Establishing the Parallel

By the rule
"x cannot be in two places at once"
I force x and x's place from nothing
because it is not here, it must be there
there must be for it to be there
there is
it is
not here (restatement)

Add to this an inverse scale;
the more unlikely or improbable it is that x is here (for we must provide for a variety of instances, some in which x is not visible and others in which x has not yet happened), the more likely or probable it is that x is there.

Instance 1: While walking home with groceries, and thinking of this and that, I am taken with a scenario.  In it, I seek out one of my associates and extend to them, in all seriousness, and in great earnestness, an invitation to x (which may very well be no more or less than the rule itself).   I am taken with the scenario, but I know it cannot be completed, in earnest or otherwise.  I cannot see myself recreating it for a variety of reasons, none of which having to do with the misplacement of x.  I think of all the things that will go otherwise--I will be refused, ridiculed, or condemned; my offer will be considered a joke. My associate will think me strange from then on, and regard me awkwardly.  The specifics of the reasons do not matter--only that they build against the likeliness of the scenario happening.  (The invitation and the scenario of the invitation are not x, but they may be seen as an extension of x, all the more so because they too were not recreated).  The restlessness one feels when counting these reasons then becomes exchangeable for its inverse;  it is no longer a matter of getting something to happen here, but to reach it there.  It is more palatable (more interesting, more workable) to imagine a place one cannot reach than a nonplace.

Further, in the former instance one may spend a great amount of time imagining ways to reach the place; one may explore ways, or never find ways, or establish ways as rituals, though I do not see this done (or spoken of) often (or in ways I like and consider worth remembering).

And lest speaking in these general terms becomes problematic, I will clarify that in this instance x was a ship, and it is never much more or less than a ship.

Names

I have decided; in the affirmative? It is affirmative, certainly.  The affirmation, the decision, is a conscious one; but is the affirmed and decided a prior state, a preexisting condition?  This seems to be the issue (for me, at least) surrounding the right to name.  Problematically, I both believe the right should not exist, and that I do not have it--defining myself by the institution I wish to abolish.  By the rules of an institution which claims origin, which claims lineage, I am a degenerate; drifter; traitor; mongrel.  I acknowledge differences within myself, but do not align them with the corresponding lineage of difference--not out of rebellious courage, mind you, but because I do not feel I have the right to do so.  Then, following this, I feel as if I have a right to claim all those places I travel to or from (this sort of claim being more the size and shape of a possessed affection than an overarching ownership).  I do not mean to speak for any of the things I claim, so it cannot be claimed I may distort the established lineage.  I will define myself through another, but not another through myself; how could I possibly hope to embody so many multitudes?  My own skin is like atmosphere around me; I am lost in it.  It's great fun, but I do not fathom crowds when I can barely fathom myself.
The shapeshifter in this town says: I am not you, and I mean you no harm (no unusual amount), but I should like to walk among you for my own reasons.  What reasons?  I will not tell you; I will not make myself toothless or expose a priori skin because I have no skin but that which you lend me and that which was lent before you.  To claim lineage and name protects only what I want today, and not what I will want tomorrow.  I am mongrel; I desire. My reasons are my own.

