Facebook Status Updates June - July 2017

June 2017

They say hate is easy, but even after everything I can’t hate you. I swear I try, but I can’t.

“I know it came to you in a dream, Jeff. But you can’t name your franchise ‘Jaysome Eats’. Trust me on this.”

“But why?”

“Because he - . I -. Look. It won’t go well.”

“There are lots of people named Jay, I can do a bird theme. It can’t lose!”

“I know. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“But I saw it, officer. The vampire just walked right in the front door of the house. I thought vampires had to be invited in!”

“Normally, yes. But the front door and back door of the home are in perfect alignment, a t-intersection faces the home, it’s facing south-west and is poorly maintained.”

“That’s relevant?”

“A home with bad feng shui cannot stop a vampire from entering it.”

Luck lies in getting what you do not deserve.

It used to be so simple, he says, but his smile isn’t simple at all.

The last page read:

There is no monster at the end of the book. The only monster is the one reading it.

There are limits. The gods do not speak of them. The dead do not whisper their names. But to all things there are lines that must not be crossed. Doors that cannot be closed once they have been opened. Truths that cannot be uttered lest the silence after them fall across the worlds that are, that were, and even those that never existed at all.

In other words, it was a Monday. The kind that is rough at all the edges and leaves your tongue tasting like something died a slow death inside you. Sometimes that is a Tuesday. Today it is a Monday. And your shadow won’t stop giggling at the promises the darkness is making.

Some days. Some days nothing can go right at all, no matter how much it tries to pretend otherwise.

“It’s like sex. People used to have sex for fun. Now it’s sperm counts and matching genotypes. There used to be love. Now … there isn’t. No one writes songs anymore. No one sings. We’re all just waiting to die, dead men who haven’t died. The signs say it’s a dead end road, but we don’t believe them.“

We stopped being friends after the second kiss.

Aesthetic:

Too verbose for six word stories.

I am scared of every wish that wishes to come true.

Is it unethical for superheroes to have secret identities?

It turned out that love was just an alternative fact, just another piece of fake news.

“The funny thing about you? I mean, one of the really funny ones? The more you speak, the less you actually say.”

Finding the magical sword didn’t unnerve Jist. That the sword had a deep, growling voice and said its name was also Jist managed to do so.

“I would rather if you did not demean your intelligence by insulting my own,” the dog said to the half-dragon. “What lies inside your horde right now is far worse than any tax collector. You may consider this a friendly warning, though we are hardly best friends.”

“I don’t even knowing you,” Martin protested.

“And yet you think I might not be a good dog?”

People say it’s easy to play pretend only when they haven’t had to spend their lives doing so.

“You don’t have any enemies? None at all? Just how pathetic are you?”

“I’m not scared of you anymore,” I whispered but my reflection just offered up a sardonic smile.

“Aren’t you?” it asked in my father’s voice.

I walk down the street. The sky isn’t one I know but I have no idea why I think that. Sam put thoughts into my head. Whatever she is, I know that. There’s a term for thoughts like that. Intruding? Intrusive? I don’t know. The street is a Way. A path. A labyrinth because the sewer is underneath. Sewage lines, power lines, cables. Information and electricity humming below us like strands of starlight. They aren’t that. Nothing is that.

Whispers echo. I don’t think they’re mine. I think this is how ghosts feel. Walking in memories. Drowning in voices. But I’m not drowning. Not even treading water. Floating above it. I’ve never had a talent before. Surviving this seems to be mine.

“I never stopped loving you.”

“That’s only because you never started.”

“You have your knowledge, yes, but I am afraid it has not translated into wisdom - and certainly not into being jaysome.”

They offered Sean the steroids, expecting him to bulk his muscles, but he used them to improve his jaw muscles in order to be a better auctioneer.

“It doesn’t feel right. Your trick with the penny, whatever it is I do. I can scare, even hurt, but I have to be angry. If I need anger to be that, then I don’t trust it. Not what I do, not what I take from people. The world is fresh cement, and I don’t want to shove my hand into it, lest it harden leave my signature behind.” And I step back then, a laugh escaping me.

Davis doesn’t move. His parka ripples a little in the wind, mismatched clothing a strange morse code I can’t understand. A few vehicles come and leave the gas station.

“Sorry. I’m not sure I’ve ever used the word ‘lest’ in my life before.”

