Facebook Status Updates May - June 2016

Facebook status updates part XLV (May. 2016) – part 45

Census: do you suffer 'e) emotional, psychological or mental health conditions'?

Me: ... since you've threatened me with jail time and/or fines if this is NOT filled out ... yes?

Time upon a once, there was a story told out of order to compensate for the build quality of the narration and to try and make it seem postmodern.

You said in the court proceedings that I ‘dragged you to your doom’.

I think you don’t understand what Hot Yoga really is.

“But if I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret anymore!”

“I understand that, but some things are more important than secrets, son. Like finding out the code your father had to abort the launch and stopping Nevada from becoming a radioactive wasteland.”

The boy thought that over. “You didn’t say please!”

“You know what? Screw this; it’s only Nevada.”

“I know you’ll never forgive me for our honeymoon, dear, but think about it: ten million views on YouTube!”

“You believe every other lie I’ve told you; why won’t you believe I love you?”

I wanted to finish off my bucket list before I died. But it turns out that trying to recreate the Ripper killings isn’t considered a worthwhile goal by some people. As if every dream has to be saccharine to be on such a list.

I only found two friends willing to continue if I fail to finish it. The rest of you are useless.

“I told you to have a great day; it’s not my fault you don’t recognize a geas when you hear one.”

That no one sat beside him on the bus wasn’t much of a superpower, but Mark realized early on that not many people had one at all.

You were the trigger that inspired so many of these words.

The church had a sign reading: Please respect our property.

Underneath, someone scrawled; respect our children first.

After the doctors went on strike, the homeopaths waited for an upsurge in business that never came.

“Why did you quit the medical profession?”

“I realized I could help more people as a spin doctor than any other kind of doctor could.”

“It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s just that this relationship is starting to feel like DLC on top of a season pass and I can’t afford it any longer.”

The monster at the end of the book turned out to be the editor who altered the author’s original ending to appease the masses.

“You don’t understand. The coyote spends a fortune on weapons from ACME to hunt down a Road Runner - clearly a foreigner since the laws of physics don’t apply to them - when the money spent on inventions could buy hundreds of birds. Wile E. Coyote was clearly a prophecy of this future from the past.”

It turned out to be almost harder to trust you than it had been to fall in love with you.

We never escape our fathers, even if we never knew them. Perhaps especially then as they hover out of sight, some bearded upon clouds, and we wait for judgement which never comes.

I will some day share the heartbreaking story that led to my faith in Cthulhu. But the person whose heart was broken still thinks everything is fine, even as they dream of lost Carcosa every night. Ia. Ia.

A love story:

My phone informed me that it wasn’t backed up, which is how I reversed into you.

Everyone says we live in a golden age, but Winnie the Pooh still fights bees for honey.

They named their baby Hashtag, trying for irony, but received only compliments from their friends who used twitter and bafflement from everyone else. #Hashtag learned, early on, to only speak in short sentences as a means to punish mom and dad.

I wish I wasn’t scared of you. Everyone else laughs, cites postpartum depression. But I have seen what lurks within your eyes. I have seen what happens when you stop smiling at all.

And no one will believe me.

You meow like all the rest, but I know you don’t belong in my litter.

“I’ve made many mistakes.” Your voice was rough until we kissed again.

“But this isn’t one of them.”

And you laughed. “No, not at all.”

But I forgot that there were worse things than mistakes, and how easy it was to become one.

I was almost tired enough to tell you the truth. But I stopped myself at the last moment since the truth can only hurt and I had promised to never hurt you.

Doctor Morgan explained to the press that cloning hadn’t been enough. Cloning humans was nothing, but the Morgan Mesh™ was designed to implant your memories directly into the clone body so you had an exact replica of yourself. When pressed as to why he had expended his vast fortune on this endeavour, the doctor smiled and said: “That’s simple. It’s not a sin if it’s sex with your clone.”

And the entire press corps fell silent, waiting for a punchline that never came.

The only thing that ever made a liar out of him was pain.

There are foods that can always be eaten after their best-before dates. Products that only haves date listed because they have to. (Twinkies isn’t one despite the rumours.) If you find enough of them, the UPC numbers will tell you a secret truth you can use to make no food in your fridge or cupboards ever spoil.

It also works with dead bodies, but only if they are kept in freezers and have a DOA tag on them. You don’t need to know how I found that out.

The company demanded loyalty but confused it with servitude.

I wish I could afford to be scared of you. But you’ve taken even the luxury of fear away from me.

I won’t be your mystery. There is nothing left to be solved.

I cannot write biography – I find within myself no capacity to wound so deeply.

“I have never said a single word I regretted.”

“And yet,” she murmured, “you claim to have no power.”

The problem with living forever is how hard it becomes to have a thought that feels original at all.

“I sing a song of forgetting but never remember why.”

We tell lies only when the truth terrifies us even more.

Hunger trumps hope.

“I am scared than when I die they will discover that my underwear and socks don’t match.”

“I keep forgetting that I can lie to you. I don’t think humans forget such things.”

