I busied myself to think of a story—a story to rival those which had excited us to the task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart….
Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it….
And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more. But this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations….
Mary Shelley, Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein
Month: October 2021
raised by pigs
my brother is applying to be a cop. he’s already a deputy with a semi-major city’s sheriff’s department, but he wants a transfer to somewhere more suburban. my dad was formerly an FBI agent. you can listen to him here, guesting on the relentless picnic. he sucks. full disclosure, I worked for the campus PD in college. it was the best paying student job. but no thank you, never again. I lucked out that an Oedipus complex trained me to be distrustful of the police state.
unfortunately, I also better understand cop psychology than most people who put ACAB in their Twitter bios. empathizing with viewpoints I disagree with comes so easily to me because my entire psychological development is a struggle to parse through the cryptofascist background noise of my upbringing. speaking of Oedipus, I would love to hear what Freud has to say about how I was affected when my dad left me, 7 months old, for Quantico, to return as an American Gestapo agent. I have suspicions.
anyway, I’m supposed to fill out a character reference questionnaire for my brother’s new department. he’s fine, much smarter than most cops. I just don’t understand how he could want to be a cop, and not in the abstract, from my political or moral objection to policing. like, he was never someone to enjoy wielding power over others. he often threw a fit when he felt like we were asking him to make a decision that affected everyone. but he doesn’t know anything else to do. he’s lazy, he didn’t enjoy school. most of his life was devoted to playing baseball, so when that didn’t work out career-wise, where was he supposed to go? I mean my answer would be “not be a cop,” but what does my opinion matter.
and that’s just it, my opinion does not matter. not to the police department asking me for a reference, not to my brother, not to my dad, not to this fucked world where everything seems awful and doomed and I can see it so clearly and it does not matter. I have tried to push back against their blinkered worldview. during the protests last summer I threatened to stop visiting if my dad didn’t take down his “thin blue line flag.” wrote a whole letter explaining my position and why it never feels like I can be heard. they did not take down their fascist memorabilia, and I have visited them since.
my thinking is I shouldn’t be so plain spoken about this, and instead use it all as the basis for fiction, which I fear will be weakened if I pull the veil back and let you see what goes into it. but I also think it’s valuable for me to be honest and forthright about this. then, when I get accused of being a plant, an op, a spook, or otherwise complicit, at least no one can ask why I hid this stuff. while we’re at it, what my dad does now, ie provide “security consultation” for very wealthy people, is even more evil, and by association probably sullies me worse, even though I refuse his offers for work. all these moral dilemmas are brought into focus by my mere existence, and I have no idea how to deal with any of them.
part of me wants to sandbag this reference questionnaire, somehow be a minor wrench in the oppressive machine recruiting my brother. but the questions just make me sad. “How often do you have contact with the candidate?” rarely. I miss my brother always, he was the only person I really had when my parents divorced. even though we have very little, next-to-nothing in common, he and I have no problem spending time together. enjoyable time. but I barely hear from him, in part because I harbor resentment over how I was always a satellite for my dad’s and brother’s interests, following around the baseball team my brother played on and my dad coached. but that childish indignation on my part seems to have created the space that made it possible for my brother to drift into law enforcement without any input from me.
when you’re a coward, everything’s always too little, too late.
astrology twitter account
mystic/empath/boddhisattva/annunaki [love letter emoji] • clairaudient/claircognizant/clairvoyant/clairtactile/clairolfactic [“see no evil” monkey emoji] • [cancer emoji][sun emoji] | [aquarius emoji][moon emoji] | [capricorn emoji][up arrow emoji] • check out my onlyfans for [eggplant emoji][water droplets emoji]
—
~*~weekly horoscope~*~
aries, taurus, gemini, leo, virgo, scorpio, sagittarius, capricorn, aquarius
yesterday will come back if you make it tomorrow. beware people who would do you harm. send a letter to friend. no, not that friend.
