Class 920

Salutations!

Obuzeti's a bit of a misnomer - it's the name of the first character I laid down in SRP here, and I just named the profile that out of a lack of better ideas - he was a Croatian maenad (a creature of wine and dance and revelry) and the name means simply "grip" in the language native there. I can't remember exactly why I picked it, but at least 50% of it likely was that it sounded cool, and some was probably that I didn't expect to be around this site that long.

Well, that's fallen through, so I might as well leave a more complete footprint, now.

Calling me by my screenname works, but I've alternatively gone by Vagrant and Gleam elsewheres on the net and still do, and they fit more comfortably to the tongue. I exist completely here on the SRP boards and have never posted anywhere else, because I don't particularly care about real-life hookups or making my political opinions known, and those seem to be the two driving forces around the rest of the board (but again, I wouldn't know, would I?)

I've stayed here because it's so free to write whatever you want - the main concern is relative privacy, and there's mods to boot out people that join unawares, which are unmatched treasures in the multitude of roleplay boards I've been across, and that's been a lot. After a whole lot of time wasting energy with face claims and avatars and signatures, I'm very happy to be left to just putting words on a page instead of assorted other nonsense. Don't expect pictures. Getting better at surfing Pinterest doesn't hold my interest.

Likewise, I'm very communicative, and I figure out very quickly whether I like a thread or not. If I don't, then I don't linger, because wasting everyone's time with a half-ass effort is insulting to anyone involved.

On the other hand, I've struggled with chronic depression and PTSD for a very long time, and that's led me to float off from some threads I've loved dearly. I don't think I've ever properly apologized for those times, and it's too late to say much about it by now.

My active threads, at the moment, are long-running storylines with CurtailedAmbrosia, who is a lady of unimpeachable talent and grace. To be honest, I could write unto forever with her alone and be just fine with that; I've been writing roleplays for a decade and a half and never met someone so easy to work with and talented as her. I hope everyone on these boards, eventually, finds someone so perfect to write with, but from personal experience it's a right pain in the ass to do so.

I'm mostly using this thread to compile ideas I'd rather not give up, and give thanks to people who made me a better person around here; and maybe they'll see it and maybe they won't, but I'll have said it, and that satisfies me almost as much. There comes a point where your personal relief is not worth disturbing someone else again, and I'm long past that.

To everyone that's helped make me a person that I can love again: thank you.

To the people I work and write with: thank you.

To those I haven't yet: I hope to meet you soon.

This is Vagrant, and I'm hoping to leave anyplace I go a better place for having had me within it.

Wall of Kudos

For all those people who have enriched my life by their presence in it here.


SinisterSpiders, the first person who ever really gave me a shot on this board. Hope you're doing alright these days, hon.

KimaniNight, who wrote a great deal with me years ago, and who I vanished on when things got to be too much everywhere else. She hasn't been on since, and I regret having done so. She was, and likely still is, a true sweetheart.

Apollo Wilde, who has vast amounts of talent, and who I've tried to write threads with multiple times, but our schedules just never seem to click. Glad to see you writing again, hon! Hope it goes better than my fumbling attempts at it.

McKenna, who I only wrote with briefly, but proved so decisive and straightforward in person that I'm glad to have known her. You kick ass, hon. Never regret it.

Aliceinchains, who's struggled so much with everything that she doesn't deserve happening to her. I hope you're alright, hon. I'll be here when or if you ever come back. Be well.

Lastly, CurtailedAmbrosia, who's made everything worth it.

Interesting Thread Archive

I've had a lot of false starts. I won't bother accounting them here. I will, however, keep track of the ideas I've liked, because they're worthwhile enough that I may restart them sometime in the future.

Eigengrau, which is one of my doomed threads with Apollo, and which I still find near and dear to my heart. A mystery thriller with elements of horror drawing from House of Leaves, where a female protagonist descends deeper and deeper into a series of apartments deserted by their tenants, wiped clean of personal artifacts, and no longer bound by the laws of physical reality in the depths of their halls. Atmospheric and lovely.

Evaporating Empathy, a thread with McKenna, who is a heroine in her own right. The origin of Jonah Moray, a violent, Byronic antihero who's since moved onto Know When to Fold 'Em, a monster of a thread with Ambrosia. I loved the premise and the characters so much I couldn't let them go.

Where the Barrens Go, which was one of my fanciful threads that I wrote for Alice, who gets a kick out of watching my creativity on full burn. I don't ever expect anyone to look at this and go "I can deal with that". It's weird on all cylinders. I adore it.

There's probably others, but I didn't start them and that makes coming back up with them a stone bitch. Probably more to add, eventually.

The Introvert's Guide to Roleplaying Etiquette

Though many, many bumps and bruises to myself and my ego, I present to fellow readers and writers what is, probably, a decent method to make sure you don't fall down the drama rabbit hole. I don't claim to be particularly wise - trial and error is a bad way to learn things, so if anyone wants to throw in their own advice, please do so.

I just really wish someone had told me these sorts of things when I started roleplaying, so now I'm leaving it out there for anyone else to learn from and make use of.

~*~

INITIATING

This is the awful part. The Seeking thread makes this a lot easier, but anyone like me eats their own liver over the proper way to title a PM or prompt to make it pop, be dashing and funny, not overly intrusive or enthusiastic, properly professional, smacking of at least acceptable levels of writing talent, and without exclamation marks, because that makes me look like I'm ten (a noticeable detriment when you're writing erotic fiction).

There are some simple measures you can take, though, and the most important one is to be specific. If you're just looking for some quick kink material, just a scene description will do, and that's the average ad out in Seeking. Putting in detail, however, shows how committed you are to the roleplay (and vice versa). A good starting character, a setting, a plotline, these are all things that will help you reel in better potential partners.

That said, you don't and probably shouldn't jump right in with the first person to respond. Take a couple days, see who replies. If they have a roleplay profile, check it out; look at their recent posts, and get an idea of how they write. You might feel a little rude saying no at this point, but it's invariably going to be worse if you put a few pity posts in and then something turns you off too hard to continue. Pull out of threads that would become a problem before they can take root. This is especially important for women because I'm reliably told that the male creeper population around here is both broad and robust. Don't be afraid to say no or to block particularly insistent douchebags. Your peace of mind is paramount.

Make sure to let people know what your schedule is like! With well-mannered partners, it cuts down on nerves, and for people that will push and nag, you can say you told them right up front. A lot of us have trouble saying no; putting up warnings up front will make it easier later on. Likewise, should your schedule grow tight mid-thread, telling people about it is a courtesy most will appreciate, and the people who fly off the handle about it would have later anyway, when you have less time and patience to deal with it. Save yourself some stress.

On the mirror side, if you're applying to someone else's prompt, have a writer's profile up for them to check over - it saves you repeating yourself and sounding very dry and boring as you say the same things for the eighth time around. Nudge them, let them know about your interest, and don't rush! Be just as relaxed and easygoing as you'd want anyone to be with you.

