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#me: hahaha SUFFER YOU FICTIONAL SKELETON!!!! SUFFER!!!
g0at0ad · 4 years
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if there’s not enough pap angst, then i’ll do it by myself!!
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analogskullerosis · 6 years
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Aries, Taurus, Sagittarius, 8th house? (Astrology asks)
Aries: what are you passionate about?
Several things, but I guess I would say I’m most passionate about my education, trying to help my family/friends/loved ones be as happy as they can be, and music (as in listening to it and appreciating music and music history, I haven’t played in an instrument in a looooong time. Haha)
Taurus: name 3 of your favorite books.
1) Different Seasons by Stephen King. It was a book made up of four novellas (Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, The Breathing Method, The Body). It’s a book I try to go back and read every year or two. It was a different work for King at the time because up until that point (1982) he had only written horror stories like Carrie, Salem’s Lot, Cujo, Skeleton Crew, etc. This was really the first time he wrote just straight dramatic stories. There are still horror elements in the novellas, but nothing supernatural. There’s also a nice afterword where he writes about what it’s like to be typecast as a horror writer and how he came to accept that and he talks a bit about how he came to write these different stories. 
Fun Fact: “The Body” became the 1986 film Stand By Me. Very good. Follows the story very well. Actually, every novella except for “The Breathing Method” has been made into a movie. Definitely recommend it! 
2) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. When I read it in 11th grade I really liked it, but didn’t appreciate the genius of it until we read it last semester for class. The wordplay, the story, the style of the whole thing is just a joy to read. I think Fitzgerald is able to wonderfully show the decadence and the sin of his age through his iconic and interesting characters. And while I recognize that symbols like the Green Light or the Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg are played out and only brought up to high school kids that don’t know what symbolism is, or none of the characters are truly likeable, it does a fantastic job at keeping me entertained through the whole thing. And that’s what I think a good book is supposed to do. Every time I read that final line (”so we beat on boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past”) I just sit back and go, “Shit, dude. If only I could write something like that…” It’s a work of genius and I just really enjoy it. 
My favorite film version will forever be the 1974 one. Every time I have to picture Daisy Buchanan I just see the image of Mia Farrow playing her. 
3) Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. I would like to take a moment and quote a few sentences from a book that my English professor/mentor (you know the one!) wrote regarding this book.
“Big Sur is a modern morality play on the demon rum with a first-person vengeance and the ‘Nadir Ray’ turned up to ‘11’. It was Kerouac’s last roar.“
“No swan song this, but more like the prolonged bellow from an alcoholic deathbed.“
I was first exposed to Kerouac in March of this year. I read On the Road for the first time and I enjoyed it. There were scenes I enjoyed and it was interesting to see how Kerouac took the real and made it into fiction (for better or worse)… Then I read Big Sur and I couldn’t put it down. You ever watch footage of a trainwreck? You want to look away but you simply can’t. Kerouac’s goal as a writer was to be as authentically him on the page as possible, and I think Big Sur is where he pulls that off best. He’s a complete fuckin’ mess through this entire thing! But it’s so fascinating to read. You feel so bad for this guy who’s suffering so hard and it’s sad to see how much his “Beat vision” got twisted by people. Here you get a front row seat to the famous writer spiraling down the track and just getting sloshed and wasted and burned out. It’s a shame, but it makes for an interesting read. If I had to sum up the book in one word, it would be this: CHAOS. If On the Road wasn’t your cup of tea, this might suit you better. 
Fun Fact: There was a whole album that was made based off this book in 2009 by Ben Gibbard (from Death Cab for Cutie) and Jay Farrar (from Son Volt). Titled, One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur. A lot of the lyrics are just words pulled straight from the book. It’s worth a listen if you’re interested. A number of the tracks were featured in the documentary that was made on Big Sur (Same name as the album.)
Sagittarius: if you could travel to any place in the world, where would it be?
