(RP Interlude) Fiction: This Must Be The Place

This is a short story (ish) covering the perspective of an NPC and things that occurred ‘off-screen’ during my campaign of Avery Alder’s brilliant  Monsterhearts 2. This particular setting is an evangelical Christian camp that seeks to ‘cure’ troubled and troublesome youth of ‘demons’ like promiscuity, homosexuality, and so forth. It is not a very nice place, run by not very nice people and, as the game delves deep into the teenage heart of darkness, not very nice things happen there. This is one of them. Title and general mood courtesy of the Talking Heads’ song of the same name. On the very weird off chance that you enjoy this, and/or other things I write, and for some reason would like to see more of it, please considering supporting my Patreon so I can afford to be alive and write terrible things.

This is set in the same universe as this story and this one, but not about the same character. It’s also several decades earlier or, somehow, not much earlier at all…

cw: violence, bullying, corporal punishment, implied child abuse, implied pedophilia

The schoolbus was a nauseating pink that basically screamed ‘out-of-towners’ across the desolate edge-of-suburb sprawl where they’d stopped for gas. It was hung with banners on each side that reinforced the statement by identifying its passengers in scrolling, effeminate cursive as “Good Christian Wives and Daughters of Tomorrow”.

She was pretty sure she wasn’t marrying anybody, not today, not tomorrow, not ever. The other girls on the bus were all the right type for that - blonde hair perfectly feathered or side-ponyed, petite figures wrapped in hot neons or pastels. 

But she wasn’t like that. Her Aunt Erna told her she was ‘big-boned’, her old coach called her a ‘she-bear’. She liked when he said that, but not when he said someone should put a ‘cub’ in her. She was big, but she knew she was strong too, and fast, and she could put a 2 kilo iron shot at 20 meters without breaking a sweat. When Helga was in a glide she didn’t feel too big or too plain or too much - she just felt powerful.

precarity, pt. 1 (CN: food, grossness, financial stuff):

I’m in a place where things aren’t desperate, now, but I can’t really recognize it.

The meal pictured is from one of those subscription services where they send you prepped ingredients and you do the cooking. It’s not cheap, but it solves the problems of finding the capacity to do frequent grocery runs, of figuring out a recipe to use, and of some of the chopping and peeling as well. It’s nice because it offers a range of cuisines, it’s about par with what I was spending on prepared foods anyways, and afterwards we have quick and easy recipes to reuse and modify however we like. It feels good to get back into cooking. It feels good to be able to afford something like this in order to do that.

There is a dilemma, however. You can pick certain dietary restrictions - no nuts, no meat, no pork, no shellfish. But you can only pick one of those. If you keep kosher-ish, you know that -neither- of those last two are permissible. You get 5 possible dishes to choose from each week, 1 of which is always pork, and our service includes 4 different dishes. Thus, dilemma.

When you grow up in a precarious financial situation, or spend a good chunk of your adult life there (or both), you experience almost physical agony at the thought of wasting food. It’s not even necessarily exclusive to -good- food, or even edible food; I’ve almost had panic attacks from being forced to throw out rancid chicken or mouldering lettuce.

So I have no emotional skillset to deal with paying for good ingredients and then having to ethically confront myself over eating them. I couldn’t just not use the shrimp. I couldn’t justify buying a different kind of protein to use instead (the company’s official advice). I couldn’t just give L. all the shrimp and partially starve myself, especially because I’m specifically trying to combat my tendency to eat less and eat cheaply to make money last longer.

Finally I decided to eat it. I justified it because no religious restriction in Judaism is supposed to be upheld in opposition to a person’s health, and I’d suffered enough beforehand.

