appointments with Bruce Willis and the Pope and took a plane and a hired limousine to go to the circus. And the trapeze artists, the trained animals, the contortionists and the fire eaters and the sword eaters all did their thing, and the clowns came out and tumbled and danced and threw pies and made faces just like before.

And because Dave had assured himself a spot on the same seat as the last time, when the clown addressed the audience, asking for volunteers to fill a two-man horse suit, he was ready. He stood up, lungs on fire, face cold. The world to him seemed to slow down as the adrenaline raced through his veins: This was the fulfillment of his life. This was revenge. At last. At last the clown pointed at him and said "And there's the horses ass", and Dave let out his breath in a mighty roar:

"FUCK YOU CLOWN!"

The end.

Proustish

2011-03-29T13:32:00.001+01:00

I feel something that’s hard to define.
It comes around the edge of spring, mostly,
when the water melts and pours from the snowbanks
in tiny little streams over the pavement,
the bent old asphalt,
with the smell like tar in the warmth of the sun,
and the grass growing in the cracks
where never a car does pass,
the asphalt of a secret old road
just for us and our childhood memories,
when we dammed up the little streams
with twigs and pebbles and built channels,
just to make something,
just to control something,
and over time we learned to know
every peak and vale in there,
never to stumble,
never to fail a marble throw,
still in the warming spring sun
in the day that never seemed to end,
and the smell of rose hip buds
spread and saturated everything.
That’s the feeling I have.

Title goes here

2011-03-25T05:39:00.003Z

A story: A young man dies, and at the funeral his friend takes his shoelace against the weak protests of his family. It's the custom of these people to keep a shoelace from someone who's died. They believe that the memories of the dead live on as long as the shoelace is kept whole. As this custom developed, it became commonplace to use thick, wiry shoelaces of indestructible plastic that could not even be used in a shoe, and our dead man's shoelace so happens to be one of these, a bright red one.

Right after the ceremony his friend ties it together with his own, black plastic shoelace and hangs them around his neck and sits down on the floor, leaning against the wall, in the coatroom of the chuch.

Thirty years go by and he doesn't leave the room.

Then one day, our friend seems to wake up. He yells and curses his friend, blaming him for dying and leaving him behind. He tears desperately at the shoelace chain, with all the futility of a mortal man raising his fist against Heaven. He can't even untie the knot, and in the end he puts it back around his neck and collapses on the floor and cries for his lost friend and for all the years he wasted.

The end.

Ten years to think of this joke

2011-03-22T05:08:00.002Z

Thing of the day: Gary Busey Rating: Invincible

2011-03-16T17:42:00.006Z

In Point Blank, after punching out Dr Cox, Gary Busey gets shot in the leg and twice in the back with a shotgun and only barely falls down. Is he the Terminator? No. He's Gary Busey. If you blow off Arnold Scwarzenegger's skin you get the Terminator. If you blow off the Terminator's metal you get Gary Busey. And if you blow off Gary Busey's head you get another Gary Busey. The Terminator is infinite Gary Buseys.

Gary Busey cannot be bargained with or reasoned with. Gary Busey doesn't feel pain, or remorse, or fear. He cannot be killed. If you give him an Oscar, he will go to rest for roughly a quarter of a century, but then he will return. And he will feed.

It has been theorized that there was once a list of fun facts about Gary Busey, but he punched it so hard it was ejected from existence.

Next time, we'll take a look at Alan Moore.

It's that time again

2011-03-08T22:01:00.005Z

I have the best nightmares. Like last night, due perhaps to a dose of poisonous oysters I really should have left in the bargain bin. It inspired this story which I've worked on the last 18 hours straight. Not as heavily dream based as The Stone Guy, cause it was not actually a very exciting or extensive dream, but it's a horror story based on a dream all the same, which is always cool. Play some Riders on the Storm, The End or Break on Through if you like because here comes the

DOORS

When my cousin disappeared it didn’t feel like a dream anymore. But until then there was something surreal about the whole thing, and I found it hard to take myself seriously. Such a shame. I always believed myself to be a person who could handle the truth, no matter how strange, but when the strangest thing did happen, my mind just glassed over. Perhaps we are no longer young enough to believe in miracles.

But it was pretty damn strange right from the start. We walked, my cousin Rich and I, on streets I’d never seen before. Just another of his late night walks, which I confess I always liked being dragged into. Something about having the whole world to ourselves, especially on the pale warm summer nights. But anyway. He went through that door on the side of what looked like one in a row of anonymous apartment buildings, all random-like, and for some reason I hesitated to follow. Maybe my sleep-addled mind was worried about trespassing. In a hallway.

I couldn’t explain what Rich was thinking, either. He mentioned a shortcut, but we weren’t even going in any straight direction. But whatever we were thinking, what we did was fairly simple: I stood in the doorway and held the door open and watched Rich sneak quietly through the grey concrete corridor towards the door at the other end. He walked past apartment doors and stairs and branching corridors, and I suppose that dreamlike sense came over me then because the corridor seemed absurdly long.

But the strangeness really started when I saw Rich push open the door on the other end and find someone standing there. Squinting, I saw myself. I heard Rich yelp. Turning around, I saw him standing in the air behind me, looking at me. I tried to touch him, and my arm passed through. At this point we both turned back and stared down the corridor at each other and at ourselves. For a moment we stood frozen in reverent silence. Then Rich came running in my direction as if the hounds of Hell were behind him. His image in the air suddenly disappeared as he moved, and soon he pushed me with him out of the clearly haunted hallway. Feeling rather numb and possibly petrified, I let myself be pushed and then pulled by the arm in the direction back to his apartment.

I think I was vaguely disappointed in my lack of impetus at these events, being reduced to an impassive doll. It may of course have been shock. I murmured and nodded in response to Rich’s agitated ranting which usually was barely coherent even at the best of times, until eventually he fells silent and looked at me gravely and asked if I was okay.

‘Sure, I said. ‘I think so.’

‘It’s just, we both saw the same thing back there, right?’ said Rich, twitching with restrained energy.

‘A hallway where the door at both ends somewhat lets you see into the hallway from the other direction? I think so.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I saw too, that’s a damned good way to put it’, he said. ‘Why aren’t you more excited?’ He sounded almost disappointed.

‘I’ll admit it was pretty wild’, I said. ‘But I’m really tired. I guess it’s just mirrors or cameras or something.’

‘I don’t think so’, he said. ‘I think we weren’t just seeing things.’ I don’t think I ever saw a real person make a distant, deep thinking face just like in the movies before, but Rich did it then, and it made me smile.

‘Nerd’, I whispered, and he made no indication of having heard me. We made it the rest of the way to his place in silence, both of us shambling like sleepwalkers up the stairs, though the sound of his keys falling on the ceramic floor tiles woke us up a bit.

‘Let’s talk more tomorrow’, he said, once inside. I grunted agreement and fell on the couch, almost exactly at the same time as Rich hit the bed. I drifted swiftly towards the lands of sleep, and could barely muster the energy to squirm out of my jeans and pull a bedsheet over me. Already Rich was snoring quietly, and I took a slow, slow breath and closed my eyes to the morning sun. I always loved going to sleep. But if I’d known it was the last time I’d ever surrender to sleep without fear, I’d have tried to make it last longer.

In the early afternoon, I woke to an empty apartment. A note on the kitchen table, in Rich’s blocky print, said:

WENT TO BAR
MI CASA

And so I was able to do my morning toilet in peace and make a breakfast out of what I could find in Rich’s kitchen: Some spare spaghetti and truly shocking amounts of condiments.

And then I went to the closest bar, where Rich held the rapt attention of a large number of patrons with the tale of last night’s adventures. He was always a good storyteller, but I couldn’t imagine how he managed to spin that yarn for more than two minutes.

‘There’s my cuz’, he shouted as soon as I came through the door. ‘You can tell them it happened, for real!’

Trepidation set in when fifteen or so eyes turned on me as I stumbled my way to the table, sat next to Rich and coughed. Someone handed me a drink to wet my throat and I figured I couldn’t put off this feat of public speaking anymore, and stuttered my way through the story in about twenty-five seconds. Cheers erupted and glasses were clinked together. After a while and a number of drinks provided by our new fanclub, I began to see the mythical and more far-reaching implications of our tale, and they grew as the day went on in a way I would be quite unable to recall in a sober state. I’d hazard to guess the magical corridor had some qualities that could only be approached in an altered mental state.

There were other subjects discussed that evening, of course. I remember that well. But as to the details of what those subjects were, a mist of beer obscures my memory. It was generally very nice. At some point my cousin absconded with a googly-eyed girl, giggling and staggering out into the night, but to his credit only after I assured him I’d be quite alright to make it home myself. I kind of looked forward to the two hour walk, even if my grip of time at the moment was loose enough that I did not imagine the night ever ending.

At one point a somewhat blurry girl told me she had been trying to give me looks all night and that I was thick as a brick if I hadn’t noticed, but she was ready to forgive me. I must have found this very confusing, as I remember my head spinning as she walked away, leaving me with a sense of having let someone down. But one glass later I was again happily floating on the surface of life with full wind in my sails, so to speak.

Eventually I set off to home port, accompanied by a boy for unclear reasons. I knew him as Rich’s good friend, and I thought he may have been in need of someplace to sleep, while I wouldn’t have minded some company on the road, but I could not remember any conversation along either of those lines and I was too embarrassed to ask.

So we walked and we sang and we laughed, shoulder to shoulder, until we ran into a girl, wide-eyed and sharp-breathed and shaking. I realized I’d last seen her hanging around Rich’s neck and grasped her shoulder, both for her comfort and my support.

‘Hey, you are’, I tried.

‘Ilse’, she said. From the bar? You were his cousin? You have to know.’

‘Alex’, I said, trying to ignore what felt like something uncomfortably out of place in the conversation. ‘And this is, um.’ I was never very good at names, and I gestured to my companion in a way that made this painfully clear to all nearby.

‘Roman’, he said and, displaying a more reliable sense of priorities than myself, ‘what’s the matter?’

‘Rich’, she said, her big eyes never closing. ‘He was going to show me the magic hallway, obviously, why didn’t we think of that earlier, but when I saw it I got scared, he went in anyway, and he never came out, and I tried looking and I ran away, I couldn’t help it.’

And, as I mentioned before, this is when reality snapped back into place for me. More brave and sober than I ever felt before, I led our merry little band straight to the fabled building, which took about ten minutes. But when I saw the door the courage ran off me like bad paint. The door my cousin had gone through three times and I just one half. Everything I ever feared was behind that door and I only understood it now. I thought about how the corridor had grown as Rich walked in it yesterday and wondered why I hadn’t felt it then, if the fear had simply been too great to feel. The door lurked, unassuming, calling me, silently, taunting me, without moving. I had no doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t ever see Rich again. And I could live with that as long as I didn’t have to look at the door anymore.

Or maybe I’m exaggerating. Maybe I’m just chickenshit. Maybe I’m reading all this crap into a plain stupid door just because of what happened later. Maybe I don’t want to admit I let Roman go first, while we held the door open for him. Anyway, he walked tall down the hallway, and only showed how tense he was when he peered into the intersections. At one point I jumped clear off the ground when I thought I saw the handle of a door behind him move a little bit, but Ilse said she didn’t see anything.

On the third intersection, at least I think it was the third, Roman said ‘What’s that?’ and walked off to the left. I wished so hard I could at least hear his footsteps that, for a while, I thought I could. The wait passed unbearable. My heart pounded so hard I thought I would sprain it and Ilse, by my side, was covered in sweat. I exchanged one glance with her which at once made me happy I was not alone in my madness and more terrified than before. Then Roman came back into view. From the right. We screamed. He looked our way and seemed to scream as well, but I couldn’t hear anything. He backed away from us, eyes wide as saucers, and broke into a run. At least he’s heading for the door on the other side, I thought, and while I braced myself for the weirdness sure to follow as his image would show up before us I was thankful that one way or the other he’d surely be out of the house soon.

But he took off to the right in the next intersection. And we never saw him again. After a while I sank down with my ass on the ground and my back against the door to keep it propped open, and Ilse soon joined me. Neither of us could take our eyes off the empty corridor. Neither of us could speak.

Remembering there was such a thing as cellphones, I took mine out of my jeans pocket and called Rich. I did not get a call signal, or a busy signal, or any signal, or even a connection error message. The call seemed to die the moment it connected. Ilse fished a phone out of her jacket and I gave her the number, and she had the same result. With nothing else left to do we traded numbers with each other, which took several seconds.

‘He’s not coming back’, said Ilse, at last. ‘Is he?’

‘Neither of them I think’, I said. A tear surprised me by rolling down my cheek, and Ilse surprised me by taking my hand in hers. She held my hand so hard it hurt, as if the world was falling apart and it was the only thing she had to hold onto. I held back as best I could, and closed my eyes, and wished I could just say something clever, something that would make this make sense, that would give us some peace, that would allow us to get the fuck away.

‘You think if we let the door close, we’re giving up on them?’ I said, just to see if we were on the same page.

‘It’s the only thing I think about’, she said, staring into the ground.

‘But what if we jam the door open?’ I said, ideas beginning to form in my head. ‘I never liked these shoes.’ With my free hand, I poked at my cheap and worn-down sneakers, trying to untie the laces.

‘And then what, just walk away?’

‘I figure we can either leave, stay here forever or go inside. Not much choice when you get down to it.’ I held my shoes in my hand and struggled to get to my feet without letting go of them or Ilse. She followed, although her brow was wrinkled with doubt. She even let go of my hand to allow me to wedge the soft shoes into the doorhinge, where they stopped the door from closing more than one quarter of the way.

‘We can’t do anything more here’, I said, stepping back to admire my handiwork. The door opening seemed no less ominous at a distance, but the ground seemed warmer against my feet.

‘And I sure as Hell am not going in there’, Ilse said

‘Not as long as I live’, I agreed. ‘Fuck it.’ I was on my way to leave, but when I thought about saying goodbye to Ilse I seemed to lose the strength to speak. But I shrugged and nodded and turned to walk away.

‘I only live twenty minutes away’, she said, with a somewhat shrill voice that stopped me in my tracks.

‘Thank fuck for that’, I said. ‘It’s over two hours for me.’ Our eyes met, and I saw how haunted and hollow she seemed, and wondered if I looked the same way.

‘I don’t think any of us wants to be alone right now’, she said, with a crooked smile that only touched her mouth, and I loved her for that.

‘I’m so sorry about Rich’, she said, as we walked side by side towards the already rising sun. ‘He seemed like a nice guy.’

‘He had his moments’, I said, trying not to think of my entire life with him. ‘I didn’t see him every day or anything.’ My voice cracked a bit at the end and Ilse looked at me with such sadness and I felt the corners of my mouth pull down beyond my control as I finished what I’d thought would be a cool punchline: ‘Only most.’

Ilse sighed and put her hand back in mine and it seemed a little more right. But just then we reached her building, a perfectly normal apartment building with no hungry doors or looping corridors or anything. We ended up on her couch, eating icecream and watching some idiotic TV show and laughing far too much. The sun was well over the horizon and Grieg’s morning song played when we went to sleep were we sat, with our legs entwined in a big blanket, and I tried to make myself feel happy as I used to, but still the last thing I knew was a twinge of fear.

I woke from a dream in which many children huddled around me, crying. At least one of them was my own, but I was not sure who. Ilse was snuggling to my chest, a comforting weight radiating warmth. My hand touched her back, which was bare and wet. ‘Fresh out of the shower I see’, I said, trying to play it cool but uncertain what I should do or if she was even awake to hear me.

‘Mmm’, she said, not moving. ‘I warmed it up for you. Or.’ She raised her head to look at me, and I had to smile at her sleep-pudgy face with strands of her long hair clinging to it. ‘We could take one together.’

‘I don’t know’, I said.

‘I want you’, she said. ‘I don’t want to let you out of my sight.’

‘I’m not’, I said, and it pained me to have to say it, so I couldn’t finish, but she understood anyway and sat up on her knees and gathered the blanket to her and swept it over her shoulders, looking away from me, sad and lonely and embarrassed. Sometimes a honest face is all it takes.

She was lovely, and I told her so. I loved her, and I told her so. ‘But there’s also the whole thing last night. It was intense. Life-altering stuff. Do you really want to get shaken up any more?’

‘Maybe I wanted intense in a good way’, she said. 'Could you at least allow me.’ She paused and gave me an adorable shy smile. ‘A little kiss?’

‘I think so’, I said and she leaned over me quickly, as if afraid one of us might change their mind, spreading the blanket like a tent over us. She brushed the hair out of her face and leaned even further, pinning my arms under hers. I was trapped with her warm, warm body and highly aware of her breasts pressing against me, and then her lips, gentle, almost playful. It was my first kiss, and my sweetest.

Ilse blushed deeper than before, and maybe I did to. But I darted to the bathroom and when I came out we acted like nothing had changed and sat quietly as we both tried to figure out what to do with the rest of our lives.

‘Maybe we should tell people’, Ilse said.

‘No one would believe it until more people disappear’, I said. ‘I don’t want to be responsible for that.’

‘No, you’re right. Or no one would disappear, in which case we’re nuts and wasting everyone’s time.’

‘Are we nuts?’

‘It’s starting to sound like the most appealing alternative.’

We both had to laugh at that, and this time there was no trace of desperation in it. We were handling the trauma of touching the strange, and we didn’t even know it. As the day went on I wondered why I was in such a whatever the opposite of hurry is to leave Ilse, and how long I could stay before she’d want to make me leave. I don’t believe in the Hollywood magic where just because you share a momentary extraordinary experience you belong together. I don’t, and I didn’t. But I think there’s such a thing as BFFs at first sight, when you recognize on an instinctual level a kindred spirit, a bro if you will, and everything you do and don’t do can’t help but draw you towards that person, and you can’t wait to spend every day of your life with him or her. Or most.

But we shared these thoughts and a few more and all of a sudden it was getting late and we were hungry and went foraging in the neighborhood, as I called it, to Ilse’s amusement. We picked up some instant foods and, upon reaching Ilse’s building again, discovered something disturbing.

‘That door’s scary, isn’t it?’ I said, as we stood outside the front door.

‘Probably just paranoia’, Ilse said. ‘But yeah. I wouldn’t want to go in there, you know, if I didn’t have to.’

‘I don’t have to’, I said. ‘But I can live with it as long as you’re with me.’

‘Going to be trouble getting through the rest of our lives not entering a building alone’, I said later, as we sat down.

And we tried getting on, for the sake of getting by, in the days that followed. We stayed in a lot, and watched a lot of TV, and played cards, and cut each others’ hair, and went over to my place to see who had it better (she did) and had a drinking contest. (Every time a character in the show tells a lie, take a drink.) (Apply to any given American comedy series.)

One time, for no particular reason, I went out alone. Maybe my body wanted to forget how the world had changed, and ran its feet itself, insisting that nothing could happen just by stepping through a door. Maybe I was drunk. But I knew my mistake as soon as I stood on the street, still barefoot. Everywhere I looked I saw doors threatening me. The store down the street had big floor-to-ceiling windows and I saw people moving in the light inside, so that seemed okay, and I went in and picked up some drinks with no problem. But when I opened the door to Ilse’s building I nearly fell inside as the hallway opened up before me like a mine shaft, like a cliff edge, like the abyss itself. I screamed and lunged back, and a bottle of Coke fell out of my bag and fell maybe ten or fifteen meters down the hallway before it touched the ground and shattered in a burst of fizzy bubbles.

I put the bag down beside the door and tried to look away from what was inside while I picked up my phone and gave Ilse a ring. My hands shook so hard I nearly dropped the phone twice and the interior of the hallway seemed to squirm and writhe in the corner of my eye and when the call connected the line went dead. I tried to swallow, but my throat hurt. I stared at the phone as if I could will it to work, and I struggled not to smash it into something. Instead I put it back in my pocket and leaned against the door and slumped down on the ground once more. But now alone.

I could not think. I had nothing left in this world but a paper bag of mixed drinks and I could not step into a building. There didn’t seem to be anything left to think, or dream, or try, or hope, so I sat on the concrete doorstep with my back to the enemy and cried and waited for something to kill me. After a while the streetlights turned on, and I walked over to one of them just to do something.

And I happened to look back just in time to see Ilse looking out her window, three stories up. I blinked and wiped my eyes and waved and jumped, and she waved back and held up her phone. I held up mine and shook my head, and she held up a finger and disappeared. I think my heart beat most sparingly in the time between then and when she came out the door, but then it rushed. It danced. It sang. It sang Run Run Run like Tracy Chapman as I ran into Ilse’s arms, crying like a damned baby. It broke as she held me tight and we fell to our knees and still she held me and stroked my hair and waited.

‘I thought you were gone like everyone else’, I said, eventually.

‘What are you doing out here anyway?’ she said, gently pushing me away to arm’s length as if to examine me for cuts, bruises or flowering insanity.

‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’, I said. Then I looked her in the eye and swallowed and said: ‘What did I do to deserve a friend like you?’

‘Yeah yeah, I love you to’, she said. ‘You know, like a friend.’

When we went up the stairs together, nothing seemed wrong. The fridge was full of cold Coke, and I sucked down a bottle so hard I was worried about it leaving a mark on my ass. Corporate magic. What can’t it protect you from?

‘These are no bullshit days’, I said, striving for poetry.

‘Absolutely no fucking bullshit days’, she said. ‘Let’s be no bullshit people.’

‘Marvellous. So the doors are after us. We can deal with that. Together.’

‘I’ll never leave your side, Alex.’

‘I’ll stand by you. Promise.’

‘Until death do us part.’

