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demytasse · 5 years

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[Shizaya] Coping Mechanism — Ch 4

[Previous Chapter]

Izaya had spent most of the morning checking for phone notifications — one by one — messages that weren’t coming, yet he almost believed they would blip into existence the moment his eyes fell upon the digital screen. There wasn't much purpose for his action beyond preoccupation, he just couldn't admit how exclusively he waited for the goddamn bedroom door to open for hours that blended into a long minute. It was tiring, the impatience that drained his battery rather than his lack of sleep. Though how could he be patient when he knew Shizuo hadn’t slept more than a few winks; the heavy thump and rustles every time the beast tossed and turned practically broadcasted his inability to reach REM and it was painful just how long the lie that he slept the morning away was kept up.

So when Shizuo finally trudged the distance of his mattress onward to grace his presence, it seemed that everything surrounding the event was a blessing, even the racket of a loose doorknob attempting to initiate its mechanism was enjoyable. Even the extended, nail-biting buildup was accepted as Izaya utilised the extra time to meticulously dress up his nonchalant air for the grand entrance. His legs elegantly tied at the last moment, chin tipped up with a lazy prowess, he propped himself up by sheer will alone. Without further hesitance the door swung open.

“Good morning, sweetie~!” Izaya twiddled his fingers in a wave.

He exuded expectancy in a fashion that looked as awkward as he tried to hide it — then again Shizuo did the same, despite his groaned out, groggy grumble.

“You’re still here.”

“Indeed, but that's what you wanted, right?” he winked.

Shizuo ignored as many pitiful flirts as he could — snuffed out his smile with a huff, and made his way to the kitchen.

He raised a section of his undershirt to scratch an itch just above a stretched-out waistband, every bit habitual as the series of cracks that rolled from his lower spine up to his shoulders. Izaya tilted his head as he spied, the same motion as Shizuo used while he forced his neck to crack with both hands. It was a fair bit of a cringe, given how familiar Izaya was to that particular strength, but knowing the outcome of each of his daily practices it wasn’t a worry that Shizuo might accidentally behead himself or something along those lines. It was a spectacle that lasted up until Shizuo paused his stretches. Curious of something upon the bar-top, he considered what to make of the object with dead eyes — the abnormality of a familiar carton that sat in a puddle of its own sweat.

“You left the milk out,” Izaya pointed.

“No fuckin’ shit?”

“You also left the coffee on the heater. Not sure if you could tell, but the smell of burning mud is quite...pungent.” Izaya’s nose crinkled in jest.

“And you couldn’t have done anything ‘bout it?” he rubbed at his eyes.

“It’s not my place.”

“...like that stopped you before, you damn brat.”

Shizuo went for an affectionate slap upside Izaya’s head, but it was evaded with an anticipated lean backward — a hum and chuckle in tow.

He commanded Shizuo to stand down with a jab to the forehead. “Are you going to make it up to me?”

The sly tone alone drained colour from Shizuo, the touch did him in; it was technically their first form of physical content in months, though it was without nerves nor fear that his body reacted against his wishes.

“H-hah?” His hand dropped to his side which directed Izaya to visually follow its course; drew his attention towards something that wished him a better ‘good morning’ than Shizuo had. “Are you serious?”

“I meant coffee, Shi-zu-chan~. Coffee.” His brow raised, teasingly satisfied, his legs switched which topped.

Shizuo stumbled backward, the sudden lightheadedness worked against his balance, tripped him around the counter to create distance; perhaps hide. To recenter his thoughts he scrutinised the milk rather than face Izaya as they talked.

“God, I—” he cleared the dry falsetto from his throat, “god, I fuckin’ I hate you.”

“Tell that to your erec—”

“DON’T!! Don't start, you asshole!” Red flowed back into his cheeks.

In a burst of emotion, he made a quick decision to prove his might with a pitch of the carton into the sink where it impressively exploded into a mess of white.

“...what will I do for cream?” Izaya laughed easily.

“I’m makin’ your damn coffee, just shut up and take what you get!!”

—

Per usual Izaya fell into observance, this time it was a particular movie of morning ritual, overplayed and overperformed. Even though he wasn’t able to watch the second actor — that is, himself — the strain of rusty muscle memory told Izaya that he too kept close to the script of waiting for his lackluster brew and his unwillingly, willing bartender to join him.

They were lone actors stuck in a loop of endless takes in the midst of a dance around the same rickety set; their awkward passion had, and continued, to disappoint a hypothetical director with a perfect vision they could hardly live up to. It exhausted the couple’s ability to keep at it day-to-day in the past, hence how they both suffered through dry ritual before Izaya inspired a...hiatus of sorts. Time without it made it clear just how bored they had gotten; what rut they’d dug themselves into.

Rewatching it, though, made for good theatre.