“I wish we were more than our catchprases.”

I only remember you within dreams.

“You called me wise, but know this: there is also wisdom in recognizing wisdom.”

“I think I am in love with just how much I hate you.”

What if there is right and wrong and it really is that simple?

“You would call it knowledge but it isn’t that, not truly. More a way of knowing.”

I said, ‘here are the keys to my heart.’

I said that but, oh, the rust.

What I call love, you call stalking.

What you call a restraining order

I call hope.

When she tried to get a sixth course of plastic surgery, she was told that her face had been declared a heritage landmark and could no longer be operated on.

Reputation is a card, and there are only so many jokers in any deck.

There are many metaphors for love: pain requires none at all.

How They Lost 100 lbs!

Or: Creative Uses of Photoshop

Or: What if someone lost 100 lbs and did not get a fake tan or new haircut for their picture?

Like beauty, there is a limit to the amount of enlightenment we can bear lest its absence wound us all the more.

“No one should try to make their outside mirror their inside. You will cut and cut and never stop until the one is as ugly as the other.”

“I used to dream of better worlds than these.”

We wait in vain for answers

To questions no one asks,

Hearts alive with bitter knowing

& knowledge that nothing lasts.

I wanted to write a love you

With alphagetti soup

But all I had were cheerios

And you need more than O’s.

Every fall we watch the trees

Murder their lives and think

It wonderful.

What is a Wet Paint sign if not a metaphor for nothing at all?

I need to be the person you need more than anyone. I need to be your true love, your soul mate, your best friend and closest companion.

And if you don't agree, I will lock you in my basement until you say yes.

You always say yes in the end.

If we fell silent every time the living died we would have no words to say at all.

Live long enough and you walk in a world full of strangers.

A sadness lurked under his dreams.

A love too heavy to be borne,

The song all chorus and not verse.

I drown in the need in your eyes.

If I can't be everything you want

Can I be anything at all?

That we can make any connection at all between us is all I need of paradise.

It means something, and the scariest thing about that is when we don't know what it means.

The house had no mirrors. If he could not see himself, he reasoned, he might be able to forget how much he hated himself.

There aren't many jobs that a ghoul is suited for; hiring myself out to dispose of corpses would have been a lot of things, few of them boring.

I liked boring. Boring was safe and sane.

What if life itself was a vacation from some other state?

Mark bought every anti-virus software on the market for himself after his ascension to the Overmind was denied thanks to a trojan virus.

“It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s just that this relationship is starting to feel like DLC on top of a season pass and I can’t afford it any longer.”

June 2016

I stopped hating you once it became too easy. Now I try to find ways to hate me but I’ve never been good enough at that at all.

I’m not sorry. I don’t know what I am.

The monster at the end of the book turned out to be the editor who altered the author’s original ending to appease the masses.

All he knew for certain was that the proper response to authority was knowing the best inflection of sir to use at any given time.

When management was away, the staff at the convenience store had a bet on as to who could best turn it into an inconvenience store.

Sometimes I wish life wasn’t a slapstick.

Then I realized if that was so we would have never met.

(I am too sick to be this hungry. Everything happens between moments of will. All gods far too hungry for flattery. This the moment before the burning begins.)

I used to think the world made sense. But then you said you loved me when all I’ve ever felt for you is disdain. I keep trying to find the words to hack you, to force that truth away, but your smile has become one I cannot crack.

Not even with my fists.

“Power also has costs, and dangers, no one would dare to pretend otherwise. But powerlessness is a terrible lure as well.”

“You invented the DimensionHopper to jump between dimensions entirely to find one where humans didn’t make the Twilight movies? Even for you, Jerry, that’s a pretty dick move.”

When ‘Texas’ didn’t work to bind the bacon elemental, the wizard pondered and then roared out: “Vegan substitute!” And with that the elemental cowered in fear and did what he asked.

The idea of love at first sight turned out to be the most dangerous spell the enemy ever cast against the Hundred Kingdons.

I laugh. I don’t mean to, but sometimes you can’t help it. “Magic? You think magic is hard? Magic is safe. Love isn’t.”

And sometimes, just sometimes, things are worth what you pay for them.

“You don’t understand. The coyote spends a fortune on weapons from ACME to hunt down a Road Runner - clearly a foreigner since the laws of physics don’t apply to them - when the money spent on inventions could buy hundreds of birds. Wile E. Coyote was clearly a prophecy of this future from the past.”

I keep forgetting how many drugs you must be on if you can bring yourself to smile at me.

“Oh,” I said, almost understanding.

“The point of the safari is that the animals in this preserve learn not to be afraid of us, even the predators. Take this one, rubbing my head and calling me a good boy. Some even call us their best friend when we wag our tails.”

I asked for a hundred wishes to come true so long as not a one of them was my own. Because your question mentioned world peace and rainbows and you would not understand the dungeon, the leather, whips and chains making a kind of peace your world would not fit into.

Not when you would be the star of the show.

You want to turn me into a poem and all I know is that it can never work because I’ll never scan right at all.