We shook our pinkie fingers and drank on this pact and listened to old school rock all night long. There may even have been dancing. And for a time, we were happy. Just like newlyweds, I suppose, except without the sex. We had a few close calls, and we learned we had to take our ridiculous monstrous inexplicable fearsome enemy seriously, but it wasn’t really that hard when you figured it out. Always enter a building within sight of another person. That’s it, that was the rule. Completely absurd, of course, but we lived with it because we had to.

I understand it’s human nature to see patterns in things, to abstract general meaning from specific events, to codify and set in rules our world in order to make sense of it. So I can hardly fault the two of us for thinking as we did that we had figured out how to beat the system, how to play by the rules. But rules, like doors, are human inventions. It did not occur to us that what was following us was not like a door at all.

It only looked like one.

One day I found myself running down a corridor, hand in hand with Ilse. We were both naked. I knew I was dreaming even before we pushed open a door and saw another corridor with ourselves pushing open the door at the other end because I distinctly remembered going to sleep just before. Still we ran, afraid to even look back to see what was following us. We ran down the same corridor until we were both breathing fire, and we ran until we simply had to stop. I leaned on a door handle by my side and felt only the most distant surprise when the door opened and I fell in, dragging Ilse behind me. She scrambled to close the door, quickly but silently.

‘This is a dream, right?’ she said. ‘I just went to bed for fuck’s sake. A very exhausting dream.’

‘You’re not dreaming’, I said. ‘Unless this is some weird shared dream or something.’

‘I see, you think you’re dreaming and I think I’m dreaming. Conundrum! How can we trust each other saying we’re not a figment of the other’s imagination?’

‘You seem pretty blasé about this horrible soul-crushing nightmare we’re living in’, I remarked, as cheerfully as I could.

‘It was a rhetorical question, dummy’, said Ilse, growing into some kind of maniacal determination. ‘We have to trust that this is not a dream. Or.’

‘I get it, or be very disappointed if it turns out not to be.’

It turned out to be nothing like an apartment behind that apartment door, once we looked around for two seconds. A tiny hallway led to a room where a half melted refrigerator and stove occupied one wall, and a swampy sofa the one opposite. There were no windows, but light came from a lamp in the ceiling. Winding narrow corridors led off in seven or eight different directions, and a sustained laugh seemed to come from somewhere far away.

‘I guess the house wants us to run around like maniacs without even knowing what’s scary’, said Ilse, trying to wrestle the deformed fridge open. ‘So we should do everything but.’

‘Yeah I could do without running anywhere in the next ten minutes’, I said. ‘Or ever.’ The fridge spilled open and revealed the exact same items we had had in Ilse’s back when we were in her apartment.

‘I think this is my apartment’ said Ilse, the mind reader. Unfazed, she threw me a bubbly energizing soft drink and took one herself. ‘Whatever. It’s kind of funny.’

‘Which part?’ I asked.

‘We lived in fear so long, and now we’re here, it’s got us, there’s nowhere more to run. Nothing we can do. We don’t have anything more to be afraid of.’ Ilse, the great thinker. Something shifted in my head as I heard her say those words, and she could see it. She smiled and came closer to me.

‘This is what you wanted all along, isn’t it? You’re a witch!’ said I, also smiling. Things now seemed less confusing. She dragged me down on the floor, and I didn’t resist.

‘Maybe’, she said. ‘Or maybe it’s what we wanted.’

When we sat up again, what was left in our bottles had gone flat and tepid, and we had some fresh ones. We made love, we slept, we urinated in the corner and we drank and were merry until the fridge was empty, and then we got to thinking. Lacking any tools but empty bottles, we tried digging through the wall roughly where the window should have been. With a broken bottle, I cut deep into the wallpaper and plaster, until a thick black fluid began seeping out of the wound.

As we stood back and pondered this development, the shallow hole in the wall closed up before our eyes and we decided to try and make it higher. The building only used to have eight floors, and there should be some way to force a roof access, assuming of course the stairs didn’t loop around the same way the hallways did. Not a great prospect. But we were, of course, desperate. Back in the corridor, we tried to look every which way, which was somewhat possible between the two of us, and we saw nothing moving as we made it up the stairs. After nine of them we could still see a vague number of stairs rising into the gloom above, much as predicted.

We went to the apartment closest to the ever-present outer door and kicked in the door to look for a hint of a window or at least an outer wall, or possibly some clothes, but we found just one room, very strangely furnished. There was a bare wooden floor and thick wooden blinds covering one wall, with no windows behind them. In one corner was a TV with a large easy chair in front of it, or at least what looked at a distance like a TV, an old-fashioned one with an antenna V and a kind of roundish shape, but with no cords or buttons.

The opposite wall was covered in drawers and cupboards, which we took to open and check for food or anything at all really, when behind us the TV sparked to life with a loud static crackle and black and white flicker bright enough that by the shadows cast in front of us we could already tell something was wrong, and without a word we went out the door. Before we left I could see a glimpse of something moving on the easy chair, and the fear I thought we had buried came jumping back.

‘Wanna try the rest of the doors?’ said Ilse, apparently neither as shaken nor stirred as me.

‘I got a bad feeling about them’, I said. ‘Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way.’ We stepped through the supposed front door without even thinking about it, looping right back to the apartment door we broke down, and turned back halfway over the threshold since neither of us wanted to walk by the open door. For a moment I imagined that would be enough, we hadn’t thought of going halfway through before and maybe now we’d get out, but of course not.

With the broken door as a point of reference we soon concluded that there was indeed only one corridor, with one intersecting almost identical corridor. Eighty apartment doors and one stairwell. However, we went another ten floors up without seeing the broken door again, so we had to suppose there were somewhere between eight hundred and infinite apartments full of random and unpleasant impossibilities waiting for us.

This we found to be a daunting notion.

‘We haven’t tried going down yet’, Ilse reminded me, ever the optimist. We were sitting on the highest step of the stairs, almost unconsciously peeking over our shoulders, almost relaxed, only a little out of breath after those ten stairs. Going down would be easier. Maybe something, sometime, somewhere could be easy. Please. Please.

So we went down ten stairs, like a breeze, and just for the sake of scientific rigor and to prevent disorientation we went out in the corridor to see the broken door, which of course was nowhere to be found. Now we debated if it was worth it to go kick the door down again to see if the same awful things were in there, or go up one floor and see if we counted wrong, and if necessary kick down in door too to see if we could find that creepy Goddamn television or perhaps something even worse, and then go two floors down to repeat the process, while keeping in mind that kicking down doors kind of hurt one’s feet.

We decided we could live in wilful ignorance at least for the time being, and went on down. It was actually kind of refreshing, relaxing even, traipsing down the stairs without a care in the world. It felt like giving up, but the house was so contrary to all human convention that surrendering might just be how to beat it, I thought.

Ilse and I were young and possibly in love, and we went on traipsing downward for a very long time before we had to rest. We curled up as we always did, back to back for warmth, and as always sleep came hard. And as always they came at us sideways, when we’d least expect it. So exhausted I could barely stand up, so dazed I couldn’t see through a ladder in two tries, and Ilse was hardly in any better shape, when the shadows came to life.

Sharp and angular and running freely on walls, floor and ceiling, they moved in unison, waggling back and forth like seaweed, hypnotic, and laughing, mocking, playing with us, they let us run down to the floor below before they even touched us. But when they touched, they hurt. They nibbled and cut, and we bled. We ran on bleeding feet, down and down, stumbling into walls and getting teeth marks on our elbows and shoulders and backs, and then our knees and hands. I had a vision of being slowly sliced, like salami, from my feet and up. Ilse cried so hard she couldn’t see, and I half dragged and half carried her with me, ever downward.

At one point I heard myself talking. I was hissing murderously, ‘what do you want from me?’ over and over again.

Then, one piece of the shadows no different from any other growled and shot out from the wall. It was so huge, and so fast, it pounced on Ilse and pushed her to the floor, and I pulled, and she screamed. Oh, how she screamed. When she couldn’t scream anymore she whimpered. I kept pulling until something gave, and then I ran. I was in so much pain by then I was not much more than an animal, I imagine, but I still hated myself as I heard her moan, hated myself because I couldn’t turn back, even after twenty stairs when the shadows no longer followed me and I could still hear her short gasping breaths.

I ran straight into the apartment door closest to the stairwell, wishing with all my heart that there would be a pig monster to tear my head off just when you needed it most. I bounced off the door, but a few painful kicks worked better and once inside, I saw what looked like a study with bookshelves and a desk and a comfortable chair. I curled up in the chair and slept the sleep of the dead, or the expecting soon to be dead and in fact looking forward to it.

But of course the house never touched me. The cuts and bites were really shallow and pretty much healed while I slept. I woke up still holding her arm. And on the desk I found a journal without anything written in it. So I wrote this story down. When I’m done I think I shall try to find another use for the pencil.

My name is Alex, and if you’re reading this I’m already dead. If you’re reading this you’re most likely going to be dead shortly yourself. I’m really sorry about that. I wish I could tell you you can get out of this, but I don’t think you can.

It’s this place, you see. It cheats. I think it’s smarter than us, and it knows it. It enjoys hurting us. Probably it feeds on our flesh and blood, possibly our fear. And it never lets go. Once you open that door, it’s too late. There’s no way out.

There’s no way out. I’m sorry, Ilse. We never really had a chance. This thing is too big, too strong, too evil, too strange. You can’t fight it. We did our best, and it wasn’t enough. There’s just no way out. But I want to apologize anyway: You were the best thing in my life. You trusted me, and I let you down. I’m so sorry.

If I had a band I'd name it The Sleepover at Invisible College

2011-03-02T07:59:00.001Z

Not inspired by Scott Pilgrim at all, ooh no.

To make dead baby jokes throw up

2011-03-01T14:58:00.004Z

It was a dark and stormy night,

and in a damp little hospital a very long way from honor and decency a young woman was having a baby. She was alone in the room for some reason, a stainless steel room with a high window like in a prison, where the sharp dead light of the flickering fluorescent tubes competed with the lightning flashing and shining in.

The woman, little more than a child herself, cried for help, unable to hear anyone or anything past the thunder. She laid on a cold steel slab usually reserved for autopsies, and they had neglected to give her as much as a blanket, and she was bleeding and she was lonely and she wondered where the doctor was. The father was dead as Hell, in the same car crash that had brought her to this sorry excuse for a house of healing, and there was likely no one else in the vicinity, let alone anyone who could need medical attention, let alone anyone who could need it more than her.

She thought of the father, briefly, and her heart ached as she remembered his warm laugh, his strong hands, his chest tearing like a ripe pumpkin when the steering wheel dug into it. Had she been hurt at all? Maybe she had hit her head. She couldn't remember, and she couldn't feel anything other than the life trying to be born from her. Something torn between her legs, and she could feel warm blood pooling under her back, and she screamed and wriggled, trying to free herself from the stupid fucking stirrups holding her feet up.

Precisely at the moment of her lowest despair, the dector came through the door, dressed in immaculate scrubs and attended by two nurses and a seasoned, heavyset midwife. She cried in relief, but it was short-lived.

Due to her youth, the doctor told her, the delivery was going to be difficult. The girl drifted out of time and space, lost in a haze of red hot pain, people pushing and pulling her every which way, screams, cold metal burrowing deep inside her, and great big splashes of blood up the walls.

Eventually, she came to her senses in complete darkness and utter quiet. She was resting on soft comforters, in deep layers of blankets, and for a long, suspended moment she laid still, exhausted but content; weak but safe. And she had had her baby!

"Where is my baby?" she wondered, aloud, and was answered by a sudden bolt of lightning. In its deafening boom the room was illuminated, and she saw one of the nurses standing under the window, with the baby in her arms.

For no particular reason, the lights in the ceiling came back on.

"Hey, give me my baby", said the woman, softly. The nurse said nothing, and did not move.

"Did you hear me? is my baby alright? Let me see her. Or him?' She tried to sound strong, confident and eager but she could barely hold her head up, let alone raise her voice.

"It's a boy", said the nurse, as another bolt of lightning struck. "Come and get him."

"Come again?"

"I said, come and get your boy."

"What, what do you mean?" the woman asked, her voice cracking. "I can't get, I can't stand up."

"Come over here and take your boy", said the nurse, carefully pronouncing each word as her voice slowly climbed to a cruel peak, "or I will break every bone in his body."

A newborn baby has over three hundred soft, cartilageous bones. Its tiny femur broke with a wet crunching sound as the nurse bent it in her strong hands. The baby was quiet, much too quiet, unlike the mother.

The mother howled madly and twisted herself so violently that she fell off the slab, onto the plain concrete floor. The many blankets around her softened the impact somewhat, but still a thick lance of pain shot through the length of her body and she clutched her belly and tried to scream, unable to make a sound. Already her hands were covered in blood, and they left a pair of tracks on the floor as she turned over to face the nurse.

"You evil, crazy, shifty-eyed whore", the woman said, brilliant in her fury, "you worthless piece of shit excuse for a girl, give me my baby before I tear your intestines out with my teeth and feed them to you till you choke on your shit." She crawled, as she spoke, an endlessly slow journey across the floor, every movement a new, unexplored continent of pain as the trail of blood flowing from the ruin of her womb grew wider.

And for every two or three steps the woman took, the nurse would break another of the boy's bones. His finger bones went easily, crushed beyond all hope of repair. The nurse touched the soft spot in his skull, ever so lightly, with her tongue, and twisted his nose and his arms and his jaw. Every one of the horrible sounds drove into the woman's heart like an iron nail, drove into her mind until all the arguments against insanity fell away and she started babbling, blubbering, whining then like a dog and then like a baby, and on occasion she would spit the blood out of her mouth and unload a string of curses so searing, so filthy, so unimaginably obscene that the nurse, even in her madness, almost turned and ran away.

And eventually, after a thousand years and a thousand thousand miles, the woman grabbed the legs of the nurse and hoisted herself up on her knees. In a voice perfectly balanced between desperate begging and godlike command, between clenched teeth she said, "give me my baby."

And the nurse threw the ragdoll shape in her face and shouted, bright and brittle and bubbling with laughter, "Psych! He was stillborn!"

One more thing about cultures

2011-02-28T07:19:00.003Z

I have long held a near-instinctive disdain for human cultures, using a comparison coined (as far as I know) by Salman Rushdie in The Ground Beneath Her Feet that suggests human cultures are less important, according to the dictionary, than cultures of bacteria in a petri dish.

So many conflicts occur since as we covered before it's much easier to engage foreign cultures with hostility than with curiosity. I'm looking forward to the eventual merging of our cultures with the bitterly determined doe-eyed hopefulness of the true optimist.

But anyway, I just remembered that bacteria are the most successful form of life in the known universe. Maybe we could learn something from them.

Word of the day: Cuntfoam Rating: Delicious

2011-02-28T07:01:00.002Z

You know how if you have particularly liberal and vigorous sex, various genital juices of the right viscosity can be whipped into a milky thin bubbly disgusting foam? This is cuntfoam, alternatively dickfoam. I just made it up, no matter what Urbandictionary may think, and now you know it too.

It's not the actual thing that's delicious (depending on mood) but the word is. Definitely the funniest insult I've made up all week.

Ah, I make up or learn of so many funny insults that never get any use in my daily life. Like "Your mama is so fat she has regular fat people in orbit around her." I knew a sumo wrestler like that once. Well, they were mostly very skinny and succinctly bemammaried people, and they functioned as satellites mostly in a social or psychological sense, but it definitely looked like they were orbiting the guy.

You might say he had a certain gravity about him.

This has been a tribute post to Hyperbole and a Half. ( >!+½ in mathematical connotation.)

The Seal

2011-02-26T11:59:00.004Z

In our ongoing series (since earlier today) of writing lengthy diatribes about minute details of daily modern life that what the fuck there are people out there right now who're killing each other to drink from puddles of muddy water with bits of goat in it - shallow puddles - so why don't you show some sense of proportion and shut the fuck up?

Because hallowed Douglas Adams with a piece of fairy cake showed us many years ago that we as mortal beings cannot afford to have a sense of proportion is why. So anyway, safety seals. Vacuum seals. All kinds of seals.

You know, when you open a jar of jam or a box of juice fresh from the store and have to work that lid like Jeff Buckley working the letter "U" in "Hallelujah", either because there's an extra lid inside that you have to punch through, rip off or possibly apply a can opener to because the handle effing broke and how much extra are you paying for that package material anyway?, or because the lid is screwed on tight and held in place with the power of nothing itself. (Vacuum.)

I looked into the fine print on this two-liter box of orange juice with a hermetic plastic seal over its juice-expunging aperture, and it says the seal is a GUARANTEE THAT THE PACKAGING HAS NEVER BEEN OPENED. (Turns out the fine print was in all uppercase letters.) This is a lie, and you, constant reader, probably know I hate lies. I hate them so much I have to break into song to accurately communicate my hatred.

When a man lies he murders some part of the world

These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives

All this I cannot bear to witness any longer

Cannot the kingdom of salvation take me home

[Approximately ten minutes of exquisite metal instrumentals; every note engram of pain and grief and loss.]

If the box has never been opened, how did they get the juice inside it?

See how their story is full of holes?

Of course it's a ridiculous myth they're asking us to buy into. They want us to think we drink a virgin juice, a pure and innocent, saintly juice untouched by the dirty world outside the box. A juice that has fallen from Heaven not into the box, but inside it, completely free from the taint of the sinful world. As if the oranges were not grown from fibrous trees fed by the earth itself, that stained dirt, and watered by generations of bloody wars between orange farmers, picked by the dirty hands of those same farmers, stomped by their even dirtier feet (okay, I'm thinking of wine now), the juice poured into great big vats where any number of bored workers may have stuck their finger in just to mess with our heads or possibly dropped their lucky rabbit foot, half-eaten corn dogs or just as corn-riddled turd without anyone even noticing.

The point is, things happen to your food before it lands in your mouth. We have lived with this knowledge for possibly more than nine hundred million years. We do not need to be protected from the truth. Please.

Dear The Expressen,

2011-02-26T08:57:00.005Z

You suck. It's not that you alone among newspapers think you're too serious to run even a single comic strip, although that's completely lacking in self-awareness and elitist and really very stupid because newspaper comic strips are an integral part to the newspaper reading experience. And it's not your consistent anti-Islam bias that's transparently delusional, finding evidence that all Muslims are terrorists, that all terrorists want to destroy Sweden of all places - I don't think any other news source has even mentioned that supposed serial suicide bomber who continues to threaten Stockholm - and that no one in the entire nation of Israel's history has done anything wrong, where no one else finds it.

No, that's all quite understandable. What annoys me is the cardboard plaques you put under the paper in the newspaper stands. Where the other, better paper has a simple logo advertising the paper, you put a picture of an excited bee and the exclamation "Sold out first!" This is unforgivable.

First of all, it's a lie that repeats itself for every day that your stack of newspapers is not, in fact, sold out before the other one. When the day's papers have not been delivered, it's a lie. When the papers are stacked and covering the lie, it's a lie covered in a stack of papers. When both the papers are sold out, it's probably a lie and it makes no sense. The only time the message holds any water is on the rare occasions when it is true; and then we know it's not meant to be true anyway because it's there just in case it happens to end up being true.

Secondly, you're actually trying to use your ability to underestimate the public's demand for the product you supply as a selling point. You're saying, "Look at us, we don't know how many papers we expect to sell! Please buy our paper! We may or may not make enough money from the paper to print and distribute enough papers to meet your demands!" This is not good marketing.

And furthermore, we all know you sell a lot fewer papers than the other guys. When you sell out first it's because many stores have two stacks of Aftonbladet for every stack of Expressen. You can't afford to print and ship as many papers as they do when you know they won't sell. Deep down you're using the "Sold out first!" message to tell us you're the underdog, and you work harder, and every other crappy excuse the second best guy uses to justify the fact that they are not as good as they other guy. You are not as good than them. You are worse. You'll never be good enough. You look even more pathetic because you still try to pretend it's a competition.

Guinness Book Of World Records You Wish You Didn't Know

2011-01-07T10:58:00.004Z

"Hamburger Frenzy

The biggest hamburger on the market is Big Bob's Texas Belt Burster - a 35.6 kg burger served for $23.95 at Bob's BBQ and Grill on Pattaya Beach in Chonburi, Thailand. If you eat the whole thing in three hours you get your money back, your name on an engraved plaque and a gift card. The record so far is 8 hours."

I imagine this: A village of a hundred or so people stealthily running in and out of the restaurant one by one, each taking a small bite of the burger while trying to look like they're all the same guy. Or. Maybe they send in one guy who's trained his whole life to be able to choke down this meal that's actually bigger than he is, with the combined savings of the whole village to pay up front. And he swallows the burger like a python swallowing a hippo and staggers out the door, money in hand, smiling and waving to the villagers who're standing just off the property, kept in check by guards with automatic weapons. He passes the cash (and the gift card) to his mother and then he explodes, showering everyone with barely-digested bits of burger and bread and blood mixed with coca-cola, which they lap up as reverently as they can manage while crying in desperate hunger. In the background fat tourists continue to line up for their own belt busters, trying not to look at the brown people and their weird customs.

Satchel Beasts!

2010-12-26T22:08:00.002Z

I hope no one was expecting that regular updates thing to be like, a regular thing. But while Incandscenture is on hold until I write a lot more and feel like translating it to English (psych for you native English speakers out there), I did this funny thing when a person known as TDK brought up the idea of Pokemon in a medieval Europe setting. Someone else known as Mumu came up with calling it Satchel Beasts by the way. (Trademark pending.)