Egypt to see the Great Pyramids of Giza. I just think they’re neat and I’ve always wanted to see them. It’s also where one of my favorite Grateful Dead shows was performed in September of 1978, so I’d like to see it for that too, hahaha. 
I would also like to see Barcelona, Spain to see La Sagrada Familia. It was the giant (unfinished) cathedral of famed Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi. Often considered to be his masterpiece. Google a picture of it, it’s gorgeous. I look at that thing and just think, “Wow. A human being actually designed that and people actually built (most of) it.” 
8th house: Do you believe in reincarnation?
Sure. I mean, I don’t know what happens when we die so anything is certainly possible. I believe we all ascend to Heaven/Hell when we’re gone but if we don’t, then I imagine we are reincarnated into something else. (I apologize if that answer didn’t make much sense.)
This ended up being longer than I thought it would. I hope all of these answers were sufficient! Thank you for asking Anisa! :) 
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asteriskes-blog · 6 years
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Temptation 1 (unfinished)
A demon walks in the door of my room, briskly and without looking at me. Gazing down upon the floor, he plops down upon the chest opposite the dresser. He is not frightening, he is not threatening, though his crocodile skin is off-putting. He is dressed business-casual, he seems beat, that is to say exhausted. I imagine that if not for his crocodile skin there would be bags beneath his orange-yellow eyes.
There is even something redeeming in his exhaustion. One feels something akin to pity. His orange-yellow eyes point to me now, piercing, tired, annoyed. As if I’ve just inconvenienced him.
But I am too tired. Done for the day. My business casual clothes are strewn about the floor. His gaze only arouses in me an indulgent and playful indignance. 
“Go away demon, I am too tired now to be corrupted,” I say with a smirk, pretending to be distracted with my book.
“Yeah, yeah” he says quickly, almost whispering. He squints his eyes, scrutinizing me, attempting, I suppose, to make me feel uncomfortable.
“Does it lessen the effectiveness of the manipulation if I know you are trying to manipulate me?” I ask.
“Hmph,” He says and leans back with his eyes closed, his hands behind his head. “No you cannot be tempted like others,” he said, “You have nurtured your own pride, deluded yourself so far that you contrive nearly every necessary pleasure through selflessness. Yes, like the rest you function on pride and greed, but in this you have tricked your mind, deformed your very nerves and neurons so that you are the best sheep you could be, and none may be suspicious of you. I can’t myself tell to what extent its genius and to what extent foolishness, though either way you are a putrid flagellant, a masochist of the first rank!”
From me errupts geniuine laughter and to him I reply:
“Ha tricks, ha delusion. Tell me demom what is this truth from which I deviate? Better yet how does anything I do ill-serve me? So I go about, as you say, a flagellant. So leave my whip and I to our romance. Let us be. So you say I am putrid, well I should not agree with you, but if it is so, let it be so. I am no enemy of vice, less so of the Devil, all you say to me when we take the spin from it is that I which I knew already, and aside from that cherished, is that not, as they say, giving your lord ‘his due?’ So tell me then what is this truth of life I defy.”
Say he:
“Ha, so there you sit, the devil on your left and Christ on your right and you a blissful child holding up an olive branch, No problems. Ha. You are worse than a Christian, you are a Christian who believes they are a Nihilist, believes so because, of course, its fashionable! You think a man may act however he pleases and that you have simply been gifted by providence with a fetish for kindness. How lucky you are truly! How privileged! Ah but you are not so simple as that, I know you Nicholas, as I know all men. You think you can throw up your hands and say ‘I am selfish! I am weak!’ and that gives your morals your moral efforts a rock solid foundation. You try to convince me even that they are of an entirely unconscious nature. Like a beast of the field goes about eating, extricating, fornicating, so there you go all smiles and alms. But you are no animal Nicholas, indeed you are a man and it is clear to me that though you prance about showing off your nuanced understandings, your shrugging cynicisms still you do not grasp the nature of true human selfishness of the capriciousness of your kind. More so still do you misunderstand the devil. He is not some god of old satisfied for the month with a few dead lambs. No he has a goal, a plan for your kind and I assure you, you do not satisfy it. For your morality is not unconscious, it is fraught with ambition and idealism; of visions of a world very different from the one you inhabit. It is not simply that you get a hard on at the half toothed smile of a beggar, that your body is inexplicably overwhelmed with ecstasy at the passing of some progressive legislation. No these sensations are contrived, they are contingent upon their satisfying your designs on as you say ‘making a brighter future for the children’ yes?”
