darling, come sit at the table, stop staring out the windows. i’m sure tyverion has shown you all you need to see. that land out there is yours, by divine right, but there are those who oppose divine right, and those who do not believe in padora’s grace. this is true of all civilizations–there are those who believe, and those who don’t. padora was wise to grant us the ability to question her existence, to give us the skeptic’s path toward enlightenment. for what good is a goddess if she cannot be held accountable for the things she does, or does not do? the exhalers would lead you to believe that padora does not even know of the world she has created, much like we sometimes forget that we are breathing, even while we do it. not knowing implies not caring, or rather, that she is not aware of our problems, nor does she try to fix them. this is justification for the wars with the outer lands; that because the unbelievers cannot be shaped by padora’s grace, we must shape it for them. but because padora strictly forbades violence, we direct the peacekeepers to fight in our stead. many of them do not return, and it is becoming difficult to replenish our forces of able-bodied men who willingly defy padora to protect tersus. it is difficult to defend your divine right, logos. but i will do whatever i can, whatever is within my power, to keep you safe until you are of age to reign. until then, please heed my words: tyverion is a good man, but easily swayed. he fought in the war of the ancients and has seen much death and destruction, and it hurts him, as he believes he is no longer connected to the breath. he is swayed in favor of the outliers and will protect them when the time comes, and he will use you to help him. you must not let that happen, for if you do, your lineage will come to an end. believe me, my love. i would never do anything to harm you. i love you and will protect you to my dying day.
Category: writing
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156: larry
lovely day outside, isn’t it? all the, ah, leaves, things, all over the place. and the, uh, wind. lovely wind. look, are you–ahhh, i should–hello, my name is, um, uh, larry, that’s right, and i … well we’ve sat at this bus stop together nearly every day now for what, six months? seven months? eight? eight months? i guess it’s unimportant–i started at the button factory on october 18th, so it’s been seven months and three days i guess–seven months! that’s a lot of time to be sitting next to each other without introducing ourselves, you know what i mean? so i’m larry, i work at the button factory. you know when you buy a new shirt and there’s a couple of extra buttons sewn on the tag, you know, in case you lose one? i sew those buttons on. i do it with a machine, a button sewing machine, maybe you’ve seen them before i don’t know. it’s pretty cool. i mean of course you’ve seen a sewing machine before, but, i mean, not because you’re a woman! oh damn it larry you’ve done it again, talked yourself into a corner. what i mean is, everyone’s seen a sewing machine, unless they’re a little baby in which case they’re not going to remember seeing a sewing machine whether or not they’ve seen it. but i mean we all know what it looks like, and mine looks like one you’d buy at sears, except more industrial. i bet you think they’d have it done by robots but nope, it’s me. i also inspect buttons sometimes but i got in trouble because i would take the defective buttons home to use as eyes on these little rabbits that i like to sew in my spare time. here. [he produces one from his pocket.] i made one for you. her name is sammy and she is a special little bunny. she has a little question for you, if you just look in her mouth. do you … not want her? here let me show you. [he pulls a slip of paper out of the mouth and reads from it.] “larry wants to know if you’d like to go to dinner with him some night.” well sammy! i didn’t, how did you, you took the words right out of my mouth! ha ha. here, i want you to have her, she’s not covered in anthrax or anything. if she was i’d have anthrax on my hands and i’d be a dead man! ha ha. here. take it. come on, take it. hey! where are you going the bus is coming! okay well, my name is larry! that’s l-a-r-r-y! two rs! remember that! bye!