It's maybe around 1300 AD, and Europe is covered in darkness. It's the last days of the Dark Ages, just before the dawn of the Renaissance. Christianity is on the rise as a religion for peace, with the crusades over. The Black Forest is full of magical beasts of frightening strength and intelligence, and everyone with a copper coin to their name is trying to find ways to tame these creatures.

Any knight or lord who is anyone will have a stable of satchel beasts at his command. Sorcerers are working overtime to craft the much vaunted satchels that can hold a beast of any size; scholars are devoted to finding ways to harness the power of lightning-balls and tunnel-diggers, and hospitals find themselves turning out the poor to care for the precious beasts instead.

Out of the frozen Northlands she came, like the Vikings of old. Much too young to walk alone, she had cropped her hair and bound her breasts and tried not to use her Christian name, which was Astrid. Being a boy was a little safer, on the road. No one would believe that one so small and without even a sword could have tamed one of the Beasts, or if they did they wouldn’t believe it was as strong, or as strange, as the Beasts were rumoured to be, and they would often try to take it from her, and find out to their cost the power of lightning and thunder the minute squirrel-like creature with the yellow fur could summon when its mistress was threatened.

So she was often harassed and accosted on the road, and tried to walk through the forest when she could. The Beasts, which were plentiful in there, she found to be more sociable and reliable than men; they would almost always fight her companion, but if by instinct or design or intelligence she knew not they would always fight to a fall, and never to the death. It was almost as if they were only playing at war.

And the pair of them, the girl and the Beast, wandered through the land, unseen by most people. If pressed, Astrid would admit she had no clear goal in her travels, and she’d look far away in the distance and speak of some dream she could barely remember, but a dream that nonetheless drove her to search for something. What that something was she wouldn’t say, if she knew. The dream she tried to forget, as if that would make it less of a sin, had showed her men and Beasts standing together, row after row as far as she could see, and all their eyes were turned to her. A chorus of voices, mixed together so that she could hear no one clearly, sang to her of victory, of pride, of being the best, of taming the Beast. Taming the Beasts. All of them.

And in the forests of the darkest night, under her coat of leaves, she would often shiver with flushed cheeks, caught between excitement and shame. To have such grandiose dreams come true would surely send her to Hell. And to have them all look upon her and admit her success, surely would be worth going to Hell. If she could tame one, simply by raising it from birth, she could tame more. . .

And eventually, she caught word of some great tournament in a nearby city, where men did pit their Beasts against one another in battles. It seemed that they fought more for glory’s sake than any other, the losers being praised and admired for their fortune and skill in wielding the strength of the wondrous Beasts as much as the winners. So she set her jaw, and pushed the bright red hat her mother had made for her down firmly on her head, seeming to shrink, to make herself invisible as she walked the road alongside many others on their way to the great event, and stepped towards destiny, towards history.

A tall boy walking beside her caught her eye, as he bent to feed an apple to a creature at his feet which seemed as if a length of the road itself had come to life; a wriggling coil of rocks grinding up a dust cloud around it where it went. The boy looked back at her with squinting eyes and asked, perfunctorily, if she meant to catch the tournament.

‘I’m Ash’, said the girl with her best boy voice, which was still a little bright. ‘I’m going to catch them all.’

Of banter and japery

2010-12-15T14:36:00.001Z

'So what’s the thing with your eyes?’ asks Jenny as they go down the stairs.

‘Is this small talk?’ says the Doctor, rolling her empty eyes. ‘No idea, actually. They’ve always been like that, they don’t do anything exciting. Look a bit neat is all.’

‘They suit you anyway. Remind me to kiss them sometime.’ Jenny stares the Doctor in the eye with unrestrained appetite and makes her blush.

‘While we’re on each others’ body and holes, how did you get that handsome scar on your cheek?’

‘A long story’, says Jenny, looking into the distance and touching her scarred cheek not noticing herself slowing down. ‘Which I’ll be happy to tell you. Sometime.’

Without quite knowing why the Doctor takes Jenny’s hand in hers and they walk side by side into the thick fog and noise of the bar and she seems to be urged forward and up by eager ghosts tickling in her stomach and making her smile a big idiot smile to Jenny who looks at her curious and affectionate and they almost walk into the old gang, sitting by the old table, without looking.

‘We were just wondering if you had been eaten’, says Death with his usual enigmatic humor. Liv puts her elbows on the table and rests her head in her hands with an angelic smile and her eyes wander from the girls’ entwined hands to their faces. The Driver only stares, without taking his glass from his mouth.

‘Well I don’t think we have to spell it out’, says the Doctor perfectly nonchalant, dropping her coat onto a chair and sitting down with smooth, well measured movements. She brushes an invisible speck of dust from her shoulder and grabs the nearest bottle and takes a gulp without glancing at the contents. Jenny sits down next to her and tries not to roll her eyes.

‘Jenny and the Doctor sitting in a tree’, says Death.

The Doctor feels a heat on her cheeks and stares hard at the table right in front of her. A joyous shout seems to rise as if from far away, slowly, building to a conversational level as Liv’s and the Driver’s smiles grow.

‘Kay eye ess ess eye en gee’, says Death, and the crimson fires of his eyes dance as if roaring with dark laughter just below the range of hearing. Crawling on the table top as if trying feebly to dig underneath it, surprised and pleased with the coolness of the wood against her cheek, the Doctor laughs helplessly.

Jenny, head tilted to the side and resting on her knuckles, watches with a patient smile, and perhaps her eyes glitter a little when no one watches her. Eventually, as the laughing and the poking and the teasing die down, she says ‘How about a walk guys? As a change from sitting and drinking all night I mean. Show me your strange beautiful city.’

‘Ooh, ooh, I was thinking about walkings before’, says the Doctor. ‘I’ve a feeling it’ll be all adventure-like and fun.’

‘You pronounced sleep-deprivation poems about it, love’, says Liv, primly patting the Doctor’s sprawled-out arm. She takes a breath, as if gearing up, and reaches unconsciously for her staff leaning on the side of the table.

‘Walk?’ says the Driver. ‘You mean like with feet?’

‘Why, were you thinking of driving somewhere’ says Death.

‘No, that seems perfectly reasonable’ says the Driver, slamming down the last half of a tall glass of beer and putting it down on the table carefully as if it might detonate at the slightest bump against the hard surface.

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The blag celebrates 101 posts! Let's mark the occasion with some sex

2010-12-13T20:49:00.003Z

In the pale light of the naked fluorescent tube Jenny looks dead but she pulls the Doctor close to her and shows herself warm and living and the water running over them seems almost like steam and the Doctor bows her head trembling a little and explores Jenny’s wet face with her mouth until Jenny slowly, gently grasps her chin and leads her to a kiss and the Doctor’s lips slip against Jenny’s and then down over her chin and neck and breast while the two girls sink to their knees, embracing, engrossed. Jenny’s back arches backward, tense, like a bow, although her arms are quite relaxed, as if disconnected from the tumult of her body, and move with just a little trace of stiffness as she leads the Doctor so patiently and carefully none of them are entirely sure if the Doctor follows her or moves of her own will, languid hands caressing Jenny’s cheeks.

And Jenny somehow lies on her back tangling her fingers into the Doctor’s thick wet hair clinging to her stomach as the Doctor touches her nipple with the top of her tongue in a moment that goes by without any special attention. Jenny barely feels the touch between the constant caress of the shower and the Doctor feels no taste other than water.

‘Be careful please I’m very sensitive just there’, says Jenny, urgently whispering, taking a sharp breath when the Doctor places a kiss just there, a small but lingering sucking kiss that makes Jenny pull her hands up to her shoulders and whine quietly.

The Doctor keeps sucking the hard hot nipple, warming up herself from the strength of Jenny’s reaction, burning with eagerness to see Jenny, to taste and smell and feel her squirm in lust and joy and to love, to care, to be allowed to do everything, but time is not enough and she wants to do everything all at once. But she can’t and she sucks and licks and tastes then the other breast and enjoys the little, the fragile little she can do just now in this moment while Jenny jerks as if in cramps under her and pushes her belly up against her breasts and beats the floor with the heels of her feet and breathes fast and deep in her throat and moans and calls, calls out as if in pain and beats the floor with the hands still doubled up to her shoulders.

The Doctor sits up, frightened, sitting on Jenny’s thighs and worries with hands crossed between her breasts while Jenny gasps for air, staring up into the water beam.

‘Are you okay’, asks the Doctor, ‘did I do something wrong or?’

‘No no’, says Jenny, blindly reaching her hands to the Doctor, finding only her knees and absently stroking them, a little protective. ‘That was a perfectly ordinary orgasm. A fine orgasm. The first one you’ve given any living person and you did that with just my breasts. Is that extra satisfying or just frustrating?’

‘Oh, right’, says the Doctor and lies down on Jenny’s chest with hands on her shoulders in something that could be an embrace if the floor wasn’t in the way and relaxes. ‘Don’t know what I was thinking.’ Jenny strokes the Doctor’s back and doesn’t seem to notice her entire body weight. ‘There’s so much happening and I’m flickering through all my talents and personalities but I can’t think of any way to stop time.’

‘I know’, says Jenny, calm, comforting. ‘It’s the worst and the best thing with time, it never stops, you don’t get a single solitary free moment.’ She twists her neck to kiss the Doctor’s forehead. ‘Though sometimes I sure wish I could.’

One heartbeat the girls lie there, wistful, glad, fulfilled, empty; one endless second in the hot drizzle of the shower.

And then they rush back across the fortunately deserted hallway to Jenny’s room and dry up with some slightly used towels and put their clothes on and hurry down the hall.

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Take a deep breath

2010-12-11T19:38:00.003Z

Courtesy of a Michael Aislabie Denham, who in the ninteenth century wrote:

"What a happiness this must have been seventy or eighty years ago and upwards, to those chosen few who had the good luck to be born on the eve of this festival of all festivals; when the whole earth was so overrun with ghosts, boggles, bloody-bones, spirits, demons, ignis fatui, brownies, bugbears, black dogs, specters, shellycoats, scarecrows, witches, wizards, barguests, Robin-Goodfellows, hags, night-bats, scrags, breaknecks, fantasms, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, boggy-boes, dobbies, hob-thrusts, fetches, kelpies, warlocks, mock-beggars, mum-pokers, Jemmy-burties, urchins, satyrs, pans, fauns, sirens, tritons, centaurs, calcars, nymphs, imps, incubuses, spoorns, men-in-the-oak, hell-wains, fire-drakes, kit-a-can-sticks, Tom-tumblers, melch-dicks, larrs, kitty-witches, hobby-lanthorns, Dick-a-Tuesdays, Elf-fires, Gyl-burnt-tales, knockers, elves, rawheads, Meg-with-the-wads, old-shocks, ouphs, pad-foots, pixies, pictrees, giants, dwarfs, Tom-pokers, tutgots, snapdragons, sprets, spunks, conjurers, thurses, spurns, tantarrabobs, swaithes, tints, tod-lowries, Jack-in-the-Wads, mormos, changelings, redcaps, yeth-hounds, colt-pixies, Tom-thumbs, black-bugs, boggarts, scar-bugs, shag-foals, hodge-pochers, hob-thrushes, bugs, bull-beggars, bygorns, bolls, caddies, bomen, brags, wraiths, waffs, flay-boggarts, fiends, gallytrots, imps, gytrashes, patches, hob-and-lanthorns, gringes, boguests, bonelesses, Peg-powlers, pucks, fays, kidnappers, gallybeggars, hudskins, nickers, madcaps, trolls, robinets, friars' lanthorns, silkies, cauld-lads, death-hearses, goblins, hob-headlesses, bugaboos, kows, or cowes, nickies, nacks necks, waiths, miffies, buckies, ghouls, sylphs, guests, swarths, freiths, freits, gy-carlins Gyre-carling, pigmies, chittifaces, nixies, Jinny-burnt-tails, dudmen, hell-hounds, dopple-gangers, boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, hobbits, hobgoblins, brown-men, cowies, dunnies, wirrikows, alholdes, mannikins, follets, korreds, lubberkins, cluricauns, kobolds, leprechauns, kors, mares, korreds, puckles korigans, sylvans, succubuses, blackmen, shadows, banshees, lian-hanshees, clabbernappers, Gabriel-hounds, mawkins, doubles, corpse lights or candles, scrats, mahounds, trows, gnomes, sprites, fates, fiends, sibyls, nicknevins, whitewomen, fairies, thrummy-caps, cutties, and nisses, and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description, that there was not a village in England that had not its own peculiar ghost."

That sentence I find funny on so many levels.

Our Homestuck homage

2010-12-10T08:28:00.002Z

The Doctor wakes a little, in a thick fog. Waking up is the worst part of sleeping, she thinks, at least if you wake in the middle of the deep sleep you’ve been missing the past few weeks or maybe months. But she stretches out in the bed and sighs pleasantly and enjoys being outside of time, unaware and unable to find out what the time is.

Idly stroking her belly and the inside of her thighs she remembers Jenny and sighs again, a little deeper, wondering in passing where the grey girl may be before sinking back into the depths. She doesn’t even know who she is but distantly notes with something hot in her cheeks that she seems much changed from the Doctor a couple of days ago who never bothered to even fantasize about having sex.

And then Jenny comes back, a warm reassuring weight by the Doctor’s side, sitting on the edge of the bed munching a sub judging by the sound containing thick layers of greasy meat. ‘Want a bite?’ she asks and the Doctor grunts no. Jenny soon concludes her affair with the sandwich and leans over the Doctor and buries a hand in her hair and brushes her lips over her cheek. The Doctor closes her eyes and smiles and floats on a small disappearing fluffy tickling cloud over the abyss of unconsciousness. She moves her mouth to say something nice and falls long and hard to sleep.

When the Doctor wakes again she sees the window in the far end of the room with the curtain opened. The night sky glows quiet and blue and serene, although the Doctor can glimpse it between the skyscrapers. Instead a streetlight below the window lights up the raindrops on the glass and Jenny’s body with its fat yellow light. Jenny stands naked with a hand against the window and watches the rain and looks calm and sad as if she was a thousand miles away and the Doctor’s heart aches at the sight of her.

‘You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve seen’, says the Doctor and stands up and takes a few hesitant steps towards Jenny with her arms wrapped around her breasts. ‘What’s on your mind?’

‘Oh, thanks’, says Jenny. She turns halfway round and watches the Doctor and smiles without losing her contact with the window, or her somber cool. ‘I’m just. . .thinking about the rain. This place is pretty, just now.’

‘Liv calls it the Land of Light and Rain. This time of the day.’ The Doctor tries to look outside and see the city as Jenny might, as a newcomer, but she can’t take her eyes off Jenny. The light on her skin makes it look somehow colored and the Doctor thinks of examining every centimeter of that skin and see how it changes color in different lights and how it tastes and how the grey nipples feel hardening against her tongue.

‘We should maybe go down to the bar and see if your friends are here’, says Jenny. ‘Bluh, I don’t like to say your friends, sounds like I’m trying to separate them and us.’ She turns back to the view, the blank buildings, the damp street. ‘Can I say our friends?’

‘We can ask them’, says the Doctor and swallows. She changes her mood with some effort and takes another few steps to embrace Jenny from behind and kiss her neck with arms around her belly. Jenny shudders and breathes in sharply and pushes gently against the Doctor. Slowly Jenny takes the Doctor’s hands in hers and leads them sliding upward.

‘I want to make you feel like you did with me’, says the Doctor, whispering to Jenny’s shoulder. The Doctor’s fingers, led by Jenny’s soft touch, brushes between her breasts and over her collarbones.’

‘I can show you’, says Jenny. ‘And, mm, you’re on the right track. I don’t want to complain but I don’t think we have time we need a shower they’re going to think I ate you up.’ Jenny talks faster and faster and shivers when the Doctor’s fingertips stroke the base of her throat.

‘Wait, you said there’s a shower here?’ says the Doctor. She stops some two or three millimeters from Jenny’s nipples and Jenny stiffens for a moment before untangling from the embrace and going around the Doctor with easy steps and dragging her by the hand out the door and across the hallway into a tiny bathroom covered in plain white tiles.

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Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more

2010-12-08T08:50:00.002Z

‘Through cracks in the armor we breathe’, says the Doctor, forgiving, smiling, pleasantly aware of Jenny’s weight on her chest. The jagged black line over her cheek, she notices, is an old scar. In the undreamed of closeness to the girl so brave, the Doctor thinks, that she lives completely without shields and displays, makes the placid philosopher shell she made a moment ago crack and she shows her self and meets Jenny’s eye with an intense burning empty expression. She relaxes, arms and legs dropping down on the mattress and her back sinks down even though she didn’t notice she was pressing herself to Jenny, it takes all her strength to be herself, the true self inside the shells.

‘My name is Altjira’, says the girl with a quiet, powerless voice. Jenny stares at her, frozen as if she had never seen a human before. ‘I’m not afraid of you. At all. So I can be myself. A little while.’ Their breaths mix, Jenny’s rattling shivering breath with the other girl’s controlled thin. ‘Kiss me again. If you please. I want you. Love you. Teach me to love.’

Jenny, perhaps not old enough to know better, closes her eyes and pushes her lips against the girl’s, lightly, gently, tenderly. The girl responds with joy, and the most minute movement of her lips, like a tiny quiver. Her heart wants to beat faster and harder but keeps a controlled rhythm with just the merest increase. Still, so still and aware of every little thing the girl lies under Jenny reaching heights of joy, physical sensations of pleasure rushing through her unmoving body that she could never dream of. When Jenny at last pulls back and yet so gently brushes her fingertips over the side of the girl’s face she opens her eyes and meets Jenny’s curious gaze and smiles a simple, powerless smile and feels her heart beat harder.

Jenny, unsure what to do next and if she has done right at all, swallows and sits up on her knees, straddling the Doctor thighs against thighs. She looks to the side, thoughtfully scratching her chin with a finger unconscious of her splendid nakedness showing to the Doctor in the flattering dusky light.

‘Hey, your breasts are even smaller than mine’, says the Doctor, back to one of her common selves, an easygoing innocent maybe thoughtlessly honest person.

Jenny puts her hands on her little breasts, not protecting as much as presenting, and looks down on them with an indulgent smile. ‘Yeah, I like them’, she says and points with her face to the left, ‘this is Simon’, and then the right, ‘and this is Garfunkel.’

‘Hi?’ says the Doctor and tears her eyes from Jenny to contemplate her own funbags.

Jenny turns to the side a bit and puts her hands behind her neck and pushes her chest out and asks, ‘what do you think?’

‘I’m not sure if I should hug you or throw you money.’ The Doctor’s hands wander, as if on their own, up Jenny’s hips, landing on her butt cheeks wondering what they’re doing there. ‘You’re the most beautiful person I’ve seen. The nakedest anyway.’

‘I can live with that’, says Jenny and bends down and tastes the Doctor’s breasts and slowly works her way further down with her mouth and her hands until the Doctor pushes against her and calls her name and comes shaking, joyous. Covered in sweat, still shaking, the Doctor only manages a satisfied whine when Jenny’s head butts against her cheek and she comes close in a warm embrace and the Doctor’s hands wrap themselves around Jenny’s back, Jenny’s hard sinewy back, which she absently notes is covered in more scars, and pulls her closer yet and so they both fall asleep, firmly entangled, while the black and white dots run across the sky.

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"Dragon girl and girl with many faces", Photoshop

2010-12-08T08:42:00.006Z

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Sleep comes at last. Again. And then again.

2010-12-06T22:52:00.003Z

CHAPTER THREE

Killers, lovers

How many have you killed?’ the Doctor asks, nicely. She lies sprawled on the wide bed and looks up on Jenny, sitting on the edge, with searching eyes and loses her breath from the intensity of Jenny’s face. Naked, unclouded sadness; quiet, sober sadness.

‘I don’t have any idea’, says Jenny, slowly, enunciating every word. She turns forward, looking into the wall. A bothered silence grows for several seconds. ‘Even if I only count human beings, only those I’ve killed of my own free will, only innocents. It’s too many to count.’

‘Stupid question huh’, says the Doctor, almost unconsciously reaching a hand to Jenny as if she wanted to save the girl from drowning in guilt. ‘How about we sleep and forget everything?’

‘Sure’, says Jenny with a humble smile over her shoulder. She takes three steps to the switch by the door to turn off the ceiling lamp and put the room in a compact darkness. A sliver of pale blue nightlight comes in through the edge of the window but lacks the strength to illuminate.

The Doctor can hear Jenny walk into something, rattle something else and crumple a third something before gliding in under the blankets next to her, so smoothly and silently the Doctor only senses the heat of her body.

‘Check this out’, Jenny whispers. A spark lights in the dark and grows to a little flame, dancing on Jenny’s extended fingertip. Sitting leaning against the wall she lights a candle in a copper candlestick in her hand. The shadows and the yellow light play in her face and she stares into the fire with a distant, dreaming smile. The Doctor stares enchanted as Jenny puts the candle down on the little table next to the bed and squirms down under the cover, unaware of anything but the shape of her body in the dim light. Jenny turns to the Doctor and brushes her cheek with a hand, with a shallow but lengthy sigh, before lying down on her back and closing her eyes.

‘The fire has its good sides and bad sides’, says Jenny under her breath, as if to herself.

The fire draws people close with the promise of security, as the Doctor finds when she wakes some time later with her arms around Jenny’s neck and face buried in her shoulder. The Doctor feels naked and unshelled and cries, if it’s for Brother or for the painful life he’s forced her to. Jenny mutters something and puts a hand on the Doctor’s shoulder, not exactly comforting but not far off for someone deep in sleep. The Doctor takes what she can get and hugs the sleeping girl a little firmer and sleeps again, while her tears keep running.

