purple moose parade. [trigger #276]

Nancy wasn’t allowed to use her earbuds when she rode in the car. Her parents both agreed, a minor and unfortunate miracle, that it was rude. Their decision was that she should be enjoying conversation with them instead of residing in her own little bubble of sound, cut off from the noises of the world. This would be a sensible rule if there was every any conversation to enjoy. Instead, the no earbuds rule simply subjected Nancy to the constant sound of her parents bickering.

Her family only had one car, and everyone commuted 40 minutes to and from the city every day for work and school. Thus was Nancy stuck with her arguing parents twice a day, for at least 80 minutes, unless of course traffic prolonged her agony. Today was a traffic day. She had already been listening to her parents bicker for 53 minutes and they weren’t even close to the front steps of school.

So far they had bickered about at least 20 different unique topics, including but not limited to dinner, laundry, dusting, the electric bill, two different sets of neighbors in two distinct arguments, summer vacation, and whether or not chickpeas and garbanzo beans were the same thing. None of these arguments had clear beginnings or ends, but vaguely bled one into the other as if powered by a perpetual disagreement machine.

Nancy was fed up, but she had no recourse. Her brain simply wasn’t adept at blocking things out, especially things that irritated her. What could she do outside of sticking her fingers in her ears and humming? This was a tactic she’d tried before but couldn’t sustain for any length of time. She could join in with the argument, but that normally only made things worse for her.

With the traffic at a standstill, she felt trapped, claustrophobic. The usual morning car ride was bad enough, but in her current situation she couldn’t even know when the end would come. How much longer would this go on? Had she died and gone to hell? Was this moment actually the eternity it felt like?

She tried to focus on her breathing, to relax and distract herself. It almost worked, but her mother’s barbed response to her father’s comment about the rain brought Nancy right back to her present circumstances.

Balling her fists and squeezing her eyes tightly shut Nancy wished has hard as she’d ever wished in her life that something, anything, would shut her parents up for just a moment. She wished and she wished, putting every ounce of mental energy she could muster into the foolish act.

Just when she thought her head might explode from how hard she was wishing Nancy heard her father mutter, “What the hell?”

It was right in the middle of one of her mother’s monologues to him about respect, and normally such an interruption by him in that moment would have resulted in an eruption of rage. However, this time her mother quickly trailed off.

Nancy opened her eyes, not sure why her parents had suddenly made her wish come true. She quickly found out. There before them, marching serenely down the median between directions of stopped traffic, was an impossible parade of purple moose. Each was purple, but in a variety of even less likely patterns and shadings: one striped like a zebra, another in argyle, yet another covered in purple gingham.

She couldn’t believe it. Had she really done this, just by wishing hard enough? Had she manifested something impossible creatures out of thin air?

Wherever the parade came from, it took her parents a full minute before they started arguing again. Sometimes you have to take what you can get.

 

into the darkness. [trigger #248]

Ever since I was young, light has always behaved strangely around me. It led to odd happenings, some that I didn’t realize were weird until much later, some I assumed had nothing to do with me.

For example, I would often have to flip a light switch multiple times to get lights to turn on when I entered a room. I always just assumed it was just that the wiring in our apartment sucked. Then, when I grew older I noticed it happened wherever I was, and only to me, never to family members or roommates.

I was young when I noticed that street lights would often shut off when I walked or drove by. Not all of them, and only occasionally, but enough to be noticeable. I’ll get close, the lights will dim or shut off entirely, and when I’m farther away it brightens back up again.

Things like this have always merely played at the edges of my mind. I made note of them, but assumed I was imagining things or making too much out of nothing. I went about my life as normal, up until that became an impossibility. The reason it is impossible is that it has gotten worse. Now, all I need to do is enter a room and the lights shut off. Every street light flickers or shuts off when I am in proximity. I can’t enter restaurants or stores at night without creating a disturbance.

I started lighting candles at home as a temporary solution, but I had to stop doing that because I started noticing that the candle flames bent away from me, without flickering or waning, they just bend away from wherever I am in the room. This was troubling to say the least, but also seemed dangerous. I didn’t want a flame that was overly zealous to get away from me to set my curtains on fire or something.