~*~

THREAD COMPOSING

The next hurdle is appropriately communicating what you what, while breaking the ice. The ideal state is not trading a few PMs with your new partner about thread goals, then never talking with them again until the thread dies. Active communication, without feeling guilty for disturbing them, is the ideal goal. You want to feel comfortable bouncing ideas off them, soundboarding and coming up with whatever comes next.

State your goals up front; where you'd like the thread to go, what ideas or kinks you want to explore. The more your partner knows, the more smoothly they can segue into what pleases you, without that sock-puppet jerkiness that is suddenly accomodating a new fetish mid-scene. Maybe this is embarrassing, but it's not going to be any less so if you pop it in the middle of word-fucking. We're basically writing porn, ladies and gentlemen. We can leave shame behind.

This is also an excellent way to figure out if your partner has bad habits, like making demands, ignoring PMs, or suddenly vanishing for long periods of time. Personal quirks like this come out fairly fast in a conversation, and as I've noted multiple times before: better to know now before you're invested.

I recognize there's a fair denomination around the board that just likes to hurdle into the smut and say "it'll be a surprise / surprise me." Fair enough - enjoy your surprises. I don't, and I deeply suspect that's a common sentiment.

~*~

ROLEPLAYING

All the setup you've done should pay off here. Have fun, that's what we're here for!

That said, things can change and start to go haywire. If you're writing particularly hot and sexy prose, your partner may get impatient or get a little too busy with their hands elsewhere; writing quality drops as a result. Gently remind them to be as into it on the keyboard as they are anywhere else; if they pop their top early and dash off two sentences in their lazy euphoria as a return post, you're probably going to be left a little frustrated in the aftermath.

(that may sound familiar.)

Godmodding is also a thing that happens a lot once the clothes start flying; everyone wants to get their rocks off, here, but don't control anyone else's character for them unless you've cleared it beforehand. That tends to be a trigger point for a lot of experienced roleplayers.

Lastly, this is where you'll experience, eventually and at some point, the much-lamented ghosting. It happens to everyone, and it will, invariably, leave you uncertain as to what you did wrong, if anything, and worried for the other person if you know them well.

I won't pretend to tell anyone what to do about their deeper friendships or long-term roleplay partners, but my rule of thumb for new partners that ghost is to wait a week past whatever their proposed schedule is, send a PM asking if everything's good in the hood, and then stop worrying about it. If they're determined to vanish, they're going to and nothing you can do will stop it. If it's a genuine emergency, they'll appreciate your patience and discretion.

~*~

WARNING SIGNALS

Because this is Lit-Erotica, there's a vast amount of people that confuse the SRP boards for the Personals section, and get possessive, intrusive, or any other variation of way too much in your business. Easy ways to see this coming:

1. Pictures, the clearest signal. If they start sending dick pics or what have you, it's safe to assume a quick exit is a good strategy. They're not likely to give up at a "no".

2. People demanding your personal information. This isn't just location, but what you look like, what your life schedule is (there's a hell of a difference between saying how often you can / intend to post, and someone asking to know what you spend all your waking hours doing), or "what would you do if I did X".

3. People addressing you as your roleplay character.

4. PM spam wondering what you're doing and why you haven't posted. No one but you can control what you're doing and what your priorities are.

5. Guilt tripping. If they start telling you all about their personal lives, and how your writing is the one light in their lives, and how desperately they need it, etc. etc., someone's looking to play you. You don't owe anyone here anything - remember that, no matter what they think. You are your own first priority.

~*~

If anyone wants to add stuff here, lemme know; my experience is rather colored by my own privileges. If you get some use out of it, or want to copy or link to this, go ahead. If I come off like a pretentious ass, well, okay, but you don't have to necessarily tell me about that.

Take care of yourselves out there, and have fun.

Active Writing

Writing something that engages the reader's interest is not just a matter of pandering to their interests - it's about the careful arrangement of words. To put a brief summary of it, the English language has fantastic utility in absorbing words from other languages because its grammar is almost entirely in syntax, without the grammatical particles common to other languages. The other side of that coin is that, if you're not careful with your word choice, you end up with Bland Soup, the story.

What I'm saying is that there's a few ways to make your writing spicier, and they don't involve suddenly turning into Thomas Pynchon or something. Listen up.

~*~

PAST TENSE SUCKS

I know it's everybody's favorite, but I'm going to be real with anyone reading this: unless you are very good at what you're doing, past tense drains action from your narrative. Things have already happened; the action potential has been drained. But more importantly, the past is a vast ocean of time that's already elapsed, and it's very easy to drift from one chronological line of events into another, and diverge into sidenotes and musings that have fuck all to do with what you're trying to write. I call this the Flashback Urge, where you invariably want to justify anything your character is doing with a paragraph or two saying why that's a thing.

Do not. Resist the urge. Hint at it in the text and let the reader reconstruct the events themselves. In the words of your fifth grade English teachers, show, don't tell. Because past tense is tremendously flexible with chronology, it's very easy to fall into endless tellings.

Past tense is also the home of the passive tense, which is not your friend. In English, you can't write a sentence in present tense and have it be passive. The syntax just doesn't function that way, because our passive tense is periphastic - a past participle conjugation with an auxiliary verb.

(what the fuck does that mean)

Alright fine, look.

The paperwork was signed.

Signed is conjugated as past participle, and we add 'to be' as an auxiliary verb so that the verb doesn't need a source. A signature appeared on the paperwork, but whodunit is an eternal mystery!

Don't do this to your readers.

~*~

CONCRETE SENSATIONS

You hold the attention of your readers by giving them concrete sensations. Don't get lost in long, winding roads in your brain; don't have three or four paragraphs of just dialogue and thoughts. Your readers can and will lose track of the physical world your writing is supposed to be dropped into. Describe calluses on knuckles, the feel of the wood grain in the table, the knots in your hair in the morning. Make it something in the reader's hand rather than an idea that floats away like a balloon as soon as their attention wanders. Let them hold onto your world with more than just their brains, and they'll really sink their teeth in.

Metaphor's really useful for this. Instead of being #betterwriting, it's "ideas they can sink their teeth into". That's a physical sensation, it's something you, the reader, has done. You've bitten into a firm apple sometime in your life. You've touched concrete, you know how rough it is. You've dropped stones into ponds and gotten lost. I can use those shared memories. I can write you, the reader, pages you already remember in your skin. You've been there already.

Write with the world you live in, folks.

~*~

THE ART OF MYSTERY

Related to tense, a bit. Here's the thing: the number one failing of any writer that does speculative fiction (the term that envelops sci-fi, fantasy, all that smorgasboard) is that they spend five-ten-fifty pages at the start of their masterpiece explaining all the shit that no one else knows and no one else wants to know right off the bat. You know what sitting around for half an hour learning dry terminology is like? Class. Eject your lectures stage left, please.

Instead, weave your knowledge into the narrative. Never explain; let the reader learn from context, rather than handfeed them all the cute bits of your universe you've spent months cooking up. You know you're creative. There's no rush to prove it to the audience.

