The Grove King’s Rival

Violence was ever present in the city , it oozed through the streets below railings like a rolling fog — it carried the weight of the blood like a black boil in the gut , and accompanied many a night with or without a companion in the cold and dark. Blood dripped from a nose shattered on a high railing.

Anulio staggered from the rough wooden balcony. “Our guest is having trouble better not stay here” said the young dark skinned girl dressed as a boy who made sure the lotus pipes and resin were collected and sent through a small copper hatch set in a stone door that none of the patrons ever saw. Anulio slumped outside against the portico and translucent glowing appendages moved in the blue brown darkness behind his eyelids. When he opened them the world swam into his eyes.

The mechanical streets traveled ceaselessly in their traces. People toiled at the whipping wheels and fiendish pulleys that led to staircases and further galleries looking on rows of wheels and cranked pulleys, with more cracked and bleeding hands to toil at them. Asterion nimbly capered over the stairs and peered down from the impossible galleries, shrieking obscene laughter that wrenched his youthful face into a distant copy of the young King Calce in his palace gardens with their chained royal jaguars*.

Anulio beheld the god Asterion’s pantomime and took him for one in whom the well of madness ran deep and relentless. He was the mad cosmic explorer given to his upriver jaunts and capers where he took delight in upending and leading to an equal insanity whomever he could convince to follow in his wake. “More wine”, he said, gesturing to the empty street of crushed bottles. The guards who roughly shook him awake almost didn’t recognize him as the man who’d risked death to defend the city he’d been sent to conquer many years in the past.

• In his rage and jealousy King Calce had named one of the cats “Ruler of the Royal Gardens” and allowed it the privilege of serving as his footstool in meetings with subordinate counsels. He advised visitants to the throne to bring propitiatory meat for “his only loyal servant”, to demonstrate that they valued their limbs intact, though he could not guarantee that the tribute would be sufficient for their “newly appointed prince” .
  
• His advisers managed to convince him that loosing the animals on the Grove King would necessitate freeing them in the streets outside, and to reach the entrance that was the only access to the temple and its meadows an onrush of such animals would either perish over the sharp cliffs nearby or run riot on the populace. “And miss the flesh from my counselors who advise me to ruin? Send the guards then. Bring me the Grove King’s crown with any part of him attached and I’ll double the reward ” . The woodland monarch was reported to have responded with a shrug, and the words “Will my successor master the frenzied hordes of beasts freed from coliseum and corral as I have?”

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Fictional characters are the best way to deal with some issues.

Caffiene and the news cycle before breakfast is hardly a sober morning.

I can’t hawk a competent Ayn Rand spoof– with campy founding fathers of vest slicing abs in world as franchise gym noir-dystopia– while dishing out militant prattle on my auto-didact merits!

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Ms. Amelia Gravedigger

The “Sex Changes Should be Mandatory” Radical Activist-

A renegade school teacher, fueled with correctly anti-bouge materialist joy at demise of the capitalist department store, outfitted by space communists to prowl the American campus and movie theater like a cyborg leopard, enforcing mandatory genital surgery to destroy monogamy. She retreats to her lair behind the nightmare urinal of an American conservative’s mental zoo in a bad neighborhood.

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Promotion is the most reaction inducing thing ( making me more reactionary-liberal ). Better off with sex ideology exhibition bouts, me v.s rad fems and the winner v.s reacto-sentinels , we’ll use giant pink pussy gloves ( patriarchal logos on boxer speedos, gloves are the closest boxers get to hats under the iron age oppression of capitalist males!), whey protein powdered on special jockstrap hand-wraps, drinking will be mandatory after the last match.

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Who wants to edit my “trouble in economic utopia” short fiction?

updates ( drugs may have crippled me, il write with broken fingers)

I’m typing up a genuine heart warming holiday story– Mrs Claus having to convince the reindeer to stay in the giant ornament shaped garage when the jolly red road-devil wants to put the sleigh through some “drifting practice” and such.