That wins a smile, broken teeth simply a part of it. “The knowing is dangerous when it does not bring understanding. I desired power, before – well, before. And after, I wished it for revenge. I’d like to say it cost me everything, but I think I paid that long ago.” He shakes his head. “Whatever you were sent to me for, I am not that. I have no power left in me. All I know is that this – being awake, magic, awareness, yes? All I know is that it can be learned, but it cannot be taught.”

I used to like your poetry. Until you began writing poems.

“You’re paranoid, Alex …”

“And how would you know that if you haven’t been spying on me like everyone else?!”

I used to love your prose, until I realized you were only writing poetry.

We only lose the things we find.

It’s important to forgive but also as important to remember.

“It’s not that drowning in ignorance. More that I know how much I don’t know. That I’m swimming in the shallows of a sea of knowledge just outside my reach. It doesn’t make sense, but that just gives it sense. Weight.”

The librarian pats my right hand. “There, there.”

“You’re not even real.”

“Well, no. But many important things aren’t real. And I am real enough, which is more than many real things can say. Do you think you are more real than me, Brodie?”

“Only on Mondays: it’s easier to be real on Mondays,” I mumble.

“Nonedays are important,” the librarian says. I have no idea which of us is joking anymore. Or if either of us ever were at all.

“No. Not like this. You’re not getting away with this!”

And only Jack fell down the hill as Jill kicked him in the heteronormative ownership paradigm.

The only thing I was taught to revere is silence. Silence was not golden but sacred. You were seen, and there to be seen, and that was the end of it for my mother, my sister, myself. Proof my father could parade before strangers, though I was never certain what we were proof of.

I learned that every question was answered with a blow, but I never learned to stop asking. I think my father respected that in me. I don’t know. I just know we valued different things, and drifted into different waters. I’d like to think I don’t hate him but I don’t know anymore.

Too much has been wrapped up in too much. The past wishes it could be as simple as chains.

“You could trust us,” the aliens said as though trust was the easiest thing to master.

I used to pretend. To play pretend, the way we all do. That things can make sense. That things do make sense. That the universe has order in it. That’s what every conspiracy is, at the heart of it: at attempt at order, at meaning. Because if there is a purpose - no matter how terrible - it makes us feel like part of something bigger than ourselves. We swallow those lie without considering it, often enough. And pretend, so very hard, that it’s our lies that aren’t lies at all.

If all the news one hears about a religion is negative, then one isn’t hearing all the news.

You pretend every door is not a gate; I pretend every window is a wall. Breaking things down to essentials perhaps, also, loses too much.

“I’m tired,” was the note she handed to him that began the divorce proceedings.

You asked me for a surety but I had only words. We never drown in water. I ask you for a promise but you only have a laugh. We were made for each other, circling in a frenzy. We have such power to hurt each other in the most wondrous ways. I thought we’d learned things but we never did - except how to make it all worse.

Once upon a time, there was a queen who tried to have no secrets from her people.

The joke pretended to be funny without insulting anyone.

It died trying to avoid being meta.

“It is – difficult. To be here, in this city, far from my home. It is not a far walk, but even so it is far away in many ways. There is the world I know, and there is the one you know. The desire for adventure always at war with the promise of security.”

July 2017

The moment when an idea pops into your head. You write it down, then google it and realize a small number of other people had the same idea and thought before you. But even so:

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chain stores.

He fought it. Each year, he did, but the disease blindsided him every time. Oh, they said it wasn’t one but he knew sickness when it came upon him.

Even if everyone else called it patriotism.

“I never want to lose you,” I said

“You won’t,” you replied.

It was only later that I realized your words hadn’t been permission for me to install the GPS tracker under your skin.

Having begun, in a fit of terribly-advised nostalgia, to watch both Ewok Movie, I have come up with a theory: these movies were the first draft of A Force Awakens and the human daughter (Cindel) is Rey.

I apologized for how I treated you but I had been certain you were only a NPC.

They said revenge was a dish best served cold. But revenge was not gazpacho.

Your silence pretended to have fangs underneath the sulk.

When dealing with a bureaucracy, never accept no from someone without the power to say yes.

Some days, if we try very hard, we can pretend that silence has any lustre to it at all.

Every funeral has been an exorcism for the last four years. And only I know that it is all your fault.

At your wake I spoke only in memes knowing it’s what you would have wanted.

It is far better to be open to knowledge than to be closed by belief.

You talk about fear as though you have never been afraid at all. And yet you wonder why I have never trusted you.