Even in regular fiction this paradigm holds. Don't explain everything that your characters do. There's probably a reason, but people don't stand around and tell you their life stories in the Real World. Don't do it in your writing either. Let them stand as idiosyncrasies rather than flinch away from having an odd character.

You're tired of justifying your weird shit to anyone else by now, probably. Give the same respect to your characters.

The Nature and History of Love - The Word, That Is

This is not a word that English handles well. It comes, originally, from a variety of Germanic sources - Proto-Germanic lubo, and later roots from Saxon, Friesian, and Gothic meaning generally 'beloved'. It was conflated with the Old English lufu, which was a generalized pidgin term to communicate any of friendliness, affection, love for God, or romantic sexual attraction. It is to the detriment of our language today that William the Conqueror never learned nor encouraged the learning of Old English in his courts and nobles, because they spoke a dialect of French known as Anglo-Norman, which was itself not French nor their native Norman but a sort of Germanic-French mix. Because the court didn't speak Old English, but the peasantry did, certain pidgin words were used to communicate a variety of related meanings, and lufu is perhaps our oldest and most awkward example.


~*~


Love means many things, in English, because the word we use is itself imprecise, and thus we fumble as a people and a culture to say what we mean. The Greeks divide it into six parts, of which three are popularly known. Here they are:

1. Agape: Perhaps best defined as benevolence, Thomas Acquinas explains this as "the act and desire to will good for another". The emotion of charity, grace, and kindness, of parenthood and community, of devotion without exception. Christians would best understand this as Grace, the capitalized term, which denotes God's limitless love and forgiveness for His children.
   
   
2. Eros: Romantic and sexual love, not necessarily entwined. Plato puts this as the "awe and appreciation of beauty, that which lets the soul recall beauty". Sex isn't always part of this, leading to the eponymous word 'platonic', so poorly understood by modern speakers. It is desire without ownership, the appreciation of that within and intrinsic in another which draws you.
   
   
3. Philia: The love of brothers and sisters, between equals, dispassionate but respectful, a thing earned and denoted by virtue. This is respect and regard without deference, an acknowledgement and a desire to see that virtue replicated and encouraged in oneself, as Aristotle notes in Nicomachean Ethics.
   
   
4. Storges: Rarely used in the texts of the philosophers due to their disdain for the concept itself, storges refers to a patient empathy and affection that is not necessarily deserved, but expected - more forbearance than genuine love. It is the comfort of broken-in shoes and familiar faces, regardless of their virtue or worthiness, what is known and accepted. Regretfully, this concept is what we in the modern age often actually mean when we say 'love'. It is the absence of anything better.
   
   
5. Philautia: Self-love, compassion for one's own self, and both a virtue and a vice to the Greeks. Overindulged, it is narcissism and egotism, but the absence of philautia means you have no concept of your own value or compassion for your mistakes; your worst tyrant is yourself, for nothing is good enough. Perhaps best translated as self-esteem and self-respect.
   
   
6. Xenia: Compassion for the stranger, the respect of a host for his guest. Inverted this is xenophobia and isolationism, because the unknown and the different threaten the host's weakness. To the Greek, a host's strength and respectability were tied to what he could offer to his guests - and this relationship was expected to be mutual, for a guest brought as much as he was given. This is the welcome of the strange and unfamiliar, the exchange of old for new, of curiosities and discovery.

~*~


Additionally, Thelema (the school of spiritual thought begun and taught by Aleister Crowley) uses a quite separate definition, which is anything performed under Will - which begets an even more involved discussion. Bear with me, I'll explain.

Will, according to Crowley, is that which we do in pursuit of personal Divinity, which is perhaps better understood as enlightenment in Buddhist terms. It is personal destiny and Truth, the unknowing movement towards actuality. What you do cannot be done for a reason, or for a result, even in desire for Telemathic Love - because to act in accordance with Will is to do without expectation of result, without need for change or in chase of victory or defeat.

"For the love of the game" is the truest expression of Will we have in modern English. Not to win, or to lose, or to change; but to experience. The most famous expression from Thelema is "Do as thou wilt is the whole of the law", and it is this to which it refers:

Not to do whatever you want to anyone else, but to follow your desires blindly, without prayer of success or dread of loss. Love, then, is the act of experience in what you desire.

In today's world, there's little room for Thelematic Love; it's hazardous and unforgiving of unleashed appetite and desire. To encapsulate that absolute yearning, though, it's very useful as a term to describe that fulfillment-of-destiny niche that we lack in the language.


~*~


For all these, English offers but one term, and a collage of synonyms and words tacked onto the side like Post-It notes. Is it any wonder that we are besieged by hostility and misunderstanding when we are so crippled in the means we use to even let one another know that they matter? Everything we say is limited by the means of conveyance - and there is so much fury and hurt in the world that commences from the failure of understanding.

We should know each other better than this. We should know ourselves more clearly. We should speak without thought, and winnow through the dross until it is we find what it is the heart meant before our lips moved.

It says a lot about me that when I get pensive I write academic essays on word etymology as opposed to doing anything useful, like my laundry.

I enjoyed it though-and even took notes on some good advice!

CurtailedAmbrosia said:

I enjoyed it though-and even took notes on some good advice!

Click to expand...

I'm glad it was of some use! I just meant that when I find myself looking up proper footnote documentation at 4:30 AM in the morning for an unprompted essay eight years after I've stopped taking classes, my unceasing thirst for suffocating detail has probably hit peak OCD.

The Human Fight

It's easy to tell people to be decent when it's all you've ever been. It's the same to you. It's what you've always been. Those other people? They just have to change what they are, eventually. You know you're right.

But I'm turning the metaphor on its head, right? I'm talking about decency. I'm not talking about nobody's skin color, or whatever political views they might have, or what crazy-ass flat earther shit they believe and preach and won't get the fuck over, it's round you stupid asshole, stop bothering me with this shit.

Lemme tell you a story.

~*~

My father is a strong man. Nobody can argue that. He came from a household where his father worked 60+ hours a week, everything to stay out and away from home he could, with an abusive and crazy bitch of a wife, with brothers that beat him with bike chains and sisters that took money out of his wallet when he slept. He left that household and went with my mother, crossed four states to settle in a new place and start a new way of life.

Took 'em six months to start throwing plates at each other, story goes. I dunno. I don't press. Divorce follows. Mom gets pregnant when he's already hooked up with some other chick, and he says, nah, that ain't mine. Get the fuck out of here. So it goes.

I meet this guy when I'm twelve years old, after the paternity test Mom finally took so he'd start paying some child support. He rubs my hair, calls me chief. Marries my mother again, moves in to support her when our grandfather dies.

Meanwhile, this other lady he was hooked up with all this time? Divorces her. All that child support he didn't pay? Fuggetaboutit. They're married now, right?

I go to schools. I get fucked up. Dunno if you ain't picked up on this yet, but I was not a happy kid. This guy, he wasn't happy with me either. I won't get into all that tangled shit here. But we did not get along, and I lived in fear of him - raw, searing fear that was physically sickening. I still can't listen to footsteps in the hallway without the hair on my forearms rising. I'll always remember the sound of him stomping down the hall towards my room.