“So I look out for myself and my progeny. So I will my view upon the world. you wish to convince me these designs are of a personally gratifying nature? So be it, this I will not deny. Has your devil something against the will to power? Whatever form it takes?”
“As I have said, the devil, like you, is a man of design, an evangelical, if I may use the term, and your worldview is much at odds with his. Or better said, because your world view is fraught with absurdities, your actions contradict his world view.”
“So I am an enemy to the devil. What of it?”
Haha, first you are mister nuance, tipping your hat to him, now you declare yourself an enemy. Hahaha. How many books have you read? And still you are a fool, always contradicting yourself so as to suit the situation.”
“So I am his friend, so I am his enemy, what is that to me? These are not tangible things, they are of no concern.”
“Oh deep down you are not his enemy I assure you that. And the reason why is very tangible. You see chief among your proud and shining virtues is that of mercy no? Like the god you were brought up on, the god of mercy? You may have ‘fallen from grace’ as you so cutely put it, but still his ideal is burned into you, still you cannot help but be made in his image. But I will tell you what you think you already know- that that god is fiction. But it is not a fiction born of insecurity as you and your ‘intellectual’ ilk seem so confidently to think, no it is a fiction born of hubris! Pure hubris against my master, the true master, the truly merciful.
How is this you say? Lets talk for a minute about mercy- or better put, as neither you nor the devil are in such a position of power over men to distribute mercy, lets call it the simple alleviation of suffering. Suffering is a nice base for you yes? To alleviate suffering can be called, for you, a central goal to bring about that ‘divine mercy’? But I say to you now my master has far better designs for such than you do.”
“Oh do enlighten then, my pride will not be hurt for assenting to the wiser, be he even the Devil! Tell me, your lord doesn’t oppose the principle of skepticism does he?”
“Principle? Ha! No there was a time... but now everything is so muddled Besides what is a skeptic when a man has no say in what he does or does not take for granted. Besides isn’t it obvious? The devil is a utilitarian, his favored may be found among skeptics and believers alike. Besides, the skeptic is not really so fond of his skepticism that he wouldn’t kiss the ground and cry tears of joy at a very inkling of assuredness, of real belief. The skeptic is only concerned with removing all that is extraneous, of getting down to the undeniable, unavoidable truths by way of reduction. But men like you, men like you Nicholas can never be true skeptics, not unaided, not running in the low and pitiful circles you run in, reading the books everyone else has read. No, people like you become like a small child at the edge of the diving board- petrified, afraid to take another step. But you... you have a fierce spirit, I’ll give you that, you are ready to believe anything, you are deep down dying above all to get down to those basic truths, down to that skeleton upon which you may build everything. And I... I am here to help you with this. I am here to give you that so that finally you and the lord will be in harmony.”
As he said this last part his mouth widened into a gleeful smile, though his eyes remained a way which seemed distant and mean, almost struggling.
“Does this look in his eyes discredit him?” I thought to myself recalling the eyes of kinder smiles. “Do perhaps, my eyes discredit me? Are they merely the result of ignorance?” So I endeavored for my eyes to show nothing to him and I asked him to continue.