While he maneuvered, Shizuo looked back and forth between his task and Izaya; off and on, he’d make eye contact only from a side-glance, but grew more and more anxious every time.

“Would you stop that?”

“Stop what?” “Staring at me,” he messed with pre-ground coffee in the bag, “it's annoying…” “You never seemed to have a problem with it before.”

Shizuo paused, “funny how things change.” The words appeared unsatisfactory to his disposition, but he slipped back upon the rails to avoid a negative train of thought. The retired monster further fumbled through setting up the coffee machine again — a round two of what was botched hours back. The cord tangled around his wrist, his frustration crackled as if the coffee had already begun to brew.

It shocked Izaya that he didn’t crush the cheap thing in the process, rather he moved onto scooping grounds with care — only half made it to the filter. What little mess he swept into his hand ultimately made it to the floor when he dusted off the rest on his boxers. With a snap of plastic and a beep the machine began its broken melody.

Izaya could’ve watched Shizuo — his performer — for hours; his own heated cheek lying in his palm, relaxed fingers curled around the arc of his head as it lulled to the side, completely in awe. He felt as if watching the romantic slice-of-life tragedy could make up for lost time — erase what mistake he’d made and perhaps turn it around. In the end, as predictable as the steps had become, no matter how boring they’d grown, Izaya realised he missed this silent film. It glossed his eyes somber.

When Shizuo turned, he was startled out of step; honestly, like he'd forgotten Izaya ever occupied the bar, except he couldn't have forgotten as he'd been impossible to get off his mind all morning. So he had no retort but a harsh intake of air, equivalent to five breaths or more. His chest filled out broad and his shoulders gained height; his long-term depression was corrected by a miracle. Shizuo forgot to exhale.

Once more he followed their tried and true script. Without hesitation he reached over the counter to rest his hand on Izaya's shoulder in trial of what he was allowed to get away with. The blunt laminate edge pushed far into his gut, yet he pressed onward without notice. All he was focused on was how flush Izaya had became as he massaged warmth over his cold shoulder; how his ex-partner melted into the touch and his shoulders rolled forward into a comfortable hang. Their exchange felt like coming home to experience their past.

Izaya eased himself off the chair, smooth and casually — metal scritched across the tile flooring as he moved closer to Shizuo to let him stroke his cheek with a feather touch. His vision closed off the world; he was relaxed enough to finally let his sleep deprivation take over, though was alert enough to will the moment to move faster towards what he wanted.

"Seriously...” Shizuo hesitated, “...why the hell are you here, Izaya?"

Words waited in queue somewhere on the back of Izaya’s tongue, jumbled with an incomprehensible answer. The failed phrasing was more a stumble through various syllables that he tried to figure out the taste, but only managed a stutter. One language was too much a challenge, but his body puppeted him though straightforward communication; he moved closer and hung just short of them conversing through touch.

His fingers weaved with the golden half of Shizuo's locks and tugged hard at the brown roots. They hiccuped — choked on hot air before they went to steal more oxygen from the other. Only the rough of their lips grazed and only a second delay from an inconvenient interruption — a wail of the coffee machine.

Both men jumped apart; the machine’s alert continued on, as did their stare.

"Let me get it." Izaya shook off their eye contact. He peeled away with his hand at the back of his head.

“No I’ll do it.”

"It's fine."

“I started the damn pot, I'll finish it.”

“How about you don’t press your luck, Shizuo,” he snipped, far humourless than his light, snappy tone, “alright?”

“Luck?! Is it luck that we almost fuckin’ kissed?” “Please,” he looked pained, “you know it was!”

Izaya regretted his snap judgement as soon as the shock spread wide on Shizuo’s features. The expression — the hurt — made it hard to ignore, how the look of betrayal was similar to one of another accident still shiny and new. What broke them apart and hadn't been addressed due to silent respect that Izaya probably didn't deserve.

Undeniably it was possible for Shizuo to forgive him, Izaya knew it; decidedly it was impossible for him to forgive himself, and he despised it.

“Fine. Do what you want, Izaya. Leave it burning again for all I care. I need to shower for work.”

“I need to leave as well.”

“No! You stay put. We need to talk!” Shizuo bellowed. “So caffeinate yourself or somethin’, but hell, if you leave, the next time I see you I'll bury your smug-ass grin into the damn concrete!”

“You sure don't look like you want to wait until next time.” He narrowed his eyes, but his voice wavered, “what happened to your controlled temper?”

“You happened!!”

“Oh…”

“Yeah, ‘oh’,” he growled.

“...”

"Tch, what happened to your nonsense monologues...” Shizuo muttered as he turned towards the bathroom.

Izaya held his tongue as if he even had any dialogue to hold back. If he actually did, the cry of the door on its hinges would have interrupted the spew anyway. It slammed near to splinters; surprisingly it was more apt to claim it was forced into its cradle, snug and intact.