From far away the static buzz of the day sky slithers in, clinging close and waking her up again. The Doctor’s neck rests on Jenny’s arm, hard like wood under the soft warm skin, and her nosetip pushes against a shoulder just as warm. Slowly, sleepily, her lips brush against Jenny’s grey skin and her hand slides over Jenny’s belly a little surprised to feel a few long scars and Jenny wakes, eager, hot, hungry. She pushes the Doctor down on her back and hoists herself up on top of her in a single smooth motion and kisses the Doctor testing, prying, urging, with barely kept in check force before opening her eyes and it’s over so fast the Doctor doesn’t quite have time to take in what’s happening.

‘Sorry’, says Jenny, eye to gleaming wet eye with the Doctor in the flickering candlelight and bare and naked and burning guilt in her stare. ‘A moment of weakness.’

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Putting the "gee" in "carnage"

2010-12-03T07:57:00.002Z

The boy’s scream dies instantly, but he keeps trembling under her while she holds the heart over her head and drinks of the dripping blood. After a few seconds she lets the heart fall to the floor, losing interest, and throws herself at the next victim. The mass of people flood out of the bar, but Jenny catches the last one in the door and rams a hand into her back. Something makes a satisfying crack when she twists and pulls her hand out and the girl falls down in a growing puddle of blood, mewling quietly. Out on the street people stand in lines as if they were waiting to be put off and Jenny runs, with heavy steps making marks in the cobblestones, striking them down one by one.

With her palm she takes off the head of a little child and moves on without touching the parents standing next to it. The mother’s desperate scream rings in Jenny’s ears several blocks away and makes her grin while the human in her, still awake and powerless, wishes with all her heart that she could cry. Somehow she eventually sinks into the red mist and doesn’t have to watch anymore.

When Jenny comes to again the city burns in smoldering ember, in flames held back by thick splashing raindrops. In the night, in the rain, in the dim light of the fire she stands on her knees surrounded by piles of bodies. She breathes heavily, exhausted, burned out. A lone, young policeman in a blue uniform steps slowly toward her and says something she can’t hear. His revolver pointing at her is clear enough, she thinks. Slowly, carefully, she sits down and turns her face to the cop, surrendering. The tears come at last, gushing over her cheeks streaked with blood.

The officer looks at her as if knowing he’s about to die. His hands shake so hard he drops the weapon. He swallows hard and goes down on his knees in front of Jenny. She blinks once, slowly, and tries to look him in the eye, tries to say how sorry she is, but turns her face down instead.

‘It’s best if you shoot me’, says Jenny with a cracking voice. She finally looks at the man, begging, grieving. He picks up the revolver without taking his eyes off her, full of terror and loathing and wonder.

‘I don’t know what’s going on’, he says. ‘You’re giving up? You kill everyone and then you give up?’

‘Please’, says Jenny. ‘I can’t take any more.’ She can’t lie. She talks and as she talks finds what’s true, what she knows but doesn’t want to admit to herself. ‘I don’t want to live anymore.’

He shoots her four times in the chest and as he shoots his face goes from pity to rage. Jenny feels nothing and slides down on her back without struggling. She doesn’t seem to be able to move. Everything seems to fall around her and then she wakes up with a twitch.

It’s three days later in a forest far, far away and Jenny is born again through the earth goddess, waking up in a cocoon of grass and dirt, but not slowly and pleasantly as she’s used to. She wakes as if from a nightmare and remembers everything as if it still happened. Shaking, weeping she curls up and mourns alone. Terra comes to her like a mother and holds her and speaks wise and encouraging words without any conviction.

And eventually Jenny gets up and walks away.

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Alchoholes

2010-12-02T07:44:00.001Z

On the weekend, the boy says, he wants to get drunk. When most of the people she knows drink every day of the week Jenny can’t see any problem with that and nor does the boy ask why she doesn’t drink and so they sit on Friday afternoon at a window table at a fancier bar together with three or four acquaintances and have a glass or ten in peace and quiet.

If time has slowed down before it comes to a complete halt now when Jenny returns from a bathroom visit and takes several gulps from her stein of raspberry lemonade before noticing the powerful burning aftertaste. Coughing and grimacing she asks the gang if something happened to the drink while she was gone and tries to remember where she knows the taste from, the strange unfriendly burning sensation that sticks to her throat and spreads in her belly. She has felt it once before, many years ago. Once that she remembers and who knows how many parties she has been to that she can’t remember. ‘Liquor?’ she guesses and everything moves so slowly, her eyebrows come up like boats in a lock.

That time eighty-four years ago comes back like a punch in the gut, the memory Jenny tried to ignore and, she now sees, should have told her drinking buddies about the first thing she did if she had dared to talk about it. She should have warned them she thinks and feels every bead of sweat pushing through the skin of her forehead and all she can hear is rumbling slowed-down voices, they all look at her with encouraging smiles and the boy holds a comforting arm around her shoulders and they still have no idea what’s happening.

‘Run’, says Jenny, she tries to sound hard as steel but only manages to get out an incoherent little sound and the fire in her belly grows fast and the world already goes red around the edges. All her life she has fought to keep the dragon down, under control, almost without failing, but with a mouthful of vodka in her she has no chance. The dragon has woken and hungers for violence and fire and blood and she can’t stop it.

‘Run’, roars Jenny, standing up stiff. Fear grabs her just below the ribs and feeds the dragon who whispers to her burning with spite and self-righteousness how much better it is to be angry than scared and she can’t resist being angry with the idiots who don’t have the sense to listen to her when she tries to warn them for her. The table, screwed to the floor, flips with a crunch of breaking wood when she raises her hand. No resistance at all. Her strength is unstoppable. The people around her stare and, at last, slowly back away from her. The fear falls away as the world turns red and the last of Jenny’s self-control fades and she wishes she could pass out or look away but she sees everything.

She sees herself stop shaking and standing still. Her head falls down to her chest and her shoulders shrink. For a moment she seems relaxed. Then she pounces on the nearest human, her boy, who looks on her uncomprehending. His compassionate expression changes to fear as he lands on the floor on his back with the grey girl kneeling on top of him and for an unbearably long second their eyes meet and neither of them can see anything they recognize and Jenny wants to hold him and tell him sorry but instead she breaks up his ribcage and rips out his heart.

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In which a white prince shows up and sweeps her of her feet

2010-12-01T08:16:00.003Z

FIREWATER

The dragonborne’s story (1)

It’s a long time ago in a world far away. Two hundred and fifty-five years old Jenny goes to school and falls in love with a boy for the first time, a boy whose name she will forget.

This school has many novelties for Jenny. She lives in a room with one of her classmates which after classes frequently fill up with ten or twenty people, talking, laughing, partying. To be forced into such closeness and such intense socializing with so many different persons makes her overwhelmed, almost scared. The greater part of these constant parties she spends sitting in a corner of her bed reading her roommate’s comic books. The roommate, Simon, sometimes pushes her on her feet to dance, sometimes to stand in front of some strange human and demurely head-loweringly avoiding to converse.

Jenny thinks to herself she likes to feel the room vibrate from all the motions and all the voices and stink from smoke and sweat and drink and steam from the cumulative body head. She likes the life and motion and the people, as long as she doesn’t have to be part of them.

Until one day the boy sits down beside her. A quiet creak from the bed springs and a wind that barely moves the hairs on her arm are the only things that signal his presence to Jenny.

‘Hey. What are you reading?’ says a noticeably sober voice by her ear. Jenny turns to a kind, curious face hidden under thick yellow hair, ditto beard, ditto eyebrows. The boy radiates calm assuredness reminding her of a mountain, and something else she can’t put her finger on. Completely surprised she stares and the boy and smiles without even thinking of saying anything.

The boy picks the forgotten book from her lap and turns it to see the cover. ‘X-men. Good choice’, he says, and Jenny’s smile gets wider all by itself.

‘I can recommend you some harder to chew stuff if you get bored sometime’, he says, and his clear blue gaze meets hers as if it was the most obvious thing in the world to ogle him for a full minute or more. Jenny’s smile slowly fades to seriousness and worry as her self-consciousness grows and she still can’t think of anything to say and can’t take her eyes off him.

The boy, fluent in a language Jenny yet hardly knows about, leans over the little space between them with something unspeakably tender in his look and kisses her, slowly. Jenny blinks several times in short order, surprised all over again by the feeling of his hairy lips unlike anything she has experienced before, closing a circuit somewhere in the depths of her heart and she gasps and her eyes tear up though she doesn’t know why while at the same time she answers his kiss, it’s not so strange, she has kissed girls many times before and the difference is small.

And the party goes on without stopping outside their skins. And the boy pulls back when he feels a tear in his beard and looks at her worried full of concern and she gives him a probing, fleeting smile followed by a real one, takes a deep breath and strokes his cheek with a grey hand.

For four days Jenny will later remember she loved for a whole lifetime. And then comes the weekend.

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On death and kidneys

2010-11-30T07:53:00.003Z

‘So’, says the Driver, ‘that was painless. Now I guess would be a good time to tell you about the twenty-five dead whores I’ve buried in my basement.’ Eight eyes nail themselves to him. ‘Too soon to make jokes? Oh well.’ He looks down at the table and takes a slow drink from his glass. ‘No, but, Doctor, you know we’re with you. Whatever happens.’ Death and Liv hasten to hum and nod in agreement and the Doctor looks humble loving on each of them in turn.

‘What loyalty’, says Jenny, wiping a maybe not entirely make-believe tear from the corner of her eye. ‘You my ladies and gentlemen are adorable. Wonderful. So happy I came here.’

‘Which I suppose brings us to the next item on today’s meeting’, says Death with a voice that makes the glasses on the table rattle just a little.

‘Hmm? I’m Jenny Creed’, says Jenny. ‘I’m not from Hearthstown. But no one is really from here if I got it right.’ She still holds the Doctor’s hand in her very warm and slowly strokes her thumb over the girl’s fingers. ‘To help people is my job. But who could resist her, what’s your name by the way?’

‘The Doctor.’

‘The Doctor’s tearjerking story. What’s everyone else’s name anyway? People in this world have such unlikely names, I love it.’

Somehow Jenny insinuates herself in the conversation without giving away anything about herself other than her drink being pure fruit juice and the night passes in the blink of an eye without a lull in the merry mutually educational exchange. When the Doctor comes to think of going home and realizes it would be impossible to even pretend to sleep there Jenny doesn’t hesitate to offer her room and Ellen assures it’s no kidney theft operation and everyone hugs and parts ways.

‘There aren’t any kidney thieves’, Jenny elucidates to the Doctor as they find themselves standing alone by the bar. ‘The technology you need to store and transport live organs cost more than you can make selling them, just about anywhere.’

‘Makes sense’, the Doctor admits. She can’t think of anything else to say.

‘So I guess it’s high time for sane people to be sound asleep’, says Jenny, with a yawn showing her tongue and gums to be grey. The Doctor stares as if she just stepped out of a black and white film and she meets the Doctor’s eyes with a playful lingering smile.

‘I can’t promise not to cut your throat when you’re sleeping’, says the Doctor, ‘but I’ll try.’

‘Always nice to hear’, says Jenny. ‘But don’t sprain yourself about it, cause I’m actually immortal.’ She leads the Doctor up a narrow flight of stairs in a dark corner of the bar and her bare grey feet step softly light on her toes on the wooden plank floor so carefree, so unhampered seething with restrained power as if she was taking effort not to spring into the air and the Doctor wonders how strong her legs are and tries to swallow her heart back down into place.

‘I wasn’t planning on seducing you anyway’, says Jenny as they reach her room, a tiny room without much more than a big bed and a big window with heavy drapes shutting out the unsound light. ‘Though I admit I am particularly fascinated by virgins.’ She turns her face down and looks up at the Doctor with a shy smile and the Doctor blushes even though she’s not sure if Jenny kids, even though she’s sure that being seduced is the last thing she would want at the moment. ‘Come and sit next to me on the bed and I’ll tell you a story.

‘You have killed someone you know and love. You can’t get away from that and I can’t say anything to make it better. I can only tell you that I’ve done the same thing, that I know a little about what you’re feeling right now, that you’re not alone, that I’m not going to let you go through it alone.’

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People, then policy, then profit

2010-11-29T17:44:00.003Z

Allow me to present The Three Laws of Politics:

1. A politician must never hurt a human, or by failing to act allow a human to be hurt.

2. A politician must always follow the first law in policy decisions.

3. A politician must always follow the first and second law in financial or budgetary decisions.

Hypothetical zeroth law:

A politician must never make a decision for a human without both the human's personal permission and an emotional investment in the human's well-being.

How to make friends and inebriate people

2010-11-29T09:40:00.002Z

She comes up with mixing beer and wine before she’s drunk enough to say that now she is a murderer. Again the Doctor cries as she tells of her mistakes, the two things she did without thinking and regrets, and his lies, how could he walk around hiding such feelings and so on, not that she succeeded in talking it out exactly, maybe she’s crazy and not the funny sort of crazy that makes life interesting but dangerous, anyway she has ruined everything and she wants Brother back.

‘I think you shouldn’t blame yourself so hard’, says a new voice. A pair of warm, strong, grey arms embraces her where she sits at the table with the Driver, Death and Liv and the Doctor, surprised but not afraid, spills tears over the arms and doesn’t move. ‘The basic problem seems to be that he was an asshole and not that he’s dead. And that’s his own fault.’ The grey girl maybe notices the Doctor’s lack of response and lets go and instead sits next to her and greets the gathering with a grave smile.

‘Well’, says the Doctor diplomatically, ‘we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, my beloved Brother even.’

‘I can’t stand that kind, fake sycophantic turds who think they can only use girls for, that the goal of any relationship with a girl is to have sex with her, sorry if I’m cruel’, says the grey girl in one breath, shifting from twisted accusing eyebrows to a worried doubtful look. ‘Were you related by blood by the way? If that matters.’

‘No, it’s just his name was Brother’, says the Doctor, more unsteady than her intake of wine-beer should suggest. ‘We were orphanage kids.’

‘Oh’, says Jenny, now with tears in her eyes and pain in her voice. ‘That’s, it’s got to be hard.’ She reaches a hand across the table to the Doctor, in a puddle of something.

‘Mm’, the Doctor hums agreeably, curiously and just a little crosseyedly searching the strange grey girl’s eye. Such plainness, such straightforwardness, she seemed self-righteous cynical at first but she cares, she really cares though we barely even met, I don’t get it. I want to spend the rest of my life figuring out who you are, the Doctor thinks. ‘Though undeniably he turned out to be an asshole at the end.’ She takes Jenny’s hand in hers and smiles through the tears.

Liv, Death and the Driver watches quietly, chocked nearly sober.

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Things happen

2010-11-24T08:31:00.002Z

The Doctor bows gratefully and watches Liv’s bare bronze-hued back as Liv walks ahead and she wishes she could stop time and gather up strength and courage to talk about everything she’s thinking and feeling and has done. But then Liv disappears further into the house and leaves her lying with her coat for a blanket on a couch, a very comfortable couch she notes just before losing consciousness.

As if in a dream the Doctor crawls to Liv, shrinking in her arms and weeping as she confesses her sins. Liv kisses her bloody hands and her wet cheeks and she looks into Liv’s eyes full of understanding and compassion and shivers nervously, as if she were unworthy of Liv’s great kindness, she blushes and wants to look away but can’t and Liv’s lips press against hers so light and careful and makes her whimper without meaning to and she answers the kiss hungry urging reckless crying. She understands she’s dreaming and wishes nothing more than to lose herself in the dream.

But she snaps awake, twined into her doctor’s coat and with her face wet, and twitches again when she sees Death’s face floating by her shoulder. Somehow in her sleep she has managed to wriggle out of her shirt and one of her little breasts poke out between the arms of the blanket, bathing in the red light of Death’s eyes, and she pulls the coat up to cover herself, holding on to it with both hands as if it might fly away and only then dares to raise her head and say hi in an unsteady voice.

‘You don’t seem to have any parts I haven’t seen before’, says Death, calming. ‘Don’t panic.’

‘Are you watching me while I sleep?’ says the Doctor, sure there must be a much better explanation to waking up with someone crouching by your side but unable to figure it out.

‘No, I just walked by and saw you crying. Was just wondering if I ought to wake you up when you woke up. Nightmares huh?’

The Doctor nods and wipes the tears from her cheeks. ‘If you want to help’, she says and turns on her side, eye to eye with Death, ‘could you sit so I can put my head on your lap? I don’t want to feel so alone.’ Her voice is weak, small, defeated and she looks so naked and scared that Death can’t tell her no. So, resting on Death’s black leg plates, soft and gentle to touch as if the spikes and blades floating around all over his armor were no more dangerous than a bed of freshly cut grass, she feels welcome and breathes deeply. She tries to become someone who can deal with the things she has done and had done to her but she lacks a frame of reference, it’s all new experiences and she is lost.

‘Want to talk?’ asks Death. Absently, he strokes her hair with an armored hand and it feels safer and cleaner than it ever did with Brother.

‘Death?’ says the Doctor, bending her neck a bit to look up at his face. ‘What would you do if I said I wanted to sleep with you?’ He can probably feel her racing heart, but he doesn’t move and doesn’t make a sound while carefully considering.

‘I’d have to say no. First of all you’re Liv’s best friend of all, and then Liv’s and my relationship, well, it’s complicated but there would be consequences. And you and I are friends too I would think.’

‘Good, that’s good’, says the Doctor, sleepily. ‘You’re a good boy.’

‘And you’re a bad girl.’

‘But I’m good at it.’

‘No but what’s the thing? Did you have a sex dream about me? Oh boy what a nightmare.’

‘None of that stuff. It was a purely hypothetical scenario. Ah right, it might have sounded like some kind of test, I didn’t mean it that way.’

‘I figured it was an invite, you couldn’t resist my musky male mysteriousness forever.’

‘You got some sort of massive musk going, I’ll admit.’ The Doctor laughs a little and chases off a little more of the day’s horrors. Time pauses for an endless moment and the Doctor feels still like Death. She can hear the buzzing from outside, slowly grinding down. The day passes like every other day and the Doctor begins to understand that everything isn’t going to end, that life intends to go on as if nothing happened for most people, that it at least intends to go on for everyone but one.

‘I was just thinking of you’ is therefore the first thing the Doctor says to Liv when she shows up with messy hair and a coffee mug.

‘Did I miss something fun?’ says Liv with a sarcastic pair of eyebrows to the cuddle pit in the couch.

‘Doc wants us all to make a porno together’, says Death with a blank voice.

‘The Driver too?’ asks Liv with a complete lack of surprise.

‘He can run the camera’, says the Doctor, trying not to giggle.

People keep lying and topping each other in silliness during food intake and clothing ontake and all three of them feel adequately pleased with being as they step into the evening light to once again seek out the magical misspelled bar. The Doctor reasons the beer might oil her up to get her long story out more easily, though Liv reminds her that truth is traditionally found in wine.

The Doctor turns her face up and catches raindrops on her tongue and savors life like a condemned person on the way to her execution. One last walk with the friends before everything changes forever. Maybe.

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Wait, what?

2010-11-22T16:15:00.004Z

The Doctor feels a new shell take shape around her like a lump in her throat. A cold and hard thing deep inside that doesn’t like being touched, that feels mobbed and frightened and betrayed. She grunts and gets him to let her up and walks to the kitchen where she turns on the water faucet to get Brother to think she’s taking a drink.

He’s going to want to do that again, says a voice, hushed, though she can hear it clearly over the sound of the water. He’s pretended to be your only friend all these years just to stick it in, the voice says. The Doctor grabs the longest and sharpest knife from the knife stand and sees her reflection in it, distanced and tense and mute, and turns the water off and goes back to the bedroom with the cold knife pressed to the side of her leg.

Smiling warmly, while watching herself as if from far away, the Doctor leans over Brother, takes his hand and kisses him with tears in her eyes, a kiss for all the years they’ve been alone without anyone else in the world while she pushes the knife in above his collar bone. It slides in so quickly and easily he doesn’t notice until the tip scratches his heart and she pulls it out with a little twist and he screams in despair and squirts blood in a thin fountain and throws her across the whole room and stands up and looks around confused and screams more.

The Doctor runs to him and holds him and finds she’s trying to hold him up when his knees buckle and they glide down on the floor together, slick with blood. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’, she cries and hugs him hard and yearning and tries to meet his faltering eyes. Brother’s arms move automatically, closing around the Doctor’s back and he looks surprised when he finds he’s trying to comfort her. His mouth opens but he doesn’t have strength left to speak and he looks sad when he dies and his arms fall down on the floor.

The Doctor lies still for a long time with her head on his chest, listening to the lack of heartbeats, while her tears make pink stripes in the thick blood.

‘I didn’t even tell you about my night’, she says, with a cracked little voice. The silliness of talking to a corpse makes her snap back, like a rubber band, and stand under the shower before the blood congeals, for the second time before breakfast, and reexamine her life. But when she tries to think it cuts her heart like a knife and she discovers new reserves of tears. It seemed like a good idea, or at least the only possible, so silly to want to take it back. Not to mention impossible.

Her skin goes from blood red back to its regular pale tone and back towards pink and she realizes she washes herself compulsively to wash away her guilt, like a killer in the movies, and decisively turns off the shower. The clothes she left after her last shower are still damp and remind her of past times, spent and forgone and ancient times almost five hours ago. Lost innocent times a whole lifetime ago. Her fingers close all by themselves around the bracelet back on its place on her left wrist as if it was an impregnable shield. Her decisiveness lasts out onto the street, the roaring empty street where she lights a cigarette just to do something to distract her from the sky. And all the way to Life and Death’s little house over on the Warpath and she rings the doorbell without hesitation but the bravery runs off her while she waits and listens to every move from within and becomes numb and dull with fear before Liv opens the door.