So here I am, trying to figure out what the hell is going on and what this all means. What exactly do I do when it isn’t that I am allergic to light, but that light seems allergic to me.

let there be light. [trigger #238]

Martin stumbled deeper into the darkness, feet aching so that each step was an agony. Yet he needed to keep pressing forward. He knew that since he couldn’t go back, he needed to go deeper into the catacombs in the hopes of finding his way out somehow on the other side. His eyes had long since adjusted, and he could make out plenty to see where he was going, but unfortunately had no idea where each turn, visible as they were, would lead.

As he followed advice he’d once heard about always turning the same direction to solve a maze, he continued turning right at ever chance, hoping that none of the corridors turned back on themselves. He took a turn and started violently as a figure stood before him. It was wholly terrifying. The hair on his arms and neck stood up, a shiver went up his spine, and inside his chest it felt like a pressure had suddenly built up at the impossibility of anyone else being down in the tombs with him.

He couldn’t make out much about the stranger, could only make out that the man was wearing a suit and a bowler hat. The way the sharp blackness of the suit and hat and the crisp whiteness of the dress shirt underneath seemed somehow more real than the surroundings, like they were deeper in color than the dim passageway. Yet, the stranger’s face seemed fuzzy and obscure, even by the standards of the darkness around them.

The stranger reached into his own chest like a man would reach into a backpack, and pulled out a bright white light that scorched Martin’s eyes. With his eyes squinted tightly shut as an orange haze danced on his closed eyelids, he thought momentarily of the irony that he had seen better in the darkness, and that the light is what had blinded him. His sudden lack of sight added tremendously to the fear he would have thought just a moment ago was the greatest he was capable of being afraid.

it’s cloudy. [trigger #237]

The morning Eric realized what he had the power to do, it was an evening like many before it. Unfortunately, there was nothing outside the routine about it. I say unfortunately, because when it happened, Eric’s father was calmly picking Eric apart with the skill and destructive ability of a malevolent surgeon. He wasn’t actually touching Eric, wasn’t causing him any physically visible injuries, but was instead carefully dismantling Eric’s self-esteem, identity, and security, already weak, frail things after a life with a man like Eric’s father. Eric didn’t know why his father did what he did. His father didn’t know either, but acted out of some deep, internal compulsion. It was almost as if he couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t place what caused his contempt for his own son, and probably wouldn’t have even been able to say it was contempt, but merely that he was saying what needed to be said.

Yes, it was unfortunate that this was a day like many others before it, but that was the case. This was one of the marathon days as well, when it went on for hours. Every day there was the common sniping, the carefully executed single shots at Eric. Other days were long procedures, where Eric’s father would literally go on for hours and hours, relentlessly offering his calmly delivered commentary on how useless, vile, and despicable Eric was. Oh, and ungrateful, too. The arsenal Eric’s father worked with was a vast and nuanced thing. His skill with words was only ever used toward this one particular task, and when he got going it was hard to stop. This was one of those such days.

Many years earlier, Eric had developed an ability in his own mind that his father didn’t know about. Eric could make his mind grow cloudy and dim, could insulate himself deep within some part of his mind, where the pain of life couldn’t touch him. At first, it happened all on its own. His father would start in on him, and he would just drift into himself. He was still there, still aware of all that was being said, but it felt like it was far away, happening to someone else. The downside is that his thoughts would become muddled and slow, he was barely functioning in these moments. The cloudiness started to happen more often in time, whenever something made him anxious, or worried, or sad.

Just when Eric had started getting used to this happening, he found he started to know how to bring it on at will. It was no longer just an automatic response of his emotional immune system, but was a mechanism he could start at will. Although stopping it was another matter altogether, he hadn’t figured that part out yet.

Eric’s life was the sort of life in which one would like to cultivate such an ability, and cultivate it he did. When the cloudiness came on, Eric would carefully test its limits, pushing against the inside of this emotional insulation to see if he could have more control of his thoughts and inner world within the puffy mental cloud he created.

On this unfortunately routine day, Eric was doing exactly that. His mind had clouded over, he was no longer paying any attention to what his father was actually saying, but was instead doing mental exercises to see if he could recall movie names and actors, albums and track listings, testing his memory within the clouds.

It was then, right after successfully naming 12 Robert Downey, Jr. movies, that he noticed his father wasn’t talking anymore. He hadn’t noticed when his father had stopped, and saw that the man was still standing in the middle of the living room, where he had been delivering his horrible malediction. His father’s face was vacant and empty, like he was a million miles away. He didn’t seem to have any idea that he was standing in the middle of the living room staring.