But we're not here about that.

Because he truly loved Mom. He got her flowers, built additions onto her dollhouse that she'd had since she was a little girl, built by our grandfather. Spent years building additions onto the house, digging gardens for her. I've never heard her laugh so hard with anyone else.

So for a long time, I hated this guy. Hated him. I mean beyond wanting to punch him or injure him or kill him. I wanted soul-rending anguish. I wanted to take the sustaining animus of the person my father was, and make it understand misery - the black kind that doesn't lift, the suffocating certainty that today's shit was nothing special and nothing that won't happen again, without consequence, without mattering. Pain without source or reason.

Took over a decade for me to get over that. Lots of stuff, I won't get into. I'm a healthier person now.

And now I look back on this guy, past and present, and wonder how he's still married to my mother. She talks a good game about leaving him. Has, for two decades. It's whatever, and he knows it. He's still mostly the same.

He visits my grandmother every time he's in the area, makes sure to visit her and makes sure she has some company now that she can't leave the house. She took him in when he was younger, let him date her daughter. He's never forgotten that.

When I was at my worst, and talked to my parents about considering suicide, he caught me in the hallway the day after, and told me either to fix my shit or hurry it up already.

I can't reconcile these parts, folks. I don't know where the decency begins and ends. I don't know why the rest of my family is real to this guy, and I'm not.

But here I am, talking about my daddy issues. Cool story, bro, but what does this relate to anything? What's the common thread here?

Listen.

~*~

It's easy for me, on my pedestal at the end of all this, to point back at this guy and call him wrong. It's easy to lay the blame on him for all this shit, for not being better.

It's really easy, in fact, because his trick these days is to pretend he never did any of it and laugh when it comes up, like it doesn't matter.

The question I struggle with is whether this negates the decency and goodness he managed to produce for everyone else in the meantime. Where does someone hit sin critical mass? What amount of shitty behavior sinks the ship?

I don't know that, and worse, I'm a real bad judge of this. I'm about as un-fucking-biased as it's possible to get when it comes to this. I can just pull my logic out of my brain and think about it outside of my own skull a bit. It's where I get writing like this.

This guy, I don't know if I'm fit to judge. But worse, does this mean I'm qualified to be an ass back to him on everything? Having reached a verdict of fuck you, asshole, am I now empowered to ruin his shit in whatever way I find convenient?

The easy answer, of course, is yes.

And yes, if the shoe was on the other foot, this guy wouldn't hesitate to fuck me over. But I staked my pride on actually being, y'know, the guy who thinks about things instead of just being an asshole. So I get to ask questions like this of myself.

Does his lack of decency cancel out mine?

He can't really hurt me the same ways anymore. I'm a grown ass man, here, talking about daddy issues. All this is old hat. It's memories.

But I still work with people like this, every day. People who don't hesitate to take the extra inch, the extra little gut shot, always pushing for one more quip at your expense, another day of being late because nobody fucking cares, bathroom breaks you have to cover them on because you can't stop them from doing it.

And it happens every day. The same guys, smoking their lungs away and complaining about being short of breath. No shit, sherlock. The same guys showing up late, taking extra bathroom breaks, complaining about everyone being on their ass all the time. No, really? That same one guy peddling his anti-Jew propaganda talking about the Rothschilds and his interest in World War II history. Like I don't know where that fucking goes, asshole. Get out of here.

It's the same shitshow, writ petty. They don't care that they're fucking over somebody, right? That they're being an asshole? It's just small shit. It doesn't matter.

Well, I was small once too. And this guy, he was right. It didn't matter, in the end. Except to me.

Now I'm still here, asking questions, and he's paying off his fourth car, making more money than anyone else in his line of business - an industry leader.

Where's the karma?

Failing that - what did I learn from all this? It had to be worth something.

Listen.

~*~

You can't make people be good.

You can't make people be guilty.

They are, independent of you and your wishes, and all the things you could do will not force them into making the kind of sense you do to yourself inside of your head.

I can't change people, and I still have to live with them. I can stand on the other side of the room and not talk to them - avoid the problem - and that sort of works, but you still work with those guys.

I'm still family with this guy.

I have to live with them.

And I can either be an asshole to them, which is a contest they'll probably win - or I can at least offer the initial opening of civility.

Which usually escalates into some fucking argument when stupid shit happens, because of course, but sometimes there's also an civil discussion that doesn't involve a fight.

And I'll be honest, I don't have the energy to hate somebody all of the time. Not even this guy.

So what I'm saying is not to forgive your abusers - or open yourself up to your bullies - or be a Christian and turn the other cheek. It's not really about any of that. It's something more complex, with nuance.

Remember who they are, but treat them as they act.

If I had to stick a label on it, that would probably be it.

Because people like these, hurting someone is an act of insignificance. It's not something that matters to them, so they're permanently surprised that you're upset. Why aren't you doing the same thing back to them, they always seem to be asking?

Why aren't you like me?

~*~

Listen.

We're fucking different. There's two types of people reading these words, I'll bet, and you can probably tell which by whether you're pissed off or nodding along.

Whether you get me, or you don't.

But hey, I'm just here to tell a story. I'm here to think things out through a page.

Maybe it changed something, and maybe it didn't.

But whatever. I did it, I wrote these words and laid down this verse, and it made me feel better to do it.

Is that all the justification I need, then?

Is that all anyone needs, in the silence of their own minds?

But then maybe you don't ask questions.

Maybe you're like this guy, and these guys.

But I'm not the one who can judge that.

A Real Conversation About Harassment

Guys. C'mon.

This is a thread in the Lounge, which already means it's not hitting the target audience. I need to title it "searching for male cowriter" with a smexy username to really get the attention of the people I'm talking to, or worse, do a thread with (open) on it, then be a woman.

I'm trying anyway. The rest of y'all, reading this, thanks for your patience.

Guys: can we not be fucking creeps for awhile?

As long as I've been on this board there's been a weird overlap between the people who actually write shit on this board, and this seething mass of non-writers who are overspill from the Personals and just message anybody that vaguely resembles tits. You know who you are.

And the upgraded form, the jokers who write threads, but are always nudging their partners for personal info. Wanting contact all the time. Pushing to move the conversations off E-Lit into chat messengers, or cell phones, where do you live, anyway? I'm single.

You motherfuckers ain't slick.

We're here to fantasize, on Lit and in SRP in particular. I get that. But the distance from ourselves is intentional. It's a safety measure, not an accident, because people are psychos and jerks and assholes, and this is a safe way to get our jollies without the cringe drama of dating websites or going to the bar.

Stop pushing.

No one pretends this is a safe space, but at least it shouldn't be a cesspool of constantly telling horndogs who barely even expect a response to fuck off.

The rest of you:

In the User Control Panel, under Messages and Notifications, you can both choose to deactivate or activate Private Messaging entirely, or you can choose to limit it to a Buddy List of preselected users. These options are here for your peace of mind. Use them as you see fit.

Take care of yourselves. That's my bit tonight.