She looked away. “It’s not that I don’t love you. I do. It would be easier if … not easier, but. I wish, sometimes, that we had never learned to speak. Everything must have been easier before we complicated it with language. Sometimes I think we invented words solely to hide what we mean. What is language if not a means of trickery?

"You speak volumes with silence. I can’t. I try, but words spill out like bandages I can’t place over wounds. I wish I could drink of silence but my tongue gets in the way. It’s not that … it is … I am … just go. Please. Just go.”

The mime walked away. And mined nothing at all.

The Lawyer’s Lament:

Our marriage fell apart when you asked me about prenuptials, and I charged you by the hour.

You were the only save state I ever wanted to save myself at.

Once upon a time there was a dragon who refused to burn down villages until the merchants guild sent a representative to explain the concept of rents and market forces.

Satisfaction Index: removing Norton Antivirus from a computer.

There are videos on the internet purporting to be proof that Alex Jones and Bill Hicks are the same person. (Aka Jones died and was replaced by Hicks.)

… I am now awaiting video proof that Ken Ham and Richard Dawkins are the same.

Heroes can retire; monsters never can.

I tell people that I don’t listen to music. And it’s true, except that I listen to you. And that is all the music I need.

We recycled hope only to see it turn into desire.

Once upon a time there was a dragon who invented coffee just so humans would have the energy needed to keep up with the elder races. What they lacked in longevity, the dragon reasoned, they would make up for with vigour.

History does not relate if the dragon came to doubt this gift, or question whether it had been a gift at all.

Ed accepted the offered power to punish the guilty, not realizing until too late that it did not come with the ability to determine who was guilty or what they might be guilty of. He did terrible things to every lawyer he encountered as a matter of principle.

The start of an rpg session :)

It is late in the afternoon as the two of you saunter into the Broken Pony at roughly the same time. The air is cold and bitter outside, the sky grey with the promise of rain or snow. Hot meals are being shouted from shops and doorways, clothing sellers preparing for the oncoming winter. A few enterprising ones shout that, “Winter Is Coming!” Only for people to yell back: “WE KNOW!”

Inside the Broken Pony there is the usual gaggle of messenger boys and girls huddled by the fire and sharing a drink between them. Locals and merchants at varied tables busying themselves with deals and plans. Omar is behind the bar, serving drinks and nods hello to each of you. Elfboy is already at the For Hire table, drinking a hot toddy.

A couple of darts games are being played against one wall - the bets in copper pieces only and the streets outside full of caravans trundling goods from the farms in the eastern reaches of the city to the other districts. Winter is, at least, generally a decent time for For Hires. The colder weather and people being cooped up indoors once storms hit tend to lead to situations that require … certain services.

The vampire murdered the children who dared to call themselves millennials when they were not a thousand years old. The media and those who hunted the vampire did not understand.

“You have no idea what you are dealing with here.”

“Heh. You act as though that would make me care.”

You are suffering, she said, as if the world was not proof enough.

Concept: Anime version of Anne of Green Gables where she becomes a giant monster that terrorizes Tokyo.

Me: Finishes writing 800+ words of notes and mapping out small town

Me: … this isn’t going to be a short story, is it?

The forest gathers about us. Trees old and new, the road a slice of human power between them all. The forest is so solid here, it’s hard to think a town is around a few bends, even if it is barely a town at all. Hard to believe we managed to force our presence into the woods at all, even though we’ve done so much more than that the whole world over.

The nightmare on elm street turned out to be the traffic congestion caused by the installation of a roundabout.

Me: *puts on jacket* "Kind of need this to cover deposit bag when taking it to the bank."

Co-worker: "That's easy for me: I just put them in my purse. But I guess guys can't do that."

Me: "Just another way we've been oppressed by the matriarchy."

You are the only language I want to be fluent in.

They said you had to learn defeat in order to win. Lose, and gain it all. But he never believed that koans were truth.

We pretended our secrets were sins because sometimes it was all that kept us sane.

“You want magic? Tap your debit card against a machine. Swipe left on your phone. Kids these days. You pay too much attention to movies. That’s all the wand one ever needs. ”

You said you wanted to exchange currency as though love was not a barter system. I said history was half the way between a dreaming and despair. You accused me of poetry, gut-punching a dozen words before I could coalesce truth. I said I was sorry knowing the word was nothing at all.

“The only thing we ever hide from is the truth.”

