Perhaps I should only speak in fiction anymore...

 Perhaps I should only speak in fiction anymore…

People seem to like the fiction that I write and the art that I create (particularly fan work)… it’s not perfect and I am glad for people who point out flaws and things that could be better.  (I have, at times, been smacked out of doing stuff that was really stupid when talking fiction-writing with people. It’s a good thing).  Yet, I seem to be increasingly aware of a hard truth in my life:  When I write a story – I get called a good writer.  When I actually express opinions and stray thoughts outside of fiction – on or offline the reaction is “Oh, my God, she’s crazy! Run away!” 

I’m serious.  I mean, I post stuff on this blog and hear crickets.  Okay, so some people do enjoy talking with me – they tend to be as crazy as I am, or even more nuts.  (Oh, the little stories my guy comes up with on drives when we see something interesting on the side of the road!  A recent trip involved “ice-cream disappointment!” and a fictional man who lived in a firehouse and refused to wear pants).  0_o  (It gets even weirder when my guy’s nephew is involved.  I love our car trips). As for more serious topics, hey, I occasionally chat with some longtime AIM-friends and on the shoutbox with folks at a fandom board… but, even there… I’ve learned to hold back.  I have learned to hold back because it seems like whenever I expose my heart to anyone or any group, it gets torn out and I walk away feeling myself devalued. 

I know it’s my own damn fault, too, even when I’m not entirely sure what I did wrong. When did I let a fart? Don’t hint at me. Tell me.

There was a serious spiritual-issues type blog that I went to for a very long time.  (Some of my few watchers were originally met on there).  I commented there, conversed there and felt very well at home – which probably should have been my sign: When I feel comfortable, I get a little too free with my expression and inevitably, well… “fart.”  When I found recently that all my commentary was moderated by default when it never had been before and no one else’s seemed to be moderated (to the point of  not only seeing contention but seeing a known troll getting through on recent threads)… I kind of decided to take the hint.  I know I said a couple of inflammatory things that annoyed the blogger a couple of times (not anything worse than I’ve seen other regulars give him in the ways of criticism or not “getting” something, IMHO), but I was pretty sure I’d long ago apologized and was forgiven…  Otherwise, I do think I know the problem:  It’s not something I do on purpose, it’s just probably my tendency to be verbose, to share a lot of personal stuff I should probably “leave at home” and the like.   

I think that some people, as nice and genuinely caring as they may be – do *not* know how to deal with me.  Things are like that for everybody.  If you were to ask me to watch a severely mentally challenged child or an elderly person with severe dementia for a day, I would be ringing my hands not knowing what to do.  I wouldn’t bear any ill-will, it’s just “I’m not trained for this and it’s outside of my experience.”  I’m like that for a lot of people with my… um… mental “hilarity.”  Something written in a bipolar depression of doomy-dooms or a mania of “I’m typing a mile a minute and cannot stop myself and ooh, there’s the send button!” – my two default states, even medicated – well, I’m sure I just outright *scare* a lot of people. 

Or maybe I really did something really wrong and “should” know what I did but am too damn stupid to. My brain… sucks.

I’m used to this kind of thing – or at least I should be.  My childhood-into-teenhood was filled with friends and cousins “growing away from me,” leaving me wondering why people with whom I used to have slumber parties seemingly-suddenly wanted nothing to do with me, even treating me like I was a stain on their new clothes… I had an online friend whom I haven’t spoken with in almost two years. The last I saw her she was having computer problems, but since she never got back to me and at the time I was being especially neurotic with her, I suspect she just cut me off.  I’d like to know if she’s alive… not to contact her, but just because I’ve been worried…

I am officially Disabled now… can’t keep a normal, job… this plays into it, too.   I’ve experienced job-place discrimination over issues I have with stress even when I’ve informed employers of them ahead of time, and of course, pre-diagnosis, I had a fast food job that I kept for a year where the new management that came after I was hired seemed to be “afraid to fire me” either because of my “seniority” or being afraid of seeing me get emotional, as everyone there knew I was “sensitive.” I, uh, took the hint when my hours were reduced to three hours one day a week that cost me more in gas and time to keep the job than to quit.  I only kept it in that state as long as I did (a couple of months on the low hours) because it was a college-job and I didn’t want to disappoint my parents by quitting instead of sticking it out until things got better.  Once my dad told me what he thought was happening and that he didn’t mind if I quit, I felt free to.