Phonemes and Weak Vowels

If you didn't read Active Writing, this post will confuse you. Read that first.


English as a poet's language is a tremendous struggle because the modern format of the language itself doesn't lend well to the job. Part of this is because we are told, over and over, to write in the past tense, which can be considered the default tense of the language.

English past tense sounds awful, to be frank. And so does progressive, and the adverb attachment, and these components of the language can make up 95% of the things you say in everyday conversation. The combination makes people sleep through whatever you say. Here's why:

1. In past tense, things are already done. Nothing is new.
2. In progressive, you're doing something, but it's not completed.
3. In the adverb phrase, you describe a verb with an entirely new clause that can balloon out into paragraphs of its own if you're a moron. You aren't adding new conflict, just describing one that's already occurred. The adverb phrase is flavor text.

Compounding that is the grammatical inflexion of each of these word categories is a limp-wristed unstressed e vowel that trails off into nothing. -ed, -ing, and -ly are all examples of this. Ending your words with a weak syllable steals their impetus. It makes your prose weak.

This is in part due to the fact that English as a language is fucking lazy. -ed was pronounced in full, once upon a time - say beloved, and you can hear the difference in the hard hit of the stressed suffix. VED. It has weight. We lost that in Old English, along with a lot of the language itself, thanks to William the Conqueror, may he be fucked forever.

- ing, likewise, is a fuckup of the Anglo-Norman scribes at the time, who had trouble pronouncing the strong syllables of proper Old English. At the time, it was pronounced -ende (en-DE) which would result in words like

- swimende
- runinde

and so on. Rather that deal with the weight of that last syllable, the scribes of the time weakened it, to - en and then attached a g at the end, forming -eng. Then they confused with with the Old English suffix -ing, which at the time was a totally separate thing, and mashed them together instead of trying to figure it out.

The history of English is that in a nutshell: people shoving shit together and pretending that works. We still do it! It's how fucking compound words work!

The adverb phrase is a reflection of the fact we're in a action-oriented language with a crippled verb inflection pattern; instead of conjugating the verb properly so that we know number, gender, time, and so on and so forth, we just shove it into the end and describe the verb in a footnote clause.

That's the adverb phrase. English really likes adverbs, so much, in fact, that you can shove -ly onto anything you want, and everyone understands you. -ly just means "having the qualities of", so instead of using a verb that means what you mean, now you can write a complete new sentence throwing darts at the board hoping that someone gets what you're talking about!

Man, fuck this language.


The work goes uphill, folks.

You want to sound sharp? Drop these shit suffixes.You can drive between them with some care, and the result is crisp, clean diction. You need a progressive every once in awhile, I admit, to tell people when you're still talking. Past tense is also required as a function of the language. Shit that happened yesterday doesn't cease to exist today.

But you can cut down on their use.

Most important, stop throwing words after your verbs with -ly. Someone that walks quickly is in a hurry. Someone that talks angrily argues. You're wasting extra words to get meaning you could have front-loaded. It's bad practice - extra iceberg lettuce in your word sandwich. Make your sentences nutritious, dammit.

Zohar III notes

This is where I'm sticking information on a planet I'm creating for another thread. This isn't one of my usual lectures, but if you like speculative ecosystems or xenobiology, you might find it interesting.


OVERVIEW

Zohar III is infamous for addictive biology. The entire planet has a high water vapor level, and creatures communicate at least as much through scent and pheromone as they do sight and hearing. Chemical weapons and defenses stand more prevalent than claws and fangs, already clumsy and prone to overheat thanks to the high gravity coefficient and choking humidity. The packed oxygen, nitrogen, and water make for wildly dominant plants that the animals creep between and over, scraping out a living as the vast arboreal entities battle for sunlight and survival. A uniquely crystalline atmosphere, clear quartz stripped of color and borne aloft by raging winds, refract the tidal sunlight and spread it over the planet evenly, so that there is no true day or night cycle, but rather periods of lesser or greater light, ranging from a sullen evening to true day. These clear sandstorms rage high overhead the plant layer, making local flight impossible and colonization, as a result, impractical. Life has to exist at the terrestrial level here, and without airlift or supplies, it looks unlikely. The local ecosystem is voracious and adaptive.


SPOTLIGHT: THE MANGROVES

The life pod makes it first to the mangroves, an ecosystem based in a saltwater delta. An aquifer has cracked the surface nearby, but heavy salt veins underground have rendered the water undrinkable. The ecosystem is instead based on the mangrove titans, enormous trees that rise on complex root systems from the saltwater below. They filter the salt out, extruding it in thick coats from their roots, and drawing purified water up through their trunks to the canopies high overhead, safe from most grazing herbivores. Soil cover is nonexistent and the footing is limited to either roots or wading through the shallows below, though shallow is a relative term - the water level varies from three to four feet at the edge of the mangrove to about fifteen closer to the aquifer.

As a result, terrestrial fauna is light on its feet and never rises that far in size; they have to be able to bound from one mangrove to the next, looking for the precious water sealed under the tough bark. The mangroves defend themselves with latex veins that can gum up mouths or claws, and natural wellsprings that form deep in the heart chambers, encouraging the wildlife to fight over freely available water rather than hacking through the tough bark.

The competition over these natural spigots is unbelievably intense; closer to the water level, in between thick root systems, oversized and vicious ant colonies reign supreme in an eternal war against each other. They evolve acidic sprays, chemical defenses, and false pheromone trails to lead each other to their doom, while colorful gather near the underside of the roots and try to knock prey loose, each dog-sized insect a hefty source of protein. Some leap and crash into the underbrush with armored skulls and powerful fins to propel them upwards, battering aside their predators with equal verve. Others have evolved pressurized gills that blast spurts of water up above, knocking ants from their perches with unbelievably accurate sprays of water. These colonies thus form the basis for an entire ecosystem of predatory fish in the waters below, feeding on the insects and each other.

Higher up, as the roots become less tangled and the trunks solidifies into cavernous columns, the competition includes more than just ants. Tiger beetles, rapidly moving predators that skirr across the mangroves, form nests in crevices, each darting faster than the eye can keep up and consuming ant scouts and queens in blurring strikes, establishing a skirmish line against the encroaching colonies. Thickly furred climbing mammals, their flexible coats impervious to the clutching mandibles of their insect neighbors, wade through the competition with disdain, picking up choice specimens and cracking their exoskeletons with curved claws, repelling others with foul pheromone stenches that confuse the nose.

Without exception, though, all these forms of life stay under cover, out of the sunlight. For up above in the open air, at the canopies staring down, the aviants reign supreme over this entire ecosystem. Enormous birds with specially adapted wings, their phalanges strengthened and dense enough that they can only glide, not properly fly - but that's enough to grant them a stooping strike from overhead branches that can crack open any defenses the planet can offer, crystalline beaks shattering chitin and piercing fur alike.

Aviants stand about five feet tall and their wings have specially-designed thrusting spikes with curled hooks, suitable for climbing up tough bark, puncturing it, or pinning down prey for consumption as needed. As said, they are no longer true fliers, but on the hot thermals rising from open water in the early afternoons. aviants tend to glide further inland in search of large prey, and return in the evening on land breezes as the earth cools faster than the water, pushing thermal columns back over the aquifer.

