Caught the abyss gazing so I gazed back and winked and it got all weird.
Cthylla, the post-canonical daughter of CTHULHU, was I suspect lifted from Tiamat, Mesopotamian matriarch and a primordial goddess of the salt sea who was later cast as evil by the Dungeons & Dragons creators as a response to cultural feminism. Technically, mansplaining (a devoutly senseless term if ever there was one) did not exist prior to the sermon on the mount, but then, hashtags for social change are how hipsters pray. Likewise, the song Worn Me Down by Rachael Yamagata could secretly be about Lady Liberty, realizing Uncle Sam had skipped the convention to meet with that floozy the Whore of Babylon. We held hands across America, Sam you bastard WHY DO YOU HAVE TO BE LIKE MY FATHER.
No song is sad enough.
Writers! Every time you write a scene where someone’s squirming through an air duct, you make building and maintenance people squirm. If you could see what suspends most air ducts you would never write these scenes. Writers! If vampires have no beating hearts, then they have no blood circulation. Which means no erections, thus making vampires out as romantic foibles tragic for different reasons altogether. Writers! If you have a character needing to score some dope, don’t have them go to the inner city block with the most brown people, or the trailer park with the least teeth, have them hit the closest Greyhound busing terminal. Writers! The woods are actually the safest place anyone might ever want to be, *because* most people avoid them. Same applies to graveyards. Threats requiring those environments, the ax murderer, the ghosts, the abomination of natural law, should and could easily be relocated to city hall. Writers! If natives were capable of enacting malignant curses, they probably would not have lost their political leverage to colonizers. Imagine someone reacting to the threat of an audit by a millennia-dead tycoon. Writers! If you indulge in any variety of power fantasy, why stop short of fucking god up the ass?
The less your concern for others not getting what they need, with emphasis and passions instead gone toward yourselves getting what you want, leads us one and all here to these trials and tribulations of the non-fiction world. With nobody left to share with, to befriend or to fuck, to empower or be empowered by. At best, intermediary thumbnails we instill with meaning, our missives passed between the bars to strangers. If the connected thumbs no matter up or down bear no affect on our seating, then we are too comfortable and that comfort betrays inconsequence. We do possess our senses for a reason.
The thing is though, that becoming aware of the nature of a given thing, and rationally choosing to change it for its betterment, is no less difficult than with these intangible matters. It’s never truly a chore dependent upon talent or skill, or gumption. If there’s no sacrifice creation is just hobby. Faith, principles or conviction as a matter of convenience, of finding the brand that questions you the least. I would imagine that more often it chooses us instead of the other way around, whether that “it” is belief or consequence. The cost of even one red cent should be a red flag, as the basic need for invocation cannot be usurped. We’re exceptions to rules somehow, someway. Maybe it’s the hard to detox Catholic guilt of my upbringing but every problem I meet, the first thing I wonder is if I myself, my actions or inaction, might be the catalyst. I mean, owning ourselves is hard enough, but if we all have the same shit, the same ideas, the same longings and belongings, we become a lot less interesting to each other. It proves how “separate but equal” nonsensically denies universal appeal, when the universe has no reason to care.
I know enough to get that so much of what constitutes various forms of magic is just processes of finding patterns, regardless if it’s termed invocation or creation or divination, or mere storytelling. But while the notion magic is for everybody feels like saying everybody is swift enough to be your bridegroom, everyone absolutely must piecemeal together truth extending beyond themselves. Lest we be repetitious middlemen. We have to make our very own stories. We have to stare into the abyss ourselves, individually, and not the rendition of anyone else.