#mentalhealth #disorderedeating
#poverty
#selfcare

This is a short story (ish) covering the perspective of an NPC and things that occurred ‘off-screen’ during my second session of Avery Alder’s brilliant  Monsterhearts 2. This particular setting is an evangelical Christian camp that seeks to ‘cure’ troubled and troublesome youth of ‘demons’ like promiscuity, homosexuality, and so forth. It is not a very nice place, run by not very nice people and, as the game delves deep into the teenage heart of darkness, not very nice things happen there. This is one of them. Title and general mood courtesy of The Mountain Goats’ song of the same name. On the very weird off chance that you enjoy this, and/or other things I write, and for some reason would like to see more of it, please considering supporting my Patreon so I can afford to be alive and write terrible things.

Worth noting, for context, this story involves the same character as this one, Geen, a 14-year-old who is a little (but not entirely) dead and also a regularly misgendered AMAB femme with a bad (murderously so) home life. Monsterhearts problems, y’know?

cw: body horror, dysphoria, gore, disordered eating language/imagery, violence, death, mild sexual content, pseudo-sexual imagery

Despite the freshly stocked bins and shelves and barrels of the mess hall’s storage room, the bounty on offer was rather sharply undercut by the fact that the food was only really edible in the loosest and most generously defined sense. No amount of skillful dilution or reconstitution, no level of skill or creativity, could transform these ingredients into anything a child would willingly eat given any alternative.

This didn’t matter to Geen, of course - she was after quantity, not quality. It all tasted the same to her, anyways. Like ash and bile and still-squirming worms, hardly any difference between each bite, no matter what dubious claims the labels made. 

Hot sauce helped, a little.

Adulting! Lauren and I joined a veggie delivery thing? And made butternut squash/beet/potato/carrot soup from scratch? And fried pea shoots with garlic? So that’s a thing. It’s always hard for me to cook for myself because, especially when I’m symptomatic, the effort just doesn’t line up with the reward - I don’t really notice when I’m hungry and I’m happy with any kind of nutrient sludge. Cooking with/for Lauren as well, though, is deeply enjoyable. And I love any opportunity to make good use of my favourite pot, passed down to me from my mom and probably as old as Lauren and I put together.
#cooking #adulting #mentalhealth #fromscratch

(Preface:This is a rough first draft of the first part of a story I’m working on about Jewish magic and disabled queers just trying to make it in this cold, weird world.)

The proper manufacture – no, not manufacture, perhaps assembly? Still too formal. Birthing? Too sentimental. Let us compromise on crafting, for it is a craft; not quite an art, not quite a science. Let us begin again.

The proper crafting of a golem, what later amateurs have variously dubbed homonculii or automata galatea or even the rather imaginative blue smoke drones, requires four fundamental components. One might call them elemental, in fact, for each of the elements is at the core of their purpose.

A shell or a skin, that can be given a shape and retain it despite weather or impact, this can be said to be earth. The earliest of our work was fashioned in mud or in clay, the most ancient stories speak to this, however this is not the whole. The earthenware golem, as classic as a design as it is, has mostly fallen out of fashion because practitioners forget that the outer shape must be made firm. The clay must be fired, the mud compressed and dried, or you simply have a mound of dough without a crust, so to speak.

This brings us to the second ingredient – the ‘blood’, or rather that which mimics water and grants us motion. To return again to the golem of clay, the traditional pairing would be a slurry, a semi-liquid familiar to all who’ve witnessed the ceaseless churning of a cement mixer during sidewalk repair. Another common mistake of the novice would be to use water, unmixed, but erosion is a lesson that need only be taught once – the sudden, shattered weight of a golem, surging forward on a tide of its own magicked fluids, is not a sight easily forgotten.

The third, if we deem the first a skin and the second blood, would be the heart itself, though this is where the metaphor becomes imperfect. Whereas our own hearts are mechanically vital for us to move through life, the nature of a golem’s heart is entirely philosophical – its reason to be, to continue, to do anything other than plod aimlessly. This is its fire, sometimes a literal ember ensconced in its chest, sometimes the quicksilver of a lightning bolt, sometimes things far stranger and unmentionable. It is the most important ingredient, but also paradoxically the only one that can be missed and still permit the golem to rise. What does this say about ourselves, I wonder, if a golem is simply an approximation of G-d’s creation? Can our fires be extinguished and our lives still persist? I wish to deny it, but I fear the proof marches past us every rush hour.

