Spiders Suck.

[Yeah, you heard me. They totally do.]

A response and reorganization of things that will spill into TEa3.

See how easy it is to make sentences here? I am a terrible, comfortable creature--Storni's cozy, writing bug from "I Am Useless":

But tied to the seductive dream world
Of my instincts, I returned to my dark hole
where, like a lazy and greedy insect
I was born for love (23)

It is not an accident that I do not catch eyes; if I am given the opportunity, I will avoid them at every turn, like a patch of nettles. It is not an accident that I was memorizing the fuzzy shapes and colors of a bookshelf over the tops of my glasses.


I am a half-lit light bulb; the other half is missing entirely. In space. In a cake. In a neural web. Somewhere. Someday, maybe.


And I must rephrase something that came out garbled: I do not feel like I am killing someone when I write. That would be weird--though I admittedly went through a PKing stage in my writinz. But I do feel as if I am killing something. I am killing a connection; burning a bridge; squishing a flea. I can face the source after I have written--bitten?--them. But it can be rather uncomfortable. My mind is hazy--the process of extrapolation and then writing is not clear cut. I am first thinking about someone, then thinking along dangerous lines, then, the tipping point: I give them a story, and they are safely pressed into fiction, safely fitted to a context again.

But if I should meet them again, it is a most uncanny meeting--for the character is not in the page, but in the mind of the author. And it is not so easy pulling those things apart. The flea on my arm, the toxo in my gut, the character in my head--it changes the way I see the source of inspiration, whatever it may be, for that, too, though tangibly real, has its spot in my head.

If you are smart, you will make friends with me before I make friends with the image of you. The bloodletting has begun--how many days do you have before Mina goes past the point of no return, as Lucy did? You must catch the vampire and stem the flow, stop the anemia--keep that life in it's original owner, always more desirable than the immortal container.

I am trying very hard to believe this, but sometimes, to my horror, I find I do not.


Also, proof that I had a nicer version of that stupid flower thing, with legit notes and everything:


Well...not that much nicer. And the subject is actually slightly different. I guess I should redraw it.

~

The opium eater wants to quit when he's sober; but he wants nothing more than what he has when he is in a moment of thrall. He wants both to be cured and to be left alone with his sickness. The situation of the writer (or, at least, those Kreisler-ish types of writers described by Schopenhauer) is not very different. But perhaps I am going too far to call writing a sickness--but I'm not talking about pen and paper; this is what happens before anything is physically written. This is the altering, the editing.


To have one foot in either world--yes, that would be ideal. But the right foot is on a muddy hill; one footstep is all that is needed to begin a very dangerous descent. One begins losing their footing from the very first.

I have gotten carried away before; I have given entire nights to trying to find a face or a color. I have saved songs like sacrifices for this process.
There is no line of mediation for those with bad balance; every step is one too far.
I have suspended hunger and sleep; I have suspended the time of day; I have suspended priorities and obligations for these moments when--when--hrmph--you know when you get the gold star in Mario that makes you shittastically invincible? It's that. And to use that moment for anything but smashin' through turtles and baddies is--well, that's just crazy.

Remind me to learn how to felt one of these. It would be rad.

~

I wonder if I feel cruel because I want to feel cruel--I want to eat the moon. But it is only a reflection on the water; the moon is a million miles away in the other direction. I harm nothing by throwing rocks at its reflection. I cannot. And this is, perhaps, a sad thing for the fox to realize. So perhaps it chooses not to. Perhaps it kicks a few rocks in spite.

But I wonder--does the moon watch the fox's devilish play? Does it see, does it feel, even if no part of it is touched? The fox will always want to know. I think the fox may throw rocks in the hopes that the moon will be angered; incited; moved. I wander if the fox indulges in this destructive divertimento because it knows it cannot reach the moon, and it thinks it has found a way of luring the moon down to its place.

But if something comes, it will not be the moon; it will be something terrible in form, I suspect, as a result of the fox's teasing.


~




I don't want to be Shimamura. Shimamura was a crapface. Ok, lets be proper about it: he was an introvert and a largely unsympathetic character (read: crapface). He stole sidelong glances of pale face over green mountains; in the windows of my train, I am stealing glances of dark faces over horned landscapes. I will not scorn red faces. I will not scorn red sleepers. I will not be Shimamura.


But I am afraid I cannot tell the difference between a mask, a reflection, and a painted face at this point. Maybe there isn't one. But I think I've been told before that there is one, so I am trying to find it--that line between This cat, That cat, and Fuzz cat.



The example I couldn't give plainly is in my thought experiment; that's as plain as it'll get until the last thought experiment, I suspect. The next best example I can give is from a book by Kij Johnson, which I will give, if asked; but I won't put it here, because this is already quite long, and I'm sleepy.

Furthermore,

I was looking for a picture of an awkward turtle, but found this instead.
Not what tortoises are for.