—
[new moon face emoji] what is shadow work? [magic orb emoji]
shadow work is when we decide to finally look in the mirror of our soul. sometimes the mirror shows us what we don’t want to see. but this mirror is in our soul. light your inner light so it shines off the mirror inside. then with lucidity, you will be ready to join the dark side. [purple imp emoji]
the artistic temperament blues
it wasn’t worth the non-fight we got into. having offered to drive, and needing to get up for work the next day, I didn’t order anything else to drink. the beer I already finished was wearing off. it was that time of evening between winding down and keeping things up, and J asked the table if she should order another. I less-than-half-joked “no,” since I was almost ready to leave. but not wanting to be pushy, and it being her friends we were out with, I deferred when she was jokingly scandalized that I’d say “no.” then it took half an hour for her to get her drink, and I sat with nothing to say, growing increasingly resentful no one asked me questions I didn’t want to answer. J told me she could get a ride with someone else, but I had volunteered to drive both her and her roommate, and I was the one who drank the least, so obviously only I could be responsible enough to make sure she was safe. after what felt like an especially pathetic stretch of silence from me, she asked me if I was okay. “yeah of course what do you mean,” I said, resuming my petulant reticence.
in the non-fight that followed, J, thinking I didn’t leave for fear of upsetting her, said “I don’t want this to sound bad, but like, we’re separate people. I don’t like, need you to be there.” this wasn’t exactly the problem, though it is a problem I have, called codependency. sacrificing myself on the altar of selflessness is what I do best, especially in my romantic relationships. as long as everyone else is okay, I’m okay, even if I’m obviously not okay. this tendency is why it took like, four years for me to actually get to know the people in my neighborhood and explore, because back then, in a prior relationship, I was afraid my jealous-as-a-dragon partner would interrogate me about what I was up to. (if you’ve heard me harp on this before, believe me, I wish I could get over it too.) the fight that led to the end of the relationship was incited by me missing like 16 calls in an hour because I fell asleep watching Blue Velvet one Friday night. she was mad about tweets of mine she found, expressing admiration for Molly Brodak’s baking. my ex was threatened by a purely virtual friendship with a married woman living on the opposite side of the continent, to give you an idea how that dynamic was. six years I wasted living like that.
even when I notice myself falling into maladaptive habits, it’s hard to think myself out of them. sometimes I think it’s a personality disorder, because additionally, when I’m upset, everything turns all black-and-white, and you’re with me or you’re against me. if interpersonal tension doesn’t dissipate, I become paranoid, and not like funny-ha-ha-the-New-World-Order paranoid, but “no one really likes you. they only keep you around selfishly. They’re scheming how to most viciously betray you,” sort of thing. keep it up, and the numerology starts whirring, and everything gets all narratively terminal.
anyway, the “separate people” thing. I don’t always feel like I’m a full person. I’m highly impressionable, needy, uncertain of my motivations, liable to acquiesce for the sake of keeping the peace, and resigned. I don’t have a social circle in my area that isn’t a direct consequence of my romantic relationship. most of my time I spend alone. on the other hand, I sometimes feel like I’m the only real person in the whole world, and everyone else is an automaton, blithely indifferent to their manifest hypocrisy. como se dice, alienated much?
of course, I know I am not above the same hypocrisy. it bothers me, at least, is the only grounds I might have to feel superior about it. but nothing changes, I keep not living my life. instead I only bitch about feel trapped, or, worse, uninteresting. there are stretches where I am filled with purpose, and the world is cast in a cinematic glow, and I act out with abandon, and this is called hypomania, which happens when I’m not sleeping well, not eating well, drinking too much coffee, otherwise upset. so to avoid going crazy, I have to live boring, says the little devil on my shoulder, reminding me that some of the most significant moments of my life were probably seized on in state of hyperarousal.
not exactly sure where I’m going with this or how to wrap it up. none of this is directly related to the non-fight I had with J. more like, it was important for me to confront myself so I stopped pitying myself. and like, maybe, maybe, I might be less pissy if I had more of my own stuff going on.
whenever I say that, J looks at me funny, like, “uh, you’re doing a lot. you have a million projects and a full time job and you’re finishing your masters degree. you think you don’t do enough?”
I mean, no, I don’t, but I also can’t tell what I’m not doing, or what I could be doing. so I write.
thoughts on Jennifer’s Body & the occult
somehow I lived til 2021 without having seen Jennifer’s Body (dir. Kusama, 2009). the movie deserves its cult status and does not deserve such a low score on rotten tomatoes. or maybe it does, but only if we lived in a world where real Movies got made, not advertisements for merchandise. I’d give anything for someone to make a zero-fucks campfest as bonkers as Jennifer’s Body in 2021.