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New thrilling adventure: Doc goes to the bathroom again

2010-11-19T11:15:00.002Z

As always The Doctor becomes motherly and worried for Brother, his distance, his manias, and he of course worries over her sleeplessness and shifting personality and they stand face to face and worry about each other for a moment, until she breaks up the worry lines with a smile and sets a course for the bathroom.

‘Isn’t it terrible, all this’, says Brother, back in the couch.

‘Oh yes, all of it. Really terrible’, the Doctor admits before closing the door around her. In the mirror she sees a hollow-eyed figure barely recognizable, hands covered in still dripping blood and sticky hair clinging to her forehead and neck - how did she get blood in her hair? She peels off the rain-dank coat like a condom and the rest of her clothes and the bracelet and feels liberated as she steps under the hot spray of the shower. For now she is not the Doctor anymore but just herself, naked, blank, without duty or friends or lies.

She is still herself when she comes out, defenseless without shells, except for the towel over her shoulders. Thoughtfully enough, Brother has lowered the volume of the lights to dimmest ember glow and turned off the music and she glides through the shadows and the silence like a ghost landing in her bed. Finally, finally. Sleep calls to her stronger than the drone of the city and she falls down on her pillow as unrelenting like the damned fall to Hell, as slow as the rain rises to Heaven. She breathes out and the motion, the relaxing, never ends.

But she doesn’t sleep.

‘Brother?’ she calls, loud enough in the soft silence. Presently, his wide-shouldered profile stands in the twilight of the doorframe. ‘Can you help me go to sleep?’ asks the girl, with a voice full of innocence and faith. Without a word Brother lies down next to her, on his side, embracing her from behind. With her back pressed against his chest and his strong arms around her belly she mumbles something grateful and quickly relaxes again.

‘I think I’m a lesbian’, she says for no particular reason, in a feeble murmur.

‘That’s nice’, Brother whispers, and she feels his breath in her hair. ‘I think I’m going down before you.’ His heart slows and his grip relaxes a little bit and she feels joy lighting up like little fireflies far away in the back regions of her head dark and thick with cotton and she falls asleep.

When she wakes it’s to a warm, unthinking dark, the best part of waking up, what a mystery, she doesn’t even know who she is, maybe she is still herself. She twists to a more comfortable position and it’s nice to rub against Brother’s warm body and she feels his penis harden and squeeze against her back and she blushes and strokes his arm. Maybe she’s in love, she thinks and when he wakes and she leads him with her hand playfully cheerfully between her cheeks and he turns her over on her back and ploughs into her hurriedly breathlessly she caresses his face and his chest with her hands and she loves, loves even though he tries to be kind and tender but can’t hold back and comes fast and collapses still half sleeping with his face buried in her neck.

‘I’ve waited for this since we were five’, says Brother, a hoarse whisper close to her ear. ‘I love you, Altjira.’

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No one said she was a very good doctor

2010-11-17T07:58:00.002Z

In a grey alleyway off the side of the road, on a thick layer of dust, lies a dirty man and bleeds. On his knees beside him, with hands on his heart, sits a boy. The Doctor’s skin tightens and her vision clears and the contours become sharper as she turns on her professional person, the doctor, who quickly pushes the boy out of the way and kneels in his stead. Liv puts her arms around the boy to hold him back while the Doctor pokes the bracelet on her wrist, the bracelet looking like a chain of unevenly shaped thick white pearls, and becomes surrounded by glowing blue figures and charts floating in the air and falling over the man’s body.

Thousands of molecule-thin threads spin out of the bracelet, picking up blood cells and stuffing them into the man’s wound. The Doctor’s left hand sinks into his chest and sloshes around, looking for faults and fiddling to put them right. Fast, fast, but not fast enough. The man’s heart stops and doesn’t start again. The Doctor takes her hand out of him and pats his chest and sighs slowly.

Then the boy sits next to her and strokes the man’s face with an unreadable expression and the doctor grabs him by the shoulder with a hand that suddenly feels stiff and awkward. All her adrenalin has run out and she looks at the boy full of misery and guilt. He gives her only a brief glance before returning his attention to the dead man, and sits unmoving unspeaking until he Doctor, Death and Liv retreat back to the street and the blue light of the night.

A solemner silence surrounds them the rest of the way to the Doctor’s building, where they pause outside the front door. The first buzzing dots of the dawn climb over the rooftops in the east as if to make the end of the night a little worse.

‘You could come on up for a nightcap’, says the Doctor. ‘Or stay the day if you want. Pajamas party for all. Of course when I say party I mean I’m going to sleep like a rock.’

‘A generous offer’, says Death. ‘But I think we’ll pass?’

‘Yeah, I guess we’ll meet up again tonight’, says Liv. ‘It might be a foreign concept for you but one tends to sleep better in one’s own bed. Some other time maybe.’

Laughing, they part ways, Liv and Death walking down Fireroad and the Doctor up the stairwell hunting for her apartment. She doesn’t remember if it was on the fifth or sixth floor, but the doctor’s cross on the door leads her right.

The apartment churns with light and sound. The lights are turned up to max and Brother sits in front of the television watching some loud music show. Slow, dramatic metal with a bass sound to make brave men cry. He sits on the edge of the couch, riveted, eyes wide open. He has not noticed the Doctor’s presence.

‘Good morning’, she says, putting her hands on his shoulders and giggling when he leaps. His shirtless torso shows an impressive collection of muscles and his jump is explosive, like a steel spring, and makes the floor shake. But he is calm before he even turns around.

‘Hey, you look like crap’, says Brother.

‘Yeah, yeah, I’m going to sleep today’, says the Doctor. ‘Have you been outside at all?’ White screens cover all the windows in the apartment and with the just as white walls it seems like an antiseptic, underground cave.

‘No, you know how it is, there’s been a lot of teevee to watch.’

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Bloodless poetry

2010-11-15T08:03:00.002Z

CHAPTER THREE

The cold morning

‘I have looked ever since’, says the girl with the glasses, leaning back in the couch, looking into the distance. ‘And I’m looking still.’

The Doctor asks herself if she believes in coincidences and Liv flashes through her mind yet again, an image of her making her magic with beautiful smooth sure moves.

‘Good luck’, says Death, enunciating the little words to make them forceful, penetrating. The girl disappears back into the mist with some grateful words. Pink clouds envelop our heroes who collectively clears their throat politely and scrapes their foot to signal their leaving. The Driver gives the others a meaningful wink, with one arm around the waist of a vague person holding him with affection.

‘I’ll be busy tonight’, he says. ‘Hop you’ll make it home without me.’

‘I might crash in your car, you don’t mind I guess’, says the Doctor for some reason like a little jab.

‘Until we meet again’, says Ellen’s voice behind the bar. ‘Or?’

‘Nope, I’ll probably never see you again’, says the Doctor, quite serious. From the bar comes an, as far as could be possible, chocked silence.

‘Don’t worry’, says Liv with calm wisdom. ‘Just some invisibility humor. I think.’ The Doctor just smiles and Liv leads her by the shoulder out into the night.

‘If we walk for thirty minutes that way’, says Death, pointing with his sword, ‘we’ll get to your place, Doc.’

‘No doubt?’ says Liv.

‘Nay. It’s like a shining compass in my head.’

‘That’s my knight’, says Liv, with a wary pat on his arm. The black spikes flow and dance around slowly but randomly and we don’t quite see how she can avoid being stabbed. She throws her staff up on her back and walks and the other two follow behind.

‘I’m into some sensitive fragile poet stuff, apparently’, says the Doctor. ‘and as such I demand to lay down some tasty jams. In the jargon of the skalds, to speak.’ Life and Death shrug their shoulders.

‘Searing dead grey daylight

And thundering maddening quiet

Like a static charge, waiting to burn us

‘Waiting, yes

This city without people

Waits, breathless

Silent like an iron bell

Echoing from a building site far away

It never stops

It’ll drive us mad

‘Still we walk the forgotten streets

Through droves of yellow leaves

Whispering against our bare feet

Stalking the endless alleys

Crying for the naked clotheslines

In the rusty voices of the fire escapes

Until the night

‘Darkness falls on the city without people

Tears and leaves and rain and darkness

Light warm rain that brings us closer

That sings of mist and streetlight rainbows

‘Still the city without people gives no shelter

No window lights to show the way back home

And we wander the empty streets

In this city without people

And hope the morning never comes.’

Quiet falls over the band and makes their footsteps echo very loud as if to underscore the emptiness of the city. ‘I suppose it’s true in a way’, says Death.

‘In a way’, says Liv. Death walks a little closer to her and she pulls her cloak a little tighter around her shoulders. The Doctor staggers happily, indifferently between them. A moment of deepest most sincere calm under the silent blue sky makes time fly away until a thin scream bounds between the walls.

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And we're out of funny comments to put here

2010-11-12T10:03:00.002Z

I prepare for the ordeals of the night by meditating deeply. I’m completely relaxed and confident in my ability to take control of the first dream I see and summon this enigmatic person, who I’m confident I’ll recognize even though I don’t remember any distinguishing features.

And I’m in my bed and the bed floats somewhere in the sea with no land in sight. The sun is higher than normal and I’m sweating in very humid heat so I guess I’m close to the equator. I wish that I wasn’t alone and a hole opens up in the air and I see her whose name I don’t know and see sees me and looks very surprised. I can’t see anything on her side of the hole, but she dismisses wherever she is with a hasty glance and steps through and sits on the bed with me.

‘It’s nice here’, she says.

‘How do we know each other’, I ask. ‘I don’t remember.’

She explains something that’s so wondrously obvious, something that makes sense of everything, something that gives me joy and peace and does something immensely meaningful. We laugh, together, and I have a wholly new and wonderful feeling of belonging, of being home, and I try to clumsily explain it to her and my voice cracks and she says she understands, I had forgotten that there are those who can understand what I say.

And then I’m awake and I remember everything and can’t understand anything. The way I remember it she is both a product of my imagination and a real person at the same time, and she both wants and doesn’t want to meet in reality at the same time. The weirdest of all is the way we planned to meet up – somehow it was impossible to just say where in the world we were, but we made a plan to figure it out, a simple and clear and obvious plan and I absolutely don’t understand it now. I can’t even think about it directly, when I try to think about it I can only see a white hole of logic, brilliant shining logic that can only be seen from the outside, I can’t get close to it, I can’t get inside.

The next night I try to tell her how the plan seems to work on dream logic, dream logic so powerful than in the waking world it’s impossible to even imagine a world where it might work, but none of us remember what the plan was about. Our hands meet and I feel her frustration which is the same as my own, the irreconcilable twosomeness, the opposites that both attract and repel at the same time and all of a sudden she gasps in fear. The monster is here and she is scared and I’m scared and we run through the rain and the pain and split up and I wake up and now I’m scared that we won’t be able to find each other.

We may not be able to find each other even in our sleep.

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Going for the world record in talking about your dreams

2010-11-10T09:11:00.004Z

If I could just remember what it was I had to remember.

I take a long walk in the dusk to let my thoughts roam. They float freely wherever they want while my legs take me where they want and I think absently that I’m less conscious now than I usually am when I sleep.

The clear pale blue twilight falls upon the dull depressing concrete buildings in suffocating silence. I feel like I’m dreaming even though I know exactly where I am. Far from the grey city I sit in the grass and listen to the crows and lie on my back with a sigh of frustration and look up on the sky and let it fill my heart with its endless blue longing. A spark in the dark labyrinths of my memory. There was something about longing. Probably I was longing, longing to fulfill my promise or longing to see my friend, I don’t think I’ve ever been capable of sympathy advanced enough to experience someone else’s longing.

The monster, or my memory of the monster, whispers in the back of my head that I shouldn’t be so sure about what I feel and don’t feel.

I don’t remember going home but suddenly I’m dreaming again. I’m standing in knee deep snow and all I can see is more snow in all directions and he’s there, a disembodied warmth pressing against my back and stroking my neck and a wet needful whisper in my ear that makes me excited and sad at the same time, a shameful hungry feeling of having done something wrong of hurting someone and I weep uncontrollably and reach desperately for rain, I want rain instead of snow, I want my armor, and stupidly there’s now supercool rain covering me in heavy ice and freezing me into a small heap on the ground and I don’t even feel my tears and I wake up, cold and wet, in the grass.

In the woods some fifty meters away I think I see someone. A white, human sized shape walking towards me slowly. But it disappears when I blink so I suppose it never was there. Hallucinations aren’t very uncommon in relation to intense dreams.

The day passes as they do until I, for no apparent reason, remember another dream that woke me in the middle of the night. That person I forgot my promise to was there. I couldn’t see her face in some weird way. I can’t remember anything but a vague sense of being somewhere that I, for once, recognized. I think we talked about my promise. I acknowledge the possibility that this actual person and I actually meet in our dreams and the promise is about finding each other in the waking world. Though it seems too obvious, too simple, too perfect.

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Dream dreams everyone can see

2010-11-08T15:23:00.002Z

I think he eats my unhappiest emotions he eats my tears but in the rain, like I said, no one can see you cry and that gives me the armor I need to walk down the street and deal with things although I no longer know what it is I feel or how much or if the rain is my pain my loneliness in space where no one can hear you scream.

So I wake up with the tiniest leak in the ceiling dripping water in my face and I don’t know if the rain outside the window inspired the rain in my dreams and I don’t know if my pillow is wet from tears and what difference does it make anyway.

Later during the day I remember something that happened a long time ago that may have been a dream but it disappears and I don’t remember what it was.

I think long and hard, but can’t remember what it was I remembered. Instead I remember a memory from very long ago, or maybe the memory of a memory. I was a little child. There was someone, someone I cared about, someone I liked talking to. Some friend. It’s been so long since I had friends it takes me a while to recall the concept.

I vaguely remember a conversation, or maybe a distillation of several conversations. I recall a deep and moving and personal talk long into the night, how strange that your lives and your friendships can be so fundamentally affected and changed forever by talks like these though none of you remember any part of what you talked about, a strange memory cause I remember being five and fifteen and twenty-five years old at the same time with no contradiction. It seems that I remember a dream.

But I have a relentless feeling that there was another person involved, a real person, a real conversation, maybe a real promise. There was something I was going to do, something I was supposed to remember, I feel an obligation to keep my word, an unmistakable seriousness that surrounds the entire memory and that I only can take to mean there was someone other than myself concerned.

Or I’m losing my mind.

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Flying Chaucers

2010-11-05T07:10:00.003Z

IN THE RAIN NO ONE CAN SEE YOU CRY

The dreamer’s story

Every night I’m somewhere I’ve never been in reality. It’s so weird I’ve learned to figure out that I’m dreaming by thinking, ”I haven’t been here before”. A castle, a river bank, a back street somewhere in a big city, a house with a thousand doors and secret paths, a jungle with stone ruins covered in moss and vines and swarming with life and motion vibrating in my entire body, smells that penetrate deep into my stomach and I’m captured by the immense enchanting richness of details and I can’t figure out how all this is in my head and then the monster comes.

He always takes me by surprise. He, it, a presence, a voice in the dark, a slimy thing with tentacles, a dog a tiger, a man, an ordinary man, a man with a creepy look in his eyes, something that looks like a man but flickers in the corner of my eye as if to let me know he’s not a man but he’s always familiar, always the same, like it works in dreams which I’ll be getting to. It’s not his monstrous nature that’s the worst part or that he follows me in all my dreams and not even that I don’t know if he’s just a dream or something else I wish I could talk to someone.

No, the thing that makes him difficult is the way he makes me feel. I call him the monster because he’s a nightmare monster who does impossible things, he changes my feelings as easily as pressing a button, he enjoys toying with my emotions and I mean that entirely literally. I’m sitting there in the jungle ruins playing carefully with my lucid dream state, willing into existence the most beautiful things, the most joyous people, the deepest most loving thoughts I can imagine, I explore the boundaries of the possible and of the impossible. And there he comes, a shadow, a face in the trees, a sorrowful tone sneaking into the background noise of the jungle, a terrible heartwrenching sadness forcing me to my knees and at first I don’t know I don’t understand what’s happening. And then I see him in everyone and remember and I try to be angry and I try to be scared but I can’t.

But I have my tricks. I remember that I’m dreaming and that if you know you’re dreaming, if you have a lucid dream, you can do anything, so I make it rain. The jungle folds in some unclear angle and becomes a concrete jungle and the rain falls hard and merciless but warm and drums on the sidewalk and the brick walls and the rooftops and make blurry little rainbows around the dirty streetlights and their yellow, fantastically hard boiled smear of a light; a damsel in distress screams somewhere and something bangs in the distance that may be gunfire and I’m living a hundred bad detective stories and loving it. I think I’m enjoying it I imagine I’m enjoying it because I fabricated this dream with things that based on history I should enjoy though the sadness he forced on me still clings and mixes with something I think is paralyzing overwhelming compassion.

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Ye olde cartoons

2010-11-03T17:08:00.002Z

Got some old crap I need to get out of my system. Bear with me:

This cartoon was supposed to have a helpful caption explaining that the stick figure had suddenly found he could talk to his autonomous nervous system. Now that you know, doesn't that make it a whole lot funnier?

This is some solid humor if I do say so myself.

Cherubs, in my world, are little balls of light that manifest abstract nouns. Usually feelings. I like the mean cherub at the bottom of the bunch.

This is completely autobiographical, except for the part where I immediately figure out my mistake. That took a few years.

If you're a humanoid, you've probably seen the xkcd strip that did this joke before me. But to me, Eve's difficulty curve can only be truly expressed as a launch ramp. With spaceships.

The joke here is that the punchline isn't nearly as funny as the idea of a girl born without arms whose parents won't give her cookies because cookies are only for people with arms (I think that autobiography is a real thing that exists by the way), and I still spent twenty minutes writing a story in one extraordinarily convoluted sentence to get to that weaksauce punchline.

That's how I roll.

Let's give it a bit of class and get the writer in it

2010-11-03T07:24:00.003Z

‘I wonder where people are telling stories’, says Death, weighing his chair on two legs and glancing to the sides. Distant gatherings seem to hold conversations, but none we can hear. A few depopulated tables away, by the wall, sits the grey girl and looks at a yellow drink.

‘I saw her in the bathroom’, says the Doctor, also glancing. ‘Not that we traded words, but.’

‘That’s Jenny’, says Ellen, out of nowhere, close to the Doctor’s ear. ‘She’s got more stories than anyone here. Maybe not on your first night. Wait a while, let the time ripen.’ The Doctor sits unmoving and watches the girl with the ashen grey skin, her tangled long black hair, her strong steady hand lifting the big glass as if it weighed no more than air, her distant thoughtful look that says she has all the time in the world, a thousand years if she wants; the black line under her eye that looks like a day old death metal make up thing, whatever may be the story behind that, her breasts pushing against her somewhat small t-shirt her grey eyes now meeting the Doctor’s and she waves and smiles kindly maybe invitingly. The Doctor blinks and shakes her head and blushes and looks into her empty glass and pokes the band on her arm.

The Doctor’s hand lies by itself on the table not bothering anyone when suddenly Life puts a gentle hand on it and squeezes. The Doctor closes and opens her eyes, slowly, as if her eyelids weighed ten kilos each and attempts a friendly amused smile but her eyes stick to Life’s breasts, a soft curve lining her tunic. The urge to feel their soft roundness, touch them and taste Life’s flavor burns in her throat and her eyes fall closed without her consent and seem now much too heavy to open again.

‘Are you drunk or just sleepy’, says Life behind a layer of soundproofing egg cartons.

‘Just sleepy’, says the Doctor and finds this true. Spurred by a surge of love she lifts her eyes to Life. ‘I’m good for a little while more’, she says. ‘You’re kind to care about my health.’ The kiss may have turned her into a lesbian in one stroke but it, the Doctor decides, will not stop her showing her friends that she cares about them. So she jokes and sings and laughs with the other until Ellen leads them, knocking on tables and chairs, to a group of old sat-in couches where the air lies heavy with generations of smoke and the scent of better brandy and the weight of history. A bit of mist slowly churns and congeals into a small, neat figure with glasses and striped green-blue hair.

‘My turn’, she says with a small brave voice. She sips a glass filled with mixed colors and tells:

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Ponderations

2010-11-02T15:24:00.003Z

I was inspired by this "controversial" Chainmail Bikini comic strip comments.

Writers, as some writer has probably remarked before me, are bastards. They can make up the most vile, inhuman, thoughtless, cruel scenarios and then write them down for all to see. They do, to some extent, go through the worst that life has to offer with a detached, coldly calculating part of their mind collecting tragedy as source material. They can and will do anything conceivable, no matter how horrible, in service of the Story, which they love as much as any parent ever loved their child.

And even though being a merciless morbid merchant of madness is a basic requirement of the job, no one has anything in particular against writers. It's mostly only when the characters of their story, who are make-believe people, act like bastards that the writer is accused of doing wrong. That's kind of weird.

But of course you have to take the blame for your characters' failings. You have to take on their sins, and carry them, and let people look on you with disgust. You have to accept that people think you are a monster. You have to consider if maybe you are. That's just another thing you have to do in service of the Story, if you're a writer.

You have to be the divider between what's real and what's made up, if you want to take your stories out into the real world and make them a part of it. You have to pay for the crimes of your story. Being a good writer is a most thankless job, most difficult and severe. And you're compelled to do it sometimes against your will.

So of course I love it.