He said that, and I made it a mission in life to show just how wrong it was.

The Deal turned out to be not what he expected. The gift to draw, to bring images to life on canvas both real and virtual. It had come to him, but the cost was that he could only draw very niche fetish art.

Some days, he almost thought it worth it.

“If you tell me your secret I might forget my own.”

I told people we broke up because I cheated on you. It was easier than explaining it was really because of how you cut your toe nails.

today in typo-land…

“Gerry – my husband – he’s in Appleford getting groceries, puppies, all of that. We run out quickly of course, with the McTavishes next door.”

…. puppies, supplies, same thing, right? :)

“You don’t understand. People don’t,” Wilbur says, and there is no judgement under the words. Somehow, that makes them hurt more. “I’m a magician, yes. The only magician in the world who deals with ghosts, and some day I will come into my own and have the kind of – of authority other magicians have. I will be a power in the world, in my own way.”

I nod. I know this much; we all do. I wait for the rest.

“And for all this power, for all this magic within me and without, I’m never going to feel that I am more powerful than food.” His gaze flicks down to his belly, back up to me. “Even if I diet, exercise, fight the war against caloric intake: even if I do all that, it won’t change anything. Food is always going to be stronger than me. I’m always going to want it, even more the magic wants me to be a magician.”

“Well, I’ve lived long enough to know the world is far stranger than people give it credit for being. A family friend of ours swears blind that he once has a ski lift talk to him and that the ski lift told him it was a dragon in disguise,” Edith says.

Wilbur chokes on a scone, gulps tea. “Not – ah, not that weird,” he gets out. “How would that even – never mind. We deal with weird things that actually happen, not stuff that’s more made up, like humans in lizard skin suits or chemtrails.”

“Or bigfoot?” Anya says dryly.

We met one of those, once. Wilbur shoots her a look.

“I’m not saying there is anything like a ski life that is a dragon, but Something doing a weird prank wouldn’t be unheard of. Maybe.” She shrugs.

I admit to using you. I sold every photo I took of you to a stock photo website.

“I hated him so much I wouldn’t let him put a face to the pain he had caused. But no one seems to understand: I tell them about how delicious this revenge is and they just punch me and say I am at fault!”

She smiled. “I write fanfic about our lives; it’s the only thing that keeps me married to you.”

You tell me the truth is sublime when I know it must taste as good as lime, that the key to truth is a key lime pie.

We always run out of songs before other things.

i never fell in love with you. it took me years to understand that I had only loved the moment rather than the man. hearts ache only for what they cannot have - as true for the arteries as for my feelings. i saw you, thought i loved you as your spirit but it was - your moustache. i fell in love with the freedom you showed in your milk moustache and not with you at all. sometimes i try and draw one on you but it’s never quite the same.

They said it was a failed exorcism but the ghost I trapped inside me is the cure for loneliness.

“You can’t hurt people with facts,” I continue. “And if you had half a brain you’d have figured out I can’t do normal either, but you didn’t even think to try. There’s no such thing as an invisible illness, just people who are dicks and never pay attention. Sometimes the worst of those don’t even have a dick at all.”

Susan stares at me in shock, but only for a moment. “I was being nice to you, since I’m not sure which one you sleep with to get your freak on,” she sneers.

I sigh. I can hear Noah move, know he’s going to say something soon. “If you came here just to insult, go home. You’re not even good at it. You’re going to resort to swearing soon.” Susan’s mouth snaps shut on whatever she was about to say.

“I’ve spent my whole life wanting power, wanting magic. I knew it existed. I read grimoires, I became wiccan, I hunted the dark corners of the internet and you just – you woke up one way and had it?” She steps forward, hands clenched into weapons. “You can do things no one else can and you don’t even know why?”

I don’t move. “Being a magician isn’t like having a talent. It can be sought, but it can’t be found. The same is true of talents, I think. It’s not about how much you want it, Becky, or even what you do with it. It’s about how much you think you deserve it. You wanted power, and that’s not the same thing at all.”

“Stop bugging me,” Jared shouted at his sons, which is when he he discovered that he had the power to turn people into bugs.

It did not help him finish paying the bills.

“I don’t want to win. Winning is – is easy. I want to not lose. For no one to lose. We get what we want, so does the Entity, same with everyone here.”

“Hold on. Winning is easy?”

“Bullies do it all the time. With brains, or brawn, or – or whatever else. It’s easy to win, but all that does it make you enemies.”