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155: tyverion, right-minder to the prince royale (padora)
glorious, isn’t it? take a look at it all, let it all sink into the depths of your eyes. this is your land, all of it, from the earth beneath your feet to the tops of those mountains in the distance, and beyond. smell the flowers blooming in the valley below, feel the wind against your cheek. this is yours. a river, about 70 miles past the mountains ahead of us, is the end of your reign, majesty. imagine, anywhere from here to there is yours to roam, to do whatever you wish in. and for this you only have two people to thank: your mother, and padora, the goddess herself, who has infused your body with her breath. the land of tersus is yours by right of divinity, yes, all of it, even beyond the river, but currently your mother the queen has suggested to the peacekeepers to wage war on the sinners of the other lands, who use the goddess’s breath to craft nefarious magics, which they use against us. she does this for you, young one, so that when you take over the throne you will have little to worry about. all she asks for is your patience and your unwavering loyalty to padora, your goddess-mother, whose breath was instilled inside of you and will be passed along to your offspring for a thousand generations, until mankind dissipates into the cosmos with the great exhalation.
it is important to remember, dear prince, that your ascendancy into royalty came from nothing, from the sheer will off the goddess, and only in the goddess will it continue. your mother, she … is a fine queen, a glorious queen, praise be her name, but her council … is worried. we are worried about her grand designs for tersus and the surrounding land. not about conquest, per se, but … her alignment with the peacekeepers. by law she should not be allowed to even speak to them, as they are the embodiment of war, chaos, destruction, the evils the goddess forbade. but we turn a blind eye, because she is afraid of what those in the other lands have devised to use against us. she is in a precarious place, and one wrong move could strip her of her divinity. we do not wish that for you, dear prince. i need you to promise to me that, no matter what happens with your mother, you will never speak with the peacekeepers, nor be a part of any of their dirty work. there are intermediaries–myself, for example–who are equipped to deal with them and their secular nature. there is dogma attached to all of this, tenants brought down from the angels. when you are older, you will understand. but for now, i need your promise. please promise me?
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154
sometimes, when i’m feeling low, i like to imagine the president taking a shit. think about it: the most powerful man in the world taking a shit, just sitting there in the whitehouse bathroom, reading the new york times, dropping a deuce into an impeccable toilet. no matter how powerful or important you might be, you still gotta shit. this is nature’s great leveler. the pope? gotta shit. kanye west? probably has IBS. everyone at some point in their day has to take a dump, they have to push out waste material from food they’ve consumed earlier. and, and! you do it too. you shit. i shit. we all shit for ice shit. we all do this simple, gross, hilarious thing. so once you get that in your head, how the hell could you ever feel low? you’re no better than the president, or no worse, because you both have to dispose of poop in your body at least once a day. we’re all just human, we all have blood and skin and hair and worries and fears and sometimes we eject waste from our bodies. how nuts is that. you can think someone is the most amazing person in the world but they still gotta shit. from that perspective, i can’t believe people don’t talk about their pooping habits more often. it should be the most ideal icebreaker!
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153
i am beholden to no one. i owe you nothing. and nobody owes me anything. i am a consciousness struggling to survive in the weighty meat bag i have been delivered into. every day i wake from blissful sleep, the one time in my day where i can disconnect from the corporeal world and rest in the world of the collective consciousness–i wake and move my meat bag through this world of time and space, pushing through trillions upon trillions of atoms, everything is atoms. i long for sleep because that is where my consciousness thrives, grabbing onto the collective unconscious and providing my waking state with copious amounts of ideas for creation. the real world bores me, i guess you could say. there are all of these cultural concepts and ideologies, dogmas, tenets, etc, which are interesting for a week or so, but mankind has all this time to think now, lots of time to think, because machines or immigrants do all the difficult labor, so we overthink these concepts into the ground. an ideology needs a little bit of leeway, some room to fluctuate and adapt, it can’t be a static extreme idea, as there will always be exceptions and loopholes. all of this bores me now, this desire to create perfection within an imperfect world. i long for sleep and the brilliant chaos of dreaming, the connection to the collective, the release from the limitations of the meat bag help up by bones. when i remember that i am just a selection of chemical reactions and subatomic particles representing life, i also remember that i am beholden to no one, that my consciousness is simultaneously miraculous and mundane. this concept if amplified and personified in the figure of christ and the mystery of the man who is also god. i am only man in mortal flesh, but in my mind … i am the god of my own consciousness. it is a lovely thing to be.