I don’t know. I sometimes feel like maybe I have no business being on this planet, in my species or in existence because it seems like I’m always doing something wrong and no one is willing or able to tell me what it is.  (Or they’re telling me and I’m too dumb and scatterbrained to get it). 

Eh, as for the blog I felt rejection from… I’m sad because the guy who runs it gives so much good advice to people who email him, with a lot of compassion and… now I feel like I will not be able to ask advice from him if I ever run into a situation when I might need it.  I’m pretty sure I’ve been labeled a “troll” or something worse in his mind.   

Everyone bothering to read this:  I don’t have a habit of trolling. I really *am* this crazy.

Posting this because: No one reads this blog – or hardly anyone.  I don’t think I’ve posted anything here that anyone can blackmail or betray me with. I hope not.   

  

Zed.

A short, atmospheric piece.  Also, it's as dark and bitter as boiled black coffee. 

The last human survivor of some unclear end of the world event determines himself to bury as many of the dead as he can. 

Why? Becuase I'm weird. That's why.

_________________________________________________

Zed.

The world had finally become more honest. 

Zed had always wanted more honesty in the world.  He couldn’t fathom that the result would leave him the last person to survive in it. 

How many times had he witnessed arguments between people only to keep the secret sentiment that if some were truly put out by the simple existence of some folks that they should stop pretending to be “generous” and act?  It was a cruel and dangerous thought, but one he had often when he saw the heat of spoken hatreds.  The old man knew that idle complaining and indignation were the favorite pastimes of many, many people.  The majority of his countrymen could have made it the national sport if they had not already had a beloved “national pastime.”   

At the same time, all the complaints he’d heard that “the world will be a better place,” once people of one broad kind or another were gone grew tiresome.  Even when it was proposed in a “kind” way – “No one wants to kill you, you’ll just die out eventually” – it struck him as obnoxious.  As far as he was concerned, people who had too much pride could find all kinds of creative ways to refuse to admit to themselves how cruel or condescending they were. It seemed to be a problem however people saw the world.   If there were as many versions of the truth, in the end, as there were people, Zed figured that he was finally the Emperor of Right.  It had come with a price, though, even as he’d taken no active part in making the world he now ruled happen.  He did not want his empire, no matter how free it made him feel.

“Is it a better world now?” he muttered ruefully as he looked down at a body. 

In his time, Zed thought that he was more equitable.  He was sure the world would be better if there were fewer people in it.  He did not focus his ideas of a die-off to any particular “kind.”  His thoughts of potential extermination were not directed at any race, creed, culture, and class, level of skill or intelligence.  He just thought the population couldn’t get much higher for the planet to sustain and had something of a phobia of crowds.   

He, however, did not want to live in a post-plague world, nor in a ruined post-war one. 

You don’t always get what you want in life.

Zed put the blade of his shovel into the moist earth.  He stroked his beard before digging in.  Everyone needed a purpose in life, even if one wasn’t entirely sure what one’s purpose was supposed to be.  If a man found no meaning in life, he had to make one.  Humans were obsessed with such things by their nature.  As the last human (at least the last human that he knew of), Zed had set himself to a purpose.  It was not to search for other survivors.  Zed did not care to find any, as he was fed up with his species by now.  Zed’s purpose now was to bury the dead.

He walked barren fields littered with corpses.  Closer to the target-centers, all flesh had been destroyed.  Even now, the poisons left from the Ultimate War were seeping into his system.  Even though Zed knew that he would not have the honor of a proper burial, he could give it to others.  It was easy to have respect for the dead where one lacked it for the living. 