“I mentioned before hubris, the hubris of the invention of the God of Abraham- your god- whether you accept it or not! You see there was a time when man did not have such wild fancies of mercy. When man did not say to himself: ‘surely there must be something better than this miserable planet. Surely we shouldn’t have to accept, nay, to tip our hats to all that is nasty and bitter. Surely destiny has decreed that one such as I should be sentenced to lay on a couch and eat grapes for an eternity. There are, of course, old ways of avoiding such a nasty fate, but those ways call for certain sacrifices and I am above such. To say that this existence is a zero-sum game... why its preposterous, for if that is the case how am I to be a hero? If that is the case I could not be a thing of goodness, there would be no duality and from me would spring both good and evil things. No, no all the gods love me, and all the gods love my perfect vision of the planet. Why in fact would heaven even make a whole number of Gods if they should always agree? Surely it’d be just as well to have one. Yes, one, one who is the epitome of strength to validate me. A singularity, perfect harmony. No disagreement or internal dissension to rustle my oh so delicate feathers. All that which requires blood of me, all that which brings me pain these mean nothing to an eternity of perfection.’
See back then man at least had to accept the everlasting ‘evil’ nature of the world. They had to grunt and fume and say under their breath ‘oh devil you just wait, i’ll have the last laugh here!’ while they went about toiling miserably, wishing haughtily pity and mercy on the men who-laughing- set lions upon them. But now, in this putrid age we have those ridiculous sort who believe its just a matter of time before all those visions of perfection (which the men of old did not dare taint with the earthly) take over the heart of every man, woman, and child on this planet. Any pain, any toil, any hint of burden is met with offense, indignance, as if it was the most morbid insult! You know well this all, for you are one among them! ‘I shall be the one’ you poke out your chest and say ‘I shall stride forth gallantly into the world and change it irrevocably. Whatever meagre portions I should take I will give this world at least thrice such. Perfection is just on the horizon, and when my progeny sit down to their eternal feast they will look back upon my meagre memory with gratefulness. Perhaps they won’t even remember me then, how delightfully humble of me to take pride anyway, sensuously humble indeed!’ So simple, how simple a life you lead. How inexplicably simple it all is. Take all of that evil and that pain and put it in a rocket ship, send it to the Moon or maybe even to Venus! You think you can just cut that knot like Alexander and all the problems will be solved. That you and your kind deserve nothing but eternal infancy. Protected, warm, safe.
 There is simply no respect whatsoever and that lack of respect, oh I warn you, that lack of respect will be your greatest sin. You say you give the devil his due, but that is a lie, a mocking and sick lie. You say you are reconciled to him while in secret you plot to disenfranchise him; to eliminate him and his memory. He has seen your vision of the world and he saw in that world no place for him. But he need not revenge himself, for that will come in time. He only needs to sit back and watch the world work to see you and your sort wreak havoc upon yourselves and the planet you so imperiously cherish.”
“And how” I asked him seriously “are a few simple acts of charity, a genuine concern for civic involvement and progress, and whatever other deplorable actions of goodness in which I am engaged assure my doom? What doom is this anyway, for which you give me such a lauding credit?”
“Mr. Cox you know well what the chaos is, you feel the anxiety of it every day... I know... you are sensitive to these things. You see the way the world is going, you see the bubble before you- everyday it grows. Every day the civilization declines, the analogies to Rome are no longer so lionizing as they may once have been. Rome, you say, fell from decadence, the same decadence you see all about you everywhere. Not in one group, or one class, but in them all. They have all reaped the benefits for now of men like you, you have built over them a mighty and luxurious castle indeed. And it is upon them that castle shall fall. The knife is coming, it will taste uncalloused skin, it will chase weak and unmuscled legs, and be seen by hearts and minds which will wish that had been so sturdy as they were when they built this castle in the hard times of old.
Into this great shelter you have let reprobate filth! Men who serve neither God nor the Devil. Men and Women who, had they not had their minds and wills dulled by your ease and charity, would, without a second thought, quit your church for my masters call. But instead they, like the beasts they are, go to where the fruit grows ripest. Go to where men like you foolishly give of yourself again and again and again. For you may seek to give threefold what you take. But what about a hundred or a thousand times that? What if of those three thousand not one gives half of what they have taken? It is only natural when you have such lofty hopes to smother your contempt for those who squander your gifts on further reducing their ability to contribute. It is only natural when you distribute such hope that those pathetic masses should say to themselves in their hour of drunken self-pity ‘thank god that the future should find a solution to this all!’