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152: geneva
[whispers] don’t take this the wrong way, but … do you have halitosis? you see the size of this room? everyone in this room can smell your odor. it doesn’t smell like body odor though, so i’m just wondering … halitosis? bad breath? if so i have some of these breath strips, you put them on your tongue and … hey, i’m talking to you! this is very important. you’ve disrupted the perfectly fine air in this room with your rank breath. i know, it’s hard to deal with halitosis, but if you expect us all to put up your terrible stench you have another thing coming, mister. life isn’t fair, okay? life deals us these terrible cards that we have to live with for the rest of our lives. life gave you halitosis, you have to deal with that. life gave me an itchy pussy, that’s what i have to deal with. no STDs or anything just it itches all the time, my gyno can’t figure out what’s going on. so every time i have sex with a gentleman occasionally i have to tell him to hold on while i scratch my labia. sometimes i make him angle his dick so he can scratch my vaginal canal with his penile head. look the important thing is that your problems are yours and yours alone–they are not ours. so get your stinky breath out of here and get some listerine or something. come on man!
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151: d3
ultimately i am a bad friend. i apologize for this. it’s because i value silence and alone time. i make the excuse that i need the space to create but the truth is that i have a suspicion of how other people view me–namely, that they think i’m boring or annoying or whatever–negative things, all of them, and enough to keep me indoors and in front of a computer screen. i’m a bad friend and a worse boyfriend. i’m sorry. i’d change but that would require change, and now i can just be a lazy loner. it makes me sad. i’d love to change, i feel the desire bubble up in me occasionally but it’s hard to rip deep seated roots out of the earth. “he had such promise,” i hear characters say in my head. i look up an article that says that jon hamm didn’t achieve success until his 30s. but he worked hard. he worked hard for a decade to get there. i haven’t. i took classes and made myself a pseudo-expert in a field most people don’t care about, a field that requires people to care about it. a field that desires warm bodies in a small room to generate lasting heat. so what the fuck? where is my desire? why do i not want to see anyone? why do i refrain from going out? why am i such a bad friend and boring boyfriend? she said “you’ll find someone better for you” and i thought “where?”. i’m ruining myself just thinking about it. how do you think so positively? where does it come from? how do i find it? give me your secrets, let me delve into this world. i need your naive love for mankind. it’s like a booster shot i don’t want but desperately need. i have depression flu. i gotta have that flu shot.
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150: captain shiver
dead. they’re all dead. jesus christ. what the fuck happened here? central, if you can hear me, i’m about fifty meters inside the shell and it’s chaos here. people are dead left and right, and their body parts strewn around like they were blown apart. i can’t even count how many dead, it’s … tremendous. most look like they were just dismembered, there are torsos and arms and legs. oxygen level outside the shell is normal, but inside, it’s 45% more saturated. i haven’t had contact with the other crew since 0400, i don’t know if they’re still alive. central, something fucked up is going on in here. these body parts were in the shell before it attached, nobody has been in here besides me as far as i know … there’s blood everywhere. central you gotta get marines here, ASAP. this room’s making me feel woozy, like .. maybe it’s the extra oxygen or something. i’m gonna leave. i have to leave. this is–oh fuck the entrance is closed. central can you hear me? central? captain shiver to central, come in. please come in central, i’ve got a serious problem here, i have a SERIOUS PROBLEM– [sound cuts out. static]
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149: johnny
you go through slumps. it’s not easy. it looks easy, sure, because what you see is the end result. you see the glitz, the glamour, all that lovely stuff. sometimes e or tmz or whatever the popular gossip outlet is now will show you the more seedier stuff, but the public eats that up too. they love it. but what you don’t see is the grueling hours of rehearsal, the constant waiting, the disappointment when you study an audition side for days and then head into a casting office and you look in their eyes and know immediately that you’re not getting the part. see, film, tv, that acting is all here, in the eyes, in micro expressions, because the camera is right there. you see brad pitt’s face up close and it’s fifty feet tall on a screen. you can see everything, and when you study film acting, you start to pick up on those nuances. you also, i mean, mr. watson talked about this briefly in high school–stanford-meisner technique is, a lot of it is just sitting in front of your acting partner and describing them. like, their face, their facial expressions, and reacting to what you perceive as their mood. i was always good at it because i spent a lot of time analyzing dad’s face, since he was always so deadpan all the time. so, you know, if i told a joke and he liked it, i’d see his eyebrow raise up a little bit and that’s when i’d know.