Scott Pilgrim: A review in 60 seconds

2010-11-02T00:55:00.007Z

So the movie was even more fantabulous than I expected. Even after reading the comic forwards and backwards and torrenting the movie from Russia and watching Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz and letting my expectations build day after day for flippin months until I was more excited about it than I remember being about anything in like five hundred years and on Friday it was at-thank-God-last released in the old homeland and I still had to wait two more days to see it.

(I feel for you Germans who still have to wait like six months.)

But anyway I mean you'd think I'd know what to expect but the movie was still about twice as good as when I watched it last. And my friend who I watched it with who didn't know anything about it was crying fucking tears of joy.

And yes I mean the tears were fucking on her cheeks in the back of the theater and made new baby tears that flooded the theater in a tsunami of "<3" sounds and those sounds was the music was the battles was the story was love forever.

And then Superman showed up.

Further bar crawling

2010-11-01T07:58:00.003Z

Back at the table Death still laughs, if a little less deafening. ‘Hey, you’re the Doctor’, says Ellen’s voice somewhere nearby. A chair pulls out, as if to offer the Doctor its seat. ‘I’ve got to get back to work. But let’s talk a little, later.’

‘The crapper here is, hm, wondrous’, the Doctor informs as she sits down and chugs a nearby glass.

‘How are you, speaking of nothing’, says Life. Her clear brown eyes flare up with concern. ‘Slept any recently?’

‘It’s been three or four days I guess’, says the Doctor, intensely staring at her drink. She can’t really remember how long she’s been awake, but her mental retreat is interrupted by a blazing insight. ‘Have you noticed this glass looks half empty? Yeah I think it’s half empty and I thought that was pessimistic of me but I worked out it’s because I’m in the process of emptying it. If you were filling it it would be half full.’ Without warning the Doctor’s chin rests on the table and she looks up on the glass as she holds it in front of her nose. ‘But from below everything looks more up of course.’

‘Then what do you call it if you fill a glass at the same time as you’re emptying it?’ says Death and leans forward and puts his straw in the Doctor’s glass to demonstrate. The Doctor’s eyebrows wrinkle as she considers the engineering of optimism.

‘Meh, it seems half full’ she says at last.

‘Then I think you’re an optimism still’ says Death, cheerfully.

‘Well I have been stuck on naïve-curiosity all day. Nice stuff’, says the Doctor. Life and the Driver give her a sideways look that says “All day?” with sarcastic quotes. ‘Fine, it’s more of my favorite mode’, she replies with faltering eyes and pinkish cheeks and tries to remake herself as a shameless worldly sex researcher.

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Shithouse adventures

2010-10-29T09:52:00.004+01:00

‘Yes, I’m sitting on your knee’ says Ellen. Life experimentally pokes the air, finding an invisible arm and making a surprised noise. ‘Where did you think all the drinks were coming from?’

‘Uprightfully’, says the Driver with a slight slur, ‘I stopped thinking about it a while ago.’

‘That is as it should be’, says Ellen. ‘No one really wants to see the bartender.’

‘Question’, says the Doctor, marvelling at the clarity of her thoughts. ‘Is this the perfect job for you or are you perfect for the job?’

‘Oh, the bar is just my day job. So to speak. So, give us a loud old chuckle, big guy? There's a free drink in it for you.’

Death shrugs his shoulder and impales a wayward fly and says, ‘Someone has to say something funny first.’

‘I’m going to build a bear’, says the Doctor and burps and stands up on the first try.

‘Weak, Doctor’, says Death, yet bubbling with laughter for the very poorness of the joke. ‘Weak ass.’

‘When I get back I’ll tell you a story about two tomatoes who were crossing a road’, says the Doctor solemnly, and that’s enough to set off Death, who vibrates Ellen like a milkshake. This inspires her to tell a riddle about what you get if you cross a cow and an oil billionaire, and she stutters through the word “cow” as the Doctor comes too far away to hear her.

The ladies’ room, it turns out, lies at the end of a thin winding corridor and is a forest. When the Doctor opens the door she is met by soft green sunlight refined through a thick canopy of leaves, bird song and the scent of growing ferns and birches. She remembers the sun, although she can’t remember the last time she saw it, and she stumbles stunned through the green and tries to see everything at the same time. A grey girl with bare feet steps past and gives the Doctor a little nod that says isn’t it awkward to run into people in public bathrooms but look a the funny side, and walks out the door that’s standing by itself amongst the trees. The doctor, self-conscious, hides in the thickest bush she can find and takes care of her business, glad to have so many leaves to wipe with.

Next she examines the ground and finds thick moss, layers of fallen leaves, roots and soft brown earth at the bottom. The earth smells sour but clean and the Doctor wonders why there are so few traces of people. She sits with her back against a massive tree trunk and soaks in the whispers of the trees and the buzzing twirling sensation in the base of her skull that makes everything a little unfocused, relaxed, less sharp and edgy. She feels a calm coming over her and for a moment it reminds her of the feeling of falling asleep, but then she remembers her friends and makes her way back to the door and through.

Trying a little idea, she closes the door and opens it again to a small, dusty bathroom with rusty metal walls and a cracked mirror over the sink. Without a moment’s surprise she turns back and lets the door fall shut behind her.

Life in Hearthstown has given the Doctor a large degree of shock resistance.

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Politicians

2010-10-22T09:40:00.002+01:00

Am I right?

Meh

2010-10-10T17:45:00.006+01:00

I think the comic is officially discontinued. All of us here are just too disgusted with the elections in the old homeland (Sweden) to do any constructive work. The parliament's new racist party makes it hard to dream. Maybe too hard. They are fundamentally opposed to the concept of imagination, after all. If you liked the comic, blame the Sweden Democrats.

In the meantime, I'll just post this old story from a long time ago. I call it, unoriginally,

NIGHTMARE CITY

I wipe the sweat off my face with a heavy hand, unconsciously rubbing my brow to wake up a little more. The curls of hair on my forehead are straight, soaked with sweat. The sheets are twisted into ropes that for an instant seem to bind me down when I sit up on the edge of the bed. I notice I'm in a hotel room. I don't remember where it is or how I got here. It's a worn-down old room with a tiny TV bolted down in front of the double sized bed and a few crumpled roaches on the window board and cracked wallpapers in nothing colors and a dripping faucet in the doorless bathroom and a rusty fan in the ceiling and nothing much else. The sun's coming in at a weird angle, barely leaving any light through the glassless window with its blinds hanging halfway off like a sad flag.

I take all this in in less than a second, and then notice my heavy breath and violent heartbeat. For some reason I'm afraid. Did I have a dream? I don't remember what happened but I guess it must have been a nightmare.

Am I still dreaming?

There's no sound in the entire building or outside. I pick up clothes from the floor, neatly folded like I wouldn't leave them, but it's a white t-shirt and bluejeans that fit me as if they were mine. The jeans are even worn in at the right places. So I'm dressed and walk out the door with a mission, a purpose. I'm going to find out where I am and what I'm doing here. Maybe also how I got here and from where. And where everyone has gone to.

The hotel building is abandoned, I can tell. There's no smell of any living thing, just creaking floors and narrow hallways and stairs leading me down to the street. Everything seems to be covered in a thin layer of filth, dust or dirt. My feet get dirty as I walk in a spiral out from the building, street after street with no sign of life. In one of a thousand dark windows I spy some movement, but I decide it's a hallucination caused by stress and wishful thinking.

There are no clouds in the sky, nor any sun. I stop at an intersection and look up and try to think, but there's some padded resistance in my mind and the thoughts slip away. I forget something and start walking again, feeling kinda absent. A thin whistle comes sneaking out of nowhere, growing in volume so slowly that once I hear it, it's like it's always been there in the background. It grows unbearably loud, a grating rumbling as if the air, or the sky itself, was tearing. There might be a distant siren too, but I can't really hear it over the noise.

I fall on my knees and cover my ears, pushing until I realize I might crush my skull with my hands. I think it's more of a shockwave than a soundwave by now. I feel something wet in my ear and realize I'm about to pass out.

Just before I close my eyes the bomb lands right in front of me. I can see the blunt tip burrowing into the ground, the asphalt opening like thick licorice sauce. Everything's so slow, incredibly slow, more than any amount of adrenaline or synaptic manipulation could do. I can see the flash of light growing, like a spark, even though I should be blind before my eyes know what hit them. The heat blast hit me at fifteen hundred kilometers per second and should atomize my body long before my nerves can react, but still I feel it. It's warmer than anything I've felt in my whole life, and I can't decide if I'm happy or scared. But then I'm scared, cause I realize the sound is going to hit me next, sound loud enough to vaporize me, and my ears already hurt so bad. Why doesn't it come?

And I wake up, still feeling the echo of the pain. Or it hurts because I'm still pushing my hands against my ears. I open my eyes and see a ceiling. I'm in a double sized bed in a run-down hotel room and it feels disturbingly familiar.

Should be because I went to bed here last night, I tell myself and lie still and try to remember what dream it was that made me hurt myself. Ears are still sore. It was something about a bomb. The sky outside the window distracts me, it's heavy and white with something not quite snow clouds. I get up and have a look at the snow, big fluffy flakes drifting slowly through the air. It must be cold, there's not even any glass in the window, but then I can't really feel cold that easily. After a minute I realize it's ash, not snow. Is there a volcano having an eruption nearby? Nobody seems concerned. I can see people on the street walking around in unmistakable small town strides, greeting each other and taking it easy. The sounds in the building tell me the guests are feeling well and the staff's untroubled.

I put my clothes on with an exhibitionist's sigh of regret and walk to the door, vaguely noticing a weird resistance. When I open the door I suddenly have to hold onto it to keep from falling back; the room's leaning at least forty-five degrees. I climb over the threshold and stare down the vertical abyss of the corridor and suddenly I can't think of anything to do except stumble backwards and try to get a grip on the situation, but the room heaves in the middle of my step and throws me out into the black. I fall too fast, the light of the open door fade into a tiny blip and disappear and I see nothing more.

Fighting the panic, I let the soulsteel flow out of my arms and hips and shape glider wings, somewhere between a bat's and a dragonfly's. They break my fall and let me feel my way around for something to hang onto. If I can just find a wall I'd have some stable point to build on and I could take it from there and I'd feel great, even though it's harder to climb than it is to glide.

But the darkness seems to stretch infinitely in all directions and I feel very small and powerless. I scream and I don't hear an echo, and I scream in case someone can hear me, and I scream just to hear something, and then I scream in complete horror.

And I wake up with the scream in my throat and sit up in the bed with my heart pounding. For a moment, I remember everything but then I just remember the dark and the loneliness and I lie down and stare at the ceiling fan with my right arm across my forehead. My left hand wanders, stroking my body to make sure it's there and for the sake of cheap pleasure. Absently, I let the hand caress my crotch and one breast and then the other. I don't feel very enthusiastic - in fact, I seem unable to avoid smiling derisively over my own decadence - but my body answers readily enough.

But I tear myself away from the thrills of the flesh and thoughtfully rest my hand on my face instead. I stroke a finger along the scar, from the eye almost all the way down to the jaw, a crooked and uneven line over my cheek, and then up again.

I don't remember where I am or how I got there and I don't feel much like getting out of bed, but my belly comes to life with a hungry growl so I spring to action before I get incapacitated.

The hotel restaurant says breakfast is on the house, lucky me, I doubt I have any money, so I sit down at one of several empty tables with a plate full of toast, cold and hard, and damp slices of cheese sealed in plastic and - strangely enough - a big glass of nice fresh orange juice. It's been a long strange night, I think, vaguely glad it's over, when a cloud of insects pour out from the kitchen area. I know, with dreamlike clarity, the bugs are so poisonous even I can't handle them, and before I know it I'm running for the exit. There's a family sitting at one of the innermost tables. They fall down before they can stand up. The boy can't have been older than eight, I think, and his feeble cry ring in my ears while I run away. I'm so sorry, I whisper to him, I couldn't do anything.

Outside I run into a mist and for a second I'm afraid it's my own mist, the red mist, the dragon that can't be tamed. But it's normal mundane mist, white, so thick I can't see more than twenty meters. Far away, maybe half a kilometer, I hear some twisted sounds, a mixture of tormented screams and half intelligent grunts, like a flock of pigs was out hunting and signalling to each other. Thick groans from pigs the size of houses. Sighing slippery sloshes from giant squids climbing on house walls.

I bounce off a streetlight up to a roof without even thinking about it, trying to focus on moving in a straight direction as fast and as far as I can, because it seems like the most natural thing in the world to get away from here. Something is wrong, something that can't be fought, something not even I stand a chance against, and my guts tell me something's coming for me and I trust it.

I run in a straight line for what feels like half an hour, skipping from roof to roof, sometimes without seeing where I'm going. I'm not tired yet, but I stop to catch my breath and a creature staggers out of the mist towards me on four legs. I can see steaming hot blood squirting out of its joints with every step. It's got four human arms and no head, except an opening between the front shoulders that look like a mouth. It moans with a hint of lust and jumps for me and I analyze its skill without thinking. Warrior's habit, I guess. It possesses a great deal of aggression but no balance. The soulsteel flows out of my hand and shapes a blade that nearly cuts it in half. I feel a little laid-back as I sidestep and twist to avoid the gush. Whatever the thing is, it screams surprisingly loud and spurt out a foul-smelling substance that could hardly be blood all over the place.

I can feel the fear and uncertainty boiling away in the rush of combat. It feels great to be able to fight instead of going on thinking about questions I can't answer. So I set off in hopefully the same direction as before and smile. A while later I run into another monster, something birdlike about four meters tall with three thin arms with too many joints and huge claws instead of hands or paws or whatever it is birds have. It's slowly rocking back and forth like it's trying to hypnotize me. Or seduce me. It's got a beak in its face that opens and produces a coarse scream and I don't hesitate to attack it. I jump up to its chest height and shape a smooth, curved blade on my right arm from the elbow down past the fingertips and twist to the left to cut it and then impale it on my left elbow.

But I land on my side, hard, on the brick surface behind him. I'm disoriented and trying to figure out what happened. He doesn't seem to have any substance; I went through him without resistance. I'm trying to breathe and move when two claws come down on the sides of my head and tear me into the air. I grab the claws and try to break free though they cut to the bone of my hands. The tips dig into my temples and I start to worry about my health when I come eye to eye with the bird guy's expressionless face. I look at him and don't notice the third claw coming from above and cutting my head off.

I'm terribly, awfully awake and trying to scream but I don't have any lungs. I can hear my body hitting the ground with a loud thud. The feeling of being unable to move falls away along with everything else and the unconsciousness comes over me like mercy.

And I wake up and grab my throat desperately and stare up at the sky and convulse violently, once, and draw a shivering uncertain breath. I swallow and close my eyes and try not to cry and don't notice where I am at first.

Stifling a sob that wants to turn into a long wail, I open my eyes and find that I'm leaning on a concrete wall, on asphalt covered with litter and dirt, and I'm dressed. The sky, far above between the buildings, is clear and blue. The impressions on my skin tell me I've lain here all night, in a garbage heap. I remember parts of the last two dreams. I wonder I'm going mad and bite my lip to wake up and touch my throat again and shake through a silent sob.

Darkness sweeps across the sky in a few seconds and lights come on in the windows and I stand and stare, supporting myself against the wall, unable to muster the energy to move. I feel utterly lethargic. Then I hear a thick, scraping sound from behind and stagger away without looking back. I can think clearly now and formulate the hypothesis that this city, this weird small town that's big as a big city, that I've never been in before, has trapped me and torture me with unending nightmares. No matter if I'm awake or asleep, no matter if I can wake completely, or if there is such a thing, the only thing I have to do is get out of here. The only thing I can do. So I walk down the street with heavy steps, followed by sounds that may be my echo, though sometimes there's that scraping sound too.

After about ten minutes I find a bigger road and follow it towards something that feels like the city limit. Stars twinkle in the sky, did they used to be there? I think the horrors are over.

But where the road signs say there should be a highway there's just a hole in the ground. I can't see the bottom or the other side in the dark, and on the right and left sides there's wastelands that look somehow very uninviting, though it's only weed and rocks and a few car wrecks, crisscrossed with barbed wire fences to mark property limits. Without thinking I coil up - the scraping sounds very close now - and let the soulsteel flow into my legs and reinforce the muscle and bone and jump fifteen meters up and stretch out my wings and glide into the hole in front of me. I can land on the ground or on the wall, and climb up. I can handle a hole. I chalk up the uneasy feeling from one of the dreams where I was flying, but it seems unlikely the same nightmare would be repeated. If something happens I can flap my wings and work my way up in the air. I try not to think about the fact I can't do that for very long.

Far below there seems to be something, maybe lava, and I look at it until I nearly hit my head on the rock wall. I've never seen such an inviting piece of earth, and I lunge for it. But it seems to be closing too fast. Maybe I'm flying faster than I thought, I think. But I look behind me and feel lethargic again when I see the other wall closing in on me with incredible speed. I climb as fast as I can, but I don't have a chance. I think about digging a hole just when I'm crushed between the walls.

And I wake up sitting on a wooden bench, resting on a table. I fight down the hopelessness that threatens to drown me and look around what seems to be a small Italian restaurant. Behind me is a glass wall with a view of an empty street. The room is empty, but I can smell lingering scents of food, cigarette smoke and human. Feels nice.

Have I been here all along, I say out loud, cause that's how it feels. The dreams fade to distant memories and I'm sure that uneasy feeling is gone. Maybe, I think, the memory of that uneasy feeling is fake, maybe my emotional experience has been manipulated or maybe I've just gotten used to the constant surrealistic, slightly off sense, as if an alien intelligence had made a copy of reality that's indefinably wrong. None of these possibilities interest me, so I walk out into the sunshine and decide to go south.

On top of a very tall building I don't recall seeing before, I see the figure of a man, impossibly clear at this distance. He raises his arms and laughs, a thunderous joyless laugh that I shouldn't be able to hear so well and a layer of blood pour over the sky and turns it angry red. The sun shines through like the angry eye of a dragon that barely lights the day, and the city seems to come alive. I can see twenty or thirty movements in the corner of my eye, and think vaguely of psychological stamina, unconsciously moving in the direction that seems to have the least signs of life in it. In the dusk and shadows I can't really see the twisted things I'm up against, but they're many and they move purposefully, if pathetically wobbling on their crooked legs, and make sounds of equal parts rage and hunger and pity and pain. They gather in a large group in front of me, two of them bumping into each other, the bigger one putting something into the smaller one and pushing it down on the ground. The two of them spasm and twitch and make sounds of satisfaction and pain, respectively. I realize I'm watching a rape and try not to throw up and manage to turn away and run.

A vague fear keeps me from going up to rooftop height, and with no clear path to take I instinctively feel like hiding, so I break through a window and into a house. The sounds and motions outside suddenly seem far away and unimportant. I seem to be in a very ordinary home. Probably belonging to an old woman, judging by the very snug and covered in little decorations and keepsakes sitting room. There's no smell of anyone present.

In the kitchen, I find a fridge full of useful things. I eat a whole pack of butter, forcing it down while pinching my nose. It's so gross, but there's almost no better way to get a quick boost of energy. I take a mouthful of sugar and wash it down with milk and grab a bag of sausages to eat on the road. I make my way through rows of buildings, leaping from one window to the next, collecting about a dozen cuts on my forearms and noticing how every building seems closer than the last. Eventually I get to a building wall to wall with another, and open one window, kick in the next and step through.

I recognize this hallway. It's the hotel I slept in, or dreamt that I slept or whatever. It seems like a step backward but I can't think of anything to do except following the hall to the end.

I walk past several bricked up, boarded up or simply disappeared doors and go up some stairs. For a while the world seems to turn around and I fall up about twenty floors through the stairwell. I'm pretty sure the hotel had only three floors and I'm very sure I'm dreaming now, when I land in a skewed corridor like a dark tunnel with a little light shining at the end. Torn between the slough of despair and the survival instinct that tells me to keep moving, I walk towards the light.

It's a broken door leading into a room like many others in the hotel. It's a little better than mine, with a half-sized kitchen and a separate bedroom and a room with a lonely comfy chair in front of a television. I wonder what I'm doing and why I'm here while I look through the room, or of it's a suite, for maybe thirty seconds. When I come out of the bedroom I see the TV is on and showing quiet static; what we used to call ant wars when I was a kid. I don't know why I bother but I try to make sense of it, when I notice the shape in the chair. A fat man with a bullet hole in his head. He's apparently shot himself, but there's no weapon. The blood's still running down the wall behind him.

I run away so maybe I don't have to think about how that could possibly happen, and for once it works. I can't seem to think coherently at all. I get the feeling my head is somehow locked. I run without wanting to, without being able to stop or decide my direction. In some underground back alley sort of thing I stop and wake up and hear a human voice. A crying girl. I spot her sitting in a corner with her legs drawn up and her arms crossed and her face hidden. I think about who would do this to a child and I'm overwhelmed with anger and compassion. I sit down in front of her, slowly, trying not to frighten her.

I ask her if she can help me and she gives me a curious look. She doesn't say anything so I tell her my name and what I remember and what I think is happening, because I think it might make her talk but then I realize it's mostly because I want to talk. She seems totally nonverbal. Shock, I assume, hugging her tenderly and patiently and feeding her a sausage. I tell her everything is going to be fine and I'm going to help her and even though she doesn't realize it, she's helping me. She takes my hand and we walk side by side up a stairway of steel to the ground level. Things seem calm, though the blood red sky is still there.