Eric returned to the surface of himself, unintentionally leaving behind his cloudy protection to investigate his father’s condition. As he did so, his father squinted his eyes, his face becoming animated again. He looked at Eric for a moment, as if trying to remember not just what he’d been saying but where he was, maybe even who he was. He opened his mouth to speak, once, twice, but then decided against it, pursed his lips, and abruptly left the living room.

That was the day that Eric realized that his ability had grown far beyond anything he would have previously thought possible. Eric was longer limited to merely clouding his own mind, he was capable of clouding over someone else’s mind as well. For the first time in his memory, Eric realized he was looking forward to his next encounter with his father.

we need to chat. [trigger #236]

“Hey Tony, it’s Justin. Call me when you get this, we need to chat. I just got word that there is a problem with the recruitment side of the organization that is much larger than we originally expected. Not for personnel, there is no shortage of people who want to be involved with us. However, there has been a problem recruiting resources for raw materials. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that we need at least 200 subjects a month for the various sacrifices and somatic materials needed for hexes, curses, wards, and prophecies. It used to be so easy to get recruits to sign away their bodies and souls without even realizing they were doing it, and I have to tell ya, I’m not sure what it is that changed. Enrollment has dipped more than 200% since January of last year, only 17 months ago. Somebody is screwing with us, whether from the outside or within the organization. 

“Please call me back when you get this so we can get the ball rolling on a plan to sort this out. I’m worried about what the folks upstairs will do to us if we can’t get the ship righted. I wouldn’t put it past them to literally take it out of our hide.

“Talk to you soon.” 

samurai. [trigger #231]

The vampire and the samurai. Most think of them in terms of things that do not exist. Vampires as things that have never existed. Samurai as things which once existed but do no longer. You probably believe this, too. You would scoff at the idea that both of these things exist, although samurai now exist purely as a subset of vampires. 

I see that I’m losing you. Let me explain. 

You’ve no doubt seen plenty of popular culture’s idea of what it means to be a vampire. Some are closer than others in the particulars of how vampirism works on a purely practical level, with the notable exception that most misunderstand the true relationship between vampires and daylight, but that is best left for another essay. Some of these depictions even deal well with what it means emotionally and psychologically to both crave and require human blood to survive. However, it’s rare to come across any that deal well with what it means to live for centuries. The questions about what make life worth living don’t stop just because you are immortal. They actually only get worse. Questions of meaning still plague the undead. 

All vampires are of course individuals, and so generalizations about them are as worthless as those about any other people group. Still, let me share a fairly common story arc for vampires. Early on, vampires are split into two basic groups: those who go on a bloody killing spree from the outset, and those who attempt for some time to avoid harming human beings in their quest for blood.

Those who begin killing with delighted abandon will often keep up their fervor for decades, maybe even more than a century for those with a special knack for it, but eventually killing grows old, as all things must, and these vampires are left killing for food. Their heart is no longer in it. 

Those who begin non-violently will struggle and scrape for some time. It’s a much harder life. Eventually, decades of watching humans butcher and destroy one another takes its toll, and these former vegetarians finally start feeding on living human prey. However, they are doing it out of nihilistic despair. Sure, some of the more violent sects of vampire extremists come from this group who initially were nonviolent, but most are actually unrecognizable from the previous group. Their feeding comes from resignation and depression, and thus they are merely consumers. 

Many have found various solutions to this problem. Some starve themselves to death. Some allow humans to kill them. Some become barbaric or animalistic. Some resort to vigilantism, attempting to feed only on those guilty according to a particular set of morals or laws. Religions are tried. Philosophies are tested. It is a maturational dilemma that only happens for those who have violently survived for a very, very long time. 

Of all the various attempts to make sense of the vampiric unlife, none has come close to being as beneficial as bushido. The code of the samurai offers a worldview that allows for the necessity of a life of violence, yet is tempered by grace, serenity, and honor. For the vampire, as she struggles to understand her place in the world, who in her better moments will try to improve the world instead of being merely a plague or parasite, the bushido offers answers. Bloodlust is guided by purpose, violence is wielded in wisdom, and society and community is offered to those who are often isolated and secretive. 

Yes, samurai do still exist in 2014, and every one of them is a vampire. 

7-11 on my birthday. [trigger #230]

There are three things I have to do every year.