Vidyuh

      I haven't played video games in a really long time--for most of the middle of that time, I decided it was because they weren't for me.  I didn't play them as religiously as others and I felt I didn't play them for the right--the same--reasons as many of my peers either.  Gaming culture makes me feel shy and stumble-footed; a double blush born of feeling like I have no business being there and the mad love for the handful of games that brought me creeping in to begin with. For a good five years I took pride in the stack of slick Game Informer magazines I horded in my room.  I flipped through them for the pictures--concept art or a two-pose sprite on a lush unmoving townscape, it was beautiful.  I still remember the Baten Kaitos advert I tried to draw, the twisted Resident Evil and Doom monsters spilling from their screenshots and around the reviews I didn't read because who wants to read when you can look at beasties. And something about the smell of the zines--again, something slick and almost oily, altogether different from the chemical coconut-flower fragrances of Seventeen. I think the whole stack spanned only a year or two--but they were new to me for a couple after, since I rarely played the games that spawned the articles.
      This was how I accessed games that were fifty, then sixty dollars a piece when new.  Somewhere between high school and college, I realized that most of my peers bought video games as soon as they came out.  And my mind was blown.  My family had a careful ritual of watching a game come out, sometimes first in a magazine, or in a commercial, a great digital dawn.  Only then  then sunset came before the rise--you had to forget about it for awhile, until the price dropped and it showed up at random as a gift because shit you are a kid and you have no monies.  And now, well, shit--I'm an adult, and I still don't really have money.  Sixty dollars is a third of a gaming console A THIRD OF A GAMING CONSOLE. I just--I don't even.
I had a gameboy color (translucent grape--the badassest shit out there), a super nintendo, an n64, a playstation, a playstation 2, and a ds lite.  All of these things were bought at least a year after they came out--I remember the n64 we got when it was right about where the ps2 is now: great bins of discount games in the middle of Gamestop, no designated wall space anymore.  I didn't upgrade to a Wii, a Playstation 3, or an Xbox 360 because shit those fuckers are expensive.  They still are, because the ps3 started out phenomenally expensive to begin with, and the 360 keeps rolling out newer models that keep the price fresh.  And the Wii...is just the Wii.
      The other reason I can't justify this purchase (other than being poor as shit) is that I don't play all the games. Or a lot of games.  Or finish ones I don't like, sometimes.  Games scare me.  They excite me, too, and that's what draws me to them.  When I'm alone, or with friends, I can usually get past the scaring part, but I've never really participated in any sort of gaming culture because there's no way to say "hello I'm scared as tits of playing Super Mario World how are you today."  I don't know if it's because I can't distance myself from games or what--I feel like the good and the bad are forever locked together in this one--but what makes games so real for me, so desirable, is also what makes them terrifying objects.  RPGs I can usually handle better, because the pacing is rather controlled and shit don't sneak up on you.  Boss fights are usually what get me.  Hide and seek and tag are things I like that terrify me as well; so there's probably a theme in this somewhere.
      Husks still give me the serious goddamn heebie jeebies, especially those linebacker fucks that charge you in Mass Effect 2, but I pull out my particle gun, curse a lot, and get over it.      So it's something I can push pass, usually if I'm on my own, because it feels embarrassing as fuck otherwise.  The first day I played Mass Effect (the first first-person shooter I've played since maybe junior high), I died three times in the first mission and decided "FUCK this is just not going to happen."  Then I came back to it a week later and desperately ground past the disorientation until I was "in"-- that place where the world fits like a glove, in terms of it being manipulable, and the slight necessary distance the manipulable often demands.  They say the brain goes entirely blank during an orgasm; it's something like that when you're deep enough.
      There are still aspects I can't suspend, though.  Sometimes I feel like the characters in current playthroughs are aware of what I've done (in general, and to them) in previous playthroughs. When I'm Hawke, I help Zevran not just because I'm diplomatic but because, well, maybe I feel like I have to atone for my Warden's killing him.  As if he knows.  As if his uncanny reappearance is due to this unsettled issue and not the fact that I didn't import my Origins save.  I know I should try to diversify my choices in playthroughs, but--and it sounds ridiculous--it's like I worry about putting all potentials on the same ground; as if the new playthrough will efface, or at least dim, the previous (which is usually the first, and therefore the most strongly felt, and the most researched).
      I've been doing every last weenie side mission in Mass Effect 2 before the final battle because Thane threw all of my Garrus feels into question and GODDAMN, THE MAN(man-lizard?) IS DYING.  I've already resigned myself to having to make a new Shepard for ME3 (unless I creep over to my friends house every weekend to play it on her device in the utmost of creepy ways), so whoever I choose, it doesn't matter.  This story, this playthrough, ends, and I can make infinite others.  But fuck, what if they know?      Something small, the shock waves of a parallel self passing through all other parallel selves. I wonder if it stems from the recent decision I made regarding dream weight--but maybe they are both of some other slight influence.  As much as I want to see Malus and Celosia again, I haven't finished a second runthrough of SOTC because I don't know if I can do what I did while knowing what I'm doing; even if the game hasn't changed, I have.  I change it.
      The games I unabashedly love, to date, are: Twinsen, Draken, Digimon World 2, Pokemon Red and Gold, Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy 7, LoZ: Phantom Hourglass, Dragon Ages and Mass Effects.  In twenty years, it seems a bit paltry, I guess, due partly to being stuck in console history.  But I don't know.  It doesn't bother me anymore--the what I am and how I do.  I'm calling it the Bioware Age of my life, because that's about when it happened.
       In this first year of the Bioware Age, no fucks are given and all my feels are valid.