“...looks like I will need that drink after all, Shizu-chan.”

AN: These awkwardly stubborn assholes...

#shizaya #orihara izaya #heiwajima shizuo #shizuo x izaya #izaya orihara #shizuo heiwajima #durarara #durarara!!#durarara fanfics #fanfic #fanfiction #drrr!!#drrr #izuo #izaya x shizuo #durarara fanfiction #demytasse fanfiction #shizaya coping mechanism

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jasondilts · 5 years

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Old Touchtones, New Touch-screens

Electronic technology will only bring us more information, more choices, more contacts, and more complexity. It will push us beyond all the old frontiers of identity—home, neighborhood, country, values, and the natural rhythms of nature. Our old touchstones for forming an identity will fail and we will have a pervasive identity crisis. -Yogi Bhajan, April 1995

There’s no definitive date for when the Aquarian shift began, though I suspect it was the release of the first iPhone in June of 2007 that jolted the transition. People had been carrying handheld computers in their pockets for many years, but it was this technological milestone that truly began the steady march toward a digitally-focused existence. The existing social order accepted that technology was a tool to augment reality, and at first cell phone etiquette reinforced this notion. In the early days of the iPhone, it was quite common to be invited to interact with a person’s new device. I’d run into a friend at a coffee shop, and she would gleeful show me all of her new pictures and explain the latest app she had downloaded. The phone was an entry point into her world, a way for us to better relate to teach other. It was a conversation starter as much as a connector. It could be put away as easily as it could be picked up. A face-to-face chat over java with full focus from both parties was the norm, such rendezvous uninhibited by incessant dings, pings, and rings. At first, that is.

It all changed so quickly. Syncing easily with the emerging phenomena of social media, these shiny devices were how we were going to say connected. Every time something new happened on Facebook, we’d get a notification and have to see what was going on—right then and there! It was rude not to respond right away, ruder than only half-listening or outright ignoring whatever the person in front of you was saying. Whatever was going on inside the glass of our devise gradually became more important than what was happening in front of us. We never spoke about this or decided this was true, but our collective actions affirmed a new order. Eventually, we stopped sharing our phones with each other and developed an increasingly intimate relationship with a glass screen that was constantly transfixed before our eyes, the auto-lock blackness constantly showing us our own reflection. It was the people we knew who had always had the most profound impact on our development. Now that was changing. These phones were a signifier that we would soon be called to go within to grow.

Pisces is symbolized by two circling fish biting at each other’s ends. In the final days of the Piscean era, we unconsciously decided that we’d chased our tails long enough. Human connections are fraught with drama and give way to distractions. Most of us weren’t starting relationships to evolve; we just had needs to be satisfied. We looked to others to make us less lonely, feel validated, be sexually satisfied, and escape whatever insanity was going on in our minds. In the Aquarian age, we won’t relate to each other like that. There will be more ownership of one’s purpose and more thoughtfulness to how we engage with others. We won’t see people as extensions of ourselves or vessels for our own satisfaction. Rather we will appreciate the unique faculty that is the individual, accepting people as they are and celebrating their purpose on the planet. Knowing people authentically is how we will grow. We will bring our best selves to interactions because we will understand that lower emotions like anger, jealousy, and guilt come from the insanity of our mind and are not the fault of others. We will live by the ethos that we are 100% responsible for our own understanding.

Clearly, we have a long way to go. If the Golden Age is only 16 years away, though, we’re in for some rapid changes. Maybe that’s why shit is going to hit the fan in a big way. It’s always messy when we are forced to change. Every time the screen of our phone goes dark, a force beyond us is beckoning the way forward; we are shown ourselves so that we can go inside to receive the answers. Yet we constantly queue up our home screens to call up literally thousands of distractions each day that keep us as far away from our authentic selves as possible. It’s hard to know who you are or what you are here to do when you are lost inside a peep-hole of someone else’s drama. It’s easier to read the post about your friend’s lunch or watch the news about Trump’s latest Twitter tirade than it is to drop in to what’s actually going on inside you. These phones and the unspoken order of compulsory real-time availability they come with are perhaps the last great distraction. I say last because I am not sure we could become any more disconnected from reality than we are now. Surely new iterations of “smart-devises” will come, but they will all just add depth to the phenomena that is already here and affirm the inevitable. Everything we know is fading away. I wonder if this is how it was in the last days of Atlantis: the pervading sense that there had never been so much advancement and opportunity quietly colliding with a disaster that would wash away this evolution from the annals of history.

If we are to survive this next shift, we must get honest about how technology has affected us on the individual level. We aren’t going back to the way it used to be, but surely we can show up better for the way it is now. The fundamental questions we must answer are: how is our identity being maimed by these so-called advancements and how do we reclaim our power so that we are not at the effects of our screens?

Next week I’ll share some of my own experiences with these questions and I hope everyone who reads this will do their own introspection and sharing as well!