Then, after the cheer and annoying simpering human joy of Christmas is out of the air, I’ll pry open the demon crawlspace in the back of my head and post the lucid dream novel that’s been angrily kicking in protest at my academy starched crit writings ( who enjoys academic literary crit from academic pros, let alone amatuers?) .

It’s better than any more attempts at poetry; though I love a fight , with words or more blunt means ( with gloves preferred) , I’ll leave that to the poets and lay down my fisticuffs in the poetic arena. No regrets; I’ve gained an appreciation of the art that happens in plain ol’ prose, and that’s enough in this life.

The Haunted Lagoon

The wampas creatures held that the swamp belonged to all swamp things. The first man was passing across the fens singing and trembling aside fen blade leaves with no dismay through his long legs ran blood beneath his ragged troubadour’s cowl. The traveler looked to the beetling roots– above the sky.

The traveler gazed at the fen. Among the elm scar bushes the sound of wooden roller pins creaked. The flowing gray locks of an ancient visage from the abandoned car mill ; drank all the blood this fen can teem with does I. She hovered and the thin yellowed sheets flowed with menace. A long thin break in the boat oar serving the rollers and illusion. And who wishes to travel my bog and fen without the price of one kettle of blood?

She lifted up a rusted kettle. The traveler ran stubby fingers stained with strong drink and long nights in cold wild places. it looks that you’ve all the blood this fen can teem with , to run through your rollers and broil in yr course? And this fen may be yours considering of traveler’s rights? My long haul through mountain fen and broad leafed vale, careening.

Writing update

This novel writing November is heading into the final innings and I’ve nearly completed another final draft of a sci-fi novel I started years ago. I’m frowning and tapping incessantly at the keyboard, I’m probably about to be kicked out of my parent’s house where they’ve allowed me to go through recovery (and been rewarded with an irritating madman novel writer for their generosity, so it’ll be for the best I find my way somewhere else).

As for other things I’ve written here, I’ve archived the posts where I’m too obviously imitating other writers ( wordpress is only a writer’s workshop if it’s made into one, and I’ll assume that most readers don’t want to read my writing exercises). Over the years I’ve stolen from theatrical culture and gay culture to pad my untutored artistic* leavings. But how could I lift something I couldn’t ever carry off? It’s like a jowly dog stealing smartphones in his drooly mouth; he won’t be able to trade it in for something he’d rather have but he can succeed in slopping some drool over the chic handheld.

Now a dog might be able to steal a car, provided it was lank and long legged enough to reach the pedals. But he’s going to be distracted by all kinds of things: other cars, cute girl bits on dogs outside, dog shit in the street, on someone’s doorstep, well mostly dog shit but you get the idea– dogs aren’t racing cars and are smarter for not trying. When I think of the musicians and writers I claimed some kind of faint similarity or kinship to, I can see that I must’ve been tripping banana crackers indeed. One thing about being a performative type person and not taking the stage for a long time, is that everything can get ugly.

*should I even call what I do art? Maybe that’s for others, to call it art, all I produce are meta-comments on other people’s art , trashy novels and a post-rock song every 3 years to half a decade.

Stating It Plain and Simple

So where’s my left future? I can see the self-destructive bent of capitalism; much better writers than me could over-flow library shelves on this point alone. I don’t know how I can be a real radical leftist; I’ve experienced the horrors of capitalism, but I also like plastic TV screens and big throbby speaker cabinets and tasty caffeinated drinks easily ordered from drive –thru diners.

 And though I may not be singular or a unique genius, I do love distance from other people no matter how much pain it causes me ( this is not masochism). Hatred is a different, momentary (and thankfully short-lived) feeling for me; the fact that I’ve wanted revenge against hard to extremely hard-right people after Anders Brievik, after Charlottesville and the various church shootings, is balanced by knowing that the lone figure of me acting on such a desire for revenge would hurt the cause I support more than some reactionary enemy (which I’ve mostly concocted in my mind from online news sources).