I mean, ultimately it’s nowhere near a perfect movie. I can’t even say for sure if it’s a Good movie. not sure if it’s really my business saying if it’s Good or Bad anyway, but that’s an aesthetic discussion I’m not getting into now, not exactly. Jennifer’s Body is definitely a Fun movie, and it’s got grit and texture and takes silly risks and let’s itself be overrun with ideas. so few movies do that nowadays. and far be it from me to criticize a movie that burns Chris Pratt up in a fire explicitly symbolic of the World Trade Center attacks.
where it loses me is in the last 1/3, when Diablo Cody has to explain the mechanism of evil and tie it all up, and the film’s logic becomes too convenient. this hinges on easy “occult” cliches that offer very corny justification for Needy’s escape and revenge. when she goes into her school library searching for answers and finds an extensive “occult” section, me, being the pedantic librarian I am, I was like “yr school library would not have those books.” (later, Needy’s boyfriend “hangs the lampshade” on this when he asks her “our library has an occult section?”) but like, fine, like, the movie obviously relishes the absurdity of teen films and splatter flicks. the end just gets a little too Diablo Cody, and wobbles.
speaking of the occult (hoped for a more artful segue, but fuck you this is my blog), I started reading The Occult: A History, by Colin Wilson. truth be told, I’m ambivalent about the occult. And to maintain my ambivalence, or to prevent it from being too easy to determine what I “actually” think, I sometimes struggle with how much I should write publicly what I feel about my preoccupations. I don’t have simple explanations for my perverse fascinations, or for my idiosyncratic convictions. like, in The Occult, Wilson writes about faculties often termed paranormal or supernatural as being nothing of the sort, and that we all have some measure of perception that is subconscious, instinctual, not explainable by narrow conceptions of “logic.” this seems obviously true to me, based on my own experiences with premonition, intuition, and nonverbal communication. from this epistemological basis, though, one could easily follow lines of thought and feeling that would not only seem insane, they would feel insane. when one attempts to communicate felt truths from that alienated point of view, with all the conviction of someone asserting that 2 and 2 is 4, a mismatch of contexts gives the impression of psychosis. if you’ve ever read the writings of schizophrenics or any of those books that get labeled “conspiracy theory” on the back, you know what I mean. I have a stack of these books, plus books on shit like ESP, astral projection, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, etc., that I intend to read once my school work is done. whether it’s all true, or if I’ll go crazy, or if those are two sides of the same coin, we’re going to find out.
were it to have not been so horror-lore exposition-y, Jennifer’s Body obviously would have been a different movie, so my criticism feels a little meaningless. I most value art that commits to its premise, which hell fuckin yeah that movie commits.
from “the art & practice of astral projection” by ophiel
this blog is lovingly dedicated to cody’s mean, violent, and stubborn disposition!
new moon in libra
in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator’s conscience exacts revenge on him, for two things. one is murder, but not only murder, a murder where the victim, an old man, almost catches him, the murderer. because the old man knows there’s someone else in the room, the narrator doesn’t have the same unfair advantage he would ambushing an old man who’s asleep. so that’s weighing the ol’ Scales against him. then, after there’s blood on his hands, the narrator lies to the cops. now, who wouldn’t agree that such dishonesty denies the relative equality between souls? this is Nietzsche’s (oct 15) ironic sense of justice inverted into felt guilt, a burning guilt brought on by the double violation of near-mutual recognition.
I listened to Christopher Lee read the story and I wanted to say he overdoes it, but the narrator really is that cartoonish in prose, & so is a lot of Poe, who I’m revisiting because I’m trying to write a horror story this month; “The Sphinx” I like more because it’s weirder, more oblique and disconcerting; it has something to say about shared reality, alienation, and democracy. “The Tell-Tale Heart” seems more like an exercise in pacing. could also be an overexposure thing. cartoonish isn’t necessarily bad either, to be clear, not a critique of Poe really. idk it’s Libra szn I can’t be *that* mean. tho Bela Lugosi (oct 20) kinda disappointed me in The Black Cat (1935), “suggested by” Poe’s story with the same name and carried by Boris Karloff’s performance (and his great costumes).
last night I watched Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), a delightfully gothic sexploit that titillates and horrifies in equal measure. creepazoid rapists & malevolent city slickers shot in high contrast black & white, cast in shadows stark enough to compete with the most self-serious of the German expressionists. not to mention stacked-brick-house 60s babes, wearing (and removing) all kinds of lacy things. all of which is to say it was extremely “my shit.”