In the heat of noon, then, local life is a little more free to search for food or a mate, but when the sky turns orange the upper trees are barren and empty, as the aviants soar overhead in croaking flocks from one thick trunk to another.

Aside from the mangrove titans, local flora is limited due to the consistent presence of salt; any plant that survives in this area is a halophyte out of necessity, since they either grow in saltwater or must contend with the salt extrusion the mangrove titans use to both filter it out of their systems and defend against parasites and climbing vines. There are pockets of fungal flowers that grow on leaf litter midway up the titans, which draw water vapor from the air itself and reproduce on spores flung into the daily breezes. Some vines have also evolved to tolerate the salt deposits of the mangroves, working their dendrites in under the bark to suckle on water veins, where the latex doesn't kill them instead.

The vast majority of flora, instead, have turned to predation as a source of protein and energy. Rampant entomological competition serves as a feast for anything capable of entrapping them, so pheromone-filled pitchers, bladderworts, and sundews are omnipresent on the lower levels, looking to lure curious scouts or workers to their doom. Other flytraps and catapult traps leave out succulent, edible stamen or fruit equivalents, trapping the offerings with tendrils that snap closed once touched that blast soporific vapors when disturbed. Still others are quietly toxic mosses that creep in and poison the titanwells, feasting on the bodies that lay about as mute warning.

Life in the mangroves is cheap, and all too easily snatched.


SPOTLIGHT: THE OYSTER SHALLOWS

The root systems surrounding the mangrove titans is plastered with oyster beds that filter nutrients from the ecosystems above and from the aquifer itself, creating the bedrock for its own community. Oyster beds provide safe breeding and feeding grounds for hundreds of species of fish that live throughout the tremendous aquifer, for hiding places are abundant in the enormous and emptied oysters and the calcified spat attached to them. Wider water channels wind their way through these beds, creating a labyrinthine paradise underneath the mangroves.

The oyster shallows are a dim existence - sunlight filters only fitfully through the thick, tangled root systems the titans weave underneath themselves, illuminating the living carpet of ants that work their way through the roots above. Dozens of species of fish have evolved ways to knock these ants off into the water below, where the jorah, a local family of fish that travel in aggressive schools through the main channels. Anything that falls into the water is swiftly tugged into the oyster beds and shredded by jorah, with everything else gleefully picking away from the sides - jorah, perhaps intentionally, don't evolve large enough jaws to predate on other fish in an effective manner, but are fantastic at taking tough chunks of chitin out of exoskeletons. They thus live in large, interchangeable schools with archerfish, hammerheads, and the other varieties of fish that specialize in knocking loose ants for the school.

These schools keep to the centers of the channels as best they can - they're prime food for the amphibious ratrawls, a quadrupedal amphibian that dominates most of the oyster beds. They use a chemical compound in their mouths to form quickly-hardening spit, and use that spittle to create shallow-water beds and dens atop the highest oyster banks. From these vantage points they fish in the channels, trying to pick out from the jorah schools with rapid dives. Ratrawls live in small family packs and remain distinct for their ululating croaks that can be heard anywhere in the mangroves during the cool hours of morning and evening, a hefty, deep-chested call.

Ratrawl pads are their own little centers of life - various crabs, starfish, and other microbiology life scratch out lives in the side and the undercarriage of their spittle-spun docks. The amphibians themselves are omnivorous and will eat anything they can get in their mouths with their flexible paws, but are clumsy out of the water and can't dig their own building material out of the way once it sets.

The masters of the oyster beds are huaromin - a nickname in another language that translates to "shore rattler". Indeed, these are tremendous snakes averaging anywhere from a dozen feet to much longer in length, with armored scales and a thick bone-mantled tail that they vibrate against the oyster beds, battering them to pieces to create the steep ravines they swim through. Huaromin channels, rather than the five-to-fifteen foot depth the rest of the oyster beds average, can be as much as thirty to forty feet deep and perhaps ten feet wide, riverlike ravines that cut through the beds and leave channels for the titans to put down new roots into the soil underneath. The great rattlers themselves feed on large prey - ratrawls are a favorite delicacy, when they dive too far into the channels hunting the schools, and rattlers are also infamous for using the vibrations of their tails to knock loose dozens of ants at once, creating a feeding frenzy that they can leisurely pick off jorah from, rather than hunting down the schools when they're on the defensive.

Huaromin themselves are bioluminescent, and the sight of them slowly winding their way through the channels is awe-inspiring - but deceptive. They turn off the display while hunting, and flare it bright on attack, to stun and dazzle their prey.

More Zohar Biomes, Part II

SPOTLIGHT: SURFACE SHOALS

The surface of the acquifer has less salinity - rainwater and runoff from the nearby jungle collects on the surface and remains there, meaning the lake is stratified into separate levels. The topmost, approximately a hundred feet in depth, is not that much worse than regular saltwater ocean, varying from 15-20% salinity as the constant freshwater addition purifies the top layer. Thus, here shoals of phytoplankton, krill, and brine shrimp rising from the deep to spawn and form the basis of a new food chain. The fish here are big, broad swimmers that school to keep diving or swimming aviants from scooping them out of the water easily; they sail through the sun-bright waters and only leave the open waters to lay eggs in the oyster shallows, a journey they make only once at the end of their lives; few make it through the gauntlet of predators there, and fewer young survive, but it's more than would survive if the eggs were left to float in open water, prey for the other fish.

The main predators this close to the surface are garsnaps, fast and agile fish that power through the water at ridiculous speeds. They are explosive hunters that use bursts of speed and an electromagnetic sense to locate their prey, rather than being confused by the visual illusions of school swimming. They're nearly blind when charging, as a protective membrane drops over their eyes at that time; even the aviants don't stay in open water for long, because no matter your size, a garsnap barreling into your side at eighty miles an hour and trying to bore a hole right through with its gnashing teeth is a deeply unpleasant experience, and once it starts gathering momentum the garsnap doesn't care what it hits, so long as it has a pulse.

There's also a breed of enormous euryptid, a kind of arthropod that has adapted to skimming the abundant microscopic life from the top layer of the acquifer. Looking something like an enormous gilled scorpion, these creatures float lazily about the surface, mouth open, filtering their food from the water while their thick shells protect them from virtually any attack. In addition, they're still terrestrial enough to crawl onto the local beaches to lay eggs, safeguarding them from aquatic poachers. Having no natural predators, the sunscorpions, as they're called, keep growing until they starve or parasites hollow them out from the inside; invariably, their shells sink to the bottom, where they contribute to the looming ecological disaster that is the Brinedeep Yeasts.

SPOTLIGHT: THE BRINEDEEP

The bottom of the salt acquifer is a hostile zone - freshwater from rainfall tends to lower the salt saturation at the higher levels, allowing some amount of life to proliferate, but the bottom is hypersaline, bypassing 30% salinity. The only thing that lives this far down, where the salt concentration is so high that it precipitates out in thick piles on the lakebed, are the brine shrimp and the black yeast.