I suppose this battle within my head and heart led to me acting out with destructive drug use more than any need to soothe residual hangovers from my early 20’s. It’s been unclear for the most part, but this blog project has been about killing the reactionary mind inside me as substitute for outward acts of vengeance. I know I’ll never succeed fully in battling the rampant monstrosity of human thought and behavior; it’s only an approximation of a better vision of life.

This does not make me Buddhist or otherwise religious. I can accept Croce’s anti-metaphysical claims about philosophy and science as replacement and continuation of religion, but I love him for the poetry in his writing . Perhaps I’ve gone too far in asserting his statements as a new religion ( “With each new prophecy a little bit of evil enters the world” , the most succinct phrase on any of those ambitions. )

Offline, I’ve turned from writing horror to sci-fi. I feel no need to disguise (rather than harness and temper) my politics in fiction writing; trashy sci-fi is better with that human (or otherwise) element and I want to take it more seriously while having fun writing. And perhaps horror writers suffering from anhedonic depression are more qualified to write in that genre. I now feel too non-anhedonic, and won’t continue that literary path.

Reverse Reactions and Cognitive Biases –updated

This political writing is starting to conflict with my aesthetic side, and I doubt the sense and usefullness of it. Its less about any analysis that could come close to anthropological and might be stepping into the personal without kindling much light on human behavior in economics or politics. I’ll leave it here till better grows from the academic soil.

It’s easy to reach the level of obsessive madness contending with various strains of Ignatius Reilly thinking when I’ve had that mentality for a long time, and re-enforced by ignoring political thought and engagement for years like I did after Occupy shorted out and faded away.  Not having much political ability or knowledge, I’d rather not become the red opposite of those Trots who went hard-conservative like Christopher Hitchens (eloquent and witty as he often was). I can settle for being a smarter liberal.

Cognitive biases still operate and distort my vision of the world. In my everyday life I tend to display and act on stereotypes towards Chinese and Mediterranean peoples, regardless of any intake of their cuisines and my drooling sexist admiration of the women from those fair lands.

“Categorization leads to the perception of in-groups and out-groups, groupsto which we do and do not belong, respectively. In turn, in-group versusout-group distinctions spawn several common biases…People also display an out-grouphomogeneity bias . They generally view members of out-groups as being moresimilar to one another than are members of in-groups (Bauer, 2001).
In other words, we perceive that “they are all alike” but recognize that “we are diverse”. (Passer, Smith 2007).

Does this apply to members of self-selected political groupings? I’d say less so than the everyday prejudice that we’re all familiar with. When it involves political extension of the everyday cognitive bias, and several further levels of focus on elevating common prejudice to an absolute ideal, that sort of thinking is on its way to turning up in mismatched clothes reeking the nadir of beer runs.

I’ll be the first to admit that censorious people have existed and continue to exist on the modern American left, but when far-right to trad-reactionary people want to publicly strut about declaring the Civil Rights Act a grievous mistake and drum up support for the summary execution of suppressed minorities,what did they expect, free luxurious rides throughout North America? Feelings of visceral disgust course through my body when I hear people once close to me state such notions against the democracy protecting gains of the mid-20th century. As for the conspiracy minded side of the culture I have no idea what many online conspiracy theorists are theorizing about, it usually sounds like bad trip “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” mash-ups to me.

Let’s assume that Americans by and large regardless of their skin color or native language probably don’t want the same welfare state that was built in Scandinavian countries during the late 20th century. The full democracy brand of thought is at least as rooted in American tradition as Burke (and Pat Buchanan’s) iron-hefty respect for prejudice and old standards.

I don’t have to search through the red swamps of any net-forum to find a copy of Paine’s Agrarian Justice ( its on an official .gov website with the slightly amusing tagline This is an archival or historical document and may not reflect current policies or procedures. ).