Your kindness has doomed them, your inability to admit to your personality any meanness has filled their hearts with false promises. Your ideologies of tolerance and soft cushions have enabled them. And when the lights go out they will have you to thank. For they are weak and will always suffer, that is their lot. In times of old the church had the courtesy and wherewithal to refer to these as reprobate, as Calvin’s damned. But now that concept sickens you, now you and your society see that word, reprobate, as an evil one, perhaps the most evil word of all. You would dare not utter it for fear of an existential crises, though in secret you hold it for the devil and for those strong few who contradict you.
And those weak and selfish, they and their progeny will receive threefold the punishment you deemed yourself too lofty to give. Perhaps they could have been something great. But instead you gave their fathers and their grandfathers and their mothers and their grandmothers liquor money. Or on the upper crust you celebrated their neuroticism and their vices, you lead them to believe it was better and more righteous to be a victim to their past than to carry on. And so their children and grandchildren were doomed, because you had faith in them.”
“And I should object” I said, “that there are enough strong in this world, that if they all should be good and really devote themselves to good works then real and honest ways to avoid these problems should be found. It is rather the absence of hope and the prevalence of the sort of man I suspect you wish me to be which are the issue. For wherever vice and its suffering is found there is there also one profiting. Whenever some youth proclaims some faulty or naive ideology there are those there among them who wish only for self-aggrandizement and so in pursuit of defend that faulty vehicle with vehemence. It is not only the work of charities to hand out money blindly. Though likely some operate in such a way, most of the sort involved in any kind of charitable activity have a more dynamic view and approach to their involvement in their respective communities. As for the poor wretches of which you speak- the mentally unstable and the addicts- these are the exceptions and not the rule. And not every addict lives the entirety of their life so diseased, for some help may be found, and in that recovery, though it may have been one among a thousand, there is created a real and intimate source of hope for the outcome of good works. There is one who stands to say, ‘so my salvation and the salvation of those like me was a one in a million chance, so through my efforts let us make it 2 in a million.’”
At this the deamon smirked and shook his head:
“And so he should convert another I suppose? Make it 3 in a million, and so on and so on. But what if in the course of gaining those 3 you loose 300? If the 3 have so positive and compounding impact, do the 300 whither to dust? Or indeed do those 300 reprobate drag down the world with them? Swallowing up any bit of good you have built. Indeed what has your centuries upon centuries of good work brought you? Your warm bed and white picket fence? No indeed it was the suffering and oppression of others which gave these to you, gave you your luxuries, your luxury of hope. The luxury of thinking that the nectar you so easily obtain can simply be plucked from the trees and strewn about all over the dismal, suffering parts of the world. The luxury of thinking that the dismal sufferings of these people is somehow the most unnatural denial of the way things should be, that somewhere, in the great soft blanket the world has so carefully stitched for you, some evil ogre has torn a hole causing all those poor people to suffer. 
It simply couldn’t be that it is natural for those people to suffer, that is is natural for someone to suffer, that indeed every ounce of happiness you receive is leached from someone else. 
They know pleasures their forefathers never did. Some, you know the sort, even experienced this ‘earthly perfection’ in their childhood, spoiled and cushioned from every care and misfortune. And when these urchins reach adulthood and taste the first drop of the worlds bitterness become to the acutest extent outraged and offended. You have also the opposite variety- those who’s lives have been so unceasingly miserable that it obviously must be something gone terribly awry with the world. Yes there is always something wrong they say, terribly wrong. It would be an outrage, so they think, that this should be their lot.
Look to your campuses: the haughty vacant smile of the Marxist, or for that matter of the Libertarian. Where have you seen that smile before you wonder. Then it strikes you, where the manifesto now sits there was once a bible, 
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