#ageofaquarius #aquarianshift #yogibhajan #Kundalini #kundaliniyoga #technology #iphone #smartphone

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mathematicalghost · 4 years

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scorbunny is my son now

Listen, I pretend to know much more about pokemon than I actually do. I spent seven hours queuing for the Pokemon Center in London, but please do not ask me about pokemon. My entire ranking list for pokemon rests on “which pokemon would I most like as a pet?”. I’ve been asked what my favourite generation is (I don’t know), what my favourite region is (I don’t know), and what my favourite game is (I’ve only played Diamond, Blue Mystery Dungeon, and Yellow). In summary: I do not know anything about these funky little pocket monsters, I’m sorry.

Pokemon, as a concept, has always attracted my attention. Much like Animal Crossing and literally any MMO ever, I want to be the kind of person who likes these games. I want to feel that kind of joy that can only come from methodically catching [enter full Pokedex total here] funky little pocket monsters through a combination of catching funky little pocket monsters and giving stones to some of your favourite little funky pocket monsters. I want to be the person who likes Pokemon.

I really fucking hate grinding, and repetition, and “thinking”. So maybe Pokemon wasn’t for me.

I played Diamond the year it released. If you want to keep notes, I was nine years old. I wanted the monster on the box who was shiny, and blue, and nice and sharp. I also got my request in early when it came to Christmas of 2006, so I got a copy of Diamond and my stepbrother had to get a copy of Pearl.

Vaguely, my recollection of these games involved me being stuck in caves (Although, I played Blue Mystery Dungeon a few years after release but still before I hit the age of 13, so my memories of both games fade into one), being annoyed that I was stuck in caves, and losing all my pokemon repeatedly in wild grass. Pokemon, broadly, was a stressful experience and all I wanted was to play a digital version of the card game that I occasionally collected and even more occasionally played.

When Pokemon Sword and Shield came out I was positioned in the never-before seen position in that I:

Owned a current gen console

Had friends, and they would entertain a conversation about literally any interest

I had money that didn’t need to be spent on a bus fare

When the Pokemon Centre London was announced, and then later the concept that you’d be queuing from 2am to get even the slightest hope of entry was introduced, I was gripped with a need I’d last felt when I begged my father for a copy of Pokemon Diamond.

I want to be the kind of person who likes Pokemon.

So I did it. I got in line at 4;15am, and at approximately 11;30am I had been relieved of £95 in exchange for a few stickers, an umbrella, and a 30cm Scorbunny plushie.

Two days later I remembered I should probably pre-order Pokemon Sword because I wanted that cool ass steelbook and also like, I just spent seven hours queueing for Pokemon and then went straight to work, and that should mean something.

My parcel arrived a day late, mostly due to Nintendo’s bizarre ideas about how big a box should be to post a video game in, but then I was stuck in. My mission to be Someone Who Likes Pokemon.

I chose Scorbunny as my starter, primarily because he looked cute and also I’d used 1 of my 5 item quotas to buy him as a plushie and I should honour that. From then, I crashed through the map, primarily not catching Pokemon as I’d forgotten that I was no longer 8 years old and much better at resource management now, and picking up Pokemon who were either cute, useful, a mix of both, or the Noctowl who was neither but always remained in my team for reasons I still can’t fully express. Most of my team were built through NPC trades or pure accident as opposed to any level of skill.

And it was… great fun? I never needed to try a gym a second time, and I only once lost all my Pokemon and had to restart at the previous town. Some of the rivals I came across on the path were harder than others, but never impossible. When I knew I’d truly fucked it, I simply set up camp and played ball with my Pokemon before healing up and moving on (using Potions are for fools/people smarter than me, I can’t tell). The routes were never particularly long - Route 8 stands out as a tough one, but I still crossed it without too much trouble. Each town had an NPC trade with a Pokemon who always came in handy for the next gym and eventually became part of my final approach team.

It took me 27 hours to run through the main story, including the brief deviations to level up my Pokemon to prepare for the next gym. In my final approach, I was under the level of my opponents, and I still ran through it with some nail biting moments and a lot of Full Revives. I played Sword, and so got to experience the Fighting gym and Rock gym - leading to the bizarre experience of being in the middle of a snowy town without leading into an Ice gym. Choosing an edition of Pokemon should technically involve considerations of which has the better exclusives and gyms as well as the legendary, but in predictable fashion I did what I imagine every other Sword player did. I saw a dog with a sword, and I wanted that for myself.

After finishing the Championship run, there is a second ending story that you can complete. Did I do it? Of course not. I wandered out to the Wild Area, camped out with my final team of Pokemon, and had a curry. And then I switched off the game.

Maybe I’m still not quite the kind of person who likes the concept of a Pokemon game, but I sure did enjoy Sword.

#game review #review #misc

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