The girl runs amazingly fast into another alley, maybe to hide again, so I follow her. The idea of leaving her doesn't occur to me. I hesitate, afraid to scare her, and don't catch up with her until she hits a dead end. She turns around and looks me straight in the eye and her eyes are glowing red balls. She smiles kindly and walks towards me and grows with every step until she towers over me, enormous, and I throw myself out of the way just before her foot comes down on me. I tumble through a door into a garage, with room for maybe a hundred cars.

I don't have a plan, I don't have a thought in my head when I go out through the front door and resume walking down the street. The scraping sound behind me is back. Tears run down my cheeks. A stone cuts into my foot, that's weird, it never happens, and so I limp onward leaving a trail of blood. I shake and feel some biting sensation in my flesh and wonder if I'm cold.

In the middle of the road I stop, unable to move on. Something soft and invisible and impenetrable blocks the way. Another alley seems to call out to me, a narrow passage between two high-rise buildings with laundry hanging on lines between them. In the darkness there's Jerika standing, waiting for me. Jerika in her pretty blue dress with a dandelion in her hair and a smile of naked longing. Jerika who died at sixteen but now she's seven and whispers don't cry mommy and hugs me when I fall on my knees before her and quivering gasping weeping give up.

I say I'm sorry and close my eyes drive my hand through her ribcage. The soulsteel rests. You have to do these things with your own hands. When it's your children and your friends you have to kill them with your hands.

Mommy, says Jerika, like a question, a feeble little voice drowning in the bubbling bright blood pouring from her. I don't move, don't open my eyes, don't breathe. I try not to feel the wetness running over my arm and stomach and thighs, try not to feel the beating of the tiny heart weakening every second, the lungs squeezing my wrist like warm water balloons when she breathes, the torn flesh twitching in shock, the thin defenceless arms that won't let go but hold me even harder because she's scared and trusts her mother and wants to be comforted; try not to feel the final tremble when the little body goes still.

I stand there on my knees for a while, breathing hard and trying not to have a nervous breakdown, until a fierce grip around my neck forces me up on my toes and then throws me down on my back. I don't resist, I've forgotten my rage and my strength and my soulsteel, I barely look at this new enemy. It's got a way too big head without a neck, a conical body with four muscular arms and two rudimentary legs. It's got an enormous eye and a wide mouth with hundreds of triangular piranha teeth and a long, thin tongue running in and out like a snake's. It drools copiously, drenching me, and tears off my clothes and grab my wrists and ankles and pin me down with its enormous weight as if I was resisting. It smells sour and rotten and washes my face with its tongue and pushes against my sex, probing.

A prehensile penis opens up my labia and slides in, greasy, thin and far too long. It's sharp and penetrates all the way to my heart. I've not even begun feeling humiliated or anything when I black out.

I wake up slowly, first of all aware of sunlight on my skin and birdsong in the air. Everything is bright and soft, thick expensive bed sheets making a pleasant scratchy sound when it brushes against my skin. I remember everything and understand it had to be a dream because I remember how I got here. I'm at Lucia's place, and everything that happened after last night must have been a dream.

I don't think it was a regular dream, though. I can still feel the fear and sorrow and despair and I cry, unwillingly, violently. Lucia, sleeping close to me, wakes up scared and asks what's wrong and strokes my cheek and turns my face against hers. I look into her eyes and see her sleepy, confused concern and realize I'm not sure if I'm still dreaming. I swear and pull away and try to make myself accept the possibility that this is real. I have to take that chance, I have to believe Lucia is my friend and want to help me. Or I'm never going to have a moment's peace again.

I tell her everything, sniffling and babbling, face buried in her chest. She holds me and I feel her body being racked and torn by compassion and I love her for caring about me. I rest my hand on the curve of her cheek and look her straight in the eye and tell her I don't know if she is real, and my voice cracks with fear.

Lucia doesn't look away and doesn't worry about my touching her even though she knows I could snap her neck like a twig. Yes, she says, indecisive, you know there is no way for me to prove to you that I'm not a dream. She gives me a sad smile and caresses my neck. You just have to trust me, she says. I can see my reflection in her eyes and see my face twist into a grimace of pain and hold her close and cry again. I weep like a little child. I cry my fucking heart out. I think it's mostly because I'm so glad it's over.

Then the bed sucks me in and Lucia disappears and I fall into a swirling cosmic abyss and wake up under the all too familiar rusty ceiling fan.

A review of a page of a book of fantasy someone found off the Internet

2010-09-17T23:48:00.003+01:00

Ripping on bad writing. That seems like a worthwhile pursuit.

And just like our writer here, I don't know where to start.

As Spikenards watched, Bronwyn slipped the transparent cloak from her shoulders; it fell with a whisper.

Yes, let's take a moment to giggle at the name of what I'm sure is a particularly brave and temperamental, mighty and wise yet humble and humane romantic alleged rapist elf king: Spikenard. As in, put something sharp in your bojangles. Like Albert Fish, he of the child molesting and the serial killing and the eating of rotting human flesh and shoving long needles from his taint to his tonsils.

Also, I think Bronwyn was the name of a Wiccan in Something*Positive. So I'm guessing this book is kind of a big deal in the let's pretend we're magical elves community. I'm not saying we should judge people based on the books they read, as long as it's books in plural, or that we should judge a work of art based on its fanbase, but I don't know how to finish that sentence.

Anyway, we're to assume the magical princess Bronwyn was wearing nothing but a transparent cloak, and then took it off so that the presence of her spectacular body in its natural state could entice Spikeballs as a subtle, thrillingly impassive kind of foreplay.

She removed her transparent cloak to do this.

Transparent cloak.

I believe Hugh Grant once said, "There are absurdities in life that one finds inherently hilarious, but as you get older you realize they're not going away and gradually they become less funny." He may have read this book.

She let her hands drop to her sides; she pulled her shoulders back and stood erect, feet apart, legs straight. This is what he saw:

Easy with the semicolon there, tiger. It's like salt; if you use it too much it loses value and picancy and meaning. It makes your food dry; your heart sick; your writing crap.

So, can you stand with your feet apart and your legs straight? If you can it might mean you have crooked legs, or a massive gaping vagina separating your legs. Also, standing with your legs straight is neither relaxing nor a useful signal of body language. It means you're tense, self-conscious and possibly unstable. Put your legs at a slight angle apart, and now you look steady, self-assured, possibly defiant. It would go well with that erect, boob-thrusting pose where you're just not giving a damn about your hands, which is cool.

If you ever realize, at any point in a social situation, that you have hands and don't know what to do with them, may the Gods be with you.

Of course our writer here may just be trying to convey that she's not crouching, but standing erect. But the word "erect" takes care of that, wouldn't that be superfluous? Oh, we haven't seen anything yet.

Bronwyn standing pale and tall in the nervous light that shimmered through a vibrating canopy of green leaves. The shifting bands of milky light and emerald shadow made her seem luminous, translucent, as though she were a tallow candle glowing beneath its own flame. Like a porcelain lantern. Like a curtain fluttering in a window at dawn. Like a ghost that came and went with the twilight and darkness, that first veiled and then revealed. Like a stiletto.

I threw up in my mouth a bit when I got to the end there and realized what's actually going on is that the canopy is casting moving shadows. Now, it's a pretty thing, one of many things I like about the forest, the chaotic yet peaceful play of shadow and light as the trees move in the wind. If there is any wind. It's easy to get poetic when you try to describe it. But, and this is going to be a repeating theme in this text, the guy takes it too fucking far.

On a glancing read, I got the impression Bronwyn here is magical enough to glow with an inner light, pardon me, beneath her own flame, but actually it's the light from above that's so fantastic it's responsible for the effect.

The nervous light. Which is shining just like a curtain, and a ghost in the darkness. Hang on, it's luminous and translucent. So basically she's as see-through as that invisible cloak she was wearing. Or at least looks see-through.

Do I get paid for this? No?

Her hair had the sheen of the sea beneath an eclipsed moon. It was the color of a leopard's tongue, of oiled mahogany. It was terra cotta, bay and chestnut. Her hair was a helmet, a hood, the cowl of a monk, magician or cobra.

Uh. Too many colors. Let's do this one impossibility at a time. The sea at night isn't sheening anything, especially when there's not even moonlight to light it up. So it's pretty much shimmering like the color black. Maybe it's the pretend-black blue ink they use to draw black hair in comic books? A leopard's tongue I'd have to look up, but I'm going to assume for the sake of there being good in the world that it's some kind of black. Like mahogany. No, wait, you got me there. Oiled wood is going to be some kind of oiled wood gleam, although maybe close to black if it's mahogany.

Terracotta, however, is an earthen brown color. It's not like the sea at night. It might be like the sea of shit that is this book, I dunno. Chestnuts are green and brown, depending on the season and how colorblind you are. Bay, and I did look this up, is a color specific to horses. It's the color of a brown horse. So, nice horsenutclaywood ponytail to accent your hyperblack hair with oil highlights, I guess?

Helmet hair is not attractive. I get that you're trying to convey that her hair frames her face, or that it is styled, or something, but it's not a good style. It's not even five good styles evoking different animals and mysterious professions all at once. It's just a mess. I bet the princess went to a hair stylist and said "I want it to look like a cobra neck shield and a mysterious conjurer's cloak at the same time" and the stylist, worrying about keeping his head, just went nuts and created some kind of superdimensional hair dome that shifts in different perspectives.

And that's why Bronwyn can never be photographed, because the information contained in her hair could cause any device trying to capture it to explode.

Her face had the fragrance of a gibbous moon.

Hold it right the fuck there. Gibbous means hump, as in hunchback. Lovecraft pretty much owns that word, and his gibbous moons are not good or pure or beautiful. They're ugly, too large, too round and scream of ill omens. You're making what I hope is the heroine of the story a freaking eldritch monster. Of course, we don't know the meaning of the word abomination yet.

And of course she doesn't look like an overripe moon. Her face smells like an overripe moon looks. If any picture were ever to capture the transcendental beauty of princess Bronwyn, it's going to have stank lines coming off her face.

It's the only way.

Her face had the fragrance of a gibbous moon. The scent of fresh snow. Her eyes were dark birds in fresh snow. They were the birds' shadows, they were mirrors; they were the legends on old charts. They were antique armor and the tears of dragons. Her brows were a raptor's sharp, anxious wings. They were a pair of schythes. Her ears were a puzzle carved in ivory. Her teeth were her only bracelet; she carried them within the red velvet purse of her lips. Her tongue was amber. Her tongue was a ferret, an aemone, a fox caught in the teeth of a tiger.

Schizophrenic epileptic tongue dance, roger. Is this some kind of sexy thing? Her tongue is dancing like a drunk hillbilly, apparently hanging out between her teeth that are (hopefully gently) biting down on it? If you've ever seen a guy trying to sex you up by showing his mad tongue twitching skills, you know that this is disgusting. Now imagine someone doing that and never stopping. And somehow her tongue is acting like amber, which you may recall is fossilized tree sap, so it looks like it's flowing like liquid only it's a smooth, elegant rock and at the same time flopping and squirming like living sea snot and crawling and flailing desperately like a small furry animal. All at once.

By the way, the word "Electron" is derived from the old Greek word for amber. It's a cool stone.

Working backwards through the paragraph, in what world are bracelets sexy? Is a person somehow less attractive when wearing nothing at all than when dolled up with some useless decoration? And teeth bracelets? In your mouth? Because they are actually your teeth? And your mouth is like a fine red leather handbag? Accessorize less, and for the love of all that's sensuous don't accessorize with metaphors for body parts. The human body is about the most perfect design in the universe. It's in our instincts to have sex with it because it's a human body. You're not going to make it sexier by turning parts of it into something that's not human body.

Like puzzle ears. You know who looks like a puzzle? The Puzzler. He looks like that because Punisher threw him to a plate glass window. He makes little children cry. His face is a disaster area. He is walking traumatization. I weep for the princess' deformed, shiny ivory ears.

And then we have more of that thing where a thing is several distinct different things at the same time. It's almost pointless to make fun of it. Apparently her perfectly styled eyebrows have a predatory, instrument of death look. That's pretty badass. I'd like to know how it looks. But why are they anxious? I can't make any sense of that unless she is making an anxious Frodo-face, which completely ruins the wicked cruel swoop intended by the eyebrows. Also, I don't think anyone has ever referred to a pair of eyebrows as "brows". It makes it sound like she has two foreheads.

And we reach the mirrors of the soul, the good ol' eyes. So much can be said about your character through their eyes. So much can be said about your wanktastic Mary-Sue writing tendencies by the amount of writing you put into and around their eyes.

But it's getting hard to make fun of such an obviously ill man. Eyes like the tears of a dragon? Very melodramatic, cringe-inducingly melodramatic, but I'll buy it. Eyes like legends? You realize that means her eyes look like the chart in the corner of a Risk map where it says how many armies you get for holding each continent. Her eyes look like pie charts, like a drawing of a compass. It's like an optometrist testing your vision on a board with random letters, and when he looks into your eye he sees a reflection of the board in your eye, and also your eye looks like a board. It's completely fucking insane. It makes Bronwyn's eyes being like the shadows of birds over a field of snow and antique, heavy metalwork body armor at the same time make sense in comparision.

Well, almost.

Her shoulders were the clay in a potter's kiln.

So they were pretty hot then? HEEEEEYOOOOOOO.

Her shoulders were fieldstones; they were the white, square stones of which walls are made.

Fieldstones are naturally occurring rocks that are useful to build houses. They are not cut or worked in any way. Square, three dimensional marble stones that are the only stones our writer can imagine are worthy to use for building houses are not naturally occurring. They are cut into square shapes. The two types of building rock in this sentence are mutually exclusive. A single person cannot look like both of them.

Unless. Maybe it's one shoulder each. That'd be a very tactful way to describe her horrible deformity which as it is included here must be assumed is a thing that Shotcrotch finds attractive. That sounds unlikely. More likely it's just a paradox caused by poor writing.

They were windows covered with steam.

Incredible, we've already topped the almost unfathomable contradiction of the previous sentence. Now, in addition to three distinct kinds of solid, unyielding stone her bewildering shoulders are also like steam-covered glass, a most fragile and transient material. Kind of like the elements we create in particle accelerators that exist for a negative amount of time before they decay, except in more poetic, more medieval-tech terms.

The writer has to understand how contradictory this is. He must have intentionally done this to convey an uncanny, otherworldly beauty too strange for words, right?

Right?

They were porcelain. They were opal and moonstone.

So, fragile shiny semi-precious gemstones in impossible combinations. These are some impressive shoulders. Maybe she's like Ivar Wide-reach, the old viking whose embrace was said to hold many things. Maybe she's Atlas.

Her neck was the foam that curls from the prow of a ship, it was a sheaf of alfalfa or barley, it was the lonely dance of the pearl-grey shark.

Unless she has a neck like a shark, I'm going to guess this is more literally meant and her neck moves or curves with the sleek silent muscular grace of nature's most efficient killing machine. But not in a predatory manner, but like a lonely shark dancing when no one is watching. I want to see a ballet interpretation of this.

And foam. Of course, it's better than foaming at the mouth. I'm going to assume her neck is constantly in motion, like the horror tongue, except it's the flowing, roiling motion of the sea, or Will Ferrel and Chris Kattan headbanging to What is Love?.

And what the fuck is with the vegetables in the middle of this sentence? I can only assume they're in there to stop the woman from turning completely into a dangerous, carnivore creature and instead make her more like a gentle pliable hair of grass that the hero can bone without being threatened.

Her legs were quills. They were bundles of wicker, they were candelabra; the muscles were summer lightning, that flickered like a passing thought; they were captured eels or a cable on a windlass. Her thighs were geese, pythons, schooners. They were cypress or banyan; her thighs were a forge, they were shears; her thighs were sandstone, they were the sandstone buttresses of a cathedral, they were silk or cobwebs. her calves were sweet with the sap of elders, her feet were bleached bone, her feet were driftwood. Her feet were springs, marmosets or locusts; her toes were snails, they were snails with shells of tears.

Yeah, there's some more of that diminishing, non-complimentary sneak attack on womanhood crap. I cannot in good conscience call this writer anything other than sexist. The only thing that could more clearly convey the message that Bronwyn is never meant to leave the kitchen would be if her legs were boiled spaghetti. Quills? He goes on with more impressive metaphors to try and cover it up, but the quills part is the first and most important.

And I'm also doubting my theory that this is secretly good writing, that in the contrast of the conflicting imagery a finely crafted, non-literal design was actually taking place. No, this is crap. He's throwing out every fucking image he can conceive of with no comprehension of how unflattering, unbelievable, nonsensical or flat-out hilarious the result becomes.

I mean, snails for toes? Pretty magical snails, in an attempt at some last-minute salvaging on the realization that he's flat out of ideas and cannot for the life of him think of anything to favorably compare toes to, with shells like tears? Priceless.

But the height of humor is the thighs, which contain so many impossible things Arthur Dent would be impressed. I'm mostly noticing the highly anachronistic schooners, you know, sailboats. They remind me of Thor's Volkswagen-like muscles. The Guide was, of course, intended as comedy so that's not really a flattering comparison.

Sturdy, resilient tropical trees mixed with Goddamned cobwebs does not for plausible anatomy make. And feet like locusts? I envision further stank lines.

Her arms were a corral, a fence, an enclosure; they were pennants; they were highways.

It would have been better if you forgot all about the arms like your clever character did, Mr. writer. Now you've got a whole set of limbs hanging around and you. Do. Not. Know. What. To. Do. With. Them.

This is not clever or poetic or beautiful. This is a writer realizing a person has arms, too, and he's stuck in a corner because he has described everything else so leaving them out would be weird. He's trying to make the arms interesting, thinking of ways that they work, as a frame around the torso, as a connecting bridge to the hands, anything to make them worth noticing.

Hey, arms are beautiful. If you've got the slightest bit of muscle tone, the biceps will have some curves that catches the eye, and begs to be traced with a loving finger. You could focus on how she is actively not doing anything with her arms, just letting them hang without a care in the world, maybe with a subtle slow motion inviting naughty thoughts or something. But noo, you're almost done and don't even care anymore, the naked girl can't just stand around being looked at for this many pages, we've got to get to work on her.

Her fingers were incense. They were silver fish in clear water; they were the speed of the fish, they were the fish's wake. They were semaphores; they were meteors.

See, clearly her hands are going to town with nasty gestures. It's got to be like she's giving a long-range handjob. Either that or more epileptic seizures. And I get that incense is holy and stuff and when you light that up you reach a different mental state (maybe I'm thinking of sandalwood) but you're seriously just laying down the fact that her fingers are sticks of incense. It's probably not even burning. What with all the fish and water.

Wait, meteors? I don't even

Her spine was a snake.

Oh goody, we have to look at her backside too.

It was the track of a snake. it was the groove the water snake makes in the glossy mud of the riverbank. Her spine was a viper, an anaconda. it was the strength of the anaconda.

It was fun coming up with that stuff were she has the qualities of these cool animals, I wish I'd thought of that before I got all the way to the hands. But it's not too late to do some more of it.

It was the anaconda's unknown hieroglyphic. Her spine was a ladder, a rod; it was a chain, a canal, it was a caravan.

Oh, we're not done yet. Now her spine is a list of things that a) are kind of impressive or exciting, b) have long shapes and c) oops, that's all I've got. Let's go back to where her spine, which is shaped like a snake and manages the reptile brain's reflex responses, is a lot of different snakes and snake-related things which I'm sure no one's thought of before! It strikes like a viper and coils like an anaconda, because Bronwyn is a sexy-ass hunter/warrior chick I just remembered.

Her buttocks were fresh-baked loaves; they were ivory eggs, they were the eggs of the lonely phoenix. They were a fist.

I could eat breakfast off that ass. Now, you might think it's hilarious how her two buttcheeks form one fist, but I don't think that's the funniest part. No, I'm thinking how in a Sandman story we learn that the phoenix lays two eggs. But that's the same number as the hams we're looking for, what's fun with that, you wonder? Well, one of the eggs is white and the other is black.

Her breasts were citrus, they were soapstone; they were bright cumulus and the smooth fingertips of Musrum. Her breasts were honecombs and dew-beaded windows, or soft, sweet cheese. They were sweet apples; they were glass, they were cowries. They were the twin moons of the Earth.

Saved the best for last, huh? I've never heard of two of those things. Musrum seems to be some kind of Buddha analogy, at least that's my impression after watching the kickass trailer for Asura's Wrath earlier today. It's kind of a neat idea, a boob having the shape of the fingertip of Buddha. There's your first contact. Of course I'm just guessing. And a cowry is a kind of slug. I'm guessing at that point the dude just went for any round-ish shape imaginable.

This is kind of becoming a noticable problem. There's so many objects contained within these breasts, it's hard to tell which are intended as pleasing metaphors and which are just metaphors for round things. Sweet cheese? And citrus? That's going to curdle. And if you're going to refer to a pair of funbags as citrus fruits, please specify. It could be anything from stinging-your-mouth baby lemons to we're-going-to-need-a-wheelbarrow Florida oranges.

Clearly we're not going for any specific size, as that would make her less attractive to some members of the audience, so the citrus part must refer to flavor.

Combined with honey.

Honeycombs aren't even round, they're flat.

And then we get into the parts where her breasts are clouds, moist windows and glass. Basically two kinds of water, and two kinds of glass. These themes are so prevalent I'm forced to conclude her breasts are transparent, and you can see into the lungs under them.

The nipples rose like mercury with her heat. They rose like monuments atop flowered hills, above deserts of hot sand; the nipples were savory morels, with the flavor of the forest.

So I'm picturing a group of tiny people roping up her nipples and pulling them vertically. Also a couple of mercury thermometers mounted of her fine glass gazongas. And they're swelling like mushrooms, like when you watch them grow in time-lapse video, and when you suck on them they taste like pine forest air freshener and dirt. Clearly we're dealing with some manifestation of the Earth goddess here. Let me tell you, dirt is a highly acquired taste.