“I trusted you.”

“Not with the truth!”

“There are things more important than the truth.”

I try to tell myself that each failure is a learning experience.

But all I seem to learn is how to fail even better next time.

A love story

My phone informed me that it wasn’t backed up, which is how I reversed into you.

“We are monsters because we will not involve ourselves in the affairs of lesser species? On the contrary, such actions would only serve to destroy any gains they could make themselves. Compassion is not always the virtue you assume it to be.”

It turned out to be almost harder to trust you than it had been to fall in love with you.

I will some day share the heartbreaking story that led to my faith in Cthulhu. But the person whose heart was broken still thinks everything is fine, even as they dream of lost Carcosa every night. Ia.

Ia.

We never escape our fathers, even if we never knew them. Perhaps especially then as they hover out of sight, some bearded upon clouds, and we wait for judgement which never comes.

I am the secret your heart sings, the whisper the wind almost admits in the branches, the one status update you won’t post on Facebook, the moment when everything comes together even as we break apart.

Sometimes the dance is won only by those who refuse to dance at all.

Sometimes we forget that stories feel pain too.

And that there are pains one cannot hide from, truths one cannot one away from. Not even to farm goats.

If not for bad taste, some people would have no taste at all.

My term of endearment for you is what got us on that terrorist watch list.

We feel the same sun, hear the same waters, walk under the same sky but it is not enough to stop you from hating me even if we have never met.

After the first automated police officers murdered a dozen actors during an open-air production of King Lear, their anti-violence sensors were modulated to understand histrionics.

Even the pain tells me to trust you.

“You can try and hold the life you used to have,” Kadin says. “Most faekin can’t but you make people all know you never had braces at all, things like that. You can hide,” he adds and doesn’t hide the envy in his voice.

“But your parents don’t know about you - I mean, this part of you.”

“They have never looked closely. They look closer now, but at other things.”

“Us.”

He nods and says nothing else at all.

I like to think I’m a good person. That I try to be one. But right now I do t know what I’d do if his parents were in front of me. And I have even less idea about what Kadin would want me to do.

Facebook understands. Even if people never do, Facebook always understands me.

We run to catch busses to work faster than we seek out love.

I wish I wasn’t scared of you. Everyone else laughs, cites postpartum depression. But I have seen what lurks within your eyes. I have seen what happens when you stop smiling at all.

And no one will believe me.

You meow like all the rest, but I know you don’t belong in my litter.

“That is how the best curses work - you make the person doing it believe a part of it came from within them, or get the other party to think that. Everyone has intrusive thoughts in their head - those moments when you wander by someone, and just consider killing them, shoving them into traffic - those weird what ifs we never act on.” Trudy shrugs. “A good curse would make you think it was just that, the parts of you that you don’t like. Proper curses don’t end when they end, if they were well-made.”

“Housecleaning,” the wizard whispered, a final word of terror as the demon tore through the door into their quarters as though it wasn’t there, the protective wards that had been inscribed in it little more than suds on the floor.

The demon did not even trip on the wet floor, and the end result of the wizard’s feeble attempt at a protection spell would necessitate a deep-clean of the entire quarters to remove all the stains.

Even after the aliens invaded, the lawyers still found work.

Only the real estate brokers made friends with the aliens, since they would make friends with anyone if money was involved.

Mom and Dad still complain about my not finding a job, even if the aliens took everything from us that mattered.

The aliens made crop circles just before they left, along with a dozen pyramids.

After the accident, you still said you loved me. I didn’t understand it. I could barely move. So much of me was – missing. Gone. I could feel nothing below my waist, which mattered nothing since I had no legs at all. You acted as if it wasn’t important. Told horrified people that I was still me. I need a machine to speak, the voice no longer my own, using blinks to talk where others use words, even if it works so poorly it frustrates me to tears.

I am silent so often now, burdened with arms that do not work, a chest in need of machinery to pretend to be human. You feed me, change tubing, change diapers and all the while you say you love me.

I do not understand. You control my every breath, so I cannot even breathe: “Why?” You hold me as if we were still truly together and it hurts so much.

You are my everything, and I have no idea what I am to you.

I am so sorry.

They say the drug can erase pain but what happens when pain is all you can feel?

They said it didn’t matter if you lost battles, so long as you won the war. We won, only to find out that victory never meant what we though it did and that there is only defeat in the end.

It turned out to be an awful truth Derek discovered, but once your muse gets into BDSM, they only want pain - and his lack of stories did not count in the least.

I told the interviewer that my only goal in five years was to still be employed. They never want honesty, even if they claim to ask for it. But at least they never asked about my ten year plan. Because the Great Old Ones have told me no one will be around in ten years.

I’m not sure I’m supposed to reveal that in an interview though. They aren’t allowed to ask about your religion, though mine isn’t a religion at all but the truth of the cosmos.

There are billions of stars in the sky, he reasoned, and decided that the gold stars in the Starbucks reward program would take a long time to effect even that as he accepted a rewards card.