Black yeast is an invasive species, and coupled with a form of invasive cnidaria colloquially referred to as the Grease , it collects in the fallen and abandoned shells of the sunscorpions above. The Grease's mesoglea (the jelly like substance that forms the main mass of jellyfish, anemones, or sea cucumbers) fills in the shell, laced with yeast that feasts off the nutritious dregs of the ecosystems above, feeding the Grease in turn. This chimerous substance fills the shell, and then the mesoglea begins to absorb oxygen, eventually forcing the shell to become buoyant enough to rise to the upper layers.

Grease-infested shells are a menace; they have no real senses worth speaking about except for touch - when something brushes the thick layer of mesoglea covering the outside of the shell, the interior reflexively tightens and propels the shell forward at great speed as the water trapped inside jets out. The yeast then attempts to inhale whatever it might have struck by suctioning water in through the open 'mouth' of the shell, trapping it inside the gelatinous Grease, where the prey is trapped, leeched of moisture, and finally devoured for its nutrients. Grease shells are only active during the day; without sunlight to photosynthesize from, the shell doesn't have enough energy to force itself into motion, and sinks back to the bottom again.

The Nature of Forgiveness

I'm thirty years old, this year. I've come a long way.

D'ya know, when I was young - fifteen on up, maybe to twenty-two - there wasn't a day I thought I would live out the year. I was perpetually on the edge of despair; waiting for the day I'd fall off the edge, that I'd have the courage, that a car would swerve and smash me, that my father would have enough and just shoot me, that God would take my heart from me and I'd wither and die and finally, finally, be done.

I remember those days, hon. I remember what it was like to think I wasn't worth forgiveness.

I didn't start fights. I've never gotten anyone pregnant, or done drugs, or crimes, or the things you would think that would cause that kind of guilt. It was existential. I was a library brat that forever apologized to the world that I couldn't go back and hide in those shelves. I felt tiny in a world of giants, of people that felt more than I did, wanted more than I did, loved and laughed and talked and were more than I was, and I knew it.

When you don't think you're as real as the people around you - that your pain is of less weight, that your immortal soul is transparent and gossamer, waiting for a stray breeze to blow it apart and away like a spider's web - you get caught in the forks of a dilemma. You don't want to be, but you don't want to burden the people around you with the necessity of cleaning up after your existence. You want to not just be undone, but to be forgotten, entirely. Let people go on, back to that brighter world that everyone lives in, without you.

~*~

I know now, intellectually, why I thought that. If you went and talked with my doctor you'd learn that my body produces about a third of the serotonin it should. Put simply, even at my happiest - I'm be about a third as happy as anyone else can feel. The rest of the time, I'm aware of the absence. It's not a sliding scale; I know there are levels of well-being and happiness I simply cannot reach, without drugs, without treatments, without pills.

I put those away, years ago. I'll live or die as I am.

I still don't know the kind of dancing, outright bliss I've seen in others. I know that I'm stern from a distance, but also mostly blank; I substitute humor for joy, wryness for excitement, and satisfaction for contentment. People see more colors than I do, in the emotional range, but I don't hurt less. That's a paradigm that took me a long time, to accept. For a very long time, I felt like the world was tilted against me, meant to curse me, undo me.

No more.

I'm thirty years old, and I can think about tomorrow without tears coming to my eyes and asking when it will end. I can think about paying the bills next month. What I'll be doing in six months, or a year, or what or who I might be in ten years. It took me twenty years through the valley of the shadow of death, but I've learned to forgive myself for not being the person I wanted to be; that bright, shining beacon, that person that can help everyone, that person who is better and brighter than me.

There is no day that you'll wake up and become the person you imagine yourself to be, when you see the movie premieres, when you're closing your eyes at night and wishing about who you'll be tomorrow and what you'll do. You're just you. You'll hurt the same and feel the same longing, and when you lay down tomorrow, your dreams are just as distant. There's just less of you to achieve them, one less day in the tally of your life.

No, hon.

Listen to me.

Love yourself.

~*~

When you learn to forgive yourself your flaws; the person that you are instead of the person you'd meant to be; the friends you'd thought you'd keep, and didn't; the love you'd thought you'd find in yourself, only to find exhaustion, Leonard Cohen's long and broken Hallelujah - that in grace of the Lord, all the things I'd thought I'd find, hallelujah, hallelujah, I am still here. I was not lost in the journey. Here I am, less than I'd hoped, more than I deserved. I still am. I persevere.

The people I love - what I call love, however you feel it - I am there for. The people I see passing by, broken, hoping for love they won't give themselves, forgiveness that burns their hands - I give them what I can. I can tell you the words but I can't help people not ready to listen. I wasn't, when I was hurting. I had to go before God. I had to be burned at the altar. I understand, hon. I know that naked pain.

You are not alone. The path is not walked alone, and where you go there will be people that understand. There will be a hand offered to you, and a place that is warm and welcome.

Keep going, is what I'm saying. I'm thirty, and I have so long left to go. I have family to take care of, and books to write. I have parts of myself left to discover, and sights left to see. I am not yet the man I wanted to be. I have no more regrets. I do not live in fear of tomorrow.

If you're hurting, understand: it will pass. There is love for you yet in this world. Keep going.

-O

Abusive People, and How to Recognize Them

I am deeply familiar with the psychology of the abusive. They're constantly angry, not because of anything, but because that's the filter through which they perceive the world. They act angry because this is how they maintain advantage; and this is a concept that doesn't translate well for you or me, for healthy human beings who want to be happy and fucking left alone.

An abuser, to the best of my knowledge - gender is irrelevant, I've actually found, that just changes the methods a little - exists in a state of perpetual low-key anxiety. At the absolute best, you can only ever satiate these people. They cannot be pleased, only temporarily put off.

These folks don't understand friendship, or family, or even basic business, because they don't understand being equals. I don't even really think they view themselves as that. What they need is dirt.

These people exist to bring the world low. Everyone is flawed, everyone is imperfect, everyone is hiding something. By implication, they're better, but that's because an abuser will pick one or two flaws and wield them like fucking trophies against you. They're prideful, prudish, picky, conscientious - something that's not a flaw, in the sense that it's a weakness to be remedied or worked upon, but merely evidence that they concede the existence of their own mortality. And you are not allowed to bring it up because only they can.

So, with their flanks secured and this is how they think of it, they're shoring up for arguments before they have them, these people will proceed to try to make you owe them, because they exist in a world where either they have dirt on you or you don't exist. They will disinvite you from their world.

Advantage - in the psychological parlance of the abusive - is having some evidence they're better than you. Advantage doesn't last forever; it deteriorates, because memories grow thin and old of the last time they showed someone their place, and they need more of it, because these folks lack basic, functional self esteem.

~*~

THE APPROACHES OF THE ABUSIVE:

COURTESY

Politeness is a tactic a lot of abusive folks pick up. It's a way to inflict your superiority on people without using insults and being seen as "rude", or chasing people off at first glance. If you've ever dealt with older Chinese or Japanese folks, they fucking weaponize this (there's some Chinese tradition of giving host-gifts that basically turns this into courtesy tango). It's also a big deal in the South.