He dug deep and wiped the sweat from his brow.  He looked to the well-dressed corpse behind him.  “You lived fine, mighty fine, didn’t you?” he said before resuming his labor.  “Mighty fine, mighty fine,” he clucked, almost singing the words.    

After Zed finished the rich person’s grave, he rested and walked some more, paying no mind to scavenging dogs that panted and staggered.  They were affected by the lingering shadow of the war, as well. 

Everything in the past world had been “kill the poor” and “eat the rich.”  The poor dogs were left to eat everything that was left. 

Zed smiled a wicked yet warm smile when he saw a man and a woman holding hands.  He’d known these people personally in life – not well, but they’d been his neighbors.  He couldn’t muster a profound sense of grief over them, but that may have been a simple matter of his sorrow having been already sapped past its limit.

He’d always found a point when he was laughing when he’d start crying.  It seems he’d found a point in crying when he’d start laughing.  Zed did not know if the amused bitterness with which he was regarding everything now was a sign that he was desperately keeping sane or if it meant he had no sanity left.

Dead fingers were intertwined in an embrace Zed would never have seen in life between the two.

The old woman wore a gold-plated pendant around her neck that was in the shape of a cross.  Zed’s a-religious aunt used to wear a big turquoise cross with a star-shape around it because she’d bought it on a trip to the American Southwest for the sake of beauty. The symbolism of the piece neither was meaningful to her nor offensive, because it merely symbolized the Southwest for her.  Zed knew, however, that unlike his aunt, that the old neighbor-woman’s adornment had been very meaningful to her, a tribal identifying mark and a bit of soul-devotion.   He’d met her at his door with literature from time to time.  He learned to pretend to be in the bath whenever he heard her distinctive three-rap knock.

As for the man, not much younger than the woman was, his obsessions had run counter to hers.  The dead man, in life, had been arrested for vandalism for the time he’d placed padlocks on all the doors of the local church.  He could not change what was in people’s hearts as much as he may have wanted to, but he could inconvenience and frustrate people he didn’t like and make his general protest known.  At least he didn’t go door-to-door…but he had gotten into a conversation with Zed once at a local café’ that Zed had just gotten bored with and walked away from.  

The two had seen the end coming and held hands.  The obnoxious clucking hen and the crashing bore were together as cold flesh.  Zed looked down at then and laughed.  “Where’s the pride now?” he asked.  “So proud of your big brain?  The same goop as hers.  So proud of your big heart?  Rotting in a still chest just like his.” 

Zed set to digging again.  Perhaps it would be just to bury them together since they had reconciled so sweetly? 

Ol’ Zed was just too cynical to be a humanist or a true humanitarian.  It seemed to him that whenever he talked to people who’d claimed to have love and cuddles for all Humankind, that “certain kinds of people” were always left out of the human family.  He’d found that people who talked big about their own equal-mindedness were inclined to include those they disliked as worthy of “love” only on the grounds of the idea that “those people can change.”  Zed had wondered if the “You’re are worthy of living or just being left alone because you might someday become like me” model was really the love, cuddles and equity that people seemed to think they were so great for crowing about.  Even when the most idealistic of persons was confronted with the idea of forgiveness and understanding issued to criminals and sociopaths… oh, it was fun to watch those smug smiles turn into constipated frowns! 

In all honesty, the people of the world had wanted each other gone for far less serious matters than criminality.  Zed had a few relatives who would smile and be polite to everyone they met on shopping trips and the like only to let their racist ideas slip out among “safe” company.  Having become quite familiar with this, he suspected that this kind of thing went on in every household on the planet, save for a few particularly idealistic families.  People always seemed to slip out of the masks they wore whenever they felt safe.  Conversely, some people felt free to let their bile flow free only when they were safely behind a mask. 

Zed sat beneath a blighted tree.  Its skeletal remains provided no shade, but he was strangely comforted by it, nonetheless.  He stretched his hurting back against its flaking bark.  People and pieces were scattered over the ashen hills before him. 

Zed had really not much cared for people.  He’d found them too irritable and too proud.