Her ribs were a niche, an alcove, an apse; her stomach was an idol in the niche, alcove or apse, an effigy, a phantom. Her stomach was a beach, a savannah, a flagstone warmed by the sun, a cat asleep on the flagstone, a bleached canvas sail in hot southern winds. Her navel winked like a doll's eye, like the eye of a whale, like the drowsy cat.

I may be going mad, but I see what he's going for with all this cat imagery. Like, a really cute person might act as a cat, and they'll like having their belly rubbed. Is that an outrageous stretch or is it just that as I write this the clock tolls four in the morning?

Otherwise it's just a load of random nouns vaguely describing objects of a physical nature similar to the body parts they're applied to. Apparently he can't even decide if the ribcage is a niche or some other kind of indentation. And I guess having it being all of them at the same time would have been crazy.

And I'm more and more bothered by how non-descriptive all this is. This is supposed to be a woman who's pure sex with pointy ears or something. How is a weathered sail an attractive thing, however metaphorical, wherever on a humanoid body it's located? It's just a disjointed image of, I suppose, something that floated through the subconscious of the writer as he stared at the blank page. It's not how you write foreplay. And that winking bellybutton was creepy when a death-scared cop described one in Powers, and that was supposed to be horror.

Her pubes was like a field of wheat after the harvest, a field neatly furrowed; it was a nest, a pomegranate, an arrowhead, a rune. It was a shadow. it was moss on a smooth white stone. There was an orchid within the moss. There was a drop of dew upon the orchid. It had the breath of moss-beds, of the deep seas, of the abyss, of scrimshaw and blue glass, of cold iron; she had the sex of rain forests, the ibis and the scarab; she had the sex of mirrors and candles, of the hot, careful winds that stroke the veldt, the winds that taste of clay and seed and blood; the winds that dreamed of tawny, lean animals.

When I read "The sex of rainforests" I immediately pictured her having sex like an entire horde of monkeys. Then I remembered we're pussy-footing around the word vagina and it's not the act of sex, but her vagina that sounds like an entire horde of monkeys.

And that's not all. Her vagina is also the vagina of, let's count them, a bird, an insect, a mirror, a candle and a variety of winds. But that's just the usual nonsense, on a greater scale reserved, apparently, for the holiest of holy genitalia Batman this guy is a big damn virgin.

It's always cute when a writer innocently replaces words for genitalia with something like, well, "orchid". Yep, that's a beautiful flower between her legs. I hope his lord Ballsack has a stamen so he can pollinate her properly.

If you know what I mean.

I think this "harvested field" is supposed to mean she's roughly shaved her bathing suit area. That's nice and all, but you realize we're talking about the remaining, scratchy short hairs as if it was a thing of haunting beauty. It reminds me of that annoyingly positive guy in an episode of Friends. You've got no silky smooth coat of pubes, no cushioning pillow or cute curls, nor the sleek aerodynamic bald option; you're looking at basically the most uncomfortable and least attractive state a crop of public hair can possibly be, and you're trying to play it off as wondrously poetic.

And then the ensuing dialogue takes it in a completely different direction, holy snaps, this is one special gal. She's something in between every known natural state of being. She's a complete freak of nature. She's so unique and special, there's no sensible way to define her. She is, therefore, no one and nothing.

This is how you do cheap writing. You fill in every option and still leave everything wide open so no potential customer is turned off, nor has to work to imagine anything for you. Stack sweeping poetic statements so tall there's no proof of the absolute lack of substance beneath. It's the like Emperor's New Clothes made out of words. Except we don't need to buy into the illusion, we don't have to make nice with the emperor or pretend we're getting it so we don't look dumb.

Boy, this was fun.

Real World Ösmo

2010-09-13T21:48:00.002+01:00

Yeah, no comic yet. We're doing something funny this week. But then we were sidetracked by something even funnier: A comic book from Sweden, circa 1996, called Galago. Like any good comic, it starts out with a six page article sparsely illustrated with black and white photos. This article is what I'm not going to share with you, cause it's a shame no one outside of tiny Sweden should ever get this kind of entertainment.

For legal purposes, the article was originally written by Jimbo Braddock and Reff Clorton, both which I doubt have ever existed. It's translated here for fun and not for profit. For foreign words you're curious about, check out Wikipedia and learn stuff!

Seven completely normal young people corralled on a surface the size of a parking space. In an apartment in central Ösmo, just outside Stockholm. The TV show "Real World Ösmo" has become a huge success and the kids have broken through on every front. This was a chance no one wanted to miss. Just by going around being yourself you could write history! The film team consisted of 53 camera operators and 56 sound guys and all of them volunteered. 1 850 boys and 2 776 girls showed up to the first audition. The producer and his dad, who had bought the rights from MTV in Los Angeles for 69 million dollars, asked if there was anyone who wanted to be on TV. Everyone put their hand up. "Then you can get right out, cause this is for real, it is 'the real thing, it is the real world'!" shouted the producer, Nuppe Nicklasson. Left over were seven kids who really just showed up late and were found outside the condition in the darkness under a bridge.

There were Turid, a one-legged Sami girl who used to sell glass pearls on Drottninggatan. Mädchen, a German transvestite who dreamed of a better world. Frytema, a perky party girl from Hoboken with rats in her hair and crabs in her tail. Sven-Ture, a tired doubleworking bus driver dreaming of being a journalist and directing movies. Here we met Ville, born in a kayak on Greenland to Christian missionaries, wants to be a musician, wants to write books, wants to be a TV producer, wants to have nice hair and New Age ideals. Here is Scrapotkin, who's really a dog from Tasmania who can speak. And last but not least Erik Hörstadius, a keen loner who likes to fight. In short, six or seven completely normal kids in Stockholm today. The fifteen camera teams cried the whole time for the eighteen months of shooting. Two thousand recorded hours were cut down to two half-hour episodes. Everyone was nervous and couldn't speak at first. They tried to lighten the mood with Parcheesi. But eventually things happened with a vengeance: Sven-Ture went to the grocery store to get food and Ernst told about the cat he used to have when he was twelve and Frytema dyed her hair on a Wednesday morning! In short these seven people who had never met before were forced to live together under strict everyday conditions. This is reality and not some stage play. It's amazing. "This is the biggest thing on TV ever" says Nuppe Nicklasson. He doesn't leave his home anymore. He just sits inside and watches the cut tapes of The Real World Ösmo. "This", he says with tears in his eyes, "this is reality, this is TV, not that out there", and he points with his hand out the window.

Galago sent their two reporters Jimbo and Reff, because we wanted to know more about these epochal deeds and managed to gather the seven youths to a conversation about creativity, art and self-realization.

Galago: How does it feel now that the show is finished?

Ville: What?

Mädchen: I'm fine, thank you. Yeah, it's like this, I really wanted to say: So I didn't know where Ösmo was before.

Galago: Were is Ösmo, really?

Mädchen: I don't remember now.

Three of the youngsters stand up simultaneously and point in different directions and rotate like rotors with their hands raised.

Galago: Thanks, that's enough, please sit down. That was very helpful what you just did. Now we're wondering how you felt about being recorded all the time?

Frytema: It was hard having a camera up your nose when you were eating and sometimes you'd like to go home and then you find out you're home. That's scary, I think.

Galago: But you felt at home though?

Frytema: Yes, well, I lived there.

Galago: Certainly, but it was just an artificial home that was going to disappear in a few months.

Frytema: To me it feels like it's my home. At the moment I live in a cardboard box that says Banana co. And I'm very scared because it says under no circumstances should the box be used for anything other than bananas. I think that sucks. I mean bananas. . .

Galago: How does everyone else feel now when everything is done?

Ville: What?

Galago: What do you want to do now afterwards?

Ville: What do you mean after? I don't get it.

Galago: We mean after Real World Ösmo.

Ville: I'm going into TV! I'm going to be a TV host. Or polymath artist or weather girl.

Galago: Wasn't it hard to come from such small circles, small circumstances, and suddenly become famous almost all over the world?

Mädchen: How do you mean?

Galago: Now what don't you get?

Mädchen: Now I think I don't get anything.

Galago: No, I can see that. But if I put it this way: Ösmo sure as Hell isn't New York, you'll have to agree?!

Mädchen: Yes, I actually have a good mind not to agree with that.

Erik: Yes, it's factually true, we have access to all the TV channels, we've done everything, we know everything, we've seen everything, we've created all the wars, we've taken all the trips, drunk beer from Baikal, we've made love in Fontana di Trevi, we've picked stones on Akropolis, we're Generation X, do you get it, do you get it, do you get it? We've done it all. . .

Ville: With each other.

Turid: No we haven't! You didn't want to!

Ville: Because you have one leg.

Erik: That's true. You fall out to the right all the time and out of the frame.

Galago: Do you feel you've become more aware of your image now?

Sven-Ture: Yeah, you're never out of the frame you know, and sometimes you'd like to be.

Galago: When?

Sven-Ture: When I'd had too much candy for example and threw up. They didn't have to air that.

Nuppe Nicklasson (producer): I'm going to have to step in here. Firstly everyone got to do whatever they wanted with their money, forty-five kronor a day, all up to themselves. If they bought candy instead of real food it's their business. But you Galago folks probably think that society should intervene in these situations?

Galago: We think there should be a society. . .

Nuppe: Okay, that's your opinion, I don't agree, but secondly we ran Sven-Ture's throw-up directly in paint-box. It can't have taken more than four minutes tops.

A technician: Two and a half actually.

Ville: How much is that?

The technician: A lot. Which means little, you know? Right?

Ville: Noo?

Everyone present whip out their fingers to count and talk over each other so it's hard to convey the conversation in writing. One really understands that being on TV has been a tense experience, the kids are excited, they ceaselessly stand up and walk around, pushing the tips of their noses against the only window in the room, wich shows the mixer table of the sound guys, and lie down straight next to the wall, fall asleep and wake up, cry and laugh. But to return to the subject of money.

Galago: You only got forty-five smackers a day?

Nuppe: Hang on. Sven-Ture got forty-five smackers but not the others. It was supposed to be like in real life. Frytema got a couple of thousand because she was nice, Ville got nothing.

Ville: I had it coming.

The technician: Sven-Ture had even taken loans to be on the show and we helped him sort that out.

Sven-Ture: Yes, but I still consider myself a winner. A lot of people go without work.

Turid: Erik Brunner had an inital salary of 46 000 a month plus benefits just because he's famous, it's so fucking unfair, I want to be famous too!

Galago: He only calls himself Erik Hörstadius?

Nuppe: Of course, but this is like reality, key word like. Get it?

Frytema: Reality is so weird. Sometimes I feel like I can't deal with it.

Galago: What do you do then?

Frytema: I only become real when I'm on TV. I have to be in the picture all the time. I want to host a show. I want my own talkshow. I want to introduce people on TV and ask how it feels.

Galago: So you kids have seen all the episodes?

Erik: Yeah, it was all we were allowed to watch when we were closed in.

Galago: What did you think?

Turid: The Andy Warhol episode was weirdest.

Galago: In what way?

Turid: We just laid there sleeping all the time.

Frytema: It didn't help even when they changed the colors all the time.

Sven-Ture: Good thing we were given pills or we'd never have been able to get through all that shit.

Galago: You took pills?

Erik: "We got regular food too."

Nuppe: I like that you bring that up. Okay, we've actually wanted to focus on the the issue of food. People talk so damn much about it. Don't they? For young adults food is such a terribly tense topic, so we wanted to both disarm the drama a bit, show it's really just as simple as sex, and at the same time provoke debate. We think we've succeeded. Yeah, maybe you can talk about the concept yourselves?

Frytema: I got almost no food at all.

Erik: And I got infinite food.

Frytema: We sat directly in front of each other, could see into each others' eyes.

Nuppe: How did that work out, you think?

Frytema: I thought it was fine. A lot of girls don't eat food. It's a body thing.

Erik: And me, I got these Australian giant steaks, outrageously large! I'm really thinking of going there now, that's my ambition right now. Surf, dive. "You name it."

Ville: The Great Barrier Reef?

Erik: What? What the Hell are you talking about, sitting there?

Ville: That's there right?

Nuppe: The Great Career Reef! (laughter)

Erik: No, I'd probably have had a great time with those steaks except they had too much cream.

Galago: Let's talk about the violence in the show, there's been a lot of talk about that.

Nuppe: Far too much! If you look at the percentage of aired material showing violence, not to speak of unaired material. . .

Sven-Ture: It's the same violence as there's out there in society! Exactly the same!

Galago: But I know many of those here in this room have reacted to when you Ernst, shall we say, attacked Scrapotkin?

Erik: Everyone saw it started as a joke! Everyone saw! Alright!

Galago: And then it turned serious.

Erik: (inaudible)

Nuppe: Leave the kid alone, he's had a rough time.

Galago: And then it became serious, right Ernst?

Erik: I guess you'd have to say that. He died and all.

Turid: You killed another human! Curse you!

Erik: Yeah but he was gay too! Among other things!

Galago: You said in the show that you don't feel guilt, is that true?

Erik: It's not true! Everyone who's seen me knows! They know I'm not the same jokester motormouth guy I used to be! I've changed. Become more vunlerable, kind of the revenge of fate. There's nothing for me. It's over. I mean my life is over! Though at the same time I've become calmer sometimes, more soft, more what do I mean philosophically inclined. Serious. Now I can walk alone on the beaches at sunset, the wind blows through my hair and I feel the greatness of the sea, I feel a kinship with loneliness, the cries of gulls, you know? I've become bigger and smaller at the same time.

Galago: You seem to have put a lot of thought into this.

Erik: Naw, but I've been interviewed about it more than anything else.

Frytema: It's incredible, I don't love you a bit less even though you did such a terrible thing! Though you did the awful thing and crossed the line a human must not cross! I've learned so much about myself, Erik! You don't have to love me back but I'll always, always love you in spite of what you've done! O, Erik!

Erik: I'll just say one thing: I'd do it again if I was on TV!

Scrapotkin saunters into the room.

Galago: What's your thoughts, Scrapotkin?

Erik: What? Didn't he die?

Scrapotkin: Bark!

Erik: No this is boring now goodbye!

Erik leaves us and stands off to the side of the room and dances. He's got a lovely body and you can tell he's got real ass-shaking skill. As if given a signal all the kids begin dancing and it's like they can't stop, they truly belong to a different culture that can only be expressed in dance. The pulsing music and the strobe lights on the wall create a hallucinatory effect. It seems to never want to end. Then everything goes back to normal.

Turid: Why are you talking to Scrapotkin and not to me, I died too! I died a lot better really, I was captured by the Germans in a mountain top fortress that kind of sat on top of a pillar. It was just at the climax and I'm sure everyone thought I was going to make it. My forehead was penetrated by a shot and I instantly closed my eyes, you could see it, and I sank into the water slowly, I was dressed all in white and quivered with orgasms all through my body -

Ville: And how about me! I was tortured by the Germans! I died in a concentration camp. And yet I'm still a nazi. That's weird huh?

Galago: Very.

Erik: I was going to crash over Vietnam but then I changed my mind and died of an overdose on stage even though Ville was the real musician.

Ville: That's totally okay.

The guys slap their hands together and you can see the time in Real World Ösmo have made them friends, maybe for a whole lifetime - however short it may be. The girls start crying and hug each other. They run to the ladies' room to talk while the dudes keep slapping palm to palm, hundreds of times, until there are no more opposing sexes or races. It feels beautiful to be a part of this.

Galago: You've been killed by Germans and been rock stars, eaten, pooped and loved in front of the camera in a luxurious apartment. You've been in a situation I know many youngsters envy you. Many never get a chance. What happens now? How does your future look in an ever harsher society where a lot of people get laid off, where the government cuts down because it has to, when everthing's just so. . .

Ville: I still have my dream of being a musician. I'll never let it go.

Frytema: So what? We've done great! Everyone, papers and commercial radio and commercial TV calls and wants to interview us, probably someone will call and offer a job too. I want to work in movies, I can say that right now.

Sven-Ture: I've lost my bus driving job because I couldn't take time off, but I take one day at a time and hope for the future. I don't regret being here for sure.

Mädchen: I'd wanted to go home.

Erik Hörstadius: And I'm going to keep writing amazing political portraits, revealing biographies and randy novels full of unbelievable burlesque rides, tall stories from a present day Stockholm mixed with more respectable stuff about Astrid Lindgren's and for example Olof Palme's mistakes, there's so much, Srebrenica, Treblinka which is still current. But not to forget love, the sensuous love. Every girl dreams about a stinking drunk guy throwing them down on their back and immediately coming, even the most frigid feminist-troll, by God! I swear.

Galago: But are you the real Erik Hörstadius?

Erik: Yeah, maybe. I don't know. No, I'm not. I really don't know who I am.

Nuppe: Thanks, that's enough. I think the kids have been wonderful to work with but now you've got to get your asses on the road. We've given you the chance of a lifetime and we did that one hundred percent, but it's a tough world out there. Lots of strong forces in motion. But you really have to go now. We're closing now. Out.

Turid: But our clothes. . .

The youngsters disappear without clothes into the cold nineties night. Sixty meters below us the streetlights of Ösmo sprays its greasy gleam over concrete and bloody, maimed bodies. Nuppe walks over to the minibar and makes us each a stiff drink.

Nuppe: Kids and alcohol I've never mixed, at least. Maybe that's why the show was such a success? Now we're going to have new kids. That feels neat. I want them younger. How young can they get, do you know? Look, I can dance! Imagine getting a vacation. Imagine getting a million dollars. I'd travel around the world. No, I'd make the greatest movie ever! I can't not work, create, it's my life. If you knew how hard I've worked on this show. I've had to make myself hard and untouchable. I'm really a sensitive person. Look, I can cry! I should really have been in front of the camera! Why didn't I get to do that? I've been tricked! Look now I'm crying for real.

Galago: Calm down. You got to be in Galago.

Nuppe: When was that?

Galago: Okay, what's happening with you now?

Nuppe: I'm going down to make Real World Mogadishu, but I don't know if it's going to film well. What does it cost to go there and where the Hell is it?

Comic 1:13

2010-09-06T22:52:00.003+01:00

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Sorry about the little delay there. Our artist was off communing with the Buddha or something. And we totally didn't get anywhere on that buffer mentioned earlier. I guess thirteen is really unlucky sometimes. Or maybe we got a sextuple case of the wobbly knees on the dawning realization that we have an actual fan, carefully and keenly reading everything we put out. That could be it.

Anyway, that was totally worth waiting three weeks for right? Non-stop, exciting baby action!

Comic 1:12

2010-08-16T16:17:00.004+01:00

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I hope you like the color green. We've a thing going on here where we try to invent new shades of green at least once per comic.

Comic 1:11

2010-08-09T21:11:00.003+01:00

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Is it a visualization of Plato's Cave? Is it an attempt at making the comic look like cave paintings? Or is it artwork sympathetic with the narrative's breakdown of normal reality? All of the above, apparently, plus some experimental pushing-the-comics-envelope artsiness.

I love this page. (And not just cause I'm in it.) But maybe it's just me. Don't worry, we'll soon return to our ordinarily scheduled silhouette drawings. In the meantime, have a gander at the hi-res version if you're into that sort of thing.

Messing with Bible thumpers for fun and profit

2010-08-06T08:27:00.003+01:00

What exactly is it that makes us so sure the Bible is the word of God? I mean to me it's pretty clear Leviticus was written by a collective of homophobes preaching against homosexuality because it made them uncomfortable, and they were convincing enough to get people 2500 years ago to believe them when they said they were taking dictation from God himself.

If I were to say God is talking through me and he says to say sorry for the misunderstanding, thou shalt have sex in the butt if that's what does it for thee. What would it take for you to accept that as the reconsidered, older and wiser word of God?

Should I somehow be able to convince the Vatican church to put it in the Bible by virtue of it being a message from God? Let's be a little realistic here: They're never, not in a thousand years, going to do that. It doesn't matter how much you insist that you're hearing the voice of God, the Bible is never going to be edited for you unless you can convince millions of people. Which is a bit of a problem.

When did this happen? When did God stop giving with the Gospel? And why? I mean, it was okay as late as 1500 years ago, people who had divine visions back then were believed.

We're forced to acknowledge the fact that people are not perfect. Either people were just crazy back then and didn't know any better which explains how the whole God illusion was invented, or people these days are too clever for their own good, too full of themselves to admit that someone who claims to speak with God may in fact speak true. Again, this is a problem.

Because if you want to follow the teachings of the church of your choice, how do you know those teachings are not outdated? How do you know God is not still speaking to us, but fails to make his voice heard to those with the proper authority?

Now God may be speaking directly to the Pope. I believe that's possible. If you're Catholic, that would seal the deal. But remember that we have a wide array of forces acting as a buffer, specifically to ensure that the undiluted, unedited word of God cannot reach the masses. The Vatican is full of people with power and motivation to ensure that any word of God that slips by the Pope's lips is carefully censored before it's revealed to the public. Those are old, wealthy men with every interest in maintaining the power that makes them wealthy. Much like the merchants in the temple that pissed of Jesus, they are not the exquisitely holy vessel of God the Pope (supposedly) is.

And if one believes in God, one cannot believe that His sole spokesperson on earth is the Pope. At that point you're making the Pope out to be God incarnate, and that's just silly. There should be other voices. But the earthly powers that be will not allow them to be heard.

Heck, maybe you are hearing God's voice and you've just been conditioned to ignore it and listen to your priest instead. You're only human after all, you can make mistakes. How would you know?