point is, you go into those casting calls and you can see immediately when the casting director doesn’t want you for the part. their face falls, not in a big way, just … you can see the creases in the corners of their mouth turn so slightly downward. you see their eyes narrow. “i’m wasting my time,” you imagine them saying, but you say your lines anyway because that’s the dumb social contact acting has built up over the past few centuries. and this happens all. the. time. especially in los angeles. acting, performance, creation, it’s all built on the fiery embers of failure. actors are failure personified, little whiskey-filled phoenixes who have to crawl out of the ashes of their own demise. we’re retarded. we’re insane! we’re foolish. at least you knew or had this sense of your path in life, teddy. sure it wasn’t great but it was solid and you maintained it, you knew your place and you kept at it, you knew your faults up front and didn’t fight against them. i think that takes a lot of guts. i really do. i spent a lot of my life hiding behind this acting persona so that i wouldn’t have to deal with this soul-crushing sense of constant defeat. i kept climbing out of the ashes again and again and again. you’re just loving the ashes. i gotta respect that.
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148: lucy
god, i can’t even. i can’t even anymore. i literally cannot even. i think i could even at one point but by this point i absolutely cannot even. i can’t. i can’t even. i mean, it’s just so, it’s so very, i can’t even, you know, i saw it, i mean, i saw it, i saw it happen and then trevor said something and i was like i can’t even right now and left. i can’t even, when i think about it i can’t even. i can’t. i can’t. i can’t even. can you…? could you even if you tried? cause i tried. i tried to even and i couldn’t, i laid on the ground and just tried to even and i couldn’t. i spent a week trying. a whole week. turned off my phone, went out into the woods, laid on a bamboo mat in a log cabin built by my grandpa in the summer of 1936. they, my grandma and him, had run off to montana to escape the depression and live off the land. they had a bunch of seeds, a .30-06, some bullets, i think that was it. ate nothing but stuff they killed at first, had to eat everything so they wouldn’t starve. just eating meat doesn’t have enough nutrition, you see. that gun is still there, covered in cobwebs. everything was covered in cobwebs. i spent a week just cleaning the place and setting up rat traps and stuff like that. and then, you know, no TV, no radio even. no smartphone. i was off the grid. i brought a bunch of luna bars and firewood for cooking. groceries and whatnot. i didn’t know where to put them because there wasn’t a fridge or even an icebox. how the hell did people keep their produce fresh back then, you know? i ended up cooking a lot for the first couple of days, after i cleaned, i mean. i cooked up stews and chili and stuff that i could put in tupperware and live off of for a couple of weeks. i wasn’t thinking of the long term, i just wanted a few days alone in this cabin, to think, to rest, to recuperate. and … i did. it felt like i did. it was sunny the whole time, clear skies, i was about a hundred feet away from a brook, like an actual babbling brook. it was gorgeous, it was so quiet at night, kind of scary, but i was literally in the middle of nowhere so i wasn’t scared. not of people at least. maybe bears. but it was so serene, it made me feel so peaceful, so connected to the earth. some nights i would just lie in the little, stiff bed in the single room of this cabin and i’d stare out of the window at the trees rustling in the breeze and i would just cry, i’d cry for hours, cry about shit that happened to me and shit that hadn’t, cry about the future, and cry-laugh and laugh and get angry. i had all these feelings that did not need to hide behind anything anymore. no people to judge me, no crazy, extenuating circumstances that lodged stress in my chest. it was glorious. no makeup, no need to “prepare” myself for anyone, men, women, anyone. i’d go hiking in the morning and eat stew in the afternoon and nap and none of my worries were worries anymore. then, on sunday, i packed up all my things and drove back into town, watching the woods slowly dissipate, replaced with the urban jungle of skyscrapers and people. i saw an old man with a walker waiting to cross the street and i cried so hard for him my chest hurt. he was so lovely, just a little old man being beautiful and gentle. and even then, after all that time spent alone in a cabin in the woods, i still can’t even. i can’t. i can’t even. i just seriously cannot.