Our final element, our air, is deceptively simple to procure and pass on. This determines our creation’s longevity, as ours was defined when our creator breathed life into us. And so we all too often use our breath, but it is a fraction of a fraction, raising a child that will never reach maturity. I will not give examples of alternatives, as there have been great crimes wrought in pursuit of such things, but I will confide that there are very different kinds of breaths in the world. This is evident in the first gasp and cry of a newborn, or the rattling exhalation of the dying, and it falls on the practitioner to weigh what such vitality is worth and what each truly costs.

And so we are done. But of course you protest! This is a shopping list, a recipe, not a story. And I know that you crave stories – this last was not intended as a tale in itself, but rather as context. A reasoning for why I would endure the cold and the cigarette butts and the reek of dog shit. For the crafting is such a careful thing, not to be delayed or distracted from by such mundanities, and the need was great.

I have a rough relationship with getting ‘dressed up’ because so much of my life my style was 'be as invisible as possible’. I never developed makeup or hair skills when I could blame clumsiness on the ignorance of youth, and I dated a lot of people who (with the most casual disregard) responded to my fumbling attempts to assert aesthetic choices by insulting me and shutting me down.
This was my grandpa’s first coat when he came to Canada. Wearing it makes me feel beautiful, in and out, in large part because I don’t -have- much that I love in my queer life that intersects with my family life. My last ex ridiculed it as a 'pimp’ coat, because some white people can only see a stereotype and not an artifact of real PoC history.
Yesterday, my dear and beloved partner took me to Mary Lambert’s concert at the Drake for my birthday. Her 'Everybody Is A Babe’ tour. And I thought, fuck it, I’m going to try and be a babe. Whatever kind of babe it is that my aesthetic creates. We did my eyes up like a metallic femme version of Floki’s makeup in Vikings, painted my lips gold, and painted my nails in gold and purple to match. We pulled my hair forward in a Basquiat-esque spray. I used my brass-handled, most elegant cane.

We listened to Camonghne Felix read poetry about abortion and race and our terrible now, we listened to Mal Blum sing about being made small by those we think we love, and we sang with Mary and a hundred other queer/fat/femme weirdos about feeling too many things and wanting too many things and being too many things.
We sat and we sang, we made friends with the strangers next to us, and I felt beautiful on my birthday.

#birthday
#latergram #marylambert #everybodyisababe #drakeunderground #queer #nonbinary #lgbt#lgbtq #lgbtqa #selflove #queerpoc #malblum #queerjews

This is a short story (ish) covering the perspective of an NPC and things that occurred ‘off-screen’ during my first (!) session of Avery Alder’s brilliant  Monsterhearts 2. This particular setting is an evangelical Christian camp that seeks to ‘cure’ troubled and troublesome youth of ‘demons’ like promiscuity, homosexuality, and so forth. It is not a very nice place, run by not very nice people and, as the game delves deep into the teenage heart of darkness, not very nice things happen there. This is one of them. Title and general mood courtesy of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k77lWX6mpac  

CW: child abuse both implied (severe) and depicted (moderate), bullying, misgendering, physical violence, panic attack/PTSD

Geen watches as the two canoes push off from the dock, feeling an unexpected mixture of emotions that defy easy understanding – jealousy? Wistfulness? Loneliness? Something unhappy, but the particular flavour eludes her, and after a few seconds the feeling fades entirely and is forgotten. Boredom returns.

new years, new fears

(before it gets too confusing, the Jewish New Year just passed, which is what I’m referring to. Welcome to 5778, kiddos.)