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity
Ecclesiastes 1:2, c’mon you knew that.
mornings are like this: the alarm goes off at 6:50am, which I snooze until 7:00am. I fail at avoiding the internet for the first 15 minutes of wakeful consciousness, winding me into compulsivity from the jump. the sink’s never empty because my kitchen is tiny and I am lazy. or, rather, I do not afford myself the same consideration I would for guests on whom I want to make a good impression (ie women I want to see naked). clean the french press, make a cup of coffee, sit down with whatever I’m working on that day: right now it’s this. sometimes I read, sometimes I waste a bunch of time looking at my screens. the sun this morning is muted by lingering clouds that had electrified the sky all night, a rare thunderstorm on the Southern California coast. for some reason I am still being coquettish about where I live. fine it’s Ventura, that’s where I live. I don’t really care if you know I guess. then I eat a yogurt, shower, sometimes hit the bong, and head to work.
on balance, I could stand to “do” more, and more intensely. maybe I’ll get into microdosing; I bought a vial of LSD at the start of 2020’s COVID lockdown and haven’t sampled any of it yet. an experiment in living and perceiving for the sake of documentation. but doing things so that there’s something to write about is extreme vanity, only for the cameras, like a Kim K (Oct 21) pap walk. all the same, vanity is a powerful motivator for me, I will admit shamelessly. perhaps I ought to accept as much, under this airheaded bimbo of a Libra new moon.
monday oct 4
today, I pulled the 8 of coins, which in the Raider-Waite-Coleman deck is depicted as a young craftsman in a workshop, diligently plying the pentacled disks representative of the suit. fitting that I’ve been working straight through since this morning, first on a bunch of boring start-of-the-week library operation stuff, then on wrapping up a couple portfolio items for my MLIS program that demonstrate my competency in areas D (“Apply the fundamental principles of planning, management, marketing, and advocacy”) and G (“Demonstrate understanding of basic principles and standards involved in organizing information such as classification and controlled vocabulary systems, cataloging systems, metadata schemas or other systems for making information accessible to a particular clientele“).
but I’m sick of that and I intended on writing here today, because I need to square up against myself a little wrt what I want to do. I am a cagey, aloof person; self-revelation and “oversharing” do not come naturally to me. additionally, I am paranoid about online surveillance, both by the machines and by witch-hunters. I strive to clearly perceive and confront myself through writing, even though I don’t usually write publicly in anything resembling realist narration about, idk, my romantic troubles or my mundane behavior. relatedly I have been known to speak disparagingly of opmhalaskeptical writing, the province of personal blogs.
however, I know this won’t work out in the long run. I bore myself when I write too much in my head, enumerating neurosis and abstracted considerations without referent to tangible, lived life. so part of what this blog is for is training myself to be less cerebral and more visceral, and for hardening myself against the horror of exposure. writing that has a chance of doing the tyrannically narcissistic thing I want it to do, ie let me influence other’s impression of the world, requires making an example of myself on the knowledge that what I present is intended to stimulate reflection or to otherwise provoke. which means like, knowingly and willingly shedding less-than-favorable light on my actions and desires, and refraining from passing public judgement myself. this is basically the only valuable thing someone can learn from the example of stand up comedy.
but, like, it’s not that I am embarrassed to say I watch bukkake porn or whatever. it’s sort of that I think it’s kind of boring to talk about myself and so I don’t think anyone cares what happens to me in my boring little life. or if I’m in a grandiose mood, the role of self-aggrandizing diva comes easy, but I generally avoid venting vitriol and petty grievances—the most intense of my motivations—as public writing because….well, in part because I previously had people in my life who would demand explanation for anything like that, and because I don’t want my artistic efforts to cause strife in my personal relationships. however, being an artist means accepting the consequences of your efforts no matter what, with the corollary that anticipated negative consequences are not in themselves sufficient reason to forego the effort. and most people around me now have been nothing but supportive of my work. and stating intentions or desires publicly is a powerful tool for self-catalysis. so, as it always is, when I am most hesitant about expressing something strongly felt, that’s when I’m on the right path.
right now I’m conscientiously staying “in my head” because this isn’t some coy evasion, like I have something “real” in mind that I’m not talking about. but tomorrow I plan to write a new moon report, something I want to do consistently, and I think it would be best to try narrativizing my experience rather than my thoughts. maybe I’ll even say a few things to make sure I’m embarrassed about it.
the black cat (1934)
69 pairs of trochees to chant in a baseball stadium
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