Ever since I was seven I have gone to 7-11 every year on my birthday for a Slurpee. I don’t really like Slurpees anymore, but I do like traditions, so there you have it.

Every year since I was 16, on the anniversary of the day I got my license, I take a long drive with one person without any preordained destination in mind. The drive just has to be a minimum of one hour in each direction. I still very much love long drives.

Finally, every year since the year my dad died when I was 27, I go to his grave on his birthday and tell him all the things that happened over the year. I don’t believe he can hear me, but it still makes me feel better. 

I’ve just discovered the fourth thing I need to do annually: travel to a new city and get lost without a phone. The first time happened yesterday, quite by accident. On a last minute business trip to Portland, Oregon I left my hotel room looking for dinner after a long day in training. My phone was nearly dead and I was too hungry to wait for it to charge, so I left it behind. Normally, my phone is the primary thing I use to find my way around, to get directions as well as finding well-reviewed restaurants and bars. This felt remarkably like leaving one of my senses behind while venturing into a place I don’t know at all. Or, I imagine it felt like that, I’ve never actually left one of my senses behind so I can’t confirm that. 

Anyway, at first it was scary. I was getting hungrier, weaker, and grumpier by the minute. That’s when I resolved to walk into the next place I came across that sells food of any kind. It turned out to be a Whole Foods. I grabbed some Kind Bars and a Vitamin Water and sat on a bench outside the door eating greedily. I was laying my head down waiting for the sugar to hit my bloodstream so I felt human again when I heard a soft voice behind me. “Are you okay, Sweetie?” I looked up to see a beautiful woman covered in elaborate tattoos standing beside me. She didn’t look concerned as much as curious. 

“Oh, yes. Sorry. I just went too long without eating. Just waiting for my body to realize I just fed it.” 

She grinned. “I see. Well, what you really need is a drink. Come with me.” 

I was about to argue that this didn’t seem like the wisest idea in my current state when enough of my normal faculties must have been restored by food, because I realized how foolish it would have been to say no when a beautiful woman asked me to get a drink. She was already several steps away, apparently feeling no doubt that I would follow. I stood and walked double time to catch up with her. 

“I’m Tom, by the way.” 

“Nope,” she said. “Come up with a different one. I’ll try my best to forget the real one. This will be more fun if we skip all the factual minutia. Let’s be strangers, and enjoy the freedom to be honest about the more important things than personal details. Let’s make anonymity our friend. Call me, Christina.” 

I thought for a moment. It was odd, I was still trying to catch up with what was going on. After a minute or so of walking quietly, I realized it was the kind of odd I liked. “Okay, then. I’m Fitz.” 

“Fitz?” 

“Yup, it’s a character from a book I like. If I have to pick a name for just one night I want to pick one I wouldn’t actually pick forever.” 

She smiled more with her eyes than her mouth. I knew I was playing the game correctly now. 

**I’m out of writing time for today. However, I think I’m going to continue this one in the future.** 

explosion. [trigger #226]

His name is Cursed, although it has not always been so. Once he had a name given to him by parents who loved him, but that name has long been forgotten, perhaps even by himself. When one’s life is as long as Cursed’s has been, it is normal to go through names as some cease to fit and new ones become more appropriate. His time for changing names has passed. He knows that Cursed will be his final name, no matter how much longer his life continues, and when every moment is lived in agony life feels very long indeed. Such it is to be cursed. Cursed. Cursed the cursed. 

There was a time when it seemed to most that Cursed was not an appropriate name under the circumstances. He had after all taken on his affliction by saving every living thing that exists. Hero, or Champion, or even Sacrifice would have been more fitting. Yet, Cursed is the name that stuck, the name he accepted most willingly, and as the many long years have passed it has become clear that whatever the circumstances of his predicament’s birth, it is certainly most appropriately deemed a curse. 

It happened centuries ago, when all life was almost snuffed out like a candle. It wasn’t some great evil that actively attempted to end the world, just a foolish young man trying to make a name for himself at a small university. Against the warnings of others, this young man went too far in his magical endeavors, meddled with elements beyond his ken, or the ken of any mortal. He accidentally created what has since come to be referred to as an Instance. A singularity in time and space that acts like a black hole but in reverse, like the Big Bang. While his experiments were well beyond his skill, his skill was still considerable. He saw what was happening and was able to temporarily arrest the explosion, keep the Instance from rushing out from itself and extinguishing all existence, at least in the form we currently know it.