My anxieties always drive me to place heightened importance on the ‘right’ kind of dates. The fifths, the firsts, the Mondays and Fridays. In a pinch maybe a fifteenth or a Wednesday if I’m doing something minor like finally responding to an email or writing an overdue blog post (ahem). Doing the thing is its own kind of anxiety gauntlet, but once I’m through it (or feeling ready to get through it), it’s the dates and times that weigh on me.

Which means a new year, the planet pulling itself around for another try, that carries a lot of meaning for me. It feels heavier - with expectations, with symbolism, but also with potential. It’s the potential I’m trying to focus on, because wanting to harness that potential is the only feeling strong enough to drive me through all the shitty self-doubting rest of it.

Every day and every hour, I’m trying to remind myself of the potential. That it’s there for me to grasp, that it doesn’t disappear just because I miss a Monday deadline that I arbitrarily set for myself, that maybe only I’m even aware of. That the ideas I’ve had, the projects I’m passionate about, the goals I’ve been working towards, that they’re all still there when the sun rises. When the week ends, or the month, or the year. It’s all still there. It all still matters.

So I’m reminding myself that I can still do the work, and that the work I’ve done is still there. That the plans I have, these grand dreams of community and care, might feel more needed than ever but that there’s still time. There’s always time. That things can only happen as they happen, and that each step to get there is a necessary one, even if it’s not always a straight line or a sure path. Every year spent researching instead of traveling, working a shit job instead of shortening your bucket list, of just keeping yourself alive to get to the next screen; every part of it matters, and every part is getting you to where you need to be. That for every dead-end there’s a person you’ll meet that makes the dream a little more doable. A new book to read that’ll crystallize a hundred pages of scribbled thoughts into a fundamental truth.

The pieces fall into place, even if we’re not aware of them yet, because we’re doing the work, a little bit at a time, as much as we can at a time. In our own time.

Remind yourself of that potential, and that it never disappears. It might change, just as you will, just as your vision of what you want to do with it will change. But it never disappears, and it never diminishes. Whether you try the thing you’re afraid to after thinking it over for a night or agonising about it for a decade, you’ve always been heading towards it. Every moment you’ve lived counts towards that - not just the moments that make others jealous or the ones we’ve been told to reach for, but every moment.

The planet pulls itself around for one more try, and so do you, and that makes all the difference. Even standing still, you’ve come a billion miles from where you were.

I don’t have a lot, and I’m losing it.

The world is worse every day, but the worst part is that I expected it to.

Paranoia isn’t like other types of anxiety. A lot of anxiety self-care is like, “remind yourself that people love you” or “rediscover beauty in the world”, but paranoia doesn’t sit well with that. Paranoia remembers the times those people were unreliable. Paranoia knows that beauty is precarious, and there’s a sea of shit around it.

When I was a child, it seemed that every other person, young or old, was a bully waiting for their chance to strike or to squeeze. You experience something enough times, you learn to expect it, because that’s about all you can do to keep safe.

Before I was diagnosed with anything, before I was medicated away from concern, my deep fears were almost always the same - a government preoccupied with its own enrichment, bigots wielding violence with impunity, the wealthy taking everything they can and charging for the privilege. In short, the same bullies, doing the same thing, unchecked.

It took years of convincing for me to let go of those fears. Not completely, but a long enough effort loosened paranoia’s grip on my brain enough that I could use it for other things. I did some good writing. I made some good friends. I went out, when previously the idea of ‘out’ was terrifying.

Years of trying, for what I thought would be decades of living a ‘normal’ life. I never thought it would be a handful of years before it was all over. Because the thing about paranoia, about overcoming paranoia, is you need to be told every day that it’s not true. And you need to see that, even if things aren’t better, that they aren’t nearly as bad as you predicted.

But it is true.

My brain is like a snowglobe, and the static just won’t settle. Too many of my fears are true, or even worse than I’d imagined, and that makes all the rest of them possible. I can’t separate anymore what a rational fear is, because they’ve been proven entirely reasonable. Years of reassurances, meaningless, because it was all the 'sane’ people who were deluding themselves. I’m a Jew, when even the left holds onto its antisemitism, but I can pretend not to be, can let that life die in order to live. But I can’t take off my skin. My family can’t take off its blackness, or its poverty.