The world was pretty quiet now.  He couldn’t complain about his life as long as he had something meaningful to do.  He held the handle of shovel across his knees. 

END.  

 

To Join the Sea of Electrons...

I was poking around TV Tropes http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage  last night prompted not by boredom (as I usually am) but by someone giving me (and a blog I was on in general) a recommendation for a fan fiction for a fandom I'm not in but have read listed around the 'net.  (Apparently, it's pretty popular.  If I were a reader of the books it was based on and not just a casual watcher of the movies who forgets most of their content, I might give the fic a shot)...  Anyhow, since it's been Troped, I was clicking links from it about the author and such, as what happens when one browses TV Tropes, and wound up round-about reading about Transhumanism and the scientific quest for immortality...

... I remembered a PBS special I saw a long while ago that was narrated by astronomer/physicist Degrasse, I think... all about this thing and and shaking my head at one guy who was trying to extend his life by taking hundreds of vitamins and supplements every day to ward off aging and thinking "That guy's gonna get hit by a car."

Yes, I'm a stupid dumb-dumb non-scientist and a bit of a cynical bitch. Live with it.

Anyway, the special had all kinds of other physical immortality bids, including brain-uploading to software.  This very thing has been explored in some of the animes I've watched and loved. The title of this post is a reference to an episode of "Cowboy Bebop"   http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/CowboyBebop?from=Main.CowboyBebop  .  One I've seen that takes it to 11 is Kaiba http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/Kaiba?from=Main.Kaiba  (Linked from Tropes rather than main Wiki because I have the window open and it's handy). 

In addition to that, I remember recently reading a couple of articles about this stuff  (half news, half opinion) on Huffington Post regarding scientists thinking we are on the very cusp of just this sort of thing.  It's a pretty interesting idea, but I can't say I'm not a bit suspicious of the "Singularity" just because I can see it being the domain of the privileged that leaves out the disadvantaged (This was a major theme in "Kaiba" listed above.  I recall there being a revolutionary group dedicated to killing the physical souls/memories of the dead that existed in that universe just to get rid of the inequality of the rich abusing the system.  Death may be a bitch, but at least it's equal). 

My thoughts on the subject of death are rather weird... I *do* want to live forever, in a way,  but I trust a divine hand/spiritual matters for that more than I'll ever trust even the smartest of humans or machines. Even if the divine/spiritual does not exist, mankind has hurt me too much to have a lot of trust for it (yes, if it came down to it, I can easily see myself trusting in Nothing more than Humanity, especially since I suspect "eternity" might be subjective/a matter of perception, anyway).. Machines, well... I can't even trust those with my art files:  http://shadsie.deviantart.com/#/d5d09x9 Also, yesterday, I accidentally overwrote my awesome maxed-out I-can-climb-the-impossible-tower! save-file on "Shadow of the Colossus" because I wasn't paying attention, so.... trust my consciousness to a computer or to people running one?  Urgh!   Anyway, I probably don't deserve to live forever,  anyway.  I'm one of those cracked/insane people they'd weed out of the program real early...

That said, if I ever get the IQ-boost I need to write a decent fiction story on such a complex and genius-philosophy subject, I'm tempted to write something in which we're all minds uploaded into a massive computer-database or free-floating on the Internet or in the "sea of electrons"  and since we're all immortal and cannot kill each other anymore, we've achieved an unprecedented level of peace until... 

A million-year-long flamewar breaks out about whether or not Smurfs lay eggs. 

Or people's entertainment preferences. 

Or people get so bored that the collective computer consciousness starts increasingly becoming composed of  people doing nothing but sharing videos of cats and the occasional cat-brain that's been uploaded interrupting peoples' free-floating philosophy-sessions with plaintive cries of "Tuna!" or "Ear itchy! Scratch now!" (It doesn't matter if the cat has no body and no ears anymore... cats are cats).  



... Yeah. I'm too dumb and nuts to deserve to have my mind live forever in the material / electronic world. I sometimes think even self-awareness itself for me may be more of a curse than a blessing.