All knew there wasn’t much time. His halt of calamity was a temporary measure, time was dwindling quickly. A professor at the school, the Chair of Magical Theory, was the one who took action. He realized a tremendous degree of skill and vigilance would be required to keep the Instance at bay. Without consulting anyone, and using a magic none have ever fully understood, he took the Instance into himself. He took into his own being a creative force so strong that it would in its turn destroy all that currently is. Once within himself, he was able to freeze the explosion indefinitely.

The cost was immense.  

Of course, some of the pain goes without saying. It would never have been easy to constantly be racked by the pain of a thousand thousand galaxies attempting to burst forth from his chest. Yet it goes far beyond that. To freeze the explosion, it was required that he freeze a part of himself. Not in a purely physical sense, but across multiple planes and dimensions. The very fabric of his existence is stuck, locked in place. That pain goes far beyond anything conceivable by all aside from him. It is physical, emotional, philosophical, spiritual, existential, and astronomical. As perceived by a finite being, it is practically infinite.

And so his name is Cursed. No other name has ever been more fitting.  

the power of a chalkboard. [trigger #162]

The last thing Merle needed was to run into gremkins, but that’s exactly what happened. He was exhausted, he’d been using far too much magic in his experiments, and being this tired it was a terrible idea to be out and about in the wild.

To come into contact with being as powerful as gremkins was a stroke of ill luck, indeed. As everyone knows, gremkins wield vastly powerful magic, but only have the brains of children who’ve never had parents. They are terribly dangerous, but not because they hold any malice in their hearts. They just honestly don’t know any better. So, when they had sensed the powerful magic in Merle and decided to eat him to consume it, there was no thought given to how he might feel about being eaten, or that it would kill him to be eaten; all the gremkins knew was that they wanted, and that was all they needed to know.

He’d tried threatening them, scolding them, and frightening them. Nothing had worked thus far aside from prolonging the inevitable. At full strength, he might have had the strength to simply bludgeon his way past them, although at a considerable cost to himself perhaps. Yet, in his current weakened state, he had no chance of surviving a head to head confrontation with twelve gremkins.

That was when he had a sudden inspiration. He remembered being a child, and thinking that his teacher knew absolutely everything, without failure or error. Perhaps the child-minds of these gremkins felt the same way.

“My good, gremkin friends. You really can’t eat me at all.”

“Wassit? Sures we does, Wizardy. We’s loves the be eaten you soons.”

“No, I’m afraid it just won’t work, the law of obsficationism simply won’t allow it.”

“Wassat, then? I’s already knows, buts you should explains the law of obsyfakinsism to me mates, here.”

With his last remaining reserve of magical energy, Merle manifested a chalkboard and chalk. In long, boring sentences he made up the Law of Obsficationism and talked gibberish about it to the gremkins, writing odd equations and words on the board as if they meant something.

By the time he wrapped up, two of the gremkins were asleep, and four more didn’t look far behind. He cleared his throat, “Ahem, so, you see, you really can’t be eating me at all, friends.”

“Welly lookit here, boys. He’s a’bein’ right here after all. That theres rules of obsicrustaceanism is as clear as day to me, and it means we can’ts be eatins at ‘im after all. Dammit all.”

“Awww! Blast and bugger. Come offit. Why not?!?”

“Stupid! Didn’t yous hear what he’s beens sayin’? Law’s the law boys, can’t do nothin’ about that.”

And just as quickly as children are prone to lose interest, especially after a long, boring lecture of one kind or another, the gremkins heard a noise and chased it off into the woods. At this point, Merle heaved a great sigh of relief and sunk down onto his knees from exhaustion.

kinky boots (not the obvious). [trigger #160]

“Um, Janine?”

“Yeah, Hugh?”

“What’s going on?”

“What do you mean what’s going on?”

“What are you wearing?”

“Clothes, Hugh. I’m wearing clothes.”

“You’re wearing poodles as boots. And they’re alive. And they actually appear not to mind.”

“Yeah, they’re one of my favorite pairs, but their hair is getting all kinky and they are starting to make my feet cramp as they get tighter…. and you weren’t talking about that, you were commenting on the fact that I forgot to change when I got back from Faerie. This is awkward.”

“Ummm, Faerie?”

“Yeah, Hugh, listen. There are some things you don’t know about me. We need to have a talk.”