Heya, Folks

Bit of necessary opening work. I kind of have some ground to make up since I felt the need to open on a weird unedited textual meditation.

I kind of had an embarrassing shouty moment, not too long ago. If you haven't had one, I'm not sure I quite recommend it. It's liberating to really flex your swearing muscles and to post all the obnoxious anime trash you like and to dispense with your political opinions, but in the midst of the embarrassing shouty moment—a polite, derpy way to phrase "nervous fucking breakdown"—it doesn't really translate as well as you'd like.

Anyway...ha. I did it on my social media, with my face attached to it. I learned that one of the perks to anonymity is that no one can call you up to yell at you for minutes at a time about some of the stuff you say. So I thought that it would be healthy and useful for me to do things like that on here. I haven't quite figured out what the theme of this blog will be; it could be a place for unnecessary meditations on my family, for dense and angry political opinions about a world I don't understand, my own sparse and boring autobiography, or writing bits from actual works I genuinely want lots of people to see.

I think, for the time being, the theme will be: whatever I want to say on any given day. That's something I don't do as much as I should and it will provide a nice antidote to how politely I tend to live my daily life. And how non...like...embarrassingly enthusiastically.

I'll cap this off with a footnote I forgot to place on my first post and that should give you a good idea of the type of culture I'm much too embedded in:

chuunibyou: literally translated as something like "eighth-grader syndrome." Often abbreviated as "chuuni." I'm not well-versed enough in Japanese culture to tell you what it actually looks like, but the personal definition I've always attached to it is: something so earnestly and embarrassingly attempting to be cool that it would make any sensible adult cringe a lot. If you follow me for any length of time, you will see me try unbelievably hard to make up cool things and you will probably cringe if you have any more sense than me.

A Self-Indulgent Beginning

It’s a common thread, both in the stories we told ourselves back when all we had was fire and in the artifices we construct to entertain those of us still attached to mythological resonance: there is often a significant number, three being, in particular, a pleasing one; and there is always a parent. I believe these days a father is preferred: a Father capable of a Son all on His own; in the old days, it was just as often a mother. So, bear with me; with a start like this, I can’t help but be self-indulgent.

I’ve recently begun to think of things in this way myself. In the sense that each one of us is a world, or a god or a hero making their way through and dominating our worlds however we can, there is something about reaching back to archetypes and myths in order to make sense of things, and to form images that are pleasing—at least to me. And my creation myth begins something like this:

In the beginning, there were three of us; there still are, if I’m truly fortunate and one of us hasn’t gone too far off the deep end to still be here tomorrow. We certainly did have a mother; unlike the earth figures of myth who were fertile enough to produce life simply by being, this one was too human, and so paternity was necessary as well. But for all that his lifegiving sperm was necessary to create us at the beginning of our worlds, I am convinced in some ways that it was always pieces of our mother we each took with us, and each different ones too.

One of us took what I suppose you could term what’s best in her: vibrant energy and feelings, a friendliness it’s impossible not to want to trust. You could call it the golden tongue, if you like. This one is, in some ways, resplendent. This wasn’t always true, but I’m sure old stories skip the uninteresting parts where Medea was an ungainly child or where Isis was secretly a crybaby before figuring out the Earth’s secret magics. So I will as well. People listen to her and instinctively flock to her banner. Whatever she does, I am convinced she will always excel, though she does so with an awkwardness that is more interesting to watch than effortless success.

One of us took the opposite. Something so opposite, in fact, that, at times, it’s easy to be convinced what she took was the same thing: mania. An out-of-control, jagged razor edge which she sometimes balances on in her own mind and at others cuts other people on, deeply. She is just as captivating—all of us are; this is a myth after all, which began with a figure I genuinely have never understood—but it is the captivation that results from watching a tightrope walker who is sure to fall off and break something permanently. Whatever that mania was, whatever sickness she held onto from our personal mother-figure, it also has made her, in a way, legendary—at least, again, to me. Her humor is just as easy, her grace is just as natural, and her ability to navigate the world is just as unpleasant. But at times, it’s almost tragic enough that I think, had I the words or the meter, I could write verse about it just as grossly compelling as watching Oedipus work his whole glorious life long just to impale his own eyes after throwing away everything.

The last is me (not chronologically, as it turns out I'm apparently the oldest one). No need for the “one of us” word construction here. I think many of my gifts are my own, but there is one small thing that I took. I lie. My truth is a fanciful, ephemeral thing; I have the ability to make whichever bits and pieces of it I like cease to exist for anyone but myself—because, of course, it takes genuine insanity to tell lies that good. In the same way that I will never know the maternal figure responsible for my life, my story, and my lies, no one will ever actually know me. This is, of course, by my own design. But, be warned: to have a truth that does not really exist is probably the same thing as being a ghost. If one sister is a beautiful, clumsy sun goddess and another is living in her own personal underworld, I am the ghost that stalks misty forests, occasionally haunting whoever is unlucky enough to be my personal anchor to the real world.

We all, of course, took things from our father. My inflated, ungainly prose and indulgent conceit aside, this isn’t a true myth. In genetics, we take all from all sources, we’re raised from all sides constantly by our environment and by various ineffable things we often find it difficult to understand. I believe we all robbed him of the same nonsensical brand of non-humor, funny only because it shows the world at large that all three of us are just a tiny bit stupid, in a good way. We all found empathy from him; we certainly didn’t find it in any of the things we took from Pandora’s Womb. He made us all human, in our separate ways; demigods, if you’ve bothered to believe the rubbish I’ve been spinning up until this point. In some ways those gifts we were blessed with would never have shone if he weren’t around. They would have been locked away, undeveloped, undifferentiated, the same repressed child locked threefold in the same forbidding castle tower.

I don’t really know where I was going with this. I think I have a sister who could actually, really fucking die. I was also potentially going to die myself, not too long ago. I have a family I’ll never be at ease speaking to, and I have no platform to speak from at the moment that is an appropriate place for what I have to say. I am denying my own personal ghostlight and struggling for something normal and plain that will constantly stifle me. I realized just three days ago that I do not really know the woman who gave birth to me and who raised me for seventeen years.

The first books I ever read were ones filled with Greek myths, and a few odd Norse or Japanese myths here or there where I was able to find them. That is, in some ways, the vocabulary that is most essential to me, in the same way that dopey tortured anime chuunibyou language is. I wanted to try grabbing onto it and seeing if it could take me anywhere for a short, inconsequential fluff piece, and if using it could help me articulate how much I love two people in a way that I can’t love anyone else because I can’t explain it to myself or to anyone else. I imagine, since this piece has put me in the mood, that I love them in the same way that Olympians loved each other: awkwardly, occasionally in a way that looks an awful lot like hate or petulant jealousy, but with a knowledge that they are peers to me in a way that no one else could understand.

This goes out to you, guys. I care enough to moderately embarrass myself on an anonymous unlinked blog page. I care enough to hope that if I do things like this more often, one day I’ll be able to put you in the front page of a book.