So where am I? What do I have? What can I do?

I can’t leave the house most days. When my brain relents, my body won’t allow it. I keep delaying little errands, and I’m not healthy enough to manage big ones. I can’t work the only jobs I’ve ever been good at, and I can’t afford to live on what I do get. I can’t get my house in order. I can’t help my parents, at a time when they most need it. I can’t honour commitments, because they’re pushed out of my head by the day’s bad news and I spend my time clawing my way back to sensibility. I try to write, or to clean, or even to just lurk online, and I end up losing bits of myself to spiralling anxiety. My memory is unreliable. My fingers sometimes won’t work. I hide in fiction, because I’m drowning in reality.

I need help, but I don’t know what to even ask for. When I try to think of what I need, the list stretches on forever, and I don’t feel right asking for even the least of things. I’m not on the frontline punching Nazis. I’m not organising rallies or upholding legal rights or anything useful. I’m just dying, a day at a time, in a cage of fear.

I need help.

I need people to come over, even though I’ll panic and reschedule and be uncomfortable. I need people to go with me places, even if it takes a few tries. I need people to keep trying. I need people to convince me that they’ll stay, that it’s worth it, that there’s somewhere to get to that isn’t the terrible now.

I started a Patreon a while ago (it’s at the top of my tumblr) because I’m about two hundred dollars shy of just managing to afford living. Two hundred dollars I have to borrow, every month, or steal from some other expense, to pay for food and for meds and for god knows what else the month throws at me. I need new shoes for my orthotics to fix my feet, but I’m stuck with the old ones even as they twist and fall apart. My partner hemorrhages money covering what should be shared expenses, putting her own schooling, her own needs, at risk.

I need help.

So often I share things saying if you can give, please do, and if you can’t, please share, but I don’t know how to do that for myself. I don’t know what to write that makes me worthy of crowdfunding. Of charity. I know so many that are struggling more, are doing more, are deserving more. I don’t know anymore what I am or what I give to the world. But I know that it’s harder and harder for me to live in it.

My father and I have never really gotten along. 

No, that’s not true:

We got along when I was pre-verbal, a blank slate.

We got along when I was very young, and too scared of failing him and failing life to have my own personality.

We got along when I was secretive about who I was, when I would put up a wall of silence instead of arguing. But everything else was an argument.

We got along when I’d stay away for a month or two or three and visit for less than a day.

We got along when I’d talk only about music, or computers, because those were his things and I’d never be better at them than he was.

Even now, when he’s weak, when he’s literally paralyzed, when his mortality has become too real, we only get along because there isn’t time for us to talk about anything other than the most superficial and immediate things.

I don’t know if I love my father. 

I know that I’m a person who doesn’t easily love. I know that sometimes I like my father, I know that my father in his way loves me. But there have been so many times, so many years, when I have hated him. 

Can that be a kind of love? To hate so strongly and for so long? Wouldn’t true hatred mean to stop trying?

I know that his failings are the same as his strengths - too common, too human, too shaped by capitalism and patriarchy and his own sadnesses and losses.

I know he wishes things were different.

I know that I wish that, too.

I know that, as a parent, I would define myself most strongly in opposition to him. It doesn’t seem fair, to want to be the opposite of someone who has never stopped trying to take care of me. Who never stopped caring, but never really knew how to.

I know that I’m afraid to be a parent, because I want to be a good father, as purely as he must have wanted to before I was born. As purely as he still does. 

How can we know what we lack in experience, in understanding, until it is too late? How can we know what we should have changed until we’ve already failed?

We can’t call back the tide. We can only sail on it, or be left on the shore. 

Na einai kalytero anthropo apo ton patera toy.

“Be a better man than your father was.”