And because they started things off by being polite, over time they can drop the level of civility - or use it to punish people who go, hey, what the fuck is this about? What'd you just imply about me / my family / my kind of people?

Because here's the lowdown: an abuser has no way to know if they're legitimately better than people they're just meeting, and this social positioning is the most vital part of their existence. Everyone is lesser or greater, and until they can find the chink that proves them better, it eats at them.

Because they're not worse, they just don't know how you've fucked up yet.

This conversation will only ever be one-way. You will never be able to call them out for being impolite, or intrusive, or rude, because that means you are, or you don't make the right kinds of conversation, or that you were weak and got angry first, or gave up the game first.

If an abuser doesn't know you for long enough, they go back to polite, because they don't know you as well anymore - largely because they're never interested in knowing you, only having ammunition against you.

So they restart the circle. They're polite; they probe for weakness. They consult their little mental notebooks for the shortcuts they've found into the sensitive nerves of your brain.

~*~

THE PITY WHORE

A pitymonger is someone who - returning to the parlance of the abusive - has their flaws baked in somehow. They're inflicted, and this is fucking amazing for abusive folks, because they don't have to cop to anything. This can be people with real, genuine handicaps, like weak bones or birth defects, but it also covers hypochondriacs, people who bawl about their emotional distress, that wield their traumas past like knives at you, you fucking unsympathetic ingrate.

You can recognize this shit because whatever their enabling excuse is comes up at least once or twice every conversation, and if asking how they are is a terrible mistake every time you make it. They're masters of emotional blackmail. Every conversation is a trial of how terrible a person you are for thinking you had a bad day in comparison to every moment of their fucking lives.

The worse the handicap, the more they need to wield it, and the better of an excuse it is to interject it as a shield into every fucking argument or accusation or vaguely-worded summary of society that occurs anywhere within audible distance.
These people are emotionally invincible, forever, as far as you and every other human is concerned, because they have been anticipating your punches and howled accusations and vicious insults since they first met you, and they need to use those arguments, even and especially if you're just like - okay, we can take the ramp. You can't beat them at spite, so don't try to make them suffer because they live for it.

A pitymonger lives for those great, thundering arguments, the moment they get to bawl that you don't understand, that their suffering is greater than you'll ever know, that they're sorry for you and your weakness in comparison to their immortal moral supremacy bestowed upon them by their tribulation. Unfortunately, the vast majority of folks pick up on this real quick and just make conversation about the weather or something else safe from the rain of trauma hellfire.

So a pitymonger suffers, over time, trigger decay. They lower the threshold for what they consider an unforgivable sin over time. If it goes a real long time, or they get antsy, they start setting up verbal booby traps to spring a fight. They bait you into calling them on something. And then you're in the shit pit, because these people have been preparing for the argument forever and already have their lines of attack and rhetorical defenses set up, while you're just wondering why the dishes aren't done.

~*~

THE ATLAS

Some people carry the world. Some folks get up every day to do things you never could, and make money you never will, and fix your car and work with the important people, and travel the world, and have certifications and degrees and honors and friends and a million other tests of integrity that you will never pass. Some people get up, every morning, to go save the world, and come back home to remind you of how fucking grateful you should be to live in it. Your successes will be meaningless and your failures will be perfect examples of why you can't be trusted to do anything.

These folks are insidious. Sometimes they're full of shit, and sometimes they're genuinely amazing with their skills and talents, but the unifying factor is that whatever gifts they possess render yours meaningless, and that will come up in every single argument, about how little you contribute, or how insignificant your role in the universe is compared to theirs. Every conflict is a dick-swinging contest before it's a discussion. They don't argue, they just crush you with the fact that you don't even have the right to argue, you didn't do enough (or even anything) to have earned your citizenship in the land of Making Important Decisions.

No level of achievement deserves an entire person as a trophy, but they'll do their level best to convince you of it, to reduce you to nothing more than captive audience; witness to glory, to what you should have been, to an ideal.

You'll know these folk because they'll introduce themselves by their jobs or their degrees or their awards, instead of their names; themselves, reduced to medal bins.

~*~

IN THE FAMILY

Here's the truth: You do not deserve to be hurt because someone else is hurt. Your pain will not ease theirs; your suffering will not right theirs.

Abusive people gravitate together, over time. These people barely stand each other, and only do because everyone else has quit the rat race of trying to prove they're good enough. All they got is each other, eventually, and conversations in which the only thing left are complaints. They toss around self-esteem like a fucking beach ball at a concert. Only one motherfucker can have it, and he's the worst, whoever he is.

And when it's in the family, it's the worst. Because you watch those Turner Classic Movies, about the value of family - about what it means to be a good person - and you'll wonder if it's alright to reach out again. If they've changed; if you can have something better.

And they're watching those movies too, you see, trying to chase down the shortcut of being a better person, of finally gaining that admiration unreserved, of being the best and the coolest and the most respectable. But you'll know when you see those invitations and those texts, and taste the bitterness of their salt through the letters, or in their voice mails. The blame is waiting for you. You are the fucking gold mine. If they're better than you, they can chip at the gemstone. At least they have this better than you.

And here's the heartbreaker, hon. It don't matter how you respond, or what you do, they'll take that piece. If you respond to that text and go, you already know it's a fight. If you don't, you didn't want to make up and you're ungrateful. If you say you're busy, they'll want to reschedule, and complain about your priorities. It's not an invitation to a dialogue, and you got to know that. It's a pirate flag on the horizon.

These people are made of fishhooks. You can't fight them. There is no magic argument and no way to make them understand. They resist everything. It's their raison d'etre, their ontological impulse. Fighting is what they do and how they justify themselves, and if you win an argument somehow - which will be because you hit them from left field with something they didn't know or forgot - they will never forgive you for that. It will take six months, maybe, but they will drag that time up over and over again until the taste of being right sours in your mouth and you're tired of it.

And then it won't be that time you were right, it'll be that time you were a cunt for no good reason. So here's the hardass lesson: fighting is not the answer. There is no set of words to win. You cannot win the game they play every second of their lives, by rules they won't explain and change at will.

Walk away.

People will call this "knowing how to lose" and that's not the right of it. They're still describing the lesson from Downtown Angry Motherfucker. It's - moving onwards. It's travel. It's experience. It's becoming more and expanding, unrolling. Not being a tight little ball of miserable angry Fuck You. Love, pretty much. Wonder. It's all of that stuff. It's wholesome and knowing joy, but not having to own it.

You'll remember their spite like a bad dream all your life, because Turner Classic Movies will tell you all about the value of family, and that only family can understand the trials we've been through. Turner Classic Movies don't know shit.

~*~

Remember that you do not deserve to be hurt. Remember that we all should be happy.

If you read all of this and none of it makes sense, God bless you. I hope you stay free all your life.

But if one person reads this that needs to hear it, it's been worthwhile to me.