Worm

[exercise in rewriting stuff I read]

     You're there, again, and here I am down the same, down the wrong trying to be there again too.  It started like this, too, a dark run through bright lights--our streets always lit and our city always endless--and maybe it's wrong for me to remind you like this but God it was good before it was a memory, before it got marked and sealed by all the shit that came after.  Can you forget the shit that came after?  Or just..find a way to extract this instance from all the others?  The city is flooded with light and I've searched so long I'm nearly blind. Maybe it's your ghost in the old caches we put down; or have you been returning all along?
     Because when we came out you went back in and this time to places where I couldn't follow.  I watched the old skin of you but it was a dead thing.  Data husk.  But how could I know you wouldn't come back?  We left because I couldn't take the lights but you needed them didn't you? You move between dark places and exist in filled spaces.  Maybe I'm right to seek your ghost because you're as much what you leave behind as what you become--it's all you are, really.  And it's beautiful.  And I thought it wasn't real because it wasn't real and like some snot-nosed kid I wanted you real and in anticipation, in eagerness, in almost-relief I let go--
     And you were gone.  Because I had chased you there, you were gone.
     What I see now is another sort of data husk--this one I can't approach.  If I did, where would you go?  If I did, what would happen to all the others?  It's not fragility that makes me hesitate, but the opposite--a bulwark, a trip-wire system; and behind it, a network of escape routes.  An army of rogues, indefinitely regrouping, each rendezvous without hierarchy.  No home base. No home.
     I think we could do this forever; I think you have prepared to, though I can't figure out why.  Maybe it doesn't matter.  Maybe because it doesn't matter.  If you moved with anything but a purpose divided and dependent on each part and path that expanded it, exploded it, you'd have something that could be traced, lost, or destroyed. Which isn't important--but it's so unimportant, so trivially boring in its prevalence that, ever the benefactor, you've deemed it worthy of avoidance--a kingpin so small it's more void than object.
     Every night I enter the city and search until I am blinded by it; until your ghost is indistinguishable from the walls and I think you are nowhere--or decidedly everywhere.  The expanding limits of the city; do I only grow the hunting grounds by seeking you?  But I will, still, and I check the old skins for signs of return, even as I drift from them, out of the city and out of the lights.  There are bodies that carry the city like you can't--like I thought you could.  I am tired and blind and when I leave the city there is a warmth; there is a home.  It is not a bad thing, Ellie.  It is not so bad a thing at all.

lemon and dirt

when thoughts stopped short

this is a test of the emergency thoughtcasting system

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cordyceps

I don't know where it is my head goes at these times, or when these times are, or why they are and why it goes

Should I like to find out, maybe, but sometimes I think this would be worse than all the not-knowing wandering

It takes a very long time to get to a place you are avoiding because you do not know where or why it is, and why you should be so much against it (the foible of every redirection charm is the residue it leaves behind, meat for the curious mind and its inevitable unraveling)

It is a very tiring way to travel, but then--have you already forgot again?--you do no really want to get where you are going.

This, which is not at all a pleasurable state, not a direction but the sort of desperate avoidance of a polarized magnet pushed forth between two insistently pinched fingers

Is equally uncomfortable when avoided, or forgotten, when remembered, or returned to, as it must always be (at least for awhile, and that little addendum too is part of the treacherous equation).

It is the condition and fierceness of the return (each return?) that creates a sort of animal condition--not other animal, just human animal

Guilt, a condensing potion and the jutting of jumbled up limbs adding a certain roughness to figure, locomotion, and mind

Wherein presences and non presences become more themselves (or their non selves) as each second continues to selve, continues to selve, continues to selve . . . .

And the collection of these bumps or declivities become so much as to irritate the eyes, ears, or nose, sensing organs which are not used to such insistent tactility

In an effort to expand while contracting, I now contemplate the skill of certain necessary deceptions

Deceptions? Obfuscations. Defense charms; sacrificial illusions.

A truth taken in is a certain sort of lie; or becomes one, when it reaches a certain critical depth. From this point on, the truth remains, but by some contamination of situation or emotion (I am not yet sure what the additive is here), the projection of this truth becomes a lie. This being the process by which certain falsities are allowed and not falsities at all---only processes mistaken for truth, and then deemed false when discovered to be otherwise.

Sometimes I think if I sit still enough and long enough I can figure this out

forgetting that this is not the thing you can or want to figure out

So I sit and think to no end.

Sometimes I get it right when I sleep, but when you sleep, variables are moved or removed until it becomes possible to solve and figure. It doesn't translate.

have you ever feel like there was something in you that wasn't you